Investigators

by W. E. B Griffin

  “What are you doing?”

  “Is that you or the FBI asking?”

  “Me.”

  “Checking some personnel records. It doesn’t make me feel like Sherlock Holmes, but it’s a dirty job that someone has to do.”

  Matthews chuckled.

  “May I tell Mr. Davis that you have taken his kind offer of employment under consideration?”

  “I don’t give a damn what you tell him,” Matt said. “Let’s eat.”

  Cynthia Longwood took a long time to wake up, and when she did, she had no idea at all where she was. The room was dark.

  She became aware first that she was wearing one of those awful hospital gowns that tie down the back and let your fanny hang out. And then, quickly, she realized that she was in a narrow hospital bed with chrome rails to keep you from falling out; and put that together to understand that she was in a hospital room.

  She sat up—her muscles seemed stiff and she didn’t seem to have much strength—and saw the glow of a cigarette. Someone was in the room with her.

  Who? A nurse?

  Cynthia let herself fall back on the bed.

  The last thing she remembered clearly was being in her own room in Bala Cynwyd. Dr. Seaburg had been there.

  Mother called him when I couldn’t stop crying.

  And he gave me something, a pill. A pill. A pill and then a shot. And told me it would let me sleep.

  And then I was in a car, and going downtown. . . .

  They must have brought me here.

  Dr. Seaburg was here, too. He had some other doctor with him. A nice old man.

  My God, what did he give me? I can’t seem to think, and I feel like I just swam across the Atlantic Ocean!

  “Are you supposed to be doing that?” Cynthia challenged.

  “Doing what?” a female voice near the cigarette glow asked.

  “Smoking in here?”

  “I didn’t think anyone would notice. I’ll put it out.”

  “No!” Cynthia said. “I don’t mind. I could use one myself.”

  A body appeared at the bedside. A female body. Extending a lit cigarette.

  “Will you settle for a puff on this?” she asked. “I don’t want you falling asleep again with a lit cigarette.”

  Cynthia had trouble finding the hand holding the cigarette. But finally she got the cigarette to her lips and took a puff.

  “You’re right,” the woman said. “I shouldn’t be smoking in here. But it’s been a long day, and I’m a nice girl, and I figured, what the hell?”

  Cynthia chuckled and took another puff on the cigarette, and in its glow saw that the woman was young, and wore a simple cotton blouse and a skirt, with a sweater over her shoulders.

  “Would you like something to drink?” the young woman asked. “There’s water and 7-Up.”

  “Oh, yes, please, 7-Up,” Cynthia said.

  “Would it bother you if I put the lights on?” the young woman said. “I don’t want to spill 7-Up all over you.”

  “Go ahead,” Cynthia said. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Amy Payne.”

  “You’re a nurse?”

  “No.”

  “I was wondering where your uniform was,” Cynthia said.

  The lights came on, painfully bright. It took what seemed to be a long time for her eyes to adjust to them.

  When she finally had everything in focus, she saw that Amy—attractive, but no real beauty—was extending a paper cup to her.

  Cynthia quickly drank it all, and held out the cup for a refill.

  “If you promise not to gulp it down the way you did that one,” Amy Payne said. “I don’t want you to toss your cookies.”

  Cynthia chuckled. She liked this woman.

  “Funny, that sounded like a nurse talking,” she said. “But okay. I promise.”

  “Not to gulp? Girl Scout’s honor?”

  “I said I promised,” Cynthia said, and added: “Actu ally, I was a Girl Scout.”

  “So was I. I hated it.”

  “Me, too,” Cynthia said.

  Amy gave her another glass of 7-Up. Cynthia took a sip.

  “If you’re not a nurse, what are you doing in here?” she asked.

  “Actually, I’m a doctor.”

  “You’re putting me on.”

  “Girl Scout’s honor,” Amy said.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Your doctor, if you’d like. Both Dr. Seaburg and Dr. Stein think that might be a good idea.”

  “Dr. Stein?”

  “Little fat fellow. Looks like Santa Claus with a shave. Talks funny.”

  Cynthia giggled when the description called up the mental image of the doctor who had been with Dr. Seaburg.

  “Why do Drs. Seaburg and Stein think it would be a good idea if you were my doctor?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I always have trouble talking about some things—the female reproductive apparatus, for example, or sex, generally—with a man. With another woman, provided she’s not old enough to be my grandmother, it’s much easier.”

  “What makes you think I would want to talk to you? About sex or anything else?”

  “I don’t know if you would want to or not,” Amy said.

  “You’re a shrink, right?”

  “Right. A pretty good one, as a matter of fact.”

  “You don’t look like a shrink.”

  “Dr. Stein looks like what most people think of when they hear the word ‘shrink,’ ” Amy said. “Wise and kind, et cetera. Would you rather talk to him?”

  “I don’t really want to talk to anybody.”

  “You’re going to have to talk to somebody, and I think you know that,” Amy said. “Maybe I could help. Your call.”

  “I really don’t want to talk to Dr. Seaburg, or the other one.”

  “Can I take that as a ‘yes’? Do you want to give it a shot, see if I can help?”

  “God, I don’t know. I’m so damned confused.”

  “When you’re damned confused is usually a pretty good time to talk to a shrink,” Amy said.

  “Let me think about it,” Cynthia said.

  “Counteroffer,” Amy said. “Give me a temporary appointment as your physician until, say, half past eight in the morning.”

  “Why?”>

  “Under those circumstances, I can prescribe medicine and offer advice.”

  “If you were my physician, what medicine would you prescribe?”

  “None. No more sedatives. I don’t like the side effects—what they gave you really makes you feel like a medicine ball at the end of a long game—and I don’t think it’s indicated.”

  “You just have been appointed my temporary physician,” Cynthia said. “What’s the advice?”

  “Two things. First, when they come in here in the morning and ask you how you want your eggs, say ‘poached’ or ‘soft-boiled.’ What they do to fried and scrambled eggs around here is obscene.”

  Cynthia giggled.

  “And second?”

  “Try to trust me. Whatever’s wrong, whatever happened, we can deal with it.”

  “Oh, shit,” Cynthia said. “I really don’t . . .”

  “That bad, huh?” Amy said.

  “Yeah, that bad.”

  “Okay, we’ll talk about it. Now, after a word with the nurse, I’m going home.”

  “What kind of a word with the nurse?”

  “Orders. One, no more sedatives. Two, you have my medical permission to smoke. Not now, in the morning, after that sedative wears off.”

  “You’ll be back in the morning?”

  “After you’ve had your breakfast.”

  “Okay,” Cynthia said, and then said, “What do I call you, ‘Doctor’?”

  “If you can remember that I’m your doctor, you can call me ‘Amy.’ I’d like that.”

  “I don’t think I understand that,” Cynthia said.

  “I don’t know about you, Cynthia, but every time I’ve told one of my friends
something I really didn’t want anybody else to know, it was all over town by the next day. What you tell me as your doctor goes no further.”

  “Not even to another doctor? Or my parents?”

  “What you tell me goes no further, period.”

  “I may not tell you anything.”

  “That’s up to you, what you tell me or don’t. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Cynthia said.

  Dr. Payne touched Cynthia Longwood’s shoulder and walked to the door. She turned off the lights, smiled at Cynthia, and walked out of the room.

  When Matt went into Personnel Records at the Roundhouse a few minutes before ten, Sergeant Sandow’s contact, a heavyset civilian, led him into a closet-size office where he had laid out the personnel jackets of the Narcotics Unit’s Five Squad.

  “I’ll stick around until you’re finished,” the civilian told him, “in case somebody wonders what the lights are doing on in here. But make it quick, will you?”

  “Right now, that is the guiding principle of my life,” Matt said, and took off his trench coat. He fished the pocket recorder out again, looked at it, shrugged, put batteries and a tape in it, and tested it.

  It worked. The question was whether or not it would be quicker to use the machine and the transcribing device, or whether he should just use pencil and a notebook.

  He decided in favor of modern technology, sat down at the desk, and started to work his way through the foot-high stack of records in front of him.

  It took him more than two hours. Dictating names and addresses into the recorder proved, he thought, much quicker than writing them down would have been; the question remained how long it would take him to transcribe them in the morning.

  None of the names and addresses of relatives and references rang any bells, except tangentially. Officer Timothy J. Calhoun of the Five Squad had uncles and aunts and cousins in both Harrisburg and Camp Hill, and was a graduate of Camp Hill High.

  It was unlikely that they knew each other, but Miss Susan Reynolds, who had not been kidnapped at all, was from Camp Hill.

  What was that bullshit she told Daffy all about, that she was in her room all the time? Her bed had not been slept in. Period. Wherever she was when everybody was looking for her, she wasn’t in the Bellvue-Stratford. At least not in her room.

  When he left the tiny office, Sandow’s civilian was asleep in his chair, and when wakened, not in what could be called a charming frame of mind.

  Matt rode the curved elevator down to the lobby and left the building. As he walked up to his car, a scruffy-looking character got out of a beat-up car, took a good look, without smiling, at Matt, then walked toward the Roundhouse.

  I know that face, Matt thought. From where?

  He unlocked the unmarked car and got in.

  I’ve seen that face somewhere, recently.

  Like an hour ago!

  Officer Timothy J. Calhoun’s photograph in his records was a mug shot of a freshly scrubbed, cleanly shaven, crew-cutted inmate of the Police Academy.

  He looks like a bum, because undercover guys in Narcotics have to look like bums. When Captain Pekach was a lieutenant in Narcotics, he wore his hair in a pigtail.

  I wonder what Calhoun’s doing at the Roundhouse at midnight?

  Matt pulled the key from the ignition switch and got out of the car in time to see Officer Calhoun enter the Roundhouse.

  He walked quickly after him, and had his identification folder in his hand when he entered the building.

  He showed it to the corporal on duty.

  “The guy who just came in here?” Matt asked.

  The corporal jerked his thumb to Matt’s right, to the door leading to Central Lockup.

  Matt went through the door. It led into sort of a corridor. To his left, on the other side of a glass wall, was the magistrate’s court. Here, after being transported to Central Lockup and being booked, prisoners were brought before the magistrate to determine if they could be freed on their own recognizance, on bail, or at all. To his right were several rows of chairs where the prisoner’s family, friends, or, for that matter, the general public could watch the magistrate in action.

  At the end of the corridor was a locked door with a glass panel leading to the Central Lockup and the booking sergeant’s desk.

  Matt went and looked through the panel.

  A uniform came to the window and indicated with a jerked thumb that he would prefer that Matt go away. Matt showed him his detective’s identification, which visibly surprised the uniform, who then moved to open the door.

  Matt shook his head, “no.”

  The uniform shrugged and walked away.

  Matt looked into the booking area. Officer Timothy J. Calhoun of the Narcotics Five Squad, now in the company of another scruffy-looking character, whom Matt recognized from the photograph on his records but could not put a name to, was watching the process by which two district uniforms were relieved of responsibility for four prisoners.

  Two of the latter were black, and dressed in flashy clothing. The other two were white, and dressed in a manner that suggested to Matt that they had white-collar jobs of some sort; had been out on the town; had decided that acquiring and ingesting one controlled substance or another would add a little excitement to the evening; had been in the process of acquiring same from the black gentlemen, whereupon all four had been busted by members of the Five Squad.

  There was nothing else to see.

  Matt turned and walked back out of the corridor, then changed direction. He motioned for the corporal behind the plate glass to open the door to the lobby of the Roundhouse. Once inside, he availed himself of the facilities of the gentlemen’s rest room, and then finally left the building.

  He got back in the unmarked car and backed it out of its parking slot.

  As he drove out of the parking lot, Officer Timothy J. Calhoun and the other male Caucasian suspected of also being a police officer attached to the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit, walked toward him.

  He didn’t have the headlights on, so there was no blinding light to interfere with Officer Calhoun’s view of the driver of the unmarked car. Confirmation that Officer Calhoun recognized him as the man who had been in the parking lot a few minutes earlier seemed to come when Matt glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that Officer Calhoun had stopped en route to his car, turned, and was looking curiously at Matt’s car.

  On what is that curiosity based? Simply that he remembered seeing me before, and a policeman’s mind picks up on things like that? Or because his sensitivity to things like that has been increased because he’s a dirty cop?

  He almost certainly made this thing as an unmarked car. So what is a young guy doing driving a new unmarked car? Is he going to put that together and decide it’s a Special Operations unmarked car? And come up with a suspicion that Special Operations is watching him?

  That would be illogical. There are a hundred other reasons why somebody from Special Operations would be at the Roundhouse at this hour having nothing to do with the Five Squad.

  But if I were a dirty cop, I would be a little paranoid.

  Did I do something stupid, following him into the Roundhouse? Did he see me looking through the window?

  Well, to hell with it. It’s done.

  Matt turned the headlights on as he left the parking lot, and headed for Rittenhouse Square.

  “Who was that in the unmarked car?” Officer Tom Coogan inquired of Officer Timothy Calhoun as soon as they were inside the well-worn Buick Special.

  “I just made him,” Calhoun said. “Remember the guy that popped the sicko, the serial rapist? Blew his brains out?”

  “John Wayne, something like that?”

  “Payne. His name is Payne.”

  “That was him?”

  “That was him, I’m sure. That fucking new unmarked car makes me sure. He’s one of them hotshots in Special Operations. Every one of them fuckers gets a new car, did you know that?”

  “I heard it,” Coogan
said. “I ran into Charley McFadden—remember him?—at the FOP.”

  “I remember him, sure. He made detective, didn’t he?”

  “Him and the spic. Martinez. Mutt and Jeff both made detective, and both of them are in Special Operations, and both run around in brand-new unmarked cars.”

  “There’s a moral in there, Coogan. Shoot a bad guy, and get yourself promoted.”

  “Mutt and Jeff didn’t shoot a bad guy, they tossed him under an elevated train,” Coogan replied.

  Calhoun laughed.

  “What the fuck do they do out there in Special Operations?” he asked.

  “Who the fuck knows? They’re Carlucci’s fair-haired boys. They caught that loony tune who wanted to blow up the vice president. Shit like that.”

  “How do you get in Special Operations?”

  “Shoot a bad guy, I told you. Get your picture on TV.”

  “If we shoot one of our bad guys, we’d wind up on charges for violating the fucker’s civil rights,” Calhoun said.

  “Speaking of our bad guys, what did we get?”

  “Nothing. Zip,” Calhoun said.

  “Nothing?”

  “The two johns had eighty-five bucks between them,” Calhoun explained. “The dinges had a half-dozen bags and three hundred bucks and change. I figured it wasn’t worth the risk to take any of it.”

  “Three hundred bucks is three hundred bucks. A little bit here, a little bit there . . .” Coogan made a little joke.

  It went over Calhoun’s head.

  “Somebody might have thought it strange that the dinges had only a hundred or so,” he replied seriously. “And we don’t take it all, remember? Don’t be so fucking greedy, Coogan.”

  “Up yours, Calhoun!”

  They drove to the Narcotics Unit’s office at 22nd Street and Hunting Park Avenue, decided finishing the paperwork could wait until they had a beer, and walked across the street to the Allgood Bar.

  It was late, and not shift-change time, and there was hardly anybody in the place. Except, sitting at a table in the rear, a stocky, swarthy man in his late thirties, who raised his bottle of Ortlieb’s beer in greeting when he saw them.

  Coogan and Calhoun stopped at the bar only long enough to get beers of their own and then walked to his table carrying them.