Gentlemen.
There was a rent-a-cop standing by the revolving door, a receptionist behind a marble counter in the marble- floored lobby, and two more rent-a-cops standing behind her.
Wohl gave her his business card. It carried the seal of the City of Philadelphia in the upper left-hand corner, the legendPOLICE DEPARTMENT CITY OF PHILADELPHIA in the lower left, and in the center his name, and below that, in slightly smaller letters,STAFF INSPECTOR . In the lower right-hand corner, it saidINTERNAL SECURITY DIVISION FRANKLIN SQUARE and listed two telephone numbers.
It was an impressive card, and usually opened doors to wherever he wanted to go very quickly.
It made absolutely no impression on the receptionist in the Ledger Building.
'Do you have an appointment with Mr. Nelson, sir?' she asked, with massive condescension.
'I believe Mr. Nelson expects me,' Wohl said.
She smiled thinly at him and dialed a number.
'There's a Mr. Wohl at Reception who says Mr. Nelson expects him.'
There was a pause, then a reply, and she hung up the telephone.
'I'm sorry, sir, but you don't seem to be on Mr. Nelson's appointment schedule,' the receptionist said. 'He's a very busy man, as I'm sure-'
'Call whoever that was back and tell her Inspector Wohl, of the police department,' Peter Wohl interrupted her.
She thought that over a moment, and finally shrugged and dialed the phone again.
This time, there was a longer pause before she hung up. She took a clipboard from a drawer, and a plastic- coated 'Visitor' badge.
'Sign on the first blank line, please,' she said, and turned to one of the rent-a-cops. 'Take this gentleman to the tenth floor, please.'
There was another entrance foyer when the elevator door was opened, behind a massive mahogany desk, and for a moment, Wohl thought he was going to have to go through the whole routine again, but a door opened, and a well-dressed, slim, gray-haired woman came through it and smiled at him.
'I'm Mr. Nelson's secretary, Inspector,' she said. 'Will you come this way, please?'
The rent-a-cop slipped into a chair beside the elevator door.
'I'm sorry about that downstairs,' the woman said, smiling at him over her shoulder. 'I think maybe you should have told her you were from the police.'
'No problem,' Peter said. It would accomplish nothing to tell her he' d given her his card with that information all over it.
Arthur J. Nelson's outer office, his secretary's office, was furnished with gleaming antiques, a Persian carpet, an oil portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt, and a startlingly lifelike stuffed carcass of a tiger, very skillfully mounted, so that, snarling, it appeared ready to pounce.
'He'll be with you just as soon as he can,' his secretary said. 'May I offer you a cup of coffee?'
'Thank you, no,' Peter said, and then his mouth ran away with him. 'I like your pussycat.'
'Mr. Nelson took that when he was just out of college,' she said, and pointed to a framed photograph on the wall. Wohl went and looked at it. It was of a young man, in sweat-soaked khakis, cradling his rifle in his arm, and resting his foot on a dead tiger, presumably the one now stuffed and mounted.
'Bengal,' the secretary said. 'That's a Bengal tiger.'
'Very impressive,' Wohl said.
He examined the tiger, idly curious about how they actually mounted and stuffed something like this.
What's inside? A wooden frame? A wire one? A plaster casting? Is that red tongue the real thing, preserved somehow? Or what?
Then he walked across the room and looked through the curtained windows. He could see the roof of Thirtieth Street Station, its classic Greek lines from that angle diluted somewhat by airconditioning machinery and a surprising forest of radio antennae. He could see the Schuylkill River, with the expressway on this side and the boat houses on the far bank.
The left of the paneled double doors to Arthur J. Nelson's office opened, and four men filed out. They all seemed determined to smile, Wohl thought idly, and then he thought they had probably just had their asses eaten out.
A handsome man wearing a blue blazer and gray trousers appeared in the door. He was much older, of course, than the young man in the tiger photograph, and heavier, and there was now a perfectly trimmed, snow- white mustache on his lip, but Wohl had no doubt that it was Arthur J. Nelson.
Formidable, Wohl thought.
Arthur J. Nelson studied Wohl for a moment, carefully.
'Sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector,' he said. 'Won't you please come in?'
He waited at the door for Wohl and put out his hand. It was firm.
'Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Nelson,' Wohl said. 'May I offer my condolences?'
'Yes, you can, and that's very kind of you,' Nelson said, as he led Wohl into his office. 'But frankly, what I would prefer is a report that you found proof positive who the animal was who killed my son, and that he resisted arrest and is no longer among the living.'
Wohl was taken momentarily aback.
What the hell. Any father would feel that way. This man is accustomed to saying exactly what he's thinking.
'I'm about to have a drink,' Nelson said. 'Will you join me? Or is that against the rules?'
'I'd like a drink,' Peter said. 'Thank you.'
'I drink single-malt scotch with a touch of water,' Nelson said. 'But there is, of course, anything else.'
'That would be fine, sir,' Peter said.
Nelson went to a bar set into the bookcases lining one wall of his office. Peter looked around the room. A second wall was glass, offering the same view of the Schuylkill he had seen outside. The other walls were covered with mounted animal heads and photographs of Arthur J. Nelson with various distinguished and/or famous people, including the sitting president of the United States. There was one of Nelson with the governor of Pennsylvania, but not, Peter noticed, one of His Honor the Mayor Carlucci.
Nelson crossed the room to where Peter stood and handed him a squat, octagonal crystal glass. There was no ice.
'Some people don't like it,' Nelson said. 'Take a sip. If you don't like it, say so.'
Wohl sipped. It was heavy, but pleasant.
'Very nice,' he said. 'I like it. Thank you.'
'I was shooting stag in Scotland, what, ten years ago. The gillie drank it. I asked him, and he told me about it. Now I have them ship it to me. All the scotch you get here, you know, is a blend.'
'It's nice,' Peter said.
'Here's to vigilante justice, Inspector,' Nelson said.
'I'm not sure I can drink to that, sir,' Peter said.
'You can't, but I can,' Nelson said. 'I didn't mean to put you on a spot.'
'If I wasn't here officially,' Peter said, 'maybe I would.'
'If you had lost your only son, Inspector, like I lost mine, youcertainly would. When something like this happens, terms like ' justice' and 'due process' seem abstract. What you want is vengeance.'
'I was about to say I know how you feel,' Peter said. 'But of course, I don't. I can't. All I can say is that we'll do everything humanly possible to find whoever took your son's life.'
'If I ask a straight question, will I get a straight answer?'
'I'll try, sir.'
'How do you cops handle it psychologically when you do catch somebody youknow is guilty of doing something horrible, obscene, unhuman like this, only to see him walk out of a courtroom a free man because of some minor point of law, or some bleeding heart on the bench?'
'The whole thing is a system, sir,' Peter said, after a moment. 'The police, catching the doer, the perpetrator, are only part of the system. We do the best we can. It's not our fault when another part of the system fails to do what it should.'
