"Both, I'd say," Matt said. His knees hurt. He pushed himself back onto the seat as DeBenedito drove around City Hall and then up Market Street.
The Highway Patrol pulled to the curb on the south side of Rittenhouse Square as a foot-patrol officer made his way down the sidewalk. He looked on curiously as the cop in the passenger seat jumped out and opened the rear door so that a civilian in a tuxedo could get out. (The inside handles on RPCs are often removed so that people put in the back can't get out before they're suppose to.)
"Good night, Hay-zus," Matt said, and raising his voice, called, " Thanks for the ride, Sergeant."
"Stay off parking garage roofs, Payne," Sergeant DeBenedito called back as Jesus Martinez got back in and slammed the door.
"Good morning," Matt said to the foot-patrol cop.
"Yeah," the cop responded, and then he watched as Matt let himself into the Delaware Valley Cancer Society Building. It was a renovated, turn-of-the-century brownstone. Renovations for a long-term lease as office space to the Cancer Society had been just about completed when the architect told the owner he had found enough space in what had been the attic to make a small apartment.
Matt had found the apartment through his father's secretary and moved in when he'd gone on the job. A month ago he had learned that his father owned the building.
The elevator ended on the floor below the attic. He got out of the elevator, thinking it was a good thing Amanda had been willing to park his car for him before catching a cab to Merion; he would need his car tomorrow, for sure, and then walked up the narrow flight of stairs to the attic apartment.
The lights were on. He didn't remember leaving them on, but that wasn't at all unusual.
He walked to the fireplace, raised his left leg, and detached the Velcro fasteners that held his ankle holster in place on the inside of his leg and took it off. He took the pistol, a five-shot.38 caliber Smith amp; Wesson Chief's Special from it. He laid the holster on the fireplace mantel and then wiped off the pistol with a siliconeimpregnated cloth.
Jason Washington had told him about doing that; that anytime you touched the metal of a pistol, the body left minute traces of acidic fluid on it. Eventually it would eat away the bluing. Habitually wiping it once a day would preserve the bluing.
He laid the pistol on the mantel and, starting to take off his dinner jacket, turned away from the fireplace.
Amanda Spencer was standing by the elbow-high bookcase that separated the "dining area" from the "kitchen." Both, in Matt's opinion, were too small to be thought of without quotation marks.
"Welcome home," Amanda said.
Matt dismissed the first thought that came to his mind: that Amanda was here because she wanted to make the beast with two backs as wishful-to-the-nth-degree thinking.
"No rent-a-cop downstairs?" he asked. "I should have told you to look in the outer lobby. They can usually be found there, asleep."
"He was there. He let me in," Amanda said.
"I don't understand," Matt said.
"Either do I," she said. "What happened where you went with Peter Wohl?"
"There was a dead cop," Matt said. "A young one. Now that I think about it, I saw him around the academy. Somebody shot him."
"Why?"
"No one seems to know," Matt said. "Somebody called it in, a dead cop in the gutter. When they got there, there he was."
"How terrible."
"He had been to Vietnam. He was about to get married. He was a relative of Sergeant DeBenedito."
"Who?"
"He was at the garage," Matt said. "And then he was at Colombia and Clarion-where the dead cop was. Wohl had him drive me home."
"Oh."
"Amanda, I'll take you out to Merion. But first, would you mind if I made myself a drink?"
"I helped myself," she said. "I hope that's all right."
"Don't be silly."
He started for the kitchen. As he approached her, Amanda stepped out of the way, making it clear, he thought, that she didn't want to be embraced, or even patted, in the most friendly, big-brotherly manner.
In the kitchen he saw that she had found where he kept his liquor, in a cabinet over the refrigerator; a squat bottle of twenty-fouryear-old Scotch, a gift from his father, was on the sink.
He found a glass and put ice in it, and then Scotch, and then tap water. He was stirring it with his finger when Amanda came up behind him and wrapped her arms around him.
"I wanted to be with you tonight," she said softly, her head against his back. "I suppose that makes me sound like a slut."
"Not unless you announce those kind of urges more than, say, twice a week," he said.
Oh, shit, he thought, you and your fucking runaway mouth! What the hell is the matter with you?
Her arms dropped away from him and he sensed that she had stepped back. He turned around.
"I suppose I deserved that," she said.
"I'm sorry," Matt said. "Jesus Christ, Amanda, I can't tell you how sorry I am I said that."
She looked into his eyes for a long time.
"You'll be the second, all right? I was engaged," she said.
"I know," he said.
"You do?"
"I mean, I know you're not a slut. I have a runaway mouth."
"Yes, you do," she agreed. "We'll have to work on that." She put her hand to his cheek. He turned his head and kissed it.
When he met her eyes again, she said, "I knew you were going to be trouble for me the first time I laid eyes on you."
"I'm not going to be trouble for you, I promise."
She laughed.
"Oh, yes you are," she said. "So now what, Matthew? You want to show me your etchings now or what?"
"They're in my sleeping-accommodations suite," he said. "That's the small closet to your immediate rear."
"I know," she said. "I looked. Lucky for you I didn't find any hairpins or forgotten lingerie in there."
"You'll be the first," he said.
"You mean inthere," she said, and when she saw the uncomfortable look on his face, she stood on her toes and kissed him gently on the lips. Then she took his hand and led him into his bedroom.
When Sergeant Nick DeBenedito and Officer Jesus Martinez walked into Highway Patrol headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler, Officer Charley McFadden was sitting on one of the folding metal chairs in the corridor.
Martinez was surprised to see him. He knew that McFadden had spent his four-to-midnight tour riding with a veteran Highway Patrolman named Jack Wyatt. Since he and DeBenedito were more than an hour late coming off shift, he had presumed that Charley would be long gone.
McFadden, a large, pleasant-faced young man of twenty-three, had already changed out of his uniform. He was wearing a knit sport shirt, a cotton jacket with a zipper closing, and blue jeans. When McFadden stood up, the jacket fell open, exposing, on his right, his badge, pinned over his belt, and his revolver. Charley carried his off-duty weapon, a.38-caliber five-shot Smith amp; Wesson Undercover Special revolver in a "high-rise pancake," a holster reportedly invented by a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, which suspended the revolver under his right arm,above the belt, almost as high as a shoulder holster would have placed it.
Jesus thought Charley looked, except that his hair was combed and he was shaved and the clothes were clean, as he had looked when the two of them were working undercover in Narcotics.
"You still here, McFadden?" Sergeant DeBenedito asked in greeting.
"I thought maybe Hay-zus would want to go to the FOP bar and hoist one," Charley said.
Charley had taken to using the Spanish pronunciation of Martinez's Christian name because of his mother, a devout Irish Catholic who had been made distinctly uncomfortable by having to refer to her son's partner as Jesus.