“What are they doing over there?” Wohl asked.
“I suppose Washington thought that was the best place to go; Central Detectives will want to get some statements, put it all together. And the lab probably wants a look at the Highway car they hit with the bottle. Maybe pick up another car or two to escort them to the Detention Center.”
If you were thinking clearly, Peter Wohl, you would not have had to ask that dumb question.
“I think I’d better get over there,” Wohl said.
Coughlin nodded.
“Peter, I called Mike Sabara and told him I thought it would be a good idea if he sent a Highway car over to Frankford Hospital. I hope that’s all right with you.”
“Thank you. That saves me making a phone call,” Wohl said. He got to his feet. “Mrs. Payne,” he began, and then couldn’t think of what to say next.
She looked up at him and smiled.
“Peter—you don’t mind if I call you Peter?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Peter, as I walked over here with Denny, I thought that I couldn’t ask for anyone better than you and Denny to look out for Matt.”
“Absolutely,” Brewster C. Payne agreed.
“Patty, we’ll take care of Matt, don’t you worry about that,” Denny Coughlin said emotionally.
“Sit down, Peter,” Brewster C. Payne said, “and finish your drink. I’m sure that everything that should be done has been done.”
“He’s right. Sit down, Peter,” Chief Coughlin chimed in. “Right now, both of us would be in the way at the Roundhouse.”
Wohl looked at both of the men, and then at Patricia Payne, and then sat down.
The Police Department records concerning Captain David R. Pekach stated that he was a bachelor, who lived in a Park Drive Manor apartment. Captain Pekach had last spent the night in his apartment approximately five months before, that is to say four days after he had made the acquaintance of Miss Martha Peebles, who resided in a turn-of-the-century mansion set on five acres at 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill.
Miss Peebles, who had a certain influence in Philadelphia (according to Business Week magazine, her father had owned outright 11.7 percent of the anthracite coal reserves of the United States, among other holdings, all of which he had left to his sole and beloved daughter), had been burglarized several times.
When the police had not only been unable to apprehend the burglar, but also to prevent additional burglaries, she had complained to her legal adviser (and lifelong friend of her father) Brewster Cortland Payne, of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester.
Mr. Payne had had a word with the other founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, who handled the criminal side of their practice. Colonel Mawson had had a word with Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich about Miss Peebles’s problem, and Commissioner Czernich, fully aware that unless Mawson got satisfaction from him, the next call the sonofabitch would make would be to Mayor Carlucci, told him to put the problem from his mind, he personally would take care of it.
Commissioner Czernich had then called Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, commanding officer of the Special Operations Division, and told him he didn’t care how he did it, he didn’t want to hear of one more incident of any kind at the residence of Miss Martha Peebles, 606 Glengarry Lane, Chestnut Hill.
Staff Inspector Wohl, in turn, turned the problem over to Captain Pekach, using essentially the same phraseology Commissioner Czernich had used when he had called.
Working with Inspector Wohl’s deputy, Captain Mike Sabara, Captain Pekach had arranged for Miss Peebles’s residence to be placed under surveillance. An unmarked Special Operations car would be parked on Glengarry Lane until the burglar was nabbed, and Highway RPCs would drive past no less than once an hour.
Captain Pekach had then presented himself personally at the Peebles residence, to assure the lady that the Philadelphia Police Department generally and Captain David Pekach personally were doing all that was humanly possible to shield her home from future violations of any kind.
In the course of their conversation, Miss Peebles had said that it wasn’t the loss of what already had been stolen, essentially bric-a-brac, that concerned her, but rather the potential theft of her late father’s collection of Early American firearms.
Captain Pekach, whose hobby happened to be Early American firearms, asked if he might see the collection. Miss Peebles obliged him.
As she passed him a rather interesting piece, a mint condition U.S. Rifle, model of 1819 with a J.H. Hall action, stamped with the initials of the proving inspector, Zachary Ellsworth Hampden, Captain, Ordnance Corps, later Deputy Chief of Ordnance, their hands touched.
Shortly afterward, Miss Peebles, who was thirty-six, willingly offered her heretofore zealously guarded pearl of great price to Captain Pekach, who was also thirty-six, who took it with what Miss Peebles regarded as exquisite tenderness, and convincing her that she had at last found what had so far eluded her, a true gentleman to share life’s joys and sorrows.
And so it was that when Captain David Pekach, after first having personally checked to see that there was a Highway RPC parked outside Goldblatt & Sons Credit Furniture & Appliances, Inc., on South Street, under orders to obey whatever orders Sergeant Jason Washington might issue, left his office at Bustleton and Bowler for the day, he did not head for his official home of record, but rather for 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill.
When he approached the house, he reached up to the sun visor and pushed the button that caused the left of the double steel gates to the estate to swing open. Three hundred yards up the cobblestone drive, he stopped his official, unmarked car under the two-car-wide portico to the left of the house and got out. There was a year-old Mercedes roadster, now wearing its steel winter top, in the other lane, pointing down the driveway.