The Victim

THIRTEEN

Captain David Pekach was relieved when the meeting in Wohl's office broke up so quickly. Under the circumstances it could have gone on for hours.

Both he and Mike Sabara followed Lieutenant Lucci to his desk, where Sabara told Lucci he would either be at home or at St. Sebastian's Church; Lucci had both numbers. Pekach told him that he would be at either of the two numbers he had given Lucci, and from half past seven at the Ristorante Alfredo downtown. He wrote the number down and gave it to Lucci.

Lucci and Sabara exchanged smiles.

"Big date, Dave, huh?" Sabara asked.

"I'm taking a lady friend to dinner, all right?" Pekach snapped. " Is there anything wrong with that?"

"Wow!" Sabara said. "What did I do? Strike a raw nerve?"

Pekach glared at him, then walked toward the door to the parking lot.

"Nicewatch, Dave," Sabara called after him.

Pekach turned and gave him the finger, then stormed out of the building. Sabara and Lucci grinned at each other.

"What was that about the watch?" Lucci asked.

"His'lady friend' gave him a watch for his birthday," Sabara said. "An Omega. Gold. With all the dials. What do you call it, a chronometer?"

"Chronograph," Lucci said. "Gold, huh?"

"Gold," Sabara confirmed.

"Why's he so sensitive about her?" Lucci asked, deciding at the last moment not to tell Captain Sabara that he had heard Captain Pekach's lady friend call him Precious when he had called him at her house.

"I don't know," Sabara replied. "I've seen her. She's not at all bad-looking. Nothing for him to be ashamed of."

Shewas Miss Martha Ellen Peebles, a female Caucasian thirty-four years and six months old, weighing 121 pounds and standing five feet four inches tall.

Miss Peebles resided alone, in a turn-of-the-century mansion at 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill. There was a live-in couple-a chauffeur-butler-majordomo and a housekeeper-cook-who were in turn helped by a constantly changing staff of maids and groundskeepers, most often nieces and nephews of the live-in couple, who kept the place up.

The house had been built by Alexander F. Peebles, who owned, among other things, what theWall Street Journal estimated was eleven percent of the nation's anthracite coal reserves. Mr. Peebles had one son, Alexander, Jr., who in turn had two children, Martha, and her brother Stephen, four years younger.

Mrs. Alexander Peebles, Jr., had died of cancer when Martha was twelve and Stephen eight. Alexander Peebles decided on the night that God finally put his wife out of her misery that his daughter was an extraordinarily good creature. Martha, who was entitled to being comforted by him on the loss of her mother, had instead come to him, in his gun-room sanctuary, where he was wallowing in Scotch-soaked self-pity, and comforted him. He was not to worry, Martha had told him; she would take care of him from now on.

Mr. Peebles never remarried and devoted the remaining eighteen years of his life to his quest for grouse in Scotland, big game in Africa, trophy sheep in the Rocky Mountains, and his collection of pre-1900 American firearms.

Since Martha truly believed she was taking care of him, her father didn't think it right to leave her at home in the company of a governess or some other domestic, so he engaged a tutor-companion for her and took her along on his hunting trips.

Their adoration was mutual. Martha thought her father was perfect in all respects. He thought she embodied all the desirable feminine traits of beauty and gentility. Her reaction to learning, while they were shooting Cape Buffalo in what was then still the Belgian Congo, that Miss Douglass, her tutor-companion, was sharing his cot was, he thought, simply splendid. One simply didn't expect that sort of sympathetic, sophisticated understanding from a sixteen-year-old girl. And by then she was as good a shot as most men he knew. What more could a father expect of a daughter?

Alexander Peebles, Jr.'s, relationship with his son was nowhere near so idyllic. The boy had always been delicate. That was probably genetic, he decided, inherited from his mother's side of the family. Her father had died young, he recalled, and her two brothers looked like librarians.

The several times he had tried to include Stephen, when he turned sixteen, in hunting trips had been disasters. When Stephen had finally managed to hit a deer-for-the-safari-pot in Tanganyika, he had looked down at the carcass and wept. The next year, after an absolutely splendid day of shooting driven pheasant on the Gladstone estate in Scotland, when their host had asked him what he thought of pheasant shooting, Stephen had replied, "Frankly I think it's disgusting slaughter."

When Alex Peebles had told his son that his remark had embarrassed him and Martha, Stephen had replied, "Tit for tat, Father.I am grossly embarrassed having a father who brings a whore along on a trip with his children."

Alex Peebles, furious at his defiant attitude and at his characterization of Karen Cayworth (who really had had several roles in motion pictures before giving up her acting career to become his secretary) as a whore, had slapped his son, intending only that, not a dislocated jaw.

Predictably, Martha had stood by her father and gone with Stephen to the hospital and then ridden with him on the train to London and put him on the plane home. She had then returned to Scotland. But the damage had been done, of course. Lord Gladstone was polite but distant, and Alex Peebles knew that it would be a long time before he was asked to shoot the estate again.

Five months after that, a month before he was to graduate, Stephen was expelled from Groton for what the headmaster called "the practice of unnatural vice."

From then on, until his death of a heart attack in the Rockies at fifty-six, Alex Peebles had as little to do with his son as possible. He put him on an allowance and gave him to understand that he was not welcome in the house on Glengarry Lane when his father was at home.

Martha, predictably, urged him to forgive and forget, but he could not find it in himself to do so. He relented to the point of offering, via Martha, to arrange for whatever psychiatric treatment was necessary to cure him of his sexual deviance. Stephen, as predictably, refused, and so far as Alex Peebles was concerned, that was that.

Alex Peebles's last will and testament was a very brief document. It left all of his worldly possessions, of whatever kind and wherever located, to his beloved daughter, Martha, of whom he was as proud as he was ashamed of his son, to whom, consequently, he was leaving nothing.

It did occur to Alex Peebles that Martha, being the warmhearted, generous, indeed Christian young woman that she was, would certainly continue to provide some sort of financial support for her brother. Stephen would not end up in the gutter.

It never entered Alex Peebles's mind that Martha, once the to-beexpected grief passed, would have trouble getting on with her own life. She was not at all bad-looking, and a damn good companion, and he was, after all, leaving her both a great deal of money and a law firm, Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, which he felt sure would manage her affairs as well, and as honestly, as they could.

Equally important-perhaps even more so-Martha was highly intelligent, well read, and levelheaded. Somewhere down the pike a man would enter her life. It was not unreasonable to hope that she would name her firstborn son after her father, Alexander Peebles Whatever.

He erred. Martha Peebles was devastated by the death of her father, and her perception of herself as a thirty-year-old woman literally all alone in the world, rather than passing, grew worse.

A self-appointed delegation of her mother's family pressed her soon after the will was probated to share her inheritance with her brother. Stephen's "peculiarities," they argued, were not his fault and probably should be laid at his father's feet. His treatment of his son, they said, was barbaric.

When she refused to do that, deciding it would constitute disobedience, literally, of her father's last will and testament, she understood that she was more than likely closing the door on any relationship she might have developed with them. That prediction soon proved to be true.

She came to understand that while she had a large number of acquaintances, she had very few, almost no, friends. There were overtures of friendship, to be sure. Some of them were genuine, but she quickly understood that she had virtually nothing in common with other well-to-do women in Philadelphia except money. She hadn't been in any school long enough to make a lifelong best friend, and felt that it was too late to try to do so now.

There was some attention from men, but she suspected that much of it was because they knew (from a rather nasty lawsuit Stephen had undertaken and lost, to break his father's will) that she alone owned Tamaqua Mining and everything else. And none of the suitors, if that word fit, really interested her.

The hunting was gone too. It was not the sort of thing a single woman could do by herself, even if she had wanted to, and without her father she had no interest in going.

She forced herself to take an interest in the business, going so far as to spend three months in Tamaqua and Hazleton, and taking courses in both mineralogy and finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Taking the courses became an end in itself. It passed the time, got her out of the house every day, and posed a challenge to her when an essay was required or an examination was to be taken.

Three years after their father died, she allowed Stephen to move back into the house. Or didn't throw him out when he moved back in without asking. She didn't want to fight with him, the court suit had been a terrible experience, she was lonely, and they could at least take some meals together.

But that didn't work, either. Stephen's young friends proved to be difficult. They didn't like him; she saw that. They were selling themselves to him. There wasn't much difference, she came to think, between her father's "secretaries" and Stephen's young men. While there probably was not an actual cash payment in either case, there were gifts and surprises that amounted to the same thing.

And when the gifts and surprises were not judged to be adequate by Stephen's young men, there were either terrible scenes or the theft of things they saw in the house. That came to a head with a handsome young man named William Walton, who said he was an actor.

She went to Stephen and told him she was sure that his friend, William Walton, was stealing things, and Stephen told her, almost hysterically, that she didn't know what she was talking about. When she insisted that she knew precisely what she was talking about, he said some very cruel things to her. She told Stephen that the next time something turned up missing, she was going to the police.

It did and she did, and the police came and did nothing. When Stephen heard about her calling the police, there was another scene, ending when she told him he had two days to find someplace else to live.

Stephen had moved out the next day. She had come down the stairs as he was putting his suitcases out and he had seen her.

"I'm sorry it's come to this, Stephen," she said.

He had looked up at her with hate in his eyes.

"Get fucked!" he had shouted. "You crazy goddamn bitch, get fucked! That's what you need, a good fuck!"

He's beside himself, she decided, because I told him to get out and because he knows that I was right, that his William Walton doesn't really like him for himself and really is stealing things. As long as he could pretend he wasn't stealing things, he could pretend that William Walton liked him for himself.

She had turned and gone back upstairs and into the gun room and wept. The gun room had been her father's favorite place, and now it was hers.

What Stephen had said, "Get fucked," now bothered her. Not the words but what they meant.

Why haven't I been fucked? I am probably the only thirty-fouryear-old virgin in the world, with the possible exception of cloistered nuns. The most likely possibility is that I am not so attractive to men so as to make them really try to overcome what is my quite natural maidenly reticence. Another possibility, of course, is that my natural maidenly reticence has been reinforced by the fact that I have encountered very few (unmarried) men who I thought I would like to have do that to me. Or is it "with" me?

And there is another possibility, rather disgusting to think of, and that is that I am really like Stephen, a deviate, a latent Lesbian. Otherwise, wouldn't I have had by now some of that overwhelming hunger, to be fucked, so to speak, that all the heroines in the novels are always experiencing? Or, come to think of it, some women I know have practically boasted about? Why don't my pants get wet when some man touches my arm-or paws my breast?

Realizing that she was slipping into depression, which, of late, had meant that she would drink more than was good for her, she resolved to fight it.

She took out a bottle of the port her father had liked so much and taught her to appreciate, and drank two glasses of it, and not a drop more, and then left the gun room, carefully locking it after her.

In the next two days there were more thefts of bric-a-brac and other valuables, and she called the police again, and again they did nothing.

So she got in her car and drove downtown to see Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, one of the senior partners in the law firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester in the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building. Colonel Mawson wasn't there, but another senior partner, Brewster C. Payne, of whom, she remembered, her father had spoken admiringly, saw her.

She told him what was going on, of the thefts and the break-ins, and how the police had been absolutely useless. He tried to talk her into moving out of the house until the police could get to the bottom of what was happening. She told him she had no intention of being run out of her own house.

He told her that Colonel Mawson and Police Commissioner Czernick were great friends, and that as soon as Colonel Mawson returned to the office, he would tell him of their conversation and that he felt sure Colonel Mawson would get some action from the police.

The very same day, late in the afternoon, Harriet Evans, the gentle black woman who-with her husband-had been helping them run the house as long as Martha could remember, came upstairs and said, "Miss Martha, there's another policeman to see you. This one's a captain."

Miss Martha Peebles received Captain David Pekach, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol, in the upstairs sitting room. She explained the problem all over again to him, including her suspicion that Stephen's "actor" friend was the culprit. He assured her that the entire resources of the Highway Patrol would from that moment guarantee the inviolability of her property.

Somehow in conversation it came out that Captain Pekach was not a married man. And she mentioned her father's weapons, and he expressed interest, and, somewhat reluctantly, she took him to the gun room.

When he showed particular interest in one piece, she identified it for him: "That is a U.S. rifle, that is to say, a military rifle, Model of 1819-"

"With a J. H. Hall action," Captain Pekach interrupted.

"Oh, do you know weapons?"

"And stamped with the initials of the proving inspector," he went on. "Z. E. H."

"Zachary Ellsworth-" Martha began to explain.

"Hampden," Captain Pekach concluded as their eyes met. "Captain, Ordnance Corps, later Deputy Chief of Ordnance."

"He was born in Allentown, you know," Martha said.

"No. I didn't know."

"There are some other pieces you might find interesting, Captain," Martha said, "if I'm not taking you away from something more important."

He looked at his watch.

"I'm running late now," he said.

"I understand," she said.

"But perhaps some other time?"

"If you like."

He gestured around the gun room.

"I could happily spend the next two years in here," he said.

He means that. He does want to come back!

"Well, perhaps when you get off duty," she said.

He looked pained.

"Miss Peebles, I'm commanding officer of the Highway Patrol. We're trying very hard to find the man the newspapers are calling the Northwest Philadelphia serial rapist."

"Yes, I read the papers."

"I want to speak to the men coming off their shifts, to see if they may have come up with something. That will keep me busy, I'm afraid, until twelve-thirty or so."

"I understand," she said. Then she heard herself say, actually shamelessly and brazenly lie, "Captain, I'm a night person. I rarely go to bed until the wee hours. I'm sure if you drove past here at one, or even two, there would be lights on."

"Well, I had planned to check on your property before going home," he said. "I've stationed officers nearby."

"Well, then, by all means, if you see a light, come in. I'll give you a cup of coffee."

After five minutes past one that morning Martha Peebles could no longer think of herself as the world's oldest virgin, except for cloistered nuns, perhaps.

And her father, she thought, would have approved of David, once he had gotten to know him. They were very much alike in many ways. Not superficially. Inside.

Martha knew from the very beginning, which she placed as the moment, post coitus, that he had reached out to her and rolled her over onto him, so that she lay with her face against the hair on his chest, listening to the beat of his heart, feeling the firm muscles of his leg against hers, that David was the man she had been waiting forwithout of course knowing it-all her life.

Captain David Pekach drove directly from the meeting in Staff Inspector Peter Wohl's office at Bustleton and Bowler to 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill. He parked his unmarked car in one of the four garage stalls in what had been the carriage house behind the house, then walked back down the drive to the entrance portico.

The door opened as he got there.

"Good evening, Captain," Evans, the black guy, greeted him. He was wearing a gray cotton jacket and a black bow tie.

"What do you say, Evans?"

"Miss Martha said to say that if you would like to change, she will be with you in a moment."

"We're going to dinner," Pekach said.

"So I understand, sir. Can I get you a drink, Captain? Or a glass of beer?"

"A beer would be fine, thank you," Pekach said.

"I'll bring it right up, sir," Evans said, smiling.

Martha had told David that Evans "adores you, and so does Harriet," and Evans was always pleasant enough, but there was something about him-and about his wife-living in the house and knowing about him and Martha that made Pekach uncomfortable.

Pekach climbed the wide curving stairs and went down the corridor to "his room." That was a little game they were playing. The story was that because he lived to hell-and-gone on the other side of Philadelphia, he sometimes "stayed over." When he "stayed over," he stayed in a guest room, which just happened to have a connecting door to Martha's bedroom.

Every time he "stayed over," which was more the rule than the exception, either he or Martha carefully mussed the sheets on the bed in the guest room, sometimes by even bouncing up and down on them. And every morning either Harriet or one of the nieces made up the guest room bed and everyone pretended that was where he had slept.

When he went in the guest room, there was clothing, not his, on what-because he didn't know the proper term-he called the clotheshorse. It was a mahogany device designed to hold a jacket and trousers. There was a narrow shelf behind the jacket hanger, intended, he supposed, to hold your wallet and change and watch. He had never seen any clothing on it and had never used it. He hung his uniforms and clothes in an enormous wardrobe.

When he opened the wardrobe to change into civilian clothing, there was another surprise. He had expected to find his dark blue suit and his new gray flannel suit (Martha bought it for him at Brooks Brothers, and he hated to remember what it had cost). The wardrobe was now nearly full of men's clothing, but neither his dark blue suit nor his new gray flannel suit was among them.

"What the hell?" he muttered, confused. He turned from the wardrobe. Both Evans (bearing a tray with a bottle of beer and a pilsner glass) and Martha were entering the room.

Martha was wearing a black dress and a double string of pearls long enough to reach her bosom.

My God, she's good-looking!

"Oh, damn, you haven't tried it on yet!" Martha said.

"Tried what on?"

"That, of course, silly," she said, and pointed at the clothing on the clotheshorse.

"That's not mine," he said.

"Yes and no, Precious," Martha said. "Try it on."

She took the coat-he saw now that it was a blue blazer with brass buttons.

"Honey," he said, "I told you I don't want you buying me any more clothes."

"And I haven't," she said. "Have I, Evans?"

"No, Captain, she hasn't."

There was nothing to do but put the jacket on. It was doublebreasted and it fit.

"Perfect," Evans said.

"Look at the buttons," Martha said. He looked. The brass buttons were the official brass buttons of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia.

"Thank Evans for that," Martha said. "You have no idea how much trouble he had getting his hands on those."

"Where did the coat come from?"

"Tiller and Whyde, I think," Martha said.

"That's right, Miss Martha," Evans confirmed.

"What the hell is that?"

"Daddy's tailor-one of them-in London," Martha said. "Precious, you look wonderful in it!"

"This is your father's?" he asked. The notion made him slightly uncomfortable, quite aside from considerations of Martha getting him clothes.

"No, it's yours.Now it's yours."

"I suggested to Miss Martha, Captain," Evans said, "that you and Mr. Alex were just about the same size, and all his clothes were here, just waiting to feed the moths."

"So we checked, and Evans was right, and all we had to do was take the trousers in a half inch, and an inch off the jacket sleeves, and of course find your policeman's buttons. Evans knows this marvelous Italian tailor on Chestnut Street, so all you have to do is say 'Thank you, Evans.' "

"Allof those clothes?" Pekach said, pointing to the wardrobe.

"Mr. Alex always dressed very well," Evans said.

Captain David Pekach came very close to sayingOh, shit,I don't want your father's goddamn clothes.

But he didn't. He saw a look of genuine pleasure at having done something nice on Evans's face, and then he looked at Martha and saw how happy her eyes were.

"Thank you, Evans," Captain Pekach said.

"My pleasure, Captain. I'm just glad the sizes worked out; that you were just a little smaller than Mr. Alex, rather than the other way around."

"It worked out fine, thank you, Evans."

Evans smiled and left the room.

"I don't know what I'm going to do with you," Pekach said to Martha.

She met his eyes and smiled. "Oh, you'll think of something."

Martha walked to where Evans had left the beer, poured some skillfully in the glass, and handed it to Pekach.

"I love it when I can do something nice for you, my Precious," she said.

He kissed her gently, tasting her lipstick.

"I better take a shower," he said.

She came into the bathroom, as she often did, and watched him shave. She had told him she liked to do that, to feel his cheeks when he had just finished shaving.

When they went downstairs, Evans had brought her Mercedes coupe around to the portico from the garage, and was holding the door open for her. Pekach got behind the wheel and glanced at her to make sure she had her seat belt fastened. There was a flash of thigh and of the lace at the hem of her black slip.

For a woman who didn't know the first fucking thing about sex, he thought for perhaps the fiftieth time, she really knows how to pick underwear that turns me on.

He put the Mercedes in gear, drove down the drive to Glengarry Lane, and idly decided that the best route downtown would be the Schuylkill Expressway.

Just north of the Zoological Gardens, Martha asked if they had caught whoever had shot the policeman.

"No. And we don't have a clue," Pekach said. "Just before I came

… to your place"-he'd almost said "home"- "we had a meeting, and Tony Harris, who's running the job, and is a damn good cop, said all he knows to do is go back over what he already has."

"You almost said 'home,' " Martha said, "didn't you?"

He looked at her and was surprised to find they were holding hands.

"Slip of the tongue," he said.

"Nice slip, I like it."

"You too."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I like your slip," he said.

"Oh," she said. "Thank you."

She raised his hand to her mouth and kissed it.

There was the howl of a siren. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a Highway car behind him and dropped his eyes to the large round speedometer of the Mercedes. The indicator was pointing just beyond seventy.

"Shit," he said, freed his hand, and moved into the right lane.

The Highway car pulled up beside him. The police officer in the passenger seat gestured imperiously for him to pull to the curb, the gesture turning into a friendly wave as Officer Jesus Martinez, a stricken look on his face, recognized the commanding officer of the Highway Patrol. The Highway car suddenly slowed and fell behind.

"I hate that," Pekach said. "Getting caught by my own men."

"Then you shouldn't speed, Precious." Martha laughed. "You should see your face!"

"It's this damn car," Pekach said. "They don't know it. If we were in my car, that wouldn't have happened."

"Then you should drive this car more, so they get to know it."

"I couldn't drive your car to work," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because it's yours."

"Let me give it to you, then."

"Martha, Goddammit, stop!"

"We've been over this before," she said. "It makes me happy to give you things."

"It's not right," he said.

"I love you and I can easily afford it, so what's wrong with it?"

"It's not right," he repeated.

"Sorry," Martha said.

"Honey, you always giving me things…"He searched for the words. "It makes me feel less than a man."

"That's absurd," she said. "Look at yourself! As young as you are, being a captain. Commanding Officer of Highway. You're worried about being a man?"

He didn't reply.

"And that's not the only manly thing you do very well," Martha said. She leaned over and put her tongue in his ear and groped him.

"Jesus, honey!"

"You must be getting tired of me," Martha teased. "I remember when you used to like that."

"I'm not tired of you, baby," he said. "I could never get tired of you."

"So then let me give you the car."

"Will you ever quit?"

"Probably not," she said, and caught his hand and held it against her cheek. Then she asked, "Where are we going? Not that it matters."

"Ristorante Alfredo," he said, trying to pronounce it in Italian.

"I hear that's very nice."

"Peter Wohl says it is," Pekach said. "I asked him for a good place to go, and he said Ristorante Alfredo is very nice."

"You like him, don't you?"

"He's a good boss. He doesn'tact much like a cop, but from his reputation and from what I've seen, he's a hell of a cop."

What Peter Wohl had said specifically were that there were two nice things about Ristorante Alfredo. First, that the food and atmosphere were first-class; and second, that the management had the charming habit of picking up the tab.

"The Mob owns it, I guess you know," Wohl had said. "They get some sort of perverse pleasure out of buying captains and up their meals. You're a captain now, Dave. Enjoy. Rank hath its privileges. I try to make them happy at least once a month."

Dave Pekach had made reservations for dinner at Ristorante Alfredo because of what Wohl had said about the food and atmosphere. He wasn't sure that Wohl wasn't pulling his leg about having the check grabbed. If that happened, fine, but he wasn't counting on it. He even sort of hoped they wouldn't. It was important somehow that he take Martha someplace that she would enjoy, preferably expensive.

There was a young Italian guy (areal Italian, to judge by the way he mangled the language) in a tuxedo behind a sort of stand-up desk in the lobby of Ristorante Alfredo. When Pekach said his name was Pekach and that he had made reservations, the guy almost pissed his pants unlatching a velvet rope and bowing them past it to a table in a far corner of the room.

Dave saw other diners in the elegantly furnished room looking at Martha in her black dress and pearls, and the way she walked, and he was proud of her.

The Italian guy in the tuxedo held Martha's chair for her and said he hoped the table was satisfactory, and then he snapped his fingers and two other guys appeared, a busboy and a guy in a short red jacket with what looked like a silver spoon on a gold chain around his neck. The busboy had a bottle wrapped in a towel in a silver bucket on legs.

The guy with the spoon around his neck unwrapped the towel so that Dave could see that what he had was a bottle of French champagne.

"Compliments of the house, Captain Pekach," the Italian guy said. "I hope is satisfactory."

"Oh, Moet is always satisfactory," Martha said, smiling.

"You permit?" the Italian guy said, and unwrapped the wire, popped the cork, and poured about a quarter of an inch in Pekach's glass.

I'm supposed to sip that, to make sure it's not sour or something, Dave remembered, and did so.

"Very nice," he said.

"I am so happy," the Italian guy said, and poured Martha and then Pekach each a glassful.

"I leave you to enjoy wine," the Italian guy said. "In time I will recommend."

"To us," Martha said, raising her glass.

"Yeah," Dave Pekach said.

A waiter appeared a minute or so later and delivered menus.

And a minute or so after that the Italian guy came back.

"Captain Pekach, you will excuse. Mr. Baltazari would be so happy to have a minute of your time," he said, and gestured across the room to the far corner where two men sat at a corner table. When they saw him looking, they both gave a little wave.

Dave Pekach decided the younger one, a swarthy-skinned man with hair elaborately combed forward to conceal male pattern baldness, must be Baltazari, whom he had never heard of. The other man, older, in a gray suit, he knew by sight. On a cork bulletin board in the Intelligence Division, his photograph was pinned to the top of the Organized Crime organizational chart. The PhiladelphiaDaily News ritually referred to him as "Mob Boss Vincenzo Savarese."

Jesus Christ, what's all this? What's he want to do, say hello?

The Italian guy was already tugging at Dave Pekach's chair.

"Excuse me, honey?"

"Of course," Martha said.

Dave walked across the room.

"Good evening, Captain Pekach," Baltazari said. "Welcome to Ristorante Alfredo. Please sit down."

He waved his hand and a waiter appeared. He turned over a champagne glass and poured and then disappeared. Then Baltazari got up and disappeared.

"I won't take you long from the company of that charming lady," Vincenzo Savarese said. "But when I heard you were in the restaurant, I didn't want to miss the opportunity to thank you."

"Excuse me?"

"You were exceedingly understanding and gracious to my granddaughter, Captain, and I wanted you to know how grateful I am."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Dave Pekach said honestly.

"Last June-defying, I have to say, the orders of her parents-my granddaughter went out with a very foolish young man and found herself in the hands of the police."

Pekach shook his head, signifying that he was still in the dark as he searched his memory.

"It was very late at night in North Philadelphia, where Old York Road cuts into North Broad?" Pekach continued to shake his head no. " There was a chase by the police. The boy wrecked the car?" Savarese continued.

Dave suddenly remembered. He had been on the way home from his Cousin Stanley's wedding in Bethlehem. He had passed the scene of a wreck and had seen a Narcotics team and their car and, curious, stopped. What it was, was a minor incident, a carful of kids who had bought some marijuana, been caught at it, and had run.

There had been four kids, the driver and another boy, and two girls, both of them clean-cut, nice-looking, both scared out of their minds, in the back of a district RPC, which was about to transport them to Central Lockup. He had felt sorry for the girls and didn't want to subject them to the horrors of going through Central Lockup. So, after making sure the district cops had their names, he had turned them loose, sending them home in a cab. "I remember," he said.

"My granddaughter said that you were gracious and understanding," Savarese said. "Far more, I suspect, than were her mother and father. I don't think she will be doing anything like that ever again."

"She seemed to be a very nice young woman," Pekach said. "We all stub our toes from time to time."

"I simply wanted to say that I will never forget your kindness and am very grateful," Savarese said, and then stood up and put out his hand. "If there is ever anything I can do for you, Captain…"

"Forget it. I was just doing my job."

Savarese smiled at him and walked across the restaurant to the door. The Italian in the tuxedo stood there waiting for him, holding his hat and coat.

Pekach shrugged and started back toward Martha.

Baltazari intercepted him.

"I think you dropped these, Captain," he said, and handed Pekach a book of matches.

"No, I don't think so," Pekach said.

"I'm sure you did," Baltazari said.

Pekach examined the matchbook. It was a Ristorante Alfredo matchbook. It was open, and a name and address was written inside it. The name didn't ring a bell.

"Mr. Savarese's friends are always grateful when someone does him, or his family, a courtesy, Captain Pekach," Baltazari said. "Now go and enjoy your meal."

Pekach put the matches in his pocket.

The young Italian was at his table.

"If I may suggest-"

"What was that all about?"

Dave shrugged. He smiled at her. "You may suggest," he said to the young Italian.

Martha's knee found Dave's under the table.

"I think you like our Tournedos Alfredo very much," the young Italian said.

"I love tournedos," Martha said.

Dave Pekach had no idea what a tournedo was.

"Sounds fine," he said.

Martha's knee pressed a little harder against his.

"And before, some clams with Sauce Venezia?"

"Fine," Dave said.