“Who’s he? Am I supposed to know what that means?” Kevin McFadden asked.
“A staff inspector is higher than a captain,” Charley explained. “All they do is the important investigations.”
“So?” Agnes McFadden said.
“So, Mom, so here is this Staff Inspector Wohl, wearing a suit that must have cost him two hundred bucks, and driving this brand-new Ford LTD, and he ain’t hardly any older than Lieutenant Pekach, that’s what!”
“He must have pull, then,” Agnes McFadden said. “He must know somebody.”
“Ah, Jesus Christ, Mom!” Charley said, and stormed out of the kitchen.
“You shouldn’t have said that, Agnes,” Kevin McFadden said. “Charley’s ambitious, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
The front door slammed, and a moment later, they could hear the whine of the Volkswagen starter.
“Talk to me about ambition,” Agnes replied, “when they call up and tell you they’re sorry, some bum shot him. Or stuck a knife in him.”
****
Peter Wohl started the LTD and looked across the seat at Louise Dutton.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I have seen faster typists.”
He chuckled. The typist who had typed up her statement had been a young black woman, obviously as new to the typewriter as she was determined to do a good, accurate, no strike-over, job.
“Where to now?” he asked.
“I’ve got to go to work, of course,” Louise said. “But I think I had better get my car, first. On the way, you can drop off your uniform.”
“Not that I don’t want your company,” he said, “but I could drop you at the station, and we could get your car later. For that matter, I could bring it to the station.”
“I thought about that,” she said. “And decided that since you live in Timbuctoo, I’d rather get it now. On the long way back downtown, I’ll have time to think, to come up with a credible reason why I was such a disgrace to journalism last night.”
“Huh? Oh, you mean they expected you to come in and—what’s the term?—write up what happened to Nelson?”
“Yes, they did,” Louise said. “And when I didn’t, I confirmed all of Leonard Cohen’s male chauvinist theories about the emotional instability of female reporters. Real reporters, men reporters, don’t get hysterical.”
“You weren’t hysterical,” Peter said. “You were upset, but you had every right to be.”
They were now passing City Hall, and heading out John F. Kennedy Boulevard, past the construction sites of what the developers said would be Downtown Philadelphia Reborn.
Louise turned and looked at him.
“You’re a really nice guy, Peter Wohl,” she said. “Anyone ever tell you that?”
“All the time,” he said.
She laughed, and changed the subject: “When we get to your place, I have to go inside.”
“Why?”
“Because my underwear was still wet, and I couldn’t put it on,” she said.
The logical conclusion to be drawn from that statement, Peter thought, is that she is at this moment, underwear-less. Phrased another way, she is naked under her dress.
“You should have seen your face just now,” Louise said.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Your eyes grew wide,” she said. “Does that turn you on, Peter Wohl? A woman not wearing underwear?”
“Get off my back,” he flared.
“It does!” she said, delighted. “It does!”
He turned and glared at her. She wasn’t fazed. She smiled at him.
He returned his attention to the road. Louise noticed that he was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were white.
They said nothing else to each other until they reached his apartment. He pulled the nose of the Ford against the garage door, turned off the ignition, handed her the apartment key, and laid his arm on the back of the seat.
“I would just run along,” he said. “But I’m going to need my key back. I’ll wait here.”
“I’ll throw it out the window,” she said.
“Fine,” he said.
She went up the stairs and he leaned on the fender of the Ford LTD. A minute or so later, he heard the window in his bathroom grate open. He turned and looked up at the window. All he could see was her head; she had to be kneeling on the toilet seat.
“Can you come up here a minute?” she said. “I’ve got a little trouble.”
He went up the stairs and into the apartment.
Louise’s head peered at him around his nearly closed bedroom door.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
“I don’t want to go to work,” Louise said. “Not right now.”
“Then don’t go,” he said. “Stay here as long as you like.”
“You really are a very sweet guy, Peter,” Louise said.
“You seem to be a little ambiguous about that,” Peter said.
“You’re sore about the way I teased you in the car, aren’t you?”
“You enjoy humiliating people, go ahead,” he said.
“I was just teasing, “ she said. “If I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t tease you.”
“I understand,” he said. “I don’t think you’re half as clever, or as sophisticated as you do, but I understand you.”
“Oh, damn you,” she said, and opened the door all the way. “You don’t understand me at all.”
She walked within six feet of him and stopped, and looked into his eyes.
“Come on, Peter,” she said. “Loosen up.”
“Is there anything else I can get you?” Peter asked.
Louise unbuttoned her jacket, and then shrugged out of it.
She raised her eyes to his.
“What do I have to do, Peter?” she asked, very softly. “Throw you on the white couch and rip your clothes off?”
****
Officer Charley McFadden pulled into a gas station and called Jesus Martinez and told him what he had in mind. Hay-zus’s mother answered the phone and with obvious reluctance, after she told him Hay-zus was asleep, got him on the phone.
“You want to help me catch Gerald Vincent Gallagher?”
“I thought you were working with Homicide,” Hay-zus said.
“The detective with the job let me very politely know that he didn’t need my help, thank you very much.”
There was a long pause.
“Where do you think he is?” Hay-zus asked.
“I want to look for him at the Bridge Street Terminal,” McFadden said.
The Bridge Street Terminal, which is the end of the line for the Market Street Elevated, a major transfer point for people traveling to and from Center City and West Philadelphia.
“In other words, you don’t have the first fucking idea where he is,” Martinez said.
“I got a feeling, Hay-zus,” Charley McFadden said.
Gerald Vincent Gallagher, Charley McFadden had reasoned, would have hidden someplace for a while. Then he would want to get out of the Northeast. He didn’t have a car—few junkies did—but he would have the price of bus or subway fare, if he had to panhandle for it.
There was a long pause.
“Ah, shit,” Jesus Martinez said. “I’ll meet you there.”
And then he hung up.
McFadden parked his Volkswagen fifty feet from the intersection of Frankford and Bridge Streets. He went to a candy store across the street and bought two large 7-Ups to go (lots of ice); two Hershey bars; two Mounds bars; two bags of Planter’s peanuts; and a pack of Chesterfields.
He carried everything back to the Volkswagen, and arranged it and himself on and around the front seat. He slumped down on the seat, and lit a cigarette.
It was liable to be a long wait for Gerald Vincent Gallagher. And, of course, he might not show.
If he didn’t show, McFadden decided, he would not put in for overtime. Nobody had told him
to stake out the terminal.
But he might. And he would really like to catch the despicable shit, so he would wait.
He had been there ten minutes when a trackless trolley pulled in. A slight, dark, young-appearing man wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt got off. He looked around until he spotted the Volkswagen and then walked to it, and got in.
“I just thought,” he said. “Since nobody told us to do this, we can’t put in for overtime, right?”
“When we catch him, we can,” McFadden said. “I’ll bet you believe in the Easter Bunny, too, huh?” Jesus Martinez said. Then he looked at the supplies McFadden had laid in. “No wonder you’re fat,” he said. “That shit’s no good for you.”
He reached for one of the 7-Ups, and they settled down to wait.
****
Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester maintained law offices on the eleventh floor of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building on Market Street, east of Broad. It was convenient to both the federal courthouse and the financial district.
Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson and Brewster Cortland Payne II, the founding partners of the firm, occupied offices on either side of the Large Conference Room. They shared a secretary, Mrs. Irene Craig, a tall, dignified, silver-haired woman in her fifties. Mrs. Craig had two secretaries of her own, set up in an office off her own tastefully furnished office. Although she could, if necessary, type nearly one hundred words per minute on her state-of-the-art IBM typewriter, Mrs. Craig rarely typed anything on it except Memoranda of Incoming Calls.
Her function, she had once told her husband, was to serve as sort of a traffic cop, offering, and barring, entrance to the attention, either in person or on the phone, of her bosses. Their time was valuable, and it was her job to see that it was not wasted.
She was very good at her job, and although it was a secret between them, she brought home more money than did her husband, who worked for the Prudential Insurance Company.
When she came to work, at her ritual time of 8:45, fifteen minutes before the business day actually began, she was surprised to see the colonel’s office door open. Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson rarely appeared before ten, or ten-thirty. She went into his office. He wasn’t there, but there was evidence that he had been.
There were cigarettes in his ashtray; two cardboard coffee containers from the machine way down the hall by the typists’ pool; and crumpled paper in his wastebasket. The colonel’s leather-framed doodle pad was covered with triangles, stars, a setting sun, and a multidigit telephone number Mrs. Craig recognized from the prefix to be one in London, England.
Mrs. Craig retrieved the crumpled paper from the wastebasket, unfolded it, and read it. There were names on it: Louise Button, Lt. DelRaye, Insp. Wohl (Wall?), and, underlined, Stanford Fortner Wells III. There was an address, 6 Stockton Place, and several telephone numbers, none of which Mrs. Craig recognized. And then she remembered that Stanford Fortner Wells III had something to do with newspapers; what, exactly, she couldn’t recall.
She dumped the contents of the ashtray in the waste-basket, added the cardboard coffee containers, and then carried it outside and dumped it in her own wastebasket. Then she went to the smaller office where her assistants worked and started the coffee machine. That was for her. She liked a cup of coffee to begin the day, and sometimes Mr. Payne came in wanting a cup.
Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson came in the office at ten past nine, smiled at her, and asked if Mr. Payne was in.
“Not yet, any minute,” she said.
“Let me know the minute he does, will you please? And could you get me a cup of coffee?”
He went in his office, and as she went to fetch the coffee, she saw him go to the window of his office that gave a view of Market Street down to the river and stand, with his hands on his hips, as if he was mad at something, looking out.
Brewster Cortland Payne II came into her office as she was carrying a cup of coffee, with two envelopes of saccharin and a spoon on the saucer across it to the colonel’s office.
“Good morning,” Brewster Payne said, with a nod and a smile. He was a tall and thin, almost skinny, man wearing a single-breasted vested gray suit, a subdued necktie, and black shoes. Yet there was something, an air of authority and wisdom, Mrs. Craig knew, that made people look at him in a crowd. He looked, she thought, like what a successful attorney should look like. Sometimes, especially when she was annoyed with him, the colonel didn’t look that way to her.
“Good morning,” she said. “He asked me to let him know the minute you came in.” Brewster Payne’s face registered amused surprise.
“Do you think he is annoyed that I’m a little late?” he asked, and added: “I would be grateful for some coffee myself.”
“Here,” Mrs. Craig said, handing him the cup and saucer. “Tell him I’m getting his.”
When she delivered the coffee, Brewster Payne was sprawled on the colonel’s red leather couch, his long legs stretched out in front of him, balancing his coffee on his stomach. The colonel was standing beside his desk. When she handed him the coffee, he gave her an absent smile and set it down on the desk.
Mrs. Craig left, closing the door after her. There was someone new in the outer office.
“Hello, Matt,” she said. She liked Matt Payne, thought that he was a really handsome, and more important, nice young man. She liked the way he smiled.
“Good morning, Mrs. Craig,” he said, and then blurted: “Is there any chance I could see him this morning? He doesn’t expect me, but ...”
“He’s in with the colonel,” she said. “I don’t know how long they’ll be.”
“I think this was a bad idea,” Matt said.
“Don’t be silly. Sit down, I’ll get you some coffee.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
He was enormously relieved, Mrs. Craig saw, and was glad that she had insisted that he stay, even though it would delay the morning’s schedule by fifteen minutes or more. Fifteen minutes, plus however long the colonel and Mr. Payne were in the colonel’s office.
****
Louise Dutton came out of the bathroom wearing Peter’s bathrobe. It hung loosely on her but even in the dim light, he could see the imprint of her nipples. He thought she looked incredibly appealing.
She walked across the bedroom to the bed, looked down at Peter a moment, and then sat down on the bed.
“Well,” she said. “Look who woke up.”
“I wasn’t asleep, Delilah,” he said. “I watched you get out of bed.”
“Delilah?”
“I never really thought she rendered Samson helpless by giving him a haircut,” Peter said. “That was the edited-for-children version.”
“You Samson”—she chuckled—”me Delilah?”
“And as soon as I get my strength back, I’ll tear the temple down,” Peter said. “Actually, what I have to do is face the dragon in his lair.”
“Now I’m the dragon? The dragon lady?”
“I was referring to Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, our beloved chief of detectives,” Wohl said. He reached to his right, away from her, and took his wristwatch from the bedside table. He glanced at it, strapped it on, and said, “I’ve got to see how the Nelson investigation is going, and then go see Arthur J. Nelson. I’m late now.”
“Then why aren’t you out of bed, getting dressed?” she asked.
He held his arms out, and she came into them. He kissed the top of her head.
She purred, “Nice.”
“I wasn’t sure you would like me to do that,” he said, her face against his chest.
“Why not?”
“It’s after, “ Peter said. “Women have been known to regret a moment of passion.”
“I was afraid when I came back in here, you would be all dressed and ready to leave,” she said. “Because it’s after.”
He laughed, and pulled his head back so that he could look at her face.
“Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am?” he asked.
“You’re the type, Peter,” she said.
“You like this better?”
“Much better,” she said.
“Blow in my ear, and the world is yours,” he said.
She giggled and kissed his chest.
“There’s no small voice of reason in the back of your mind sending up an alarm?” she asked. “ ‘What am I getting myself into with this crazy lady ?’ “
“What the small voice of reason is asking is, ‘What happens when she realizes what she’s done? The TV Lady and the Cop?’ “
“That would seem to suggest there was more for you in what happened than one more notch on your gun.” Louise said.
“If I wasn’t afraid it would trigger one of your smartass replies, I would tell you it’s never been that way for me before,” Peter said.
She pushed herself into a sitting position and looked down at him.
“For me, either,” she said. “I mean, really, I had to ask you.”
“Oh, come on,” he said.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “And that suggests the possibility that I’m queer for cops. What do they call those pathetic little girls who chase the bands around? ‘Groupies’? Maybe I’m a cop groupie.”
“This is what I was afraid of,” Peter said. “That you would start thinking.”
“Why shouldn’t I think?”
“Because if you do, sure as Christ made little apples, you’ll come up with some good excuse to cut it off between us.”
“Maybe that would be best, in the long run,” she said.
“Not for me, it wouldn’t,” he said.
“ ‘He said, with finality,’ “ Louise said. “Why do you say that, Peter? So ... With such finality?”
“I told you before, it was never that way for me. before,” Peter said.
“You don’t think that might be because you saw a friend of yours slumped dead against the wall of a diner yesterday afternoon? That sort of thing would tend, I would suppose, to excite the emotions. Or that I might be at a high emotional peak myself? I was there, too, not to mention poor little Jerome?”
“I don’t give a damn what caused it, all I know is how I feel about what happened,” Peter said. “I gather this is not what they call a reciprocal emotion?”
“I didn’t say that,” Louise said quickly. “Jesus Christ, Peter, I didn’t know you existed this time yesterday!” she said. “What do you expect from me?”
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