The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

She sat on the edge of the bed, keeping the towel in place.

I was right. Thrice, or even twice and a half, is a more than a sufficiency, it is a surfeit.

“I haven’t heard the elevator in a while. I guess they’re all gone. Would you like me to take you home?”

“I have a car.”

“Where?”

“In the garage in the basement.”

“Parked right next to the elevator?”

“How did you know that?”

“You’re the Cadillac in my parking spot. Spots. The gods—the Greco-Roman ones, who understand this sort of thing—obviously wanted us to get together.”

“I don’t know about that, but I do know what got us together. It’s spelled G I N. As in, I should know better than to drink martinis.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Yes, of course, I’m sorry,” Helene said. “I expect you hear this from all your married ladies, but in my case it’s true. I normally don’t do things like this.”

“Well, I’m glad you made an exception for me,” Matt said. “And just for the record, you’re my first married lady. I would like to thank you for being gentle with me, it being my first time.”

She laughed, and then grew serious.

“I would like to say the same thing,” she said. “But you’re the third. And I decided just ninety seconds ago, the last.”

“I didn’t measure up?”

“That’s the trouble. You—left nothing to be desired. Except more of you, and that’s obviously out of the question.”

“Why is it obviously out of the question?”

She got up suddenly from the bed, dropped the towel, and walked out of the bedroom, snapping, “I’m married,” angrily over her shoulder.

She’ll be back, Matt thought confidently. She will at least say good-bye.

But she did not come back, so he picked up the towel she had dropped and put it around his waist and went looking for her.

She was gone.

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nbsp; I don’t even know what her last name is.

During his military service Staff Inspector Peter F. Wohl had learned that rubber gloves were what smart people wore when applying cordovan shoe polish to foot wear, otherwise you walked around for a couple of days with brown fingernails. When the last pair had worn out, the only rubber gloves he could find in the Acme Supermarket had been the ones he now wore, which were flaming pink in color and decorated in a floral pattern. At the time, their function, not their appearance, had seemed to be the criteria.

Now he was not so sure. Mrs. Samantha Stoddard, the 230-pound, fifty-two-year-old Afro-American grandmother who cleaned the apartment two times a week had found them under the sink and offered the unsolicited opinion that he better hope nobody but her ever saw them. “I know you like girls, Peter. Other people might wonder.”

Mrs. Stoddard felt at ease calling Staff Inspector Wohl by his Christian name because she had been doing so since he was four years old. She still spent the balance of the week working for his mother.

When the telephone rang, at ten past seven in the morning, Wohl was standing at his kitchen sink, wearing his pink rubber gloves, his underwear, an unbuttoned shirt, and his socks, examining with satisfaction the shine he had just caused to appear on a pair of loafers. At five past seven, as he prepared to slip his feet into them, he had discovered that they were in desperate need of a shine.

From the sound of the bell, he could tell that it was his official telephone ringing. He headed for the bedroom, hurriedly removing the flaming pink rubber gloves as he did so. The left came off with no difficulty; the right stuck. Before he got it off, he had cordovan shoe polish all over his left hand.

“Shit!” he said aloud, adding aloud. “Why do I think this is going to be one of those days?”