"I told you," Mr. Payne had firmly told Lieutenant Nes-bitt, "the bachelor party and the wedding, and that's it."
"She's Daffy's maid of honor," Chad protested.
"I don't give a damn if she's queen of the nymphomaniacs, no, goddammit, no."
"You don't like girls anymore?"
"Not when more than two or three of them are gathered together for something like this. And I've got a job, you know.''
"Tell me about it, Kojak," Chad Nesbitt had replied.
"Chad, I really don't have the time," Matt Payne said. "Even if I wanted to."
"I'm beginning to think you're serious about this, buddy."
"You're goddamn right I'm serious,"
"Okay, okay. Tell you what. Show up for the rehearsal and I'll work something out."
"All I have to do is show up sober in a monkey suit and hand you the ring. I don't have to rehearse that."
"It's tails, asshole, you understand that? Not a dinner jacket."
"I will dazzle one and all with my sartorial elegance," Payne said.
"If you don't show up for the rehearsal, Daffy's mother will have hysterics."
That was, Matt Payne realized, less a figure of speech than a statement of fact. Mrs. Soames T. Browne was prone to emotional outbursts. Matt still had a clear memory of her shrieking "You dirty little boy" at him the day she discov-ered him playing doctor with Daphne at age five. And he knew that nothing that had happened since had really changed her opinion of his character. He knew, too, that she had tried to have Chad pick someone else to serve as his best man.
"Okay," Matt Payne had said, giving in. "The rehearsal, the bachelor dinner, and the wedding. But that's it. Deal?"
"Deal," Lieutenant Nesbitt had said, shaking his hand and smiling, then adding, "You rotten son of a bitch."
Matt Payne had been waiting inside the vestibule of St. Mark's Protestant Episcopal Church on Locust Street, be-tween Rittenhouse Square and South Broad Street in central Philadelphia, when the rehearsal party arrived in a convoy of three station wagons, two Mercurys, and a Buick.
Mrs. Soames T. Browne, who was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a flowing light blue silk dress briefly offered Matt Payne a hand covered in an elbow-length glove.
"Hello, Matthew. How nice to see you. Be sure to give my love to your mother and father.''
"I'll do that, Mrs. Browne," Matt said. "Thank you."
She did not introduce him to the blonde with Daffy.
"Come along, girls," Mrs. Browne said, snatching back her hand and sweeping quickly through the vestibule into the church.
"I'm Matt Payne," Matt said to the blonde, "since Daffy apparently isn't going to introduce us."
"Sorry," Daffy said. "Amanda, Matt. Don't be nice to him; he's being a real prick."
"Who is Daffy Browne and why is she saying all those terrible things about me?"
"You know damn well why," Daffy said.
"Haven't the foggiest," Matt said.
"Well, for one thing, Matt, Amanda won't have a date for the cocktail party after the rehearsal."
"I thought I was going to be her date."
"Chad said you flatly refused," Daffy said.
"He must have been pulling your chain again," Matt said. "He has a strange sense of humor."
"He does not," Daffy said loyally.
"He was suspended from pool privileges at Rose Tree for a year for dropping Tootsie Rolls in the swimming pool," Matt said. "That isn't strange?"
It took Amanda a moment to form in her mind the mental image of Tootsie Rolls floating around a swimming pool, and then she bit her lip to keep from smiling.
"Is that true?" Amanda asked.
"Goddamn you, Matt!" Daffy said, making it clear it was true.
"The mother of the bride made one of her famous running dives into the pool," Matt went on. "Somewhere beneath the surface she opened her eyes and saw one of the Tootsie Rolls. She came out of the pool like a missile from a sub-marine."
Amanda laughed, a hearty, deep belly laugh. Matt liked it.
"My father wanted to award her a loving cup," Matt said, "inscribed 'to the first Rose Tree matron who has really walked on water,' but my mother wouldn't let him."
"I absolutely refuse to believe that," Daffy Browne said. "Matt, you're disgusting!"
Mrs. Soames T. Browne reappeared.
"Darling, the rector would like a word with you," she said, and led her into the church.
Amanda smiled at Matt Payne.
"You are going to the cocktail party?" she asked.
He nodded. "And the dinner. As a matter of fact, Amanda, whither thou goest, there also shall Payne go. That's from the Song of Solomon, in case you're a heathen and don't know your Bible."
She chuckled and put her hand on his arm. "I'm glad," she said.
"Pay close attention inside," Matt said. "You and I may well be going through some barbarian ritual like this ourselves in the very near future."
She met his eyes for a moment, appraisingly.
"Chad tells me that you've taken a job with the city," she said, smoothly changing the subject.
"Is that what he told you?" Matt asked dryly.
"Was he pulling my chain too?"
"No."
"What do you do?"
"Street cleaning."
"Street cleaning?"
"Right now I'm in training," Matt said. "Studying the theory and history, you see. But one day soon I hope to have my own broom and garbage can on wheels."
"City Sanitation, in other words? Aren't you ever seri-ous? ''
"I was serious a moment ago, when I said you should pay close attention to the barbaric ritual."
The only thing that hadn't been just fine with Amanda in the time since he'd met her in the vestibule at St. Mark's was that he hadn't been able to get her alone. There had always been other people around and no way to separate from the group.
He had managed to kiss her, twice. The night before last he had tried to kiss her at the Merion Cricket Club, before Madame Browne had hauled her off in the station wagon. She had turned her face at the last second and all he got was a cheek. A very nice cheek, to be sure, but just a cheek. Last night she had not turned her face as she prepared to enter what he thought of as the Barque of the Vestal Virgins to be hauled off from the Rose Tree Hunt Club to the Browne place in Merion.
It had not been a kiss that would go down in the history books to rank with the one Delilah gave Samson before she gave him the haircut, but it had been on the lips, and they were sweet lips indeed, and his heart had jumped startlingly.
Tonight they would be alone. The Brownes were entertain-ing, especially their out-of-town guests, at cocktails and dinner at the Union League in downtown Philadelphia. It was tacitly admitted to be an old-folks' affair, and the young peo-ple could leave after dinner. Amanda liked jazz, another character trait he found appealing. So, they would go listen to jazz. With a little luck the lights would be dim. She prob-ably would let him hold her hand, and possibly permit even other manifestations of affection.
If the gods favored him, after they left the jazz joint she would accept his invitation to see his apartment. There, he wasn't sure what he would do. On one hand, he would cheer-fully sacrifice one nut and both ears to get into Amanda's pants, but on the other, she was clearly not the sort of girl from whom one could expect a quick piece of tail. Amanda Spencer was the kind of girl one marched before an altar and promised to be faithful to until death did you part.
Matt Payne was very much aware that he could fuck up the whole relationship by making a crude pass at her. He didn't want to do that.
God only knows what that goddamn Daffy has told her about me. Going back to me talking her out of her pants when we were five.
***
The residence of Mr. and Mrs. Soames T. Browne in Merion was an adaptation, circa 1890, of an English manor house, circa 1600. The essential differences were that the interior dimensions were larger and there was inside plumbing. B
ut everything else was there: a forest of chimneys, a cobblestone courtyard, enormous stone building blocks, turret like protru-sions, leaded windows, ancient oaks, formal gardens, and an entrance that always reminded Matt of a movie he'd seen starring Errol Flynn as Robin Hood. In the movie, when the heavy oak door had swung slowly open, Errol Flynn had run the door opener through with a sword.
The heavy oak door swung open and an elderly black man in a gray cotton jacket stood there.
"I'm very glad to see you, Matt," the Brownes' butler said.
"Why do you say that, Mr. Ward?" Matt asked. He had known the Brownes' butler, and his wife, all of his life.
"Because the consensus was that you wouldn't show and I'd wind up driving Daffy's friend into town," Ward said. "They're all gone."
"This one's sort of special," Matt confessed.
"It was her and me against everybody else," Ward said. "She insisted on waiting for you."
"Really?" Matt replied, pleased.
"I'll go tell her you're here," Ward said. "There's a fresh pot of coffee in the kitchen, if that interests you."
"No thank you. I'll just wait."
He watched the elderly man slowly start to ascend the stairs. He had taken only four or five steps when Amanda appeared at the top and started down.
"See?" she said to the butler. "We were right." She looked at Matt. "I saw you drive up. I love the car, but you don't strike me as the Porsche type."
"I can get a gold chain and unbutton my shirt to the navel, if you like," Matt said.
She had come up to him by then.
"No thank you." She chuckled, then surprised him by kissing him on the lips.
"Hot damn!" he said.
"Draw no inferences," she said. "I'm just a naturally friendly person."
When he got behind the wheel and looked at Amanda as she got in beside him, he remembered too late that he had forgotten to hold the door for her.
"I should have held the door for you," he said. "Sorry. My mother says I have the manners of a Cossack."
She laughed again, and all of a sudden it occurred to him that their faces were no more than six inches apart-and noth-ing ventured, nothing gained.
"God, that was nice!" he said a moment later.
"Drive," she said. "Has this thing got a vanity mirror?"
"A what?"
She pulled the visor down and found what she was looking for.
"That's a vanity mirror," she said, and replenished her lipstick. "You've probably got some lipstick on you."
"I will never wash again."
She handed him a tissue.
"Take it off," she ordered, and he complied.
"These are really nice wheels," she said a short while later. "But I bet all the girls tell you that."
"My graduation present," Matt said.
"You already dinged it," Amanda said.
"You mean the cracked turn-signal lens?" he asked, sur-prised that she had noticed it. "That's nothing. You should have seen what happened to my first Porsche. That was to-taled."
"Are you putting me on?"
"Not at all. A guy in a van ran into the back and really clobbered it."
"I think I would have killed him."
"As a matter of fact, I did," Matt said. "Took out my trusty five-shooter and blew his brains out."
He heard her inhale. After a moment she said, "You mean six-shooter," and then added, "That wasn't funny. Some-times, Matt, you don't know where to draw the line."
"Sorry."
"That was the pot calling the kettle black," she said. "I'm sorry, I had no right to say that to you."
"You have blanket authority to say anything you want to me."
He gave into the temptation and grabbed her hand. When she didn't object and withdraw it, he kissed it. Then she pulled it free.
"Am I going to have trouble with you tonight?"
"No," he said. "We do what you want to do, and nothing else."
"Funny, I thought you were going to offer to show me your etchings."
"I don't have any etchings," he said.
"But you do have an apartment, right?"
"You're supposed to wait until I ask you before you indig-nantly tell me you're not that kind of girl," Matt said.
She laughed, the genuine laugh Matt had come to like.
"Touch‚," she said.
"After we escape from this dinner, would you like to see my apartment?"
"I'm not that kind of girl."
"I was afraid of that," he said. "No, that's not true. I knew that. You brought this whole thing up. I'm getting a bum rap."
"Daffy warned me about you," she said. "The best de-fense is a good offense. Haven't you ever heard that?"
"How did the kiss fit into that strategy?"
"How far is where we're going?" she said, cleverly chang-ing the subject.
"Not far enough. In no more than twenty minutes we'll be there."
***
A Mercedes-Benz 380 SL convertible with its ragtop up drove onto the fourth floor of the Penn Services Parking Ga-rage. The driver, a young woman, looked forward over the steering wheel, looking for a place to park.
She did not look toward where Charles was standing, be-hind a round concrete pole at the north end of the building, in a position that both gave him a view of the street down which Anthony J. DeZego would probably come-unless, of course, he sent Jowls the Bellboy to fetch the car-and also shielded him from the view of anyone who came out of the stairwell to get his car.
And she did not find a parking space, as Charles knew she would not; the fourth floor was full.
The Mercedes continued around and went up the vehicular ramp to the roof.
Charles looked out the window again and saw Anthony J. DeZego walking quickly down the street toward the Penn Services Parking Garage from the fourth-floor window. He was alone; there would have been a problem if he had had the blonde-without-a-bra with him.
He looked down at the street and saw Victor, or at least Victor's shoulder, where he was sitting in the Pontiac. It would have been better if he could have caught Victor's attention and signaled him that DeZego was coming; but where Victor was parked, the garage attendant could see him and probably would have remembered having seen some guy across the street in a Pontiac who kept looking up at the garage.
Victor was watching the exit; that was all that counted.
Charles took his pigskin gloves from his pocket and pulled them on. Then he picked up the carry-on bag and walked down the center of the vehicular path toward the stairwell. If another car came or someone walked out of the stairwell, he would be just one more customer leaving the garage.
No one came.
The stairwell was sort of a square of concrete blocks set aside the south side of the building. The door from it was maybe six feet from the wall. Management had generously provided a rubber wedge to keep the door open when nec-essary. When Charles decided the dame in the Benz had had time to park her car and go down the stairs, he opened the door and propped it open with the wedge.
He had considered doing the job in the stairwell itself but had decided that the stairwell probably would carry the sound of the Remington down to the attendant and make him curi-ous. When he heard footsteps coming up the stairwell, he would kick the wedge loose and let the automatic door-closer do its thing.
Then, when DeZego came onto the fourth floor, and he was sure it was him, he would do the job. With the door closed, the noise would not be funneled downstairs.
He stepped into the shadow of the stairwell wall, unzipped the carry-on, removed the Remington, pushed the safety off, and checked to make sure the red on the little button was visible, that he hadn't by mistake put the safety on. Then he put the Remington under the Burberry trench coat. The pocket had a flap and a slit, so that you could get your hand inside the coat. He held the Remington by the pistol grip straight down against his leg.
He heard footsteps on the stairs.
He dislodged the rubber wedge w
ith his toe, and the door started to close.
He put his ear to the concrete, not really expecting to hear anything. But he was surprised. The stairs were metal, and they sort of rang like a bell. He could hear DeZego coming closer and closer. He waited for the door to open.
It didn't.
W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 03 - The Victim Page 5
