Page 81

“Well, what do you need?”

“I’m going from here to see Nelson,” Wohl said. “I’d like to talk to the detective who has the job.”

“Sure.”

“If it’s all right with you, Henry, I’d like to ask him to tell me when they need Miss Dutton in here. I don’t want anybody saying, ‘Get in the car, honey.’ “

“Tony Harris got the Nelson job,” Quaire said.

“I heard. Good man, from what I hear,” Wohl said.

“Tony Harris is at the Nelson apartment,” Quaire said. “You want me to get him in here?”

“I really have to talk to him before I see Nelson. Maybe the thing for me to do is meet him over there.”

“You want to do that, I’ll call him and tell him to wait for you.”

“Please, Henry,” Wohl said.

****

Staff Inspector Peter Wohl’s first reaction when he saw Detective Anthony C. Harris was anger.

Tony Harris was in his early thirties, a slight and wiry man already starting to bald, the smooth youthful skin on his face already starting to crease and line. He was wearing a shirt and tie, and a sports coat and slacks that had probably come from the racks of some discount clothier several years before.

It was a pleasant spring day and Detective Harris had elected to wait for Inspector Wohl outside the crime scene, which had already begun to stink sickeningly of blood, on the street. Specifically, when Wohl passed through the Stockton Place barrier, Harris was sitting on the hood of Wohl’s Jaguar XK-120, which was parked, top down, where he had left it last night.

There were twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer on the XK-120’s hood, applied, one coat at a time, with a laborious rubdown between each coat, by Peter Wohl himself. Only an ignorant asshole, with no appreciation of the finer things of life, would plant his gritty ass on twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer.

Wohl screeched to a stop by the Jaguar, leaned across the seat, rolled down the window, and returned Tony Harris’s pleasant smile by snapping, “Get your ass off my hood!”

Then he drove twenty feet farther down the cobble-stoned street and stopped the LTD.

Looking a little sheepish, Harris walked to the LTD as Wohl got out.

“Jesus Christ, Tony!” Wohl fumed, still angry. “There’s twenty coats of lacquer on there!”

“Sorry,” Harris mumbled. “I didn’t think.”

“Obviously,” Wohl said.

Wohl’s anger died as quickly as it had flared. Tony Harris looked beat and worn down. Without consciously calling it up from his memory, what Wohl knew about Harris came into his mind. First came the important impression he had filed away, which was that Harris was a good cop, more important, one of the brighter Homicide detectives. Then he remembered hearing that after nine years of marriage and four kids, Mrs. Harris had ca

ught Tony straying from the marital bed and run him before a judge who had awarded her both ears and the tail.

If I were Tony Harris, Peter Wohl thought, who has to put in sixty, sixty-five hours a week to make enough money to pay child support with enough left over to pay for an “efficiency” apartment for myself, and some staff inspector, no older than I am, pulls rank and jumps my ass for scratching the precious paint on his precious sports car, I would be pissed. And rightly so.

“Hell, Tony, I’m sorry,” Wohl said, offering his hand. “But I painted that sonofabitch by myself. All twenty coats.”

“I was wrong,” Harris said. “I just wasn’t thinking. Or I wasn’t thinking about a paint job.”

“I guess what I was really pissed about was my own stupidity,” Wohl said. “I know better than using my own car on the job. Right after I saw you, I asked myself, ‘Christ, what if it had rained last night?’ “

“You took that TV woman out through the basement in her own car?” Harris asked.

“Yeah.”

“It took DelRaye some time to figure that out,” Harris said. “Talk about pissed.”