He had a sudden, painfully clear mental image of Penny naked in his arms. Of how good that felt.
"May I speak?" Matt asked.
"I'm waiting."
"I'm not going to hurt Penny. Period. I don't really think that… what happened…hurt her."
"And what are you going to do when she realizes that you don't love her?"
"I never told her I did."
"When she learns about the rest of your harem?" Amy asked, and pointed to the telephone. "Like the one who just called?"
Matt shrugged.
"I can only repeat that I will not hurt her," Matt said.
"You've already set the stage to do exactly that. She sees you as a life preserver, someone she can lean on. I don't know how she's going to react when she finds out, inevitably, that's not true. Certainly, you're not willing to assume emotional responsibility for her. And even if you were, I don't think you could handle it."
He didn't reply.
"Penny cannot be just one more notch on your gun, Matt."
"I never thought of her that way," Matt interrupted.
Amy ignored his response.
"You can't, when she becomes an inconvenience, tell Penny, the way you told that woman on the telephone just now, 'I can't talk to you right now. I'll call you right back.' She cannot take that kind of rejection, for that matter, any rejection right now. It would put her right back in The Lindens."
"Okay, you made your point."
"You're going to have to disabuse her of the notion that she's in love with you very gently."
"I told you, you made your point."
Amy glowered at him, but after a moment her face softened.
"Okay, Matt. Ihave made my point. And you're not really a sonofabitch. You're incredibly stupid and insensitive, of course, and you do most of your thinking with your penis. A typical male, I would say."
He looked at her and smiled.
"How about an egg roll?"
"You bastard!" Amy said, but she sat beside him on the couch and helped herself to an egg roll.
When she left, half an hour later, and he steeled himself to call Evelyn back, there was no answer.
He knew that if he stayed in the apartment he would get drunk, so he called Charley McFadden, and Charley's mother said he was out with his girlfriend.
He walked up Rittenhouse Square to the Rittenhouse Club, and stood at the bar and ordered a Scotch. There were some people there whom he knew vaguely, and who smiled at him. He moved down the bar and tried to join their conversation.
Before he finished his first drink, he realized that he was wholly disinterested in what they were talking about.
I look like them. I act like them. I am a product of the same socio-economic background. But I am no longer like them. I'm a cop.
So where does that leave me with Penny?
He motioned to the bartender, so that he could sign the chit, and then he went back to his apartment.
TWENTY-THREE
Matt woke instantly at the first ring of the telephone, and was instantly wide awake, and aware that he was in his armchair in the living room. He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was quarter past eleven.
The telephone rang a second time. On the third ring, the answering machine would kick in.
Evelyn, of course. Who else? And Jesus, I don't want to talk to her!
He picked up the telephone a half second after the answering machine began to play his message.
He spoke over it. "I'm here. Hang on until the machine does its thing."
"Did I wake you up?" Sergeant Jerry O'Dowd asked.
"Yeah, but it's all right. What's up?"
"I thought if you didn't have anything better to do, you might want to put in some unpaid overtime."
No, as a matter of fact, I would not want to put in some overtime, paid or otherwise. But he wouldn't ask if it wasn't important.
"Sure. What's up?"
"Not to be repeated, okay?"
"Sure."
"I was not impressed with the two guys Olsen sent to relieve us at the airport. I know one of them, and he couldn't be trusted to follow an elephant down Broad Street."
"You want me to go out there? Lanza knows me."
"I thought about that. And decided it was worth the risk. But I wouldn't drive the Porsche."
Wohl doesn't know about this. If he did, he would tell me to stay at least five miles away from the airport.
As if he had read Mart's mind, O'Dowd said, "If there is any static, from Wohl especially, I'll take the heat. With a little bit of luck, no one will ever know about this but you and me. I'll be proven wrong about the guy I know."
"You'll have to explain that."
"If I'm wrong, and I hope I will be, the guys on Lanza will be able to follow him. If they can follow him, wherever he's going, fine, we'll hang it up. But if they lose him, which wouldn't be surprising, at midnight in that area, I want to be on him. Then I'll get on the radio and tell the other guys where he is."
"You want me to go with you?"
"No. I want both of us to follow him. That would have three people following him. I don't think all three of us would lose him. But if they did, and I did, and you didn't…"
"Okay. Where do I meet you?"
"There's an all-night diner on South Broad right across from the stadium. You know it?"
"Uh-huh."
"Twenty minutes?"
"I'll be there."
"Thanks, Matt. I've got one of those feelings about tonight."
"Twenty minutes," Matt repeated. "You still have Tony Harris's car?"
"Yeah," O'Dowd said, and hung up.
At ten minutes after eleven, Corporal Vito Lanza came out of the Airport Unit, went to the parking lot, unlocked his Cadillac, and entered the sparse stream of traffic leaving the airport in the direction of Philadelphia.
So did a four-year-old Pontiac, with two men in it; a new Ford sedan with one man in it; and a twelve-year-old Volkswagen driven by Detective M. M. Payne, who brought up the tail of the line.
Corporal Lanza took Penrose Avenue, sometimes known as Bridge Avenue, which carried him across the Schuylkill River to the stop light at the intersection of Pattison Avenue. Until this point, he had been driving in the left lane, and so had the Pontiac and the Ford. At the last moment, Corporal Lanza jerked the Cadillac into the right lane, and as the light turned red, he turned right onto Pattison Avenue.
The line of traffic closed up, and left the Pontiac and the Ford with no choice but to wait for the light to turn green again, with the hope that Corporal Lanza intended to get on South Broad Street, and that they could intercept him by following Penrose as it turns into Moyamensing Avenue, which angles to the right, and intersects South Broad Street at Oregon Avenue just north of Marconi Plaza.
Detective Payne, in the twelve-year-old Volkswagen, had not been able to get in line behind the Pontiac and the Ford in the left lane, and consequently was already in the right lane when Corporal Lanza abruptly moved into it.
He saw that the Pontiac and the Ford were trapped in the left lane, and thought, as the drivers of the Pontiac and the Ford did, that they could probably catch up with Lanza at South Broad and Oregon. But in the meantime, there was only one possible course of action for him to take, and he took it.
He drove the Bug onto the sidewalk, down the sidewalk to Pattison Avenue, and then down Pattison past the U.S. Naval Hospital and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park to South Broad Street.
As he approached South Broad, as he saw Lanza's Cadillac turn left onto South Broad Street, the traffic light turned orange and then red. Matt ran it, which caused the horns of several automobiles to sound angrily. But he did not lose Lanza, even though Lanza was driving like hell.
Policemen tend to do that,Matt thought wryly, remembering his encounter with the State Trooper on the way to the Oaks and Pines Lodge,secure in the knowledge they are unlikely to get a ticket from a brother officer.