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"May I speak?" Matt asked.
"I'm waiting."
"I'm not going to hurt Penny. Period. I don't really think that… what happened…hurt her."
"And what are you going to do when she realizes that you don't love her?"
"I never told her I did."
"When she learns about the rest of your harem?" Amy asked, and pointed to the telephone. "Like the one who just called?"
Matt shrugged.
"I can only repeat that I will not hurt her," Matt said.
"You've already set the stage to do exactly that. She sees you as a life preserver, someone she can lean on. I don't know how she's going to react when she finds out, inevitably, that's not true. Certainly, you're not willing to assume emotional responsibility for her. And even if you were, I don't think you could handle it."
He didn't reply.
"Penny cannot be just one more notch on your gun, Matt."
"I never thought of her that way," Matt interrupted.
Amy ignored his response.
"You can't, when she becomes an inconvenience, tell Penny, the way you told that woman on the telephone just now, 'I can't talk to you right now. I'll call you right back.' She cannot take that kind of rejection, for that matter, any rejection right now. It would put her right back in The Lindens."
"Okay, you made your point."
"You're going to have to disabuse her of the notion that she's in love with you very gently."
"I told you, you made your point."
Amy glowered at him, but after a moment her face softened.
"Okay, Matt. Ihave made my point. And you're not really a sonofabitch. You're incredibly stupid and insensitive, of course, and you do most of your thinking with your penis. A typical male, I would say."
He looked at her and smiled.
"How about an egg roll?"
"You bastard!" Amy said, but she sat beside him on the couch and helped herself to an egg roll.
When she left, half an hour later, and he steeled himself to call Evelyn back, there was no answer.
He knew that if he stayed in the apartment he would get drunk, so he called Charley McFadden, and Charley's mother said he was out with his girlfriend.
He walked up Rittenhouse Square to the Rittenhouse Club, and stood at the bar and ordered a Scotch. There were some people there whom he knew vaguely, and who smiled at him. He moved down the bar and tried to join their conversation.
Before he finished his first drink, he realized that he was wholly disinterested in what they were talking about.
I look like them. I act like them. I am a product of the same socio-economic background. But I am no longer like them. I'm a cop.
So where does that leave me with Penny?
He motioned to the bartender, so that he could sign the chit, and then he went back to his apartment.
TWENTY-THREE
