“I don’t suppose,” Peter agreed amiably, “that there is much room in a Porsche for floor-covering samples.”
“This is nice,” Naomi said, now stroking the Jaguar’s glistening fender with the balls of her fingers. “New, huh?”
Peter Wohl laughed. “It’s older than you are.”
She looked at him in confusion. “It looks new,” she said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Peter said. “But that left Coventry in February 1950.”
“Left where?”
“Coventry. England. Where they make them.”
“But it looks new.”
“Thank you again.”
“I’ll be damned,” Naomi said. She looked down at Peter and smiled. “You hear what happened last night?”
“No.”
“About the woman who was raped? Practically right around the corner?”
“No,” Peter Wohl replied truthfully. He had spent the previous day, and the day before that, the whole damned weekend, in Harrisburg, the state capital, in a hot and dusty records depository.
“He forced her into his van, did—you know—to her, and then threw her out of the van in Fairmount Park. It was on the radio, KYW.”
“I hadn’t heard.”
“With Mel gone so much, it scares me.”
“Did they say, on the radio, if it was the same man they think has done it before?” Peter asked.
“They said they think it is,” Naomi said.
Interesting, Peter Wohl thought, if it is the same guy, it’s the first time he’s done that.
“Naked,” Naomi said.
“Excuse me?”
“He threw her out of the van naked. Without any clothes.”
Well, that would tie in with the humiliation that seems to be part of this weirdo’s modus operandi.
There was the sound of tires moving across the cobblestones in front of the garages, and Peter’s ears picked up the slightly different pitch of an engine with its idle speed set high; the sound of an engine in a police car.
He hoisted himself off the mechanic’s crawler. A Highway Patrol car pulled to a stop. The door opened, and a sergeant in the special Highway Patrol uniform (crushed crown cap, Sam Browne belt, and motorcyclist’s breeches and puttees) got out. Wohl recognized him. His name was Sergeant Alexander W. Dannelly. Wohl remembered the name because the last time he had seen him was the day Captain Dutch Moffitt had been shot to death at the Waikiki Diner, over on Roosevelt Boulevard. Sergeant Dannelly had been the first to respond to the call, “Officer needs assistance; shots fired; officer wounded.”
And Dannelly recognized him, too. He smiled, and started to wave, and then caught the look in Wohl’s eyes and the barely perceptible shake of his head, and stopped.
“Can I help you, Officer?” Wohl asked.
“I’m looking for a man named Wohl,” Sergeant Dannelly said.
“I’m Wohl.”
“May I speak to you a moment, sir?”