“Maybe somebody figures they paid their dues,” Lieutenant Michleson said. “Highway didn’t catch the critter who shot Captain Moffitt. They did.”
“When are they going?”
“They’re to report in the morning.”
Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, at thirty-five the youngest of the eighteen Staff Inspectors of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia, who was lying on his back, looked up from what he was doing and found himself staring up a woman’s shorts at her underpants. The underpants were red, and more or less transparent, and worn under a pair of white shorts.
He pushed himself, on his mechanic’s crawler, the rest of the way out from under the Jaguar XK-120, and sat up. There was grease on his face, and on his bare, smoothly muscled chest, but there was still something about him that suggested more the accountant, or the lawyer, than a mechanic. Or a police officer.
“Hi,” the wearer of the red underpants and white shorts said.
“Hi,” Peter Wohl said, noticing now that she was also wearing a man’s white shirt, the bottom rolled up and tied in a knot under her bosom, which served to bare her belly and put her not at all unattractive navel on display.
“I saw you working out the window,” the woman said, “and I figured you could use this.” She extended a bottle of Budweiser to him.
Peter Wohl noticed now that the hand holding the bottle had both an engagement and a wedding ring on the appropriate finger.
He took the beer.
“Thank you,” he said, and took a pull at the neck.
“Naomi,” the woman said. “Naomi Schneider.”
“Peter Wohl,” he said.
Naomi Schneider, it registered on Peter Wohl’s policeman’s mind, was a white female, approximately five feet six inches tall, approximately 130 pounds, approximately twenty-five years of age, with no significant distinguishing marks or scars.
“We’re in Two-B,” Naomi Schneider volunteered. “My husband and I, I mean. We moved in last week.”
“I saw the moving van,” Peter said.
Two-B was the apartment occupying the rear half of the second floor of what Peter thought of as the House. There were six apartments in the House, a World War I-era mansion on the 8800 block of Norwood Road in Chestnut Hill, which had been converted into what the owner, a corporation, called “luxury apartments.” The apartments in the rear of the building looked out on the four-car garage, and what had been the chauffeur’s quarters above it. Peter Wohl lived in the ex-chauffeur’s quarters, and to the often undisguised annoyance of the tenants of the House occupied two of the four garages.
It was possible, he thought, that Mr. Schneider had suggested to his wife that maybe if they made friends with the guy in the garage apartment with the Jaguar and two garages they could talk him out of one of them. There had been, he had noticed lately, a Porsche convertible coupe parked either on the street, or behind the house. They could probably make the argument that as fellow fine sports car aficionados he would appreciate that it was nearly criminal to have to leave a Porsche outside exposed to the elements.
But he dismissed that possible scenario as being less likely than the possibility that Mr. Schneider knew nothing of his wife’s gesture of friendliness, and that Naomi had something in mind that had nothing to do with their Porsche.
“My husband travels,” Naomi offered. “He’s in floor coverings. He goes as far west as Pittsburgh.”
Bingo!
“Oh, really?”
He now noticed that Naomi Schneider’s eyes were very dark. Dark-eyed women do not have blond hair. Naomi’s hair was, therefore, dyed blond. It was well done, no dark roots or anything, but obviously her hair was naturally black, or nearly so. Peter had a theory about that. Women with dark hair who peroxided it should not go out in the bright sunlight. Dyed blond hair might work inside, especially at night, but in the sunlight, it looked…dyed.
“He’s generally gone two or three nights a week,” Naomi offered. “What do you do?”
Peter elected to misunderstand her. “I just had the seats out,” he said. “I took them to a place downtown and had the foam rubber replaced, and now I’m putting them back in.”
Naomi stepped to the car and ran her fingers over the softly glowing red leather.
“Nice,” she said. “But I meant, what do
you do?”
“I work for the city,” Peter said. “I see a Porsche around. That yours?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said. “Mel, my husband, sometimes drives it on business, but there’s not much room in it for samples, so usually he takes the station wagon, and leaves me the Porsche.”