'You ever hear that a stiff prick has no conscience?'
'How deep are you in with her?'
'It happened just once,' Matt said. 'She was at a party downstairs. She saw my gun and got turned on by it. She was a little drunk.'
'Are you going to pursue it?' Wohl asked, and then, before Matt could reply, asked, 'What do you mean she got turned on by your gun?
'It was a little frightening. She wanted to know if it was the gun I used on the serial rapist. It aroused her.'
'Well,are you going to pursue it?'
'What do you do to get out of something like this?'
'You thank God the lady's leaving town. In the meantime, don't answer your telephone.'
'Anything like this ever happen to you?'
'You mean a gun fetishist?'
'I mean a married woman.'
'Yeah. Once. It was very painful.'
Matt picked up his glass and leaned back in the leather armchair, looking thoughtfully into his beer.
I wonder why I told him that? Wohl thought. I damned sure never told anybody else.
'I don't want to sound like I didn't know what I was doing, but I didn't actually seduce her,' Matt said.
'No man has ever seduced a mature woman,' Wohl said. 'And probably very few virgins have ever been seduced. The way it works is thatthey decide whothey want to have take them to bed, and thenthey arrange to be seduced.'
Matt looked up at him.
'You really believe that?'
I don't know if I do or not. It sounds plausible. But what I was really trying to do was cheer him up. More than that, to point him onto Ye Olde Straight and Narrow.
Why the hell am I doing that? What the hell am I doing here, anyway? I could have told him about the FBI investigation on the phone.
The answer, obviously, is that I am very fond of this kid. He is, I suppose, the little brother that I never had. So what's wrong with that?
'It sounds plausible,' Wohl said with a grin.
'So I'm not on your shit list?'
'You're not on mine, butI'm apparently on everybody else's.'
'They're not blaming you for what happened?'
'It's a question of who had the responsibility. That's spelled W O H
L.'
'You couldn't be expected to sit outside his house yourself,' Payne argued. 'If it's anybody's fault, it's Jack Malone's.'
'Malone works for me,' Wohl said. 'Whatever he does, or doesn't do, is my responsibility.'
'Loyalty down and loyalty up, huh?'
'Is something wrong with that?'
Matt shrugged and looked uncomfortable.
'Come on, Matt, out with it.'
Payne met his eyes.
'Did you tell Malone to lay off trying to catch Bob Holland?'
'Not specifically,' Wohl replied. 'I'm sure he got the message, though.' And then he understood the meaning of Payne's question. 'What do you know that I don't, Matt?'
'I promised him if I decided to tell you, I would tell him first.'
'This isn't the Boy Scouts. You can't have it both ways.'
'Charley caught him surveilling Holland's body shop, the one up by Temple.'
'What do you mean, caught him?'
'McFadden-off duty, he had just dropped Margaret off at work at Temple-'
'Margaret being his girlfriend?'
'Right. So he saw this old car with somebody in it parked near Holland's body shop. And he checked it out. It was Malone. He, Malone, told Charley not to tell anybody about it.'
'Which proves what?'
'The night you had me measuring the school building, Malone showed up there. Charley was with me. He offered to buy us a cheese-steak, and I brought him here. Both of them. And he admitted that what he was trying to do was catch Holland.'
'And you decided not to tell me, right?'
Matt nodded.
'I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't gone to play Dick Tracy and gotten myself shot, but that night, I told Malone I was going to sleep on it, that I would probably decide I had to tell you, but if I did, I would tell him first.'
'You must have had a reason,' Wohl said, more than a little annoyed. 'You work for me, getting back to that loyalty business.
'He convinced the both us that Holland is a thief,' Matt said.
'You and McFadden, of course, being experts in the area of car theft.'
'Open the goddamn door!' the intercom speaker erupted. 'Michael J. O' Hara is gracing these crummy premises with his presence.'
'Oh, shit!' Wohl said, even though he had to smile. 'The last guy in Philadelphia I want to see is Mickey.'
'You want to hide in the bedroom while I get rid of him?'
'No,' Wohl said, after a moment's hesitation. 'I've always thought, said, Mickey can be trusted. Let's put it to the test.'
He walked quickly to the stairwell, and down it, to let O'Hara in.
TWENTY-SEVEN
'Imust be getting old,' Michael J. O'Hara said to Inspector Peter Wohl as Wohl handed him a bottle of Tuborg. 'I should have guessed you would be here.'
'I'm not here, Mickey. You didn't see me.'
O'Hara looked at him intently for a moment, and then shrugged and nodded his agreement.
'Okay. Neither of us are here. But if we were here, and I asked you, on or off the record, 'How do you think you're going to like Harrisburg?' what would be your off-the-record, just-between-us-boys reply?'
'Onthe record, I'm not going to Harrisburg.'
'That's not what it said-whathe said,he being Farnsworth Stillwell-on the radio.'
'As I was just saying to Casanova here, you should never believe everything you hear on the radio, or read in the newspapers, especially theLedger.'
'Give me a for example.'
'I just gave you one. I never told Stillwell that I would take that job.'
'If I were to write that- 'Staff Inspector Peter Wohl today emphatically denied that he ever intended to resign from the Police Department to become chief investigator for Farnsworth Stillwell, newly appointed deputy attorney general for corporate crime'-it would make Stillwell look pretty silly.'
'How about leaving out the phrase 'to resign from the Police Department'?'
