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Walter Davis, thinking, Oh, God, homemade Dago Red! took a swallow. It was surprisingly good.

“You’re almost certainly drinking an alcoholic beverage on which the applicable federal tax has not been paid,” Wohl said. “Does that bother you?”

“Not a damned bit, to tell you the truth,” Davis said. He stood up, called “Frankie” and then “Salud!” and then sat down, looking at Wohl, obviously pleased with himself.

Wohl chuckled, then looked at Matt Payne.

“Matt, when we get back to the office, round up everything in my files on the Nelson murder case. Make a copy of everything. Then go to Homicide and do the same thing. Then find Detective Harris and photocopy everything he has. Have it ready for me in the morning.”

“Yes, sir,” Matt Payne said.

“I’ll take a look at it, see if anything is missing, and then you can take it to the FBI. Soon enough for you, Walter?”

“Thank you, Peter. ‘Harris,’ you said, was the detective on the job? Any chance that I could talk to him?”

“You, or one of your people?”

“Actually, I was thinking of one of my people.”

“Tony Harris is the exception to the rule that most detectives really would rather be FBI agents, Walter. I don’t think that would be very productive.”

“I thought everybody loved us,” Davis said.

“We all do. Isn’t that so, Officer Payne?”

“Yes, sir. We all love the FBI.”

The waitress with the beehive hairdo delivered their meal.

The veal was, Walter Davis was willing to admit, better than the veal in Ristorante Alfredo. And the homemade Chianti was nicer than some of the dry red wine he’d had at twenty-five dollars a bottle in Ristorante Alfredo.

But he knew that neither the quality of the food nor its considerably cheaper than Ristorante Alfredo prices were the reasons Peter Wohl had brought him here for lunch.

SIX

Under the special agent in charge (the “SAC”) of the Philadelphia Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were three divisions, Criminal Affairs, Counterintelligence, and Administration. Each division was under an assistant agent in charge, called an “A-SAC.”

It was SAC Davis’s custom to hold two daily Senior Staff Conferences, called “SSC”s, each business day, one first thing in the morning, and the other at four P.M. Participation at the SSCs was limited to the SAC and the three A-SACs. The conferences were informal. No stenographic record was made of them, except when the SAC could not be present, and one of the A-SACs was standing in for him. The SAC naturally wanted to know what he had missed, so a steno was called in to make a written record.

If one of the A-SACs could not make a SSC, one of his assistants, customarily, but not always, the most senior special agent in that division, would be appointed to stand in for him.

This was very common. The A-SACs were busy men, and it was often inconvenient for them to make both daily SSCs, although they generally tried to make at least one of them, and took especial pains not to miss two days’ SSCs in a row.

B

ut it was a rare thing for SAC Davis to find, as he did when he returned to his office from lunch with Staff Inspector Wohl and Officer Payne, all three A-SACs waiting outside his office for the afternoon SSC.

He was pleased. In addition to whatever else would be discussed, he intended to discuss the upcoming trials of Clifford Wallis and Delmore Travis. The political aspects were mind-boggling. Washington was going to be breathing down his neck on this one, and not only the senior hierarchy of the FBI, joining which was one of SAC Davis’s most fond dreams, but the higher—highest—echelons of the Department of Justice.

If he handled this well, it would reflect well upon him. If he dropped the ball (or someone he was responsible for dropped it), there would be no chance whatever that he would be transferred to Washington and named a deputy inspector. And from what he had seen of the situation, there was a saber-toothed tiger behind every filing cabinet, just waiting to leap and bite off somebody’s ass.

This sort of a case was the sort of thing one should discuss with the A-SACs personally, not with one of their subordinates. With all three of the A-SACs present at this SSC, it would not be necessary to call a special SSC.

Davis waited until he had heard all the reports of what was going on in the Criminal, Administrative, and Counterintelligence Divisions, and made the few decisions necessary before getting into what he was now thinking of as the “Wallis/Travis Sticky Ball of Wax.”

Then he gave a report, the essentials and the flavor, of both the personal conference he had had in Washington the day before and the two telephone calls he had had that morning before going off to lunch with Staff Inspector Wohl and his straight man.

“I had lunch today with Staff Inspector Wohl of the Philadelphia Police Department,” he announced. “Everybody know who Wohl is?”