The Daphne jail was like none in his experience. It reminded Matt more of a hospital than a jail. It was spotless. The walls were of white tile. The bars on the six cells were white. The in-cell toilets were of stainless steel, and there was no graffiti on the walls.
The first cell was empty. Sergeant Kenny pointed to the second. It held a large, crew-cutted man wearing white coveralls on the chest of which was embroidered DAPHNE JAIL in red.
Matt stepped in front of the cell and looked in. Olivia stepped up beside him.
Homer C. Daniels, as if he was trying to be friendly, at first smiled—if a little uneasily—at the young couple standing with Sergeant Kenny looking into his cell.
Then the smile vanished.
“Who are you?” he asked, and when there no response, angrily demanded, “Sergeant, who the fuck are these people?”
“Watch your mouth, Mr. Daniels,” Sergeant Kenny said. “You see the lady!”
“I’m Sergeant Payne, Mr. Daniels,” Matt said. “And this is Detective Lassiter. We’re from the Homicide Unit of the Philadelphia police department.”
“What do you want with me?” Daniels asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. But that’s about all I can say to you without your attorney being present.”
He turned and walked toward the door through which he had entered the cell block. He stopped just inside, out of sight of the cell, and gestured almost frantically for Kenny to follow him, but Kenny waited until Olivia had turned away from the cell and started for the door.
They both looked at Matt in bewilderment.
Matt frantically silently mouthed something to Sergeant Kenny. He had to do it three times before Kenny understood, thought it over, shrugged, and then dutifully repeated what Matt had mouthed.
“You think that’s your man, Sergeant?” he said, speaking a little more loudly than he normally did.
“No question about it,” Matt boomed, confidently. “That’s him. It all fits. The knife, the mask, the digital camera. Same modus operandi. All we’ll have to do is match the DNA, and there’s no challenging DNA. I’ll start the extradition paperwork tonight.”
Olivia shook her head in disbelief.
Matt gestured for Olivia and Kenny to go through the door. When they had, he closed it.
“Now we call the Black Buddha,” he said to Olivia.
Olivia rolled her eyes.
Oh, shit! There goes my automatic mouth again.
“ ‘The Black Buddha’ is what we call my lieutenant,” Matt said, “who is an African-American gentleman slightly larger than you, Sergeant, and generally regarded as the best homicide investigator between Bangor, Maine, and Key West, Florida.”
“Bigger than me?” Kenny asked.
“Bigger than you, Sergeant,” Olivia said.
Kenny smiled. “How do you start the extradition paperwork? ”
“I haven’t a clue,” Matt confessed. “I’ll ask Lieutenant Washington.”
“What was that business in there?” Kenny asked.
“When I saw that sonofabitch, the idea of him getting a good night’s sleep, thinking he was going to bail himself out of here tomorrow, annoyed me. And then I remembered what Washington told me—”
“The Black Buddha?” Kenny interrupted.
Matt nodded.
“—about the likelihood of a suspect who has (a) time to reflect on his sins and (b) not had much sleep telling you a lot more than he would if he had had neither.”
“You’re not actually thinking of interviewing him?” Olivia asked.
“I’ll do exactly what Washington tells me to do,” Matt said.
“Hello?” a female voice said. Matt recognized it to be that of Martha Washington.
“Matt, Martha,” Matt said.
“Martha Washington?” Sergeant Kenny asked, smiling. Matt smiled.
“He’s in the shower, Matt. And you, I understand, are in the Deep South?”
“About as deep as you can get,” Matt said. “Standing here with a sergeant who looks like your husband’s twin brother. I really have to talk to him. When should I call back?”
“I’ll just hand him the cellular,” she said. “Hold on.”
“I’m already annoyed with you for not having checked in earlier,” Washington’s voice came over the line. “And I dislike being interrupted when I am in the midst of my ablutions. That said, you may proceed.”
“This is our doer, Jason.”
“You will forgive me for asking, Matthew, but do you believe this because of something more than your intuition? ”
“Sergeant Kenny showed me the knife he had. It’s a twin of the one in the pictures. He had a digital camera—a new one—and a package of plastic ties. He was trying to pry open a window in a young woman’s apartment when the Citizens’ Watch guy caught him.”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Homer C. Daniels. White male, six feet one inch, two hundred pounds, mid-thirties. He’s a dealer in exotic cars, from Las Vegas, and he drives all over the country doing business.”
“On what charges are they—presumably the Daphne police—holding him?”
“Peeping, a misdemeanor, and leaving the scene of an accident, which is a little heavier.”
“Is there a chance, however slight, that he might be allowed to post bail?”
“Not tonight.”
There was a thirty-second pause.
“I will be calling you back shortly, Matthew. May I presume your cell phone battery is fully charged?”
“You may so presume.”
“Splendid,” Washington said, and the line went dead.
Matt hung up the telephone on Sergeant Kenny’s desk. “He’s going to call me back,” Matt said.
“You want to wait here?”
“I think maybe I’d better.”
“We keep a pot of coffee going,” Sergeant Kenny said.
Matt’s cellular buzzed fifteen minutes later.
“I have just spoken with Mrs. Solomon,” Washington said. “Placing what I truly hope is justified confidence in your analysis of the situation, she is dispatching an assistant district attorney—probably, if she decides Peter Wohl will just have to do without his services for a day or two, Steven Cohen, Esq. As we speak, a teletype message is being prepared asking the Daphne authorities to hold Mr. Daniels. Travel arrangements similarly are under way. You will be advised of the details.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said.
“I devoutly hope this is not premature: Good job, Matt!”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Please share that with Detective Lassiter.”
“Yes, sir.”
EIGHTEEN
[ONE]
We’re going to have to check out of the hotel,” Olivia said, almost as soon as they got into the Mustang. "We never should have gone in there in the first place.”
“The alternative would seem to be sleeping on the beach,” Matt said.
“The alternative was any of the motels we saw when we turned off the interstate into Daphne.”
“Every time I stay in a motel off an interstate, I am invariably denied sleep by the sounds of unbridled passion, a crying baby, or a barking dog—often all of the above—coming from the next cubicle. What’s wrong with where we are?”
“An assistant D.A. is coming tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t want him going back to Philadelphia and saying, ‘When I got down there, Payne has got his squeeze in a plush hotel.’ ”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Matt confessed. “And the cold fact seems to be that I do seem to have my squeeze in a plush hotel. You’re right, we better get out of there before our shameful secret becomes public knowledge. But in the morning. Not tonight.”
Matt looked at Olivia, expecting a smile. She was not smiling.
“Is that how you think of me, as your squeeze?”
“That was your term, Mother, not mine.”
Neither said anything else for the next ten minutes, until they were off
four-lane U.S. 98 and driving through Fairhope.
“Hey, look at that!” Matt said, cheerfully, pointing. “Trattoria.”
“What?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that was an Italian restaurant, ” he said. “It doesn’t sound Polish. How about it, squeeze? A little linguini, a nice bottle of red, maybe even candles romantically flickering in a bottle covered with dripping wax?”
“Don’t ever call me that again,” she said, coldly.
“Sorry,” Matt said. “I was about to add, ‘Then we can go to the hotel and fool around.’ Does that interest you at all, Detective Lassiter?”
“Just go to the hotel, please.”
“You want to tell me what I’ve done wrong?”
“From your perspective, probably nothing.”
“And from yours?”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?”
“Us.”
“What about ‘us’? This afternoon—Christ, from the time I first laid eyes on you—I thought ‘us’ was nice and dared to think the feeling was reciprocal.”
“It’s happening too fast,” she said. “And you’re dangerous.”
“How the hell am I dangerous?”
“You don’t think, that’s your problem,” she said.
“Give me a for example, Mother.”
“You never should have talked to the doer without permission. ”
“Were you there when I said, ‘I can’t talk to you without your lawyer being present’ or words to that effect?”
When she didn’t reply, he asked,
“Anything else I’ve done dangerously?”
“When you chased the guy in Philadelphia, you were drunk.”
“I wasn’t drunk. And you will recall I caught him.”
“After you fell down twice.”
“I fell over a goddamn wire.”
She snorted.
“And the Highway sergeant gave you mints. He saw you were drunk.”
“Isn’t that what they call the pot calling the kettle black?”
“At least I admit it.”
“Okay. I admit it. I was drunk. Happy?”
“And we never should have gone to the hotel in the first place. You should have thought what it would mean to me if it ever got out.”
“I wasn’t aware that our going to a hotel—in which, by the way, we have separate rooms—was going to see you branded forever with a scarlet A on your forehead.”
“It would damned sure keep me from staying in Homicide, ” Olivia said.
“Look, you better be prepared, Olivia—Christ, you’re naive—for all sorts of clever remarks from the guys in Homicide about our ‘vacation’ in Alabama. Whether we move into some dump of a motel or not, there are going to be suggestions that we fooled around.”
“What they’re going to think, is (a) I walked into Homicide, and (b) took one look at the hotshot sergeant, who calls the first deputy commissioner ‘Uncle Denny,’ and (c) jumped into his bed. And you know it, and you know that’ll keep me from staying in Homicide. And you don’t care.”
“As much as I would like it to be otherwise, I think you have absolutely no chance of staying in Homicide.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s so. The only reason I’m in Homicide is because Mariani had that brainstorm about giving the top-five guys on the sergeant’s exam their choice of assignment.”
“It had nothing to do, right, with your ‘Uncle Denny’ Coughlin?”
“No, goddamn it, it didn’t. He tried to talk me out of it, as a matter of fact.”
She snorted again.
“And he was probably right. There is no one more aware of my limitations as a Homicide investigator than I am.”
“Amazing! That’s the first modest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Oh, screw you!”
“Fat chance!”
The doorman of the Grand Hotel opened the door for Olivia.
“Olivia, would you like to have dinner with me?”
“I think I’ll have a sandwich in my room. But thank you just the same.”
She smiled at the doorman and walked into the hotel.
[TWO]
Matt drove back into Fairhope and had linguini with Italian sausage and a bottle of Merlot—all of a bottle of Merlot—in La Trattoria, while considering the differences of the mental processes of the opposite sexes.
And then he drove very carefully back to the Grand Hotel, asked for any messages—there were none—and then went into the hotel’s Bird Cage Lounge, where he sat all by himself in an upholstered chair at a table and had the first of five drinks of Famous Grouse on the rocks. The prospect of a scotch—or even an Irish—martini did not have much appeal.
Between drinks three and four, he used the house phone on the bar to call Miss Olivia Lassiter. The hotel operator said she was sorry, but Miss Lassiter had left word that she didn’t wish to take any more calls tonight.
Between drinks four and five, his cellular buzzed.
It was Detective Joe D’Amata.
“The Black Buddha said to call, Matt. Meet Delta 311 at the Mobile airport—”
“Mobile?”
“That’s what he said. Mobile. Arriving at twelve-thirty-five. ”
“They pronounced that ‘Mow-beel,’ not ‘Mow-bile,’ by the way.”
“No shit?”
“Tell him I’ll be at the ‘Mow-Beel’ airport. Who’s Mrs. Solomon sending down? Did she make up her mind?”
“I dunno,” Joe said. “This is the doer, huh?”
“It sure looks like it, Joe.”
“Good for you, Matt. Having a good time?”
“Absolutely, Joe.”
“Yeah, I bet you are,” D’Amata said, chuckled, and hung up.
After drink five, Matt signaled for the waitress and signed the bill.
“I’ve had all the fun I can stand for one night,” he said to her.
He left a call for half past seven and went to bed.
He woke with a hangover and a clammy undershirt.
He wondered about that and sniffed, and when he first encountered a really foul odor, remembered he had had a nightmare.
I always smell like death warmed over when I have one. And this was one of the better ones:
A Ford van driven by Warren K. Fletcher, white male, five feet ten, thirty-one, of Germantown was backing up toward him with the obvious intention of squashing him between the van and the Porsche. First he couldn’t get the .38 snub-nose out of its holster no matter how hard he tried, and then when he finally got it out he couldn’t make it fire no matter how hard he pulled on the trigger, and then when he finally got it to fire, he fired five times and missed all five times. . . .
He’d seen the movie before, and when he missed with the last shot, and the van was about to squash him, he usually woke up.
But I don’t remember waking up last night.
Probably the booze.
And Fletcher as the star of my nightmare? Usually it’s Susan.
Is there some significance in Fletcher showing up again?
The sweat soaked T-shirt smelled so foul that he didn’t want to pack it with the rest of his clothing. He took it instead into the shower with him and started to wash it.
To hell with this! I’ll just buy another T-shirt!
He tossed the T-shirt into a trash can and then took a long shower, considered again the gross injustices of the world as he found it, then had an inspiration.
“Screw her!” he said aloud, and when he got out of the shower, he walked still naked and dripping to the bedside telephone and called the concierge.
The concierge said the pro shop of the Lakewood Country Club would have clubs to rent and golf shoes for sale.
“And how about a tee time? As early as possible?”
“Well, perhaps tomorrow, sir. The rain’ll probably stop in time for the course to be playable tomorrow. Shall I reserve a tee time for you then?�
��
“I’ll be gone, I’m sorry. Thank you very much.”
Having the telephone in his hand reminded him of two calls he had to make, and he made them.
First he called Colonel Richards and told him he thought the peeper was the man they were looking for, and that an assistant district attorney was en route from Philadelphia. And then he called Sergeant Kenny and told him that he would be meeting whoever was coming from Philadelphia at the Mobile airport a little after noon.
“I think whoever’s coming will want to see the chief right away. Is he going to be available then? As soon as I can get from the airport to the station?”
“He’ll be here then, I’m sure.”
“If he needs to talk to me, you’ve got my cellular number.”
“Right,” Kenny said. “Mind telling me what you’ll be doing?”
Until that moment, Matt had no idea—since golf was out and it was raining—how he was going to spend the morning. But it came to him.
“I’m going to take statements from the colonel, the old guy . . .”
“Mr. Chambers Galloway,” Kenny furnished. “I’ll give you his number.”
“And anybody else . . . maybe Fats Gambino, if I have time on the way to the airport.”
Kenny chuckled, deep in his throat, reminding Matt of Jason Washington.
“That’ll make Ol’ Fats’s day. His place is right on Airport Boulevard, a couple of miles short of the airport. You can’t miss it. I wouldn’t suggest you tell him you’re coming.”
“And anybody else you think would be a good idea.”
“I’ll think on it, and tell you when you come in.”
“Thanks, Kenny.”
“My pleasure.”
Matt considered for a moment having a room-service breakfast, but decided against it, but not because of the thought he had on the way to the dining room, which was that after he ate a leisurely breakfast, he would call Detective Lassiter and suggest that if she was now awake, they had work to do. He would then meet her in the lobby, and she could have a McMuffin and canned orange juice for breakfast at the McDonald’s on their way to Daphne.
She came into the dining room a minute after he took a table, even before the waiter had brought coffee.
Final Justice Page 44
