Joellen watched as he put on a pair of rubber gloves and very carefully polished his shoes.
“Woodrow Junior would have done that if you’d have told him,” Joellen said.
“I messed them up, I’ll make them right,” he said.
Then he went back upstairs, got his gun from the drawer, went back downstairs, kissed Joellen good-bye. He got his uniform cap and his nightstick from the hall clothes hanger and left the house.
It was seven blocks to the District Headquarters at Twenty-second and Hunting Park Avenue.
Woodrow walked briskly, looking to see what he could see, thinking that when roll call was over and he went on patrol he’d cruise the alleys. He’d been off for seventy hours, and there was no telling what might have happened in that time.
It was a morning like any other. There was absolutely nothing different about it that would have made him suspect that before the day was over, he would be in the office of the Northwest Police Division Inspector, getting his hand shook, and having his picture made with the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia.
Having decided First things first, Matt limped to Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., from the Marine Police Unit pier. There the Senior Maintenance Advisor, a somewhat epicene young man in a blazer and bow tie and three maintenance technicians in spotless white thigh-length coats which made them look more, Matt thought, like gynecologists waiting for a patient than automobile mechanics, confirmed his worst fears about the Porsche.
“Whatever did you do to it?” the Senior Maintenance Advisor asked, in what Matt thought was mingled horror and joy as he calculated the size of the repair bill.
Well, I was chasing a murder suspect down by the refineries in Chester, and I had to turn the headlights off so that he wouldn’t know he was being followed.
“I ran over a bumper,” Matt said.
“I’ll say you did!”
“You should have left it where you did it,” one of the maintenance technicians volunteered, his tone suggesting Matt deserved a prize for Idiot of the Year. “Called a wrecker. No telling how much damage to the suspension you did driving it in.”
Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., evidently felt such enormous sympathy for him, or figured they could make up the cost when they presented him with the bill, that they gave him a loaner. A new 911 Demonstrator. Matt suspected that sometime in the next day or two he would receive a call from Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., asking him, taking into consideration what the repair bill for repairing the damage he had done to his old car would be, would he be interested in a very special deal on the car he was now driving?
He then went to his apartment. There was no one there. Helene Kellog had apparently gone off with Wally Milham someplace-Wally had said that it would be three o’clock, maybe later, before the lab was finished testing the guns taken from the river-or possibly had calmed down enough to go to work.
There was evidence of her presence in the apartment-a can of hair spray, a mascara brush, and a jar of deodorant on the sink in his bathroom-when he stripped out of Wohl’s clothes and went to take a shower.
That reminded him that he had not telephoned Amanda on the pretense that she should not be concerned if she called the apartment and a woman answered.
The hot water of the shower exacerbated whatever the hell he had been rolling around in on the Chester pier had done to his face and hands. When he wiped the condensation off the mirror to shave, he looked like a lobster. A lobster with a three-square-inch albino white spot on the right cheek, which served to make the rest of his face look even redder.
And shaving hurt, even with an electric razor.
He had just about finished dressing when the telephone rang.
That’s obviously Inspector Wohl, calling to apologize for having spoken harshly to me, and to express the gratitude and admiration of the entire Police Department for my brilliant detecting.
Or the President of the United States, (b) being quite as likely as (a).
Jesus, maybe it’s Amanda!
“Hello.”
“You’re a hard man to find, Matt,” the familiar voice of Mrs. Irene Craig, his father’s secretary, said. “Hold on.” Faintly, he could hear her add, presumably over the intercom to his father, “Triumph! Perseverance pays!”
“Matt? Good morning.”
“Good morning, Dad.”
“I’ve been concerned about you, and not only because we rather expected to see you at home last night and no one seems to know where you are.”
“Sorry, I was working.”
“Are you working now?”
“No. I just got out of the shower.”
“I don’t suppose you would have time to come by the office for a few minutes?”
“Yes, sir, I could.”
“Fine, I’ll see you shortly,” his father said, and hung up.
He did that, Matt hypothesized, correctly, so that I wouldn’t have time to come up with an excuse not to go to his office. I wonder what he wants.
“What in the world happened to your face?” Brewster Cortland Payne II greeted him twenty minutes later.
“I don’t suppose you would believe I fell asleep under a sunlamp?”
“I wouldn’t,” said Irene Craig. “You’ll have to do better than that. Would you like some coffee, Matt?”
“Very much, thank you. Black, please.”
His father waved him into one of two green leather-upholstered chairs facing his desk.
“Two, Irene, please, and then hold my calls,” his father said.
He waited until Mrs. Craig had served the coffee, left, and closed the door behind her.
“What did happen to your face?”
“I fell into something that, according to Amy, was some kind of caustic.”
“Amy’s had a look at you?”
Matt nodded.
“How did it happen?”
“I was working.”
“That’s what I told your mother, that you were probably working. First, when you didn’t show up for dinner as promised, and again when you didn’t show up by bedtime, and a third time when Amanda Spencer called at midnight.”
“Amanda called out there?”
“She was concerned for you,” Matt’s father said. “Apparently, she called the apartment several times. A woman answered one time, and then she called back and there was a man, who either didn’t know where you are or wouldn’t tell her.”
“God!”
“Your mother said it must have been very difficult for Amanda to call us.”
“Oh, boy!”
“I wasn’t aware that you and Amanda were close,” Matt’s father said, carefully.
Matt met his eyes.
“That’s been a very recent development,” Matt said after a moment. “I don’t suppose it makes me any less of a sonofabitch, but…there was nothing between us before Penny killed herself.”
“I didn’t think there had been,” his father said. “You’ve never been duplicitous. Your mother, however, told me that she saw Amanda looking at you, quote, ‘in a certain way,’ unquote, at Martha Peebles’s party.”
“Jesus, that’s the second time I heard that. I hope the Detweilers didn’t see it.”
“So do I,” his father said. He came around from behind his desk and handed Matt a small sheet of notepaper.
“Your mother told Amanda that she would have you call her as soon as we found you,” he said. “The first number is her office number, the second her apartment. I think you’d better call her; she’s quite upset.”
“What does Mother think of me?”
“I think she’s happy for you, Matt,” Brewster Cortland Payne II said, and walked toward his door. “I am.”
He left the office and closed the door behind him.
Matt reached for the telephone.
TWENTY-ONE
There are a number of City Ordinances dealing with the disposition of garbage and an equally large number of City Ordinances dealing with the setting of open fires within the City. A good deal of legal thought has gone into their preparation, and the means by which they were to be enforced.