long list of his other skills and accomplishments?”
“Matthews told me.”
“Then let ‘caution, caution, toujours caution’ be your creed, Matthew.”
“That’s audacity, not caution. ‘L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.’ ”
“Don’t correct me, please. I’m a sergeant, and sergeants are never wrong. And the one thing I absolutely do not want from you is audacity. I will, with more or less bated breath, await your next call.”
“Sometime this afternoon,” Matt said.
The line went dead.
Matt hung up and looked into the lobby.
Susan, looking uncomfortable, was walking across the lobby toward his office.
He started to get up, then changed his mind. His newly acquired attaché case was in the well of the desk. He planned—while he hoped anyone looking would think he was tying his shoe—to transfer the bank loot from Susan’s purse there.
“Ready for lunch?” Susan asked at the door.
“Come into my office, my dear, and I will explain why the bank has to repossess your Porsche.”
He waved her into the chair beside the desk. She put her purse on the floor in front of her. Matt bent over, grabbed the purse, and put it into the desk well. Then he opened the attaché case, went into Susan’s purse, and moved the money, noticing as he did that some of the stacks of currency were bound with paper strips bearing the names of the banks from which they had been stolen.
These people are really stupid! Those currency wrappers would really tie them to the robberies. Didn’t Chenowith think about that? Or did he simply assume that Susan would take care of getting rid of the wrappers and she was too stupid to do it?
He closed the briefcase and ran his finger over the combination lock.
Jesus, if the combination wasn’t set at 000, I’m going to have to break the lock to get back into it. That wasn’t too smart, Matthew!
He slid Susan’s purse back across the floor to her, then straightened up.
“Done,” he said and smiled.
She nervously smiled back.
Not too stupid to get rid of the currency wrappers; she’s not stupid. Naive. That’s the word. Naive.
“Well, let’s go,” Matt said. “For some reason, I’m starved.”
“That’s because you didn’t eat any breakfast,” she said.
“After you left, I did,” Matt said. “It was cold, but I needed the strength of good red meat.”
He waved her ahead of him out of the office.
When they passed Mr. Chase’s office, his “girl”—she was at least forty—smiled approvingly at them.
“I wish I had more time, Peter, to enjoy this,” Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin said indicating the Rittenhouse Grill Room’s “Today’s Luncheon Specials”—a mixed grill—a waiter had just set before them.
That’s not a simple expression of regret, Wohl thought, that he is a busy man who had trouble fitting lunch with me at the Rittenhouse Club into his busy schedule. I don’t know what the hell he really means, but let’s get whatever the hell it is—from half a dozen possibilities—out in the open.
“I belong here now,” Peter said.
“I thought that might be the case when you invited me here,” Coughlin said.
“Matt’s father—maybe I should say Amy’s father—called me up and said he would like to put me up for membership. I told him I’d like to think it over, and then I thought it over, and decided, what the hell, why not? It is a good place to have discreet little talks . . . like now. So I told him, ‘Yes, thank you.’ ”
Coughlin nodded.
“You should have said ‘Matt and Amy’s father,’ ” Coughlin said. “The background of that is Matt went to his father about getting you in here. He didn’t want it to look as if he had his nose up your rear end. Amy went to her dad, and asked him what about getting you in here like I’m in here, what do they call it?—ex officio, it comes with the job.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“So Brewster Payne came to me and said he’d be delighted to get you in, provided you never found out that Matt asked him, or that it wouldn’t get you in trouble with the department. For being too big for your britches, in other words. There’s a lot of chief inspectors who don’t get to join. As a matter of fact, it’s only me and Lowenstein. He said that he’s been thinking about it, aside from Matt and Amy, for some time. He said there’s a lot of people, including him, who think that somewhere down the pike, you should be police commissioner . . .”
“Jesus!” Peter blurted.
“. . . and he