“Good. As of tomorrow, you’re on three days special assignment at the Roundhouse. Report to Sergeant McElroy in Chief Lowenstein’s office.”
Matt looked at Sutton for amplification. None came.
“Can you tell me what this is all about?” Matt asked.
Sutton looked at him carefully. “I thought maybe you could tell me,” he said, finally.
Matt shook his head from side to side.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Sutton said. “Harry McElroy . . . you know who he is?”
“I know him.”
“Harry called down for Captain Eames, and I took the call because he wasn’t there. He said the chief wants you down there starting tomorrow morning, for three days, maybe four, and the fewer people know about it, the better.”
Matt shrugged again. That had told him nothing.
“So I asked him, what was it all about, and Harry said if anybody asked, they needed somebody to help out with paperwork, that you were good at that.”
Matt grunted.
“So if anybody asks, that’s the story,” Sutton said.
“I know what it is,” Matt said. “Based on my brilliant record as the recovered car expert of East Detectives, they’re going to transfer me to Homicide.”
Sutton looked at him, and after a moment laughed.
“It’s a dirty job, kid,” he said, “but somebody has to do it.”
“Well, it can’t be worse, whatever it is, than recovered cars,” Matt said.
“I got to get home. We have to go to a wake. Jerry Sullivan, retired as a lieutenant out of the 9th District a year ago. Just dropped dead.”
“I didn’t know him.”
“They had just sold their house; they were going to move to Wildwood,” Sutton said.
He pushed himself off the bar stool, picked up his change, nodded at Matt, and walked out of the bar.
Detective Matthew M. Payne lived in a very small apartment on the top floor of a brownstone mansion on Rittenhouse Square, in what is known in Philadelphia as Center City. The three main floors of the mansion had three years before been converted to office space, all of which had been leased to the Delaware Valley Cancer Society.
It had never entered the owner’s mind when he had authorized the expense of converting the attic, not suitable for use as offices, into an apartment that it would house a policeman. He thought that he could earn a small rent by renting the tiny rooms to an elderly couple, or a widow or widower, someone of limited means who worked downtown, perhaps in the Franklin Institute or the Free Public Library, and who would be willing to put up with the inconvenience of access and the slanting walls and limited space because it was convenient and, possibly more important, because the building was protected around the clock by the rent-a-cops of the Holmes Security Service. Downtown Philadelphia was not a very safe place at night for people getting on in years.
Neither, at the time of the attic’s conversion, had it ever entered the owner’s mind that his son, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, would become a policeman. Brewster Cortland Payne II had then believed, with reason, that Matt, after a three-year tour of duty as a Marine officer, would go to law school and join the law firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, of which he was a founding partner.
Matt’s precommissioning physical, however, had found something wrong with his eyes. Nothing serious, but sufficient to deny him his commission. Brewster Payne had been privately relieved. He understood what a blow it was to a twenty-one-year-old’s ego to be informed that you don’t measure up to Marine Corps standards, but Matt was an unusually bright kid, and time would heal that wound. In the meantime, a word in the right ear would see Matt accepted in whatever law school he wanted to attend.
Despite a life at Pennsylvania that seemed to Brewster C. Payne to have been devoted primarily to drinking beer and lifting skirts, Matt had graduated cum laude.
And then Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol of the Pennsylvania Police Department, had been shot to death while trying to stop an armed robbery.
It was the second death in the line of duty for the Moffitt family. Twenty-two years before, his brother, Sergeant John Xavier Moffitt, had been shot to death answering a silent alarm call. Six months after his death, Sergeant Moffitt’s widow had given birth to their son.
Four months after that, having spent the last trimester of her pregnancy