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“I’m Mr. Nelson’s secretary, Inspector,” she said. “Will you come this way, please?”
The rent-a-cop slipped into a chair beside the elevator door.
“I’m sorry about that downstairs,” the woman said, smiling at him over her shoulder. “I think maybe you should have told her you were from the police.”
“No problem,” Peter said. It would accomplish nothing to tell her he’d given her his card with that information all over it.
Arthur J. Nelson’s outer office, his secretary’s office, was furnished with gleaming antiques, a Persian carpet, an oil portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt, and a startlingly lifelike stuffed carcass of a tiger, very skillfully mounted, so that, snarling, it appeared ready to pounce.
“He’ll be with you just as soon as he can,” his secretary said. “May I offer you a cup of coffee?”
“Thank you, no,” Peter said, and then his mouth ran away with him. “I like your pussycat.”
“Mr. Nelson took that when he was just out of college,” she said, and pointed to a framed photograph on the wall. Wohl went and looked at it. It was of a young man, in sweat-soaked khakis, cradling his rifle in his arm, and resting his foot on a dead tiger, presumably the one now stuffed and mounted.
“Bengal,” the secretary said. “That’s a Bengal tiger.”
“Very impressive,” Wohl said.
He examined the tiger, idly curious about how they actually mounted and stuffed something like this.
What’s inside? A wooden frame? A wire one? A plaster casting? Is that red tongue the real thing, preserved somehow? Or what?
Then he walked acr
oss the room and looked through the curtained windows. He could see the roof of Thirtieth Street Station, its classic Greek lines from that angle diluted somewhat by air-conditioning machinery and a surprising forest of radio antennae. He could see the Schuylkill River, with the expressway on this side and the boat houses on the far bank.
The left of the paneled double doors to Arthur J. Nelson’s office opened, and four men filed out. They all seemed determined to smile, Wohl thought idly, and then he thought they had probably just had their asses eaten out.
A handsome man wearing a blue blazer and gray trousers appeared in the door. He was much older, of course, than the young man in the tiger photograph, and heavier, and there was now a perfectly trimmed, snow-white mustache on his lip, but Wohl had no doubt that it was Arthur J. Nelson.
Formidable, Wohl thought.
Arthur J. Nelson studied Wohl for a moment, carefully.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector,” he said. “Won’t you please come in?”
He waited at the door for Wohl and put out his hand. It was firm.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Nelson,” Wohl said. “May I offer my condolences?”
“Yes, you can, and that’s very kind of you,” Nelson said, as he led Wohl into his office. “But frankly, what I would prefer is a report that you found proof positive who the animal was who killed my son, and that he resisted arrest and is no longer among the living.”
Wohl was taken momentarily aback.
What the hell. Any father would feel that way. This man is accustomed to saying exactly what he’s thinking.
“I’m about to have a drink,” Nelson said. “Will you join me? Or is that against the rules?”
“I’d like a drink,” Peter said. “Thank you.”
“I drink single-malt scotch with a touch of water,” Nelson said. “But there is, of course, anything else.”
“That would be fine, sir,” Peter said.
Nelson went to a bar set into the bookcases lining one wall of his office. Peter looked around the room. A second wall was glass, offering the same view of the Schuylkill he had seen outside. The other walls were covered with mounted animal heads and photographs of Arthur J. Nelson with various distinguished and/or famous people, including the sitting president of the United States. There was one of Nelson with the governor of Pennsylvania, but not, Peter noticed, one of His Honor the Mayor Carlucci.
Nelson crossed the room to where Peter stood and handed him a squat, octagonal crystal glass. There was no ice.
