"I helped myself," she said. "I hope that's all right."
"Don't be silly."
He started for the kitchen. As he approached her, Amanda stepped out of the way, making it clear, he thought, that she didn't want to be embraced, or even patted, in the most friendly, big-brotherly manner.
In the kitchen he saw that she had found where he kept his liquor, in a cabinet over the refrigerator; a squat bottle of twenty-four-year-old Scotch, a gift from his father, was on the sink.
He found a glass and put ice in it, and then Scotch, and then tap water. He was stirring it with his finger when Amanda came up behind him and wrapped her arms around him.
"I wanted to be with you tonight," she said softly, her head against his back. "I suppose that makes me sound like a slut."
"Not unless you announce those kind of urges more than, say, twice a week," he said.
Oh, shit, he thought, you and your fucking runaway mouth! What the hell is the matter with you ?
Her arms dropped away from him and he sensed that she had stepped back. He turned around.
"I suppose I deserved that," she said.
"I'm sorry," Matt said. "Jesus Christ, Amanda, I can't tell you how sorry I am I said that."
She looked into his eyes for a long time.
"You'll be the second, all right? I was engaged," she said.
"I know," he said.
"You do?"
"I mean, I know you're not a slut. I have a runaway mouth."
"Yes, you do," she agreed. "We'll have to work on that." She put her hand to his cheek. He turned his head and kissed it.
When he met her eyes again, she said, "I knew you were going to be trouble for me the first time I laid eyes on you."
"I'm not going to be trouble for you, I promise."
She laughed.
"Oh, yes you are," she said. "So now what, Matthew? You want to show me your etchings now or what?''
"They're in my sleeping-accommodations suite," he said. "That's the small closet to your immediate rear."
"I know," she said. "I looked. Lucky for you I didn't find any hairpins or forgotten lingerie in there."
"You'll be the first," he said.
"You mean in there," she said, and when she saw the uncomfortable look on his face, she stood on her toes and kissed him gently on the lips. Then she took his hand and led him into his bedroom.
***
When Sergeant Nick DeBenedito and Officer Jesus Marti-nez walked into Highway Patrol headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler, Officer Charley McFadden was sitting on one of the folding metal chairs in the corridor.
Martinez was surprised to see him. He knew that Mc-Fadden had spent his four-to-midnight tour riding with a vet-eran Highway Patrolman named Jack Wyatt. Since he and DeBenedito were more than an hour late coming off shift, he had presumed that Charley would be long gone.
McFadden, a large, pleasant-faced young man of twenty-three, had already changed out of his uniform. He was wear-ing a knit sport shirt, a cotton jacket with a zipper closing, and blue jeans. When McFadden stood up, the jacket fell open, exposing, on his right, his badge, pinned over his belt, and his revolver. Charley carried his off-duty weapon, a.38-caliber five-shot Smith & Wesson Undercover Special re-volver in a "high-rise pancake," a holster reportedly in-vented by a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, which suspended the revolver under his right arm, above the belt, almost as high as a shoulder holster would have placed it.
Jesus thought Charley looked, except that his hair was combed and he was shaved and the clothes were clean, as he had looked when the two of them were working undercover in Narcotics.
"You still here, McFadden?" Sergeant DeBenedito asked in greeting.
"I thought maybe Hay-zus would want to go to the FOP bar and hoist one," Charley said.
Charley had taken to using the Spanish pronunciation of Martinez's Christian name because of his mother, a devout Irish Catholic who had been made distinctly uncomfortable by having to refer to her son's partner as Jesus.
"Yeah, why not?" Martinez replied. Actually he did not want to go to the FOP bar with Charley at all. But he didn't see how he could say no after Charley had hung around the station for more than an hour waiting for him. "Give me a minute to change."
He consoled himself with the thought that it was only the decent thing to do. Charley had, after all, volunteered to drive him to work when he learned that Jesus's Ford was (again) in the muffler shop for squeaking brakes, and then he'd hung around for more than an hour waiting to drive him home. If he wanted to have a beer, they'd go get a beer.
Five minutes later he emerged from the locker room in civilian clothing. He wore a dark blue shirt, even darker blue trousers, and a light brown leather jacket. There was a fourteen-karat gold-plated chain around his neck, and what the guy in the jewelry store had said was an Inca sun medal-lion hanging from that. His badge was in his pocket, and although he, too, carried an Undercover Special, he did so in a shoulder holster. He had tried the pancake and it hadn't worked. His hips weren't wide enough or something. It always felt like it was about to fall off.
Despite the early-morning hour, the parking lot of the FOP Building, just off North Broad Street in Central Philadelphia, was almost full. About a quarter of the Police Department had come off shift at midnight with a thirst. Cops are happiest in the company of other cops, and attracting more customers to the bar at the FOP has never posed a problem for the officers of the FOP.
Jesus followed Charley down the stairs from the street to the basement bar and was surprised when Charley took a table against the wall. Charley usually liked to sit at the bar, which gave him, he said, a better look at the activity, by which he meant the women.
"Hold the table," Charley ordered, and went to the bar. He returned with two bottles of Ortlieb's and a huge bowl of popcorn. A year or so before, Jesus Martinez had become interested in nutrition, and was convinced that popcorn, and most of what else Charley put in his mouth, was not good for you.
"You're going to eat the whole damned bowl?"
"You can have some," Charley said. "I read in the paper that they just found out that popcorn is just as good for you as wheat germ."
"Really?" Jesus said, and then realized his chain was be-ing pulled.
"Yeah, the article said that they found out that popcorn is almost as good for you as french fries without catsup. No match, of course, for french fries with catsup."
"Bullshit!"
"Had you going, didn't I?" Charley asked, pleased with himself.
"Laugh at me all you want. All that garbage you keep putting in your mouth is going to catch up with you sooner or later.''
"Tell me about Payne," McFadden said abruptly.
"You heard about that, huh?" Jesus said, chuckling.
"Yeah, I heard about it," McFadden said, on the edge of unpleasantness.
"Well, it was really sort of funny-"
"Funny?" McFadden asked. "You think it's funny?"
"Yeah, Charley, I do. It was sort of funny."
"Well, I think it was shitty, pal!"
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about DeBenedito putting Payne down on the roof of the parking garage in his fancy clothes."
"I didn't hear about that," McFadden said.
"Well, DeBenedito and I went in on the shooting on the roof of the Penn Services Parking Garage. He put me out of the car one floor down, and I went up the stairs. When I got there, he's got your pal Payne down on the floor. 'Tell him I'm a cop, Martinez!' Payne yells when he sees me. So I did, and DeBenedito let him up. I thought it was funny. If you don't, go fuck yourself."
"I didn't hear about that," Charley repeated, sounding a little confused. "I was talking about your pal, Sergeant Dolan, taking Payne and his girlfriend over to Narcotics and searching his car."
"I don't know anything about that," Jesus said.
"Bullshit!"
"I don
't. You sure about your facts?"
"Yeah, I'm sure about my facts."
"Well, all I know is that Payne was at the scene, where the cop got shot. He came there driving Inspector Wohl's Jaguar, and then Wohl made us take him home. That's one of the reasons we was an hour late. If Dolan had him over at Narcotics, two things: One, I didn't know about it; and two, he would now be in Central Lockup. Dolan doesn't make mistakes."
"Yeah, I know you think he walks on water."
"He's a goddamned good cop," Martinez said flatly. "Where'd you hear he had something going with Payne?"
"Wyatt and I went by Bustleton and Bowler about ten-thirty, and somebody told him, and he told me."
"You sure he wasn't pulling your chain?"
"Yeah. It was no joke. Dolan had Payne, his girlfriend, and his car, over at Narcotics."
"Then Dolan had something," Martinez said.
"Something he got from you, maybe?" McFadden asked.
"I told you, I never heard about this," Martinez said, and then the implication of what McFadden had said sank in.
"Fuck you, Charley!" he said, flaring, and he stood up so quickly that he bumped against the table, knocking over the beer bottles. "Jesus Christ, what a shitty thing to say!"
"If you didn't do it, then I'm sorry," McFadden said after a moment.
"That's not good enough. Fuck you!"
"You cut off his tire valves!" McFadden said. "Tell me that wasn't a shitty thing to do."
"The son of a bitch was sound asleep on a stakeout," Martinez said. "He deserved that."
"No he didn't. A pal would have woke him up."
"Rich Boy is not my pal," Martinez said. "He doesn't take me riding around in his Porsche like some people I know. All he's doing is playing cop."
"He put down the Northwest rapist. That's playing cop?"
"You know, and I know, that he just stumbled on that scumbag," Martinez said.
"He put him down! Jesus Christ, Hay-zus!"
"Okay, so he put him down," Martinez admitted grudg-ingly. "But it wouldn't surprise me at all to find he's stuffing shit up his nose."
"You've got no right to say something like that!"
"You had no right to say what you did about me fingering him to Dolan."
"I said I was sorry.''
"Yeah, you said you were sorry," Martinez said. "I'm going home. I've had enough of your bullshit for one night."
"Oh, sit down and drink your beer."
"Fuck you."
"Sit down, Hay-zus."
"Or what?"
"Or I'll sit on you."
Martinez glowered at him angrily for a moment and then smiled.
"You would, too, you fucking, overgrown Mick."
"You bet your ass I would," McFadden said.
***
Matt woke up and opened his eyes and saw that Amanda was supporting her head on her hand and looking down at him.
"Hi," she said, and bent her head and kissed him.
"Christ, and some people have alarm clocks!"
She laughed.
He looked up at the ceiling, where his bedside clock, a housewarming gift from his sister Amy, projected the time on the ceiling. It was a quarter past five.
"What were you thinking?" he asked.
"Wondering, actually."
"Okay. What were you wondering?"
"Two things."
"What two things?"
"Whether there is anything in your refrigerator besides a jar of olives."
"No," he said. "I haven't been shopping in a week. And what else were you wondering?''
"Whether I'm pregnant," Amanda said.
"Jesus! You're not on the pill?"
"I stopped taking the pill when I broke my engagement. And something like this wasn't supposed to be on the agenda."
"I would be delighted to make an honest woman of you," Matt said.
"Maybe I'll be lucky."
"Not at all, my pleasure."
"That's not what I meant." She giggled and jerked one of the hairs curling around his nipple out.
"Ouch," he said, and reached out for her and pulled her down to him so that she was lying with her face on his chest and her leg thrown over him.
"This is probably not a very smart thing for us to do," she said.
"I disagree absolutely," he said.
"What are the Brownes going to think?" she asked.
"We could tell them we had car trouble. Do you really care what the Brownes think?"
"No," she said, after a moment. "Okay. We'll tell them we had car trouble and not give a damn whether or not they believe us."
He chuckled and tightened his arm around her.
"Are you going to feed me, or what?" she asked.
"I'd rather 'or what,' " he said.
"You're boasting," she said. "Idle promises."
"See for yourself," Matt said.
She raised her head an inch off his chest.
"I'll be damned," she said. "Isn't that amazing?"
***
There were two Highway cops sitting at the counter of the small restaurant in the Marriott Motel on City Line Avenue when Matt and Amanda walked in.
He didn't recognize either of them and saw nothing like recognition in their eyes, either. Both looked carefully at Amanda and him, however, something Matt ascribed to Amanda's good looks, her low-cut evening dress, and the disparity between that and the tweed sport coat and slacks he had put on to go to work; or all of the above.
He was wrong. As soon as they had sat down in one of the booths, he saw alarm in Amanda's eyes and looked over his shoulder to see what had caused it. Both Highway cops were marching to the booth.
And they were, Matt thought, in their breeches and boots, their Sam Browne belts and leather jackets, intimidating.
"Seen the papers, Payne?" the larger of the two asked.
"No."
"Thought maybe not," the cop said.
How the hell am I going to introduce these guys to Amanda ? That's obviously what they want, and I have absolutely no idea what either of their names are.
He was wrong about that too. The second Highway cop carefully laid slightly mussed copies of the Bulletin, the Ledger, and the Daily News on the table and then nodded to Amanda.
"Ma'am," he said. By then the first cop was halfway to the door.
"Hey!" Matt called. Both cops looked at him, "Thank you."
Both waved and then left the diner.
"For a moment there I thought we were going to be ar-rested again," Amanda said.
"We weren't."
"Call it what you like," she said. "Are they all like that?"
"Like what?"
"So, what's a word? Those two looked like an American version of the Gestapo."
"They're Highway," Matt said. "They're sort of special. Sort of the elite."
"That's what they said about the Gestapo," Amanda said.
"Hey, they're the good guys," Matt said.
"How is it they knew you?"
"I guess they know I work for Inspector Wohl."
"What does Peter Wohl have to do with them?"
"He's their boss, one step removed. He commands Special Operations. Highway is under Special Operations."
A waitress appeared with menus.
"Isn't that awful?" she said, pointing at the front page of the Daily News.
Matt looked at it for the first time. Above the headline there was a half-page photo of Anthony J. DeZego slumped against the concrete blocks of the stairwell at the Penn Services Parking Garage.
MAFIA FIGURE MURDERED SOCIALITE WOUNDED IN
CENTER CITY SHOOTING
"Let me see," Amanda said, and he slid the tabloid across the table to her and turned to the Ledger. The story was at the lower right corner of the front page, under a two-column picture of Miss Penelope Detweiler:
NESFOODS HEIRESS SHOT
IN CENTER CITY
POLICE BAFFLED
BY EARLY EVE SHOOTING
By Charl
es E.Whaley,
W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 03 - The Victim Page 14
