He doesn’t look like a cop, Amy thought when she saw Peter talking to the night manager in the lobby of her apartment building. Mr. Ramerez has put the well-cut suit and the Jaguar together and decided Dr. Payne is carrying on with a lawyer or a stockbroker.
“Good evening, Doctor,” Peter said.
“Thank you for coming at this hour,” Amy replied. “Shall we go up?” She smiled at Mr. Ramerez. “Good evening, Mr. Ramerez.”
It is obviously important to me that Mr. Ramerez understand that I am not carrying on with him, cop or stockbroker.
They rode in silence and somewhat awkwardly to Amy’s apartment. She unlocked the door, and entered. He followed her.
“Coffee? Or a drink?” she asked.
“Neither, thank you. You said you wanted to talk about Matt.”
“I think it important that he not be left alone.”
“Tiny Lewis-he’s a police officer…”
“I know who he is,” Amy interrupted.
Peter nodded and went on: “…will be at Matt’s apartment at seven-fifteen in the morning. If you think he should not be alone tonight, I can go back.”
“I think he’ll be all right tonight,” she said. “Can you keep him busy? Especially for the next few days?”
Wohl nodded.
“He blames himself for Penny,” Amy said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I don’t know if you appreciate it, but he is actually rather sensitive.”
“I know.”
“You know what he did tonight?” she asked, and went on without waiting for a reply. “He put his arms around me and asked who holds my hand when I need it.”
“There has been at least one applicant for that job that I know about. As I recall, you didn’t seem interested.”
“Damn you, Peter, you’re not making this easy.”
“I don’t know if you appreciate it, but I am actually rather sensitive,” Wohl mockingly paraphrased what she had said about Matt.
“You bastard!” she said, but laughed. “Honest to God, Peter, I didn’t want to hurt you.”
He shrugged.
“I lied,” Amy said.
“Not returning calls, not being in, having ‘previous plans’ when I finally got you on the phone is not exactly lying.”
“I mean tonight,” Amy said. “Certainly to you, and probably to myself. I knew that you, the Ancient and Honorable Order of Cops, were going to gather protectively around Matt and do more for him than I could.”
Wohl looked at her, waiting for her to go on.
“I wanted somebody, to hold my hand. Penny Detweiler was my patient. I failed her.”
He looked at her a moment.
“Somebody? Anybody? Or me?”
“I knew you would be there,” Amy said.
Peter held his arms open. She took several hesitant steps toward him, and ultimately wound up with her face on his chest.
“Amy, you did everything that could be done for that girl,” Peter said, putting his hand on the back of her head, gently caressing it. “Some people are beyond help. Or don’t want it.”
“Oh, God, Peter! I feel so lousy about it!”
He felt her back stiffen under his hand, and then tremble with repressed sobs.
“Tell you what I’m going to do, Doc,” he said gently. “On one condition, I will accept your kind invitation to breakfast.”
She pushed away from him and looked up at his face.
“I made no such invitation.”
“That I cook breakfast. The culinary arts not being among your many other accomplishments.”
“You think that would help?”
“I don’t think it would hurt.”
“I don’t even know if there’s anything in the fridge.”
“So I’ll open a can of spaghetti.”
Amy tried to smile, failed, and put her head against his chest. She felt his arms tighten around her.
“Would you rather tear off my clothes here, or should we wait until we get into the bedroom?”
It was half past seven when the ringing of his door buzzer woke Matt Payne.
He fumbled on his bedside table for his wristwatch, saw the time, muttered a sacrilege, and got out of bed.
The buzzer went off again, for about five seconds.
“I’m coming, for Christ’s sake,” Matt said, although there was no possibility at all that anyone could hear him.
There was ten seconds of silence as he looked around for his discarded underpants-it being his custom to sleep in his birthday suit-and then another five seconds of buzzer.
He was halfway through the kitchen when the buzzer sounded again.
He found the button that activated the door’s solenoid, pushed it, and then continued through the kitchen and the living room to the head of the stairs. When he looked down, the bulk of Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., attired in a nicely cut dark-blue suit, nearly filled the narrow stairway.
“Tiny, what the hell do you want?” Matt asked, far less than graciously.
“What I want to do is be home in my bed,” Tiny Lewis replied. “What I have been told to do is not let you out of my sight.”
“By who?”
“Wohl,” Tiny said as he reached the head of the stairs. “God, are you always that hard to wake up? I’ve been sitting on that damned buzzer for ten minutes. I was about to take the door.”
“I didn’t get to bed until three,” Matt said.
Tiny looked uncomfortable.
“Matt, I don’t think booze is the solution.”
“I was with Washington at the Mall Tavern.”
“Doing what?”
“Ostensibly, it was so that he and I could listen to Homicide gossip. About the time he went home, I decided it was to introduce me socially to the Homicide guys; he was playing rabbi for me.”
“My father said they’re really going to be pissed that the Mayor sent you over there.”
“I think their reaction, thanks to Washington, has been reduced from homicidal rage, pun intended, to bitter resentment by Washington’s act of charity. Actually, they seemed to understand it wasn’t my doing.”
“I would have been here yesterday,” Tiny said. “Personally, not because Wohl would have sent me. But Washington said there would be enough people here then, and I should come today.” Tiny paused. “I’m sorry about what happened, Matt.”
“Thank you.”
“Anyway, you’re stuck with me,” Tiny said. “And apropos of nothing whatever, I haven’t had my breakfast.”
“See what’s in the refrigerator while I have a shower,” Matt said.
Matt came back into the kitchen ten minutes later to the smell of frying bacon and percolating coffee, and the sight of Tiny Lewis neatly arranging tableware on the kitchen table. He had taken off his suit jacket and put on an apron. It was a full-sized apron, but on Tiny’s massive bulk it appeared much smaller. He looked ridiculous, and Matt smiled.
“I’ll bet you can iron very well, too,” he said.
“Fuck you, you don’t get no breakfast,” Tiny replied amiably.
“When you’re through with that, you can vacuum the living room.”
“Fuck you again,” Tiny said. “Tell me about the double homicide at the Inferno.”
Over breakfast, Matt told him.
“This Atchison guy is very good,” he concluded. “Smart and tough. And his lawyer is good, too. Just when Milham was starting to get him, the lawyer-”
“Who’s his lawyer?”
“A guy named Sidney Margolis.”
Tiny snorted. “I know who he is. A real sleazeball. My father told me he’s been reported to the bar association so often he’s got his own filing cabinet.”
“He’s smart. He saw Milham was getting to Atchison, and said, ‘Interview over. My client is in great pain.’”
“Was he?”
“After Margolis told him he was, he was. And that was it.”
“I wish I could have seen the interview,” Tiny said.
“Milham is very good.”
“You heard about his lady friend’s husband?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think he had anything to do with it?”
“No,” Matt said immediately.
“Neither does my father,” Tiny said. “He said it’s two-to-one it’s something to do with Narcotics. Heading the long list of things I was absolutely forbidden to do when I came on the job was accept an assignment to Narcotics. He said those guys roll around on the pigsty floor so much, and there’s so much money floating around that he’s not surprised how many of them are dirty, but how many are straight.”
“Charley and the Little Spic were undercover narcs, and so was Captain Pekach. They’re straight.”
“The exceptions that prove the rule,” Tiny said. “So what do we do today?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going out to Chestnut Hill in half an hour. Jesus, I hate to face that! The funeral is this afternoon.”
“You mean, we’re going to Chestnut Hill. I have heard my master’s voice, and it said I’m not to let you out of my sight.”
“Family and intimate friends only,” Matt said. “I think it will be my family, the Detweilers, and the Nesbitts. And that’s it.”
“So what do I tell Wohl, since the riffraff aren’t welcome?”
“I’ll call him.”
“Matt, I don’t mind feeling unwelcome. With a suntan like mine, you get pretty used to it. If I can help some way…”
“You’d make a lousy situation worse, Tiny, but thanks,” Matt said. He got up from the table and started toward the telephone, then stopped. He touched Tiny’s shoulder, and Tiny looked up at him. “I appreciate that, pal,” Matt said.
“Somehow saying I’m sorry about what happened doesn’t seem to be enough.”
Matt picked up the telephone and dialed Wohl’s home number. When there was no answer, he called the headquarters of the Special Operations Division to see if, as he often did, Wohl had come to work early. When Wohl’s private line was not answered by the fifth ring, the call was automatically transferred to the line of the tour lieutenant.
“Special Operations, Lieutenant Suffern.”
“Matt Payne, sir. Have you got a location on the Inspector?”
“Yeah. I got a number. Just a minute, Matt,” Lieutenant Suffern said, and then his voice changed: “Matt, I was sorry to hear…”
“Thank you.”
“If there’s anything I can do?”
“I can’t think of a thing, but thank you. I appreciate the thought.”
“Here it is,” Suffern said, “One-thirty A.M. this morning until further notice.” He then read Matt the telephone number at which Inspector Wohl could be reached.
A look of mingled amusement and annoyance flickered across Matt’s face. The number he had been given was familiar to him. It was the one number in Greater Philadelphia where calling Inspector Wohl at this time would be a very bad idea indeed. It was that of the apartment of his sister, Amelia Payne, M.D., Ph. D.
“Thank you, sir.”
“When you feel up to it, Matt, we’ll go hoist a couple.”
“Thank you,” Matt said. “I’d like to.”
Matt hung up and turned to Tiny, a smile crossing his face at his own wit.
“Wohl can’t be reached right now,” he said. “He’s at the doctor’s.”
“So what do we do?”
“When all else fails, tell the truth,” Matt said. “You go to the schoolhouse and when Wohl shows up you tell him I said ‘Thank you, but no thank you, I don’t want any company.’”
“I don’t know, Matt,” Tiny said dubiously. “Wohl wasn’t making a suggestion. He told me to sit on you.”
“Oh, shit,” Matt said, and dialed Amy’s number.
“Dr. Payne is not available at this time,” her answering machine reported. “If you will leave your name and number, she will return your call as soon as possible. Please wait for the tone. Thank you.”
“Amy, I know you’re there. I need to talk to Inspector Wohl.”
A moment later, Wohl himself came on the line.
“What is it, Matt?”
“Tiny Lewis is here. Having him go with me to the Detweilers’ is not such a good idea. The funeral is family and intimate friends only.”
“So your sister has been telling me,” Wohl said. “He’s there? Put him on the line.”
Matt held the phone up, and Tiny rose massively from the table and took it.
“Yes, sir?” he said.
Tiny’s was the only side of the conversation Matt could hear, and he was curious when Tiny chuckled, a deep rumble, and said, “I would, too. That’d be something to see.”
When he hung up, Matt asked, “What would be ‘something to see’?”
“The Mayor’s face when somebody tells him he can’t get in. Wohl said he knows the Mayor’s going to the funeral.”
“This one he may not get to go to,” Matt said. “My father said nobody’s been invited, period.”
“Wohl also said I was to drive you out there, if you wanted, and then to keep myself available. I was going to do that anyway.”
“You can take me over to the Parkway as soon as I get dressed. I’m going to drive my sister out there, in her car.”
“Yeah, sure. But listen to what I said. You need me, you know where to find me.”
Inspector Peter Wohl was examining the hole gouged in his cheek by Amy Payne’s dull razor-and from which an astonishing flow of blood was now escaping-when Amy appeared in the bathroom door.
She was in her underwear. It was white, and what there was of it was mostly lace. He found the sight very appealing, and wondered if that was her everyday underwear, or whether she had worn it for him.
That pleasant notion was immediately shattered by her tone of voice and the look on her face.
“It’s for you,” she said. “Again. Does everyone in Philadelphia know you’re here?”
“Sorry,” he said, and quickly tore off a square of toilet paper, pressed it to the wound, and went into her bedroom. He sat on the bed and grabbed the telephone.
“Inspector Wohl.”
“I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,” Jason Washington’s deep, mellifluous voice said.
Washington’s the soul of discretion. When he got this number from the tour lieutenant-and with that memory of his, he probably knows whose number it is-unless it was important, he would have waited until I went to work.
“No trouble. I’m just sitting here quietly bleeding to death. Good morning, Jason. What’s up?”
“I just had an interesting call. An informant who has been reliable with what he’s given me-which hasn’t been much-in the past. He said the Inferno murders were a mob contract.”
“Interesting. Did he give you a name?”
“Frankie Foley.”
“Never heard of him.”
Amy sat on the bed beside him and put her hand on his cheek. It was a gesture of affection, but only by implication. She had a cotton swab dipped in some kind of antiseptic.
She pulled the toilet paper bandage off and professionally swabbed his gouge.
“Neither have I. And neither has Organized Crime or Intelligence.”
“Even more interesting.”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
It was a moment before Wohl replied.
“Give it to Homicide. And then see if you can make a connection to Cassandro.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wohl had an unpleasant thought. There was a strong possibility that he would have to remind Washington that a new chain of command was in effect. Washington was used to reporting directly to him. He might not like having to go through Weisbach.
“What did Weisbach say when you told him?”
“He said he thought we better give it to Homicide, but to ask you first.”
Thank God! Personnel conflict avoided.
“Write this down, Jason. The true sign of another man’s intelligence is the degree to which he agrees with you.”
Washington laughed.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said, and hung up.
“Who was that?” Amy asked.
“Jason Washington.”
“I thought so. How did he know you were here? What did you do, put an ad in the Bulletin? Who else knows where you spent the night?”
“There is a very short list of people who have to know where I am all the time. The tour lieutenant knows where to find me. Since only Matt and Jason called, to answer your question two people have reason to suspect I spent the night here.”
“God!”
“There is a solution to the problem,” Peter said. “I could make an honest woman of you.”
“Surely you jest,” she said after a moment’s pause.
“I don’t know if I am or not,” Peter said. “You better not consider that a firm offer.”
She stood up. “Now I’m sorry I fixed your face,” she said, and walked toward the bathroom.
“Nice ass,” he called after her.
She gave him the finger without turning and went into the bathroom, closing the door.
Jesus, where did that “make an honest woman of you” crack come from?
He stood up and started looking for his clothing.
Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., of the Ninth District, a very tall, well-muscled man, was sitting in a wicker armchair on the enclosed porch of his home reading the Philadelphia Bulletin when Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., of Special Operations, pushed the door open and walked in.
Tiny, who knew his father was working the midnight-out tour, was surprised to see him. It was his father’s custom, when he came off the midnight-out tour, to take a shower and go to bed and get his eight hours’ sleep. And here he was, in an obviously fresh white shirt, immaculately shaven, looking as if he was about to go on duty.
“I thought you were working the midnight-out,” Tiny said.
“Good morning, son. How are you? I am fine, thank you for asking,” Lieutenant Lewis said dryly.
“Sorry.”
“I was supposed to fill in for Lieutenant Prater, who was ill,” Lieutenant Lewis said. “When I got to the office, he had experienced a miraculous recovery. And I thought you were working days.”
“I’m working,” Tiny said, and gestured toward the car parked in the drive.
“How can you be working and here?”
“My orders, Lieutenant, sir, are to stay close to the radio, in case I’m needed.”
“You needn’t be sarcastic, Foster, it was a reasonable question.”
“Inspector Wohl told me to give Matt Payne some company,” Tiny said. “I wasn’t needed.”
“What a tragedy!” Lieutenant Lewis said.
“I thought I’d come see Mom,” Tiny said.
“Since I would not be here, you mean?”
“Pop, every time I see you, you jump all over me.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Just now,” Tiny said. “The implication that I’m screwing off being here.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what you meant.”
“You are driving a departmental vehicle, presumably on duty, visiting your family.”
“I’m doing what I’m ordered to do. Pop, I’m a pretty good cop! Inspector Wohl expects me to be available if he needs me. I don’t think he expected me to just sit in the car and wait for the radio to go off.”
“You believe that, don’t you?”
“Believe what?”
“That you’re a pretty good cop.”
“I’m not as good a cop as you are, but yeah, I’m a pretty good cop.”
“I’m sure you will take offense when I say this, but you don’t know what being a police officer really means.”
“You mean, I never worked in a district?”
“Exactly.”
“Come on, Pop. If Inspector Wohl thought I would learn anything riding around in a car, walking a beat, that’s what he’d have me doing.”
“That sort of thing is beneath you, right?”
“I think we better stop this before either one of us says something we’ll be sorry for,” Tiny said.
Lieutenant Lewis looked at his son for a moment before replying.
“I’m not saying that what you’re doing is not important, or that you don’t do it well.”
“It is important-we’re going to put a dirty captain and a dirty lieutenant away-and I helped. Wohl and Washington wouldn’t have let me get close to that job if they didn’t think I could handle it.”
“All I’m saying, Foster,” Lieutenant Lewis said, “is that I am concerned that you have no experience as a police officer on the street. You don’t even have any friends who are common, ordinary policemen, do you?”
“I guess not,” Tiny said.
“Would you indulge me if I asked you to do something?”
“Within reason.”
It came out more sarcastically, more disrespectfully than Tiny intended, and there was frost for a moment in his father’s eyes. But then apparently he decided to let it pass.
“Did I understand you to say that, so long as you keep yourself available, you’re free to move about the city?”
“That’s right.”
“Go inside, say hello to your mother, tell her you’re coming to dinner tonight, and that we’re going for a ride. Police business.”
“A ride? What police business?”
“We’re going to the Thirty-ninth District. I have a friend there, a common ordinary policeman, who I want you to meet. You might even learn something from him.”
Police Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., badge number 2554 of the Thirty-ninth District, who had twenty-four years on the job, twenty-two of it in the Thirty-ninth District, wanted only one thing from the Philadelphia Police Department. He wanted to make it to retirement, tell them where to mail his retirement checks, and go back home to Hartsville, South Carolina.
Having done that, it was his devout hope that he would never have to put on a uniform, look at a gun, or see Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ever again so long as the Good Lord saw fit to let him live.
He thought of it as going back to Hartsville, although in fact he could never remember living there. He had been brought to Philadelphia from Hartsville at the age of three by his father, who had decided that as bad as things might be up north, with the depression and all, they couldn’t be any worse than being a sharecropper with a wife and child to feed on a hardscrabble farm in South Carolina.
The first memory of a home that Officer Bailey had was of an attic room in a row house on Sydenham in North Philadelphia. There was a table in it, and two beds, one for Mamma Dear and Daddy, and one for him, and then when Charles David came along, for him and Charles David. There was an electric hot plate, and a galvanized bucket for water. The bathroom was one floor down, and shared with the three families who occupied the five rooms on the second floor.
The room was provided to them by the charity of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, to which Officer Bailey and his family still belonged.
He had vague memories of Daddy leaving the apartment in the morning to seek work as a laborer, and much more clear memories of Daddy leaving the room (and later the two-room apartment on the second floor of another row house) carrying his shoe-shine box to walk downtown to station himself at the Market Street Station of the Pennsylvania Railroad to shine the shoes of the rich white folks who rode the train in from places with funny-sounding names like Bala Cynwyd and Glen Riddle.
And he had memories of Hartsville from those times, too. Of going to see Granny Bailey and Granny Smythe back in Hartsville. Mamma Dear and Daddy had believed with the other members of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church that if it was in the Bible, that was all there was to it, you did what it said, and you spent eternity with the Good Lord, or you didn’t, and you spent eternity in the fiery fires of Hell. It said in the Good Book that you were supposed to Honor Thy Mother and Thy Father, and that meant you went to see your mother and your father at least at Christmas, and more often if you could afford it, and affording it meant saving up to buy the bus tickets, and for a few little presents to take with you, even if that meant you didn’t get to drink Coca-Cola or go to the movies.
Bailey had liked Hartsville even then, even if he now recognized that Granny Smythe’s “farm” was nothing more than a weathered shack without inside plumbing that sat on three acres she had been given in the will of old Mr. Smythe-probably because it wasn’t worth the powder to blow it away-whose father had bought Granny Smythe’s father at a slave auction in Beaufort.
There were chickens on Granny Smythe’s farm, and a couple of dogs, and almost always a couple of pigs, and the whole place had seemed a much nicer place to live than in a row house in North Philadelphia.
He had asked several times why they had to live in Philadelphia, and Daddy had told him that he didn’t expect him to understand, but that Philadelphia was a place where you could better yourself, get a good education, and make something of yourself.
Bailey remembered being dropped off with Charles David at the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church by Mamma Dear, wearing a crisp white maid’s uniform, so he and Charles David could be cared for, and she could work and make some money and realize her and Daddy’s dream of buying a house that would be theirs, instead of paying rent.
He remembered the beating Daddy had given him with a leather belt when he was in the fifth grade at the Dunbar Elementary School and the teacher had come by the house they were then renting and reported that he had not only been cutting school, but giving her talk-back in class, and running around with the wrong crowd.
Charles David, who was now a welder at the Navy Shipyard, still told that story, said that he got through high school because he had been there when Daddy had taken a strap to Woodrow for cutting school and sassing the teacher at Dunbar, and he was smart enough to learn by vicarious experience.
Woodrow had graduated from Dunbar Elementary School and gone on to graduate from William Penn High School. By then, Daddy had gone from shining shoes inside the Market Street Station to shining them in a barbershop on South Ninth Street, and finally to shining them in the gents’ room of the Rittenhouse Club on Rittenhouse Square. He was on salary then, paid to be in the gents’ room from just before lunch until maybe nine o’clock at night, shining anybody who climbed up on the chair’s shoes for free. It was part of what you got being a member of the Rittenhouse Club, getting your shoes shined for free.
The members weren’t supposed to pay the shoe-shine boy, but, Daddy had told him, maybe about one in four would hand him a quarter or fifty cents anyway, and at Christmas, about three or four of the members whose shoes he had shined all year would wish him “Merry Christmas” and slip him some folding money. Usually it was ten or twenty dollars, but sometimes more. The first one-hundred-dollar bill Woodrow had ever seen in his life one of the Rittenhouse gentlemen had given to his father at Christmas.
That hundred dollars, and just about everything else Daddy and Mamma Dear could scrape together (what was left, in other words, after they’d given the Good Lord’s Tithe to the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, and after they’d put money away to go home to Hartsville at Christmas and maybe to go home for a funeral or a wedding or something like that), had gone into coming up with the money for the down payment on the house, and then paying the house off.
The house was another reason Woodrow really hated Philadelphia. Daddy and Mamma Dear had worked their hearts out, done without, to pay for the thing, and they had just about paid it off when the neighborhood had started to go to hell.
Woodrow did not like to curse, but hell was the only word that fit, and he knew the Good Lord would not think he was being blasphemous.
Trash moved in. Black trash and white trash. Drinkers and adulterers and blasphemers, people who took no pride in the neighborhood or themselves.
It had been bad when Woodrow had finished William Penn High School and was looking for work, it was worse when, at twenty-two, he’d applied for a job on the cops, and it had grown worse ever since. He spent his first two years in the Twenty-second District, learning how to be a cop, and then they had transferred him-they’d asked him first how he would feel about it, to give the devil his due-to the Thirty-ninth District which was then about thirty percent black (they said “Negro” in those days, but it meant the same thing as ‘nigger’ and everybody knew it) and getting blacker.
“You live there, Woodrow,” Lieutenant Grogarty, a red-faced Irishman, had asked him. “How would you feel about working there, with your people?”
At the time, truth to tell, Woodrow had thought it would be a pretty good idea. He had still thought then-he was only two years out of the Academy and didn’t know better-that a police officer could be a force for good, that a good Christian man could help people.
He thought that one of the problems was that most cops were white men, and colored folks naturally resented that. He thought that maybe it would be different if a colored police officer were handling things.
He’d been wrong about that. His being colored hadn’t made a bit of difference. The people he had to deal with didn’t care if he was black or yellow or green. He was The Man. He was the badge. He was the guy who was going to put them in jail. They hated him. Worse, he hadn’t been able to help anyone that he could tell. Unless arresting some punk after he’d hit some old lady in the back of her head, and stolen her groceries and rent money and spent it on loose women, whiskey, or worse could be considered helping.
He had been bitter when he’d finally faced the truth about this, even considered quitting the cops, finding some other job. He didn’t know what other kind of job he could get-all he’d ever done after high school before he came on the cops was work unskilled labor jobs-but he thought there had to be something.
He had had a long talk about it with the Pastor Emeritus of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, Rev. Dr. Joshua Steele-that fine old gentleman and servant of the Good Lord was still alive then, eat up with cancer but not willing to quit-and Dr. Steele had told him that all the Bible said was that if you prayed, the Good Lord would point out a Christian man’s path to him. Nothing was said about that path being easy.
“You ask the Good Lord, Woodrow, if He has other plans for you, and if so, what. If He wants you to do something else, Woodrow, He’ll let you know. You’ll know, boy. In your heart, you’ll know.”
Woodrow, after prayerful consideration, had decided that if the Good Lord wanted him to do something else, he would have let him know. And since he didn’t get a sign or anything, it was logical to conclude that the Lord was perfectly happy having him do what he was doing.
Which wasn’t so strange, he came to decide. While he wasn’t able to change things much, or help a lot of people, every once in a while he was able to do something for somebody.
And maybe locking up punks who were beating up and robbing old people was really helping. If they were in jail, they at least weren’t robbing and beating up on people.
Three months later, Woodrow met Joellen, who had come up from Georgia right after she finished high school. He never told her-she might have laughed at him-but he took meeting her as a sign from the Good Lord that he had done the right thing. Joellen was like a present from the Good Lord. And so was Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Jr., when he come along twenty months later.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Woodrow didn’t know if he could have handled Mamma Dear and Daddy being taken into heaven within four months of each other if it hadn’t been for Joellen, and with her already starting to show what the Good Lord was giving them: Woodrow Wilson, Junior.
That meant two more trips back home to Hartsville. Mamma Dear had told Daddy in the hospital that she had been paying all along for a burial policy, sixty-five cents a week for twenty years and more, that he didn’t know about, and that she wanted him to spend the money to send her back to Hartsville and bury her beside her Mamma, Granny Smythe. She didn’t want to be buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beside strangers.
Four months after they buried Mamma Dear, Woodrow buried Daddy beside her. That was really when Woodrow decided he was going to come home to Hartsville, and when he told Joellen what he had decided, she said that was fine with her, she didn’t like living up north anyhow.
There was no work he could get in Hartsville that paid anything like what he was making on the cops, and they didn’t even know what a pension for colored people was in Hartsville, so that meant he had to stay on the cops, put in his time, and then retire to Hartsville.
That had been a long time ago, and at the time he’d thought he could sell the house that Mamma Dear and Daddy had sacrificed so much for, and maybe buy a little farm in Hartsville. Let somebody else work it on shares, not work it himself.
That hadn’t turned out. With the trash moving into the neighborhood, you couldn’t sell the place at hardly any price today. But he and Joellen had been able to save some money, and with his police pension, it was going to be all right when they went home to Hartsville.
Several times in the last couple of years, he had been offered different jobs in the Thirty-ninth District. Once the Captain had asked him if he wanted to help the Corporal, be what they called a “trainee” (which sounded like some kid, but wasn’t) with the administration, but he told him no thank you, I’d just as soon just work my beat than be inside all day. Another time, another two times, they’d asked him did he want to do something called “Community Relations.”
“We want people to start thinking about the police as being their friends, Woodrow,” a lieutenant had told him, a colored lieutenant. “And with your position in the community, your being a deacon at Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, for example, we think you’re just the man to help us.”
He told the Lieutenant, “Thank you, sir, for thinking about me, but I’m not interested in anything like that, I don’t think I’d be any good at it.”
What Woodrow thought he was good at was what he did, what he wanted to do until he got his time in and could go home to Hartsville, South Carolina. He worked his beat. He protected old people from getting hit in the head and having their grocery money stolen by some punk. He looked for new faces standing around on corners and talked to them, and told them he didn’t like funny cigarettes or worse sold on his beat and that he had a good memory for faces.
The punks on the street corner could call him Old Oreo, or Uncle Tom, or whatever they liked, and it didn’t bother him much, because he knew he was straight with the Good Lord and that was all that mattered. The Bible said all there was to say about bearing false witness against your neighbor. And also because he knew what else the punks who called him names told the new punks: “Don’t cross that mean old nigger, he’ll catch you alone when there’s nobody around and slap you up aside of the head with his club or his gun and knock you into the middle of next week.”
He liked to walk his beat. You could see much more of what was going on just ambling down the street than you could from inside an RPC. A lot of police officers hated to get out of their cars, but Woodrow was just the opposite. He liked to walk, say hello to people, be seen, see things he wouldn’t have been able to see driving a car.
Officer Bailey was not surprised to get the call telling him to meet the Sergeant, but when he got there, he was surprised to see Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., standing by the car, talking to the Sergeant.
He and Lewis went back together a long time. He was a good man, in Bailey’s opinion. God-fearing, honest, hardworking. But Bailey was a little worried when he saw him. Lewis was assigned to the Ninth District.
What’s he doing here?
Maybe he’s been sent to talk me into taking one of those special jobs in Community Relations the Lieutenant had talked to me about and I turned down.
When the Sergeant saw Bailey coming, he shook Lieutenant Lewis’s hand, got back in his car, and drove off. Lieutenant Lewis stood in the middle of the street and waited for Bailey to drive up.
“How are you, Woodrow?” Lieutenant Lewis said, offering his hand.
“Pretty good, Lieutenant. How’s yourself?”
“We were riding around-” Lieutenant Lewis said, interrupting himself to point at the new car parked at the curb. Woodrow saw that it was an unmarked car, the kind inspectors and the like got, and that a black man was behind the wheel.
“-and we had some time, and I thought maybe we could have a cup of coffee or something.”
“I can always find time to take a cup of coffee with you,” Woodrow said. “Right over there’s as good a place as any. At least it’s clean.”
“The Sergeant said it would be all right if you put yourself out of service for half an hour.”
“I’ll park this,” Woodrow said.
When he came back from parking the car, he recognized the man driving the car.
“This your boy, isn’t it, Foster? He wasn’t nearly so big the last time I saw him.”
“How do you do, sir?” Tiny said politely.
“Well, I’ll be. I recognized him from his picture in the paper. When they arrested those dirty cops.”
They went in the small neighborhood restaurant. An obese woman brought coffee to the table for all of them.
“Miss Kathy, this is Lieutenant Foster, and his boy,” Woodrow said. “We go back a long way.”
“Way back,” Lieutenant Lewis agreed. “When I graduated from the Academy Officer Bailey sort of took me under his wing.”
“Is that so?” the woman said, and walked away.
“When Foster here finished the Academy, they sent him right to Special Operations, put him in plain clothes, and gave him a car,” Lieutenant Lewis said. “Things have changed, eh, Woodrow?”
“You like what you’re doing, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was thinking the other day that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t,” Bailey said.
Lieutenant Lewis laughed.
“You don’t mean that, Woodrow,” he said.
“Yes, I do mean it. Don’t take this the wrong way, boy, but I’m glad I’m not starting out. I don’t think I could take another twenty-some years walking this beat.”
“I was telling Foster that walking a beat is what the police are all about,” Lieutenant Lewis said.
“Well, then, the country’s in trouble,” Bailey said. “Because we’re losing, Foster, and you know it. Things get a little worse every day, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that anybody can do about it.”
“What I was trying to get across to Foster was that there’s no substitute for the experience an officer like yourself gets,” Lieutenant Lewis said.
“Well, maybe you’re right, but the only thing my experience does is make me tired. Time was, I used to think I could clean up a place. Now I know better. All I’m doing is slowing down how fast it’s getting worse. And I only get to slow it down a little on good days.”
Lieutenant Lewis laughed politely.
“I was thinking, Woodrow,” he said, “that since Foster hasn’t had any experience on the streets, that maybe you’d be good enough to let him ride around with you once in a while. You know, show him the tricks of the trade.”
“Good Lord,” Officer Bailey laughed, “why would he want to do that?”
Lieutenant Lewis glanced at his son. He saw that it was only with a great effort that Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., was able to keep his face straight, not let it show what he was thinking.
“My father is right, Mr. Bailey,” Tiny said. “I could probably learn a lot from you.”
That response surprised and then delighted Lieutenant Lewis, but the delight was short-lived:
“The only thing you could learn by riding around with me,” Officer Bailey said, “is that Satan’s having his way, and if you have half the brains you were born with, you already know that.”
Officer Lewis looked at his watch.
“Is there a phone around here, Mr. Bailey? I’ve got to check in.”
“There’s a pay phone outside,” Bailey said. “But most likely somebody ripped the handset off for the fun of it. You go see Miss Kathy, and tell her I said to let you use hers.”
“Thank you,” Tiny said.
When he was out of earshot, Officer Bailey nodded approvingly.
“Nice boy, Foster,” he said. “You should be proud of him.”
“I am,” Lieutenant Lewis said.
Men in light blue uniforms, suggesting State Police uniforms, with shoulder patches reading “Nesfoods International Security,” stood at the gates of the Detweiler estate. They were armed, Matt noticed, with chrome-plated Smith amp; Wesson. 357 caliber revolvers, and their Sam Browne belts held rows of shining cartridges.
“Anyone trying to shoot their way in here’s going to have his hands full,” Matt said softly as he slowed and lowered the window of Amy’s station wagon.
“You really have a strange sense of humor,” Amy said, and leaned over him to speak to the security man.
“I’m Dr. Payne,” Amy said, “and this is my brother.”
One of the two men consulted a clipboard.
“Yes, Ma’am, you’re on the list,” the security man said, and the left of the tall wrought-iron gates began to open inward.
Matt raised the window.
“And you’re back on Peter’s list, too, I see,” Matt said.
“Matt, I understand that you’re under a terrible strain,” Amy said tolerantly, either the understanding psychiatrist or the sympathetic older sister, or both, “but please try to control your mouth. Things are going to be difficult enough in here.”
“I wonder how long it’s going to be before Mother Detweiler decides that if I had only been reasonable, reasonable defined as resigning from the Police Department and taking my rightful position in society, Penny wouldn’t have stuck that needle in her arm, and that this whole thing is my fault.”
“That’s to be expected,” Amy said. “The important thing is that you don’t accept that line of reasoning.”
“In other words, she’s already started down that road?”
“What did you expect?” Amy said. “She, and Uncle Dick, have to find someone to blame.”
“Give me a straight answer, Doc. I don’t feel I’m responsible. What does that make me?”
“Is that your emotional reaction, as opposed to a logical conclusion you’ve come to?”
“How about both?”
“Straight answer: You’re probably still in emotional shock. Have you wept?”
“I haven’t had time to,” Matt said. “I didn’t get to bed until about three.”
“More people showed up at your apartment?” Amy said, annoyance in her voice.
“No, I went to the bar where the Homicide detectives hang out with Jason Washington. He was trying to make me palatable to them.”
“What does that mean?”
“When I go back on the job, I’m going to spend some time in Homicide.”
“What’s all that about?”
“It’s a long story. What I will ostensibly be doing is working on the Inferno job.”
“What’s the ‘Inferno job’?”
“Washington and I walked up on a double homicide on Market Street, in a gin mill called the Inferno Lounge.”
“The bar owner? They killed his wife? I heard something on the radio.”
“The wife and business partner had their brains blown out. The husband suffered a. 32 flesh wound to the leg.”
“Is there something significant in that?” Amy asked.
“Let us say the version of the incident related by the not-so-bereaved husband is not regarded as being wholly true,” Matt said.
“But why are you going to Homicide?” Amy asked.
She didn’t get an answer.
“Jesus Christ, what’s this?” Matt exclaimed. “It looks like a used-car lot.”
Amy looked out the windshield. The wide cobblestone drive in front of the Detweiler mansion and the last fifty yards of the road leading to it were crowded with cars, a substantial percentage of them Cadillacs and Lincolns. There were five or six limousines, including two Rolls Royces.
“Dad said family and intimate friends,” Amy said. “It’s apparently gotten out of hand.”
“Intimate friends, or the morbidly curious?” Matt asked. “With a soupcon of social climbers thrown in for good measure?”
“Matt, have those acidulous thoughts if they make you feel better, but for the sake of Uncle Dick and Aunt Grace-and Mother and Dad-please have the decency to keep them to yourself.”
“Sorry,” he said, sounding contrite.
“What were they supposed to say when someone called, or simply showed up? ‘Sorry, you’re not welcome’?”
“Oh, shit, there’s Chad,” Matt said. “And the very pregnant Daffy and friend.”
“Why are you surprised, and why ‘oh, shit’?”
“I would just as soon not see them just now.”
Mr. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV glanced down the drive as the station wagon drove up, recognized the occupants, and touched the arm of his wife. Mrs. Nesbitt in turn touched the arm of Miss Amanda Chase Spencer, a strikingly beautiful blonde who was wearing a black silk suit with a hat and veil nearly identical to Mrs. Nesbitt’s. All three stopped and waited on the lower of the shallow steps leading to the flagstone patio before the mansion’s front door.
“How are you holding up, buddy?” Chad asked, grasping Matt’s arm.
“Oh, Matt,” Daffy said. “Poor Matt!”
She embraced him, which caused her swollen belly to push against him.
“Hello, Matt,” Amanda said. “I’m so very sorry.”
“Thank you,” Matt said, reaching around Daffy to take the gloved hand she extended.
“I still can’t believe it,” Daffy said as she finally released Matt.
“I’m Amelia Payne,” Amy said to Amanda.
“How do you do?”
“I thought this was supposed to be family and immediate friends only,” Matt said, gesturing at all the cars.
“Matt, I can’t believe you said that!” Daffy said, horrified.
Matt looked at her without comprehension.
“Amanda’s been staying with us, for Martha Peebles’s engagement party,” Chad said coldly.
“Oh, Christ, I wasn’t talking about you, Amanda,” Matt said, finally realizing how what he had said had been interpreted.
“I know you weren’t,” Amanda said.
“I didn’t see you out there,” Matt said.
“I didn’t want you to,” Amanda said simply.
“Penny and Amanda were very close,” Daffy said.
“No, we weren’t,” Amanda corrected her. “We knew each other at Bennington. That’s all.”
Good for you, Matt thought. Cut the bullshit.
Chad Nesbitt gave her a strange look.
“Shall we go in?” he said, taking his wife’s arm.
Baxley, the Detweiler butler, opened the door to them. He was a man in his fifties, and wearing a morning coat with a horizontally striped vest.
“Mr. Detweiler’s been expecting you, Doctor,” he said.
The translation of which is that Mother D is about to lose control. Or has already lost it, Matt thought.
“I’ll go up,” Amy said. “Thank you, Baxley.”
“Coffee has been laid in the library,” Baxley said. “Miss Penny is in the sitting room.”
“Thank you, Baxley,” Chad Nesbitt said. He put his hand on Matt’s arm.
“Take care of him, Chad,” Amy said. “I’ll go see Aunt Grace.”
“I will,” Chad said. “Coffee first, Matt?”
“Yeah.”
As they walked across the foyer, Matt glanced through the open door of the sitting room. He could see the foot of a glistening mahogany casket, surrounded by flowers.
Shit, I didn’t even think about flowers.
Mother certainly sent some in my name, knowing that I wouldn’t do it myself.
Heads turned as the four of them went into the library. There were perhaps twenty-five people in the room, most of whom Matt knew by sight. A long table had been set with silver coffee services and trays of pastry. A man in a gray jacket and two maids stood behind the table. A small table behind them held bottles of whiskey and cognac.
Chad propelled Matt to the table.
“I need a little liquid courage myself to face up to going in there,” Chad said, indicating to the manservant to produce a bottle of cognac. “Straight up, Matt? Or do you want something to cut it with?”
I don’t want any at all, strangely enough. I don’t need any liquid courage to go in there and look at Penny’s body. For one thing, it’s not Penny. Just a body. And I’m used to bodies. Just the other day, I saw two of them, both with their brains blown all over the room. If that didn’t bother me, this certainly won’t. I am not anywhere close to the near-state of emotional collapse that everyone seems to think I’m in.
“It’s a little early for me, Chad,” Matt said. “Maybe later.”
“Suit yourself,” Chad said, taking the cognac bottle from the man behind the table, pouring half an inch of it into a snifter, and tossing it down.
“I wish I could have one of those,” Daffy said.
“Baby, you can’t,” Chad said sympathetically.
“If it’s a girl, I want to name her Penelope,” Daffy said.
Matt saw this idea didn’t please the prospective father, but that he was wise enough not to argue with his wife here.
“You’re not having anything?” Amanda asked, at Matt’s elbow.
“Probably later,” he said.
“Let’s get it over with,” Chad said.
“That’s a terrible thing…” Daffy protested.
“Unless you want to go in alone first, Matt?” Chad asked solicitously.
Anything to get away from these three. Go in there alone, stay what seems to be an appropriate period for profound introspection and grief, and then get the hell out.
“Thank you,” Matt said softly.
“ Thank you,” the hypocrite said, with what he judged to be what his audience expected in grief-stricken tone and facial demeanor.
He smiled wanly at Chad, Daffy, and Amanda and walked away from them, out of the library, across the foyer and into the sitting room. There was a line of people, maybe half a dozen, waiting for their last look at the mortal remains of Miss Penelope Detweiler. He took his place with them, and slowly made his way to the casket, looking for, and finally finding, behind the casket, a floral display bearing a card reading “Matthew Mark Payne” and then noticing the strange mingled smells of expensive perfume on the woman in front of him and from the flowers, and comparing it with what he had smelled in the office of the Inferno Lounge, the last time he’d looked at mortal remains. There it had been the sick sweet smell of the pools of blood under the bodies, mingled with the foul odors of feces and urine released in death.
And then it was his turn to look down at Penny in her coffin.
She looks as if she’s asleep, he thought, which is the effect the cosmetic technologist at the undertaker’s was struggling to achieve.
And then, like a wall falling on him, and without warning, his chest contracted painfully, a wailing moan saying “Oh, shit!” in a voice he recognized as his own came out of it, and his chest began to heave with sobs.
He next became aware that someone was pulling him away from the casket, where his right hand was caressing the cool, unmoving flesh of Penny’s cheeks, and then that the someone was Chad, gently saying, “Come on, ol’ buddy. Just come along with us,” and then that Daffy’s swollen belly was pressing against him as they led him out of the sitting room past those next in line, and that, when he looked at her, tears were running down her cheeks, cutting courses through her pancake makeup.
“Inspector Wohl,” Peter answered his telephone.
“The funeral’s over,” Amy said.
“I was hoping you’d call. How did it go?”
“Matt has a way with words. When we got here, he said it was ‘intimate friends, and the morbidly curious, with a soupcon of social climbers thrown in for good measure.’”
“How did he handle it?”
“He broke down when he saw her in the casket. Really broke down. Chad Nesbitt and his very pregnant wife had to practically carry him out of the room.”
There was a moment’s silence before Wohl said:
“You said last night you expected something like that to happen.”
“That was a clinical opinion; professionally, I’m relieved. It’s the first step, acceptance, in managing grief. Personally, he’s my little brother. It was awful. I felt so damned sorry for him.”
“How’s he now? Where is he now?”
“Oh, now he’s got his stiff upper lip back in place. He and Chad are into the booze. There’s quite a post-interment party going on out here.”
“You want me to send someone out there and get him? I sent Tiny Lewis to sit on him, but…”
“I know,” Amy said. “What I was hoping to hear was you volunteering to come out here and get the both of us.”
“It was bad for you?”
“As we were coming back here from the cemetery-I thought Grace Detweiler might need me, so I rode with them-I caught her looking at me as if she had just realized that if I had done my job, Penny would still be here.”
“That could be an overactive imagination.”
“I don’t think so. I got the same look here in the house when I was getting a tranquilizer out of my purse for her. She’s decided-seeing how Matt collapsed completely probably had a lot to do with it-that he’s still an irresponsible boy, who can’t be blamed. She needs somebody to blame. I make a fine candidate to be the real villain, because I really didn’t help Penny at all.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Wohl said, “I’m on my way, Amy,” and the line went dead in her ear.
“It’s a good thing I know you’re a doctor,” Inspector Peter Wohl said to Dr. Amelia Payne as they came off the elevator into the lobby of the Delaware Valley Cancer Society Building on Rittenhouse Square.
“Meaning what?”
“The folklore among us laypersons is don’t mix booze and pills.”
“That’s a good general rule of thumb,” Amy said. “What I gave Matt is what we doctor persons prescribe as a sedative when the patient person has been soaking up cognac like a sponge. It is my professional opinion that that patient person will be out like a light for the next twelve to eighteen hours without side effects. Any other questions, layperson?”
Wohl smiled at her.
“How about dinner tonight?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I guess that makes breakfast tomorrow out of the question.”
“I didn’t say that,” Amy said. “I said no dinner. I have to make my rounds, and then there’s a very sick young woman I want to spend some time with. But I didn’t say anything about breakfast, or, for that matter, a midnight supper with candles and wine, being out of any question.”
“My place or yours, doctor person?”
She didn’t reply directly.
“We left my car at the Detweilers’s.”
“Give me the keys. I’ll have someone run me out there, and I’ll drop it by-where? The hospital? Your place?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you took it to your place? When I leave the hospital, I’ll catch a cab out there. It’ll probably be after eleven.”
“Done,” he said, putting his hand out for the keys.
“You’re headed for the hospital now?” he asked. She nodded. “You want a ride?”
“Where are you going?”
“Wherever you need to go is right on my way.”
“I’ll catch a cab,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
Their eyes met, and held. Somewhat hesitantly, Wohl moved his face closer to hers.
“Don’t push me, Peter,” Amy said, and then moved her face closer to his and kissed him on the lips.
Then she quickly walked away from him, out the door and onto Rittenhouse Square. He started to follow her, then changed his mind.
He went to the receptionist’s desk and asked to use her telephone.
“Of course,” she said with a smile that suggested she did not find him unattractive.
He smiled at her and dialed a number from memory.
“Inspector Wohl,” he said as he watched Amy get into a cab. “Anything for me?”
“Chief Lowenstein’s been trying to reach you all afternoon, sir,” the tour lieutenant reported.
“Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ll call Chief Lowenstein and get back to you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wohl broke the connection with his finger and dialed Chief Lowenstein’s private number.
“Lowenstein.”
“Peter Wohl, Chief.”
“Where are you, Peter?”
“Center City. Rittenhouse Square.”
“With Matt Payne?”
“I just left him.”
“How is he?”
“His sister gave him a pill she said will knock him out until tomorrow.”
“I really feel sorry for him,” Lowenstein said, and then immediately added: “I need to talk to you, Peter.”
“I’m available for you anytime, Chief.”
“Why don’t you let me buy you a drink at the bar in the Warwick?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ten minutes, Peter,” Lowenstein said. “Thank you.”