learning to type, and the four months since her son had been born learning shorthand, Sergeant Moffitt’s widow had found employment as a typist trainee with the law firm of Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill & Payne.
There was a police pension, of course, and there had been some insurance, but Patricia Moffitt had known that it would not be enough to give her son all that she wanted to give him.
On a Sunday afternoon two months after entering the employ of Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill & Payne, while pushing her son in a stroller near the Franklin Institute, Patricia Moffitt ran into Brewster Cortland Payne II, whom she recognized as the heir apparent to Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill & Payne. She had been informed that Young Mr. Payne was not only the son of the presiding partner of the firm, but the grandson of one of the founding partners.
Despite this distinguished lineage, Brewster Cortland Payne II was obviously in waters beyond his depth outside the Franklin Institute. He was pushing a stroller, carrying a two-year-old boy, and leading a four-and-half-year-old girl on what looked like a dog harness and leash.
As Mrs. Moffitt and Mr. Payne exchanged brief greetings (she had twice typed letters for him) the girl announced somewhat self-righteously that “Foster has poo-pooed his pants and Daddy didn’t bring a diaper.”
Mrs. Moffitt took pity on Mr. Payne and took the boy into a rest room in the Franklin Institute and diapered him. When she returned, Mr. Payne told her, he was “rather much in the same situation as yourself, Mrs. Moffitt.”
Specifically, he told her that Mrs. Brewster Cortland Payne II had died in a traffic accident eight months before, returning from their country place in the Poconos.
Three months after that, Mrs. Moffitt and Mr. Payne had shocked and/or enraged the Payne family, the Moffitt family, and assorted friends and relatives on both sides by driving themselves and their children to Bethesda, Maryland, on Friday after work and getting married.
Six months after their marriage, Brewster had adopted Patricia’s son, in the process changing Matthew Mark Moffitt’s name to Payne.
When, the day after Captain Dutch Moffitt had been laid to rest in the cemetery of St. Monica’s Roman Catholic Church, Matt Payne had joined the Philadelphia Police Department, Brewster Payne did not have to hear the professional psychiatric opinion of his daughter, Amelia Payne, M.D., that Matt had done so to prove that he was a man, to overcome the psychological castration of his rejection by the Marines. He had figured that out himself.
And so had Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin of the Philadelphia Police Department. Denny Coughlin had been Sergeant John X. Moffitt’s best friend, and over the years had become quite close to Brewster Payne, as they dealt with the problem of Mother Moffitt, Matt’s grandmother, a bellicose German-Irish woman who sincerely believed that Brewster Cortland Payne II would burn in hell for seducing her son’s widow into abandoning Holy Mother Church for Protestantism, and raising her grandson as a heathen.
Over more whiskey than was probably good for them in the bar at the Union League, Denny Coughlin and Brewster Payne had agreed that Matt’s idea that he wanted to be cop was understandable, but once he found out how things were, he would come to his senses. A couple of weeks, no more than a month, in the Police Academy would open his eyes to what he had let himself in for, and he would resign.
Matt did not resign. On his graduation, Denny Coughlin used his influence to have him assigned to clerical duties in the newly formed Special Operations Division. He had knocked on Patricia Moffitt’s door to tell her that her husband had been killed in the line of duty. He had no intention of knocking on Patricia M. Payne’s door to tell her her son had been killed.
He had explained the situation to the commanding officer of the Special Operations Division, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl. Coughlin believed, with some reason, that Peter Wohl was the smartest cop in the Department. Peter Wohl had been a homicide detective, the youngest sergeant ever in Highway Patrol, and had been the youngest ever staff inspector working in Internal Affairs when the mayor had set up Special Operations and put him in charge. Wohl’s father was Chief Inspector Augustus Wohl, retired, for whom both Denny Coughlin and Jerry Carlucci had worked early on in their careers.
Peter Wohl understood the situation even better than Denny Coughlin thought. He understood that Matt