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“Where’s Lieutenant DelRaye?” he asked.

“Ground-floor apartment,” the uniform told him.

Jerome Nelson was lying on his stomach on an outsize bed in his mirrored bedroom. He was, save for a sleeveless undershirt, naked. There were more wounds than Wohl could conveniently count on his back, his buttocks and legs, and the bed was soaked with darkening blood. There was the sweet smell of blood in the air, competing with the smell of perfume.

Lieutenant Edward M. DelRaye, a large, balding man who showed vestiges of having been a very handsome man in his twenties and thirties, was standing with his arms folded on his chest, watching a photographer from the crime lab taking pictures of the body with a 35-mm camera.

“DelRaye,” Wohl said, and DelRaye turned around and looked at him. He didn’t say anything.

“Radio relay my message to you?” Wohl asked.

DelRaye nodded. “What’s going on, Inspector?” he asked.

Edward M. DelRaye had been a detective when Peter Wohl had entered the academy. He had not liked Peter Wohl from the time they had met, when Wohl had been a plainclothes patrolman in Civil Disobedience. He had still been a detective when Wohl made corporal, equivalent in rank to a detective, and they’d had a couple of run-ins, jurisdictional disputes, when Wohl had been a Highway Patrol corporal and then sergeant. When Wohl had been assigned to Internal Affairs, DelRaye had run off at the mouth more than once about how nice it must be to have a Chief Inspector for a father, who could arrange your career for you, see that you got good jobs.

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DelRaye had made sergeant about the time Peter Wohl had made captain, and had only recently been promoted to lieutenant, long after Wohl had become a staff inspector. He was a good detective, from what Wohl had heard, and which seemed to be proved by his long-time assignment to Homicide, but he was also a loud-mouthed, crude sonofabitch whom Wohl disliked, and whom he avoided whenever possible.

“You want to tell me what you have, Lieutenant?” Wohl said.

“Somebody carved up the fag,” DelRaye said, jerking his thumb toward the bed.

“I’m interested in the witness,” Wohl said.

“Are you really, now?”

“Take it from the top, DelRaye,” Wohl said, evenly, but coldly.

“Well, in case you didn’t know, her name is Louise Dutton. The same one that was with Dutch Moffitt this afternoon when he got blown away. She come home from work about half past twelve, quarter to one, and found the door, his door, open. So she went in, and found the faggot in here, and called it in. I was up, so when the radio notified us, I rolled on it. I heard what she had to say, and told her I was going to take her to the Roundhouse for her statement, and to let her look at some mug shots, and she told me to go fuck myself, she wasn’t going anywhere.”

“You were, I’m sure, your usual tactful, charming self, DelRaye,” Wohl said.

“I don’t like drunken women, and I especially don’t like dirty-mouthed ones,” DelRaye said.

“Then what happened?” Wohl asked.

“I turned around, and she was gone, and the Sixth District cop in the foyer, or the lobby, outside the apartment, said she went up in the elevator. So I went upstairs, and knocked on her door, and told her who I was, and she told me to go fuck myself again. Then I called for a wagon. I was going to have her door forced. She’s acting like she could be the doer, Wohl.”

That’s bullshit, DelRaye. You know as well as I do she didn’t do it. But there is now a Staff Inspector on the scene, who knows that while you can batter down the door of a suspect, you can’t go around busting open witnesses’ doors without a better reason than she told you to go fuck yourself.

“You really think she could be the doer, Lieutenant?” Wohl asked, dryly sarcastic, and then, without waiting for an answer, asked, “She’s still upstairs? You didn’t enter her apartment?”

“I got your message, Inspector,” DelRaye said. “She can’t go anywhere. I got two cops trying to talk sense to her through the door.”

“I know her,” Wohl said. “I’ll try to talk to her.”

“I know,” DelRaye said. “When she’s not screaming at me to go fuck myself, she’s screaming that she demands to see Inspector Wohl.”

“Really?” Wohl asked, surprised.

“Her exact words were, ‘Get that sonofabitch down here!’ “ DelRaye said. “Don’t you think you ought to tell me what’s going on with you and her?”

“I was in on the assist when Dutch Moffitt was shot,” Wohl said. “When the commissioner heard that the eyewitness was Miss Dutton, and who she was, he decided it was in the best interest of the department to treat her with kid gloves, and since I was there, told me to take care of it.”

“Something going on between her and Dutch? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m saying that when a woman goes on television twice a day, it doesn’t hurt to have her think kindly of the police department,” Wohl said.