if there was ever anything he could for me I should not hesitate to let him know.”
“You should hold off calling that marker in until you’re running for governor or the Senate. Or the White House.”
“All I want to do is be mayor of Philadelphia.”
“Isn’t that what you said when they appointed you police commissioner? That all you wanted to be was commissioner?”
“What is this, Beat Up On Jerry Carlucci Day?”
“You want a straight answer to that?”
“No, lie to me.”
“I sent word to Payne to meet me in my office at half past one. I’m going to tell him, when he goes back on the job, that what he was doing was paperwork in the Roundhouse, not running out to Las Vegas, for Christ’s sake, baby-sitting Detweiler’s daughter. He’s going to have a hard enough time proving himself over at East as it is . . .”
“I’ve been in a detective division. Right there in East Detectives, as a matter of fact. You don’t have to tell me about detective divisions. ”
“. . . . without us pulling him out of there every time somebody like Detweiler wants a favor from you,” Lowenstein finished.
“I’m not as dumb as I look, Matt,” the mayor said. “I’m even one or two steps ahead of you.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, I am. I thought you and Denny Coughlin did a dumb thing when you sent him to East Detectives in the first place.”
“He made detective. What you do with new detectives is send them to out to the Academy to learn the new forms, and then to a division, to learn how to be a detective. You tell me, why is that dumb?”
“Because he is who he is.”
“You tell me, who is he?”
“He’s the guy who took down the Northwest Philadelphia serial rapist, and the guy who shot it out with that Islamic Liberation Army jackass and won. That makes him different, without the other things. Like I said, I’ve been in a detective division. They’re really going to stay on his ass to remind him he’s a rookie, until he proves himself.”
“He’s a good kid. He can handle that.”
“Sure he can, and what have we got then? I’ll tell you what we’ll have—one more detective who can probably work a crime scene about as good as any other detective.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“The Good of the Department is what I’m talking about.”
“Then you have lost me somewhere along the way.”
“Do you know how many college graduates have applied for the Department in the last year?”
“No.”
“Fifty-three.”
“So?”
“Do you know how many college graduates applied, in the three years previous to this one?”
“I have no idea.”
“Seventeen. Not each year. Total.”
“Now I’m really lost.”
“Public relations,” the mayor said significantly.
“What does that mean?”
“That a lot of young men, fifty-three young men, with college degrees, with the potential to become really good cops, saw Payne’s picture in the newspapers and decided they might like being a cop themselves.”
“Do you know that? Or just think that?”
“I checked it out,” the mayor said.
“So what are you saying, Jerry? That we should put Payne on recruiting duty?”
“I’m saying you and Coughlin should have left him right where he was, in Special Operations.”
“A,” Lowenstein said, “you always transfer people who get promoted. B, there are no detectives in Special Operations.”
“A, that ‘transfer people when they get promoted’ didn’t come off the mountain with Moses, engraved on stone, and B, as of today there are two detectives assigned to Special Operations.”
“Two detectives who should have been sent back to Homicide where they belong,” Lowenstein said.
“If you mean Jason Washington, he’s a sergeant now. He got promoted, and he didn’t get transferred out of Special Operations. I said two detectives. One of whom is Tony Harris, who would probably go back to being a drunk if we sent him back to Homicide.”
Lowenstein took a deep swallow of his Jack Daniel’s and water. He was impressed again with Jerry Carlucci’s intimate knowledge of what was going on in the Department.
Detectives Jason Washington and Tony Harris, in Lowenstein’s judgment the two best Homicide detectives, had been “temporarily ” assigned to the then newly formed Special Operations Division when Mayor Carlucci had taken away the Northwest serial rapist job from Northwest Detectives and given it to Peter Wohl.
Other special jobs had come up, and they had never gone back to Homicide, which had been a continuing source of annoyance to Matt Lowenstein. The only good thing about it was that Tony Harris seemed to have gotten