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Matt chuckled. “You were pretty close?”
“I knew him pretty well, all our lives, but we weren’t close. Dutch was Highway Patrol, and that’s a way of life. They don’t think anybody else really is a cop. Maybe Organized Crime, or Intelligence, but certainly not a staff inspector. I guess, really, that Dutch tolerated me. I’d been in the Highway Patrol, even if I later went wrong.”
“You were there, where he was shot, I mean. I heard that.”
“I was nearby when I heard the call. I responded.”
“I don’t understand what really happened,” Matt said. “He didn’t know he was shot?”
“The adrenaline was flowing,” Wohl said. “The minute he went to work, his system was all charged up. I’m sure he knew he was hit, but I don’t think he had any idea how bad.”
“You ever been shot?” Matt asked.
“Yes,” Wohl said, and changed the subject. “How come you’re in here? As opposed to some saloon around the campus, for example?”
“I heard they’re going to close it and tear it down,” Matt said, “so I thought I’d come in for a drink for auld lang syne.”
“They’re going to tear it down? I hadn’t heard that.” “They are, but that wasn’t a straight answer,” Matt said.
“Oh?”
“When I left the Moffitt house,” Matt said, “I had two choices. My fraternity house, or a saloon near the fraternity house. There would be two kinds of people in both, those who felt sorry for me—“
“That’s understandable,” Wohl said.
“Not because of my uncle Dutch,” Matt said. “They didn’t know about that. Because I failed my precommissioning physical examination, and am now officially exempt from military service. I didn’t want sympathy on one hand, and if one more of those sonsofbitches had told me how lucky I was, I think I would have punched him out.”
“Why’d you flunk the physical? Did they tell you?”
“Something with my eyes. Probably, they said, I’ll never have a moment’s trouble with them, but on the other hand, the United States Marine Corps can’t take the chance that something will.”
“I guess I’m with those who think you were probably lucky,” Wohl said. “I did a hitch in the army when I finished high school. I wasn’t going to be a cop like my old man. So I joined the army and they made me an MP. You didn’t miss anything.”
“I wanted to go,” Matt said. “My father was a marine. My real father.”
“He was also a cop,” Wohl said. “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Matt said. “I’ve seen the ads in the papers.”
“The reason those ads are in the paper is because they don’t pay a starting-off police officer a living wage,” Wohl said. “A guy just out of high school can go to work for Budd, someplace like that, and make a lot more money. So they have to actively recruit to find a guy who meets the stan
dards, and who really wants to be a cop, even if it means waiting for the city council to come across with long-overdue pay raises.”
“I don’t need money,” Matt said.
“Everybody needs money,” Wohl said, surprised at the remark; it sounded stupid.
“I mean, I have more than enough,” Matt said. “When my father ... I think of him as my father. My real father was killed before I was born. When my stepfather adopted me, he started investing the money my real father had left, the insurance money, the rest of it, for me. My father is a very clever guy. He turned it into a lot of money, and when I turned twenty-one, he handed it over to me.”
“What would he say if you joined the police department? What would your mother say?”
“Oh, they wouldn’t like it at all,” Matt said. “My father wants me to go to law school. But I don’t think they would say anything. I think he would sort of understand.”
The booze is talking, Peter Wohl decided. The kid lost his uncle. His father got killed on the job. He just came from Dutch’s house, where Denny Coughlin and my father, and maybe the commissioner and maybe even the mayor, plus a dozen other cops were standing around, half in the bag, recounting the heroic exploits of Dutch Moffitt. And this kid’s father. In the morning, if he remembers this conversation, this kid will be embarrassed.
****
I am not fall-down drunk, Peter Wohl thought, as he put the key in his apartment door. If I were fall-down drunk, I would have tried to put the Jaguar in the garage. I am still sober enough to realize that I am too drunk to try to thread that narrow needle with the nose of the Jaguar.
He had stayed at the bar in the Hotel Adelphia nightclub far longer than he had intended to stay, and he had far more to drink than he usually did. He had all of a sudden realized that he was drunk, shaken Matt Payne’s hand, collected his change, reclaimed the Jaguar, and driven home.
