"What's a Staff Inspector? "

"Sort of like a detective."

"And that's sort of a secret."

The phone rang again, and he picked it up.

"Peter Wohl," he said.

"Inspector, this is Mike Sabara."

Wohl covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

"Excuse me, please, Naomi?"

"Oh, sure," she said, and put her index finger in front of her lips in a gesture signifying she understood the necessity for secrecy.

When she turned around, he saw that her red underpants had apparently gathered in the decolletage of her buttocks; her cheeks peeked out naked from beneath the white shorts.

"What's up, Mike?" Wohl asked.

"I'd like to talk to you, if you can spare me fifteen minutes."

"Anytime. Where are you?"

"Harbison and Levick," Sabara said. "Could I come over there?"

The headquarters of the Second and Fifteenth districts, and the Northeast Detectives, at Harbison and Levick Streets, was in a squat, ugly, two-story building whose brown-and-tan brick had become covered with a dark film from the exhausts of the heavy traffic passing by over the years.

"Mike, I've got to go downtown," Wohl said, after deciding he really would rather not go to Harbison and Levick. "What about meeting me in DaVinci's Restaurant? At Twenty-first and Walnut? In about fifteen minutes?"

"I'll be there," Lieutenant Sabara said. "Thank you."

"Be with you in a minute, Naomi," Wohl called, and closed the door. He dressed in a white button-down shirt, a regimentally striped necktie, and the trousers to a blue cord suit. He slipped his arms through the shoulder holster straps, shrugged into the suit jacket, and then put the wallet and the rest of the impedimenta in various pockets. He checked his appearance in a mirror on the back on the door, then went into the living room, where he caught Naomi having a pull at the neck of his beer bottle.

"Very nice!" Naomi said.

"Naomi, I don't want to sound rude, but I have to go."

"I understand."

"What was it Mr. Schneider wanted you to ask me?" he asked.

"He said I should see if I could find out if you would consider subletting one of your garages."

"I'm sorry, I can't do that. I need one for the Jaguar, and my other car belongs to the city, and that has to be kept in a garage."

"Why?" It was not a challenge, but simple curiosity.

"Well, there's a couple of very expensive radios in it that the city doesn't want to have boosted."

"Boosted? You mean stolen?"

"Right."

"That makes sense," she said. "I'll tell Mel."

She got off the couch, displaying a large and not at all unattractive area of inner thigh in the process.

"Well," she said. "I'll let you go."

He followed her to the door, aware that as a gentleman he should not be paying as much attention as he was to her nakedgluteus maximus, which was peeking out the hem of her shorts.

"Naomi," he said, as he pulled the door open for her, "when you talk to your husband about me, would you tell him that I would consider it a favor if he didn't spread it around that I'm a cop?"

"I won't even tell him."

"Well, you don't have to go that far."

"There's a lot of things I don't tell Mel," Naomi said, softly.

And then her fingers brushed his crotch. Peter pulled away, in a reflex action, and had just decided it was an accidental contact, when that theory was disproved. Naomi's fingers followed his retreating groin, found what she was looking for, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

"See you around, Peter," she said, looking into his eyes. Then she let go of him, laughed, and went quickly down the stairs.

Peter Wohl glanced at the fuel gauge of the Ford LTD as he turned the ignition key off in the parking lot on Walnut Street near the DaVinci Restaurant. The needle was below E; he was running on the fumes. Since he had driven only from his apartment here, that meant that it had been below E when he had arrived home; andthat meant he had come damned close to running out of gas on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or on the Schuylkill Expressway, which would have been a disaster. It would have given him the option of radioing for a police wrecker to bring him gas, which would have been embarrassing, or getting drowned in the torrential rain trying to walk to a gas station. Drowned and/or run over.

Periodically in his life, Wohl believed, he seemed to find himself walking along the edge of a steep cliff, acrumbling cliff, with disaster a half-step away. He was obviously in that condition now. The gas gauge seemed to prove that; and so did Naomi of the traveling husband and groping fingers. And, he decided, he probably wasn't going to like at all what Mike Sabara had on his mind.

He got out of the car, and locked it, aware that when he got back in it, the inside temperature would be sizzling; that he would sweat, and his now natty and freshly pressed suit would be mussed when he went to see Chief Coughlin. And he had a gut feeling that was going to be some sort of a disaster, too. It wasn't very likely that Coughlin was going to call him in on a day off to tell him what a splendid job he had been doing and why didn't he take some time off as a reward.

A quick glance around the parking lot told him that Sabara wasn't here yet. He would have spotted a marked Highway Patrol car immediately, and even if Sabara was in an unmarked car, he would have spotted the radio antenna and black-walled tires.

And, he thought, as he walked into the DaVinci, if what Coughlin was after was to hear how his current investigation was going, the reason he had been in Harrisburg, he wasn't going to come across as Sherlock Holmes, either. The only thing two days of rooting around in the Pennsylvania Department of Records had produced was a couple of leads that were weak at best and very probably would turn out to be worthless.

The DaVinci restaurant, named after the artist/inventor, not the proprietor, served very good food despite what Peter thought of as restaurant theatrics. As a general rule of thumb, he had found that restaurants that went out of their way to convert their space into something exotic generally served mediocre to terrible food. The DaVinci had gone a little overboard, he thought, trying to turn their space into rustic Italian. There were red checkered tablecloths; a lot of phony trellises; plastic grapes; and empty Chianti bottles with candles stuck in their necks. But the food was good, and the people who ran the place were very nice.

He asked for and got a table on the lower level, which gave him a view of both the upper level and the bar just inside the door. The waitress was a tall, pretty young brunette who looked as though she should be on a college campus. Then he remembered hearing that the waitresses in DaVinci's were aspiring actresses, hoping to meet theatrical people who came to Philly, and were supposed to patronize DaVinci's.

Her smile vanished when he ordered just coffee.

Or can she tell I'm not a movie producer?

When she delivered his coffee, he handed her a dollar and told her to keep the change. That didn't seem to change her attitude at all.

Mike Sabara came into the room a few minutes later, immediately after Peter had scalded his mouth on the lip of the coffee cup, which had apparently been delivered to his table fresh from the fires of hell.

Mike was in uniform, the crushed-crown cap and motorcyclist's breeches and puttees peculiar to Highway Patrol, worn with a Sam Browne belt festooned with a long line of cartridges and black leather accoutrements for the tools of a policeman's trade, flashlight, handcuffs, and so on. Mike was wearing an open-collared white shirt, with a captain's insignia, two parallel silver bars, on each collar point.

The Highway Patrol and its special uniform went back a long time, way before the Second World War. It had been organized as a traffic law enforcement force, as the name implied, and in the old days, it had been mounted almost entirely on motorcycles, hence the breeches and puttees and soft-crowned cap.