The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

Not too stupid to get rid of the currency wrappers; she’s not stupid. Naive. That’s the word. Naive.

“Well, let’s go,” Matt said. “For some reason, I’m starved.”

“That’s because you didn’t eat any breakfast,” she said.

“After you left, I did,” Matt said. “It was cold, but I needed the strength of good red meat.”

He waved her ahead of him out of the office.

When they passed Mr. Chase’s office, his “girl”—she was at least forty—smiled approvingly at them.

“I wish I had more time, Peter, to enjoy this,” Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin said indicating the Rittenhouse Grill Room’s “Today’s Luncheon Specials”—a mixed grill—a waiter had just set before them.

That’s not a simple expression of regret, Wohl thought, that he is a busy man who had trouble fitting lunch with me at the Rittenhouse Club into his busy schedule. I don’t know what the hell he really means, but let’s get whatever the hell it is—from half a dozen possibilities—out in the open.

“I belong here now,” Peter said.

“I thought that might be the case when you invited me here,” Coughlin said.

“Matt’s father—maybe I should say Amy’s father—called me up and said he would like to put me up for membership. I told him I’d like to think it over, and then I thought it over, and decided, what the hell, why not? It is a good place to have discreet little talks . . . like now. So I told him, ‘Yes, thank you.’ ”

Coughlin nodded.

“You should have said ‘Matt and Amy’s father,’ ” Coughlin said. “The background of that is Matt went to his father about getting you in here. He

didn’t want it to look as if he had his nose up your rear end. Amy went to her dad, and asked him what about getting you in here like I’m in here, what do they call it?—ex officio, it comes with the job.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“So Brewster Payne came to me and said he’d be delighted to get you in, provided you never found out that Matt asked him, or that it wouldn’t get you in trouble with the department. For being too big for your britches, in other words. There’s a lot of chief inspectors who don’t get to join. As a matter of fact, it’s only me and Lowenstein. He said that he’s been thinking about it, aside from Matt and Amy, for some time. He said there’s a lot of people, including him, who think that somewhere down the pike, you should be police commissioner . . .”

“Jesus!” Peter blurted.

“. . . and he wondered if getting you in here, now, would help or hurt that. He also said he didn’t want you to get the idea he was doing it to make points with you about Matt. He asked me to think it over and get back to him. So I thought it over, and I got back to him, and told him I thought it was a good idea, and that I felt sure you would come to me, ask me about it, and I would tell you that.”

“Chief . . .”

“It’s a good idea, Peter,” Coughlin said.

“I didn’t want to put you on a spot,” Wohl said.

“I gave you the benefit of that doubt. So far I’ve seen no signs that you’re getting too big for your britches. But I think there are—I know there are—some people in the department who do, and will take you being in here as proof of that.”

He sliced off a piece of his lamb chop and put it in his mouth.

“Before you tell me what you want to tell me, Peter, did you hear this Chenowith character has got himself a sawed-off fully automatic carbine?”

Wohl nodded. “I heard.”

“Presumably Matty has been told?”

“He’s been told.”

“You think he’s going to obey his orders?”

“You read the riot act to him, I read the riot act to him, and Washington read the riot act to him. I’ve been telling myself we are the three people whose orders he’s most likely to obey.”

Coughlin nodded.