“I’ll meet you there,” Wohl said, and laid the microphone down.
Pekach, in full uniform, complete to motorcyclist’s boots and Sam Browne belt festooned with shiny cartridges, was leaning on a Highway blue-and-white on the cobblestones before Wohl’s garage apartment when Wohl got there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he was working the expressway with radar for speeders, Wohl thought, and was immediately sorry. That was both unkind and not true. What David Pekach was doing was what he would have done himself in the circumstances, making the point that Highway could expect to find the boss riding around at midnight, and the second, equally important point, that he was not sneaking around in an unmarked car, but in uniform and in a blue-and-white.
Wohl pulled the nose of the LTD up to the garage and got out.
“Let me put this away, David,” he called. “And then I’ll buy you a beer. Long night?”
“I thought it was a good idea to ride around,” Pekach said.
“So do I,” Wohl said, as he unlocked the doors and swung them open. “But it’s after midnight.”
He put the car in the garage, and then touched Pekach’s arm as he led him up the stairs to the apartment.
“You seen the papers?” Pekach said.
“No, should I have?”
“Yeah, I think so. I brought you the Bulletin and the Ledger.”
“Thank you,” Wohl said. “It wouldn’t take a minute to make coffee.”
“I’m coffeed out; beer would be fine.”
“Sit,” Wohl said, pointing to the couch beneath the oil painting of the voluptuous nude, and went to the refrigerator and came back with two bottles of Schlitz. “Glass?”
“This is fine,” Pekach said, “thank you.”
“Nothing on Elizabeth Woodham?” Wohl asked. “I expect I would have heard….”
David Pekach shook his head.
“Not a damn thing,” he said. “I was so frustrated I actually wrote a speeding ticket.”
“Really?” Wohl chuckled.
“Sonofabitch came by me at about eighty, as if I wasn’t there. I thought maybe he was drunk, so I pulled him over. He was sober. Just in a hurry.”
“It’s been a long time since I wrote a ticket,” Wohl said.
“When he saw he was going to get a ticket,” Pekach said, “he got nasty. He said he was surprised a captain would be out getting people for something like speeding when we had a serial rapist and a kidnapped woman on our hands.”
“Ouch,” Wohl said.
“I felt like belting the sonofabitch,” Pekach said. “That was just before you called.”
“I had a disturbing session just before I called you,” Wohl said. “With a psychiatrist. You’ve seen that kid hanging around Bustleton and Bowler? Payne?”
“He’s Dutch’s nephew or something?”
“Yeah. Well, his sister. I let her read the files and asked her for a profile.”
“And?”
“Not much that’ll help us find him, I’m afraid. But she said—the way she put it was ‘slippery slope’—that once somebody like this doer goes over the edge, commits the first act, starts to act out his fantasies, it’s a slippery slope.”
“Huh,” Pekach said.