'You don't sound very happy about that,' she said. Irene Craig had known Matthew Payne virtually all of his life, liked him very much, and shared his father's opinion that Matt's becoming a cop ranked high on the list of Dumb Ideas of All Time.
'Ambivalent,' he said, as he started to stack the Xeroxed pages. 'On one hand, I am, at least theoretically, opposed to the idea of special treatment. On the other hand-proving, I suppose, that I am not nearly as noble as I like to think I am-I like what I'm doing.'
'Which is?'
'I'm the gofer for a very nice guy, and a very sharp cop, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl.'
'He's the one who had his picture in the paper? The one they put in charge of this new-'
'Special Operations,' Matt filled in.
'That sounds interesting.'
'It's fascinating.'
'I'm glad for you,' she said.
Not really, she thought. I would be a lot happier if he was miserable as a cop; then maybe he 'd come to his senses and quit. But at least Denny Coughlin is watching out for him; that's something.
'I like it,' Matt said. 'So much I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.'
'Stick around,' she said, laughing. 'It will. It always does.'
'Thanks a lot,' Matt said, chuckling.
'You want to see your father?'
'No,' he said, and when he saw the look on her face, quickly added, ' I've got to get back. He's probably busy; and I had breakfast with him this morning.'
'Well, I'll tell him you were in.'
'If you think you have to.'
'You're a scamp,' she said. 'Okay. I won't tell him. How's the apartment?'
'I can't get used to the quiet,' he said.
He had, two weeks before, moved into an attic apartment in a refurbished pre-Civil War building on Rittenhouse Square. His previous legal residence had been a fraternity house on Walnut Street near the University of Pennsylvania campus. Irene Craig knew that he knew his father had 'found' the apartment for him, in a building owned by Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., the lower three floors of which were on long-term lease to the Delaware Valley Cancer Society. She wondered if he knew that eighty percent of the stock of Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., was owned by Brewster Cortland Payne II. Now that she thought of it, she decided he didn't.
'Maybe what you need is the patter of little feet to break the quiet,' Irene Craig said.
'Don't eventhink things like that!' Matt protested.
When the Xerox machine finally finished, Irene Craig gave him thick rubber bands to bind the four copies together, and then, impulsively, kissed him on the cheek.
'Take care of yourself, sport,' she said.
When Matt returned to the Highway Patrol building at Bustleton and Bowler, he stopped first at his car, double-parking the Fury to do so, and put his service revolver and shoulder holster under the driver's seat of his Porsche. Then he drove the Fury into the parking lot.
He gave the keys to Sergeant Frizell, who apparently had had a word with Inspector Wohl about Officer Payne's place in the pecking order of Special Operations.
Frizell handed him a cardboard box full of multipart forms.
'The Inspector said do as many of these as you can today,' Frizell sad. 'There's a typewriter on a desk in there.'
'What are they?' Matt asked.
'The requisition and transfer forms for the cars, and for the extra radios,' Frizell explained. 'On top is one already filled out; just fill out the others the same way.'
They were, Matt soon saw, the 'paperwork' without which Good Old Ernie in the radio garage had been, at first, unwilling to do any work. Plus the paperwork for the cars themselves, the ones they had already taken from the motor pool, and blank forms, with the specific data for the particular car to be later filled in, for cars yet to be drawn, as they were actually taken from the motor pool.
The only word to describe the typewriter was 'wretched.' It was an ancient Underwood. The keys stuck. The platen was so worn that the keys made deep indentations in, or actually punched through, the upper layers of paper and carbon, and whatever the mechanism that controlled the paper feeding was called, that was so worn that Matt had to manually align each line as he typed.
He completed two forms and decided the situation was absurd. He looked at his watch. It was quarter to five. He went into the other room.
'Sergeant,' he said. 'I think I know where I can get a better typewriter. Would it be all right if I left now and did these forms there?'
'You mean, at home?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I don't give a damn where you type them, Payne, just that they get typed.'
'Good night, then.'
'Yeah.'
Matt took the carton of blank forms and carried it to the Porsche. At this time of day, he decided, he would do better going over to 1-95 and taking that downtown, rather than going down Roosevelt Boulevard to North Broad Street. He could, he decided, make better time on 1-95. There was not much fun driving a car capable of speeds well over one hundred if you couldn't go any faster than thirty-five.
Two miles down 1-95, he glanced in the mirror to see if it was clear to pass a U-Haul van, towing a trailer. It was not. There was a car in the lane beside him. It was painted blue-and-white, and there was a chrome-plated device on its roof containing flashing lights. They were flashing.
He dropped his eyes to the speedometer and saw that he was exceeding the speed limit by fifteen miles per hour. The police car, aHighway Patrol car, he realized with horror, pulled abreast of him, and the Highway Patrolman in the passenger seat gestured with his finger for Matt to pull to the side of the superhighway.
'Oh, Jesus!' Matt muttered, as he looked in the mirror and turned on his signal.
He had a flash of insight, of wisdom.
He broke the law. He would take his medicine. He would not mention that he was a fellow Police Officer, in the faint hope that he could beat the ticket. That way, there was a chance that it would not come to Staff Inspector Wohl's attention that on his very first day on the job, he had been arrested for racing down 1-95 somewhere between eighty and eighty-five miles per hour.
He stopped and went into the glove compartment for the vehicle registration certificate. The glove compartment was absolutely empty. Matt had a sudden, very clear, mental image of the vehicle registration. It, together with the bill of sale and the title and the other paperwork, was in the upper right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers in his room in the house in Wallingford.
He glanced in the mirror and saw that both Highway Patrolmen had gotten out of the car and were approaching his. He hurriedly dug his wallet from his trousers and got out of the car.
First one, and then three more cars in the outer lane flashed past him, so close and so fast that he was genuinely frightened. He walked to the back of the car and extended his driver's license to one of the Highway Patrolmen.
'I don't seem to have the registration with me,' Matt said.
'You were going at least eighty,' the patrolman said. 'You had it up to eighty-five.'
'Guilty,' Matt said, wanly.
'You mind if we examine the interior of your car, sir?' the other Highway Patrolman said. Matt turned his head to look at him; he was at the passenger-side window, looking inside.
'No, not at all,' Matt said, obligingly. 'Help yourself.'
He turned to face the Highway Patrolman who had his driver's license.
'My registration is at home,' Matt said.
'This your address, 3906 Walnut?'
'No, sir,' Matt said. 'Actually, I just moved. I now live on Rittenhouse Square.'
