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That message ended abruptly. Peter was quite sure that Chief Inspector of Detectives Matt Lowenstein had glanced at his watch toward the end, seen the time, thought out loud, and then slammed the phone down.
The machine reached the end of the recorded messages and started to rewind.
“What was that all about?” Louise asked.
“Well, apparently an undercover cop spotted—”
“Who was she?” Louise interrupted.
It took him a moment to frame his reply.
“Three days ago, I would have said she was my girl friend,” he said.
“Nice girl?”
“Very nice,” he said. “Her name is Barbara Crowley, and she’s a psychiatric nurse.”
“That must come in handy,” Louise said.
“Everybody who knows us, except one, thinks that Barbara and I make a lovely couple and should get married,” Peter said.
“Who’s the dissenter? Her father?”
“Me,” Peter said. “She’s a nice girl, but I don’t love her.”
“As of when?”
“As of always,” Peter said. “I never felt that way about her.”
“What way is that?”
“The way I feel about you,” Peter said.
“I suppose it has occurred to you that about the only thing we have going for us is that we screw good?”
“That’s a good starting place,” Peter said. “We can build on that.”
She met his eyes for a long moment, then said: “I’m not going to go look at a headless corpse tonight.”
“Okay,” he said. “But you will have to eventually.”
“What if I just refuse?”
“You don’t want to do that,” Peter said.
“What if I do?”
“They’ll get a court order. If you refuse the order, they’ll hold you in contempt, put you in the House of Correction until you change your mind. You wouldn’t like it in the House of Correction. They’re really not your kind of people.”
She just looked at him.
“I’ll call Jason Washington and tell him to meet us at the medical examiner’s tomorrow morning. Say, eight o’clock,” Peter said.
“I’ve got to work in the morning,” she said.
“We’ll go there before you go to work,” Peter said, and then added: “I thought you told me you went to work at two o’clock?”
“I usually do,” she said. “But tomorrow, I’ve got to cover a funeral.”
