Page 30

“Where can we find a place to park?” Wohl asked.

“Going in Shank & Evelyn’s?”

“Yeah.”

“You got a parking place,” Sergeant McGovern said. He raised his eyes to Matt Payne. “Back it up, son, and I’ll get out of your way.”

“Good to see you, Pat.”

“Yeah, you too,” McGovern said as he started to get back in his car. “Say hello to your old man. He all right?”

Davis remembered that Wohl’s father was a retired chief inspector.

“If anything, meaner.”

“Impossible,” McGovern said, and then got his car moving.

Payne moved into the space vacated, and Davis and Wohl got out of the car.

“Peter,” Davis said quietly, touching Wohl’s arm. “Could we send your driver someplace else to eat?”

“Is this personal, Walter?”

Davis hesitated a moment

before replying.

“No. Not really.”

“He’s good with details,” Wohl said, nodding toward Payne.

Which translates, Davis thought, a little annoyed, that Wohl’s straight man doesn’t go somewhere else to eat.

Shank & Evelyn’s Restaurant was worse for Davis’s purposes than he could have imagined possible. The whole place was smaller than his office, and consisted of a grill, a counter with ten or twelve stools, and half a dozen tables, at the largest of which, provided they kept their elbows at their sides, four people could eat.

What I should have done, Davis thought, annoyed, was simply get in my car and drive out to Wohl’s office at Bustleton and Bowler. This is a disaster.

They found seats at a tiny table littered with the debris of the previous customers’ meals. A massively bosomed waitress with a beehive hairdo first cleaned the table and then took their orders. Wohl ordered the veal, and somewhat reluctantly, Davis ordered the same.

“Sausage, hot sausage, and peppers, please, extra peppers,” Matt Payne said.

“Frankie around?” Wohl asked her.

“In the back,” the waitress said.

Wohl nodded.

A minute or so later, a very large, sweating man in a chef’s hat, T-shirt, and white trousers came up to the table, offering his hand.

“How the hell are you, Peter?”

“Frankie, say hello to Walter Davis and Matt Payne,” Wohl said. “This is Frankie Perri.”

Frankie gave them a callused ham of a hand.

“Matt works for me,” Wohl went on. “Walter runs the FBI. He said he’d never met a Mob guy, so I said I could fix that and brought him here.”

“He’s kidding, I hope you know,” Frankie said.