The Witness

by W. E. B Griffin

  On the third floor, he unlocked the door to his stairwell and motioned for her to precede him. At the top, when he had turned on the lights, she turned to him and smiled.

  “Dickens would have said ‘tiny garret.’”

  “And he would have been right.”

  “Make me a drink—martini?”

  “Sure.”

  “But first, show me the gun.”

  He squatted, took the revolver from its holster, opened the cylinder, and ejected the cartridges.

  “Those are the bullets, the same kind?”

  “Cartridges,” he corrected automatically.

  “Let me see one.”

  He dropped one in her hand. She inhaled audibly as she touched it, and then rolled it around in the upturned palm of her hand.

  “Show me how it goes in,” she said.

  He took the cartridge back and dropped it in the cylinder.

  “It takes five,” he said.

  He unloaded it again, dropped the cartridge in his pocket, and handed her the revolver.

  As he poured gin over ice in his tiny kitchen, he could see her looking at the gun from all angles. Finally, she sniffed it, and then sat down, disappearing from sight behind the bookcase that separated the “living area” from the “dining area,” at least on the architect’s plans.

  When he went into the living area, she was sitting on the edge of his couch. The pistol was on the coffee table. She was running her fingers over it. To do so, she had to lean forward, which served to give him a good look down her dress.

  “I found that very interesting,” she said, reaching up for her drink. “‘Exciting’ would be a better word.”

  “We try to please,” he said. He picked up the pistol and carried it to the mantel over the fireplace. He was now more than a little uncomfortable. He didn’t like her reaction to the pistol, and suspected that she was somehow excited by the knowledge that he had killed someone with it.

  There’s a word for that, and it’s spelled P E R V E R S E.

  When he turned around, she was on her feet, walking toward him.

  “How old are you, Poor Patricia Payne’s Boy Matthew?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “I’m pushing thirty,” she said. “Which does pose something of a problem for you, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She laughed, just a little nastily.

  “As does the fact that I am behaving very oddly indeed about your gun, not to mention the fact that I am married. Right?”

  He could think of nothing whatever to say.

  “So we will leave the decision up to you, Matthew Payne. Do I say good night and thank you for showing me your etchings, or do I take off my dress?”

  “Do what you want to do,” Matt said.

  She met his eyes, and pushed her dress off one shoulder and then the other, and then worked it down off her hips.

  Then she walked to him, put her hands to his face, and kissed him. And then he felt her hand on his zipper.

  When Margaret McCarthy got in Charley McFadden’s Volkswagen he could almost immediately smell soap. He glanced at her and saw that her hair was still damp.

  Charley immediately had—and was as immediately shamed by—a mental image of Margaret naked in her shower.

  “You didn’t have to do this, you know,” Margaret said.

  “What? You got some guy waiting for you at the hospital?”

  “Absolutely, and in my uniform we’re going to a bar somewhere.”

  “I’ll break his neck,” Charley said.

  “What I meant, honey,” Margaret said, “was that you didn’t have to stay up just to drive me to work.”

  I really like it when she calls me “honey.”

  “I don’t want you wandering around North Broad Street alone at midnight,” Charley said. “Are we going to argue about this again?”

  “No, Charley.”

  “Call me ‘honey’ again,” Charley said. “I like that.”

  “Just ‘honey.’ Not ‘sugar’? How do you feel about ‘saccharine’?”

  “Now, you’re making fun of me.”

  “No, honey, I’m not,” Margaret said, and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  “I like that too,” he said.

  “Well, I’d do it more often if I didn’t wear lipstick. When I go on duty, no lipstick, and you get a little smooch.”

  “Now you know why I had to drive you to work,” Charley said.

  She laughed.

  “What are you going to do now? Go home? Or go back to the FOP and have a couple of beers with Matt?”

  “If I went to the FOP and Payne was still there, I would have to carry him home. Anyway, he had a date.”

  “A date? He doesn’t have a girl, does he?”

  “He has lots of them. Jesus, with that car, what did you expect?”

  “A lot of girls, including this one, don’t really care what kind of a car a fellow drives.”

  “There’s not a lot of girls like you.”

  “Is that the voice of experience talking?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Matt was really bananas about one girl. A rich girl, like him. He met her when Whatsername, the girl whose father owns Nesfoods, got married.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was a rich girl. She thought he was nuts for wanting to be a cop. Instead of like, a lawyer, something like that.”

  “So why does he want to be a cop?”

  “I thought a lot about that. What it is, I think, is that he likes it. It’s got nothing to do with him not getting in the Marines, or that his father, his real father, was killed on the job. I think he just likes it. And he’s working for Inspector Wohl. He gets to see a lot of stuff. I don’t think he’d stick around if they had him in one of the districts, turning off fire hydrants.”

  “You really like him, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. We get along good.”

  “You going to ask him to be your best man when we get married?”

  Charley had not thought about a best man.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I will, if I live that long.”

  “Are we going to start on that subject again?”

  “I’m not starting anything. That’s just the truth.”

  “We want to have some money in the bank when we get married.”

  “I’d just as soon go in hock like everybody else,” Charley said. “Jesus, baby, I go nuts sometimes thinking about you.”

  “Like when, for example?”

  “Like now, for example. Since you asked. I smell your soap, and then I—”

  “Then you what?”

  “I think of you taking a shower.”

  “Those are carnal thoughts.”

  “You bet your ass they are,” Charley said. “About as carnal as they get.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”

  “You think you could live six weeks the way things are?”

  “What happens in six weeks?”

  “The semester’s over. I could skip a semester. I wouldn’t want to be a just-married, and work a full shift, and try to go to school. But I could skip a semester.”

  “Jesus, baby, you mean it?”

  “I’ll call my mother in the morning and tell her we don’t want to wait anymore.”

  “Jesus! Great!”

  “I get those thoughts too, honey,” Margaret said. She reached over and caught his hand.

  At the hospital, when she kissed him, she kissed him on the mouth and gave him a little tongue, something she didn’t hardly ever do.

  Where the fuck am I?

  I was thinking about that, and what she said about her having those kind of thoughts, carnal thoughts too, and drove right across Broad Street without thinking where I’m supposed to be going.

  “Shit!” he said, and slowed abruptly, and made the next left.

  There’s Holland’s body shop. That means I�
�m behind Holland Pontiac-GMC, just a block off North Broad. That’s not so bad. I could have wound up in Paoli or somewhere not thinking like that.

  And then something wrong caught his eye. There was a guy sitting in a beat-up old Mustang in an alley.

  If I hadn’t been looking to see where the fuck I was, I would never have seen him.

  What’s wrong about it? Well, maybe nothing. Or maybe he’s drunk. Or dead. Or maybe not. Now that I think of it, he was smoking a cigarette. People don’t sit in alleys smoking cigarettes at midnight. Not around here.

  He made the next right, and the next, and pulled to the curb.

  Fuck it, McFadden. It ain’t any of your business, and you ain’t Sherlock Holmes.

  Fuck fuck it!

  Charley turned off the headlights and got out of the car. He took his wallet ID folder from his pocket and folded it back on itself, so the badge was visible, and then he took the snub nose from its holster, and held it at arm’s length down along his leg so that it would be kind of hard to see.

  Then he went in the alley, and sort of keeping in the shadows walked down close to the Mustang.

  Piece of shit, that car.

  Moving very quickly now, he walked up to the driver’s window. He tapped on the window with his badge.

  He scared shit out of the guy inside, who jumped.

  The window rolled down.

  “Excuse me, sir. I’m a police officer. Is everything all right?”

  “I’m a Three-Six-Nine,” the man said. “Everything’s okay. On the job.”

  Oh, shit. He’s probably a Central Detective on stakeout. Why didn’t you mind your own fucking business?

  Fuck fuck fuck it. Maybe he ain’t.

  “Let me see your folder, please,” Charley said, and pulled the door open so the light would come on. It didn’t.

  Lieutenant Jack Malone thinking, This big fucker, whoever he is, smells something wrong, and he’s got his gun out, very slowly and nonthreateningly found his badge and photo ID and handed it to Officer Charles McFadden.

  “Lieutenant, I’m sorry as hell about this.”

  “Don’t be silly. You were just doing your job. I suppose I did look a little suspicious.”

  “I didn’t know what the fuck to think, so I thought I’d better check. Sorry to bother you, sir.”

  “No problem, I told you that,” Malone said. “But I don’t want this on the record. You call it in?”

  “No, sir. I’m in my own car. No radio.”

  “Just keep this between ourselves. What did you say your name was?”

  “McFadden, sir.”

  “You work this district?”

  “No, sir. I’m Highway.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly tell Captain Pekach how alert you were. But I don’t want anyone else to know you saw me here. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir. I understand. Good night, sir.”

  Charley stuffed his pistol back in its holster and walked back up the alley.

  Nice guy. I really could have got my ass in a crack doing that. But he understood why I did it. Malone was his name. I wonder where he works. He said he knows Captain Pekach.

  And then he got back in the Volkswagen, and there was still a faint smell of Margaret’s soap, and he started to think about her, and her in the shower, and what she had said about her having those kinds of thoughts too, and Lieutenant Malone and the rusty piece of shit he was driving were relegated to a far corner of his mind.

  TEN

  The time projected on the ceiling by the clever little machine that had been Amelia Payne, M.D.’s birthday present to her little brother showed that it was quarter past eleven.

  It should be later than that, Matt thought, considering all that’s happened.

  He bent one of the pillows on the bed in half and propped it under his head. Then he reached down and pulled up the blanket. The sheet that covered him wasn’t enough; he felt chilled.

  He could hear the shower running in the bath, and in his mind’s eye saw Helene at her ablutions, and for a moment considered leaping out of the bed and getting in the shower with her.

  He sensed that it would be a bad idea, and discarded the notion.

  Three times is a sufficiency. At the moment, almost certainly, the lady is not burning with lust.

  Well, two and a half, considering the first time was more on the order of premature ejaculation than a proper screw.

  With an effort, she had been very kind about that. He was not to worry. It happened sometimes. But she had been visibly pleased at his resurgent desire, or more precisely when El Wango had risen phoenixlike from the ashes of too-quickly burned passion.

  And clearly done his duty: There is absolutely no way that she could have faked that orgasm.

  Orgasms?

  Passion followed by sleep, followed by slowly becoming delightedly aware that what one is fondling in one’s sleep is not the goddamn pillow again, but a magnificent real live boob, attached to a real live woman.

  One who whispered huskily in the dark “Don’t stop!” when, ever the gentleman, I decided that copping a feel was perhaps not the thing to do under the circumstances.

  And El Wango, God bless him, had risen to the occasion, giving his all for God, Mother, and Country, as if determined to prove that what good had happened previously was the norm, and that “oh, shit” spasm earlier on a once-in-a-century aberration.

  She had said, “I’ll be sore for a week,” which I understand could be a complaint, but which, I believe, I will accept as a compliment.

  The drumming of the shower died, and he could hear the last gurgle as the water went down the drain, and he could hear other faint sounds, including what he thought was the sound of his hairbrush clattering into the washbasin.

  And then she came out. In her underwear, but still modestly covering herself with a towel.

  “You’re not leaving?” Matt said. “The evening is young.”

  “The question is what about the Opera Ball people?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, keeping the towel in place.

  I was right. Thrice, or even twice and a half, is a more than a sufficiency, it is a surfeit.

  “I haven’t heard the elevator in a while. I guess they’re all gone. Would you like me to take you home?”

  “I have a car.”

  “Where?”

  “In the garage in the basement.”

  “Parked right next to the elevator?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “You’re the Cadillac in my parking spot. Spots. The gods—the Greco-Roman ones, who understand this sort of thing—obviously wanted us to get together.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I do know what got us together. It’s spelled G I N. As in, I should know better than to drink martinis.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “Yes, of course, I’m sorry,” Helene said. “I expect you hear this from all your married ladies, but in my case it’s true. I normally don’t do things like this.”

  “Well, I’m glad you made an exception for me,” Matt said. “And just for the record, you’re my first married lady. I would like to thank you for being gentle with me, it being my first time.”

  She laughed, and then grew serious.

  “I would like to say the same thing,” she said. “But you’re the third. And I decided just ninety seconds ago, the last.”

  “I didn’t measure up?”

  “That’s the trouble. You—left nothing to be desired. Except more of you, and that’s obviously out of the question.”

  “Why is it obviously out of the question?”

  She got up suddenly from the bed, dropped the towel, and walked out of the bedroom, snapping, “I’m married,” angrily over her shoulder.

  She’ll be back, Matt thought confidently. She will at least say good-bye.

  But she did not come back, so he picked up the towel she had dropped and put it around his waist and went looking for her.

  She was gone.

&
nbsp; I don’t even know what her last name is.

  During his military service Staff Inspector Peter F. Wohl had learned that rubber gloves were what smart people wore when applying cordovan shoe polish to foot wear, otherwise you walked around for a couple of days with brown fingernails. When the last pair had worn out, the only rubber gloves he could find in the Acme Supermarket had been the ones he now wore, which were flaming pink in color and decorated in a floral pattern. At the time, their function, not their appearance, had seemed to be the criteria.

  Now he was not so sure. Mrs. Samantha Stoddard, the 230-pound, fifty-two-year-old Afro-American grandmother who cleaned the apartment two times a week had found them under the sink and offered the unsolicited opinion that he better hope nobody but her ever saw them. “I know you like girls, Peter. Other people might wonder.”

  Mrs. Stoddard felt at ease calling Staff Inspector Wohl by his Christian name because she had been doing so since he was four years old. She still spent the balance of the week working for his mother.

  When the telephone rang, at ten past seven in the morning, Wohl was standing at his kitchen sink, wearing his pink rubber gloves, his underwear, an unbuttoned shirt, and his socks, examining with satisfaction the shine he had just caused to appear on a pair of loafers. At five past seven, as he prepared to slip his feet into them, he had discovered that they were in desperate need of a shine.

  From the sound of the bell, he could tell that it was his official telephone ringing. He headed for the bedroom, hurriedly removing the flaming pink rubber gloves as he did so. The left came off with no difficulty; the right stuck. Before he got it off, he had cordovan shoe polish all over his left hand.

  “Shit!” he said aloud, adding aloud. “Why do I think this is going to be one of those days?”

  Then he picked up the telephone.

  “Inspector Wohl.”

  “Matt Lowenstein, Peter. Is there some reason you can’t meet me at Tommy Callis’s office at eight?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Keep it under your hat,” Lowenstein said, and hung up.

  Wohl replaced the handset in its cradle, but, deep in thought, kept his hand on it for a moment. Thomas J. Callis was the district attorney. He could think of no business he—that is to say Special Operations, including Highway Patrol—had with the district attorney. If something serious had happened, he would have been informed of it.