The Murderers boh-6

by W. E. B Griffin

  ELEVEN

  At 7:40 A.M. Miss Penelope Detweiler was sitting up in her canopied four-poster bed in her three-room apartment on the second floor of the Detweiler mansion when Mrs. Violet Rogers, who had been employed as a domestic servant by the Detweilers since Miss Detweiler was in diapers, entered carrying a tray with coffee, toast, and orange juice.

  Miss Detweiler was wearing a thin, pale blue, sleeveless nightgown. Her eyes were open, and there was a look of surprise on her face.

  There was a length of rubber medical tubing tied around Miss Detweiler’s left arm between the elbow and the shoulder. A plastic, throwaway hypodermic injection syringe hung from Miss Detweiler’s lower left arm.

  “Oh, Penny!” Mrs. Rogers moaned. “Oh, Penny!”

  She put the tray on the dully gleaming cherrywood hope chest at the foot of the bed, then stood erect, her arms folded disapprovingly against her rather massive breast, her full, very black face showing mingled compassion, sorrow, and anger.

  And then she met Miss Detweiler’s eyes.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” Mrs. Rogers said, moaned, and walked quickly to the bed.

  She waved a large, plump hand before Miss Detweiler’s eyes. There was no reaction.

  She put her hand to Miss Detweiler’s forehead, then withdrew it as if the contact had burned.

  She put her hands on Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and shook her.

  “Penny! Penny, honey!”

  There was no response.

  When Mrs. Rogers removed her hands from Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and let her rest again on the pillows against the headboard, Miss Detweiler started to slowly slide to the right.

  Mrs. Rogers tried to stop the movement but could not. She watched in horror as Miss Detweiler came to rest on her side. Her head tilted back, and she seemed to be staring at the canopy of her bed.

  Mrs. Rogers turned from the bed and walked to the door. In the corridor, the walk became a trot, and then she was running to the end of the corridor, past an oil portrait of Miss Detweiler in her pink debutante gown, past the wide stairway leading down to the entrance foyer of the mansion, into the corridor of the other wing of the mansion, to the door of the apartment of Miss Detweiler’s parents.

  She opened and went through the door leading to the apartment sitting room without knocking, and through it to the closed double doors of the bedroom. She knocked at the left of the double doors, then went through it without waiting for a response.

  H. Richard Detweiler, a tall, thin man in his late forties, was sleeping in the oversize bed, on his side, his back to his wife Grace, who was curled up in the bed, one lower leg outside the sheets and blankets, facing away from her husband.

  Mr. Detweiler, who slept lightly, opened his eyes as Mrs. Rogers approached the bed.

  “Mr. D,” Violet said. “You better come.”

  “What is it, Violet?” Mr. Detweiler asked in mingled concern and annoyance.

  “It’s Miss Penny.”

  H. Richard Detweiler sat up abruptly. He was wearing only pajama bottoms.

  “Jesus, now what?”

  “You’d better come,” Mrs. Rogers repeated.

  He swung his feet out of the bed and reached for the dressing gown he had discarded on the floor before turning out the lights. As he put it on, his feet found a pair of slippers.

  Mrs. Detweiler, a finely featured, rather thin woman of forty-six, who looked younger, woke, raised her head, and looked around and then sat up. Her breasts were exposed; she had been sleeping wearing only her underpants.

  “What is it, Violet?” she asked as she pulled the sheet over her breasts.

  “Miss Penny.”

  “What about Miss Penny?”

  H. Richard Detweiler was headed for the door, followed by Violet.

  “Dick?” Mrs. Detweiler asked, and then, angrily, “Dick!”

  He did not reply.

  Grace Detweiler got out of bed and retrieved a thick terry-cloth bathrobe from the floor. It was too large for her, it was her husband’s, but she often wore it between the shower and the bed. She put it on, and fumbling with the belt, followed her husband and Violet out of her bedroom.

  H. Richard Detweiler entered his daughter’s bedroom.

  He saw her lying on her side and muttered something unintelligible, then walked toward the canopied bed.

  “Penny?”

  “I think she’s gone, Mr. D,” Violet said softly.

  He flashed her an almost violently angry glare, then bent over the bed and, grunting, pushed his daughter erect. Her head now lolled to one side.

  Detweiler sat on the bed and exhaled audibly.

  “Call Jensen,” he ordered. “Tell him we have a medical emergency, and to bring the Cadillac to the front door.”

  Violet went to the bedside and punched the button that would ring the telephone in the chauffeur’s apartment over the five-car garage.

  H. Richard Detweiler stood up, then squatted and grunted as he picked his daughter up in his arms.

  “Call Chestnut Hill Hospital, tell them we’re on the way, and then call Dr. Dotson and tell him to meet us there,” Detweiler said as he started to carry his daughter across the room.

  Mrs. Arne-Beatrice-Jensen answered the telephone on the second ring and told Mrs. Rogers her husband had just left in the Cadillac to take it to Merion Cadillac-Olds for service.

  “Mr. D,” Mrs. Rogers said, “Jensen took the limousine in for service.”

  “Go get the Rolls, please, Violet,” Detweiler said, as calmly as he could manage.

  “Oh, my God!” Mrs. Grace Detweiler wailed as she came into the room and saw her husband with their daughter in his arms. “What’s happened?”

  “Goddamn it, Grace, don’t go to pieces on me,” Detweiler said. He turned to Violet.

  “Not the Rolls, the station wagon,” he said, remembering.

  There wasn’t enough room in the goddamned Rolls Royce Corniche for two people and a large-sized cat, but Grace had to have a goddamned convertible.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Grace Detweiler asked.

  “God only knows what she took this time,” Detweiler said, as much to himself as in reply to his wife.

  “Beatrice,” Violet said, “get the keys to the station wagon. I’ll meet you by the door.”

  “Oh, my God!” Grace Detweiler said, putting her balled fist to her mouth. “She’s unconscious!”

  “Baxley has the station wagon,” Mrs. Jensen reported. “He’s gone shopping.”

  Baxley was the Detweiler butler. He prided himself that not one bite of food entered the house that he had not personally selected. H. Richard Detweiler suspected that Baxley had a cozy arrangement with the grocer’s and the butcher’s and so on, but he didn’t press the issue. The food was a good deal better than he had expected it would be when Grace had hired the Englishman.

  “Baxley’s gone with the station wagon,” Violet reported.

  Goddamn it all to hell! Both of them gone at the same time! And no car, of five, large enough to hold him with Penny in his arms. And nobody to drive the car if there was one.

  “Call the police,” H. Richard Detweiler ordered. “Tell them we have a medical emergency, and to send an ambulance immediately.”

  He left the bedroom carrying his daughter in his arms, and went down the corridor, past the oil portrait of his daughter in her pink debutante gown and then down the wide staircase to the entrance foyer.

  “Police Radio,” Mrs. Leander-Harriet-Polk, a somewhat more than pleasingly plump black lady, said into the microphone of her headset.

  “We need an ambulance,” Violet said.

  Harriet Polk had worked in the Radio Room in the Police Administration Building for nineteen years. Her long experience had told her from the tone of the caller’s voice that this was a genuine call, not some lunatic with a sick sense of humor.

  “Ma’am, what’s the nature of the problem?”

  “She’s unconscious, not breathing.”


  “Where are you, Ma’am?”

  “928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue,” Violet said. “It’s the Detweiler estate.”

  Harriet threw a switch on her console which connected her with the Fire Department dispatcher. Fire Department Rescue Squads are equipped with oxygen and resuscitation equipment, and manned by firemen with special Emergency Medical Treatment training.

  “Unconscious female at 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue,” she said.

  Then she spoke to her caller.

  “A rescue squad is on the way, Ma’am,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Violet said politely.

  Nineteen years on the job had also embedded in Harriet Polk’s memory a map of the City of Philadelphia, overlaid by Police District boundaries. She knew, without thinking about it, that 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue was in the Fourteenth Police District. Her board showed her that Radio Patrol Car Twenty-three of the Fourteenth District was in service.

  Harriet moved another switch.

  “Fourteen Twenty-three,” she said. “928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue. A hospital case. Rescue en route.”

  Police Officer John D. Wells, who also had nineteen years on the job, was sitting in his three-year-old Chevrolet, whose odometer was halfway through its second hundred thousand miles, outside a delicatessen on Germantown Avenue.

  He had just failed to have the moral courage to refuse stuffing his face before going off shift and home. He had a wax-paper-wrapped Taylor-ham-and-egg sandwich in his hand, and a large bite from same in his mouth.

  He picked up his microphone and, with some difficulty, answered his call: “Fourteen Twenty-three, OK.”

  He took off the emergency brake and dropped the gearshift into drive.

  He had spent most of his police career in North Philadelphia, and had been transferred to “The Hill” only six months before. He thought of it as being “retired before retiring.” There was far less activity in affluent Chestnut Hill than in North Philly.

  He didn’t, in other words, know his district well, but he knew it well enough to instantly recall that West Chestnut Hill Avenue was lined with large houses, mansions, on large plots of ground, very few of which had numbers to identify them.

  Where the hell is 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue?

  Officer Wells did not turn on either his flashing lights or siren. There was not much traffic in this area at this time of the morning, and he didn’t think it was necessary. But he pressed heavily on the accelerator pedal.

  H. Richard Detweiler, now staggering under the hundred-and-nine-pound weight of his daughter, reached the massive oak door of the foyer. He stopped and looked angrily over his shoulder and found his wife.

  “Grace, open the goddamned door!”

  She did so, and he walked through it, onto the slate-paved area before the door.

  Penny was really getting heavy. He looked around, and walked to a wrought-iron couch and sat down in it.

  Violet appeared.

  “Mr. D,” she said, “the police, the ambulance, is coming,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He looked down at his daughter’s face. Penny was looking at him, but she wasn’t seeing him.

  Oh, my God!

  “Violet, please call Mr. Payne and tell him what’s happened, and that I’m probably going to need him.”

  Violet nodded and went back in the house.

  Brewster Cortland Payne II, Esq., a tall, well-built-he had played tackle at Princeton in that memorable year when Princeton had lost sixteen of seventeen games played-man in his early fifties, was having breakfast with his wife, Patricia, on the patio outside the breakfast room of his rambling house on a four-acre plot on Providence Road in Wallingford when Mrs. Elizabeth Newman, the Payne housekeeper, appeared carrying a telephone on a long cord.

  “It’s the Detweilers’s Violet,” she said.

  Mrs. Payne, an attractive forty-four-year-old blonde, who was wearing a pleated skirt and a sweater, put her coffee cup down as she watched her husband take the telephone.

  “For you?” she asked, not really expecting a reply.

  “Good morning, Violet,” Brewster C. Payne said. “How are you?”

  “Mr. Detweiler asked me to call,” Violet said. “He said he will probably need you.”

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  Payne, who was a founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, arguably Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm, was both Mr. H. Richard Detweiler’s personal attorney and his most intimate friend. They had been classmates at both Episcopal Academy and Princeton.

  Violet told him what the problem was, ending her recitation of what had transpired by almost sobbing, “I think Penny is gone, Mr. Payne. He’s sitting outside holding her in his lap, waiting for the ambulance, but I think she’s gone.”

  “Violet, when the ambulance gets there, find out where they’re taking Penny. Call here and tell Elizabeth. I’m leaving right away. When I get into Philadelphia, I’ll call here and Elizabeth can tell me where to go. Tell Mr. Detweiler I’m on my way.”

  He broke the connection with his finger, lifted it and waited for a dial tone, and then started dialing again.

  “Well, what is it?” Patricia Payne asked.

  “Violet went into Penny’s room and found her sitting up in bed with a needle hanging out of her arm,” Payne replied, evenly. “They’re waiting for an ambulance. Violet thinks it’s too late.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  A metallic female voice came on the telephone: “Dr. Payne is not available at this time. If you will leave your name and number, she will return your call as soon as possible. Please wait for the tone. Thank you.”

  He waited for the tone and then said, “Amy, if you’re there, please pick up.”

  “Dad?”

  “Penny was found by the maid ten minutes ago with a needle in her arm. Violet thinks she’s gone.”

  “Damn!”

  “I think you had better go out there and deal with Grace,” Brewster Payne said.

  “Goddamn!” Dr. Amelia Payne said.

  “Tell her I’m coming,” Patricia said.

  “Your mother said she’s coming to Chestnut Hill,” Payne said.

  “All right,” Amy said, and the connection went dead.

  Payne waited for another dial tone and dialed again.

  “More than likely by mistake,” Matt’s voice said metallically, “you have dialed my number. If you’re trying to sell me something, you will self-destruct in ten seconds. Otherwise, you may leave a message when the machine goes bleep.”

  Bleep.

  “Matt, pick up.”

  There was no human voice.

  He’s probably at work, Payne decided, and replaced the handset in its cradle.

  “Elizabeth, please call Mrs. Craig-you’d better try her at home first-and tell her that something has come up and I don’t know when I’ll be able to come to the office. And ask her to ask Colonel Mawson to let her know where he’ll be this morning.”

  Mrs. Newman nodded.

  “Poor Matt,” Mrs. Newman said.

  “Good God!” Brewster Payne said, and then stood up. His old-fashioned, well-worn briefcase was sitting on the low fieldstone wall surrounding the patio. He picked it up and then jumped over the wall and headed toward the garage. His wife started to follow him, then stopped and called after him: “I’ve got to get my purse. And I’ll try to get Matt at work.”

  She waited until she saw his head nod, then turned and went into the house.

  Officer John D. Wells, in RPC Fourteen Twenty-three, slowed down when he reached the 900 block of West Chestnut Hill Avenue, a little angry that his memory had been correct.

  There are no goddamned numbers. Just tall fences that look like rows of spears and fancy gates, all closed. You can’t even see the houses from the street.

  Then, as he moved past one set of gates, it began to open, slowly and majestically. He slammed on the brakes and backed up, a
nd drove through the gates, up a curving drive lined with hundred-year-old oak trees.

  If this isn’t the place, I can ask.

  It was the place.

  There was a man on a patio outside an enormous house sitting on an iron couch holding a girl in her nightgown in his arms.

  Wells got quickly out of the car.

  “Thank God!” the man said, and then, quickly, angrily: “Where the hell is the ambulance? We called for an ambulance!”

  “A rescue squad’s on the way, sir,” Wells said.

  He looked down at the girl. Her eyes were open. Wells had seen enough open lifeless eyes to know this girl was dead. But he leaned over and touched the carotid artery at the rear of her ear, feeling for a pulse, to make sure.

  “Can you tell me what happened, sir?” he asked.

  “We found her this way, Violet found her this way.”

  There came the faint wailing of a siren.

  “There was a needle in her arm,” a large black woman said softly, earning a look of pained betrayal from the man holding the body.

  Wells looked. There was no needle, but there was a purple puncture wound in the girl’s arm.

  “Where did you find her?” Wells asked the black woman.

  “Sitting up in her bed,” Violet said.

  The sound of the ambulance siren had grown much louder. Then it shut off. A moment later the ambulance appeared in the driveway.

  Two firemen got quickly out, pulled a stretcher from the back of the van, and, carrying an oxygen bottle and an equipment bag, ran up to the patio.

  The taller of them, a very thin man, did exactly what Officer Wells had done, took a quick look at Miss Penelope Detweiler’s lifeless eyes and concluded she was dead, and then checked her carotid artery to make sure.

  He met Wells’s eyes and, just perceptibly, shook his head.

  “Sir,” he said, very kindly, to H. Richard Detweiler, “I think we’d better get her onto the stretcher.”

  “There was, the lady said, a needle in her arm,” Wells said.

  H. Richard Detweiler now gave Officer Wells a very dirty look.