And Mrs. Osadchy was of course wise enough to be scrupulously honest when it came to making the weekly payments of ten percent of gross income to Mr. Cassandro.

For his part, Mr. Cassandro introduced Mrs. Osadchy to several attorneys and physicians who could be relied upon to meet the needs of Mrs. Osadchy and her work force with both efficacy and confidentiality. And, more important, he let the word get out that Mrs. Osadchy was a very good friend of his, and thus entitled to a certain degree of respect. An insult to her would be considered an insult to him.

It was a smooth-running operation, and everybody had been happy with it.

And now this fucking cop was getting greedy, which could fuck everything up, and was moreover a personal embarrassment to Mr. Cassandro, who had not liked having to go to Mr. Savarese with the problem.

I should have known, when he started wanting to help himself to the hookers, Mr. Cassandro thought angrily, that this sonofabitch was going to cause me trouble.

He’s a real sleazeball, and now it’s starting to show. And cause me trouble.

What I have to remember, because I keep forgetting it, is that Lieutenant Seymour Meyer is a cop, a cop on the take, and not a businessman, and consequently can be expected to act like an asshole.

When Mr. Cassandro left Mr. Savarese in the Ristorante Alfredo, instead of getting into the car that was waiting for him outside, he walked to the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on Chestnut Street and entered a pay telephone booth in the lobby.

He telephoned to Mrs. Harriet Osadchy and told her that he was working on their problem, that he had been given permission to deal with it.

“I’m really glad to hear that,” Mrs. Osadchy replied. “He’s really getting obnoxious.”

“Financially speaking, you mean?” Mr. Cassandro asked, laughing. “Or generally speaking?”

“He called up about an hour ago, and asked what the room number was at the Bellvue. So I told him. And then he said the reason he wanted to know was because it was a slow night, and he was a little bored, so why didn’t I send Marianne over there, so they could have a little party.”

“He’s a real shit, Harriet,” Mr. Cassandro sympathized.

“It’s not just the money that he don’t pay the girls and I have to. He’s a sicko with the girls. I had a hard time making Marianne go.”

“He’s a real shit,” Mr. Cassandro repeated, and then he had a pleasant thought. “Harriet, why don’t you call over there?”

“What?”

“Tell her to keep him there. I want to talk to him. That’s as good a place as any.”

“I’ll call her,” Harriet said dubiously. “But I don’t want her involved in anything, Paulo.”

“Trust me, Harriet,” Mr. Cassandro said, and hung up.

Detective Matt Payne turned off the Parkway into the curved drive of a luxury apartment building and stopped with a squeal of tires right in front of the door. The uniformed doorman standing inside looked at him in annoyance.

The car was a silver Porsche 911. It had been Matt’s graduation present, three years before, when he had finished his undergraduate studies, cum laude, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Miss Penelope Detweiler, who was his fiancee in everything but formal announcement and ring-on-her-finger, frequently accused him, with some justification, of showering far more attention on it than he did on her.

He was still wearing the gray cotton uniform of the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel Maintenance Staff. By the time he had gone from the hotel to his apartment on Rittenhouse Square, which is five blocks west of the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel, to get the car, he had concluded (a) the smart thing for him to have done was to have prevailed yet again on Tiny Lewis’s good nature and asked him to take the damned tapes to Washington, and (b) that since he had failed to do so he was going to be so late that changing his clothing was out of the question. He had gone directly to the basement garage and taken his car.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he said to the doorman, who, accustomed to Payne’s frequent, brief, nocturnal visits, simply grunted and picked up his telephone to inform Ten Oh Six that a visitor was on his way up.

Mrs. Martha Washington, a very tall, lithe, sharply featured woman, who looked, Matt often thought, like one of the women portrayed on the Egyptian bas-reliefs in the museum, opened the door to him. She was wearing a loose, ankle-length silver lame gown.

“He’s not here, Matt,” she said, giving him her cheek to kiss. “I just opened a nice bottle of California red, if you’d like to come in and wait. He was supposed to be here by now.”

“I’m already late for dinner, thank you,” he said. “Would you give him this, please?”

He handed her a large, sealed manila envelope.

“Dinner, dressed like that?” she said, indicating his maintenance department uniform. “It looks like you’ve been fixing stopped-up sinks. What in the world have you been up to?”

She saw the uncomfortable look on his face, and quickly added: “Sorry, forget I asked.”

“I’ll take a rain check on the California red,” Matt said. “I don’t know where we’re going for dinner, but I’ll be home early if he wants me.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Ten minutes later, Matt pulled the Porsche to a stop at the black painted aluminum pole, hinged at one end, which barred access to a narrow cobblestone street in Society Hill, not far from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. A neatly lettered sign reading “Stockton Place-Private Property-No Thoroughfare” hung on short lengths of chain from the pole. A Wachenhut Private Security officer came out of a Colonial-style redbrick guard shack and walked to the Porsche.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Matthew Payne, to see Mr. Nesbitt.”

“One moment, sir, I’ll check,” the Wachenhut Security officer said, and went back into his shack.

It was said that, before renovation, the area known as Society Hill, not far from the Delaware River, had been going downhill since Benjamin Franklin-whose grave was nearby in the Christ Church Cemetery at Fifth and Arch streets-had walked its narrow streets. Before renovation had begun, it was an unpleasant slum.

Now it was an upscale neighborhood, with again some of the highest real estate values in Philadelphia. The Revolutionary-era buildings had been completely renovated-often the renovations consisted of discarding just about everything but the building’s facades-and turned into luxury apartments and town houses.

One of the developers, while doing title research, had been pleasantly surprised to learn that a narrow alley between two blocks of buildings had never been deeded to the City. That provided the legal right for them to bar the public from it, something they correctly suspected would have an appeal to the sort of people they hoped to interest in their property.

They promptly dubbed the alley “Stockton Place,” closed one end of it, and put a Colonial-style guard shack at the other.

Having been informed that Mr. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, who with his wife occupied Number Nine B Stockton Place-an apartment stretching across what had been the second floor of three Revolutionary-era buildings-did in fact expect a Mr. Payne to call, the Wachenhut Security officer pressed a switch on his control console which caused the barrier pole to rise.

Matt drove nearly to the end of Stockton Place, carefully eased the right wheels of the Porsche onto the sidewalk, walked quickly into the lobby of Number Nine, and then quickly up a wide carpeted stairway to the second floor.

The door to Nine B opened as he reached the landing. Standing in it, looking more than a little annoyed, was Miss Penelope Detweiler, who was twenty-four, blond, and just this side of beautiful. She was wearing a simple black dress, adorned with a string of pearls and a golden pin, a representation of a parrot.