Matt, startled, jumped to his feet.
Chief Inspector August Wohl, retired, was standing just inside the door, putting something back in his wallet.
"How the hell did you get in?" Matt blurted.
"I'll show you about doors sometime. Like I said, you really should get dead-bolt locks."
"What can I do for you, Mr. Wohl?"
"You could offer me a drink," he said. "I would accept. It's a long climb up here. And call me Chief, if you don't mind. It has a certain ring to it."
Matt walked into the kitchen and got out the bottle of Scotch his father had given him.
"Well, I'm glad to see there's some left," Chief Wohl said.
"Sir?"
"I really expected to find you passed out on the floor," Chief Wohl said. "That's why I let myself in. People who drink alone can get in a lot of trouble."
"I'm already in a lot of trouble," Matt said.
"So I understand."
"Water all right?"
"Just a touch. That's very nice whiskey."
"How'd you know I was here?"
"Your car's downstairs. There's lights on. There was movement I could see-shadows-from the street. It had to be either you or a burglar. I'm glad it was you. I'm too old to chase burglars."
Matt chuckled.
"Why'd you come?" he asked.
"I wanted to talk to you, but I'll be damned if I will while drinking alone."
"I'm not so sure that drinking is what I need to be doing just now."
"And the pain of feeling sorry for yourself is sharper when you're stone sober, right? And you like that?"
"What the hell," Matt said, and poured himself a drink.
"I see you have your uniform out," Chief Wohl said. "Does that mean you're going to report to the 12^th on Monday?"
"It means I'm thinking about it," Matt said.
"Which side is winning?"
"The side that's wondering if I can find anybody interested in buying a nearly new set of uniforms, size forty regular," Matt said.
"You going to ask me if I want to sit down?" Chief Wohl said.
"Oh! Sorry. Please sit down."
"Thank you," Chief Wohl said. He sat in Matt's chair and put his feet up on the footstool. Matt sat on the window ledge.
"I told Peter that I think he's wrong about you needing the experience you'll get-if you decide to go over there on Monday-at the 12^th," Chief Wohl said. "Incidentally, Peter feels lousy about the way that happened. I want you to understand that. It was out of his hands. That's one of the reasons I came here, to make sure you understood that."
"I thought it probably was," Matt said. "I mean the commissioner's decision."
"Reaction, not decision," Chief Wohl said. "There's a difference. When you decide something, you consider the facts and make a choice. When you react, it's different. Reactions are emotional."
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"Right or wrong wasn't on Czernick's agenda. What he saw was that Jerry Carlucci was going to be pissed off at Peter because of your little escapade with the Detweiler girl. He wanted to get himself out of the line of fire. Hereacted. By jumping on you before Carlucci said anything, he was proving, he thinks, to Jerry Carlucci, that he's one of the good guys."
Matt took a pull at his drink.
"You're not going to learn anything," Chief Wohl said, "if you decide to go over there on Monday, hauling fat ladies with broken legs downstairs-"
Matt laughed.
"I say something funny?" Chief Wohl snapped.
"I'm sorry," Matt said. "But I was thinking in exactly those terms-hauling fat ladies-when I was thinking about what I would be doing in the 12^th."
"As I was saying, you won't learn anything hauling fat ladies except how to haul fat ladies. The idea of putting rookies on jobs like that is to give them experience. You've already had your experience."
"Do you mean because I shot the serial rapist?" Matt asked.
"No. As a matter of fact, I didn't even think about that," Chief Wohl said. "No, not that. That was something else. What I meant was the price of going off half-cocked before you think through what's liable to happen if you do what seems like such a great idea. The price of doing something dumb is what I mean."
"It's obviously expensive," Matt said. "I lose my job. I get my boss in trouble. I get to haul fat ladies. And because I was dumb, the scumbags who shot the other scumbag and Penny Detweiler get away with it. That really makes me mad. No, not mad. Ashamed of myself."
He became aware that Chief Wohl was looking at him with an entirely different look on his face.
"Chief, did I say something wrong?" Matt asked.
"No," Chief Wohl replied. "No, not at all. Can I have another one of these?"
"Certainly."
When Matt was at the sink, Chief Wohl got up and followed him.
"They may not get away with it," he said. "I have just decided that if I tell you something, it won't go any further. Am I right?"
"Do you think, after the trouble I've caused, that I am any judge of my reliability?"
"I think you can judge whether or not you can keep your mouth shut,particularly since you have just learned how you can get other people in trouble."
"Yes, sir," Matt said after a moment. "I can keep my mouth shut."
Chief Wohl met his eyes for a moment and then nodded.
"There is a set of rules involving the Mob and the police. Nobody talks about them, but they're there. I won't tell you how I know this, but Vincenzo Savarese got word to Jerry Carlucci that the Mob-Mobs, there's a couple of them-had nothing to do with the shooting of that Italian cop… what was his name?"
"Magnella. Joseph Magnella," Matt furnished.
"We believe him. The reason he told us that is not because he gives a damn about a dead cop but because he doesn't want us looking for the doer, doers, in the Mob. We might come across something else he doesn't want us to know. Since we're taking him at his word, that means we can devote the resources to looking elsewhere. You with me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Okay. The DeZego hit is different. Ordinarily we really don't spend a lot of time worrying about the Mob killing each other. If we can catch the doer, fine. But we know that we seldom do catch the doers, so we go through the motions and let it drop. The DeZego hit is different."
"Because of Penny Detweiler?"
"No. Well, maybe a little. But that's not what I'm talking about. The one thing the Mob does not do is point the finger at some other Mob guy and say he's the doer, go lock him up. That violates their Sicilian Code of Honor, telling the police anything about some other mafioso. If a Mob guy is hit, it's one of two ways. It was, by their standards, a justified hit, and that's the end of it. Or it was unjustified and they put out a contract on the guy who did it. This was different. They pointed us, with that matchbook Savarese gave Dave Pekach, at the pimp."
"He was black."
"More important," Chief Wohl said, a tone of impatience in his voice, "he didn't do it."
"Yeah," Matt said, chagrined. "Maybe they wanted him-the pimp, I mean-killed for some other reason."
"Could well be, but that's not the point. The point is that Savarese tried to play games with us. Two things with that. One, we wonder why. Two, more important, that breaks the rules. He lied to us. We can't have that."
"So what happens?"
"The first thing we think is that if he lied to us about the pimp, he's probably lying to us about not knowing who killed the Italian cop. So that means we can't trust him."
"So you start looking around the Mob for who killed DeZego and who killed Magnella."
"Yeah," Chief Wohl said. "But before we do that, to make sure that he knows we haven't broken our end of the arrangement, we let him know we know he broke the rules first."
"How?"
Chief Wohl told him. And as he was explaining what was going to happen-in fact, hadalready happened, thirty minutes before, just after ten P.M., just before Chief Inspector Wohl, retired, had shown up at the apartment-a question arose in Matt's mind that he knew he could never raise: whether the chief had been a spectator or a participant.