“We are. Jack’s a good guy.”
“They have the telephones in my house tapped?”
“Yes, they do. And the local cops are watching your place in the Poconos. I didn’t know about the tap on your office phone, or that they had an agent in your office. It’s lucky I didn’t call over there and say something indiscreet.”
“Do you think I am, Matt, ‘a really dangerous bitch’?”
“You can’t blame Jack for that, honey,” Matt replied. “He knows you’re helping these people. And he knows they’re dangerous. And he hasn’t, the FBI hasn’t, been able to lay a hand on you so far. In his mind, you’re dangerous.”
“You have any second thoughts last night, Matt?”
“About us?”
“Yes.”
“Not last night. I woke up wondering whether you would be in the office when I called there this morning, or on a plane to San José, Costa Rica.”
“San José, Costa Rica?”
“Foreign country of choice for fleeing felons,” Matt said. “They don’t believe much in extradition.”
“And what are you thinking now?”
“That we don’t have much time. We have to get that bank money out of your safe-deposit box right away. Do you talk to this FBI woman? Is she curious about where you go, and why?”
“Until three minutes ago, I thought it was simple feminine curiosity. Why?”
“Tell her you’re going to have lunch with me. I’m sure those bastards told her about me. If not vice versa. Then come to the bank, get the money out of the box, and give it to me. I don’t think, if they’re onto you having the money in the bank, that they will think you’d try to move it when you were going to be with me.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet. One thing at a time. I’ll buy a briefcase before I go to the bank. They gave me an office to use, and we can move it from your purse to my briefcase in there. That way, you won’t have the money if they should grab you as you leave the bank. I don’t think that’s likely, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that lady agent coincidentally had to cash a check about the time you’d be here.”
Susan nodded, almost absently, her acceptance of that.
“If I tell you where you can find Bryan, will you help Jennifer get away?”
“No,” Matt said. “I can’t do that, honey.”
“You said Costa Rica doesn’t believe in extradition?”
“I won’t let you let yourself in for another aiding-and-abetting charge,” Matt said. “For one thing, it would tie you closer to the bombing and the bank robberies, and there’s a chance—not much of a chance, but a chance—that maybe we can do something about that. And if you helped her in getting out of the country, they’d learn about it, and really go after you. I can’t let you do anything like that.”
“I just can’t turn Jennie in!” she said.
“Does she trust you?”
“Of course.”
“Then tell her to turn herself in. A good lawyer, and a babe in arms, might get her out of the murder rap.”
“She’d never betray Bryan.”
“Tell her to start thinking about her baby. They take babies away from women doing life without possibility of parole.”
“You mean when she calls?”
“ ‘I can’t meet you, Jennifer, because I don’t want to be responsible for them taking your baby away from you.’ Something like that. Sow the seed.”
“I don’t know,” Susan said doubtfully.
“Have you any better ideas?”
She shook her head, then started to cry.
“That’s not going to do any good. And I don’t want that lady FBI agent to get on the phone and tell her boss you came to work looking like you’d been crying. They might interpret that as meaning something.”
That speech had the precisely opposite reaction to the one Matt had hoped for. It seemed to open a floodgate.
He tried to comfort her, fully aware as he did so that comforting a weeping woman was not among his social skills.
When she was finished, she pushed herself away from him, sat up, and knelt on the bed. There was a box of Kleenex on the bedside table, and she blew her nose loudly.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Honey, you’re just going to have to get used to the idea that your friend Jennifer is beyond salvation.”
“I know,” Susan said. “That’s not what I was crying about.”
“Then what?”
“Us,” she said. “Where the hell were you, my precious beloved, when I needed you? To deliver that Jennie-made-the-wrong-choice speech, to tell me ‘I won’t let you get yourself in for an aiding-and-abetting charge’?”
“I wish I had been there,” Matt said. “Jesus, I can’t believe how someone as intelligent as you are has fucked yourself up like this!”
“Truth, they keep saying, is stranger than fiction,” Susan said.
Matt didn’t reply.
“What are you thinking now?” Susan asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do. I thought about that in the wee hours last night. I’ve got to start thinking about how things really are, not how I wish they were.”
“That’s a start,” he said.
“So what were you thinking just now?”
“How things really are?” he asked. “The naked truth?”
She nodded.
“I want to take your clothes off,” Matt said.
“Just like that?”
“You asked.”
She pushed herself off the bed and stood up.
“I’ll take them off,” she said. “You tend to rip them.”
“If you don’t want—” Matt began, now chagrined.
“When I was crying, honey,” Susan interrupted, “I was thinking, Why doesn’t he put his hand up my dress when I desperately want him to, need him to?”
Matt had a sudden, unpleasant thought.
What that could be is, “I will fuck a gorilla and pretend I love it if it will keep me from going to the slam.”
Three minutes later, as he lay spent on top of her, he knew that wasn’t true and was deeply ashamed of himself.
Officer Paul Thomas O’Mara stood in the door to Inspector Peter Wohl’s office, waited until Wohl had finished speaking on the telephone, and then announced, “There’s a Dr. Payne on three, Inspector. You want to talk to her?”
“I think I can find time to work the good doctor into my busy schedule, Tommy, ” Wohl replied. “Thank you very much, and please close the door.”
Then he picked up his telephone and punched the Line Three button.
“Peter?”
“I have this problem, Doctor,” he began. “I wake up in the morning, alone in my bed—”
“You want to buy me lunch?”
“You have the same problem, do you? Your place or mine?”
“Here.”
“You’re at home?”
“I’m at the hospital.”
“The last time we ate there, as I recall, the guy playing the violin was on strike, the champagne was warm, and they were out of everything but dry sandwiches and ice cream in little paper cups. Doesn’t Ristorante Alfredo seem a much better idea?”
“You have trouble remembering that I work for a living, don’t you?”
“I’ve offered to take you away from all that.”
“This is serious, Peter.”
“You haven’t had another case of introspection, have you? While I’m gnawing on a dry sandwich, you’re not going to give me that ‘this is just not going to work out, Peter’ speech, are you?”
“I don’t think I will,” she said chuckling, “but that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
“Okay, Doc. What time?”
“When can you get away?”
“Anytime from right now.”
“You could come right now?”
“The never-ending war against crime
will have to wait. My lover calls.”
“God, you’re as bad at Matt.”
“If this is about him, I don’t have anything to tell you. I just finished talking to Jack Matthews—I was talking to him when you called—and he said that as of half past seven this morning, Matt had nothing to report.”
“It’s not about Matt. Can you come right now?”
“You sound serious. Yeah. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Please, then, Peter.”
“No farewell declaration of affection?”
“I’ll be in my office.”
“I guess not,” Peter said. “But nevertheless, I will come instantly, borne on the wings of love.”
“Oh, God,” Amy said and hung up.
Inspector Wohl swung his feet, clad in highly polished loafers, off his desk and left his office. Officer O’Mara stood up at his desk.
“Until further notice, I’ll be with Dr. Payne at University Hospital,” Wohl told him. “You have her number. Try to keep everybody in Special Operations from knowing that.”
“Yes, sir. You’re unavailable.”
“I didn’t say that, Tommy,” Wohl said patiently. “Just use a little discretion. Don’t tell everybody who calls where I am.”
“Yes, sir.”
Detective Harry Cronin of South Detectives, who had been on the job for nineteen years, and a detective for thirteen, cleverly deduced it was going to be a bad day when he went into his kitchen at approximately 10:30 A.M. and found the kitchen table bare, not even a tablecloth.
Normally, before she went to work, Mrs. Cynthia Koontz Cronin, to whom Detective Cronin had been married for eighteen years, set the table for his breakfast. Patty was a technician in the Pathological Laboratory of Temple University Hospital, and left the house at half past six or so.
Normally, the Bulletin would be neatly folded beside the table setting, there would be a flower in a little vase Patty had bought at an auction house on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, and there would usually be a little note informing him there was scrapple, or Taylor ham, in the fridge.
Detective Cronin was more than a little hungover—when he’d gone off the job at midnight the night before, he had stopped off at the Red Rooster bar, run into Sergeant Aloysius J. Sutton of East Detectives, and had had several more belts than had been his intention—and further cleverly deduced that his coming home half in the bag probably had something to with the bare kitchen table.
He opened the refrigerator door. The one thing he decided he could not face right now was taking an unborn chicken from its shell and watch it sizzle in a frying pan. Neither did he completely trust himself to slice a piece of Taylor ham from its roll without taking part of a finger at the same time.
He reached for a bottle of Ortlieb’s. It would settle his stomach.
He carried it into his living room and looked around for the Bulletin. It was nowhere around, which he deduced indicated that Patty was really pissed.
What the hell, he decided, he’d lie on the couch and see what was on the tube, and get up around noon, go get a cheese steak or something for lunch, and return to the house prepared to apologize to Patty for having run into Sergeant Sutton and having maybe one more than he should have.
“Good morning,” Peter said when Amy waved him into her comfortably furnished office.
The sunlight coming into her office from behind her showed him that beneath her white nylon medical smock, Amelia A. Payne, M.D., was wearing only a skirt and underwear.
The psychiatric wing of University Hospital was often overheated, and this was not the first time he had noticed this was her means of dealing with it.
He found this erotically stimulating, but from the look on her face he knew that he should not mention it.
“Good morning,” she said and did not get up from her desk.
“Why do I suspect that you’re not going to throw yourself in my arms?”
“Because I’m not. Peter, this is a hospital.”
“Love, I have heard, cures all things.”
“The medical term for what ails you is ‘retarded mental development,’ ” she said but she smiled for a moment, then pushed a sheet of paper across her glass topped desk toward him.
He picked it up and read, “Miss Cynthia Longwood was stripped naked and orally raped by a policeman under circumstances that were themselves traumatic.”
He looked at her, his eyebrows raised questioningly.
“I’m on thin ice ethically with this, Peter,” she said. “Please don’t push me. Right now, I’m wondering whether I should have gone to Denny Coughlin with this.”
“I’m glad you came to me,” he said seriously. “Okay, Doctor, tell me more, starting with, is this your medical opinion?”
“No. But I believe it.”
“Where did this come from?” he asked, waving the sheet of paper.
“It was left as a telephone message for me at quarter to two this morning,” Amy said.
“By whom?”
Amy shrugged.
“This woman is a patient of yours?” Peter asked, and when Amy nodded, thought out loud: “Then it obviously came from someone who (a) knew that and (b) was not a relative or family friend—they would have told you—and (c) is trying to be helpful—maybe—without getting himself involved—certainly.”
Amy nodded and said simply, “Yes.”
“You think this happened?” Peter asked.
“Yes.”
“You want to tell me why?”
“Just before I called you, I spoke with Cynthia.”
“And she said she had been . . .”
“I raised the subject obliquely,” Amy said. “Very obliquely. That was enough to send her back to square one. I had to sedate her, and I really didn’t want to.”
“How do you define ‘square one’?”
“Hysteria, drifting in and out of catatonia. The problem here, Peter, is that this is a precursor to schizophrenia. Once that line is crossed, it’s often very difficult to bring people back. That’s what I want desperately to avoid here.”
“In other words, you’ve got a sick girl on your hands.”
“Who—this is where I’m on thin ethical advice, telling you this—was already living with something pretty hard to deal with before this happened to her.”
“You going to tell me what?”
“Peter, this might be, very probably is, a violation of physician-patient confidentiality. The only reason I decided I could tell you is because she doesn’t know I know.”
“Know what?”
“Cynthia Longwood is your typical Main Line Presbyterian Princess. From Bala Cynwyd. Her father is Randolph Longwood, the builder. She doesn’t remember it, but I’ve seen her at the Rose Tree Hunt Club.”
“So, being a very nice girl, the . . . oral rape . . . really affected her?”
“Whose maternal grandfather is Vincenzo Savarese, the gangster.”
“Jesus!” Wohl said genuinely surprised. “How do you know that?”
“Another confidentiality about to be violated,” Amy said. “When they brought her in here, I thought, God forgive me, that she was the typical Main Line Princess who had a fight with her boyfriend, and whose parents wanted nothing but the best, damn the cost, for their lovesick princess. I had really sick people to try to help, and declined to attend her.”
“I don’t quite follow that, honey.”
From her face, Peter saw that this was not the time to address A. A. Payne, M.D., using a term of endearment.
“When her grandfather heard about that, he showed up in Dad’s office and begged him to beg me to see her. He did—he called me, he didn’t beg—and out of either a desire to do Dad a favor, or out of morbid curiosity, I agreed to see her.”
“I’ll be damned!” Peter said. “Do you think that call came from Savarese?”
“I think that’s possible, don’t you?”
“What do you want from me, Amy?”
“In the be
st of all possible worlds, I would be able to go tell Cynthia that the bastard who did this to her has been arrested and will never bother her again. She has recurring nightmares, in which I really think she relives the horror of this over and over again. And the brain, protecting itself, keeps trying to push the memory into a remote corner. And the result of that could damned well be schizophrenia.”
“I can’t really offer much hope on that score. Presumably she hasn’t given you a description of the ‘traumatic circumstances,’ much less a description of the cop?”
“No. But—and here we go again, violating physician-patient confidentiality—her blood workup showed traces of morphine, or its derivatives.”
“She’s an addict?”
“How do you define that? Was Penny Detweiler an addict? Two days before she put that needle in her arm, I did her blood, it came back clean, and I was able to tell myself she was past the worst of her addiction. Possibly Cynthia is psychologically addicted. Sniff a couple of lines and it doesn’t seem to matter that Grandpa is a gangster and that all your friends are likely to find that out tomorrow. Or today. And your life will be ruined.”
“You like this girl, don’t you?”
“Yeah, and I’m not supposed to. I’m supposed to be professionally detached.”
“You think the ‘already traumatic circumstances’ had something to do with drugs?”
Amy shrugged.
“That would seem to make sense, wouldn’t it?”
“Who took the message?”
“The supervisory nurse and the resident. You want to talk to them?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you might want to. I asked them to stick around.”
“I’d like your permission to talk to Denny about this, Amy.”
“Thank you for asking my permission,” she said. “I was afraid you’d feel you have to go to him, with or without my permission.”
“Denny can be trusted, honey,” he said. “I don’t know if we can find the animal who did this, but we’ll damned well try.”
She shrugged resignedly. “Now that I’ve told you, I feel better. Not comfortable, but better.”
“Is there a boyfriend? A girlfriend?”
“There is—maybe was—a boyfriend. I don’t know his name. And he hasn’t been to see her. Or even called.”
The Investigators Page 36
