"The adrenaline was flowing," Wohl said. "The minute he went to work, his system was all charged up. I'm sure he knew he was hit, but I don' t think he had any idea how bad."

"You ever been shot?" Matt asked.

"Yes," Wohl said, and changed the subject. "How come you're in here? As opposed to some saloon around the campus, for example?"

"I heard they're going to close it and tear it down," Matt said, "so I thought I'd come in for a drink for auld lang syne."

"They're going to tear it down? I hadn't heard that." "They are, but that wasn't a straight answer," Matt said.

"Oh?"

"When I left the Moffitt house," Matt said, "I had two choices. My fraternity house, or a saloon near the fraternity house. There would be two kinds of people in both, those who felt sorry for me-"

"That's understandable," Wohl said.

"Not because of my uncle Dutch," Matt said. "They didn't know about that. Because I failed my precommissioning physical examination, and am now officially exempt from military service. I didn't want sympathy on one hand, and if one more of those sonsofbitches had told me how lucky I was, I think I would have punched him out."

"Why'd you flunk the physical? Did they tell you?"

"Something with my eyes. Probably, they said, I'll never have a moment's trouble with them, but on the other hand, the United States Marine Corps can't take the chance that something will."

"I guess I'm with those who think you were probably lucky," Wohl said. "I did a hitch in the army when I finished high school.I wasn't going to be a cop like my old man. So I joined the army and they made me an MP. You didn't miss anything."

"I wanted to go," Matt said. "My father was a marine. My real father."

"He was also a cop," Wohl said. "I've been thinking about that, too," Matt said. "I've seen the ads in the papers."

"The reason those ads are in the paper is because they don't pay a starting-off police officer a living wage," Wohl said. "A guy just out of high school can go to work for Budd, someplace like that, and make a lot more money. So they have to actively recruit to find a guy who meets the standards, and who really wants to be a cop, even if it means waiting for the city council to come across with long-overdue pay raises."

"I don't need money," Matt said.

"Everybody needs money," Wohl said, surprised at the remark; it sounded stupid.

"I mean, I have more than enough," Matt said. "When my father… I think of him as my father. My real father was killed before I was born. When mystepfather adopted me, he started investing the money my real father had left, the insurance money, the rest of it, for me. My father is a very clever guy. He turned it into a lot of money, and when I turned twenty-one, he handed it over to me."

"What would he say if you joined the police department? What would your mother say?"

"Oh, they wouldn't like it at all," Matt said. "My father wants me to go to law school. But I don't think they would say anything. I think he would sort of understand."

The booze is talking, Peter Wohl decided. The kid lost his uncle. His father got killed on the job. He just came from Dutch's house, where Denny Coughlin and my father, and maybe the commissioner and maybe even the mayor, plus a dozen other cops were standing around, half in the bag, recounting the heroic exploits of Dutch Moffitt. And this kid's father. In the morning, if he remembers this conversation, this kid will be embarrassed.

I am not fall-down drunk, Peter Wohl thought, as he put the key in his apartment door. If I were fall-down drunk, I would have tried to put the Jaguar in the garage. I am still sober enough to realize that I am too drunk to try to thread that narrow needle with the nose of the Jaguar.

He had stayed at the bar in the Hotel Adelphia nightclub far longer than he had intended to stay, and he had far more to drink than he usually did. He had all of a sudden realized that he was drunk, shaken Matt Payne's hand, collected his change, reclaimed the Jaguar, and driven home.

A shrink would say that he had gotten drunk as a delayed reaction to seeing Dutch Moffitt slumped dead against the wall of the Waikiki Diner. So, for that matter, would his boss, Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin. And so, he realized, would his father. His father had known he would not be at the wake, and why.

There was no way either Denny Coughlin or his father would hear about it. There had been no other cops in the Hotel Adelphia, and he had managed to get home without running over a covey of nuns or into a fire hydrant.

God, Peter Wohl thought, takes care of fools and drunks, and I certainly qualify on both counts.

The red light on his telephone answering machine was glowing a steady red. If there had been calls, it would have been blinking on and off".

He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and drank most of a twelve-ounce bottle of soda water from the neck, which produced a booming belch.

Then he went to his bedroom, and remembered (which pleased him) about getting his uniform out of the zipper bag so that he could have it pressed in the morning. He had just laid the bag on an upholstered chair and started to work the zipper when the phone rang.

He looked at his watch. It was almost two in the morning. Neither his mother nor Barbara would be calling at this hour; it was therefore safe to answer the phone. He picked up the phone beside the bed.

"Wohl," he said.

"I hope I didn't wake you, Inspector." Wohl recognized the voice of Lieutenant Louis Natali of Homicide.

"I just walked in, Lou," Wohl said.

"Well, if you heard it over the radio, I'm sorry, but I thought you would want to know."

"I didn't have a radio," Wohl said. "What didn't I hear?"

He's calling to tell me they caught the little shit who killed Dutch; that was nice of him.

"I'll try to give it to you quick," Natali said. "Hobbs and I were down in the Third District… checking out a report that Gerald Vincent Gallagher had been seen, About one o'clock, we heard a radio call of a stabbing and hospital case at Six-C Stockton Place. A little while later, I called Homicide and found we had a job there. Lieutenant DelRaye is on the scene. The deceased is a guy named Jerome Nelson."

"Christ, I met him this afternoon," Wohl said. "Nice little…"He stopped himself and ended, "Guy."

"The female who called it in is your friend Louise Dutton."

"I'll be damned," Wohl said. "She lives upstairs."

"I was told she was hysterical and locked herself in her apartment. DelRaye just called for a wagon to transport her to Homicide. I think he's talking about taking her door if she doesn't come out."

"Jesus!"

"You didn't get this from me, Peter," Natali said.

"I owe you," Wohl said, broke the connection with his finger, and dialed from memory the number of the Homicide Division. A detective answered.

"This is Inspector Wohl," he said. "Lieutenant DelRaye is at a homicide scene on Stockton Place. Please get word to him that I am en route, and he is not to, not to, take the door until I get there."

At 2:03 a.m., One-Ninety-Four, a patrol car assigned to the Nineteenth District, went on the air and reported that he was in pursuit of an English sports car proceeding eastward on Lancaster Avenue just past Girard Avenue at a high rate of speed.

At 2:05 a.m. One-Ninety-Four went back on the air: "One-Ninety-Four. Disregard the pursuit. It was a Three-Six-Nine."

Three-Six-Nine is the radio code used to identify a police officer.

The officer in One-Ninety-Four was naturally curious why a man carrying the tin of a staff inspector was going hell for leather down Lancaster Avenue in an English sports car at two in the morning, but he had been on the job long enough to understand that patrol officers were wise not to ask staff inspectors what the hell they thought they were doing.