"Tony Harris got the Nelson job," Quaire said.
"I heard. Good man, from what I hear," Wohl said.
"Tony Harris is at the Nelson apartment," Quaire said. "You want me to get him in here?"
"I really have to talk to him before I see Nelson. Maybe the thing for me to do is meet him over there."
"You want to do that, I'll call him and tell him to wait for you."
"Please, Henry," Wohl said.
Staff Inspector Peter Wohl's first reaction when he saw Detective Anthony C. Harris was anger.
Tony Harris was in his early thirties, a slight and wiry man already starting to bald, the smooth youthful skin on his face already starting to crease and line. He was wearing a shirt and tie, and a sports coat and slacks that had probably come from the racks of some discount clothier several years before.
It was a pleasant spring day and Detective Harris had elected to wait for Inspector Wohl outside the crime scene, which had already begun to stink sickeningly of blood, on the street. Specifically, when Wohl passed through the Stockton Place barrier, Harris was sitting on the hood of Wohl's Jaguar XK-120, which was parked, top down, where he had left it last night.
There were twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer on the XK-120's hood, applied, one coat at a time, with a laborious rubdown between each coat, by Peter Wohl himself.Only an ignorant asshole, with no appreciation of the finer things of life, would plant his gritty ass on twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer.
Wohl screeched to a stop by the Jaguar, leaned across the seat, rolled down the window, and returned Tony Harris's pleasant smile by snapping, "Get your ass off my hood!"
Then he drove twenty feet farther down the cobble-stoned street and stopped the LTD.
Looking a little sheepish, Harris walked to the LTD as Wohl got out.
"Jesus Christ, Tony!" Wohl fumed, still angry. "There's twenty coats of lacquer on there!"
"Sorry," Harris mumbled. "I didn't think."
"Obviously," Wohl said.
Wohl's anger died as quickly as it had flared. Tony Harris looked beat and worn down. Without consciously calling it up from his memory, what Wohl knew about Harris came into his mind. First came the important impression he had filed away, which was that Harris was a good cop, more important, one of the brighter Homicide detectives. Then he remembered hearing that after nine years of marriage and four kids, Mrs. Harris had caught Tony straying from the marital bed and run him before a judge who had awarded her both ears and the tail.
If I were Tony Harris, Peter Wohl thought, who has to put in sixty, sixty-five hours a week to make enough money to pay child support with enough left over to pay for an "efficiency" apartment for myself, and some staff inspector, no older than I am, pulls rank and jumps my ass for scratching the precious paint on his precious sports car, I would be pissed. And rightly so.
"Hell, Tony, I'm sorry," Wohl said, offering his hand. "But I painted that sonofabitch by myself. All twenty coats."
"I was wrong," Harris said. "I just wasn't thinking. Or I wasn't thinking about a paint job."
"I guess what I was really pissed about was my own stupidity," Wohl said. "I know better than using my own car on the job. Right after I saw you, I asked myself, 'Christ, what if it had rained last night?' "
"You took that TV woman out through the basement in her own car?" Harris asked.
"Yeah."
"It took DelRaye some time to figure that out," Harris said. "Talk about pissed."
"Well, I'm sorry he was," Wohl said. "But it was a vicious circle, the more pissed he got at her, the more pissed she got at him. I had to break it, and that seemed to be the best way to do it. The whole department would have paid for it for a long time."
"I think maybe he was pissed because he knew his ass was showing," Harris said. "You can't push a dame like that around. She file a complaint?"
"No," Wohl said.
Harris shrugged.
"Did Captain Quaire say anything to you about me?" Wohl asked.
"He said it came from upstairs that you were to be in on it," Harris said.
"I've been temporarily transferred to the Charm Squad," Wohl said. " I'm to keep Miss Dutton happy, and to report daily to Mr. Nelson's father on the progress of your investigation."
Harris chuckled.
"What have you got, Tony?"
"He was a fag, I guess you know?"
"I met him," Wohl said.
"I want to talk to his boyfriend," Harris said. "We're looking for him. Very large black guy, big enough, strong enough, to cut up Nelson the way he was. His name, we think, is Pierre St. Maury. His birth certificate probably says John Jones, but that's what he called himself."
"You think he's the doer?"
"That's where I am now," Harris said. "The rent-a-cops told me that he spent the night here a lot; drove Nelson's car-cars-and probably had a key. There are no signs of forcible entry. And there's a burglar alarm. One of Nelson's cars is missing. AJaguar, by the way, Inspector," Harris said, a naughty look in his eyes. "I put the Jag in NCIC."
The FBI's National Crime Information Center operated a massive computer listing details of crimes nationwide. If the Jaguar was found somewhere, or even stopped for a traffic violation, the information that it was connected with a crime in Philadelphia would be immediately available to the police officers involved.
"Screw you, Tony," Wohl said, and laughed.
"A new one," Harris went on. "An 'XJ6'?"
"Four-door sedan," Wohl furnished. "A work of art. Twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars."
Harris's face registered surprise at the price.
"Police radio is broadcasting the description every half hour," he went on. "I also ordered a subsector search. Nelson's other car is a Ford Fairlane convertible. That's in the garage."
"Lover's quarrel?" Wohl asked.
Harris held both palms upward in front of him, and made a gesture, like a scale in balance.
"Maybe," he said. "That would explain what he did to the victim. I think we have the weapons. They used one of those Chinese knives, you know, looks like a cleaver, but sharp as a razor?"
Wohl nodded.
"And another knife, a regular one, a butcher knife with a bone handle, which is probably what he used to stab him."
"You said 'maybe,' Tony," Wohl said.
"I'm just guessing, Inspector," Harris said.
"Go ahead," Wohl said.
"There was a lot of stuff stolen, or I think so. There's no jewelry to speak of in the apartment… some ordinary cuff links, tie clasps, but nothing worth any money. The victim wore rings, they're gone, we know that. No money in the wallet, or anywhere else that anybody could find. He probably had a watch, or watches, and there's none in there. And there was marks on the bedside table, probably a portable TV, that's gone."
"Leading up to what?"
"When two homosexuals get into something like this, they usually don' t steal anything, too. I mean, not the boyfriend. They work off the anger and run. So maybe it wasn't the boyfriend."
"Or the boyfriend might be a cold-blooded sonofa-bitch," Wohl said.
"Yeah," Harris said, and made the balancing gestures again. "We got people looking for Mr. St. Maury," he went on. "And for the Jaguar. We're trying to find if he had any jewelry that was good enough to be insured, which would give us a description. Captain Quaire said you were going to see his father?"
"I'm going there as soon as I leave here," Wohl said. "I'll ask."
"I'd like to talk to him, too," Harris said.
"I think I'd better see him alone," Wohl thought out loud. "I'll tell him you'll want to see him. Maybe he can come up with some kind of a list of jewelry, expensive stuff in the apartment."