“Commissioner,” he said.
“Tony,” Coughlin said, as they shook hands. Then Coughlin asked, “They found something?”
“Jason didn’t think they found enough,” Harris said. “That’s why he sent them back.”
“The famous Jason Washington’s ‘never leave a stone unturned’ philosophy?”
“Never leave the stones under the stone unturned,” Harris said.
“Can you walk it through for me, Tony? Bright Eyes here just might learn something.”
“Sure,” Harris said. “Two doers. They came through that door. Two young black guys, one of them fat. They—I got this primarily from a guy who works here—took a look around, then the fat one walked to the last booth on the left and sat down, and the other one sat in the first booth—where you are, Matt. My eyewitness, who was mopping the floor by the door, ducked into the kitchen. He looked out, saw the fat guy take a revolver—wrapped in newspaper—from his jacket, and told the kitchen supervisor. She called 911.
“The next thing my eyewitness knew, there was a shot.” Harris pointed to the ceiling above where Matt was standing. “We recovered the bullet. Full jacket .38. If we can find the gun, we can most likely get a good match. Then the fat doer went into the kitchen. . . .”
“Let’s have a look,” Coughlin said.
“Yes, sir,” Harris said, and led them through the restaurant to the kitchen doors.
“We have a bunch of prints from both sides of the doors,” Harris said. “All the employees had been fingerprinted, so we’re running the ones we lifted against those.”
He pushed the door open.
“My eyewitness was behind the door, with his back against the wall,” Harris said. “He saw the fat doer grab the telephone, listen a moment—presumably long enough to hear she was talking to Police Radio—rip the phone from the wall, call her an obscene name, hold his revolver at arm’s length, and shoot her. She slid down the wall, and then fell forward.”
He pointed to the chalked outline of a body on the floor, and to blood smeared on the wall.
“Then the fat doer herded everybody but my eyewitness, who he didn’t see, into the cooler, and jammed a sharpening steel into the padlock loops.”
He pointed to the cooler door, then went on. “Then he went back into the restaurant, not seeing my eyewitness, and started to take wallets, et cetera, from the citizens. Doer Number One, meanwhile, is taking money from the cash register.
“Right about then, Kenny Charlton came through the door. Doer Number One is crouched behind the cashier’s counter. Kenny saw him, the doer jumps up, wraps his arm around Kenny, wrestles with him. The fat doer then runs up, sticks his gun under Kenny’s bulletproof vest, and fires. Kenny goes down. Doer Number One steps over Kenny’s body, takes two shots at it, and then follows Doer Number Two out the door and down Snyder. Mickey O’Hara got their picture, but it’s a lousy picture. No fault of Mickey’s.”
“Why did the fat doer stick his gun under Charlton’s vest?” Matt asked. “Why not just shoot him in the head? Or the lower back, below the vest?”
Coughlin gave him a look Matt could not interpret, and finally decided it was exasperation at his having asked a question that obviously could not be answered.
Tony Harris held up both hands in a helpless gesture.
The restaurant manager walked up to them with three mugs of coffee on a tray.
“I thought you and the other detectives might like . . .”
“That’s very nice of you,” Coughlin said.
“Mr. Benetti, this is Commissioner Coughlin,” Harris said.
“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. . . .”
“I like to think I’m still a detective,” Coughlin said. “No offense taken.”
“I . . . uh . . . don’t know how to say this,” Benetti said. “But I’m glad to see you here, Commissioner. I would hate to have what those animals did to Mrs. Fernandez and Officer Charlton . . . wind up as an unsolved crime.”
“We’re going to try very hard, Mr. Benetti, to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Coughlin said.
Benetti looked at Coughlin, then put out his hand.
“Thank you,” he said, and walked away.
Coughlin looked over his shoulder, then pointed to one of the banquettes. He slid in one side, and Tony Harris and Matt into the other.
“Still no idea who these animals are?” Coughlin asked.
Harris shook his head, “no.”
“The police artist’s stuff is just about useless,” Harris said. “Everybody saw somebody else. We’re going to have to have a tip, or make them with a fingerprint.”
Coughlin shook his head.
“One question, Tony. I want the answer off the top of your head. How would you feel about having Sergeant Payne in Homicide?”
Harris chuckled, then smiled.
“I heard The List was out,” he said. “Good for you, Matt!”
“That doesn’t answer my question, Tony,” Coughlin said.
“Welcome, welcome!” Tony said.
“I should have known better than to try that,” Coughlin said. “In law school, they teach you never to ask a question to somebody on the stand unless you know what the answer’s going to be.”
“Commissioner, you asked,” Harris said. “What’s wrong with Matt coming to Homicide?”
“He’s too young, for one thing. He hasn’t been on the job long enough, for another. I can go on.”
“He’s also smart,” Harris said. “And he’s a stone-under-the -stone turner. I didn’t wonder why this bastard didn’t shoot Kenny in the head, or lower back. Matt already thinks like the Black Buddha. The other stuff, we can teach him.”
Coughlin snorted.
“And he’s going to make a good witness on the stand,” Harris said. “Think about that.”
“I’ll be damned,” Coughlin said. “For a moment, I thought— I guess, to be honest, hoped—you were pulling my leg. But you’re serious, aren’t you?”
Tony Harris nodded his head. “I thought you’d be all for him coming to Homicide,” he said.
Coughlin looked between the two of them but didn’t respond directly.
After a moment, he asked, “Are you about finished here, Tony?”
“Just about.”
“I need a ride to the Roundhouse.”
“My pleasure.”
“Matt’s going to Easton on a job I gave Peter Wohl and Peter gave to Matt,” Coughlin said. “And he’d better get going.”
“What job’s that?” Harris asked.
“One of those I’d rather not talk about,” Coughlin said, looking at Matt. “But the sooner you know something, Matt, the better.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“You sore at me, Matt?” Coughlin said.
“I could never be sore at you,” Matt said.
Coughlin met his eyes and then nodded.
Then he pushed himself out of the banquette.
[FOUR]
Matt started to head for the Schuylkill Expressway as the fastest way out of town. When he turned onto South Street, he punched the autodial button on his cellular, which caused Inspector Wohl to answer his cellular on the second ring.
“Matt, boss. Commissioner Coughlin’s on his way back to the Roundhouse, and I’m on my way to Easton. Okay?”
“From the cheerful sound of your voice, I guess you again refused to listen to his sage advice?”
“He didn’t offer any,” Matt said. “He tried to sandbag me with Tony Harris.”
“And?”
“Tony said I already think like the Black Buddha, they can teach me what I have to know, and ‘welcome’—no, ‘welcome, welcome’—to Homicide.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“He also told me he gave you the Cassidy job,” Matt said.
Again there was a perceptible pause.
“If you come up with something unpleasant, give me a call,” Wohl said. “Otherwise fill me in in the morning.”
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br /> “Yes, sir,” Matt said.
Wohl broke the connection without saying anything else.
At the next intersection—South and Twentieth Streets— Matt changed his mind about the Schuylkill Expressway and instead drove back to Rittenhouse Square, where he drove into the underground garage, parked the unmarked Ford, and got in the Porsche.
It had occurred to him that he hadn’t driven the Porsche much lately, and it needed a run. What he liked best about the Porsche—something he somewhat snobbishly thought most people didn’t understand—was not how easily you could get it up to well over 100, 120 miles per hour—a great many cars would do that—but how beautifully it handled on narrow, winding roads, making 60 or 70 where lesser cars would lose control at 50 or less. Such as the twenty miles or so of Route 611 between Kintnersville and Easton, where the road ran alongside the old Delaware Canal.
With the winding road, and a lot else on his mind—
God, that was an unexpected compliment from Tony Harris, me thinking like Jason . . .
And it couldn’t have been timed better. Uncle Denny had egg all over his face. . . .
I wonder when the promotion will actually happen?
What am I going to do if Captain Cassidy’s brother’s will hasn’t been filed in the courthouse? Some people don’t even have wills. What do they call that, intestate, something like that?
With a little luck, the courthouse’ll have a computer and I can do a search for all real estate in the name of John Paul Cassidy. . . .
I’ve got to find out more about Whatshisname who stuffed his girlfriend in a trunk and sends Dave Pekach taunting postcards from Europe. . . .
Uncle Denny said the body was (a) mummified and (b) in the trunk for a year? Didn’t it smell?
I’ll have to find out when Stan Colt is going to grace Philadelphia with his presence. I really would like to see more—a hell of a lot more—of Vice President Terry Davis. . . .
Nice legs. Nice everything. . . .
—he didn’t think about Route 611 passing through Doylestown, right past the Crossroads Diner, until the diner itself came into view.
Shit, Shit, Shit!
The mental image of Susan with the neat hole under her sightless eyes jumped into his mind.
No, goddamn it. No! Not twice in one day!
Think of something else.
Terry Davis in the shower.
A mummified body in a trunk. If you want to feel nauseous, think of a stinking, mummified body.
But (a) mummies don’t stink. They look like leather statues, but they don’t smell, (b) mummies are bodies that have gone through some sort of preservation process. They gut them, I think I remember from sixth grade, and then fill the cavity with some kind of preservatives—or was it rocks? sand?—and then wrap them in linen.
The body in this weirdo’s trunk might have been dried out after a year, but, technically speaking, it wasn’t mummified. After a year, why wasn’t it a skeleton? Wouldn’t the flesh have completely decomposed—giving off one hell of a stink—in a year?
There is a lot you don’t know about bodies. And ergo sum, a sergeant of the Homicide Bureau should know a lot about dead bodies.
Maybe I can take a course at the university.
Not a bullshit undergraduate course, but a course at the medical school. Amy’s a professor. She should (a) know and (b) have the clout to have her little brother admitted.
Christ, I’m going seventy-five in a fifty-five zone!
Sorry to be speeding, Officer. What it was, when I passed the Crossroads Diner, was that I naturally recalled my girlfriend with the back of her head blown out in the parking lot. . . .
Terry Davis has long legs. Nice long legs.
Why do long legs turn me on?
Why do some bosoms, but not others, turn me on?
Why did Terry Davis turn me on like that?
She really does have nice legs.
And she smelled good, too.
He recognized where he was. What he thought of as “the end of Straight 611 out of Doylestown.” The concrete highway turned into macadam, made a sharp right turn, then a sharp left turn, and then got curvy.
Right around the next curve is where we pick up the old canal.
I’ll be damned! I’m not going to throw up.
And I’m not sweat-soaked.
Thank you, God!
He made the left turn and shoved his foot hard against the accelerator.
FOUR
[ONE]
Johnny Cassidy’s Shamrock Bar was on The Hill in Easton, near—and drawing much of its business from—Lafayette College. Even at four in the afternoon, there were a lot of customers, mixed students and faculty and other staff of the college.
Matt took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, a pickled egg, and a Cassidy Burger—“Famous All Over The Hill”— and struck up a conversation with the bartender, who had a plastic nameplate with a shamrock and “Mickey O’Neal Manager” printed on it pinned to his crisp, white, open-collar, cuffs-rolled-up shirt. Matt thought he was probably thirty-five or forty, and was not surprised that he was talkative.
When Matt asked how Johnny Cassidy was, O’Neal shook his head sadly and said the Big C had gotten him, five, no six, months before. Johnny kept feeling tired, and he finally went to the doctor, and six weeks later he was dead. Died the same week as his mother, in fact.
“So what’s going to happen to the bar?”
“It’s going to stay open,” Mickey O’Neal said, firmly, and then went on to explain that he’d worked in the place for fifteen years before Johnny died, starting out as an afternoon bartender and working his way up to assistant manager, and got to know him real well. Johnny had been godfather to two of his kids. “They called him Uncle Johnny.”
When Johnny knew his time was up, he made a deal with Mickey and his brother—Johnny’s younger brother, nice guy, who’s a cop in Philadelphia, and who had cared for their mother until she died; Johnny had never married—which gave twenty-five percent of the place to O’Neal and the rest to his brother.
“We’re talking about me buying him out, over time, you know, but right now, I’m just running the place for the both of us. Once a month, I write him a check for his share of what we make. It’s a pretty good deal all around. The bar stays open, which means I have a job, and his brother gets a check—a nice check, I don’t mind saying—once a month. Which is nice, too. Johnny figured he owed his brother—did I say he’s a cop in Philly?—for taking care of their mother all those years.”
There were now answers to the questions raised by what Detective Payne had learned at the Northampton County Court House: Seven months before, for one dollar and other good and valuable consideration, all assets, real estate, inventory and goodwill of the property privately held by John Paul Cassidy at 2301 Tatamy Road, Easton, had been sold to the Shamrock Corporation. The building at 2301 Tatamy Road housed both Johnny Cassidy’s Shamrock Bar and, above it, four apartments on two floors.
It would appear on the surface—he would nose around a little more, of course—that there was a perfectly good reason for Captain Cassidy’s sudden affluence. If the brother had insurance, which seemed likely—and the mother did, which also seemed likely—that would explain where he had gotten the cash to buy the condominium at the shore. And it seemed reasonable that getting a check every month for his share of the profits would explain why Captain Cassidy felt he could afford to give his old Suburban to his daughter and buy a new Yukon XL, no money down, to be paid for with the monthly check.
Detective Payne had a third beer “on the house” and another pickled egg, and then got back in his Porsche to return to Philadelphia.
[TWO]
The temptation to take the very interesting winding road beside the old Delaware Canal was irresistible. But he didn’t want to go back through Doylestown—past the Crossroads Diner—so he turned off Route 611 onto Route 32 a few miles south of Riegelsville, and followed it along the Delaware.
> A few miles past New Hope, his cellular phone tinkled. He looked at his watch and saw that it was quarter to five.
That’s probably Peter. Despite what he said about filling him in in the morning, he wants to know what I found out.
“Yes, sir, Inspector, sir. Detective Payne at your service, sir.”
“Hey, Matt,” a familiar voice said. It was that of Chad Nesbitt. They had been best friends since kindergarten.
“The Crown Prince of tomato soup himself? To what do I owe the honor?”
“Where are you?” Chad asked, a tone of exasperation in his voice.
“About five miles south of picturesque New Hope on Route 32. I presume there is some reason for your curiosity?”
“What are you doing way up there?”
“Fighting crime, of course. Protecting defenseless citizens such as yourself from evildoers.”
“Daffy wants you to come to supper. Can you?”
Daffy was Mrs. Nesbitt.
“Why does that make me suspicious?”
“Matt, for Christ’s sake, make peace with her. It gets to be a real pain in the ass for me with you two always at each other’s throat.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“There’s a girl she wants you to meet.”
“Not only no, but hell no.”
“This one’s nice. I think you’ll like her.”
“She’s a nymphomaniac who owns a liquor store?”
“Sometimes, Matt, you can be a real pain in the ass,” Chad said.
There was a perceptible silence.
“Come on, Matt. Please.”
“If you give me your solemn word that when I get there, we can go directly from ‘How do you do?’ to carnal pleasures on your carpet without—”
“Fuck you. Come or don’t.”
“When?”
“As soon as you can get here.”
“Okay,” Matt said. “Take me half an hour, depending on the traffic on Interstate 95.”
The Wachenhut Security guards who stood in the Colonial-style guard shack at the entrance to Stockton Place in Society Hill were chosen by Wachenhut with more care than their guards at the more than one hundred other locations Wachenhut protected in the Philadelphia area.
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