“Am I going to be honored with your company later today?” Martha asked. “At any time later today? Or maybe sometime this week?”
“I know what you should do. You should go back to bed and try this again. This time, get up with a smile, and with nothing in your heart but compassion for your overworked and underappreciated husband.”
“We haven’t had any time together for weeks. And even when you’re here, you’re not. You’re working.”
“I know. This will be over soon, Martha. And we’ll go to the shore for a couple of days.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she said, but she went to him and kissed his cheek. “Get that stuff off my table. Put the damned typewriter back where you found it.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Jason said. He put the typewriter back where he had found it, in a small closet in the kitchen, and then, carrying the tape recorder, left the apartment, pausing only long enough to pat his wife on her rump.
“Good morning, Jason,” Wohl said as Washington got into the front seat of Wohl’s car.“I’m sorry about this, but I really thought I should get this to you as soon as I could.”
“What’s up?”
“About midnight last night, Matt and I walked up on a double homicide on Market Street.”
“Really? What in the world were you two doing walking on Market Street at midnight?”
“For a quick answer, the bar at the Rittenhouse Club was closed.”
“Tell me about the homicide.”
“Two victims. What looks like large-caliber-bullet wounds to the cranium. One victim was the wife of one of the owners of the Inferno Lounge…”
“I know where it is.”
“And the other the partner. It was called in by the other partner, who suffered a small-caliber-bullet wound in what he says was an encounter with the doers, two vaguely described white males.”
He didn’t call me here to tell me this. Why? Because he thinks that it wasn’t an armed robbery, that the husband was the doer? And the Homicide detective is accepting the husband’s story?
“We got there right after a Ninth District wagon responded to the call. Chief Lowenstein also came to the scene, and then got me alone. He knows what’s going on.”
I knew that he wouldn’t have bothered me if it wasn’t important!
“His finding out was inevitable. How much did you have to tell him?”
“Not much. He knows the names. Most of them. I told him I couldn’t talk about it. The only time he really leaned on me was to ask how much time he had.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Quote, not much, unquote.”
“That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Peter, I told him that we didn’t have the conversation, that if we had it, I would have to report it.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“That’s up to you, Peter. I’ll play it any way you want me to.”
“I like Matt Lowenstein. There has been absolutely nothing to suggest he’s done anything wrong. What purpose would it serve to go to Carlucci with this?”
“You heard what the Mayor said, Peter. If anyone came to you or me asking—asking anything—about the investigation, he wanted to know about it.”
“The call is yours, Jason. Was Chief Lowenstein—what word am I looking for?—pissed that you wouldn’t tell him anything?”
“No. He seemed to understand he was putting me on a spot.”