“From the cheerful sound of your voice, I guess you again refused to listen to his sage advice?”
“He didn’t offer any,” Matt said. “He tried to sandbag me with Tony Harris.”
“And?”
“Tony said I already think like the Black Buddha, they can teach me what I have to know, and ‘welcome’-no, ‘welcome, welcome’-to Homicide.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“He also told me he gave you the Cassidy job,” Matt said.
Again there was a perceptible pause.
“If you come up with something unpleasant, give me a call,” Wohl said. “Otherwise fill me in in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said.
Wohl broke the connection without saying anything else.
At the next intersection-South and Twentieth Streets- Matt changed his mind about the Schuylkill Expressway and instead drove back to Rittenhouse Square, where he drove into the underground garage, parked the unmarked Ford, and got in the Porsche.
It had occurred to him that he hadn’t driven the Porsche much lately, and it needed a run. What he liked best about the Porsche-something he somewhat snobbishly thought most people didn’t understand-was not how easily you could get it up to well over 100, 120 miles per hour-a great many cars would do that-but how beautifully it handled on narrow, winding roads, making 60 or 70 where lesser cars would lose control at 50 or less. Such as the twenty miles or so of Route 611 between Kintnersville and Easton, where the road ran alongside the old Delaware Canal.
With the winding road, and a lot else on his mind-
God, that was an unexpected compliment from Tony Harris, me thinking like Jason…
And it couldn’t have been timed better. Uncle Denny had egg all over his face…
I wonder when the promotion will actually happen?
What am I going to do if Captain Cassidy’s brother’s will hasn’t been filed in the courthouse? Some people don’t even have wills. What do they call that, intestate, something like that?
With a little luck, the courthouse’ll have a computer and I can do a search for all real estate in the name of John Paul Cassidy…
I’ve got to find out more about Whatshisname who stuffed his girlfriend in a trunk and sends Dave Pekach taunting postcards from Europe…
Uncle Denny said the body was (a) mummified and (b) in the trunk for a year? Didn’t it smell?
I’ll have to find out when Stan Colt is going to grace Philadelphia with his presence. I really would like to see more-a hell of a lot more-of Vice President Terry Davis…
Nice legs. Nice everything…
— he didn’t think about Route 611 passing through Doylestown, right past the Crossroads Diner, until the diner itself came into view.
Shit, Shit, Shit!
The mental image of Susan with the neat hole under her sightless eyes jumped into his mind.
No, goddamn it. No! Not twice in one day!
Think of something else.
Terry Davis in the shower.
A mummified body in a trunk. If you want to feel nauseous, think of a stinking, mummified body.
But (a) mummies don’t stink. They look like leather statues, but they don’t smell, (b) mummies are bodies that have gone through some sort of preservation process. They gut them, I think I remember from sixth grade, and then fill the cavity with some kind of preservatives-or was it rocks? sand? — and then wrap them in linen.
The body in this weirdo’s trunk might have been dried out after a year, but, technically speaking, it wasn’t mummified. After a year, why wasn’t it a skeleton? Wouldn’t the flesh have completely decomposed-giving off one hell of a stink-in a year?
There is a lot you don’t know about bodies. And ergo sum, a sergeant of the Homicide Bureau should know a lot about dead bodies.
Maybe I can take a course at the university.
Not a bullshit undergraduate course, but a course at the medical school. Amy’s a professor. She should (a) know and (b) have the clout to have her little brother admitted.
Christ, I’m going seventy-five in a fifty-five zone!
Sorry to be speeding, Officer. What it was, when I passed the Crossroads Diner, was that I naturally recalled my girlfriend with the back of her head blown out in the parking lot…
Terry Davis has long legs. Nice long legs.
Why do long legs turn me on?
Why do some bosoms, but not others, turn me on?
Why did Terry Davis turn me on like that?
She really does have nice legs.
And she smelled good, too.
He recognized where he was. What he thought of as “the end of Straight 611 out of Doylestown.” The concrete highway turned into macadam, made a sharp right turn, then a sharp left turn, and then got curvy.
Right around the next curve is where we pick up the old canal.
I’ll be damned! I’m not going to throw up.
And I’m not sweat-soaked.
Thank you, God!
He made the left turn and shoved his foot hard against the accelerator.
FOUR
Johnny Cassidy’s Shamrock Bar was on The Hill in Easton, near-and drawing much of its business from- Lafayette College. Even at four in the afternoon, there were a lot of customers, mixed students and faculty and other staff of the college.
Matt took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, a pickled egg, and a Cassidy Burger-“Famous All Over The Hill”- and struck up a conversation with the bartender, who had a plastic nameplate with a shamrock and “Mickey O’Neal Manager” printed on it pinned to his crisp, white, open-collar, cuffs-rolled-up shirt. Matt thought he was probably thirty-five or forty, and was not surprised that he was talkative.
When Matt asked how Johnny Cassidy was, O’Neal shook his head sadly and said the Big C had gotten him, five, no six, months before. Johnny kept feeling tired, and he finally went to the doctor, and six weeks later he was dead. Died the same week as his mother, in fact.
“So what’s going to happen to the bar?”
“It’s going to stay open,” Mickey O’Neal said, firmly, and then went on to explain that he’d worked in the place for fifteen years before Johnny died, starting out as an afternoon bartender and working his way up to assistant manager, and got to know him real well. Johnny had been godfather to two of his kids. “They called him Uncle Johnny.”
When Johnny knew his time was up, he made a deal with Mickey and his brother-Johnny’s younger brother, nice guy, who’s a cop in Philadelphia, and who had cared for their mother until she died; Johnny had never married-which gave twenty-five percent of the place to O’Neal and the rest to his brother.
“We’re talking about me buying him out, over time, you know, but right now, I’m just running the place for the both of us. Once a month, I write him a check for his share of what we make. It’s a pretty good deal all around. The bar stays open, which means I have a job, and his brother gets a check-a nice check, I don’t mind saying-once a month. Which is nice, too. Johnny figured he owed his brother-did I say he’s a cop in Philly? — for taking care of their mother all those years.”
