"Yes, ma'am," Charley McFadden said. He turned to the two wagon cops. "You can take him," he said.
"And I'm going to get on the telephone right now and tell him about this," the victim said. "This is simply outrageous."
"Yes, ma'am," Charley McFadden said.
Clarence Sims was led to the wagon, helped inside, and driven to the West Detectives District at Fifty-fifth and Pine Streets, where his glowing ember of hope that he was going to walk was extinguished by a detective who began their discussion by explaining his rights underMiranda.
Lieutenant Ed Michleson, the Day Watch commander at the Twelfth District, was not at all surprised to get the telephone call from Sergeant Willoughby of Chief Inspector Coughlin's office informing him that he was about to lose the services of Officers Jesus Martinez and Charles McFadden.
When they had been assigned to the Twelfth District, it had been with the understanding that it was only temporary, that they would be reassigned. The District Commander had told him that he had gotten it from Chief Coughlin himself that their assignment was only until he could find a good job for them.
They had been previously working plainclothes in Narcotics, a good, but not unusual assignment for young cops who showed promise and whose faces were not yet known on the street, and who, if they let their hair grow and dressed like bums could sort of melt into the drug culture.
When their faces became known, which was inevitable, the next step was usually back into uniform. But McFadden and Martinez had, on their own, staked out the Bridge amp; Pratt Street terminal of the subway, and there found the junkie who had shot Captain Dutch Moffitt, of Highway Patrol, to death. McFadden had chased Gerald Vincent Gallagher down the tracks where Gallagher had fallen against the third rail and then gotten himself run over by a subway train.
In the movies, or in a cop-and-robbers program on TV, with the mayor and assorted big shots beaming in the background, the Commissioner would have handed them detectives' badges, and congratulations for a job well done. But this was real life, and promotions to detective in the Philadelphia Police Department came only after you had taken, and passed, the civil service examination. Martinez had taken the exam and flunked it, and McFadden hadn't been a cop long enough to be eligible to even take it.
But it was good police work, and Chief Inspector Coughlin, who was a good guy, didn't want to put them back into uniform-which young cops working plainclothes considered a demotion-even though with their pictures on the front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia, and on TV, their effectiveness as undercover Narcs was destroyed.
So he'd loaned them to Twelfth District, which was under-strength, and had a problem with thieves working shopping mall parking lots, until he could find someplace to assign them permanently. And now he had.
Lieutenant Michleson got up and walked into the Operations Room and asked the corporal where Mutt and Jeff were. They looked like Mutt and Jeff. McFadden was a great big kid, large boned, tall and heavy. Martinez was a little Latin type, wiry and just over Department minimums for height and weight.
"They're on their way in," the corporal said. "They just arrested a guy robbing a car in the parking lot at Penrose Plaza. That makes five they caught since they been here."
"When they finish up the paperwork, send them in to me," Michleson said. "We're going to lose them."
"Where they going?"
"Highway."
"Highway?" the corporal replied, surprised, then laughed. "Those two?"
"That's not kind, Charley," Michleson said, smiling at the mental image of Mutt and Jeff all decked out in Highway Patrol regalia.
"I don't think Hay-zus is big enough to straddle a Harley," the corporal said.
"Maybe somebody figures they paid their dues," Lieutenant Michleson said. "Highway didn't catch the critter who shot Captain Moffitt. They did."
"When are they going?"
"They're to report in the morning."
Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, at thirty-five the youngest of the eighteen Staff Inspectors of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia, who was lying on his back, looked up from what he was doing and found himself staring up a woman's shorts at her underpants. The underpants were red, and more or less transparent, and worn under a pair of white shorts.
He pushed himself, on his mechanic's crawler, the rest of the way out from under the Jaguar XK-120, and sat up. There was grease on his face, and on his bare, smoothly muscled chest, but there was still something about him that suggested more the accountant, or the lawyer, than a mechanic. Or a police officer.
"Hi," the wearer of the red underpants and white shorts said.
"Hi," Peter Wohl said, noticing now that she was also wearing a man's white shirt, the bottom rolled up and tied in a knot under her bosom, which served to bare her belly and put her not at all unattractive navel on display.
"I saw you working out the window," the woman said, "and I figured you could use this." She extended a bottle of Budweiser to him.
Peter Wohl noticed now that the hand holding the bottle had both an engagement and a wedding ring on the appropriate finger.
He took the beer.
"Thank you," he said, and took a pull at the neck.
"Naomi," the woman said. "Naomi Schneider."
"Peter Wohl," he said.
Naomi Schneider, it registered on Peter Wohl's policeman's mind, was a white female, approximately five feet six inches tall, approximately 130 pounds, approximately twenty-five years of age, with no significant distinguishing marks or scars.
"We're in Two-B," Naomi Schneider volunteered. "My husband and I, I mean. We moved in last week."
"I saw the moving van," Peter said.
Two-B was the apartment occupying the rear half of the second floor of what Peter thought of as the House. There were six apartments in the House, a World War I-era mansion on the 8800 block of Norwood Road in Chestnut Hill, which had been converted into what the owner, a corporation, called "luxury apartments." The apartments in the rear of the building looked out on the four-car garage, and what had been the chauffeur's quarters above it. Peter Wohl lived in the ex-chauffeur's quarters, and to the often undisguised annoyance of the tenants of the House occupied two of the four garages.
It was possible, he thought, that Mr. Schneider had suggested to his wife that maybe if they made friends with the guy in the garage apartment with the Jaguar andtwo garages they could talk him out of one of them. There had been, he had noticed lately, a Porsche convertible coupe parked either on the street, or behind the house. They could probably make the argument that as fellow fine sports caraficionados he would appreciate that it was nearly criminal to have to leave a Porsche outside exposed to the elements.
But he dismissed that possible scenario as being less likely than the possibility that Mr. Schneider knew nothing of his wife's gesture of friendliness, and that Naomi had something in mind that had nothing to do with their Porsche.
"My husband travels," Naomi offered. "He's in floor coverings. He goes as far west as Pittsburgh."
Bingo!
"Oh, really?"
He now noticed that Naomi Schneider's eyes were very dark. Dark-eyed women do not have blond hair. Naomi's hair was, therefore, dyed blond. It was well done, no dark roots or anything, but obviously her hair was naturally black, or nearly so. Peter had a theory about that. Women with dark hair who peroxided it should not go out in the bright sunlight. Dyed blond hair might work inside, especially at night, but in the sunlight, it looked… dyed.
"He's generally gone two or three nights a week," Naomi offered. " What do you do?"