“Coughlin set it up?” Stennis asked.
Matdorf nodded. “Chief Coughlin and the boy’s father went through the Academy together. They were pretty tight. I know, because I was in the same class.”
His face expressionless, Matdorf met Stennis’s eyes for a long moment. Then he turned and walked off the firing line.
EIGHT
When Peter Wohl drove into the parking lot behind the Police Administration Building at Eighth and Arch, he pulled up to the gasoline pump and filled the Ford’s gas tank.
It took 19.7 gallons. He had heard somewhere that the Ford held 22 gallons. That meant that despite the gas gauge needle pointing below E, he really had been in no danger of running out of gas.
There was a moral to be drawn from that, he thought, as he drove around the parking lot, looking for a place to park. For yea, though I walk along the edge of the crumbling cliff, I seem to have an unnatural good luck that keeps me from falling off.
He pulled the Ford into one of the parking slots reserved for official visitors and got out, leaving the windows open a crack to let the heat out. There was, he rationalized, not much of a chance that even the most dedicated radio thief would attempt to practice his profession in the Roundhouse parking lot.
The Police Administration Building was universally known as the Roundhouse. It was not really round, but curved. The building and its interior walls, including even those of the elevators, were curved. It was, he thought, called the Roundhouse because that came easier to the tongue than “Curved House.”
He entered the building by the rear door. Inside, to the right, was a door leading to the Arraignment Room. The Roundhouse, in addition to housing the administrative offices of the Police Department on the upper floors, was also a jail. Prisoners were transported from the districts around the city to a basement facility where they were fingerprinted, photographed, and put in holding cells until it was their turn to face the magistrate, who would hear the complaint against them, and either turn them loose or decide what their bail, if any, should be.
There was sort of a small grandstand in which the family and friends of the accused could watch through a plate-glass wall as the accused was brought before the magistrate.
To the left was the door leading to the lobby of the Roundhouse. It was kept closed and locked. A solenoid operated by a Police Officer, usually a Corporal, sitting behind a thick, shatterproof window directly opposite the door, controlled the lock.
Most senior officers of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia, that is to say from Deputy Commissioners on down through the Captains, were known by sight to the cop controlling the door. Peter Wohl, as a Staff Inspector, was rather high in the police hierarchy. He was one of seventeen Staff Inspectors, a rank immediately superior to Captains, and immediately subordinate to Inspectors. On the rare occasions when Staff Inspector Wohl wore his uniform, it carried a gold oak leaf, identical to that of majors in the armed forces. Inspectors wore silver oak leaves, and Chief Inspectors a colonel’s eagle.
Senior officers were accustomed, when entering the Roundhouse, to having the solenoid to the locked door to the lobby buzzing when they reached it. When Peter Wohl reached it, it remained firmly locked. He looked over his shoulder at the cop, a middle-aged Corporal behind the shatterproof glass. The Corporal was looking at him, wearing an official, as opposed to genuine, smile, and gesturing Wohl over to him with his index finger.
Peter Wohl had been keeping count. This made it thirteen-six. Of the nineteen times he had tried to get through the door without showing his identification to the cop behind the shatterproof glass window, he had failed thirteen times; only six times had he been recognized and passed.
He walked to the window.
“Help you, sir?” the Corporal asked.
“I’m Inspector Wohl,” Peter said. The corporal looked surprised and then uncomfortable as Wohl extended the leather folder holding his badge (a round silver affair embossed with a representation of City Hall and the letters STAFF INSPECTOR) and identification for him to see.
“Sorry, Inspector,” the Corporal said.
“You’re doing your job,” Peter said, and smiled at him.
He went back to the door, and through it, and walked across the lobby to the elevators. Then he stopped and walked to a glass case mounted on the wall. It held the photographs and badges of Police Officers killed in the line of duty. There was a new one, of an officer in the uniform of a captain of Highway Patrol. Richard C. Moffitt.
Captain Dutch Moffitt and Peter Wohl had been friends as long as Wohl could remember. Not close friends—Dutch had been too flamboyant for that—but friends. They had known they could count on each other if there was a need; they exchanged favors. Wohl thought that the last favor he had done Dutch was to convince Jeannie, the Widow Moffitt, that Dutch had business with the blonde Dutch had been with in the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard when he had been fatally wounded by a junkie holding the place up.
Wohl turned and entered the elevator and pushed the button for the third floor, the right wing of which was more or less the Executive Suite of the Roundhouse. It housed the offices of the Commissioner, the Deputy Commissioners, and some of the more important Chief Inspectors, including that of Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin.
The corridor to that portion of the building was guarded by a natty man in his early thirties, either a plainclothesman or a detective, sitting at a desk. He knew Wohl.
“Hello, Inspector, how are you?”
“About to melt,” Wohl said, smiling at him. “I heard some of the cops in Florida can wear shorts. You think I could talk Chief Coughlin into permitting that?”
“I don’t have the legs for that,” the cop said, as Wohl went down the corridor.
Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin shared an outer office with Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernick, separated from it by the Commissioner’s Conference Room.
Sergeant Tom Lenihan sat at a desk to the left. A pleasant-faced, very large man, his hair was just starting to thin. He was in his shirtsleeves; a snub-nosed revolver could be seen on his hip.
“Well, I’m glad you could fit the Chief into your busy schedule,” Lenihan said, with a smile. “I know he’ll be pleased.”