The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

Then he picked up the telephone.

“Inspector Wohl.”

“Matt Lowenstein, Peter. Is there some reason you can’t meet me at Tommy Callis’s office at eight?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep it under your hat,” Lowenstein said, and hung up.

Wohl replaced the handset in its cradle, but, deep in thought, kept his hand on it for a moment. Thomas J. Callis was the district attorney. He could think of no business he—that is to say Special Operations, including Highway Patrol—had with the district attorney. If something serious had happened, he would have been informed of it.

A wild hair appeared—Tony Harris was on a spectacular bender; he could have run into a school bus or something—and was immediately discarded. He would have heard of that too, as quickly as he had learned that they had held Tony overnight in the 9th District holding cell.

He shrugged, and dialed the Special Operations number. He told the lieutenant who answered that he would be in late. He did not say how late or where he would be. Lowenstein had told him to keep the meeting at the DA’s office under his hat.

He looked at his watch, then shook his head. There was no time to go somewhere for breakfast.

He returned to the kitchen, put a pot of water on the stove to boil, and got eggs and bread from the refrigerator. He decided he would not make coffee, because that would mean having to clean the pot, technically a brewer his mother had given him for Christmas. It made marvelous coffee, but unless it was cleaned almost immediately, it turned the coffee grounds in its works to concrete and required a major overhaul.

When the water boiled, he added vinegar, then, with a wooden spoon, swirled the water around until it formed a whirlpool. Then, expertly, he cracked two eggs with one hand and dropped them into the water. By the time they were done, the toaster had popped up. He took the eggs from the water with a slotted spoon, put them onto the toast, and moved to his small kitchen table. Time elapsed, beginning to end: ten minutes.

“If I only had a cup of coffee,” he announced aloud, “all would be right in my world.”

Then it occurred to him that if he was to meet with the district attorney, a suit would be in order, not the blazer and slacks he had intended to wear. And if he wore a suit, shoes, not loafers, would be in order.

The whole goddamn shoe-shining business, including the polish-stained left hand, had been a waste of time and effort.

He returned to the sink, and washed his hands with a bar of miracle abrasive soap that was guaranteed to remove all kinds of stain. The manufacturers had apparently never dealt with cordovan shoe polish.

Or, he thought cynically, they knew damned well that very few people would wrap up a fifty-cent bar of soap and mail it off to Dubuque, Iowa, or wherever, for a refund. Particularly since they wouldn’t have the address in Iowa, having thrown the wrapping away when they took the soap out.

He took his pale blue shirt off, replaced it with a white one, and put on a dark gray, pin-striped suit.

“Oh, you are a handsome devil, Peter Wohl,” he said as he checked himself in the mirror. “I wonder why you don’t get laid more than you do?”

He arrived downtown at the district attorney’s office with five minutes to spare, having exceeded the speed limit over almost all of the route.

As he looked at his watch, he thought the hour was odd. He didn’t think the district attorney was usually about the people’s business at eight A.M. Had Callis summoned Lowenstein at this time? Probably not. If Callis had wanted to see them, somebody would have called him too. The odds were that Lowenstein had called Callis and told him he had to see him as soon as possible, and then when Callis had agreed, Lowenstein had called him.

Why?

Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, Detective Joe D’Amata of Homicide, and another man, obviously a detective, were in Callis’s outer office when Peter walked in.

“I was getting worried about you,” Lowenstein greeted him.

“Good morning, Chief, I’m not late, am I?”

“Just barely,” Lowenstein said. “You know Jerry Pelosi, don’t you?”

“Sure. How are you, Pelosi?”

They shook hands.

The mystery is over. Pelosi’s the Central Detectives guy working the Goldblatt job. This is about that.

There was no chance to ask Chief Lowenstein. A large, silver-haired, ruddy-faced man, the Hon. Thomas J. Callis, district attorney of Philadelphia, swept into his outer office, the door held open for him by Philadelphia County Detective W.H. Mahoney. The district attorney had in effect his own detective bureau. Most of them, like Mahoney, were ex-Philadelphia Police Department officers. A detective bodyguard-driver was one of the perks of being the district attorney.

“Hello, Matt,” Callis said. “How the hell are you?”