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“Tell me, Peter, does your wife know of this uncontrollable urge of yours to look down women’s necklines?”
He felt his face redden.
“It’s probably very dangerous,” Louise went on. “The last time I felt sexual vibrations from a cop, somebody shot him.”
With a very great effort, which he felt sure failed, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl picked up his glass and took a sip with as much savoir faire as he could muster.
****
The telephone was ringing when Peter Wohl walked into his apartment. He lived in West Philadelphia, on Montgomery Avenue, in a one-bedroom apartment over a four-car garage. It had once been the chauffeur’s apartment when the large (sixteen-room) brownstone house on an acre and a half had been a single-family dwelling. There were now six apartments, described as “luxury,” in the house, whose new owner, a corporation, restricted its tenants to those who had neither children nor domestic pets weighing more than twenty-five pounds.
Peter nodded and smiled at some of his fellow tenants, but he wasn’t friendly with any of them. He had rebuffed friendly overtures for a number of reasons, among them the problems he saw in associating socially with bright young couples who smoked cannabis sativa, and probably ingested by one means or another other prohibited substances.
To bust, or not to bust, that is the question! Whether ‘tis nobler to apprehend (which probably would result in a stern warning, plus a slap on the wrist) or look the other way.
Or, better yet, not to know about it, by politely rejecting invitations to drop by for a couple of drinks, and maybe some laughs, and who knows what else. They believed, he thought, what he had told them: that he worked for the city. They probably believed that he was a middle-level functionary in the Department of Public Property, or something like that. He was reasonably sure that his neighbors did not associate him with the fuzz, the pigs, or whatever pejorative term was being applied to the cops by the chicly liberal this week.
And then there was the matter of his having two of the four garages, which meant that some of his fellow tenants had to park their cars on the street, or in the driveway, or find another garage someplace else. He had been approached by three of his fellow tenants at different times to give up one of his two garages, if not for fairness, then for money.
He had politely rejected those overtures, too, which had been visibly disappointing and annoying to those asking.
The apartment looked as if it had been decorated by an expensive interior decorator. The walls were white; there was a shaggy white carpet; the furniture was stylish, lots of glass and white leather and chrome. He had been going with an interior decorator at the time he’d taken the apartment, and willing to acknowledge that he knew next to nothing about decorating. Dorothea had decorated it for him, free of charge, and got the furniture and carpet for him at her professional discount.
Dorothea was long gone, they having mutually agreed that the mature and civilized thing to do in their particular circumstance was to turn him in on a lawyer, and so was much of what she had called the “unity of ambience.”
A men’s club downtown had gone under, and auctioned off the furnishings. Peter had bought a small mahogany service bar; two red overstuffed leather armcha
irs with matching footstools; and a six-by-ten-foot oil painting of a voluptuous nude reclining on a couch that had for fifty odd years decorated the men’s bar of the defunct club. That had replaced a nearly as large modern work of art on the living room wall. The artwork replaced had had a title (!! Number Three.), but Peter had taken to referring to it as “The Smear,” even before Love in Bloom had started to wither.
Dorothea, very pregnant, had come to see him, bringing the lawyer with her. The purpose of the visit was to see if Peter could “do anything” for a client of the lawyer, who was also a dear friend, who had a son found in possession of just over a pound of Acapulco Gold brand of cannabis sativa. Dorothea had been even more upset about the bar, the chairs, and the painting than she had been at his announcement that he couldn’t be of help.
“You’ve raped the ambience, Peter,” Dorothea had said. “If you want my opinion.”
When Peter went into the bedroom, the red light was blinking on his telephone answering device. He snapped it off and picked up the telephone. “Hello?”
“We’re just going out for supper,” Chief Inspector (Retired) August Wohl announced, without any preliminary greeting, in his deep, rasping voice, “and afterward, we’re going to see Jeannie and Gertrude Moffitt. Your mother thought you might want to eat with us.”
“I was over there earlier, Dad,” Peter said. “Right after it happened.”
“You were?” Chief Inspector Wohl sounded surprised.
“I went in on the call, Dad,” Peter said.
“How come?”
“I was on Roosevelt Boulevard. I was the first senior guy on the scene. I just missed Jeannie at Nazareth Hospital, but then I saw her at the house.”
“But that was on the job,” August Wohl argued. “Tonight’s for close friends. The wake’s tomorrow. You and Dutch were friends.”
“It won’t look right, if you don’t go to the house tonight.” Mrs. Olga Wohl came on the extension. “We’ve known the Moffitts all our lives. And, tomorrow, at the wake, there will be so many people there ...”
“I’ll try to get by later, Mother,” Peter said. “I’m going out to dinner.”
“With who, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He didn’t reply.
“You hear anything, Peter?” Chief Inspector Wohl asked.
