"Who were you with?"
"A girl named Barbara Crowley. She's a nurse at the Psychiatric Institute."
"That's the girl you took to Herman Webb's retirement party?"
"Yes, sir."
"I admire your taste, Peter," Commissioner Czernick said. "She seems to be a very fine young woman."
"So my mother keeps telling me," Wohl said.
"You should listen to your mother," Czernick said, smiling.
"When I got home, I called Homicide to see if anything had happened, if they'd found Gerald Vincent Gallagher, and they told me what had happened at Stockton Place, and I figured I'd better go, and I did."
That, Peter thought, wasn't the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but it wasn't a lie. So why do 1 feel uncomfortable?
"What happened there?"
"Can I go off the record?" Wohl asked.
The commissioner looked at him with surprise, thought that over, and then nodded.
"Lieutenant DelRaye had rolled on the job, and with his usual tact, he'd rubbed Louise Dutton the wrong way. When I got there, she was locked in her apartment, and DelRaye was about to take down her door. He had a wagon waiting to bring her over here."
"Jesus!" Czernick said. "So what happened?"
"I talked to her. She'd found the body, and was understandably pretty upset. She said she was not going to come over here, period. And she meant it. She asked me to take her out of there, and I did."
"Where did you take her?"
"To my place," Peter said. "She said she didn't want to go to a hotel. I'm sure she felt she would be recognized. Anyway, it was half past two in the morning, and it seemed like the thing to do."
"You better hope your girl friend doesn't find out," Czernick said.
"So I calmed her down, and gave her something to eat, and at eight o' clock, I brought her in. I just got to Homicide when you called down there."
"How do you think she feels about the police department?" Czernick asked.
"DelRaye aside, I think she likes us," Peter said.
"She going to file a complaint about DelRaye?" Czernick asked.
"No, sir."
"You see Colonel Mawson downstairs?"
"Yes, sir. I guess WCBL sent him over?"
"No," Czernick said. "The name Stanford Fortner Wells mean anything to you, Peter?"
Wohl shook his head no.
"Wells Newspapers?" Czernick pursued.
"Oh, yeah. Sure."
"He sent the colonel," Czernick said.
Peter suddenly recalled, very clearly, what he'd thought when he'd first seen Louise Dutton's apartment; that she couldn't afford it; that she might be a high-class hooker on the side, or some rich man's "good friend." That certainly would explain a lot.
"He's her father," Czernick went on. "So it seems the extra courtesies we have been giving Miss Dutton were the thing to do."
"She told me she had tried to call her father, but that he was out of the country," Peter said. "London, she said. She didn't tell me who he was."
He realized that he had just experienced an emotional shock, several emotions all at once. He was ashamed that he had been so willing to accept that Louise was someone's mistress, which would have neatly explained how she could afford that expensive apartment. His relief at learning that Stanford Wells was her father, not her lover, was startling. And immediately replaced with disappointment, even chagrin. Whatever slim chance there could be that something might develop between him and Louise had just been blown out of the water. The daughter of a newspaper empire was not about to even dally with a cop, much less move with him into a vine-covered cottage by the side of the road.
"Peter, I want you to stay with this," Commissioner Czernick said. " I'm going to tell J. Arthur Nelson that I've assigned you to oversee the case and that you'll report to him at least daily where the investigation is leading."
"Yes, sir," Peter said.
"Find out where things stand, and then you call him. Better yet, go see him."
"Yes, sir."
"Make sure that he understands what you're telling him is for him personally, not for theLedger. Tell him as much as you think you can. I don't want theLedger screaming about police ineptitude. And stay with the Dutton woman, too. I don't want the Philadelphia Police Department's federal grants cut because Stanford Fortner Wells III tells his politicians to cut them. Which I think he damned sure would have done if we had brought his daughter here handcuffed in the back of a wagon."
"Yes, sir," Peter said.
"That's it, Peter," Commissioner Czernick said. "Keep me advised."
NINE
Mr. and Mrs. Kevin McFadden, who lived in a row house on Fitzgerald Street, not far from Methodist Hospital in South Philadelphia, were not entirely pleased with their son Charles's choice of a career as a policeman. Kevin McFadden had been an employee of the Philadelphia Gas Works since he had left high school, and Mrs. McFadden (Agnes) had just naturally assumed that Charley would follow in his father's footsteps. By and large the gas works had treated Kevin McFadden all right for twenty-seven years, and when he turned sixty, he would have a nice pension, based on (by then) forty-one years of service to the company.
Mrs. Agnes McFadden could not understand why Charley, who his father had got on as a helper with the gas works after his graduation from Bishop Newman High School, had thrown that over to become a cop. Her primary concern was for her son's safety. Being a policeman was a dangerous job. Whenever she went in Charley's room and saw his gun and the boxes of ammunition for it, on the closet shelf, it made her shudder.
And it wasn't as if he would have been a helper forever. You can't start at the top, you have to work your way up. Kevin had worked his way up. He was now a lead foreman, and the money was good, and with his seniority, he got all of his weekends and most holidays off.
Kevin hadn't been a lot of a help, when Agnes McFadden had tried to talk Charley out of quitting the gas works and going on the cops. He had taken Charley's side, agreeing with him that a pension when you were forty-five was a hell of a lot better than a pension you got only when you were sixty, if you lived that long.
"Christ," he said, "Charley could retire atforty-five years old, still a young man, and go get another job, and every month there would be a check from the city for as long as he lived."
And he added that if Charley didn't want to work for the gas works, that was his business.
Mr. and Mrs. McFadden, however, were in agreement concerning Charley' s duties within the police department. They didn't like that one damned bit, even if they tried (with not much success) to keep it to themselves.
He went around looking like a goddamned bum. Facts are facts. Agnes hadn't let Kevin go to work in clothes like that, even way back when he didn't have much seniority and was working underground. God only knew what people in the neighborhood thought Charley was doing for a living.
Not that he was around the neighborhood much. They hardly ever saw him, they couldn't remember the last time he had gone to church with them, and he never even went to Flo amp; Danny's Bar amp; Grill with his father anymore.
Theyunderstood, of course, when he told them he had been assigned to the Narcotics Squad, in a "plainclothes" assignment, and that the reason he dressed like a bum was you couldn't expect to catch drug guys unless you looked like them. It wasn't like arresting somebody for speeding. And they believed him when he said it was an opportunity, that if he did good, he could get promoted quickly, and that there was practically unlimited overtime right now.
So far as Agnes McFadden was concerned, overtime was fine, but there was also such a thing as too much of a good thing. Charley had had his own phone put in; and two, three, and sometimes even more nights a week, he would no sooner get home, usually at some ungodly hour after they had gone to bed, than it would ring, and it would be his partner calling; and she would hear him running down the stairs and slamming the front door (he'd been doing that since he was five years old) and then she would hear him starting up the battered old car-a Volkswagenhe drove and tearing off down the street.