Page 183

will have to wait. My lover calls.”

“God, you’re as bad at Matt.”

“If this is about him, I don’t have anything to tell you. I just finished talking to Jack Matthews—I was talking to him when you called—and he said that as of half past seven this morning, Matt had nothing to report.”

“It’s not about Matt. Can you come right now?”

“You sound serious. Yeah. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Please, then, Peter.”

“No farewell declaration of affection?”

“I’ll be in my office.”

“I guess not,” Peter said. “But nevertheless, I will come instantly, borne on the wings of love.”

“Oh, God,” Amy said and hung up.

Inspector Wohl swung his feet, clad in highly polished loafers, off his desk and left his office. Officer O’Mara stood up at his desk.

“Until further notice, I’ll be with Dr. Payne at University Hospital,” Wohl told him. “You have her number. Try to keep everybody in Special Operations from knowing that.”

“Yes, sir. You’re unavailable.”

“I didn’t say that, Tommy,” Wohl said patiently. “Just use a little discretion. Don’t tell everybody who calls where I am.”

“Yes, sir.”

Detective Harry Cronin of South Detectives, who had been on the job for nineteen years, and a detective for thirteen, cleverly deduced it was going to be a bad day when he went into his kitchen at approximately 10:30 A.M. and found the kitchen table bare, not even a tablecloth.

Normally, before she went to work, Mrs. Cynthia Koontz Cronin, to whom Detective Cronin had been married for eighteen years, set the table for his breakfast. Patty was a technician in the Pathological Laboratory of Temple University Hospital, and left the house at half past six or so.

Normally, the Bulletin would be neatly folded beside the table setting, there would be a flower in a little vase Patty had bought at an auction house on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, and there would usually be a little note informing him there was scrapple, or Taylor ham, in the fridge.

Detective Cronin was more than a little hungover—when he’d gone off the job at midnight the night before, he had stopped off at the Red Rooster bar, run into Sergeant Aloysius J. Sutton of East Detectives, and had had several more belts than had been his intention—and further cleverly deduced that his coming home half in the bag probably had something to with the bare kitchen table.

He opened the refrigerator door. The one thing he decided he could not face right now was taking an unborn chicken from its shell and watch it sizzle in a frying pan. Neither did he completely trust himself to slice a piece of Taylor ham from its roll without taking part of a finger at the same time.

He reached for a bottle of Ortlieb’s. It would settle his stomach.

He carried it into his living room and looked around for the Bulletin. It was nowhere around, which he deduced indicated that Patty was really pissed.

What the hell, he decided, he’d lie on the couch and see what was on the tube, and get up around noon, go get a cheese steak or something for lunch, and return to the house prepared to apologize to Patty for having run into Sergeant Sutton and having maybe one more than he should have.

“Good morning,” Peter said when Amy waved him into her comfortably furnished office.

The sunlight coming into her office from behind her showed him that beneath her white nylon medical smock, Amelia A. Payne, M.D., was wearing only a skirt and underwear.

The psychiatric wing of University Hospital was often overheated, and this was not the first time he had noticed this was her means of dealing with it.

He found this erotically stimulating, but from the look on her face he knew that he should not mention it.

“Good morning,” she said and did not get up from her desk.

“Why do I suspect that you’re not going to throw yourself in my arms?”

“Because I’m not. Peter, this is a hospital.”