Investigators Read online

  And conceivably, at this very moment, Saint Susan might be doing with someone else—even that horse’s ass T. Winslow Hayes was a possibility—what she had been unwilling to do with him, and, if this was true, be absolutely uninterested in talking to her mother or Daffy or anyone else while so engaged.

  If she was so engaged, her car would be in the hotel garage. If that was so, he could call Daffy and tell her so. It would be a confession of failure on his part to seduce the lady, but on the other hand it would get Daffy off his back.

  He went out the side door of the hotel and walked the half block to the public parking garage that also provided parking services for guests of the Bellvue-Stratford.

  En route, without really thinking about it, he made the choice among his options. He could ask the attendant if there was a red Porsche 911 in the garage, which the attendant might not know; if at that point he tried to have a look for himself, that might require that he produce his badge, which he didn’t want to do. Or he could just march purposefully past the attendant—the garage was self-park—as if he were going to reclaim his car and have a look.

  He chose the latter option. The attendant in his little cubicle didn’t even raise his head from the Philadelphia Daily News when he walked past him.

  There was no Porsche on the ground, or first and second floors, but there were two, both 911s, on the third. Neither was red, but he thought Daffy might be wrong about the color.

  The blue Porsche 911 had Maryland tags, so that obviously wasn’t it. The second, black, Porsche had Pennsylvania plates. Half a bingo. There weren’t that many Porsche 911s around, so the odds were that a black Porsche 911 with Pennsylvania plates belonged to Saint Susan. But on the other hand, one should not jump to premature conclusions.

  He peered through the rear window for some kind of connection with Saint Susan, and found none. Quite the opposite. He didn’t think Saint Susan would have left a battered briefcase and a somewhat raunchy male golf hat on the seat of her car.

  “Can I help you, buddy?” a male voice demanded.

  He looked up and found himself being regarded with more than a little suspicion by a Wachenhut Security Service rent-a-cop.

  Matt immediately understood that it was less an offer of assistance than a pointed inquiry.

  “No, thanks,” he said with a smile.

  “What are you doing?” the rent-a-cop demanded.

  Matt produced his detective’s identification, a badge and a photo identification card in a leather folder.

  “Police business,” he said.

  “Lemme see that,” the rent-a-cop said, holding his hand out for the folder.

  Matt was not surprised. He was aware that he looked like a nice young well-dressed man from the suburbs—someone just starting to climb the corporate ladder at the First Philadelphia Bank & Trust, for example—and had grown used to people being surprised to learn that he was a detective.

  The rent-a-cop carefully compared Matt’s photograph with his face, then changed his attitude as he handed the ID back.

  “Anything I can help you with?”

  “I was looking for a Porsche 911 like this,” Matt said. “But red. This isn’t the one.”

  “I don’t think we got one,” the rent-a-cop said, searching his memory, and then added, “We had one yesterday. With a really good-looking blonde in it. She went out about half past five, just as I was going off duty.”

  “That’s probably what I was looking for,” Matt said. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Anytime,” the rent-a-cop said.

  Matt left the garage and walked back toward Broad Street.

  There’s a pay phone just inside the lobby of the Bellvue. I’ll call Chad from there, and tell him that wherever Susan is doing whatever she is doing, she’s not doing it at the Bellvue.

  He got as far as the bank of pay phones before he had second thoughts about that. He realized he had a growing feeling—cop’s intuition—that something was not entirely kosher here.

  It wouldn’t hurt to have a look at her room.

  He walked across the lobby and got on one of the elevators.

  He stopped before room 706 and knocked at the door. When there was no answer, he called, “Susan, it’s Matt Payne. If you’re in there, please open the door.”

  When there was still no answer, he took the passkey from his pocket and unlocked the door and walked in.

  There was no one in the room.

  The bed had not been slept in. The cover had not been pulled down, and it was not mussed, as if Susan had not lain down on it.

  A matching brassiere and scanty underpants, a slip, and a sweater and skirt were on the bed.

  The bathroom was a mess. Tidiness was apparently not among Susan’s many virtues. She had apparently showered before going to Daffy and Chad’s. Discarded towels were on the floor. And she had shaved her legs and/or armpits. Her lady’s-model razor was in the sink.

  And it was apparently that time of the month, for there was an open carton of Tampax on the shelf, beside a bottle of perfume, a stick of deodorant, and other feminine beauty supplies and tools.

  He first decided that when Susan had left her room, she had had absolutely no intention of bringing anyone male with her when she returned, otherwise she wouldn’t have left all the junk out in the open, and then he had the some what ungallant and immodest thought that the reason she had put him down so firmly was that, under the circumstances, there was no way they could have done anything about it.

  And then he was suddenly very uncomfortable, to the point of shame, with the sense of being an intruder on her very personal life.

  I’ve got absolutely no right to be in here. What the hell was I thinking about? Jesus Christ, what would I have done if she suddenly had walked in here?

  He walked quickly out of the bathroom, and through the bedroom to the corridor, carefully closing the door behind him. As he turned toward the elevator, he saw two women of the housekeeping staff examining him carefully.

  Shit!

  He rode down to the lobby, walked quickly through the lobby and out onto South Broad, and got into his car.

  On the way to Wallingford, he pulled into a gas station and called Chad from a pay phone. He didn’t want his parents to overhear him, as they probably would if he called from what he thought of as home.

  He told Chad what he knew, that when he called from the lobby of the Bellvue-Stratford, she didn’t answer her telephone, and that the rent-a-cop at the parking garage told him he remembered seeing a blonde in a red Porsche 911 leaving early the previous evening.

  He did not mention to Chad that she had apparently not spent the night in her room—the unmade bed suggested that—because that would have meant letting Chad know he’d gone into her room.

  He now recognized that going into her room was another item on his long list of Dumb Things I Have Done Without Thinking First.

  The whole incident should be finished and done with, but once again he had that feeling that something wasn’t kosher and that the incident was not closed.

  FIVE

  Patricia Payne found her husband on the flagstone patio outside the kitchen, comfortably sprawled on a cast-aluminum lounge, and, surprising her not at all, with a thick legal brief in his hands.

  “Guess who’s coming to breakfast?” she asked.

  Mr. and Mrs. Brewster Cortland Payne lived in a large, rambling house on four acres on Providence Road, in Wallingford, on Pennsylvania Route 252. It was a museum, Payne often thought gratefully, that Patricia had turned, with love, into a home.

  What was now the kitchen and the sewing room had been the whole house when it had been built of fieldstone before the Revolution. Additions and modifications over two centuries had turned it into a large rambling structure that fit no specific architectural category, although a real estate saleswoman had once remarked in the hearing of Patricia that “the Payne place just looked like old, old money.”

  The house was comfortable, even luxurious
, but not ostentatious. There was neither swimming pool nor tennis court, but there was, in what a century before had been a stable, a four-car garage. The Payne family swam, as well as rode, at the Rose Tree Hunt Club. They had a summer house in Cape May, New Jersey, which did have a tennis court, as well as a berth for their boat, a thirty-eight-foot Hatteras, called Final Tort IV.

  The only thing wrong with it, Brewster Payne now thought, was that the children were now gone.

  “Not Amy,” he said. “I just talked to her.”

  Amelia Alice Payne, M.D., was the eldest of the Payne children.

  “Matt.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “He called here,” she said. “And he said he would be here in an hour.”

  “I wonder what the probability factor of that actually happening is?”

  “Maybe he’s got something on his mind,” Patricia said. “He seemed a little strange last night.”

  “He didn’t seem strange to me,” he said.

  The telephone, sitting on the fieldstone wall that bordered the patio, rang.

  Patricia answered it, then handed it to her husband.

  “Brewster Payne,” he said.

  “Charley Emmons, Brew. How the hell are you?”

  Charles M. Emmons, Esq., was a law-school classmate and a frequent golf partner of Brewster Payne, and the senior member of a Wall Street law firm that specialized in corporate mergers.

  “Charley, my boy! How the hell are you?”

  “At the moment, a little embarrassed, frankly.”

  “I can’t believe you want to borrow money, but I will listen with compassion.”

  “I don’t have to borrow money from you; I can take all I need from you on the links.”

  “Do I detect a challenge?”

  “Unfortunately, no. I wish it was something like that.”

  “What’s up, Charley? What can I do for you?”

  “You don’t know Tom Reynolds, do you?”

  Thomas J. Reynolds, if that’s who he’s talking about, Brewster Payne recalled, is chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of—what the hell is the name?—a Fortune 500 company that has been gobbling up independent food manufacturers at what looks like a rate of one a week.

  “Only by reputation. But if we’re talking about the same fellow, Pat and I met his daughter last night.”

  “Susan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tom knows we’re friends,” Charley Emmons said.

  “And how might Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo and Lester be of service to—what’s the name of his company?”

  “Tomar, Inc.,” Charley furnished.

  “Yes, of course, Tomar, Incorporated. You know our motto, Charley: ‘No case too small, no cause so apparently harebrained, so long as there is an adequate retainer up front.’ ”

  Charley Emmons laughed dutifully.

  “The thing is, Brew—the firm is in pretty deep with Tomar; otherwise, believe me, I wouldn’t be making this call—about Tom’s daughter.”

  “Oh?”

  “You were at young Nesbitt’s last night?”

  “Yes, we were. I rather thought we’d see you there.”

  “The story as I get it, Brew, is that Susan left the party with Matt and hasn’t been seen since.”

  There was a perceptible pause before Payne replied.

  “Charley, Matt is no longer a child. And neither is that young woman. Matt, you know, has an apartment in the city . . .”

  “I understand, I understand,” Charley said. “But the thing is, the girl always telephones her mother when she’s out of town, just before she goes to bed, and she didn’t call last night.”

  “How old is the girl? Twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that?”

  “Actually, a little older. Twenty-six or twenty-seven.”

  “So when it comes to defending my son, I won’t have to worry about statutory rape, will I?”

  “Now, take it easy, Brew. No one is suggesting . . .”

  “What exactly are you suggesting, Charley?”

  “I’m suggesting that I have a very important client—and a friend, too—who is worried about his daughter. You can understand that.”

  “All right. What is it you want me to do?”

  “Find Matt, and have him have the girl call home. Do you have any idea where he is?”

  “What makes Mr. Reynolds so sure his daughter is with Matt?” Payne asked.

  “When her mother, in the wee hours, called her hotel—the Bellvue—and there was no answer, she called young Nesbitt’s wife—the girls were at Bennington together—and she told her Matt had taken the girl somewhere to listen to jazz.”

  “Charley, I’m more than a little reluctant to intrude in Matt’s personal life.”

  “I understand that, Brew. But under the circumstances . . .”

  “Does the phrase ‘consenting adults’ ever come up in your practice, Charley?”

  “Brew, the girl’s an only child. A Presbyterian Jewish Princess, if you like.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Matt’s type,” Payne said, thinking aloud. “As a matter of fact, Charley, Matt’s on his way out here. I will, with great discretion, ask him if he is acquainted with this young woman, and if there is any way he can suggest to her that she should telephone her mother.”

  “And you’ll call me, right?”

  There was a perceptible pause before Brewster Cortland Payne II replied.

  “All right, Charley, I’ll call you.”

  He replaced the telephone in its cradle.

  “The phrase ‘consenting adults’ caught my attention, darling,” Patricia said.

  “You remember the girl we met last night? Talking to Matt?”

  “What about her?”

  “No one seems to know where she is,” Payne said. “When last seen, she was in the company of one Matthew Payne, headed for some jazz place.”

  “No,” Patricia said.

  “No?”

  “I went looking for Matt last night. I couldn’t find him, but that girl was still there.”

  “Maybe he was there and you couldn’t find him.”

  “No. I asked Martha Peebles if she had seen Matt, and she said she had seen him leaving. And that was before I saw the girl. Her name is Susan Reynolds, by the way.”

  “Apparently, no one knows where Susan Reynolds is. She apparently calls home when she’s away. She didn’t do that last night, and she didn’t answer the telephone at the Bellvue.”

  “But someone thinks Matt knows? Is there a problem of some sort?”

  “I don’t think so,” Payne said. “Do you think it would be too much to hope that Matt has the whole day free? That he might have time for nine holes?”

  “What you could do is ask him,” Patricia said.

  Peter Wohl had more than once told his mother, who kept raising the question, that the reason he had not married was that with the Jaguar to support, he obviously could not also afford to support a wife. His mother was not entirely sure that he was pulling her leg.

  The Jaguar, on which he had spent a good deal of time and a great deal of money restoring, was an XK-120 Drop Head Coupe. It was now in better mechanical and cosmetic condition than when it had left the Jaguar factory in Coventry, England.

  While he had never entered the Jaguar in any of the Concours d’Elegance competitions frequently held in Philadelphia and its suburbs, he attended many of them whenever he could find the time. He had disqualified his car from competition—very reluctantly—by adding to it what classic-car buffs call somewhat scornfully “an aftermarket accessory.”

  The accessory was not noticed by most people, even those pausing to take long and admiring looks at the pristine, always gleaming roadster, but the antenna, approximately ten inches in height, mounted precisely in the center of the trunk lid, would not for long have escaped the eagle eyes of Concours d’Elegance judges. And once they had noticed that desecration of form and style, it wouldn’t t
ake them long to start snooping around the passenger compartment, where they would have found, carefully concealed beneath the dash, the police-band shortwave transceiver to which the antenna was connected.

  When Peter Wohl carefully turned the Jaguar into Jeanes Street in Northwest Philadelphia, the gleaming black Cadillac limousine provided by the City of Philadelphia to transport its mayor, the Hon. Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, was parked before the comfortable row house in which Wohl had grown up.

  Two police officers in plainclothes were in the process of removing insulated food containers from the trunk of the mayoral limousine and carrying them into the house. He recognized the police officers. One was Sergeant Charles Monahan, who was the mayor’s chauffeur, and the other was Lieutenant Jack Fellows, a tall, muscular black man who was officially the mayor’s bodyguard. It was also said of Jack Fellows that he was the police officer closest to the mayor, except, of course for Chief Inspector Augustus Wohl, Retired.

  When Lieutenant Fellows saw the Jaguar, he smiled and mimed staggering under the weight of the insulated food container. Peter Wohl waved and smiled, and then, when he had pulled up behind the limousine, reached under the dashboard of the Jaguar and came up with a microphone.

  “William One,” he said into it.

  Regulations of the Philadelphia Police Department required, among thousands of other things, that senior police supervisors—such as the inspector who was the commanding officer of the Special Operations Division—be in contact with the police department twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year round.

  Inasmuch as senior police supervisors required to be in constant contact are also furnished around-the-clock, radio-equipped police cars, most often unmarked, so that they may quickly respond to any call of duty, this usually poses no problems for the individuals concerned. Peter Wohl, however, was quite fond of his Jaguar, and determined to drive it when he thought of himself as off-duty.

  So, with some pain, he found himself purchasing with his own funds the very expensive police radio, and with even greater pain, drilling a hole in the center of the Jaguar’s trunk lid to mount its antenna.