“Drink it anyway, you’re an outnumbered WASP,” Colt said, and then frowned, remembering. “Hey, I still don’t have any money. I’ll pay you back.”
“Sure.”
“The Bulletin will pay,” Mickey announced. “Why don’t we get a table?”
They took a table. The bartender delivered a round of drinks.
“You hang out with these guys, right, Mickey?” Mr. Colt inquired.
“Yeah. What I want to know is what you’re doing with them.”
“Matt’s showing me around the police department, and doing a goddamn good job of it.”
“For a WASP,” Mickey said, “Matty’s a pretty good cop. I owe him big time.”
“How come?”
“A couple of years back, we were in an alley, and a really bad guy comes down it shooting at us with a. 45-”
“Jesus, Mickey!” Matt protested.
“-and Matty put him down,” O’Hara went on. “Took a bullet in the leg, but the bottom line was one dead bad guy.”
“No shit?”
“We call him the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”
“My friends don’t call me that,” Matt said, coldly.
“Or sometimes the Casanova of Center City,” O’Hara went blithely on.
“Yeah, I like his taste in women,” Mr. Colt said. “You should have seen the one he had with him tonight.”
“Curiosity overwhelms me,” Washington said. “To whom does Mr. Colt refer, Matthew?”
“Captain Quaire assigned Detective Lassiter to explain the Williamson job to him,” Matt said.
“You got something going with her, Matty?” O’Hara asked.
“No, I don’t.”
Mr. Colt winked broadly, held up his balled first with the thumb extended, and said, “Right.”
Washington and Wohl smiled.
“So what’s going on in here?” Mr. Colt inquired. “You’re just hanging out, or what?”
O’Hara looked at Wohl.
“You tell him, Peter,” he said.
Wohl’s smile vanished. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged.
“Mr. Colt…” he began.
“I can’t get you to call me ‘Stan’?”
“Stan, just about everybody in the department trusts Mickey to keep his mouth shut when he knows something we don’t want to be public knowledge,” Wohl said.