“Sounds fine to me,” Peter said.
“And the doorbell rings, and I go to answer it, and there stands Hizzoner the Mayor Carlucci. ‘Sorry, Mrs. Wohl,’ Hizzoner says. ‘But your fine husband, the late Inspector Wohl, was just shot by an angry housewife. Or was it a bandit? Doesn’t really matter. He’s dead. Gone to that Great Roundhouse in the Sky.’ “
It took Peter a moment to reply, but finally he said, “Are you always this cheerful in the morning?”
“Only when I’m on my way to see a severed head while en route to a funeral,” Louise said. “But I’m serious, Peter.”
“Then I’ll answer you seriously,” he said. “I am a Staff Inspector. I don’t respond to calls. Supervisors supervise. The guys on the street are the ones that have to deal with the public. That’s for openers. And most police officers who do their twenty years on the street never fire their pistols except on the range.”
“That’s why you carry a gun all the time, right?” Louise countered.
“I can’t remember the last time I took it out of the holster except to clean it,” Peter said.
“I can,” Louise said. “The very first time I saw you, Peter, you were jumping out of a car with your gun in your hand.”
“That was an anomaly,” Peter said. “Dutch getting shot was an anomaly. He’s probably the first captain who fired his weapon in the line of duty in twenty years.”
“That may be, but Dutch got shot,” Louise said. “Got shot and killed. And there you were, with your gun in your hand, rushing to the gun battle at the OK Corral.”
“What did you think when you saw me getting out of my car?”
“ ‘Where did that good-looking man come from?’ “
“How about ‘Thank God, it’s the cops’?” Peter asked, softly.
She met his eyes for a long moment.
“Touché” she said, finally.
“That’s what I do, baby,” Peter said. “I’m a cop. And I’m good at what I do. And, actuarially speaking, I’m in probably no more of a risky occupation than a, hell, I don’t know, an airline pilot or a stockbroker.”
“Tell that to Mrs. Moffitt,” Louise said.
“Eat your eggs before they get cold, baby,” Peter said.
“I don’t think so,” she said, pushing the plate away. “I think I would rather get something to eat after I look at the head.”
“I’m sorry, but that is necessary,” Peter said.
“Peter, I don’t know if I could spend the rest of my life wondering if I ‘m going to be a widow by the end of the day,” Louise said.
“You’re exaggerating the risk,” he said.
“Is it graven on stone somewhere that you have to spend the rest of your life as a cop?”
“It’s what I do, Louise. And I like it.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” she said, and got to her feet. “Go put on your policeman’s suit, and take me to see the severed head,” she said.
“We can talk this out,” Peter said.
“I think everything that can be said on the subject has been said,” Louise said. “It was what Daddy was talking about when he said the idea of us getting married was a lousy one.”
“Come on, baby,” Peter said. “I understand why you’re upset, but—”
“Just shut up, Peter,” Louise said. “Just please shut up.”
****
Antonio V. “Big Tony” Amarazzo, proprietor of Tony’s Barbershop, stood behind the barber chair, swinging it from side to side so that the man in the chair could admire his handiwork. He had given the large man under the striped bib his very first haircut, twenty years before, the day before he started kindergarten.
Officer Charles McFadden looked into the mirror. The mirror was partly covered by the front page of the Four Star Edition of the Bulletin, with his picture on it, which had been taped to the mirror below the legend (lettered with shoe whitener) “OUR NEIGHBORHOOD HERO CHARLEY MCFADDEN.”
“Looks fine, Mr. Amarazzo,” Charley said. “Thank you.”
“ ‘Mister Amarazzo’?” Big Tony replied. “You sore at me or what? We haven’t been friends since God only knows how long?”
Charley, who could not think of a response, smiled at Big Tony’s reflection in the mirror.
“And now we’re gonna give you a shave that’ll turn your chin into a baby’s bottom,” Big Tony said.
“Oh, I don’t want a shave,” Charley protested.
“You can’t go to Saint Dominic’s needing a shave,” Big Tony said, as he pushed Charley back in the chair and draped his face in a hot towel, “and don’t worry, it’s on the house. My privilege.”
Ninety seconds later, as Charley wondered how long (he had never had a barbershop shave before) Big Tony was going to keep the towels on his face, someone else came into the barbershop.
“You know who’s in the chair, under the towels?” Charley heard Big Tony say. “Charley McFadden, that’s who. You seen the Bulletin?”
“I seen it,” an unfamiliar voice said. “I’ll be goddamned.”
Charley had folded his hands over his stomach. He was startled when his right hand was picked up, and vigorously shaken by two hands.
“Good for you, Charley,” the voice said. “I was just telling the wife, when we seen the paper, that if there was more cops like you, and more shitasses killed like the one you killed, Philly’d be a hell of a lot better off. We’re all proud of you, boy.”
“I knew all along,” Charley heard Big Tony say, “that Charley was a cop. I couldn’t say anything, of course.”
When Big Tony pulled the hot towel off, and started to lather Charley’s face, there were three other men from the neighborhood standing behind the chair, waiting to shake his hand.
****
It was a pleasant spring morning, and the Payne family was having breakfast outside, on a flagstone patio. The whole family, for the first time in a long time, was all home at once. Foster J. Payne, twenty-five, who looked very much like his father, had come home from Cambridge, where he had just completed his second year at Harvard Law; and Amelia Alice “Amy” Payne, twenty-seven, who had three years before—the youngest in her Johns Hopkins class—earned the right to append “M.D.” after her name, had just completed her residency in psychiatry at the Louisiana State University Medical Center, and had come home to find a place for herself in Philadelphia. Brewster C. Payne III, eighteen, who had just graduated from Episcopal Academy, had commuted to school; but he was, after spending the summer in Europe (his graduation present), going to Dartmouth; and Patricia Payne was very aware that the nest would then be forever empty.
Amy was petite and intense, not a pretty girl, but an attractive, natural one. In judging his children intellectually (and of course, privately) Brewster Payne had rated his daughter first, then Matt, then Foster, and finally Brewster, who was known as “B.C.” Just as privately, Patricia Payne had done the same thing, with the same result, except that she had rated B.C. ahead of Foster.
Amy was very smart, perhaps even brilliant. She had been astonishingly precocious, and as astonishingly determined from the time she had been a little girl. Patricia worried that it might cause her trouble when she married, until she learned to adapt to her husband, or perhaps to the more general principle that it is sometimes far wiser to keep your mouth shut than to persist in trying to correct someone else’s erroneous notions.
Matt was bright. He had never had any trouble in school, and there had been at least a dozen letters from teachers and headmasters saying essentially the same thing, that if he applied himself, he could be an A student. He never applied himself (Patricia was convinced he had never done an hour’s honest homework in his life) and he had never been an A student.
Foster was, but Foster had to work at it. By definition, Foster was the only student among the three of them. Amy rarely had to crack a book, Matt was never willing to, and Foster seldom had his nose out of one. B.C. had been a 3.5 average student at Episcopal without ever
having brought a book home from school.
The patio was furnished with a long, wrought-iron, mottled-glass-topped table, with eight cushioned wrought-iron chairs. Two smaller matching tables sat against the fieldstone, slate-topped patio wall. Two electric frying pans had been set up on one of them, and it also held a bowl of eggs and a plate with bacon and Taylor ham. The other held an electric percolator, a pitcher of milk, a toaster, bread and muffins, and a pitcher of orange juice.
Patricia Payne had decided, when the kids were growing up, that the solution to everybody’s sauntering down to breakfast in their own good time was, rather than shouted entreaties and threats up the kitchen stairwell, a cafeteria-style buffet. The kids came down when they wanted, and cooked their own eggs. In the old days, too, there had been two newspapers, which at least partially solved the question of who got what section when.
There was something bittersweet about today’s breakfast, Patricia thought: fond memories of breakfasts past, pleasure that everyone was once again having breakfast together again, and a disquieting fear that today, or at least the next week or so, might be the very last time it would happen.
“That’s absolute bullshit!” Matthew Payne said, furiously.
Everybody looked at him. He was on the right side of the far end of the table, bent over a folded copy of the Ledger.
“Matt!” Patricia Payne said.
“Did you see this?” Matt asked, rhetorically.
“Actually, no,” Brewster Payne said, dryly. “When I came down, all that was left of the paper was the real estate ads.”
“Tell us what the goddamn liberals have done this time, Matty,” Amy said.
“You watch your language, too, Doctor,” Patricia Payne said.
Matt got up and walked down the table to Brewster Payne and laid the editorial page on the table before him. He pointed.
“ ‘No Room In Philadelphia For Vigilante Justice’,” Matt quoted. “Just read that garbage!”
Brewster Payne read the editorial, then pushed the paper to his wife.
“Maybe they know something you don’t, Matt,” he said.
“I met that cop yesterday,” Matt said.
“You met him?” Amy said.
“Denny Coughlin took me to meet him,” Matt said. “First he took me to the medical examiner’s and showed me the body, and then he took me to South Philadelphia to meet the cop.”
“Why did he do that?” Amy asked.
“He shares your opinion, Doctor, that I shouldn’t join the police,” Matt said. “He was trying to scare me off.”
“I suppose even a policeman can spot obvious insanity when he sees it,” Amy said.
“Amy!” Patricia Payne said.
Foster Payne got up and stood behind Patricia Payne and read the editorial.
“Whoever wrote this,” he said, “is one careful step the safe side of libel,” he said.
“It’s bullshit,” Matt said. “It’s . . . vicious. I saw that cop. He was damned near in shock. He was so shook up he didn’t even know who Denny Coughlin was. He’s a nice, simple Irish Catholic guy who could no more throw somebody in front of an elevated train than Mom could.”
“But it doesn’t say that, Matthew,” Foster Payne explained patiently. “It doesn’t say he pushed that man onto the tracks. What it says is that that allegation has been raised, and that having been raised, the city has a clear duty to investigate. Historically, police have overreacted when one of their own has been harmed.”
Matthew glared at him; said, with infinite disgust, “Oh, Jesus!” and then looked at Brewster Payne. “Now that Harvard Law has been heard from, Dad, what do you say?”
“I don’t really know enough about what really happened to make a judgment,” Brewster Payne said. “But I think it reasonable to suggest that Arthur J. Nelson, having lost his son the way he did, is not very happy with the police.”
“Daddy, you saw where the police are looking for the Nelson boy’s homosexual lover?” Amy asked. “His Negro homosexual lover?”
“Oh, no!” Patricia Payne said. “How awful!”
“No, I didn’t,” Brewster Payne said. “But if that’s true, that would lend a little weight to my argument, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re not suggesting, Brew, that Mr. Nelson would allow something like that to be published; something untrue, as Matt says it is, simply to ... get back at the police.”
“Welcome to the real world, Mother,” Amy said.
SEVENTEEN
Jason Washington was waiting for them at the medical examiner’s office. His expressive face showed both surprise and, Peter Wohl thought, just a touch of amusement when he saw that Wohl was in uniform.
“Good morning, Miss Dutton,” Washington said. “I’m sorry to have to put you through this.”
“It’s all right,” Louise said.
“They’re installing a closed-circuit television system, to make this sort of identification a little easier on people,” Washington said. “But it’s not working yet.”
“I can come back in a month,” Louise said.
They chuckled. Washington smiled at Wohl.
“And may I say, Inspector, how spiffy you look today?” he said.
“I’m going to be a pallbearer,” Wohl said.
“Can we get on with this?” Louise asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Washington said. “Miss Dutton, I’m going to take you inside, and show you some remains. I will then ask you if you have ever seen that individual, and if so, where, when, and the circumstances.”
“All right,” Louise said.
“You want me to come with you?” Peter asked.
“Only if you want to,” Louise said.
Louise stepped back involuntarily when Jason Washington lifted the sheet covering the remains of Gerald Vincent Gallagher, but she did not faint, nor did she become nauseous. When Peter Wohl tried to steady her by putting his hands on her arms, she shook free impatiently.
“I don’t know his name,” she said, levelly. “But I have seen that man before. In the Waikiki Diner. He’s the man who was holding the diner up when Captain Moffitt tried to stop him.”
“There is no question in your mind?” Washington asked.
“For some reason, it stuck in my mind,” Louise said, sarcastically, and then turned and walked quickly out of the room.
Wohl caught up with her.
“You all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You want a cup of coffee? Something else?”
“No, thank you,” she said.
“You want to go get some breakfast?”
“No, thank you.”
“You have to eat, Louise,” Wohl said.
“He said, ever practical,” she said, mockingly.
“You do,” he said.
“All right, then,” she said.
They went to a small restaurant crowded with office workers on the way to work. They were the subject of a good deal of curiosity. People recognized Louise, Wohl realized. They might not be able to recognize her as the TV lady, but they knew they had seen her someplace.
She ate French toast and bacon, but said very little.
“I have the feeling that I’ve done something wrong,” Peter said.
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
As they walked back to his car, they passed a Traffic Division cop, who saluted Peter, who, not expecting it, returned it somewhat awkwardly. Then he noticed that the cop was wearing the mourning band over his badge. He had completely forgotten about that. The mourning bands were sliced from the elastic cloth around the bottom of old uniform caps. He didn’t have an old uniform cap. He had no idea what had happened to either his old regular patrolman’s cap, or the crushed-crown cap he had worn as a Highway Patrol sergeant. And there never had been cause to replace his senior officer’s cap; he hadn’t worn it twenty times.
He wondered if someone would have one at Marshutz & Sons, predicting that someone like him would show
up without one. And if that didn’t happen, what he would do about it.
He drove Louise back to Stockton Place and pulled to the curb before Number Six.
“What about later?” he asked.
“What about later?” she parroted.
“When am I going to see you?”
“I have to work, and then I have to see my father, and then I have to go back to work. I’ll call you.”
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you?”
“Don’t press me, Peter,” she said, and got out of the car. And then she walked around the front and to his window and motioned for him to lower it. She bent down and kissed him. It started as a quick kiss, but it quickly became intimate.
Not passionate, he thought, intimate.
“That may not have been smart,” Louise said, looking into his eyes for a moment, and then walking quickly into the building, not looking back.
Intimate, Peter Wohl thought, and a little sad, as in a farewell kiss.
He looked at her closed door for a moment, and then made a U-turn on the cobblestones, and drove away.
He had headed, without thinking, for Marshutz & Sons, but changed his mind and instead drove to the Roundhouse. There might have been another development, something turned up around Jerome Nelson’s car, maybe, or something else. If there was something concrete, maybe it would placate Arthur J. Nelson. His orders had been to stroke him, not antagonize him.
And somewhere in the Roundhouse he could probably find someone who could give him a mourning band; he didn’t want to take the chance that he could get one at the funeral home.
He went directly to Homicide.
Captain Henry C. Quaire was sitting on one of the desks, talking on the telephone, and seemed to expect him; when he saw Wohl he pointed to one of the rooms adjacent to one of the interrogation rooms. Then he covered the phone with his hand and said, “Be right with you.”
Wohl nodded and went into the room. Through the one-way mirror, he could see three people in the interrogation room. One was Detective Tony Harris. There was another man, a tall, rather aesthetic-looking black man in his twenties or thirties whom Wohl didn’t recognize but who, to judge by the handcuffs hanging over his belt in the small of his back, was a detective. The third man was a very large, very black, visibly uncomfortable man handcuffed to the interrogation chair. He fit the description of Pierre St. Maury.
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