Amelia Payne, Ph. D., M.D., stopped the Buick in front of the Detweiler mansion, effectively denying the use of the drive to anyone else who wished to use it, and got out. She was wearing a pleated tweed skirt and a sweater, and looked like a typical Main Line Young Matron.
The EMT firemen standing near the blanket-covered body were therefore surprised when she knelt beside the stretcher and started to remove the blanket.
“Hey, lady!”
“I’m Dr. Payne,” Amy said, and examined the body very quickly. Then she pulled the blanket back in place and stood up.
“Let’s get this into the house,” she said. “Out of sight.”
“We’re waiting for the M.E.”
“And while we’re waiting, we’re going to move the body into the house,” Dr. Payne said. “That wasn’t a suggestion.”
The EMT firemen picked up the stretcher and followed her into the house.
She crossed the foyer and opened the door to the sitting room and saw her father and H. Richard Detweiler talking softly.
“Are you all right, Uncle Dick?” she asked.
“Ginger-peachy, honey,” Detweiler replied.
“Grace is upstairs, Amy,” her father said.
“I’ll look in on her,” Amy said, and pulled the door closed. She turned to the firemen. “Over there,” she said. “In the dining room.”
She crossed the foyer, opened the door to the dining room, and waited inside until the firemen had carried the stretcher inside. Then she issued other orders:
“One of you stay here, the other wait outside for the M.E. When he gets here, send for me. I’ll be upstairs with Mrs. Detweiler, the mother.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” the larger of the two EMTs-whose body weight was approximately twice that of Amy’s-said docilely.
Amy went quickly up the stairs to the second floor.
A black Ford Falcon with the seal of the City of Philadelphia and those words in small white letters on its doors passed through the gates of the Detweiler estate and drove to the door of the mansion.
Bernard C. Potter, a middle-aged, balding black man, tie-less, wearing a sports coat and carrying a 35mm camera and a small black bag, got out and walked toward the door. Bernie Potter was an investigator for the Office of the Medical Examiner, City of Philadelphia.
This job, Potter thought, judging from the number of police cars-and especially the Fire Department rescue vehicle that normally would have been long gone from the scene-parked in front of the house, is going to be a little unusual.
And then Captain O’Connor, who Bernie Potter knew was Commanding Officer of Northwest Detectives, came out the door. This was another indication that something special was going on. Captains of Detectives did not normally go out on routine Five Two Nine Two jobs.
“What do you say, Bernie?”
“What have we got?” Bernie asked as they shook hands.
“Looks like a simple OD, Bernie. Caucasian female, early twenties, whose father happens to own Nesfoods.”
“Nice house,” Bernie said. “I didn’t think these people were on public assistance. Where the body?”
“In the dining room.”
“What are you guys still doing here?” Bernie asked the Fire Department EMT on the patio. It was simple curiosity, not a reprimand.
The EMT looked uncomfortable.
“Like I told you,” Captain O’Connor answered for him, “the father owns Nesfoods International.” And then he looked down the drive at a new Ford coming up. “And here comes, I think, Chief Coughlin.”
“Equal justice under the law, right?” Bernie asked.
“There’s a doctor, a lady doctor, in there,” the EMT said, “said she wanted to be called when you came.”
“What does she want?” Bernie asked.
The EMT shrugged.
Chief Coughlin got out of his car and walked up.
“Good morning, Chief,” Tom O’Connor said.
Coughlin shook his hand and then Bernie Potter’s.
“Long time no see, Bernie,” he said. “You pronounce yet?”
“Haven’t seen the body.”
“The quicker we can get this over, the better. You call for a wagon, Tom?”
“I didn’t. I don’t like to get in the way of my people.”
“Check and see. If he hasn’t called for one, get one here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where’s the body?”
“In the dining room,” the EMT said.
“I heard it was on the patio here.”
“The lady doctor made us move it,” the EMT said.
“Let’s go have a look at it,” Coughlin said. “I know where the dining room is. Tom, you make sure about the wagon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Coughlin led the way to the dining room.
“How did it get on the stretcher?” Bernie asked.
“What I hear is that the father carried it downstairs,” the EMT said. “When we got here, he was sitting outside on one of them metal chairs, couches, holding it in his arms. We took it from him.”
A look of pain, or compassion, flashed briefly over Chief Coughlin’s face.
“Where did they find it?” Bernie asked.
Dr. Amelia Payne entered the dining room.
“In her bedroom,” she answered the question. “In an erect position, with a syringe in her left arm.”
“Dr. Payne, this is Mr. Potter, an investigator of the Medical Examiner’s Office.”
“How do you do?” Amy said. “Death was apparently instantaneous, or nearly so,” she went on. “There is a frothy liquid in the nostrils, often encountered in cases of heroin poisoning. The decedent was a known narcotic-substance abuser. In my opinion-”
“Doctor,” Bernie interrupted her uncomfortably, “I don’t mean to sound hard-nosed, but you don’t have any status here. This is the M.E.’s business.”
“I am a licensed physician, Mr. Potter,” Amy said. “The decedent was my patient, and she died in her home in not-unexpected circumstances. Under those circumstances, I am authorized to pronounce, and to conduct, if in my judgment it is necessary, any postmortem examination.”
“Amy, honey,” Chief Coughlin said gently.
“Yes?” She turned to him.
“I know where you’re coming from, Amy. But let me tell you how it is. You may be right. You probably are. But while you’re fighting the M.E. taking Penny’s body, think what’s going to happen: It’s going to take time, maybe a couple of days, before even your father can get an injunction. Until he gets a judge to issue an order to release it to you, the M.E.’ll hold the body. Let’s get it over with, as quickly and painlessly as possible. I already talked to the M.E. He’s going to do the autopsy himself, as soon as the body gets there. It can be in the hands of the funeral home in two, three hours.”
She didn’t respond.
“Grace Detweiler’s going to need you,” Coughlin went on. “And Matt. That’s what’s important.”
Amy looked at Bernie.
“There’s no need for a postmortem,” she said. “Everybody in this room knows how this girl killed herself.”
“It’s the law, Doctor,” Bernie said sympathetically.
Amy turned to Dennis Coughlin.
“What about Matt? Does he know?”
“Peter Wohl’s waiting for him on North Broad Street. He’ll tell him. Unless…”
“No,” Amy said. “I think Peter’s the best one. They have a sibling relationship. And Peter obviously has more experience than my father. You think Matt will come here?”
“I would suppose so.”
She turned to Bernie Potter.
“OK, Mr. Potter,” she said. “She is pronounced at nine twenty-five A.M. ” She turned back to Chief Coughlin. “Thank you, Uncle Denny.”
She walked out of the dining room.
Chief Coughlin turned to the EMT.
“The wagon’s on the way. Wait in here until it gets here.”
Th
e EMT nodded.
“I’m going to have to see the bedroom, Chief,” Bernie Potter said.
“I’ll show you where it is,” Chief Coughlin said. “You through here?”
“I haven’t seen the body,” Potter said.
He squatted beside the stretcher and pulled the blanket off. He looked closely at the eyes and then closed them. He examined the nostrils.
“Yeah,” he said, as if to himself. Then, “Give me a hand rolling her over.”
The EMT helped him turn the body on its stomach. Bernie Potter tugged and pulled at Penelope Alice Detweiler’s nightdress until it was up around her neck.
There was evidence of livor. The lower back and buttocks and the back of her legs were a dark purple color. Gravity drains blood in a corpse to the body’s lowest point.
“OK,” he said. “No signs of trauma on the back. Now let’s turn her the other way.”
There was more evidence of livor when the body was again on its back. The abdominal area and groin were a deep purple color.
“No trauma here, either,” Bernie Potter said. He picked up the left arm.
“It looks like a needle could have been in here,” he said. “It’s discolored.”
“The maid said there was a syringe in her arm,” Captain O’Connor said. “And the district sergeant saw one, and some rubber tubing, on the floor in the corridor upstairs. He put chairs over them.”
Bernie Potter nodded. Then he put Penelope’s arm back beside her body, tugged at the nightgown so that it covered the body again, replaced the blanket, and stood up.
“OK,” he said. “Now let’s go see the bedroom. And the needle.”
Chief Coughlin led the procession upstairs.
“There it is,” Tom O’Connor said when they came to the chairs in the middle of the upstairs corridor. He carefully picked up the chairs Officer Wells had placed over the plastic hypodermic syringe and the surgical rubber tubing and put them against the wall.
Bernie Potter went into his bag and took two plastic bags from it. Then, using a forceps, he picked up the syringe and the tubing from the carpet and carefully placed them into the plastic bags.
Coughlin then led him to Penelope’s bedroom. Potter first took several photographs of the bed and the bedside tables, then took another, larger plastic bag from his bag and, using the forceps, moved the spoon, the candle, the cotton ball, and the glassine bag containing a white crystalline substance from Penelope’s bedside table into it.
“OK,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need. Let me use a telephone and I’m on my way.”
“I’ll show you, Bernie,” Chief Coughlin said. “There’s one by the door downstairs.”
As they went down the stairs, the door to the dining room opened and two uniformed police officers came through it, carrying Penelope’s body on a stretcher. It was covered with a blanket, but her arm hung down from the side.
“The arm!” Chief Coughlin said.
One of the Fire Department EMTs, who was holding the door open, went quickly and put the arm onto the stretcher.
The policemen carried the stretcher outside and down the stairs from the patio and slid it through the already open doors of a Police Department wagon.
Chief Coughlin pointed to the telephone, then walked out onto the patio.
“Just don’t give it to anybody,” he called. “It’s for Dr. Greene. He expects it.”
“Yes, sir,” one of the police officers said.
Coughlin went back into the foyer.
Bernie Potter was just hanging up the telephone.
“Thanks, Bernie,” Coughlin said, and put out his hand.
“Christ, what a way to begin a day,” Bernie said.
“Yeah,” Coughlin said.
It would have been reasonable for anyone seeing Inspector Peter Wohl leaning on the trunk of his car, its right wheels off the pavement on the sidewalk, his arms folded on his chest, a look of annoyance on his face, to assume that he was an up-and-coming stockbroker, or lawyer, about to be late for an early-morning appointment because his new car had broken down and the Keystone Automobile Club was taking their own damned sweet time coming to his rescue.
The look of displeasure on his face was in fact not even because he was going to have to tell Matt Payne, of whom he was extraordinarily fond-his mother had once said that Matt was like the little brother she had never been able to give him, and she was, he had realized, right-that the love of his life was dead, but rather because it had just occurred to him that he was really a cold-blooded sonofabitch.
He would, he had realized, be as sympathetic as he could possibly be when Matt showed up, expressing his own personal sense of loss. But the truth of the matter was, he had just been honest enough with himself to admit that he felt Matt was going to be a hell of a lot better off with Penelope Detweiler dead.
It had been his experience, and as a cop, there had been a lot of experience, that a junkie is a junkie is a junkie. And in the case of Penelope Detweiler, if after the best medical and psychiatric treatment that money could, quite literally, buy, she was still sticking needles in herself, for whatever reason, that seemed to be absolutely true.
There would have been no decent future for them. If she hadn’t OD’d this morning, she would have OD’d next week, or next month, or next year, or two years from now. There would have been other incidents, sordid beyond the comprehension of people who didn’t know the horrors of narcotics addiction firsthand, and each of them would have killed Matt a little.
It was better for Matt that this had happened now, rather than after they had married, after they had children.
The fact that he felt sorry for Penelope Detweiler did not alter the fact that he was glad she had died before she could cause Matt more pain.
But by definition, Peter Wohl thought, anyone who is glad a twenty-three-year-old woman is dead is a cold-blooded sonofabitch.
He looked up as a car nearly identical to his flashed its headlights at him and then bounced up on the curb. Detective Jesus Martinez was driving. Detective Matt Payne, smiling, opened the passenger door and got out.
Martinez, annoyance on his face, hurried to follow him.
Why do those two hate each other?
The answer, obviously, is that opposites do not attract.
What do I say to Matt?
When all else fails, try the unvarnished truth.
“Don’t tell me, you’re broken down again?” Matt Payne said.
Gremlins-or the effects of John Barleycorn over the weekend affecting Monday-morning Ford assembly lines-had been at work on Inspector Wohl’s automobiles. His generators failed, the radiators leaked their coolant, the transmissions ground themselves into pieces, usually leaving him stranded in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Most of his subordinates were highly amused. He was now on his third brand-new car in six months.
“Let’s get in the car,” Wohl said. “Jesus, give us a minute, please?”
Matt looked curious but obeyed the order wordlessly. He closed the door after him and looked at Wohl.
Wohl met Matt’s eyes.
“Matt, Penny OD’d,” he said.
Matt’s face tightened. His eyebrows rose in question, as if seeking a denial of what he had just heard.
Wohl shrugged, and threw his hands up in a gesture of helplessness.
“Matt…”
“Oh, shit!” Matt said.
“The maid found her in her bed with a needle in her arm. Death was apparently instantaneous.”
“Oh, shit!”
“Tom O’Connor-he commands Northwest Detectives-called Denny Coughlin when they called it in. I happened to be in Denny’s office when he got the call. He went out to the house to see how he could help. By now the M.E. has the body.”
“Instantaneous?”
Wohl nodded. “So I’m told.”
“Oh, shit, Peter!”
“I’m sorry, Matt,” Wohl said, and put his arm around Matt’s shoulder. “I’m rea
lly sorry.”
“We had a goddamned fight last night.”
“This is not your fault, Matt. Don’t start thinking that.”
“Same goddamned subject. Our future. Me being a cop.”
“If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. They find an excuse.”
“Addicts, you mean?”
Wohl nodded.
“Has Amy been notified?” Matt asked. “This is going to wipe out Mrs. Detweiler.”
His reaction is not what I expected. But what did I expect?
“I don’t know,” Wohl said, and then had a thought. He reached under the dash for a microphone.
“Isaac Three, William One.”
“Isaac Three.” It was the voice of Sergeant Francis Holloran, Chief Inspector Coughlin’s driver.
“Tom, check with the Chief and see if Dr. Payne has been notified.”
“She’s here, Inspector.”
“Thank you,” Wohl said, and replaced the microphone. He looked over at Matt.
“I guess I’d better go out there,” Matt said.
“Take the car and as much time as you need,” Wohl said. “I’ll take Martinez with me. Or why don’t you give me the keys to your car, and I’ll have Martinez or somebody bring it out there and swap.”
“I’ll go to the schoolhouse and get my car,” Matt said. “I’m a coward, Peter. I don’t want to go out there at all. With a little bit of luck, maybe I can get myself run over by a bus on my way.”
“Matt, this isn’t your fault.”
Matt shrugged.
“I think I will take the car out there,” he said. “Get it over with. I’ll have it back at the schoolhouse in an hour or so.”
“Take what time you need,” Wohl said. “Is there anything else I can do, Matt?”
“No. But thank you.”
“See me when you come to the schoolhouse.”
Matt nodded.
“I’m really sorry, Matt.”
“Yeah. Thank you.”
They got out of the car and walked to Martinez.
“Are the keys in that?” Matt asked.
“Yeah, why?”
Without replying, Matt walked to the car, got behind the wheel, and started the engine.
The Murderers boh-6 Page 24
