"I am dazzled," Wohl said.

"Now all you street cops have to do is find the knife, and there's your doer. There can't be more than eight or ten thousand knives like that in Philadelphia. Forensics is happy to have been able to be of service."

Wohl slid photographs out of the folder and looked at them.

"I hate to think what it's going to cost to have that car repainted," he said.

"Well, I have a nice heel print of who I suspect is the doer," Lomax said. "Heel and three clear fingers, right hand. Maybe you can get him to pay to have it painted."

Wohl looked at him curiously.

"It's in a position suggesting that he laid his hand on the hood, left side, when he bent over to stick the knife in the ninety-dollar tire," Lomax said, and then pointed to one of the photographs. " There."

"Well, when we have a suspect in custody," Wohl said, "I'm sure that will be very valuable."

Lomax laughed. Both knew that while the positive identification of an individual by his fingerprints has long been established as nearly infallible-fingerprints are truly unique-it isnot true that all you have to do to find an individual is have his fingerprint or fingerprints. Trying to match a fingerprint without a name to go with it, with fingerprints on file in either a police department or in the FBI's miles of cabinets in Washington, and thus come up with a name, is for all practical purposes impossible.

"What's on here?" Lomax asked, picking up the cassette tape.

"I don't know. I didn't hear it. I don't think anybody has. They're calling there every fifteen minutes or so, so McFadden-one of the guys sitting on Payne-fixed it so that the machine worked silently."

"You want to hear it?"

"Not particularly," Wohl said, and then reconsidered. He looked at his watch. "Maybe I'd better," he said. "Let me have the phone, will you, please, Warren?"

Lomax pushed a telephone to him, and Wohl dialed a number.

"This is Inspector Wohl. Have Detective Harris call me at 555-3445."

When he had put the phone down, Lomax asked, "He getting anywhere with the Magnella job?"

"Not so far."

"How's he doing?"

"If you mean, Warren, 'is he still on a bender?' he better not be. Christ, is that all over the Department?"

"People talk, Peter."

"The word is gossip, and cops do it more than women," Wohl said.

"I was having my own troubles with good ol' Jack Daniel's for a while," Lomax said. "I'm sympathetic."

"I sometimes wonder if people weren't so sympathetic if the people they feel sorry for would straighten themselves out."

"He's a good cop, Peter."

"So I keep telling myself," Wohl said. "But then I keep hearing stories about him waving his gun around and getting thrown in a holding cell to sober up."

"You heard that, huh?"

"Let's play the tape."

Lieutenant Lomax had methodically made notes on seventeen recorded messages when his telephone rang. He answered it, then handed it to Wohl. "Tony Harris."

"Where are you working, Harris?" Wohl asked. There was a pause while Harris told him. Wohl thought a moment, then said, "Okay. Meet me at the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard at noon. If you get there before I do, get us a booth."

He hung up without waiting for a reply.

"Would you think me a racist if I told you I suspect all of these calls were from those of the Afro-American persuasion?" he asked.

"What did you expect?" Lomax replied. "Two kinds, though, I think. Some of these sleaze-balls have gone past the sixth grade."

"Yeah, I sort of noticed that. A little affectation in the diction."

"And not all of them are black, I don't think."

"No?"

"At least not on the first tape. There was a very sexy lady on tape one. 'You know who this is,' she said, in a very sultry voice indeed, 'call me in the morning,' or 'after nine in the morning.' Something like that."

"Now you're a racist. How do you know the sexy lady isn't black?"

"I doubt it. This was a pure Bala Cynwyd, Rose Tree Hunt Club accent. She talked with her teeth clenched."

Wohl chuckled. "I think one might reasonably presume that if one is young, good-looking, rich, and drives a Porsche, one might reasonably expect to get one's wick dipped."

"Even a Porsche with slashed tires?" Lomax quipped, and then started the tape again.

The fifth message next played was, "Darling, he's gone out again, thankGod, and I'm sitting here with amartini -and youknow whatthey do to me-thinking of all the things I'd like to do to you. So if you get this before eight-thirty, call me, and we can at leasttalk. Otherwise, call me after nineish in the morning."

Wohl could see the lady, teeth clenched, talking. He even had a good idea of what she looked like. Blond hair, long, parted in the middle and hanging to her shoulders. She was wearing a sweater and a pleated skirt. From Strawbridge amp; Clothier in Jenkintown.

"I wonder what she has inmind todo to Officer Payne?" Lomax asked, teeth clenched. "Something frightfullynaughty, wouldn't you say?"

"We gonna stick a.45 down your throat, motherfucker, and blow your fucking brains out your ass!"

"On the whole, I think I prefer the lady's offer," Wohl said.

"Yeah," Lomax said.

"Her voice," Wohl thought aloud, "sounds vaguely familiar. "

"If he who has gone out again, thankGod," Lomax said, in a credible mimicry, "finds out, Payne is going to have a bullet in both legs."

"We gonna cut your cock off and shove it down your throat, motherfucker!"

"I think that's more or less what the lady has in mind," Wohl said. " Except that she wants to bite it off and shove it down her own throat."

"Peter, you're a dirty old man."

"Shut it off, I've heard enough," Wohl said. "I'm on my way to ' counsel' Detective Harris. I shouldn't have a mind full of lewd images."

"I don't think you missed anything. I'll play the whole thing to be sure. But that's about what the first one had on it."

"Why do you think they're doing this, Warren?"

"I don't know," Lomax said thoughtfully. "Just to be a pain in the ass, maybe. Or they get their jollies talking nasty to a cop."

"Wouldn't that get dull after a while? How many times can you say ' fuck you'?"

"I had the feeling too, that it's organized. Some of them sound like they're reading it."

"That brings us back to why?"

"It could be, playing a psychiatrist, that they're getting a little worried, and calling Payne and Goldblatt's makes them think they're doing something useful for the revolution."

"You think they're really revolutionaries?"

"They don't sound like bomb throwers. Christ, I've listened to enough of them.They sound either really bananas, or very calm, as if they're going about God's work. These clowns don't even sound particularly angry."

"Yeah," Wohl said. "Well, thanks, Warren. It was good to see you."

"I got some really dirty tapes back there, Peter," Lomax said, gesturing toward a row of file tapes, "and some blue movies, now that we know you react to them. Come back anytime."

Martha Peebles woke thinking that she was-to her joyous surprise; four months before she would have given eight to five that she would end her life as a virginal spinster-not only a woman in love, but abetrothed woman.

David-sweet, shy David-had never actually proposed, of course, getting down on his knees and asking her to be his bride, giving her an engagement ring. But that didn't matter. He knew in his heart as she knew in hers that they were meant for each other, that it was ordained, perhaps by God, that they share life's joys and pains together, that they be man and wife.

Getting down on his knees wasn't David's style. She could not, now that she had time to think about it, imagine her father getting down on his knees either. And she already had an engagement ring. It had been her mother's.And it looked so good on her finger!