Moreover, these thieves had been inconsiderate. If they had been considerate, they would have dumped this car by a deserted lot, or in Fairmount Pa rk or someplace not surrounded by occupied dwellings. Now he would have to go knock on doors and ask people if they had seen anyone taking the tires and wheels off the Ford station wagon down the street, and if so, what did they look like.
An hour later, he finished conducting the neighborhood survey. Surprising him not at all, none of the six people he interviewed had seen anything at all.
He got back in the unmarked car and drove back to East Detectives. Not without difficulty, he found a place to park the car in the tiny parking lot, went inside, found an empty desk and a typewriter not in use, and began to complete the paperwork. Once completed, he knew, it would be carefully filed and would never be seen by human eyes again.
At five minutes to four, when his eight-to-four tour would be over, Detective Payne became aware that someone was standing behind him. He turned from the typewriter and looked over his shoulder. Sergeant Aloysius J. Sutton, a ruddy-faced, red-haired, stocky man in his late thirties, his boss, was smiling at him.
'I wish I could type that fast,' Sergeant Sutton said admiringly.
'You should see me on a typewriter built after 1929,' Payne replied.
Sutton chuckled. 'You got time for a beer when we quit?'
'Sure.'
The invitation surprised him. Having a beer with his newest rookie detective did not seem to be Sutton's style. But it was obviously a command performance. Rookie detectives did not refuse an invitation from their sergeant.
'Tom amp; Frieda's, you know it?'
Matt Payne nodded. It was a bar at Lee and Westmoreland, fifty yards from East Detectives.
'See you there.'
Sergeant Sutton walked away, back to his desk just outside Captain Eames's office, and started cleaning up the stuff on the desk.
What the hell is this all about? Jesus Christ, have I fucked up somehow? Broken some unwritten rule? It has to be something like that. I am about to get a word-to-the-wise. But what about?
At five past four, Matt Payne left the squad room of East Detectives and walked down the street to Tom amp; Frieda's. Sergeant Sutton was not in the bar and grill when he got there, and for a moment, Matt was afraid that he had been there, grown tired of waiting, and left. Left more than a little annoyed with Detective Payne.
But then Sutton, who had apparently been in the gentlemen's rest facility, touched his arm.
'I'm sorry I'm late, Sergeant.'
'In here, you can call me Al. We're…more or less…off duty.'
'Okay. Thank you.'
'Ortlieb's from the tap all right?'
'Fine.'
'What you have to do is find a bar where they sell a lot of beer, so what they give you is fresh. Most draft beer tastes like horse piss because it's been sitting around forever.'
He is making conversation. He did not bring me here because he likes me, or to deliver a lecture on the merits of fresh beer on draft. I wish to hell he would get to it.
'You got anything going that won't hold for three days?' Sergeant Al Sutton asked as he signaled the bartender.
Matt thought that over briefly. 'No.'
'Good. As of tomorrow, you're on three days special assignment at the Roundhouse. Report to Sergeant McElroy in Chief Lowenstein's office.'
Matt looked at Sutton for amplification. None came.
'Can you tell me what this is all about?' Matt asked.
Sutton looked at him carefully. 'I thought maybe you could tell me,' he said, finally.
Matt shook his head from side to side.
'I'll tell you what I know,' Sutton said. 'Harry McElroy…you know who he is?'
'I know him.'
'Harry called down for Captain Eames, and I took the call because he wasn't there. He said the chief wants you down there starting tomorrow morning, for three days, maybe four, and the fewer people know about it, the better.'
Matt shrugged again. That had told him nothing.
'So I asked him, what was it all about, and Harry said if anybody asked, they needed somebody to help out with paperwork, that you were good at that.'
Matt grunted.
'So if anybody asks, that's the story,' Sutton said.
'I know what it is,' Matt said. 'Based on my brilliant record as the recovered car expert of East Detectives, they're going to transfer me to Homicide.'
Sutton looked at him, and after a moment laughed.
'It's a dirty job, kid,' he said, 'but somebody has to do it.'
'Well, it can't be worse, whatever it is, than recovered cars,' Matt said.
'I got to get home. We have to go to a wake. Jerry Sullivan, retired as a lieutenant out of the 9^th District a year ago. Just dropped dead.'
'I didn't know him.'
'They had just sold their house; they were going to move to Wildwood,' Sutton said.
He pushed himself off the bar stool, picked up his change, nodded at Matt, and walked out of the bar.
Detective Matthew M. Payne lived in a very small apartment on the top floor of a brownstone mansion on Rittenhouse Square, in what is known in Philadelphia as Center City. The three main floors of the mansion had three years before been converted to office space, all of which had been leased to the Delaware Valley Cancer Society.
It had never entered the owner's mind when he had authorized the expense of converting the attic, not suitable for use as offices, into an apartment that it would house a policeman. He thought that he could earn a small rent by renting the tiny rooms to an elderly couple, or a widow or widower, someone of limited means who worked downtown, perhaps in the Franklin Institute or the Free Public Library, and who would be willing to put up with the inconvenience of access and the slanting walls and limited space because it was convenient and, possibly more important, because the building was protected around the clock by the rent-a-cops of the Holmes Security Service. Downtown Philadelphia was not a very safe place at night for people getting on in years.
Neither, at the time of the attic's conversion, had it ever entered the owner's mind that his son, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, would become a policeman. Brewster Cortland Payne II had then believed, with reason, that Matt, after a three-year tour of duty as a Marine officer, would go to law school and join the law firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, of which he was a founding partner.
Matt's precommissioning physical, however, had found something wrong with his eyes. Nothing serious, but sufficient to deny him his commission. Brewster Payne had been privately relieved. He understood what a blow it was to a twenty-one-year-old's ego to be informed that you don't measure up to Marine Corps standards, but Matt was an unusually bright kid, and time would heal that wound. In the meantime, a word in the right ear would see Matt accepted in whatever law school he wanted to attend.
Despite a life at Pennsylvania that seemed to Brewster C. Payne to have been devoted primarily to drinking
