“Czernich called an hour or so ago,” the mayor said. “The Secret Service told him what I already knew. The Vice President’s going to honor Philadelphia with his presence.”
Taddeus Czernich was police commissioner of the City of Philadelphia.
“It was in the papers.”
“Maybe Czernich’s driver was too busy to read the papers to him,” the mayor said.
Jerry Carlucci was not saying unkind things behind Commissioner Czernich’s back. He regularly got that sort of abuse in person. Matt Lowenstein had long ago decided that Carlucci not only really did not like Czernich, but held him in a great deal of contempt.
But Lowenstein had also long ago figured out that Czernich would probably be around as commissioner as long as Carlucci was the mayor. His loyalty to Carlucci was unquestioned, almost certainly because he very much liked being the police commissioner, and was very much aware that he served at Carlucci’s pleasure.
“Half past twelve at the Union League,” Lowenstein said. “I’ll look forward to it.”
Carlucci laughed.
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Matt,” he said, and then added, “I just had an idea about Payne too.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m still thinking about it. I’ll tell you tomorrow. You call— Whatsisname?—At the airport?”
“Paul Ardell?”
“Yeah, right. And tell him I said thanks for a job well done.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good night, Matt. Thank you.”
“Good night, Mr. Mayor.”
Marion Claude Wheatley made pork chops, green beans, apple sauce, and mashed potatoes for his supper. He liked to cook, was good at it, and when he made his own supper not only was it almost certainly going to be better than what he could get at one of the neighborhood restaurants, but it spared him both having to eat alone in public and from anything unpleasant that might happen on the way home from the restaurant.
Marion lived in the house in which he had grown up, in the 5000 block of Beaumont Street, just a few blocks off Baltimore Avenue and not far from the 49th Street Station. There was no point in pretending that the neighborhood was not deteriorating, but that didn’t mean his house was deteriorating. He took a justifiable pride in knowing that he was just as conscientious about taking care of the house as his father had been.
If something needed painting, it got painted. If one of the faucets started dripping, he went to the workshop in the basement and got the proper tools and parts and fixed it.
About the only difference in the house between now and when Mom and Dad had been alive was the burglar bars and the burglar alarm system. Marion had had to have a contractor install the burglar bars, which were actually rather attractive, he thought, wrought iron. The burglar alarm system he had installed himself.
Marion had been taught about electrical circuits in the Army. He could almost certainly have avoided service by staying in college, but that would have been dishonorable. His father had served in World War II as a major with the 28th Division. He would have been shamed if his son had avoided service when his country called upon him.
He had taken Basic Training at Fort Dix, and then gone to Fort Riley for Officer Candidate School, and been commissioned into the Ordnance Corps. He had been trained as an ammunition supply officer, and then they had asked him if he would be interested in volunteering to become an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer before he went to Vietnam. Marion hadn’t even known what that meant when they asked him. They told him that EOD officers commanded small detachments of specialists who were charged with disposing of enemy and our own ordnance, which he understood to mean artillery and mortar shells, primarily, which had been fired but which for some reason hadn’t exploded when they landed.
Sometimes shells and rockets could be disarmed, which meant that their detonating mechanisms were rendered inoperative, but sometimes that wasn’t possible, and the explosive ordnance had to be “blown in place.”
That meant that Explosive Ordnance Disposal people had to be trained in explosives, even though, as an officer, he wouldn’t be expected to do the work himself, but instead would supervise the enlisted specialists.
That training had included quite a bit about electrical circuits, about which Marion had previously known absolutely nothing.
But what he had learned in the Army was more than enough for him to easily install the burglar alarm. Actually, it was plural. Alarms. There was one system that detected intrusion of the house on the first floor. If the alarm