Investigators

by W. E. B Griffin

  He picked it up.

  “Seven-C, Dr. Martinez.”

  “You’re a hard man to get on the goddamn phone, Doctor.”

  “How may I help you?”

  “I have a message for Dr. Amelia A. Payne.”

  “She’s not here,” Dr. Martinez said.

  “The nurse told me that. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “What is the message?”

  “You got a pencil and paper?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Martinez said, although in fact he did not.

  “Okay. Now, get this right. You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “To Dr. Amelia A. Payne. Your patient, Miss Cynthia Longwood . . . Am I going too fast for you?”

  “No. Go ahead,” Dr. Martinez said.

  He had looked in on 723 just before going to an empty room to try to catch a little sleep. She had been awake. Privately, Dr. Martinez disagreed with her attending physician, Dr. Payne. If the Longwood girl had been his patient, he would have prescribed at least a mild sedative to help her through the night. She had recurring, and very disturbing, dreams, the consequence of which was that she slept very badly, did not get enough sleep, and thus dozed through the day.

  If she had been his patient, he believed it would be best to have her rested when he spoke with her, trying to get to the root of her problem. But she was Dr. A. A. Payne’s patient, not his. And he was a resident, and Dr. Payne was not only an adjunct professor of psychiatry, but held in the highest possible regard by the chief of Psychiatric Services, Aaron Stein, M.D., former president of the American Psychiatric Association.

  Despite that, and his own genuine respect for her, Dr. Martinez felt that Dr. Payne was wrong when she told him that in cases like this the best sedation was the least sedation, and it was her call.

  “Okay,” the caller said. “She was stripped naked and orally raped by a policeman under circumstances that were themselves traumatic. You got that?”

  “No. You were going too fast for me,” Dr. Martinez said as he gestured to Nurse Dubinsky that he wanted to write something.

  She pushed an aluminum clipboard to him, and when she saw that he was having trouble finding his own pen or pencil, handed him her own ballpoint.

  “Miss Cynthia Longwood was stripped naked and orally raped,” the caller began, very slowly, making it clear to Dr. Martinez that he was reciting—probably reading—what he was saying, “by a policeman under circumstances that were themselves traumatic. You got it all now, Doc?”

  And what he had recited—probably read—didn’t sound as if it had been written by the man on the telephone.

  “I’ve got it now, thank you,” Dr. Martinez said.

  “Read it back to me.”

  “Miss Cynthia Longwood was stripped naked and orally raped by a policeman under circumstances that were themselves traumatic,” Dr. Martinez recited.

  Nurse Dubinsky’s eyebrows rose, and she shook her head.

  “That’s it. You make sure Dr. Payne gets that.”

  “Of course. Just as soon as she comes in. And who should I say called?”

  The caller laughed. “Nice try! Fuck you, Doc.”

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  Dr. Martinez and Nurse Dubinsky looked at each other.

  “Interesting,” Dr. Martinez thought aloud.

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t believe the man who called wrote the message,” Dr. Martinez said. “I think he was reading it.”

  “Yeah,” Nurse Dubinsky agreed. “He didn’t sound as if he would say things like ‘orally raped’ or ‘traumatic circumstances.’ ”

  Dr. Martinez looked at his watch and wrote down the time.

  “If I happen to be asleep—”

  “You mean, ‘are not at the moment available,’ ” Nurse Dubinsky interrupted him.

  “Thank you, but no thank you,” Dr. Martinez said. “What is it you say up here about ‘calling a shovel’?”

  “A spade a spade,” she corrected him. “It’s from playing cards.”

  “If Dr. Payne should come here in the morning, and I am sleeping, please wake me. I want to talk to her about this. I think we both should be available to her.”

  “Of course,” Nurse Dubinsky said.

  “This is very interesting,” Dr. Martinez said. “I wonder who that man was? Not the policeman, certainly.”

  “That poor girl,” Nurse Dubinsky said.

  When Matt woke up, the first thing he saw was Susan’s brassiere, which he had placed with the other contents of his trousers and jacket pockets on the bedside table.

  He sat up in bed and reached for it, feeling more than a little chagrined. Taking it did not seem nearly so much a fine idea in the light of day as it had the night before.

  “Jesus,” he said aloud.

  He examined the torn buttonhole on the strap.

  Was I “mad with passion”? Or did that just happen, because we were like two squirming snakes on the seat of the Porsche?

  He raised it to his nose and sniffed it. There was a very faint odor of Susan—or her perfume? Same thing?—on it.

  Do I really love her? Or do I have a fatal case of penis erectus?

  How could I possibly love her? Christ, I hardly know her. And what we’ve done most of the time is either fight or lie to each other.

  But if I don’t love her, where did this Susie-and-me-against-the-whole-goddamned-world feeling come from?

  And does she love me? Or is this because she knows I’m onto her and fucking the cop, under the circumstances, seems a more logical thing to do than docilely putting out your wrists to have them cuffed?

  And where is Susie now? Waking up and getting ready to go to work, to wait for my call, or already on an airplane headed for San José, Costa Rica, having stopped only long enough to call Chenowith from a pay phone in the airport to tell him the cops are onto him for his bank jobs?

  Could she have been faking what happened to us in the car? Or in bed?

  Why not? I got my sex education from two sources. Dad telling me about how not to knock up some decent girl, and Amy telling me the important stuff, including that because the female is smaller and weaker than the male, nature has equipped them with superior mental mechanisms to even things up. They lie much better than men, according to Amy. And, Amy said, they are entirely capable of allowing themselves to get knocked up if that’s the only way they see to get the male of their choice to the altar. And to do that, they are entirely capable of pretending a far greater physical fascination with, sexual reaction to, the male than is actually the case. They can and do fake orgasms.

  Was that what Susie was up to? Convincing me that I was the greatest thing since Casanova in the sack because that made more sense than getting herself hauled off?

  It is entirely possible, Matthew the Innocent, that you have been played like a violin by a really tough female who had trouble not laughing out loud at your naïveté.

  Particularly when I wanted to keep her brassiere. Jesus!

  Am I that fucking stupid? Face it, you are.

  And how am I going to explain this to Peter Wohl? “Sorry, boss. I was thinking with my pecker. You know how it is”?

  Will I be allowed to resign? Or are they going to prosecute me for being an accessory? They’ll prosecute me. And they damned well should. I have betrayed that oath I took. What cops are supposed to do is get the bad guys, not help them walk from a multiple murder. I forgot that oath until just now.

  And if all this is true, and logic tells me that it is, why don’t I believe it? Why do I think that when, after carefully casing the First Harrisburg Bank & Trust Building to make sure the FBI doesn’t have somebody watching the safe-deposit-box vault, and I call her office, she will be there, waiting for my call to come get the bank loot she’s holding for Chenowith?

  Because I am the fucking fool of fame and legend, thinking with my dick?

  Or because I think that she loves me, and I love her
, and she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me?

  Well, Matthew Payne, if you’re going to go down in flames, you’re really going to go down in flames. You’re going to play this little scenario out to the end, believing what you saw in Susie’s eyes—not only that she didn’t know Chenowith was going to blow up the science building but, more important, that she loves you back—until Special Agent Leibowitz puts the cuffs on your wrists and starts reading you your Miranda rights.

  He put Susan’s brassiere back on the bedside table and picked up the telephone. He ordered orange juice, milk, coffee, a breakfast steak, two eggs sunny-side up, hash brown potatoes, and an English muffin.

  “Since I know you are going to rush this right up, which means I will be in the shower, I will leave the door ajar,” he said, and hung up. And then he added, aloud, “After all, the condemned man is entitled to the quick delivery of his last meal.”

  While he was shaving, he heard the sound of the cart being rolled into the room. He stuck his head out the bathroom door and called to the waiter, “Forge my name and add fifteen percent for the tip.”

  When he had finished shaving and combing his hair, he left the bathroom naked, and en route to the chest of drawers for his underwear lifted the cover over the steak and eggs.

  “To hell with it,” he announced to himself. “I’m hungry.” >

  And then he pulled a chair to the cart and sat down naked.

  He had just dipped the first piece of steak into one of the egg yolks when there was a knock at the door.

  “Shit,” he muttered, got up, stood behind the door and opened it.

  Maybe it’s the newspaper.

  It was Miss Susan Reynolds. She smiled at him some what shyly, met his eyes momentarily, and then looked away.

  I love her. It’s as simple as that. Otherwise, I couldn’t possibly be this happy—maybe “thrilled” is a better word—to see her.

  “Come in my parlor, my beauty, as the spider said to the fly.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d be up,” she said as she walked into the room. The first thing she saw was his reflection in a mirror, and then the room-service cart.

  “My God!” she said.

  “A little birdie told me you were coming, and I wanted to be ready.”

  “I was talking about the food,” Susan said. “But now that you mention it, put your pants on.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Do you always eat that much for breakfast?”

  “My mother taught me that the most important meal of the day is breakfast,” Matt said solemnly.

  “I’m surprised you’re not as fat as a house.”

  “May I offer you a little something while I put my pants on?”

  “All I had at the house was a glass of orange juice,” she said.

  “Help yourself,” he said, and started for the chest of drawers.

  He saw, reflected in the mirror, that she was watching him. He put an innocent look on his face and covered his crotch with both hands. Susan shook her head and smiled.

  The telephone rang.

  He sat on the bed and picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “I hope you were sound asleep,” Jack Matthews voice said.

  “Why, Special Agent Matthews of the FBI!” Matt said. “What a joy it is to hear your melodious voice!”

  Susan looked frightened, decided Matt was pulling her leg again, shook her head in resignation, and then, when he nodded, signaling that he was indeed talking to an FBI agent, looked frightened again.

  Matt signaled for her to come to the bed.

  “Are you alone? Can you talk?”

  “I am alone and I can talk,” Matt said.

  He swung his feet into the bed to give Susan room to sit down. She took one of the pillows and laid it over his midsection. Then she sat on the bed. Matt held the handset away from his ear so that Susan could hear Matthews.

  “Were you out with the Reynolds woman last night?”

  “Indeed I was.”

  “What times?”

  “Jack, you’re not my mother.”

  “Just answer the question, for Christ’s sake, Matt.”

  “She picked me up at the hotel about half past six and dropped me back off here just before midnight. We drove out to Hershey, to the hotel. We had clam chowder, roast beef, and asparagus. Did you know, Jack, that asparagus is an aphrodisiac?”

  “Don’t tell me it worked. You’re not doing anything really stupid with that woman, are you, Matt?”

  “No,” Matt said, and looked into Susan’s eyes. “I’m not doing anything stupid with that woman, Jack. Did you call up for a report on my sex life, or did you have something on your mind?”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “I had nothing to report. I have nothing to report now, so, if you will excuse me, Jack, I will return to my breakfast. The eggs are getting cold.”

  “The Ollwood woman called the Reynolds woman twice last night. Called herself ‘Mary-Ellen Porter.’ Called at six fifty-five and again at eleven thirty-two.”

  “If she called herself ‘Mary-Ellen Porter,’ how do you know it was the Ollwood woman?”

  “We ran a voiceprint, of course,” Matthews said, just a trifle condescendingly.

  “Excuse me,” Matt said. “I should have known. A voiceprint.”

  “And she called the Reynolds woman at her office yesterday morning. At 9:44.”

  “You’ve got a tap on the Reynolds woman’s office phone?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “What exactly does ‘sort of’ mean?”

  “We have an agent in her office. Not on this, something else. But she’s an agent—”

  “She’s an agent?” Matt interrupted.

  “I’m not supposed to bring you in on any of this, Matt.”

  “What the hell, I’m only a lousy local cop, right? Tell me as little as possible?”

  “There’s a lot of fraud in the welfare system. Including some people in the Department of Social Services on the take. The programs are federally assisted, so that makes it fraud against the government. So we have somebody in there. What’s she’s done is rig a simple tap, a small recorder.”

  “Has the amateur wiretapper got a name?”

  “That, I’m not going to tell you. Sorry, Matt, that’s none of your business.”

  “Good-bye, Jack.”

  “Shit!” Matthews said. “Don’t hang up!”

  “What’s her name, Jack?”

  “Veronica Haynes,” Matthews said.

  Susan exhaled audibly. Matt put his hand on her shoulder, and somehow Susan wound up lying beside him, with her face in his neck.

  “Well, maybe this is your business after all,” Matthews said. “What happens is the Ollwood woman calls the Reynolds woman, who gives her a number. Almost certainly of a phone booth. Always a different one—you’d be surprised how many phone booths there are within a five-minute walk of the Department of Social Services Building. She uses some kind of code for the number, so we never can find it until too late. Anyway, once she gives her the number, the Reynolds woman goes to the phone booth, and the Ollwood woman calls her there.”

  “So you can’t get a tap on the phone booth?”

  “No. I told you. We never can locate it until too late.”

  “So you don’t have a tape recording of what they talk about?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “They could be talking about anything? Something innocent? Like babies, for example?”

  “Where are you going? We know goddamn well what they’re talking about. Setting up a meeting.”

  “What I’m driving at is that you have nothing incriminating in these telephone calls, right?”

  “I guess you’re right,” Matthews said after a moment’s hesitation. “So what? It’s not as if we need it.”

  “What exactly have you got to tie the Reynolds woman to the bombing?”

  “Accessory after the fact. You know that.”
>
  “Did she have anything to do with the bombing itself?”

  “She doesn’t have to. If she willingly aided the bombers, same thing. Why are you asking?”

  “Maybe she could be reasoned with,” Matt began.

  “Forget it. (a) They’re determined to try all of these people. And (b) you’re not authorized to make any kind of a deal.”

  “Right. All I am is the local cop who does only what he’s told to do, right?”

  “That’s it, Matt. You understood that going in.”

  “So what did the Ollwood woman say on the phone, if anything?”

  “Nothing worth anything. What we think is significant is that she’s called so often. Twice last night. What you have to do is alert us when you think she’s going to meet these people. We’ll take it from there.”

  “Put a tail on her? Like those two clowns who tailed me?”

  “What the hell is the matter with you? Why are you so belligerent?”

  “Nothing personal, Jack. I guess I just don’t like the Imperial FBI telling me only those things you decide the dumb local cop can handle.”

  “It’s not that way, Matt, and you should know it.”

  “That’s what it feels like. Now, unless there’s something else, can I finish my breakfast?”

  “You will call me if you learn anything, right?”

  “Yeah, but don’t hold your breath. I’m not getting close.”

  “All you have to do is stick as close to her as possible, and call me when you even suspect she’s going to meet with Chenowith.”

  “Yeah, that I remember.”

  “Are you going to see her today?”

  “Probably.”

  “Try.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Watch yourself, buddy. Behind that innocent face and those magnificent teats is a really dangerous bitch.”

  “Good-bye, Jack.”

  Matt pushed himself up far enough so that he could hang up the telephone, then lay back down again. Through the entire process, Susan didn’t move her face from his neck.

  “ ‘Magnificent teats’?” Susan quoted Jack Matthews. She seemed close to tears.

  “Like I said, fair maiden,” Matt said, gently, “the cops are onto you.”

  “You sounded like you and that man are friends,” Susan said.