The booze had really flowed, and he had had more than he could handle. He was a little guy, at least compared to his brothers and cousins, and he couldn’t handle very much, anyway.
There had been the usual cracks about his size, and of course the pigtail, at the reception (“You know what Davie is? With that pigtail? One Hung Low. The world’s only Polack Chink.”) and every time he’d looked at the priest, he’d found the priest looking at him, then suddenly turning on an uneasy smile. He wasn’t their priest, he was the bride’s family’s priest, and what he was obviously thinking was, “What’s a bum like that doing in the Pekach family?”
He saw the reason for the sudden slowdown, flashing blue lights on two Philadelphia police cars at the corner. A wreck. Probably a bad one, he thought, with two cars at the scene.
He hadn’t been paying much attention to where he was. He looked around to see where he was.
When he got to the cop directing traffic, the cop signaled him to stop. Dave Pekach rolled down the window.
“You almost rear-ended the Mercury,” the cop accused. From the way the cop looked at him, Dave Pekach knew that he didn’t like men who wore long blond hair in a pigtail any more than the priest had.
“I know,” Dave Pekach said, politely. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You been drinking?” It was an accusation, not a question.
“I just came from a wedding,” Pekach admitted. “But I’m all right.”
The cop flashed his light around the inside of the Buick, to see what he could see, let Pekach sweat twenty seconds, then waved him on.
Pekach drove fifty feet, swore, and then braked hard again. The brakes squealed again, and there was a loud, dull groan from the front end as he bounced over a curb and stopped.
He opened the door and got out and started walking toward two men standing by the hood of a five-year-old Ford sedan.
“Hey, buddy!” the cop who had stopped him called. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Pekach ignored him.
The cop, trotting over, reached the old Ford just as Pekach did, just in time to hear one of the men greet Pekach: “Hey, Captain,” one of the men said. He was a heavy, redheaded Irishman in a T-shirt and blue jeans. “Don’t you look spiffy!”
The cop was embarrassed. He had sensed there was something not quite right with the car, or the man driving it. There were some subtle things. The relatively new automobile had obviously not been washed, much less polished, in some time. It looked as if it had been used hard. The driver’s side vent window had a thumb-sized piece of glass missing, and was badly cracked. The tires had black walls, and on closer examination were larger than the tires that had come with the car.
But until right now, the cop had been looking for something-wrong, something that would have given him reasonable cause to see what the clown in the pigtail might have under the seat or in the glove compartment or in the trunk. Now he looked at the car again, and saw that he had missed the real giveaway: On the shelf between the top of the backseat and the window was a thin eight-inch-tall shortwave radio antenna.
The battered Buick was a police car, and the funny-looking little guy with the hippy pigtail was a police officer. More than a cop. One of the Narcotics guys had called him “Captain.”
And then the cop put it all together. The little guy with the pigtail was Captain David Pekach, of the Narcotics Division of the Philadelphia Police Department. He remembered now, too, that Pekach had just made captain. Now that he was a captain, the cop thought, Pekach was probably going to have to get rid of the pigtail. Captains don’t work undercover; neither do lieutenants, and only rarely a sergeant. The cop remembered a story that had gone around the bar of the Fraternal Order of Police. A Narcotics Lieutenant (obviously, now Pekach) had been jumped on by the Commissioner himself for the pigtail. Pekach had stood up to him. If he was supposed to supervise his undercover men working the streets, the only way he could do that was, from time to time, to go on the streets with them. And a very good way to blow the cover of plainclothes cops working Narcotics dressed like addicts was to have them seen talking to some guy in a business suit and a neat, show-your-ears haircut. No questions were likely to be asked about a guy in a dirty sweatshirt and a pigtail. The story going around the FOP bar was that Commissioner Czernick had backed off.
“What’s going on?” Captain Pekach asked the red-haired Narc, whose name was Coogan.
“We were cutting the grass in Wissahickon Park,” the other Narcotics officer said. He was a Latin American, wearing a sleeveless denim jacket, his naked chest and stomach sweaty under it. He was a small man, smaller than Captain Pekach. At five feet seven even, he had just made the height requirement for police officers.
“Cutting the grass” was a witticism. Parks have grass. Cannibas sativa, commonly known as marijuana, is known on the street as “grass.” But arresting vendors of small quantities of grass is not a high-priority function of plainclothes officers of the Narcotics Division. The Narcotics officers knew that, and they knew that Captain David Pekach knew it.
“And?” Pekach asked.
“It was a slow night. Captain,” Alexandro Gres-Narino said, uncomfortably.
“Except for the naked lady,” Tom Coogan said.
“What naked lady?” Pekach asked.
“Some dame was running around without any clothes in the park by the Wissahickon Bridge,” Tom Coogan said. “Every car north of Market Street went in on it.”
“Tell me about this,” Pekach said, impatiently, gesturing vaguely around him.
“So there was a buy, and they run,” Coogan said. “And we chased them. And they run off the road here.”
“High-speed pursuit, no doubt?” Pekach asked, dryly.