“You can stay for supper? We bought some shrimp on the road from Wilmington…”
“Sure. I made shrimp last night for Chad and Daffy, but what the hell…”
“We could thaw a steak.”
“Shrimp’s fine. Daffy was playing matchmaker again. I’d already met her. She’s from Los Angeles. She’s handling, I guess is the word, Stan Colt when he comes to town. His real name is Stanley Coleman.”
“I saw it in the paper. Are you involved with that somehow? ”
“Peter sent me to a meeting to see what Dignitary Protection is going to need to protect Super Cop. Monsignor Schneider-who sitteth at the right hand of the Bishop-was there. I think he’s a cop groupie. He knew all about Doylestown. Anyway, he asked for me by name. When Super Cop, aka Colt aka Coleman comes to town, I’ll be temporarily assigned to Dignitary Protection. Terry said he’s interested in very young women. That ought to make it interesting.”
“Is that the young woman’s name, ‘Terry’?”
“Terry Davis. Two ‘r’s and a ‘y.’ She said her father’s a lawyer with movie connections, and he got her the job with GAM. Which stands for Global Artists Management.”
“I think I know him,” Brewster Payne said. “If it’s the same fellow, he masterfully defends, whenever challenged, the motion picture industry’s amazingly imaginative accounting practices.”
“Interesting,” Matt said. “If you happen to bump into him…"”
“I’m getting the impression that you are somewhat taken with this young lady, and therefore not entirely unhappy with the prospect of protecting… what did you call him? ‘Super Cop’?”
“She’s a blonde. Nice legs,” Matt said. “And she knows how to peel shrimp. What more can one ask for?”
“What indeed?” Brewster Payne said.
“Matt,” Patricia Payne said at the door, “I told you I was going to open a bottle of champagne.”
“I needed a little liquid courage to face Sigmund Freud,” Matt said.
She turned without replying, and after a moment, her son and husband followed her into the kitchen.
The three women were standing around the chopping block in the middle of the kitchen. They each held a champagne glass, and there were two more on the chopping block. And something else, wrapped in a handkerchief.
Matt and his father picked up the champagne stems.
“To Sergeant Payne,” Patricia Payne said, and they all touched glasses.
Matt took a sip and set it down.
“I’ve got something for you,” she said. “I wanted the family to be together when I gave it to you.”
She picked up the handkerchief and handed it to him. Even before he unwrapped it, Matt knew what it was. It was a police badge, and he knew whose.
“Your father’s,” she said.
Matt looked at the sergeant’s badge, Number 471, of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia.
“When Denny called,” Patricia Payne went on, “he said that he could arrange for you to be assigned your father’s number if I wanted. I told him I thought you would like that. And he asked me if I happened to still have it, and I told him I’d have to look. I found it. It was in the attic. And your father’s off-duty gun, the snub-nosed. 38.”
He looked at his mother but didn’t say anything.
“Your father was a good man, Matt,” his mother said. “A good police officer.”
“I have two fathers,” Matt said, his voice breaking. “My other father is a good man, too.”
Brewster Payne looked at him.
“Write this down, Matt. Never reply to a heartfelt compliment. You never can come up with something worth saying.”
He put his arm around Matt’s shoulder, and then embraced him.
“Give that to Denny before the ceremony tomorrow,” Patricia Payne said. “He’ll know how to handle it.”
Matt nodded, and slipped the badge into his pocket.
“Under the circumstances,” Brewster Payne said, picking up his whiskey glass, “barring objections, I think I’ll have another of these.”
“Me, too,” Matt said.
“First, we’ll finish the champagne,” Patricia Payne said. “And then we’ll all have a drink.”
Matt had just turned onto I-476 in Swarthmore to return to Philadelphia when the S-Band radio in the Crown Victoria went off: "S-Twelve.”
He pulled the microphone from under the center armrest.
“Twelve.”
“Meet the inspector in the 700 block of North Second.”
“Got it. En route. Thank you,” he said.
It was entirely possible that a crime had been committed in the 700 block of North Second Street, requiring his professional attention. But it was far more likely that he was going to find Inspector Wohl inside the premises at 705 North Second, which was known as Liberties Bar, and was the preferred watering hole of the Homicide Bureau.
I wonder what that’s all about?
I wonder why he didn’t call me on the cell phone?
Tomorrow, I will no longer be S-Twelve.
There was a somewhat battered, three-year-old Crown Victoria parked on Second Street in front of Liberties Bar. And a last year’s Crown Victoria, three brand-new Crown Victorias, and a Buick Rendezvous.
When Matt walked into Liberties, the drivers of these vehicles were sitting around two tables pushed together along the wall, across from the ornately carved, century-old bar. They were Deputy Commissioner Coughlin, Chief Inspector Lowenstein, Inspector Wohl, Lieutenant Washington, Detective Harris, and Michael J. O’Hara, Esq.
There was a bottle of Old Bushmills Irish whiskey, a bottle of Chivas Regal, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and two bowls, one with cashews, the other with stick pretzels, on the table.
“What’s going on?” Matt asked, slipping into a chair at the table beside Harris.
“I am interrogating a witness to the Roy Rogers job,” Harris said, nodding at O’Hara. “And getting nothing out of him.”
“Jesus, Tony,” Mickey said. “The bastards took a shot at me!”
Matt poured scotch into a glass.
“It would behoove you to go easy on that tonight, Detective Payne,” Wohl said. “Which is the reason we put the arm out for you. We didn’t want you to go off somewhere and get smashed by yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said, and picked up the drink and took a sip. Then he took his father’s badge from his apartment and slipped it to Denny Coughlin.
“Mom found that, and said to give it to you,” he said.
Coughlin looked at the badge, then laid it on the table.
“What’s that?” Lowenstein asked.
“Jack Moffitt’s sergeant’s badge,” Coughlin replied. “I remember the day he got it.” He looked at Matt and said, “I don’t want to hand this to your mother a second time. You understand me?”
Matt’s mouth ran away with him.
“Color me careful.”
“Watch your lip, Matty!” Coughlin said.
“That would make a good yarn,” Mickey O’Hara said. “ ‘New Sergeant Gets Hero Father’s Badge.’ ”
“Which you won’t write, right?” Lowenstein said.
“Okay,” Mickey said, shrugging his shoulders and reaching for the bottle of Old Bushmills.
“I loved Jack like a brother,” Coughlin said. “And he had a lot of balls. But he wasn’t a hero. His big balls got him killed. He answered a silent alarm without backup…”
“I remember,” Lowenstein said. “I had North Detectives when it happened.”
“Jack knew better,” Coughlin said. “He could still be walking around if he’d done what he was trained-ordered-to do.”
“Dennis, how would you judge Dutch Moffitt’s behavior?” Jason Washington’s sonorous voice asked.
Coughlin looked at him, obviously annoyed at the question.
“Was that an excess of male ego-‘I’m Dutch Moffitt of Highway Patrol. I can handle this punk by myself’?” Washington pursued. “Or a professional assessment of the situation in which he found himself, with the same result?”
Coughlin looked at him for a long moment before deciding if and what to answer.
“Dutch said, ‘Lay the gun on the counter, son. I don’t want to have to kill you. I’m a police officer.’ Was that the right thing to do? I think so. I would like to think that’s what I would have done. I would also like to think I would have looked around for a second doer. Dutch didn’t, and the junkie girlfriend shot him.”