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"Then leave the bag," Victor said.

"I've already walked out of there once," Charles said. "He might remember, especially if I was carrying a bag the second time. I'm not sure what I'll do. Whatever seems best."

"And if you do decide to drive, what do you want me to do?"

"First, you tell me which way I turn to get to the airport," Charles said.

"Left, then the next left, then the next right. That'll put you on South Broad Street. You just stay on it. There'll be signs."

"If you see me drive out, follow me. As soon as you can, without attracting attention, get in front of me and I'll follow you."

" Okay," Victor said.

Victor then doubled back, driving slowly through the h

eavy traffic until he was close to the Penn Services parking garage. Then he pulled to the curb and Charles got out. He opened the rear door, took out his carry-on bag, held it over his shoulder, and crossed the street to the pedestrian entrance to the garage, where he went through the one-way gate.

There is a basic flaw in my brilliant planning, he thought as he walked up the stairs to the fourth floor. Lover Boy may send Jowls the Bellboy to fetch his Caddy.

When he reached the fourth floor, he saw that there were windows from which he more than likely could look down at the street and see who was coming for the car.

If Jowls comes for it, I'll just have to walk down the stairs and get to the hotel before Jowls does, or at least before Lover Boy leaves the bar to get into the car, and follow him wherever he goes next. If the attendant remembers me, so what? Nothing will have happened here, anyway.

Charles took his handkerchief out and wiped the concrete windowsill clean, so that he wouldn't soil his Burberry, and then settled down to wait.

****

Four young men, one much younger than the other three, each with a revolver concealed somewhere under their neat business suits, stood around a filing cabinet in the outer office of the Police Commissioner of the City of Philadelphia, drinking coffee from plastic cups and trying to stay out of the way.

Two of them were sergeants, one was a detective, and one-the young one-was an officer, the lowest rank in the police hierarchy.

Both sergeants and the detective were, despite their relative youth, veteran police officers. One of the sergeants had taken and passed the examination for promotion to lieutenant; the detective had taken and passed the examination for sergeant; and both were waiting for their promotions to take effect. The other sergeant had two months before being promoted from detective. The young man had not been on the job long enough even to be eligible to take the examination for promotion to either corporal or detective, which were comparable ranks, and the first step up from the bottom.

They all had comparable jobs, however. They all worked, as a sort of a police equivalent to a military aide-de-camp, for very senior police supervisors. Their bosses had all been summoned to a meeting with the Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner of Operations, and for the past hour had been sitting around the long, wooden table in the Commissioner's conference room.

Tom Lenihan, the sergeant who was waiting for his promotion to lieutenant to become effective, was carried on the books as "driver" to Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, generally acknowledged to be the most influential of the fourteen Chief Inspectors in the Department, and reliably rumored as about to become a Deputy Commissioner.

Sergeant Stanley M. Lipshultz, who had gone to night school at Temple, had passed the bar exam a week before his promotion to sergeant. He was "driver" to Chief Inspector Robert Fisher, who headed the Special Investigations Division of the Police Department.

Detective Harry McElroy, soon to be a sergeant, was carried on the books as "driver" to Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, who was in charge of all the detectives in the Philadelphia Police Department.

Officer Matthew W. Payne, a tall, muscular young man who looked, dressed, and spoke very much like the University of Pennsylvania fraternity man he had been six months before, was carried on the manning charts as Special Assistant to Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, who was Commanding Officer of the newly formed Special Operations Division.

It was highly unusual for a rookie to be assigned anywhere but a district, most often as one of the two officers assigned to a radio patrol wagon, much less to work directly, and in civilian clothes, for a senior supervisor. There were several reasons for Officer Matthew Payne's out-of-the-ordinary assignment as Special Assistant to Staff Inspector Wohl, but primary among them was that Mayor Jerry Carlucci had so identified his role in the Department to the press.

What Mayor Jerry Carlucci had to say about what went on within the Police Department had about as much effect as if Moses had carried it down from a mountaintop chiseled on stone tablets.

The mayor had spent most of his life as a cop, rising from police officer to police commissioner before running for mayor. He held the not unreasonable views that one, he knew as much about what was good for, or bad for, the Police Department as anybody in it; and two, he was the mayor and as such was charged with the efficient administration of all functions of the city government. It wasn't, as he had told just about all the senior police supervisors at one time or another, that he "was some goddamned politician butting in on something he didn't know anything about."

Officer Payne had been assigned, right out of the Police Academy, to Special Operations before his status as Special Assistant had been made official by Mayor Carlucci, and it could be reasonably argued that that assignment had been blatant nepotism.

The assignment had been arranged by Chief Inspector Coughlin, and there had been a lot of talk about that in the upper echelons of the Department. Officer Payne had grown up calling Chief Inspector Coughlin Uncle Denny, although they were not related by blood or marriage.

Chief Inspector Coughlin had gone through the Police Academy with a young Korean War veteran named John Xavier Moffitt. They had become best friends. As a young sergeant, while answering a silent burglar alarm at a West Philadelphia service station, John X. Moffitt had been shot to death.

Two months later his widow had been delivered of a son. A year after that she had remarried, and her husband had adopted Sergeant Moffitt's son as his own. Denny Coughlin, who had never married, had kept in touch with his best friend's widow and her son over the years, serving as sort of a bridge between the boy and his natural father's family.

The bridge had crossed a stormy chasm. Johnny Moffitt's mother, Gertrude Moffitt, whose late husband had been a retired police captain, was known as Mother Moffitt. She was a devout Irish Catholic and had never forgiven Patricia Sullivan Moffitt, Johnny's widow, for what she considered a sinful betrayal of her heritage. Not only had she married out of the church, to an Episcopalian, a wealthy, socially prominent attorney, but she had abandoned the Holy Mother Church herself and acquiesced to the rearing of her son as a Protestant, and even his education at Philadelphia's Episcopal Academy.