'It's all right,' she said.
Impulsively, and although he knew he wasn't, in the turtleneck, dressed for it, he decided on the Ristorante Alfredo. He could count, he thought, on having some snotty Wop waiter, six months out of a Neapolitan slum, look haughtily down his nose at him.
It started going bad before he got that far.
An acne-faced punk in the parking garage gave him trouble about parking the Jaguar himself. It had taken him, literally, a year to find an unblemished, rust-free right front fender for the XK-120, and no sooner had he got it on, and had, finally, the whole car lacquered (20 coats) properly than a parking valet who looked like this one's idiot uncle scraped it along a concrete block wall.
He had since parked his car himself.
The scene annoyed Barbara further, although he resolved it with money, to get it over with.
SEVEN
When she saw that Peter Wohl was leading her to Ristorante Alfredo, Barbara Crowley protested.
'Peter, it's so expensive!'
She sounds like my mother, Peter thought.
'Well, I'll just stiff my ex-wife on her alimony,' he said, as he opened the door to Ristorante Alfredo. 'Tell her to have the kids get a job, too.'
Barbara, visibly, did not think that was funny. There was no ex-wife and no kids, but it was not the sort of thing Barbara thought you should joke about, particularly when there was someone who could hear and might not understand. She hadn't thought it was funny the last time he'd made his little joke, and, to judge by her face, it had not improved with age.
The headwaiter was a tall, silver-haired man, who had heard.
'Have you a reservation, sir?' he asked.
'No, but it doesn't look like you have many, either,'
Peter said, waving in the general direction of the half-empty dining room.
The headwaiter looked toward the bar, where a stout man in his early thirties sat at the bar. He was wearing an expensive suit, and his black hair was expensively cut and arranged, almost successfully, to conceal a rapidly receding hairline.
His name was Ricco Baltazari, and the restaurant and bar licenses had been issued in his name. It was actually owned by a man named Vincenzo Savarese, who; for tax purposes, and because it's hard for a convicted felon to get a liquor license, had Baltazari stand in for him.
Ricco Baltazari had taken in the whole confrontation. There was nothing he would have liked better than to have the fucking cop thrown the fuck out-what a hell of a nerve, coming to a class joint like this with no tie-but instead, with barely visible moves of his massive head, he signaled that Wohl was to be given a table. It's always better to back away from a confrontation with a fucking cop, and this fucking cop was an inspector, and Mr. Savarese was in the back, having dinner with his wife and her sister, and it was better not to risk doing anything that would cause a disturbance.
Besides, he had seen inGentlemen's Quarterly where turtlenecks were making a comeback. It wasn't like the fucking cop was wearing a fuckingshirt and no necktie. A turtleneck wasdifferent.
'Spaghetti and meatballs?' Peter Wohl asked, when they had been shown to a table covered with crisp linen and an impressive array of crystal and silverware, and handed large menus. 'Or maybe some lasagna? Or would you like me to slip the waiter a couple of bucks and have him sing 'Santa Lucia' while you make up your mind?'
Barbara didn't think that was witty, either.
'I don't know why you come to these places, if you really don't like them.'
'The mob serves the best food in Philadelphia,' Peter said. 'I thought everybody knew that.'
Barbara decided to let it drop.
'Well, everything on here looks good,' she said, with a determined smile.
Wohl looked at her, rather than at the menu. He knew what he was going to eat: First some cherrystone clams, and then veal Marsala.
She is a good-looking girl. She's intelligent. She's got a good job. She even tolerates me, which means she probably understands me. On a scale of one to ten, she's an eight in bed. What I should do is marry her, and buy a house somewhere and start raising babies. But I don't want to.
She asked him what he was going to have, and he told her, and she said that sounded fine, she would have the same thing.
'Let's have a bottle of wine,' Peter said, and opened the wine list and selected an Italian wine whose name he remembered. He pointed out the label to Barbara and asked if that was all right with her. It was fine with her.
Maybe what she needs to turn me on is a little streak of bitchiness, a little streak of not-so-tolerant-and- under-standing.
He was nearly through the bottle of wine, and halfway through the veal Marsala, when he looked up and saw Vincenzo Savarese approaching the table.
Vincenzo Savarese was sixty-three years old. What was left of his hair was silver and combed straight back over his ears. His face bore marks of childhood acne. He was wearing a double-breasted brown pinstriped suit, and there was a diamond stickpin in his necktie. He was trailed by two almost identical women in black dresses, his wife and her sister.
Vincenzo Savarese's photo was mounted, very near the top, on the wall chart of known organized crime members the Philadelphia Police Department maintained in the Organized Crime unit.
'I don't mean to disturb your dinner, Inspector,' Vincenzo Savarese said. 'Keep your seat.'
Wohl stood up, but said nothing.
'I just wanted to tell you we heard about what happened to Captain Moffitt, and we're sorry,' Vincenzo Savarese said.
'My heart goes out to his mother,' one of the women said.
Wohl wasn't absolutely sure whether it was Savarese's wife, or his sister-in-law. Looking at the woman, he said, 'Thank you.'
'I was on a retreat with Mrs. Moffitt, the mother,' the woman went on. 'At Blessed Sacrament.'
Wohl nodded.
Savarese nodded, and took the woman's arm and led them out of the dining room.
'Who was that?' Barbara Crowley asked.
'His name is Vincenzo Savarese,' Wohl said, evenly. 'He owns this place.'
'I thought you said the mob owns it.'
'It does,' Wohl said.
'Then why? Why did he do that?'
'He probably meant it, in his own perverse way,' Wohl said. 'He probably thought Dutch was a fellow man of honor. The mob is big on honor.'
'I saw that on TV,' Barbara said.
He looked at her.
'About Captain Moffitt. I wasn't going to bring it up unless you did,' Barbara said. 'But I suppose that's what's wrong, isn't it?'
'I didn't know anything was wrong,' Wohl said.
'Have it your way, Peter,' Barbara said.
'No, you tell me, what's wrong?'
'You're wearing a turtleneck sweater, and you're driving the Jaguar,' she said. 'You always do that when something went wrong at work; it's as if-as if it's asymbol, that you don't want to be a cop. At least then. And then you got into it with the kid who wanted to park your car, and then the headwaiter here…'
'That's very interesting,' he said.
