Investigators

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Do me one more favor, Manny. Reason with . . . the grandfather. Convince him that this is the way, that this is enough.”

  “I’ll try,” Giacomo said. “But don’t, as they say, hold your breath.”

  Susan Reynolds and Matt Payne had a very late lunch in Trainer’s Restaurant outside Allentown.

  Neither of them had had any appetite in the Penn-Harris, and they had ridden most of the way down U.S. 222 to Allentown in silence. In his mind, Matt was going over all of the things that could go wrong with the scheme, all the things that had to be done, and trying very hard to ignore a feeling of impending doom. He wondered, idly, once or twice, what Susan was thinking about, but didn’t ask.

  By the time they got to Allentown, however, they were both hungry, and Susan directed them to Trainer’s, which she said was on the way to Doylestown.

  “What are we going to do now?” Susan asked when they had finished their coffee and were waiting for the check.

  “First thing, you’re going to show me where your friend Chenowith lives,” Matt said.

  He knew that she wasn’t going to like this announcement at all, and waited for what he was sure would be an angry reaction. He didn’t get it.

  “He’s not my friend, Matt. I’ve told you that and told you that.”

  “I still want to see where he lives.”

  “Why?”>

  “So, when this is over, I can take the cops there,” Matt said. “You may be in jail.”

  The waitress appeared with the check in time to hear the last part of the sentence.

  Matt smiled at her in what he hoped was a disarming way.

  “Or married, or have entered a convent,” he added.

  The waitress smiled. Susan shook her head at Matt.

  When they got back in the car, Matt asked, “How do I get to Chenowith’s house?” again expecting a negative response, and being surprised when he didn’t get one.

  “Go into Doylestown, turn right at the Crossroads Diner,” Susan said.

  “Is that where you’re going to meet her?”

  “That’s where I met her the last time,” Susan said. “She may change her mind this time.”

  “But she is going to call you there, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to cut over through Quakertown and go down Route 611,” he said.

  “Any special reason?”

  “No.”

  “I’m a little afraid of showing you the house,” Susan said a minute or two later.

  “Don’t start now,” Matt said. “I want to be in a position where I can truthfully tell the FBI that you led me to the place.”

  “What if she leaves the baby in the house when she comes to meet me?” Susan asked.

  “The FBI is not going to go after him with guns blazing if they know there’s a baby around,” Matt said.

  “He’s crazy, Matt, you know that. What’s the FBI going to do if he starts shooting his machine gun?”

  “The way that happens is that they will surround the place. Then somebody will get on a bullhorn and tell him—hell, you’ve seen the movies—‘This is the FBI. We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands on your head, and no harm will come to you.’ ”

  “And what if he starts shooting his machine gun? The both of them start to shoot their machine guns?”

  “They’ll look out the window and they won’t see anything to shoot at. The FBI’s not going to stand there in the open where they can get shot. They’re not stupid.”

  “And if Bryan doesn’t come out with his hands on his head?”

  “Probably nothing. They don’t want to start shooting unless they have to. With or without knowing there’s a baby inside. After a long time—a long, long time—they might shoot some tear gas into the place. But that’s it. Once they have the place surrounded, that’s it. They can wait; time is on their side.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “And with that thought in mind, probably the smartest thing we could do right now would be to call Jack Matthews, have him meet us, you show him where Chenowith is, and let the FBI do their thing.”

  “If I show you where the house is, you’ll have to promise you won’t tell the FBI until after we meet with Jennie.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Promise!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Several minutes later, moving down a narrow, winding road, Matt said:

  “You know what worries me the most? That your friend Jennie, once I put the arm on her, is not going to listen to one goddamn word you say to her about keeping her mouth shut until she sees a lawyer. You’re not going to be the friend trying to save her ass, trying to keep her baby from getting hurt, but the traitorous bitch who turned her in to the cops.”

  “And?”

  “She starts screaming that you were in on this whole thing from the beginning. If she and Chenowith are going down, I think it’s entirely likely they’ll want to take you down with them.”

  “I was, more or less,” Susan said. “I’ll just have to take that risk.”

  “Another option, of course, is for me to stop the car and start slapping you around until you tell me where the bastard is.”

  “Oh, stop it!”

  “That’s the best idea I’ve had all day,” he said. “I really have no idea at all why I’m going along with this bullshit idea just to try to save your friend, who, I am growing more and more convinced, is just as dangerous as her boyfriend.”

  “You could slap me around all day, and I’d never tell you where the house is,” Susan said.

  She believes that. She’s probably never been slapped in her life.

  Could I slap her?

  Yes, I could.

  And get her to tell me where this goddamn house is?

  Yes, I could.

  And the FBI takes the house, and the asshole shoots off his homemade terrorist machine gun, and the FBI blows him, his girlfriend, and the baby away.

  And whose fault would that be?

  For the rest of her life, for the rest of our life, I would be the son of a bitch responsible for poor Jennie and/or her precious child getting blown away.

  Not Jennie herself. Not even Chenowith. He’s crazy, so it’s not even his fault, no matter what the son of a bitch does.

  Me. I would be the son of a bitch.

  He looked over at Susan.

  Moot point. No, I never could slap the information out of her. Not for any gentlemanly reasons, but because I could not stand the way she would look at me for having betrayed her.

  Susan seemed to be able to read his mind.

  She looked at him.

  “Could you really slap me around?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “You are really terrible,” she said, but she took his hand.

  He saw a sign reading “Doylestown 8 Miles.”

  He freed his hand and reached across and punched the button opening the glove compartment. Then he reached in and took out the microphone.

  “Radio check, please,” he said into it.

  There was no answer.

  “I keep forgetting this is a police car,” she said.

  “Well, if we had come in your red Porsche, we would have been a lot easier to spot, wouldn’t we, especially if someone—for example, the FBI—was trying to keep tabs on the owner of a red Porsche?”

  He reached across her again and changed frequencies. He again asked for a radio check, and again there was no answer.

  He tried it on every frequency he had available. There was a reply on the last one.

  “Who wants a radio check?” a female voice responded.

  “I’m a Philadelphia unmarked passing through Doylestown. I wanted to see if there was anyone I could talk to.”

  “You got the Bucks County sheriff’s administrative channel, Philadelphia.”

  “Well, thank you very much,” Matt said. “Nice to talk to you.”

  He reached across Susan a final time, turned off the radio,
put the microphone in the glove compartment, and slammed the door.

  “Satisfied?” Susan asked.

  “Now I know I can call the cops—or at least the sheriff—if I need to.”

  “What’s the administrative channel?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Matt confessed. “But whatever it is, that operator can talk to other people.”

  Two or three minutes later, he saw what he thought must be the Crossroads Diner up ahead on the left.

  “That it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I’ve been in there,” he said. “I once took Penny to a gambling hell in the Poconos and we stopped in there on the way back.”

  “A gambling hell?”

  “A mob-run joint outside Stroudsburg.”

  “What for?”

  He didn’t reply as he turned into the parking lot of the Crossroads Diner. He drove slowly through the complex. Susan showed him where the telephones were. He stopped the car, told Susan to wait, and went inside the restaurant. He took a good look around, found three places from which he could see the bank of telephones, and then left. He got back in the car and started up.

  “Okay, show me the house,” he said.

  She gave him directions.

  Twenty minutes later, they were almost there. “About a hundred yards ahead is the driveway,” she said. “The house is a couple of hundred yards down the drive. If you go in, they’re liable to see you.”

  He drove past the driveway, around the next curve in the road, and then stopped.

  “What I want you to do,” he said, “is slide over and drive. When we’re fifty yards from that driveway, stop. I’ll get out. Then you drive down the road, turn around again, go back where I turned around, wait until”—he stopped and looked at his watch—“quarter after five, and then come back to where you dropped me off. I’ll get in the back, and you head down the road.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to walk through the woods and take a look at the house.”

  “If Bryan sees you sneaking through the woods, he’ll shoot you.”

  “I don’t intend to let him see me,” Matt said, and got from behind the wheel and walked around the front of the car.

  Susan had not moved.

  “Slide over,” he said. “I have to do this.”

  “Oh, God!” she said, but she moved.

  “Not to worry, fair maiden, I am a graduate—summa cum laude—of the U.S. Marine Corps how-to-sneak-through-the-woods course offered by the Camp LeJeune School for Boys.”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” Matt said. “And I don’t intend to. Drive, please, Susan.”

  She started up.

  He opened the glove compartment again and turned on the radio.

  “However,” he said as they neared the drop-off point, “to cover every possible eventuality, if you hear gunshots, or I do not come out of the woods by twenty after five, you pick up the microphone and push the thing on the side, and say—pay attention: ‘Officer needs assistance. 4.4 miles East on Bucks County 19 from intersection of Bucks County 24.’ If you hear shots, say: ‘Shots fired.’ If they come on and ask you who you are, say you are a civilian in Philadelphia Special Operations, car William Eleven.”

  “Matt, I can’t remember all that,” Susan wailed. “Please don’t do this!”

  “Do your best,” he said. “If you have to. I don’t think you will.”

  “Don’t do this!”

  “Stop the goddamned car!” he said.

  She looked at him, then slammed on the brakes. “Start back down the road to pick me up at quarter after five,” Matt said, and got out of the car.

  He ran across the street into the woods.

  Susan didn’t move the car for a long time. He was on the verge of running back toward it when she finally started off. He could see that there were tears on her cheeks.

  What’s going to happen now is that this asshole Chenowith is going to spot me out here, fill me full of holes, then take off for parts unknown. And I will have seen the love of my life for the last time, without even thinking to kiss her good-bye!

  It didn’t happen that way.

  Aside from tearing the pocket of his suit jacket on a protruding limb, he made it through the woods to the house, got a good look at it—it was an ancient, run-down, fieldstone farmhouse with diapers and underwear drying on a line on the narrow front porch; and an old Ford station wagon and a battered Volkswagen parked next to it—saw that it would not only be fairly easy to surround without being detected but that the woods would offer all the cover the FBI would need, and made it back to the road with plenty of time to spare before Susan, on schedule, came down the road.

  He jumped in the car and she drove off.

  “I think I hate you,” Susan said. “God, that was stupid!”

  “Nothing happened. I saw what I had to see, and everything’s all right.”

  “You’re as bad as Bryan,” she said, on the edge of hysterics. “He’s playing revolutionary, and you’re playing heroic policeman.”

  “There’s a difference, Susan,” he said, and he fought back the wave of anger he felt growing inside him. “I am a policeman, not a heroic one, but a policeman. I don’t know if your fucking friend is a revolutionary or not, but he kills people, and my job is to put the son of a bitch away.”

  “I don’t want you to die!” she said.

  “Look for a telephone,” he said. “It’s time to call Jack Matthews.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  At six-thirty—fifteen minutes earlier than Matt had told him to be there—Special Agent John J. Matthews of the FBI walked into the paneled bar of the Doylestown Inn, across the street from the Bucks County courthouse, and saw Detective Matthew Payne sitting at the bar nursing what was probably a scotch and water. Beside him, looking better in the flesh than in the photographs he had seen of her, was Miss Susan Reynolds, a known associate of the Chenowith Group.

  He walked to them and tapped Detective Payne on the back.

  “Hello, Matt,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  Matt turned on the swiveled bar stool, smiled, and touched Matthews on the shoulder.

  “You’re early, buddy. I thought you might be. Tell me right now if you’re alone.”

  “You said come alone, I came alone.”

  “Good boy! Susan, this is Jack. Jack, Susan.”

  “Hello,” Susan said, torn between curiosity and not wanting to look at the FBI agent.

  “How do you do, Miss Reynolds?” Matthews said stiffly.

  “I think your reputation has preceded you, honey,” Matt said. “Jack knows who you are.”

  “Matt, what the hell is going on?” Matthews asked.

  “What are you drinking, Jack?” Matt said.

  “Nothing, thank you. What I want, Matt, is to know what’s going on.”

  “Have a drink, Jack,” Matt said, and waved for the bartender. “Another of these, please, for this gentleman,” he said.

  “Goddamn it, I don’t want a drink!”

  The bartender shrugged and walked away.

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Let me pay for these, and we’ll go someplace where we can talk.”

  He looked at the cash register tab on the bar, then reached in his pocket and peeled two bills from a wad of currency and laid them on the bar. He picked up his drink and drained it.

  Matthews saw that Reynolds’s glass was still full.

  “Where’s your car, Jack?” Matt asked.

  “Out in back.”

  “Good. So’s mine,” Matt said.

  He politely gestured for Susan to precede him out of the bar.

  When they were in the parking lot, Matthews pointed at his car. Matt nodded.

  Matt led Matthews to his unmarked Plymouth, unlocked the trunk, opened it, handed the keys to Susan, and then reached inside and came out with a briefcase.

  “What’s that?” Matthews asked.<
br />
  “It’s a briefcase full of money, Jack,” Matt said. “Let’s go sit in your car.”

  Matthews’s eyebrows rose high in exasperation.

  They walked to his car, a new Chevrolet four-door sedan with Maryland license plates.

  “What’s with the Maryland plates?” Matt asked.

  “My car collapsed,” Matthews said. “I borrowed this one.”

  He unlocked the car, Matt got in the front seat and Susan in back.

  “Okay, Matt, now what the hell is going on?”

  “To answer the question I am sure is foremost in your mind, Jack: Yes, Miss Reynolds and I are emotionally involved.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Keep that in mind. It bears very heavily on all of this.”

  “Matt, I’m going to have to report that,” Matthews said. “Jesus Christ! I can’t believe this, even of you!”

  “You’re going to have a lot to report,” Matt said, then pushed the briefcase across the seat to him. “I transfer to your custody, Agent Matthews, preserving the chain of evidence, one leather briefcase.”

  “What’s in that?” Matthews asked, not touching it.

  “Said briefcase was given to me by Miss Susan Reynolds,” Matt said. “It contains a sum of money given into Miss Reynolds’s custody by one Jennifer Ollwood.”

  Matthews looked over the seat back at Susan.

  “On several occasions, Miss Ollwood has told Miss Reynolds that she fears for her life, and for that of her infant son—”

  “What infant son?”

  “Miss Ollwood has borne a son to Mr. Bryan Chenowith,” Matt said. “Mr. Chenowith, of course, is a fleeing felon wanted on charges of murder, so Miss Ollwood takes his threats to her and her child quite seriously.”

  “What the hell are you up to, Matt? What’s going on?”

  “Miss Ollwood has told Miss Reynolds that the monies she placed in Miss Reynolds’s care came into her hands from Mr. Chenowith. Naturally fearing for her own life, Miss Reynolds did nothing about the money until questioned by the authorities—me—whereupon she immediately and unhesitatingly turned the evidence over to me.”

  “That’s not going to get her off, Matt,” Matthews said. “If that’s what you’re thinking. They’re going after your girlfriend as an accessory after the fact. The fact that she received what she knew to be stolen property—”