Officer Paul Thomas O'Mara stood in the door to Inspector Peter Wohl's office, waited until Wohl had finished speaking on the telephone, and then announced, 'There's a Dr. Payne on three, Inspector. You want to talk to her?'
'I think I can find time to work the good doctor into my busy schedule, Tommy, ' Wohl replied. 'Thank you very much, and please close the door.'
Then he picked up his telephone and punched the Line Three button.
'Peter?'
'I have this problem, Doctor,' he began. 'I wake up in the morning, alone in my bed-'
'You want to buy me lunch?'
'You have the same problem, do you? Your place or mine?'
'Here.'
'You're at home?'
'I'm at the hospital.'
'The last time we ate there, as I recall, the guy playing the violin was on strike, the champagne was warm, and they were out of everything but dry sandwiches and ice cream in little paper cups. Doesn't Ristorante Alfredo seem a much better idea?'
'You have trouble remembering that I work for a living, don't you?'
'I've offered to take you away from all that.'
'This is serious, Peter.'
'You haven't had another case of introspection, have you? While I'm gnawing on a dry sandwich, you're not going to give me that 'this is just not going to work out, Peter' speech, are you?'
'I don't think I will,' she said chuckling, 'but that's not what I want to talk to you about.'
'Okay, Doc. What time?'
'When can you get away?'
'Anytime from right now.'
'You could come right now?'
'The never-ending war against crime will have to wait. My lover calls.'
'God, you're as bad at Matt.'
'If this is about him, I don't have anything to tell you. I just finished talking to Jack Matthews-I was talking to him when you called-and he said that as of half past seven this morning, Matt had nothing to report.'
'It's not about Matt. Can you come right now?'
'You sound serious. Yeah. I can be there in fifteen minutes.'
'Please, then, Peter.'
'No farewell declaration of affection?'
'I'll be in my office.'
'I guess not,' Peter said. 'But nevertheless, I will come instantly, borne on the wings of love.'
'Oh, God,' Amy said and hung up.
Inspector Wohl swung his feet, clad in highly polished loafers, off his desk and left his office. Officer O'Mara stood up at his desk.
'Until further notice, I'll be with Dr. Payne at University Hospital,' Wohl told him. 'You have her number. Try to keep everybody in Special Operations from knowing that.'
'Yes, sir. You're unavailable.'
'I didn't say that, Tommy,' Wohl said patiently. 'Just use a little discretion. Don't tell everybody who calls where I am.'
'Yes, sir.'
Detective Harry Cronin of South Detectives, who had been on the job for nineteen years, and a detective for thirteen, cleverly deduced it was going to be a bad day when he went into his kitchen at approximately 10:30 A.M. and found the kitchen table bare, not even a tablecloth.
Normally, before she went to work, Mrs. Cynthia Koontz Cronin, to whom Detective Cronin had been married for eighteen years, set the table for his breakfast. Patty was a technician in the Pathological Laboratory of Temple University Hospital, and left the house at half past six or so.
Normally, the Bulletin would be neatly folded beside the table setting, there would be a flower in a little vase Patty had bought at an auction house on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, and there would usually be a little note informing him there was scrapple, or Taylor ham, in the fridge.
Detective Cronin was more than a little hungover-when he'd gone off the job at midnight the night before, he had stopped off at the Red Rooster bar, run into Sergeant Aloysius J. Sutton of East Detectives, and had had several more belts than had been his intention-and further cleverly deduced that his coming home half in the bag probably had something to with the bare kitchen table.
He opened the refrigerator door. The one thing he decided he could not face right now was taking an unborn chicken from its shell and watch it sizzle in a frying pan. Neither did he completely trust himself to slice a piece of Taylor ham from its roll without taking part of a finger at the same time.
He reached for a bottle of Ortlieb's. It would settle his stomach.
He carried it into his living room and looked around for the Bulletin. It was nowhere around, which he deduced indicated that Patty was really pissed.
What the hell, he decided, he'd lie on the couch and see what was on the tube, and get up around noon, go get a cheese steak or something for lunch, and return to the house prepared to apologize to Patty for having run into Sergeant Sutton and having maybe one more than he should have.
'Good morning,' Peter said when Amy waved him into her comfortably furnished office.
The sunlight coming into her office from behind her showed him that beneath her white nylon medical smock, Amelia A. Payne, M.D., was wearing only a skirt and underwear.
The psychiatric wing of University Hospital was often overheated, and this was not the first time he had noticed this was her means of dealing with it.
He found this erotically stimulating, but from the look on her face he knew that he should not mention it.
'Good morning,' she said and did not get up from her desk.
'Why do I suspect that you're not going to throw yourself in my arms?'
'Because I'm not. Peter, this is a hospital.'
'Love, I have heard, cures all things.'
'The medical term for what ails you is 'retarded mental development,' ' she said but she smiled for a moment, then pushed a sheet of paper across her glass topped desk toward him.
He picked it up and read, 'Miss Cynthia Longwood was stripped naked and orally raped by a policeman under circumstances that were themselves traumatic.'
He looked at her, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
'I'm on thin ice ethically with this, Peter,' she said. 'Please don't push me. Right now, I'm wondering whether I should have gone to Denny Coughlin with this.'
'I'm glad you came to me,' he said seriously. 'Okay, Doctor, tell me more, starting with, is this your medical opinion?'
'No. But I believe it.'
'Where did this come from?' he asked, waving the sheet of paper.
'It was left as a telephone message for me at quarter to two this morning,' Amy said.
'By whom?'
Amy shrugged.
'This woman is a patient of yours?' Peter asked, and when Amy nodded, thought out loud: 'Then it obviously came from someone who (a) knew that and (b) was not a relative or family friend-they would have told you-and (c) is trying to be helpful-maybe-without getting himself involved-certainly.'
Amy nodded and said simply, 'Yes.'
'You think this happened?' Peter asked.
'Yes.'
'You want to tell me why?'
'Just before I called you, I spoke with Cynthia.'
