"Yes?" a gruff voice asked.
"Buy you a beer?"
"Come to supper."
"I don"t want to, Dad," Wohl said.
"Oh," Chief Inspector August Wohl (retired), said. "Downey"s, Front and South, in half an hour?"
"Fine. Thanks."
THIRTEEN.
Captain David Pekach was relieved when the meeting in Wohl"s office broke up so quickly. Under the circ.u.mstances it could have gone on for hours.
Both he and Mike Sabara followed Lieutenant Lucci to his desk, where Sabara told Lucci he would either be at home or at St. Sebastian"s Church; Lucci had both numbers. Pekach told him that he would be at either of the two numbers he had given Lucci, and from half past seven at the Ristorante Alfredo downtown. He wrote the number down and gave it to Lucci.
Lucci and Sabara exchanged smiles.
"Big date, Dave, huh?" Sabara asked.
"I"m taking a lady friend to dinner, all right?" Pekach snapped. "Is there anything wrong with that?"
"Wow!" Sabara said. "What did I do? Strike a raw nerve?""
Pekach glared at him, then walked toward the door to the parking lot.
"Nice watch, Dave," Sabara called after him.
Pekach turned and gave him the finger, then stormed out of the building. Sabara and Lucci grinned at each other.
"What was that about the watch?" Lucci asked.
"His "lady friend" gave him a watch for his birthday," Sabara said. "An Omega. Gold. With all the dials. What do you call it, a chronometer?"
"Chronograph," Lucci said. "Gold, huh?"
"Gold," Sabara confirmed.
"Why"s he so sensitive about her?" Lucci asked, deciding at the last moment not to tell Captain Sabara that he had heard Captain Pekach"s lady friend call him Precious when he had called him at her house.
"I don"t know," Sabara replied. "I"ve seen her. She"s not at all bad-looking. Nothing for him to be ashamed of."
She was Miss Martha Ellen Peebles, a female Caucasian thirty-four years and six months old, weighing 121 pounds and standing five feet four inches tall.
Miss Peebles resided alone, in a turn-of-the-century mansion at 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill. There was a live-in couple-a chauffeur-butler-majordomo and a housekeeper-cook-who were in turn helped by a constantly changing staff of maids and groundskeepers, most often nieces and nephews of the live-in couple, who kept the place up.
The house had been built by Alexander F. Peebles, who owned, among other things, what the Wall Street Journal estimated was eleven percent of the nation"s anthracite coal reserves. Mr. Peebles had one son, Alexander, Jr., who in turn had two children, Martha, and her brother Stephen, four years younger.
Mrs. Alexander Peebles, Jr., had died of cancer when Martha was twelve and Stephen eight. Alexander Peebles decided on the night that G.o.d finally put his wife out of her misery that his daughter was an extraordinarily good creature. Martha, who was ent.i.tled to being comforted by him on the loss of her mother, had instead come to him, in his gun-room sanctuary, where he was wallowing in Scotch-soaked self-pity, and comforted him. He was not to worry, Martha had told him; she would take care of him from now on.
Mr. Peebles never remarried and devoted the remaining eighteen years of his life to his quest for grouse in Scotland, big game in Africa, trophy sheep in the Rocky Mountains, and his collection of pre-1900 American firearms.
Since Martha truly believed she was taking care of him, her father didn"t think it right to leave her at home in the company of a governess or some other domestic, so he engaged a tutor-companion for her and took her along on his hunting trips.
Their adoration was mutual. Martha thought her father was perfect in all respects. He thought she embodied all the desirable feminine traits of beauty and gentility. Her reaction to learning, while they were shooting Cape Buffalo in what was then still the Belgian Congo, that Miss Dougla.s.s, her tutor-companion, was sharing his cot was, he thought, simply splendid. One simply didn"t expect that sort of sympathetic, sophisticated understanding from a sixteen-year-old girl. And by then she was as good a shot as most men he knew. What more could a father expect of a daughter?
Alexander Peebles, Jr."s, relationship with his son was nowhere near so idyllic. The boy had always been delicate. That was probably genetic, he decided, inherited from his mother"s side of the family. Her father had died young, he recalled, and her two brothers looked like librarians.
The several times he had tried to include Stephen, when he turned sixteen, in hunting trips had been disasters. When Stephen had finally managed to hit a deer-for-the-safari-pot in Tanganyika, he had looked down at the carca.s.s and wept. The next year, after an absolutely splendid day of shooting driven pheasant on the Gladstone estate in Scotland, when their host had asked him what he thought of pheasant shooting, Stephen had replied, "Frankly I think it"s disgusting slaughter.""
When Alex Peebles had told his son that his remark had embarra.s.sed him and Martha, Stephen had replied, "t.i.t for tat, Father. I am grossly embarra.s.sed having a father who brings a wh.o.r.e along on a trip with his children."
Alex Peebles, furious at his defiant att.i.tude and at his characterization of Karen Cayworth (who really had had several roles in motion pictures before giving up her acting career to become his secretary) as a wh.o.r.e, had slapped his son, intending only that, not a dislocated jaw.
Predictably, Martha had stood by her father and gone with Stephen to the hospital and then ridden with him on the train to London and put him on the plane home. She had then returned to Scotland. But the damage had been done, of course. Lord Gladstone was polite but distant, and Alex Peebles knew that it would be a long time before he was asked to shoot the estate again.
Five months after that, a month before he was to graduate, Stephen was expelled from Groton for what the headmaster called "the practice of unnatural vice."
From then on, until his death of a heart attack in the Rockies at fifty-six, Alex Peebles had as little to do with his son as possible. He put him on an allowance and gave him to understand that he was not welcome in the house on Glengarry Lane when his father was at home.
Martha, predictably, urged him to forgive and forget, but he could not find it in himself to do so. He relented to the point of offering, via Martha, to arrange for whatever psychiatric treatment was necessary to cure him of his s.e.xual deviance. Stephen, as predictably, refused, and so far as Alex Peebles was concerned, that was that.
Alex Peebles"s last will and testament was a very brief doc.u.ment. It left all of his worldly possessions, of whatever kind and wherever located, to his beloved daughter, Martha, of whom he was as proud as he was ashamed of his son, to whom, consequently, he was leaving nothing.
It did occur to Alex Peebles that Martha, being the warmhearted, generous, indeed Christian young woman that she was, would certainly continue to provide some sort of financial support for her brother. Stephen would not end up in the gutter.
It never entered Alex Peebles"s mind that Martha, once the to-be-expected grief pa.s.sed, would have trouble getting on with her own life. She was not at all bad-looking, and a d.a.m.n good companion, and he was, after all, leaving her both a great deal of money and a law firm, Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, which he felt sure would manage her affairs as well, and as honestly, as they could.
Equally important-perhaps even more so-Martha was highly intelligent, well read, and levelheaded. Somewhere down the pike a man would enter her life. It was not unreasonable to hope that she would name her firstborn son after her father, Alexander Peebles Whatever.
He erred. Martha Peebles was devastated by the death of her father, and her perception of herself as a thirty-year-old woman literally all alone in the world, rather than pa.s.sing, grew worse.
A self-appointed delegation of her mother"s family pressed her soon after the will was probated to share her inheritance with her brother. Stephen"s "peculiarities," they argued, were not his fault and probably should be laid at his father"s feet. His treatment of his son, they said, was barbaric.
When she refused to do that, deciding it would const.i.tute disobedience, literally, of her father"s last will and testament, she understood that she was more than likely closing the door on any relationship she might have developed with them. That prediction soon proved to be true.
She came to understand that while she had a large number of acquaintances, she had very few, almost no, friends. There were overtures of friendship, to be sure. Some of them were genuine, but she quickly understood that she had virtually nothing in common with other well-to-do women in Philadelphia except money. She hadn"t been in any school long enough to make a lifelong best friend, and felt that it was too late to try to do so now.
There was some attention from men, but she suspected that much of it was because they knew (from a rather nasty lawsuit Stephen had undertaken and lost, to break his father"s will) that she alone owned Tamaqua Mining and everything else. And none of the suitors, if that word fit, really interested her.
The hunting was gone too. It was not the sort of thing a single woman could do by herself, even if she had wanted to, and without her father she had no interest in going.
She forced herself to take an interest in the business, going so far as to spend three months in Tamaqua and Hazleton, and taking courses in both mineralogy and finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Taking the courses became an end in itself. It pa.s.sed the time, got her out of the house every day, and posed a challenge to her when an essay was required or an examination was to be taken.
Three years after their father died, she allowed Stephen to move back into the house. Or didn"t throw him out when he moved back in without asking. She didn"t want to fight with him, the court suit had been a terrible experience, she was lonely, and they could at least take some meals together.
But that didn"t work, either. Stephen"s young friends proved to be difficult. They didn"t like him; she saw that. They were selling themselves to him. There wasn"t much difference, she came to think, between her father"s "secretaries" and Stephen"s young men. While there probably was not an actual cash payment in either case, there were gifts and surprises that amounted to the same thing.
And when the gifts and surprises were not judged to be adequate by Stephen"s young men, there were either terrible scenes or the theft of things they saw in the house. That came to a head with a handsome young man named William Walton, who said he was an actor.
She went to Stephen and told him she was sure that his friend, William Walton, was stealing things, and Stephen told her, almost hysterically, that she didn"t know what she was talking about. When she insisted that she knew precisely what she was talking about, he said some very cruel things to her. She told Stephen that the next time something turned up missing, she was going to the police.
It did and she did, and the police came and did nothing. When Stephen heard about her calling the police, there was another scene, ending when she told him he had two days to find someplace else to live.
Stephen had moved out the next day. She had come down the stairs as he was putting his suitcases out and he had seen her.
"I"m sorry it"s come to this, Stephen," she said.
He had looked up at her with hate in his eyes.
"Get f.u.c.ked!" he had shouted. "You crazy G.o.dd.a.m.n b.i.t.c.h, get f.u.c.ked! That"s what you need, a good f.u.c.k!"
He"s beside himself, she decided, because I told him to get out and because he knows that I was right, that his William Walton doesn"t "t really like him for himself and really is stealing things. As long as he could pretend he wasn"t stealing things, he could pretend that William Walton liked him for himself.
She had turned and gone back upstairs and into the gun room and wept. The gun room had been her father"s favorite place, and now it was hers.
What Stephen had said, "Get f.u.c.ked," now bothered her. Not the words but what they meant.
Why haven"t I been f.u.c.ked? I am probably the only thirty-four-year-old virgin in the world, with the possible exception of cloistered nuns. The most likely possibility is that I am not so attractive to men so as to make them really try to overcome what is my quite natural maidenly reticence. Another possibility, of course, is that my natural maidenly reticence has been reinforced by the fact that I have encountered very few (unmarried) men who I thought I would like to have do that to me. Or is it "with" me?
And there is another possibility, rather disgusting to think of, and that is that I am really like Stephen, a deviate, a latent Lesbian. Otherwise, wouldn"t "t I have had by now some of that overwhelming hunger, to be f.u.c.ked, so to speak, that all the heroines in the novels are always experiencing? Or, come to think of it, some women I know have practically boasted about? Why don"t my pants get wet when some man touches my arm-or paws my breast?
Realizing that she was slipping into depression, which, of late, had meant that she would drink more than was good for her, she resolved to fight it.
She took out a bottle of the port her father had liked so much and taught her to appreciate, and drank two gla.s.ses of it, and not a drop more, and then left the gun room, carefully locking it after her.
In the next two days there were more thefts of bric-a-brac and other valuables, and she called the police again, and again they did nothing.
So she got in her car and drove downtown to see Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, one of the senior partners in the law firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester in the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building. Colonel Mawson wasn"t there, but another senior partner, Brewster C. Payne, of whom, she remembered, her father had spoken admiringly, saw her.
She told him what was going on, of the thefts and the break-ins, and how the police had been absolutely useless. He tried to talk her into moving out of the house until the police could get to the bottom of what was happening. She told him she had no intention of being run out of her own house.
He told her that Colonel Mawson and Police Commissioner Czernick were great friends, and that as soon as Colonel Mawson returned to the office, he would tell him of their conversation and that he felt sure Colonel Mawson would get some action from the police.
The very same day, late in the afternoon, Harriet Evans, the gentle black woman who-with her husband-had been helping them run the house as long as Martha could remember, came upstairs and said, "Miss Martha, there"s another policeman to see you. This one"s a captain."
Miss Martha Peebles received Captain David Pekach, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol, in the upstairs sitting room. She explained the problem all over again to him, including her suspicion that Stephen"s "actor" friend was the culprit. He a.s.sured her that the entire resources of the Highway Patrol would from that moment guarantee the inviolability of her property.
Somehow in conversation it came out that Captain Pekach was not a married man. And she mentioned her father"s weapons, and he expressed interest, and, somewhat reluctantly, she took him to the gun room.
When he showed particular interest in one piece, she identified it for him: "That is a U.S. rifle, that is to say, a military rifle, Model of 1819-"
"With a J. H. Hall action," Captain Pekach interrupted.
"Oh, do you know weapons?"
"And stamped with the initials of the proving inspector," he went on. "Z. E. H."
"Zachary Ellsworth-" Martha began to explain.
"Hampden," Captain Pekach concluded as their eyes met. "Captain, Ordnance Corps, later Deputy Chief of Ordnance."
"He was born in Allentown, you know," Martha said.
"No. I didn"t know."
"There are some other pieces you might find interesting, Captain," Martha said, "if I"m not taking you away from something more important."
He looked at his watch.
"I"m running late now," he said.
"I understand," she said.
"But perhaps some other time?"
"If you like."
He gestured around the gun room.
"I could happily spend the next two years in here," he said.
He means that. He does want to come back!
"Well, perhaps when you get off duty," she said.
He looked pained.
"Miss Peebles, I"m commanding officer of the Highway Patrol. We"re trying very hard to find the man the newspapers are calling the Northwest Philadelphia serial rapist."
"Yes, I read the papers."
"I want to speak to the men coming off their shifts, to see if they may have come up with something. That will keep me busy, I"m afraid, until twelve-thirty or so."
"I understand," she said. Then she heard herself say, actually shamelessly and brazenly lie, "Captain, I"m a night person. I rarely go to bed until the wee hours. I"m sure if you drove past here at one, or even two, there would be lights on."
"Well, I had planned to check on your property before going home," he said. "I"ve stationed officers nearby."
"Well, then, by all means, if you see a light, come in. I"ll give you a cup of coffee."