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"Goodmorning, Officer Payne," Wohl said from under his pillow. " You're up with the goddamn roosters, I see."
"Sorry," Matt said.
He closed Wohl's door, dressed quickly, left the apartment as quietly as he could, and drove to Rittenhouse Square. He went directly to the refrigerator, took out a half gallon of milk, and filled a large glass. It was sour.
Holding his nose, he poured it down the drain, then leaned against the sink.
The red light on his telephone answering machine was flashing.
"Why did you leave?" Amanda's voice inquired metallically. Because, after telling me the cruise ship had docked, you went to bed. "I hope I didn't run you off." Perish the thought! "Call me." Now? It' s quarter after six in the morning!
This was followed by electronic beeping noises that indicated that half a dozen callers had declined Matt's recorded invitation to leave their number so he could get back to them. Then a familiar, deep, well-modulated voice: "This is Jason, Matt. I've got to do something first thing in the morning. Don't bother to come to the Roundhouse. I' ll either see you at Bustleton and Bowler around nine, or I'll call you there."
Another series, five this time, of electronic beeping noises, indicating that many callers had not elected to leave a recorded message, and then Amanda's recorded voice, sounding as if she were torn between sorrow and indignation, demanded, "Where the hell are you? I've called you every half hour for hours. Call me!"
Matt looked at his watch.
It is now 6:18a.m. I will shower and shave and see if I can eliminate the source of the rumbling in my belly, and then dress, and by then it will be close to 7:00a.m., and I will call you then, because I really don't want to talk to Mrs. Soames T. Browne at 6:18a.m.
At 7:02 A.M. Matt called the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Soames T. Browne and asked for Miss Spencer. Mrs. Soames T. Browne came on the line. Mrs. Browne told him that five minutes before, Amanda had gotten into her car and driven home, and that if he wanted her opinion, his behavior in the last couple of days had been despicable. She said she had no idea what he'd said or done to Amanda to make her cry that way and didn't want to know, but obviously he was still as cavalier about other people's feelings as he had always been. She told him she had not been surprised that he had thought it amusing to try to get Chad drunk before the wedding, but she really had been surprised to learn that he had been spreading scurrilous stories about poor Penny Detweiler to one and all, with the poor girl lying at death's door in the hospital.
And then she terminated the conversation without the customary closing salutation.
"Oh, shit!" Matt said to a dead telephone.
He put on his necktie, slipped his revolver into his ankle holster, and left the apartment. He went to his favorite restaurant, Archie's, on 16^th Street, where he had thespecialite de la maison, a chili dog with onions and two bottles of root beer, for his breakfast.
Then he got in the Porsche and headed for Bustleton and Bowler. He was almost there when he noticed that a thumb-sized glob of chili had eluded the bun and come to rest on his necktie and shirt.
****
Jason Washington had been glad when the computer came along, not so much for all the myriad benefits it had brought to industry, academia, and general all-around record-keeping, but rather because it gave him something to sort of explain the workings of the brain.
He had been fascinated for years with the subconscious deductive capabilities of the brain, going way back to his freshman year in high school, where he found, to his delight, that he could solve simple algebraic equations in his head. He had often had no idea why he had written answers to certain examination questions, only that they had been the right answers. He had sailed through freshman algebra with anA. When he got to sophomore algebra, not having taken the time to memorize the various theories offered in freshman algebra, he got in trouble, but he never forgot the joy he had experienced the year before when the brain, without any effort at all on his part, had supplied the answers to problems he didn't really understand.
He had first theorized that the brain was something like a muscle; the more you flexed it, the better it worked. That seemed logical, and he carried that around a long time, even after he became a policeman. He had really wanted to become a detective and had studied hard to prepare for the detective's examination. When he took the examination, he remembered things he was surprised that he had ever learned. That tended to support the-brain-is-a-muscle theory, but he suspected that there was more to it than that.
He saw comptometers on various bureaucrats' desks, watched them in operation, and thought that possibly the brain was sort of a super comptometer, but that (and its predecessor, the abacus) seemed too crude and too slow for a good comparison.
Then came the computer. Not only did the computer never forget anything it was told, but it had the capability to sort through all the data it had been fed, and do so with the speed of light. The computer was a brain, he concluded. More accurately the brain was a computer, a supercomputer, better than anything at MIT, capable of sorting through vast amounts of data and coming up with the answer you were looking for.
Some of its capabilities vis-a-vis police work were immediately apparent. If you fed everyone's license-plate number into it, and the other data about a car, and queried the computer, it would obligingly come up with absolutely correct listings of addresses, names, makes, anything you wanted to know.
Jason Washington had gone to an electronics store and bought a simple computer and, instead of watching television, had learned to program it in BASIC. He had written a program that allowed him to balance his checkbook. There had been a difference of a couple of pennies between what his computer said he had in his account and what the bank's computer said he had. He went over his program and then challenged the bank, not caring about the three cents but curious why two computers would disagree. He didn't get anywhere with the First Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, but a long-haired kid at the electronics store, a fellow customer, had taught him about anomalies.
As the kid explained it, it was a freak, where sometimes two and two added up to four point one, because something in either the data or the equation wasn't quite right.
By then Jason had been a detective for a long time, was already working in Homicide, and had learned that when you were working a tough job, what you looked for was something that didn't add up. An anomaly. That had a more professional ring to it than "something smells."
And he had learned something else, and that was that the brain never stopped working. It was always going through its data bank if you let it, sifting and sifting and sifting, looking through its data for anomalies. And he had learned that sometimes he could, so to speak, turn the computer on. If he went to sleep thinking about a problem, sometimes, even frequently, the brain would go on searching the data bank while he was asleep. When he woke up, rarely was there the solution to the problem. Far more often there was another question. There was no answer, the brain seemed to announce, because something is either missing or wrong. Then, wide awake, all you had to do was think about that and try to determine what was missing and/or what was wrong.
Jason Washington had gone to sleep watching the NBC evening news on television while he was goin
g over in his mind the sequence of events leading to the death, at the hands of person or persons unknown, of Anthony J. DeZego.
Mr. DeZego had spent the day at work, at Gulf Seafood Transport, 2184 Delaware Avenue, which fact was substantiated not only by his brother-in-law, Mr. Salvatore B. Mariano, another guinea gangster scumbag, but by four of his coworkers whom Jason Washington believed were telling the truth.
Mr. DeZego had then driven to the Warwick Hotel in downtown Philadelphia in his nearly new Cadillac. That fact was substantiated by the doorman, whom Washington believed, who said that Mr. DeZego had handed him a ten spot and told him to take care of the car. The car had then been parked in the Penn Services Parking Garage, fourth floor, by Lewis T. Oppen, Jr., a bellboy, who had done the car parking, left the parking stub, as directed, on the dashboard, and then delivered the keys to Mr. DeZego in the hotel cocktail lounge.
