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“No,” Patricia said.
“No?”
“I went looking for Matt last night. I couldn’t find him, but that girl was still there.”
“Maybe he was there and you couldn’t find him.”
“No. I asked Martha Peebles if she had seen Matt, and she said she had seen him leaving. And that was before I saw the girl. Her name is Susan Reynolds, by the way.”
“Apparently, no one knows where Susan Reynolds is. She apparently calls home when she’s away. She didn’t do that last night, and she didn’t answer the telephone at the Bellvue.”
“But someone thinks Matt knows? Is there a problem of some sort?”
“I don’t think so,” Payne said. “Do you think it would be too much to hope that Matt has the whole day free? That he might have time for nine holes?”
“What you could do is ask him,” Patricia said.
Peter Wohl had more than once told his mother, who kept raising the question, that the reason he had not married was that with the Jaguar to support, he obviously could not also afford to support a wife. His mother was not entirely sure that he was pulling her leg.
The Jaguar, on which he had spent a good deal of time and a great deal of money restoring, was an XK-120 Drop Head Coupe. It was now in better mechanical and cosmetic condition than when it had left the Jaguar factory in Coventry, England.
While he had never entered the Jaguar in any of the Concours d’Elegance competitions frequently held in Philadelphia and its suburbs, he attended many of them whenever he could find the time. He had disqualified his car from competition—very reluctantly—by adding to it what classic-car buffs call somewhat scornfully “an aftermarket accessory.”
The accessory was not noticed by most people, even those pausing to take long and admiring looks at the pristine, always gleaming roadster, but the antenna, approximately ten inches in height, mounted precisely in the center of the trunk lid, would not for long have escaped the eagle eyes of Concours d’Elegance judges. And once they had noticed that desecration of form and style, it wouldn’t t
ake them long to start snooping around the passenger compartment, where they would have found, carefully concealed beneath the dash, the police-band shortwave transceiver to which the antenna was connected.
When Peter Wohl carefully turned the Jaguar into Jeanes Street in Northwest Philadelphia, the gleaming black Cadillac limousine provided by the City of Philadelphia to transport its mayor, the Hon. Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, was parked before the comfortable row house in which Wohl had grown up.
Two police officers in plainclothes were in the process of removing insulated food containers from the trunk of the mayoral limousine and carrying them into the house. He recognized the police officers. One was Sergeant Charles Monahan, who was the mayor’s chauffeur, and the other was Lieutenant Jack Fellows, a tall, muscular black man who was officially the mayor’s bodyguard. It was also said of Jack Fellows that he was the police officer closest to the mayor, except, of course for Chief Inspector Augustus Wohl, Retired.
When Lieutenant Fellows saw the Jaguar, he smiled and mimed staggering under the weight of the insulated food container. Peter Wohl waved and smiled, and then, when he had pulled up behind the limousine, reached under the dashboard of the Jaguar and came up with a microphone.
“William One,” he said into it.
Regulations of the Philadelphia Police Department required, among thousands of other things, that senior police supervisors—such as the inspector who was the commanding officer of the Special Operations Division—be in contact with the police department twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year round.
Inasmuch as senior police supervisors required to be in constant contact are also furnished around-the-clock, radio-equipped police cars, most often unmarked, so that they may quickly respond to any call of duty, this usually poses no problems for the individuals concerned. Peter Wohl, however, was quite fond of his Jaguar, and determined to drive it when he thought of himself as off-duty.
So, with some pain, he found himself purchasing with his own funds the very expensive police radio, and with even greater pain, drilling a hole in the center of the Jaguar’s trunk lid to mount its antenna.
He justified the expense to himself by rationalizing that he had just been promoted to Inspector, and didn’t have a wife and children to support, and he tried hard not to think about the hole he had had to drill in the trunk lid.
“William One,” a female voice responded to his call.
“Until further notice, at Chief Wohl’s home,” Wohl said. “You have the number.”
“You and everybody else,” the female voice responded, with a chuckle.
The reference was not only to the mayor’s limousine (radio call sign “Mary One”) but also to the four other identical—except for color—new Plymouth sedans parked along Jeanes Street, the occupants of which were also required to make their whereabouts known around-the-clock to either Police Radio or Special Operations Radio and had done so.
Two of the cars were assigned to Chief Inspector of Detectives Matt Lowenstein and Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, who were widely acknowledged to be the most influential of the eight chief inspectors of the Philadelphia Police Department. The other two were assigned to Staff Inspector Mike Weisbach and Captain Michael Sabara.
Staff inspectors—the rank between captain and inspector—and captains are not normally provided with new automobiles. There is a sort of hand-me-down system in vehicle assignment. Deputy commissioners and chief inspectors get new unmarked vehicles every six months to a year. Their “used” vehicles are passed down to inspectors, who in turn pass their used cars down the line to staff inspectors and captains, who in turn pass their cars down to lieutenants and detectives. At this point, the cars have reached the end of their useful lives, and are disposed of.
Mayor Carlucci, who was a political power far beyond Philadelphia, had managed to obtain substantial grants of money from the federal government for the ACT Program.
ACT was the acronym for Anti-Crime Teams. It was a test, more or less, to see what effect saturating a high-crime area with extra police, the latest technology, and special assistance from the district attorney in the form of having assistant district attorneys with nothing to do but push ACT-arrested criminals through the criminal justice system would have, short and long term, on crime statistics.
