He believed that any police supervisor-and he was Commanding Officer of Highway, which made him a special sort of supervisor-should set an example in both his professional and personal life for his subordinates. The officers of Highway would not understand that his relationship with Martha was love of the most pure sort, and a relationship which he intended to dignify before God and man in holy matrimony in the very near future.
He was painfully sensitive to the thoughts of his peers-the most cruel joke he had heard was that the way to get rich was to have a dong like a mule and find yourself a thirty-five-year-old rich-as-hell virgin-and if they, his friends, his fellow captains, were unable to understand what he and Martha shared, certainly he could not expect more from rank-and-file officers.
Obviously, if he was picked up and dropped off every day at Marthas house, there would be talk. So he drove himself. And it was nobodys business but his own that he had arranged with the telephone company to have the number assigned to his apartment transferred to Marthas house, so that if anyone called his apartment, he would get the call in Chestnut Hill.
In just five weeks, he thought as he got into his assigned Highway Patrol car and backed it out of the five-car garage behind Marthas house, the problem would be solved, and the deception no longer necessary. They would be married.
They would already be married if they were both Catholic or, for that matter, both Episcopal. Both Martha and his mother had climbed up on a high horse about what was the one
true faith. His mother said she would witness her son getting married in a heathen ceremony over her dead body, and Martha had said that she was sorry, she had promised her late father she would be married where he had married, and his father before him, in St. Marks Church in Center City Philadelphia.
Her father would, she said, tears in her eyes, which really hurt Dave Pekach, turn over in his grave if she broke her word to him, and worse, were married according to the rules of the Church of Rome, which would have required her to promise any children of their union to be raised in the Roman Catholic faith.
Extensive appeals through the channels of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, lasting months, had resulted in a compromise. After extensive negotiations, with the prospective groom being represented by Father Kaminski, his familys parish priest, and the prospective bride by Brewster Cortland Payne II, Esq., the compromise had been reached in a ninety-second, first-person conversation between the Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and his good friend the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Philadelphia, with enough time left over to schedule eighteen holes at Merion Golf Course and a steak supper the following Wednesday.
It had been mutually agreed that the wedding would be an ecumenical service jointly conducted by the Episcopal Bishop and a Roman Catholic Monsignor, and the prospective bride would be required only to promise that she would raise any fruit of their union as Christians.
Mother Pekach had been, not without difficulty, won over to the compromise by Father Kaminski, who reminded her what St. Paul had said about it being better to marry than to burn, and argued that if the Cardinal himself was going to send Monsignor OHallohan, the Chancellor of the Archdiocese, himself, to St. Marks Church for the wedding, it really couldnt be called a heathen ceremony in a heathen church.
There would be a formal announcement of their engagement the day after tomorrow, at a party, with the wedding to follow a month later.
Captain Pekach drove out the gates of the Peebles estate at 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill, and tried to decide the best way to get from there to Frankford and Castor avenues at this time of the morning. He decided he would have a shot at going down North Broad, and then cutting over to Frankford. There was no good way to get from here to there.
He reached under the dashboard without really thinking about it and turned on both of the radios with which his car, and those of half a dozen other Special Operations/Highway Patrol cars, were equipped.
As he approached North Broad and Roosevelt Boulevard, the part of his brain which was subconsciously listening to the normal early-morning radio traffic was suddenly wide awake.
Give me a supervisor at this location. This is a Five Two Nine Two, an off-duty Three Six Nine.
Twenty-five A, the police radio operator called.
Twenty-five A, the Twenty-fifth District sergeant on patrol responded. Whats that location?
300 West Luray Street.
300 West Luray Street? My God, thats Jerry Kellogs address. Jerry Kellog? Dead? Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
I got it, Twenty-five A announced. En route.
Without really being aware of what he was doing, Captain Pekach reached down and turned on the lights and siren and pushed the accelerator to the floor.
It took him less than three minutes to reach 300 West Luray Street, but that was enough time for him to have second thoughts about his rushing to the scene.