He didn’t reply.
“You hear anything, Peter?” Chief Inspector Wohl asked.
“The woman who shot Dutch is a junkie. They have an ID on her, and on the guy, another junkie, who was involved. I think they’ll pick him up in a couple of days; I wouldn’t be surprised if they already have him. My phone answerer is blinking. A Homicide detective named Jason Washington’s got the job—”
“I know him,” August Wohl interrupted.
“I asked him to keep me advised. As soon as I hear something, I’ll let you know.”
“Why should he keep you advised?” August Wohl asked.
“Because the commissioner, for the good of the department, has assigned me to charm the lady from TV.”
“I saw the TV,” Wohl’s father said. “The blonde really was an eyewitness?”
“Yes, she was. She just made the identification, of the dead girl, and the guy who ran. Positive. I was there when she made it. The guy’s name is Gerald Vincent Gallagher.”
“White guy?”
“Yeah. The woman, too. Her name is Schmeltzer. Her father has a grocery store over by Lincoln High.”
“Jesus, I know him,” August Wohl said.
“Dad, I better see who called,” Peter said.
“He’s going to be at Marshutz & Sons, for the wake, I mean. They’re going to lay him out in the Green Room; I talked to Gertrude Moffitt,” Peter’s mother said.
“I’ll be at the wake, of course, Mother,” Peter said.
“Peter,” Chief Inspector Wohl, retired, said thoughtfully, “maybe it would be a good idea for you to wear your uniform to the funeral.”
“What?” Peter asked, surprised. Staff inspectors almost never wore uniforms.
“There will be talk, if you’re not at the house tonight—”
“You bet, there will be,” Peter’s mother interjected.
“People like to gossip,” Chief Inspector Wohl went on. “Instead of letting them gossip about maybe why you didn’t come to the house, let them gossip about you being in uniform.”
“That sounds pretty devious, Dad.”
“Either the house tonight, with his other close friends, or the uniform at the wake,” Chief Inspector Wohl said. “A gesture of respect, one way or the other.”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Peter said..
“Do what you like,” his father said, abruptly, and the line went dead.
He’s mad. He offered advice and I rejected it. And he’s probably right, too. You don’t get to be a chief inspector unless you are a master practitioner of the secret rites of the police department.
There was only one recorded message on the telephone answerer tape:
“Dennis Coughlin, Peter. You’ve done one hell of a job with that TV woman. That was very touching, what she said on the TV. The commissioner saw it, too. I guess you know—Matt Lowenstein told me he saw you—that the commissioner wants you to stay on top of this. None of us wants anything embarrassing to anyone to happen. Call me, at the house, if necessary, when you learn something.”
While the tape was rewinding, Peter glanced at his watch.
“Damn!” he said.
He tore off his jacket and his shoulder holster and started to unbutton his shirt. There was no time for a shower. He was late already. He went into the bathroom and splashed Jamaica Bay lime cologne from a bottle onto his hands, and then onto his face. He sniffed his underarms, wet his hands again, and mopped them under his arms.
He stripped to his shorts and socks, and then dressed quickly. He pulled on a pale blue turtleneck knit shirt, and then a darker blue pair of Daks trousers. He slipped his feet into loafers, put his arms through the straps of the shoulder holster, and then into a maroon blazer. He reached on a closet shelf for a snap-brim straw hat and put that on. He examined himself in the full-length mirrors that covered the sliding doors to the bedroom closet.
“My, don’t you look splendid, you handsome devil, you!” he said.
And then he ran down the stairs and put a key to the padlock on one of the garage doors, and pulled them open. He went inside. There came the sound of a starter grinding, and then an engine caught.
A British racing green 1950 Jaguar XK-120 roadster emerged slowly and carefully from the garage. It looked new, rather than twenty-three years old. It had been a mess when Peter bought it, soon after he had been promoted to lieutenant. He’d since put a lot of money and a lot of time into it. Even his mother appreciated what he had done; it was now his “cute little sporty car” rather than “that disgraceful old junky rattletrap.”
He drove at considerably in excess of the speed limit down Lancaster Avenue to Belmont, and then to the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. Barbara Crowley, R.N., a tall, lithe young woman of, he guessed, twenty-six, twenty-seven, who wore her blond hair in a pageboy, was waiting for him, and smiled when the open convertible pulled up to her.
But she was pissed, he knew, both that he was late, and that he was driving the Jaguar. She contained her annoyance because she was trying as hard as he was to find someone.
“We’re being sporty tonight, I see,” Barbara said as she got in the car.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “I will prove that, if you give me a chance.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
Impulsively, and although he knew he wasn’t, in the turtleneck, dressed for it, he decided on the Ristorante Alfredo. He could count, he thought, on having some snotty Wop waiter, six months out of a Neapolitan slum, look haughtily down his nose at him.
It started going bad before he got that far.
An acne-faced punk in the parking garage gave him trouble about parking the Jaguar himself. It had taken him, literally, a year to find an unblemished, rust-free right front fender for the XK-120, and no sooner had he got it on, and had, finally, the whole car lacquered (20 coats) properly than a parking valet who looked like this one’s idiot uncle scraped it along a concrete block wall.
He had since parked his car himself.
The scene annoyed Barbara further, although he resolved it with money, to get it over with.
SEVEN
When she saw that Peter Wohl was leading her to Ristorante Alfredo, Barbara Crowley protested.
“Peter, it’s so expensive!”
She sounds like my mother, Peter thought.
“Well, I’ll just stiff my ex-wife on her alimony,” he said, as he opened the door to Ristorante Alfredo. “Tell her to have the kids get a job, too.”
Barbara, visibly, did not think that was funny. There was no ex-wife and no kids, but it was not the sort of thing Barbara thought you should joke about, particularly when there was someone who could hear and might not understand. She hadn’t thought it was funny the last time he’d made his little joke, and, to judge by her face, it had not improved with age.
The headwaiter was a tall, silver-haired man, who had heard.
“Have you a reservation, sir?” he asked.
“No, but it doesn’t look like you have many, either,”
Peter said, waving in the general direction of the half-empty dining room.
The headwaiter looked toward the bar, where a stout man in his early thirties sat at the bar. He was wearing an expensive suit, and his black hair was expensively cut and arranged, almost successfully, to conceal a rapidly receding hairline.
His name was Ricco Baltazari, and the restaurant and bar licenses had been issued in his name. It was actually owned by a man named Vincenzo Savarese, who; for tax purposes, and because it’s hard for a convicted felon to get a liquor license, had Baltazari stand in for him.
Ricco Baltazari had taken in the whole confrontation. There was nothing he would have liked better than to have the fucking cop thrown the fuck out—what a hell of a nerve, coming to a class joint like this with no tie—but instead, with barely visible moves of his massive head, he signaled that Wohl was to be given a table. It’s always better to back away from a confrontation with a fucking cop, and this
fucking cop was an inspector, and Mr. Savarese was in the back, having dinner with his wife and her sister, and it was better not to risk doing anything that would cause a disturbance.
Besides, he had seen in Gentlemen’s Quarterly where turtlenecks were making a comeback. It wasn’t like the fucking cop was wearing a fucking shirt and no necktie. A turtleneck was different.
“Spaghetti and meatballs?” Peter Wohl asked, when they had been shown to a table covered with crisp linen and an impressive array of crystal and silverware, and handed large menus. “Or maybe some lasagna? Or would you like me to slip the waiter a couple of bucks and have him sing ‘Santa Lucia’ while you make up your mind?”
Barbara didn’t think that was witty, either.
“I don’t know why you come to these places, if you really don’t like them.”
“The mob serves the best food in Philadelphia,” Peter said. “I thought everybody knew that.”
Barbara decided to let it drop.
“Well, everything on here looks good,” she said, with a determined smile.
Wohl looked at her, rather than at the menu. He knew what he was going to eat: First some cherrystone clams, and then veal Marsala.
She is a good-looking girl. She’s intelligent. She’s got a good job. She even tolerates me, which means she probably understands me. On a scale of one to ten, she’s an eight in bed. What I should do is marry her, and buy a house somewhere and start raising babies. But I don’t want to.
She asked him what he was going to have, and he told her, and she said that sounded fine, she would have the same thing.
“Let’s have a bottle of wine,” Peter said, and opened the wine list and selected an Italian wine whose name he remembered. He pointed out the label to Barbara and asked if that was all right with her. It was fine with her.
Maybe what she needs to turn me on is a little streak of bitchiness, a little streak of not-so-tolerant-and-under-standing.
He was nearly through the bottle of wine, and halfway through the veal Marsala, when he looked up and saw Vincenzo Savarese approaching the table.
Vincenzo Savarese was sixty-three years old. What was left of his hair was silver and combed straight back over his ears. His face bore marks of childhood acne. He was wearing a double-breasted brown pin-striped suit, and there was a diamond stickpin in his necktie. He was trailed by two almost identical women in black dresses, his wife and her sister.
Vincenzo Savarese’s photo was mounted, very near the top, on the wall chart of known organized crime members the Philadelphia Police Department maintained in the Organized Crime unit.
“I don’t mean to disturb your dinner, Inspector,” Vincenzo Savarese said. “Keep your seat.”
Wohl stood up, but said nothing.
“I just wanted to tell you we heard about what happened to Captain Moffitt, and we’re sorry,” Vincenzo Savarese said.
“My heart goes out to his mother,” one of the women said.
Wohl wasn’t absolutely sure whether it was Savarese’s wife, or his sister-in-law. Looking at the woman, he said, “Thank you.”
“I was on a retreat with Mrs. Moffitt, the mother,” the woman went on. “At Blessed Sacrament.”
Wohl nodded.
Savarese nodded, and took the woman’s arm and led them out of the dining room.
“Who was that?” Barbara Crowley asked.
“His name is Vincenzo Savarese,” Wohl said, evenly. “He owns this place.”
“I thought you said the mob owns it.”
“It does,” Wohl said.
“Then why? Why did he do that?”
“He probably meant it, in his own perverse way,” Wohl said. “He probably thought Dutch was a fellow man of honor. The mob is big on honor.”
“I saw that on TV,” Barbara said.
He looked at her.
“About Captain Moffitt. I wasn’t going to bring it up unless you did,” Barbara said. “But I suppose that’s what’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t know anything was wrong,” Wohl said.
“Have it your way, Peter,” Barbara said.
“No, you tell me, what’s wrong?”
“You’re wearing a turtleneck sweater, and you’re driving the Jaguar,” she said. “You always do that when something went wrong at work; it’s as if—as if it’s a symbol, that you don’t want to be a cop. At least then. And then you got into it with the kid who wanted to park your car, and then the headwaiter here ...”
“That’s very interesting,” he said.
“Now, I’m sorry I said it,” Barbara said.
“No, I mean it. I didn’t know I was that transparent.”
“I know you pretty well, Peter,” she said.
“You want to know what’s really bothering me?” Wohl asked.
“Only if you want to tell me,” she said.
“My parents called, just before I went to pick you up,” he said. “They told me I should go by Jeannie Moffitt’s house tonight. Tonight’s for close friends. Tomorrow, they’ll have the wake. And they’re right, of course. I should, but I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t.”
“You were a friend of Dutch Moffitt’s,” Barbara said. “Why don’t you want to go?”
“Did I tell you that I went in on the assist?”
“You were there?” she asked. She seemed more sympathetic than surprised.
He nodded. “I was a couple of blocks away. When I got there, Dutch was still slumped against the wall of the Waikiki Diner.”
“You didn’t tell me anything,” Barbara said. It was, he decided, a statement of fact, rather than a reproof.
“There’s an eyewitness, that woman from Channel Nine, Louise Dutton,” Wohl said.
“I saw her,” Barbara said. “When she was on TV talking about it.”
“I think she had something going with Dutch,” Wohl said. “I’ll bet on it, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, my!” Barbara said. “And is it going to come out? Will his wife find out?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Wohl said. “The commissioner has assigned that splendid police officer, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, to see that ‘nothing awkward develops.’ “
“You mean, the commissioner knows about Captain Moffitt and that woman?”
“Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, with the good of the department ever foremost in his mind, told him,” Wohl said.
Barbara Crowley laid her hand on his.
“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” she said. “But one of the main reasons I like you is that you are really a moral man, Peter. You really think about right and wrong.”
“And all this time, I thought it was my Jaguar,” he said.
“I hate your Jaguar,” she said.
“The reason, more or less subconsciously, that I wore the turtleneck and drove the Jaguar, was that I can’t go play the role of the bereaved close friend of the family wearing a turtleneck and driving the Jaguar.”
“I thought that maybe it was because you didn’t want to take me with you,” Barbara said.
“You didn’t want to go over there,” Peter said.
“No, but you didn’t know that,” Barbara said. When he looked at her in surprise, she went on: “You could go home and change. I’ll go over there with you, if you would like. If you think I would be welcome.”
“Don’t be silly, of course you’d be welcome,” he said.
“People might get the idea, that if I went there with you, I was your girl friend.”
“I don’t think that’s much of a secret, is it?” Peter said. “But I’m not really up to going there. I suppose this makes me a moral coward, but I don’t want to look at Jeannie’s face, or the kids’,” he said. “But thank you, Barbara.”
“What it makes you is honest,” Barbara said, and laid her hand on his. Then she added, “We could go to my place.”
Barbara lived in a three-room apartment on the top floor of one of the red-brick buildings at the hospital. It was roomy and comfo
rtable.
She really thought the reason I wasn’t going over to the house was because taking her there would be one more reluctant step on our slow, but inexorable march to the altar. I squirmed out of that, and now she is offering me comfort, in the way women have comforted men since they came home with dinosaur bites.
“What I think I will do is take you home, apologize for my lousy attitude—”
“Don’t be silly, Peter,” Barbara interrupted.
“And then go home and get my uniform out of the bag so that I will remember to get it pressed in the morning.”
“Your uniform?”
“Dutch was killed in the line of duty,” Peter said. “There will be, the day after tomorrow, a splendiferous ceremony at Saint Dominic’s. I will be there, in uniform, which, my mother and dad hope, will be accepted as a gesture of my respect overwhelming my bad manners for not joining the other close friends at the house tonight.”
He saw a question forming in her eyes, but she didn’t, after a just perceptible hesitation, ask it. Instead, she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in your uniform.”
“Very spiffy,” he said. “When I wear my uniform, I have to fight to preserve my virtue. It drives the girls wild.”
“I’ll bet you look very nice in a uniform,” Barbara said.
He looked for and found the waiter and waved him over and called for the check.
There would be no check, the waiter said. It was Mr. Savarese’s pleasure.
****
Barbara insisted in going home in a cab. She wasn’t mad, she assured him, but she was tired and he was tired, and they both had had bad days and a lot to do tomorrow, and a cab was easier, and made sense.
She kissed him quickly, and got in a cab and was gone. He went to the parking garage and reclaimed the Jaguar.
As soon as he got behind the wheel, Peter Wohl began to regret not having gone to her apartment with Barbara. For one thing, he had learned that turning down an offer of sexual favors was not a good way to maintain a good relationship with a female. They could have headaches, or for other reasons be temporarily out of action, but the privilege was not reciprocal. He had probably hurt her feelings, or angered her (even if she didn’t let it show), or both, by leaving her. He was sorry to have done that, for Barbara was a good woman.
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