Authors: Duane Swierczynski
—Where should I park?
—See that valet? Just pull up there and tell him you’re waiting for a friend of Chuckie. He’ll let you sit, no worries.
At first I think D. is making a reference to some mob movie I’ve never seen,
The Friends of Chuckie
or some such shit. Takes me a full second before I realize he’s serious.
—Wait … who?
—That’s my buddy. Chuckie. He’s worked out a deal with the guy. You can sit there and not have to pay anything. Two seconds! I swear!
D. jumps out of the car and slams the door so hard it makes me flinch. Hate that. After a moment of stunned silence, I steer the Civic a quarter block up and pull over into the valet line, which is busy. A second later I realize I am accidentally cutting into the line. The valet guy in the bow tie and vest sweeps his arm in a sarcastic “after you, ma’am” gesture. I lower my window and feel the tiniest bit absurd asking:
—My friend’s a friend of Chuckie?
Astonishingly, dude loses the attitude instantly. He nods and moves on to the next car.
The digital clock on the dash says ten past midnight. It’s freezing and crazy windy. At this moment Dad’s red-eye has already lifted off, slinging him from lush California back to the grisly East Coast. I have to be at Terminal C in less than six hours. And D. is definitely taking longer than two seconds.
The valet guy, although busy with customers, finds the time to gawk at me, giving me an oh-so-charming smile that showcases the shiny black tooth in his upper jaw. (I know how to attract the lookers, right, Mom?) I turn my head and watch customers drift in and out of an old-school Italian restaurant on the corner, which apparently is the reason for all of this traffic. Now, mixed breeds such as myself should not cast ethnic aspersions, but damn, it’s like Goombah Fest up in here. Gold chains, blown-dry ’dos, older dudes with dates who could be their granddaughters, town cars and Caddies, the whole nine. Tammy would appreciate this. We should come back sometime just to people watch. (Who I really need to call this weekend. It’s getting ridiculous already. I haven’t talked to her since Halloween.)
The minutes tick by and, yes, Mom, I know I’m screwed. Another hour for the sandwiches; another thirty minutes back north to campus. I’m not getting home until 2:00 a.m. at least. All for a boy.
I met D. the first week of school, at some honors program social in some pseudo-nightclub on the first floor of the union building. Later I heard that the social was referred to as “Trader Ho’s” by the upperclassmen. All of us fresh young geeks on display, ripe for the picking. Turnout for the social was predictably huge. D. was different, though; he kind of just joked around, inviting a group of us over to his off-campus house for some beer—my first ever, by the way. (Dad would be proud.) Some of the other girls from my honors triple, who bragged about drinking beer since sophomore year of high school, were more into the shots of Jack.
D. just smiled at them all, flirted with them equally, including me. Apparently he liked to date freshman girls who had their own cars. To D., the ability to go off campus at will was a magical thing. Word around the honors nerds was that he’d gotten in some serious DUI trouble in high school and pretty much wouldn’t be driving until the end of the second Obama administration.
Not that a carless D. is a bad thing. The dude clearly drinks a lot and smoked his fair share of the wacky weed. The idea of him behind a 2,700-pound motor vehicle frightens me.
After a few more minutes of awkward waiting with the Valet to the Friend of Chuckie, watching sketchy-ass characters come and go, along with the Goodfellas parade up the street, my mind goes back to D., and cars, and weed. Wait wait. What if he’s not here picking up a book? Of course he’s not here for a book.
This is probably the place where D. scores his weed.
Party’s running low, so they ask D. to conjure up some more. He doesn’t have a car of his own (and shouldn’t be driving anyway) so he finds the only sober person with a car in the general vicinity.
Me.
I feel like a world-class idiot.
So Thanksgiving Eve, as my drug counselor Dad is boarding a plane in California, I’m in South Philly on a drug run.
Happy Thanksgiving, right?
Undercover narcotics officer Benjamin F. Wildey, 32, seated behind the wheel of his unmarked car, maintains a laserlike focus on the front door of the row house. Feels like the city’s one big freezer tonight. Not much warmer in this piece of junk hooptie, either. The whole day’s been an icy raw mess with rain and sleet and Wildey out on the street for most of it. He glances at his watch. Look at that. Thanksgiving, as of three minutes ago. Time flies when you’re posted in your car doing surveillance based on a tip from a couple of desperate snitches.
At first glance there’s nothing about the place on South Ninth Street that screams “drug house.” Clean unmarred sidewalk, freshly painted window frames, refaced brickwork. This was the kind of South Philly row home that immigrants struggled to buy for $4,000 back in the day and now could easily fetch $400,000.
But a snitch swore that a guy at this address is doing a lot of slinging with college kids. Word is he’s a midlevel dealer who calls himself “Chuckie Morphine” and specializes in small-time trappers who work the universities, sometimes doing direct sales to kids who are leery of driving to the Badlands or Pill Hill. Years ago this whole neighborhood—Passyunk—used to be solid working class, maybe a little sketchy in places. Wildey remembers those days. But now it has gastropubs and consignment shops and pop-up restaurants and all that other hipster catnip. Kids feel safe popping down here.
If the past few hours are any indication, it’s clear
something’s
going on inside this house on South Ninth. Lots of visitors. Could be a pre-Thanksgiving party, sure, but why is everybody staying for only a few minutes at a time? With no music? No noise of any kind?
What Wildey needs is a legal way inside the house. One that won’t raise any objections from the Man in the Widener Building. Doing narcotics work these days, you’ve got to be careful. Knuckleheads, perverts, and money grubbers in the department have made the job difficult of late. Take the guys whose blazing stupidity got them featured in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series a bunch of years back.
Yeah.
That
Pulitzer. A narcotics squad in the Badlands came up with the brilliant idea of busting neighborhood bodegas for selling small plastic baggies. Questionable at best. But that wasn’t the stupid part. Once inside the bodegas, the narcs helped themselves to hoagies, Tastykakes, batteries, milk, loose cash, whatever. You know, because Tastykakes and hoagies are so expensive.
Now, skimming from a dealer is a time-honored Philadelphia law enforcement tradition. But the thing with skimming from a dealer is, you have to actually skim from the dealer—the perp. You don’t steal from the frightened immigrant couple selling plastic baggies that, the last time Wildey checked, were not illegal. So these idiots sold out the department for a bunch of Tastykakes. Bravo.
Following the Tastykake Takedown, there seemed to be new scandals popping up all the damn time. A local reporter crunched some numbers and realized that, over the last four years, a Philly police officer was charged with a crime something like every three weeks. Not just narcotics, of course. But those were the ones that seemed to stick in citizens’ minds. Perhaps the most notorious being the cop who shook down a junkie, making her strip naked before jacking off on her jeans. “He was too disgusted to touch me, but he wasn’t too disgusted to touch himself and ejaculate on my seventy-dollar friggin’ pants,” the junkie told a federal judge. The cop gave her six dollars for cigarettes and told her to get dressed and scram. The local tabloid had a field day:
THOUGHT YOU GOT OFF, EH?
And a new phrase entered the local legal lexicon: “the masturbation civil rights violation.”
All of this culminated in a full-scale clusterfuck that closed an entire field unit, saw five hundred drug cases tossed, and sent a bunch of cops to desk duty or early retirement. As a result, the D.A.—most likely sowing his mayoral oats—declared war on the entire narcotics division from his office in the Widener Building.
So Wildey knows to be super-careful. The old ways don’t fly anymore—“old” meaning as of six months ago. Last spring he could have braced any one of these college kids and ordered them up against a wall, pockets out. Boom, probable cause. A ticket to the show.
But Wildey can’t stop any of them. Not without a solid, defensible-in-court reason. In the wake of all this departmental chaos, defense lawyers would knock the whole thing down without so much as a thanks
for nothing
. Chuckie Morphine himself was too smart to be caught in the open. The name on the lease of the property is a corporation, probably a shell. Nobody knows Chuckie’s real name, or even what he looks like. Wildey has yet to snatch a glimpse of him.
But he’s exactly the kind of guy Wildey’s dying to bust. Nobody else in his unit’s even heard of this guy, which means he’s relatively new.
So Wildey keeps an eye on the place, waiting for an opening. This is only one of a half-dozen leads he kept tabs on, but this is the fattest—a bloated tick ready to pop. Lots of traffic. And a pusher with an irritating nickname. Man would Wildey
love
to be the guy who busted Chuckie Fucking Morphine. Idiot should serve time just for that name.
There is also the little matter that Morphine is almost certainly a white dude. Now, Wildey isn’t racist. But a few months before he was recruited to the newly formed Narcotics Field Unit-Central South (NFU-CS for short, as in Nobody Fucks with us) he read a study from the ACLU that said the majority of people arrested for pot were black. Yet whites bought and smoked more dope than anybody else. In Philly, something like 80 percent of the marijuana arrests were of blacks. Wildey had arrested his fair share in the Badlands, though he tried to be an equal opportunity cop, busting black, brown, and white alike. Still, it would be nice to get those percentages down.
Lieutenant Katrina “Kaz” Mahoney told him the day she hired him: Find me the cases others have missed. Forget the street corner busts. Bring me big cases. I don’t care who’s paying who or what’s happened before today. The rules are different now.
So sorry, rich white drug lords. A brother has to start his career somewhere.
And here’s hoping it starts with Chuckie Morphine.
But of course … done right.
In the words of his superior: “Imagine the Man in the Widener Building is wedged up your ass at all times, watching everything you do, second-guessing every thought in your head. You take a leak, imagine him complaining you’re taking too long and massaging your prostate to get things moving.”
Ten minutes after midnight Wildey perks up when he sees a silver Honda Civic glide into the usual spot—up near the corner, where the valet guy lets all of Chuckie’s (alleged) customers idle for a bit. Breaking no laws.
Wildey actually likes this setup. Makes it easier to keep tabs on the customer base. A hat-wearing hipster, about twenty or twenty-one, bright red pants, green backpack slung over his shoulder—yo slick, Christmas ain’t for another month yet—launches himself out of the passenger seat, clears the sidewalk in a few long strides, then jogs up the short stoop to the front door. Knocks three times. Door opens. Red Pants slips inside. Say yo to Chuckie for me.
He picks up his notebook, scribbles quickly:
0044 Sub 1—W/F, driving Honda Civic
0045 Sub 2—W/M, passenger, 6'2" skinny build, green backpack over
shoulder, bright red pants, navy windbreaker
0046 S2 approaches target house, unknown male lets him in. S1 stays in car in valet spot
Once the guy goes into Chuckie’s place, Wildey turns his attention to the driver. The girl. Maybe eighteen or nineteen? Latino? Italian? Hard to tell in this light. Her hair’s up, held in place by some kind of silver piece. She’s doing the awkward
idling-in-the-valet-area
thing. Looking around, body language nervous, shoulders fidgety. An older cop told him most times you don’t need a confession. Just watch the body; it’ll tell the whole story. Clearly this girl doesn’t want to be here. Is she here against her will? Wildey writes down the Civic’s plates to look up later. There’s no laptop to run a search. All he has is a notebook, pen, badge, gun, and a portable dashboard lights/screamer that plugs into the cigarette lighter. You know, just in case this gets real.
Wildey’s hoping this is the case.
C’mon, girlie, gimme a little reasonable suspicion.
He’s been watching Chuckie’s pad off and on for almost a week now with no luck.
After quite a long while Big Red pops out of the house, tattered green backpack still slung over his shoulder. What you got there? He trots back down the stoop, crosses Ninth, not even really looking, and opens the passenger door. Taillights blink. They’re pulling out. Come on, Wildey thinks, give me
something.
Some reason to pull this car over. A twitchy taillight? Any reason to believe her inspection’s past due? Somebody cut the tags off her license? Wildey knows cops who would do that. Instant probable cause. Can’t do that anymore, though. The D.A. is probably right now sitting on the edge of his bed, nursing a glass of pinot noir, just
waiting
for someone to call to tell him that narcotics cops have fucked up again.