“Far be it from me to reject Mr. Colt’s generous invitation, ” Washington said. “And not only because it will afford me a splendid answer to Martha’s inevitable question when I finally get home.”
“Where the hell have you been, what have you been doing, and with whom?” Wohl asked.
“ ‘Actually, my precious, I was having a cheese steak at D’Allesandro’s with Mr. Stan Colt, the movie star.’ That should for once strike her dumb.”
At five past one, Mr. Stanley Colt having had his cheese steak, and having been transferred into the capable hands of Detective Charles McFadden, Matt got in his unmarked Crown Victoria and started home.
He smiled at the memory of Mr. Colt’s response to Inspector Wohl’s instructions to Detective McFadden: “He is not to get out of Mickey’s car without your permission. If he gives you any trouble, cuff him, and turn him over to Dignitary Protection at the Ritz-Carlton. Trouble is defined to include any gesture toward a member of the opposite sex beyond a friendly smile.”
“That’s not going to be a problem. I can get laid anytime. But doing this, wow!”
He had just turned onto Walnut Street and was headed west toward Rittenhouse Square when his cellular went off.
Jesus, now what?
“Payne.”
“Can you talk?” Detective Olivia Lassiter inquired.
“Yeah.”
“They have a positive ID on one of the doers in the Roy Rogers job-”
“I heard,” Matt interrupted. “And they’re running an around-the-clock surveillance, which is why they threw us out of Homicide.”
There was a silence.
“How’s your hand?” Olivia asked after a long moment.
He looked at it.
“Fine,” he said. “I had just about forgotten about it.”
“Oh.”
Another silence.
“I thought maybe you needed the bandage changed,” she said, finally.
“No. It looks fine.”
“Oh.”
Jesus Christ, Matthew, you are the dumbest sonofabitch in Philadelphia!!!
“Where are you, Mother?”
“I’m not your mother.”
“Where are you, Not My Mother?”
“In the Starbucks at Twelfth and Market.”
“What are you doing there? I thought you went to Homicide?”
“I hung around Homicide for a while, made a few more calls. Then I came here and waited until I thought you’d probably put Colt to bed. Then I called.”
“I’m at Nineteenth and Walnut. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“No.”
“For Christ’s sake, I’ll take you home.”
“If you come here, somebody who knows one or both of us will see us.”
“Then go stand in the dark around the corner on Twelfth and Filbert. I’ll pick you up there and take you home.”
There was a long pause again, before she asked, “If I took a cab to Rittenhouse Square, how could I get in the building this time of night?”
Another pause, this one on Matt’s part, and shorter.
“When you get out of the cab, I’ll be waiting for you in the lobby.”
And one final pause before she said, “The way you were talking before, I thought you didn’t want me to come over there.”
'Oh, baby!”
The chiefs of police of Daphne and Fairhope, Alabama, were privately not at all happy with the Jackson’s Oak Citizens’ Community Watch, Inc.
Daphne and Fairhope are small, prosperous, primarily residential communities in Baldwin County on Mobile Bay in South Alabama. They lie across Mobile Bay from the city of Mobile, and about thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico.
Baldwin County, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, is similarly prosperous, both because of its fertile fields and its seashore on the Gulf of Mexico-known, despite the valiant efforts of the local chambers of commerce, as the Redneck Riviera-which is famous for its spectacular snow-white beaches, and which attracts affluent tourists throughout the year.
There is not much crime-certainly not as that term is interpreted in Philadelphia-in Baldwin County or in Daphne or Fairhope. But to fight what there is, there is a nice tax base to support law enforcement and the various fire departments.
The police cruisers of the Daphne and Fairhope police departments are state-of-the-art vehicles, equipped with the latest communication systems, video recorders, computers, and speed-detection radar. They are generally replaced annually, and the “old” vehicles sold to less prosperous communities.
The Daphne chief of police was not happy with the Jackson’s Oak Citizens’ Community Watch, Inc., because he thought it was unnecessary, potentially dangerous, and enjoyed the opposite of respect from his sworn officers. The Fairhope chief of police was not happy with JOCCWI (sometimes referred to privately within the law enforcement community as “Jabberwocky”) because he feared it would be contagious and Fairhope would get one like it.
JOCCWI had been formed by a group of concerned citizens as their response to what they regarded as the Daphne police department’s inability to rid the community of drug addicts, petty thieves, Peeping Toms, and other disturbers of the domestic tranquillity.
There was a thread of justification in their complaints. So far as the chief knew, if there were those in Daphne using hard drugs, they did so in their homes and purchased them elsewhere. If a stranger appeared in either Fairhope or Daphne who looked remotely as if he might be using-much less selling-hard drugs, a cop trailed him until a search of his/her person was legally justified, or he/she left town, whichever came first.
There was cannabis sativa, of course. And on any given pleasant evening, the chief knew, the young and sometimes not-so-young might go to the beach and smoke a joint or two. Or they might go outside the clubhouse of the Lake Forest Golf and Country Club and take a couple of puffs. If his officers saw them, they were arrested.
There was more validity to the petty-theft charge. There were more than two hundred boats, power and sail, in the marina of the Lake Forest Yacht Club. Just about every one of them had something aboard-from radar sets and depth meters or “fish finders” on a forty-foot Hatteras to oars in a row-boat-that was both quickly removable and easily sold, no questions asked, in any one of a hundred places from Biloxi, Mississippi, in the west to Pensacola, Florida, in the east.
Most of these thefts could be prevented by the boats’ owners taking reasonable measures. And the only way to stop the thefts completely would be to station officers not only at the marina but in boats guarding access to it. That was out of the question.
Easily removable things, from radar detectors to hubcaps to entire wheels, were stolen from cars, too, as the founders of JOCCWI contended. And sometimes expensive lawn furniture-or even a new garden hose-bought from Home Depot would vanish from a back lawn overnight.
Sometimes the thieves were caught, sometimes they were not. It was obviously impossible for the police to be everywhere all the time.
The Peeping Tom allegation also had some merit. There were a lot of good-looking young women, married and not, in the condominiums adjacent to the Yacht Club, and on the fringes of Lake Forest, a huge area of small to medium-sized homes. It was not a gated community. It was easily possible for someone with an interest in watching young women undress to go into Lake Forest and hide behind one of its many trees with binoculars. And hard as hell to catch them at it.
