Investigators Page 7

  “Is it too much to hope that I’m interrupting something lewd, immoral, and probably illegal?”

  “Unfortunately, you have found me lying here in a state of involuntary celibacy.”

  “Mighty Matthew has struck out? How did that happen?”

  “I strongly suspect the lady doesn’t like policemen. I was doing pretty well, I thought, before what I do for a living came up.”

  “Sometimes that happens.” Wohl chuckled.

  “What’s up, boss?”

  “Golf is off, Matt. Sorry.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “Carlucci called my father last night and ‘suggested’ everybody get together for a little pasta at my father’s house this afternoon, and then ‘suggested’ who else should be there. You weren’t on the list. I wish I wasn’t.”

  The mayor’s habit of issuing orders in the form of suggestions was almost infamous. Chief Inspector Augustus Wohl, Retired, had been Carlucci’s rabbi as Carlucci had worked his way up through the police ranks. Carlucci had once, emotionally, blurted to Peter that Chief Wohl was the only man in the world he completely trusted.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Lowenstein and Coughlin will be there. And Mike Weisbach. And Sabara. You’re a detective. You figure it out.”

  It wasn’t hard to make a good guess. Matthew Lowenstein and Dennis V. Coughlin were generally regarded as the most influential of all the chief inspectors of the Philadelphia Police Department. Michael Weisbach was a staff inspector, generally regarded as one of the best of that group of senior investigators. Captain Michael J. Sabara was deputy commander of Special Operations.

  “Not Captain Pekach?” Matt asked.

  “Not Captain Pekach. I think the mayor heard him say ‘if there was anything dirty in Narcotics, I would know about it’ once too often.”

  “That makes it official? We’re going to get stuck with that Five Squad business?” Matt asked.

  “This makes it, I’d guess, a sure thing. Official will probably come down on Monday.”

  “Damn!”

  “Sorry about golf, Matt. I was really looking forward to it.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “I’ll call you when I know how bad it is,” Wohl said.

  “Damn,” Matt repeated.

  The phone went dead in his ear.

  He held it a moment in his hand, as his mind ran through all the ramifications—none of them pleasant—of the mayor “suggesting” to Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich that Special Operations—not Internal Affairs—conduct an investigation of alleged corruption in the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit.

  He looked up at the ceiling, where a clock on the bedside table projected the time of day. It was 9:15 A.M. He had gone to bed after two. He had planned to sleep until noon, by which time he presumed he would be rested, clear-eyed, and capable of parting Peter Wohl—who was a pretty good golfer—from, say, a hundred dollars at Merion.

  Now he was awake, and once awake, he stayed awake. What was he going to do now? And, for that matter, for the rest of the day?

  A call of nature answered that question for the immediate future. Matt put the telephone in its cradle, got out of bed, and went into his tiny bathroom. He was subjecting a rather nasty-looking bug who had fallen into the water closet to a strafing attack when the telephone rang again.

  He cocked his head toward the open door so that he could hear what Caller Number Two had on his or her mind.

  The prerecorded message played, and there came the beep.

  “Matt, damn you, I know she’s there, and I absolutely have to talk to her this instant! Pick up the telephone!”

  The voice was that of Mrs. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV.

  Without taking his eyes from the bug he had under relentless aerial attack, Matt raised his left hand, center finger extended, the others bent, over his head and in the general direction of the loudspeaker on the telephone answering device.

  Dear Daffy, Matt reasoned, is almost certainly referring to good ol’ blue-eyed, blond-haired, splendidly knockered, Whatsername—Susan Reynolds—with whom I struck out last night.

  Daffy thinks she came here with me.

  Can it be that the Sweet Susan—Daffy knows her well—has been known to do with others what she would not do last night with me?

  Damn!

  He flushed the toilet by depressing the lever with his foot, pulled his T-shirt over his head, and stepped into his tiny shower stall. He had just finished what he thought of as Phase One (rinse) of his shower and reached for the soap to commence Phase Two (soap) when the telephone rang again.

  He slid the shower door open to listen.

  This time it was Mr. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV himself.

  “Matt, if you’re there, for Christ’s sake, answer the phone! Daffy’s climbing the walls!”

  Matt walked naked and dripping to the telephone and picked it up.

  “She’s not here, whoever she is,” he said.

  “Then where the hell is she?” Chad Nesbitt challenged.

  “Since I’m not even sure who you’re talking about, pal—”

  “Susan Reynolds, of course,” Chad said shortly.

  “Not here. The last time I saw the lady, she was in your dining room.”

  “She’s not with you?” Chad asked, obviously surprised, and went on before Matt could reply. “But she was, right?”

  “Listen carefully. She is not here. She has never been here. Let your imagination soar,” Matt said. “Consider the possibility that she left your place with someone else.”

  “You were putting the make on her, Matt,” Chad challenged.

  “Indeed I was. But the lady proved to be monumentally uninterested.”

  “She didn’t call home,” Chad said.

  “Thank you for sharing that with me.”

  “She always calls her mother before she goes to sleep,” Chad said.

  “How touching!”

  Daffy Browne Nesbitt came on the line. “Don’t be such a sarcastic son of a bitch, Matt. Honestly, you’re a real shit!”

  “I would appreciate it if you would attempt to control your foul tongue when under the same roof as my goddaughter,” Matt said solemnly.

  “She didn’t call her mother last night,” Chad said. “So her mother called her. At the Bellvue. And then she called here.”

  “Why did she call there?”

  “I just told you,” Chad said, somewhat impatiently. “There was no answer at the Bellvue. Then she called here, at half past two. Daffy told her that she had gone with you to listen to jazz.”

  “Daffy told her what? Why?”

  “I certainly didn’t want to tell her mother that she was in your apartment,” Daffy said.

  “Have you been eavesdropping all along, Daffy, or did you just come on the line? The reason I ask is because I have already told Chad that your pal is not now, and never has been, in my apartment.”

  “Then where is she?” Daffy challenged indignantly.

  “This is where I came in. I haven’t the foggiest idea where she might be, Daffy, and”—he shifted into a Clark Gable accent—“frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  Chad chuckled.

  “The both of you are shits,” Daffy said, and hung up.

  “You might try washing her mouth out with soap,” Matt said.

  “She’s upset. She lied to Susan’s mother, and now she’s been caught at it.”

  “I’m the one who should be pissed about that, old buddy. She told Mommy that the family virgin was out with me.”

  “You’re close,” Chad said. “Be a good chap, won’t you, and go by the Bellvue?”

  “You’re as close as I am, Chad,” Matt protested.

  The Bellvue-Stratford Hotel, on South Broad Street, was nowhere near equidistant between Matt Payne’s apartment—which consisted of a bedroom, a bath not large enough for a bathtub, a kitchen separated from the dining area by a no longer functioning slid
ing partition, and a living room from which one could, if one stood on one’s toes, catch a glimpse of a small area of Rittenhouse Square, four floors below, through one of two eighteen-inch wide dormer windows—and the Nesbitt triplex on Stockton Place.

  “No, it’s not,” Chad replied. “And you know it. Besides, I can’t leave Daffy and the baby alone!”

  “Perish the thought! That nanny you just imported is to impress the neighbors, right? You certainly couldn’t trust her to watch the kid, could you?”

  “Daffy’s right. Sometimes you are a sarcastic ass,” Chad said.

  “What am I supposed to do at the Bellvue?”

  “See what you can find out. See if her car’s there, for example. And call me.”

  “What kind of a car?”

  “Daffy, what kind of a car does Susan drive?” Matt heard Chad call, and then he came back on the line. “Oddly enough, one like yours. Only red.”

  “A 911? A red 911?”

  “That’s what Daffy says.”

  “That’s why I asked.”

  “Thanks, pal,” Chad said, and the line went dead.

  Matt put the phone back in its cradle, but didn’t take his hand from it.

  “Matthew, my boy,” he said aloud. “You have just been had. Again.”

  Then he dialed a number from memory.

  On the second ring, the phone was picked up.

  “Hello,” his mother said.

  “This is the son who never seems to find time to even drop by for a cup of coffee,” Matt said.

  “Is it really?”

  “Do you think you could throw in a doughnut?”

  “If I thought the offer was genuine, I would be willing to go so far as a couple of scrambled eggs and a slice of Taylor ham. Whatever it takes. Sometime this year, I would dare to hope?”

  “How about in an hour?”

  “I will believe my extraordinary good fortune only when you physically appear. But I will light a candle and leave it in the window.”

  “Good-bye, Mother.”

  Matt returned and finished his shower and toilette, shaving while under the shower.

  He dressed quickly, in a single-breasted tweed jacket; gray flannel trousers; a white, button-down-collar shirt and slipped his feet into tasseled loafers. Just before he left his bedroom, he took his Smith & Wesson Undercover Model .38 Special-caliber revolver from the bedside table, pulled up his left trouser leg, and strapped it on his ankle.

  He started down the steep, narrow flight of stairs that led to the third-floor landing, then stopped and went back into his living room. He pulled open a drawer in a cabinet, took from it a key, and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Be prepared,” he said aloud, quoting the motto of the Boy Scouts of America. An almost astonishing number of things he had learned as a Boy Scout had been of real use to him as a police officer. The key, so far as he knew, would open the lock of every guest room in the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel. That might come in handy.

  By the time he had gone quickly down the stairs to the third-floor landing and pushed the button to summon the elevator, however, he had had second thoughts about the passkey.

  For one thing, the very fact that he had it constituted at least two violations of the law. For one thing, it was stolen. For another, it could be construed to be a “burglar’s tool.” To actually use it would constitute breaking and entering.

  He had come into possession of the key while he had been—for four very long weeks—a member of an around-the-clock surveillance detail in the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel. The Investigation Section of the Special Operations Division of the Philadelphia Police Department had been engaged in developing evidence that a Central Division captain and a Vice Squad lieutenant were accepting cash payments from the proprietress of a call girl ring in exchange for permitting her to conduct her business.

  During the surveillance, his good friend, Detective Charles Thomas “Charley” McFadden, had arrived to relieve him, not only an hour and five minutes late but wearing a proud and happy smile.

  “We won’t have to ask that asshole to let us in anywhere anymore,” Charley had announced, and handed him a freshly cut key. “We now have passkeys of our very own.”

  The asshole to whom Detective McFadden referred was the assistant manager assigned by the Bellvue-Stratford management to deal with the police during their investigation, and who had made it clear that he would rather be dealing with lepers.

  “Where did you get them?” Matt had asked.

  “I lifted one off the maintenance guy’s key rings while he was taking a crap,” Charley announced triumphantly. “I had four copies made—”

  “I thought it was illegal to duplicate a passkey,” Matt had interrupted.

  “—and dropped the key just where the guy thought he must have dropped it,” Charley had gone on, his face suggesting that Matt’s concern for the legality of the situation was amusing but not worthy of a response. “One for me, one for you, one for Jesus, and one for Tony Harris.”

  Matt had decided at that time that what Jesus thought of the purloined passkey was wholly irrelevant. He and Detective Jesus Martinez were not mutual admirers. Detective Martinez often made it clear that he regarded Detective Payne as a Main Line rich kid who was playing at being a cop, and whose promotion to detective, and assignment to Special Operations, had been political and not based on merit.

  On his part, Detective Payne thought olive-skinned Detective Martinez—who was barely above departmental minimums for height and weight and had a penchant for gold jewelry and sharply tailored suits from Krass Brothers—was a mean little man who suffered from a monumental Napoleonic complex.

  What Tony Harris thought of Charley’s boosting a passkey from a hotel maintenance man—and more important, how he reacted—would, Matt had realized, instantly decide the matter once and for all.

  Tony Harris, de jure, just one of the four detectives assigned to the Investigations Section, was de facto far more than just the detective in charge of the surveillance by virtue of his eighteen years’ seniority. He had spent thirteen of those eighteen years as a homicide detective, and earned a department-wide reputation as being among the best of them.

  He was consequently regarded with something approaching awe by Detectives Payne, McFadden, and Martinez, who had less than a year’s service as detectives.

  Tony’s response when handed the key had surprised Detective Payne.

  “Maybe you’re not as dumb as you look, McFadden,” he had said, dropping the key in his pocket.

  And they had used the keys during the rest of the surveillance.

  The difference, it occurred to Matt as he waited for the elevator, was that they had done so under cover of law. Believing in probable cause, a judge had issued a search warrant authorizing search and electronic surveillance of “appropriate areas within the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel.”

  The search warrant had obviously expired when those being surveilled had been arrested and arraigned.

  Matt was about to unlock his door, and leave the key inside his door, when the elevator appeared. He shrugged and got on, and it began its slow descent to the basement garage.

  The turn-of-the-century brownstone mansion had been gutted several years before by Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., and converted into office space, now wholly occupied by the Delaware Valley Cancer Society. The idea of turning the garret into an apartment had been a last-minute idea of the principal stockholder of Rittenhouse Properties, Inc. He thought there might be, providing a suitable tenant—a widow living on a small pension, for example—could be found, a small additional amount of revenue from the apartment, and failing finding a suitable resident, that it would be useful—as much for parking space in the basement as for the apartment itself—to himself and his family.

  At the time, it had never entered the mind of the principal stockholder of Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., Brewster Cortland Payne II, that his son would move into the apartment to comply with the requirement of the Ci
ty of Philadelphia that its police officers live within the city limits.

  There were two cars in the parking spots closest to the elevator in the basement of the building set aside for the occupant of the garret apartment. A new Plymouth four-door sedan sat in one, and a silver Porsche 911 in the other. The Plymouth was an unmarked police car assigned to Detective Matthew M. Payne. The Porsche had been a present from his father and mother, on the occasion of his graduation—summa cum laude—from the University of Pennsylvania.

  After a moment’s indecision, Matt unlocked the door of the Porsche and got behind the wheel. He was off-duty. He was going to the Bellvue-Stratford to see about Daffy’s missing friend—and afterward to have breakfast with his father—as a private citizen. The taxpayers should not be asked to pay for his gas and wear and tear on the car when he was off-duty. And besides, he liked to drive the Porsche.

  Five minutes later, after inching through early-morning inner-city traffic, he pulled to the curb on South Broad Street in an area marked “Tow Away Zone.” He took from under the seat a cardboard sign on which was stamped the gold seal of the City of Philadelphia and the words “POLICE DEPARTMENT—Official Business” and placed it on the dash of the Porsche.

  He entered the hotel, went directly to the house phones, and asked the operator to connect him with Miss Susan Reynolds.

  There was no answer.

  He put the telephone down and started to leave, then picked it up again.

  “Operator,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get Miss Susan Reynolds in 802. I’m sure she’s there, but there’s no—”

  “Miss Reynolds is in 706, sir,” the operator said after a moment, and more than a little scornfully. “I’ll ring.”

  Matt felt just a little pleased with himself. He was now possessed of good ol’ Susan’s room number. He knew if he had asked for it—unless he had identified himself as a cop, which he didn’t want to do, running down one of Daffy’s friends not being legitimate police business—the hotel would not have provided it to him, as a security measure.

  He had learned a good deal about the security measures practiced by the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel while on the surveillance detail.

  He paused thoughtfully for a moment by the house phones, then decided that one possibility was that Susan might have been willing to show the etchings in her hotel room to another of the young gentlemen who had been at Daffy and Chad’s.