Investigators

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Very funny,” he said. “A bank robber dressed up like a woman.”

  “It was a Chinese fire drill, from start to finish,” Mickey said. “I was going up Route 611 when the FBI, two cars, goes around me, lights flashing, sirens screaming, as if I was standing still. Then they got lost, I guess, because I got to the bank ten minutes before they did.”

  Schwartz smiled.

  “The first thing Young did, when he finally showed up, was to order one of his underlings to throw me out of the bank,” O’Hara went on.

  “I noticed you had your knife out for him,” Schwartz said. “This is what is known as Time For Second Thoughts.”

  “Fuck him,” Mickey said. “Let it run.”

  “Your call.”

  “Sy, that constable was really something,” O’Hara said, laughing at the memory. “He told me the reason he ran into his boss’s car was because he had just remembered he had left his gun home, and was wondering if he should go get it before going to the bank.”

  “You really want to say his truck was ‘rendered hors de combat’?”

  “Why not? I love that phrase. It calls up pictures of horny naked women in foxholes.”

  Schwartz laughed.

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “That state cop was pretty clever. I had a chance to talk to him before Young showed up and threw me out of the bank. The state cop thinks it was probably some guy from the coal regions, out of work for a long time, maybe in deep to some loan shark. You know, really desperate. If he is an amateur, and gets smart and quits now, he’s probably home free. Despite what that pompous asshole from the FBI declared, they catch damned few bank robbers.”

  “Maybe this one will be easy to find. Hairy legs. Too much lipstick.”

  “I think that description—the ‘really ugly’ part, too—may not be all that reliable.”

  “Tell me?” Schwartz asked, smiling.

  “I had the feeling after talking to Dailey that he was more than a little disappointed that once the broad had him all tied up she didn’t do all sorts of wicked sexual things to him. Hell hath no fury, et cetera.”

  “Jesus, Mickey!”

  “There’s probably going to be surveillance-camera pictures of him—or, for all we really know, her—you can judge for yourself.”

  “There’s pictures? When do we get them?”

  “So far as Young is concerned, after I told him off, I’ll get them the day after hell freezes over,” O’Hara said. “But the state cop said he’d send me a copy when he gets his.”

  “We can lean on the FBI, if you think we should.”

  “I don’t think it would be worth the effort. They’re generally pretty lousy pictures, even if the camera was working, and I wouldn’t bet on that. I asked the state cop for a copy just to satisfy my curiosity.”

  “Okay, Mickey. Nice little yarn. Would you be heart-broken if I ran it on the first page of the second section?”

  “I’m surprised that you’re going to run it at all,” O’Hara said. “It’s not much of a story.”

  “I like it,” Schwartz said, meaning it. “A little droll humor to brighten people’s dull days.”

  Without taking her eyes from the inch-thick, bound-together-with-metal-fastener sheaf of papers lying open on her cluttered desk, Susan Reynolds reached for the ringing telephone and put it to her ear.

  “Appeals, Reynolds,” she announced.

  “Miss Susan Reynolds?” an operator’s voice asked.

  “Right,” Susan said.

  “Deposit fifty-five cents, please,” the operator ordered.

  Susan could hear the melodic bonging of two quarters and a nickel.

  She felt sure she knew who was calling. She seldom got long-distance calls made from a pay phone in the office.

  Confirmation came immediately.

  “Susie?” Jennie asked.

  Jennie was Jennifer Ollwood.

  “Hi,” Susan said.

  “Could you call me back?” Jennie asked. “I’m in a phone booth and I don’t have any change.”

  “Give me the number,” Susan said, reaching for a pencil, then adding, “It’ll be a minute or two. They don’t let me make personal toll calls.”

  Jennie gave her the number. Susan repeated it back to her.

  “I have to go down to the lobby,” Susan said. “There’s no pay phone on this floor.”

  “Thank you,” Jennie said in her soft voice.

  Susan hung up and then stood.

  Susan Reynolds was listed on the manning chart of the Department of Social Services of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as an “Appeals Officer, Grade III.” She was single, twenty-six years old, naturally blond, blue-eyed, with a fair complexion, and, at five feet five and 130 pounds, was five pounds heavier than she wanted to be.

  She occupied a third-floor office in the Department of Social Services Building in Harrisburg. Through its one window, she had a view of the golden dome of the state-house. Her office was just barely large enough to hold her desk and chair, her bookcase, her three filing cabinets, and the three straight-backed chairs intended for use by visitors.

  On half of one shelf of her bookcase, Susan kept a small vase, sometimes holding a fresh flower; a photograph of her parents, and a photograph of herself standing in the snow with half a dozen other young women taken while they were all students at Bennington College in Vermont.

  The other five shelves of the ceiling-high bookcase were filled with books, notebooks, binders, and manila folders all containing laws, regulations, interpretations, and court decisions having to do with providing social services to those entitled to it.

  Just who was entitled to what social services under what conditions was frequently a subject of bitter disagreement between those who believed in their entitlement to one social service or another, and those employees of one governmental agency or another who didn’t think so.

  It was often difficult, for example, for someone who had been a recipient of a monthly check from Harrisburg intended for the support of his or her minor children to understand why, simply because one of the children had turned nineteen, the amount of the check had been reduced.

  The laws—and there were several hundred of them—generally provided that support—and there were forty or fifty different types of support—for dependent children terminated when the child reached his or her nineteenth birthday. Or was no longer resident in the home. Or had been incarcerated or become resident in a mental institution. Or joined the Army.

  Ordinarily, the situation could be explained to the recipient at the local Social Services office. But not always. If he or she wanted to appeal, the initial appeal was handled locally. If the local social services functionary upheld the decision of the social worker, the recipient could appeal yet again.

  At that point, the case moved to Harrisburg, where it was adjudicated by one of twelve appeals officers, one of whom was Miss Susan Reynolds.

  When she had first come on the job three years before, Miss Reynolds had been deeply moved by the poverty and hopeless situations of those whose appeals reached her desk.

  Emotionally, she had wanted to grant every one of them, feeling that there was simply no justification in wealthy America to deny anyone whose needs were so evident. And, in fact, for the first three weeks on the job she had granted relief to ninety percent of the appellants.

  But her decisions were subject to review by her superiors, and more than ninety percent of her decisions granting relief had been overturned.

  She had then been called before a review board that had the authority to terminate her probationary appointment as an Appeals Officer, Grade I.

  It had been pointed out to her, politely but firmly, that she had been employed by the Department of Social Services to adjudicate appeals fairly, and not to effect a redistribution of the wealth of the Commonwealth without regard to the applicable laws and regulations.

  She had seriously considered resigning her appointment—an act she
knew would please her parents, who were mystified by her choice of employment—but in the end had not, for several reasons.

  First, she knew that many, perhaps even most, of the decisions she had made had not been fair, but rather based on her emotional reaction to the pitiful lives of the people who had made the appeals. And second, she decided that she could make adjudications in the future that, while paying attention to the letter of the law, could be tempered with compassion.

  Most important in her decision not to resign was her belief that if she stayed on the job, she would be able to make some input into the system that would make it better. It was such a god-awful mess the way it was now, she had thought, that improvement had to be possible.

  She hadn’t been able to make any improvements to the system in her three years on the job—she now realized that thinking she could have had been really naive—and she had been forced to accept that a substantial number of the appeals she was called upon to adjudicate had been made by people who believed there was nothing morally wrong in trying to swindle the state out of anything they could get away with.

  But on the other hand, she thought, she had been able to overturn the adverse decisions of a large number of social workers that would really have hurt people with a legitimate entitlement to the small amounts of money provided by the state.

  And she had been promoted twice, ultimately to “Ap peals Officer, Grade III.” And both times she had wondered if she had been promoted because she was doing a good job, or whether someone higher up had examined her record and found it satisfactory using the percentage of appeals rejected as the criterion.

  Susan looked at the photograph of the Bennington girls on her shelf—Jennifer Ollwood was standing next to her in the picture—then shifted the frame slightly.

  She picked up her purse and left her office, stopping at the adjacent office, of Appeals Officer, Grade IV, Veronica Haynes, a black woman who, Susan had decided, believed that the only people who should receive aid from the state were the aged in the last few weeks of their terminal illness.

  “If anybody asks, Veronica, I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

  Veronica smiled at her. “Couple, as in two? Or several, as if you’re going out for coffee?”

  “Several, wiseass,” Susan said, smiling, and walked to the elevators.

  On the way down, she looked in her coin purse and found that it held two nickels and a dime.

  Somewhat reluctantly, the proprietress of the lobby newsstand, an obese harridan with orange hair, changed two dollars into silver for her. Susan found an empty telephone booth and went in.

  Jennifer answered on the second ring. Her voice seemed hesitant.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “That didn’t take long.”

  “I hurried. What’s up?”

  “Are you planning to come this way anytime soon?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” Susan said.

  But I could. Daffy asked me please, please come to her husband’s birthday party.

  “I’d really like to see you,” Jennie said.

  “And I’d like to see the baby,” Susan said.

  “Bryan has something he wants you to keep for him. For us,” Jennie said.

  So that’s what this is all about. Damn him!

  Bryan was Bryan Chenowith.

  If I had a file on him, he would be categorized as “Father of (illegitimate) child, residing with mother. Employable, but not employed.”

  “How’s the baby?” Susan asked.

  “Wonderful!” Jennie said, her voice reflecting the pride of the new mother.

  “I can’t wait to see him,” Susan said.

  “Then you can come?”

  “Daffy’s having a birthday party for Chad,” Susan said. “On Saturday. She’s called me twice, begging me to come. You know what I think of him.”

  “Is it too late to change your mind?” Jennie asked, a hint of desperation in her voice. “Philadelphia’s not far from here.”

  “I could call her,” Susan said.

  “In for a penny. In for a pound,” as they say.

  “That’s a ‘yes’?”

  “I want to see the baby,” Susan said, as much to herself as to Jennie.

  “Will you stay with Daffy?”

  “No,” Susan said. “Probably the Bellvue.”

  “You’ll drive down Saturday morning?”

  “Right.”>

  “I’ll call the hotel and tell you when and where to meet me,” Jennie said.

  “You don’t want to tell me now?”

  “I’d better come up with a plan,” Jennie said, giggling.

  “Okay. I’ll be at the hotel after twelve, I guess. Why don’t you call me about one?”

  “I will.”

  “Is there anything I can bring you?”

  “No. Thank you, but no. We’re doing fine.”

  Said the noble bride from the deck of the sinking ship.

  “Well, then, I’ll see you over the weekend,” Susan said.

  “I really love you, you know that,” Jennie said, and the phone went dead.

  Susan made two more telephone calls before going back to her office. The first was to Daphne Elizabeth Browne Nesbitt, who was also in the photograph of the Bennington girls on Susan’s bookshelf. She told Daffy that her plans had changed and that she now could come to Chad’s party, if that would be all right.

  Daffy said she would have the crème de la crème of Philadelphia’s bachelors lined up for her selection.

  I was afraid of that. It was another reason I didn’t want to come to your asshole of a husband’s birthday party.

  “I would rather snag my men on my own hook, Daffy. Thank you just the same.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Daffy said. “Advertising pays. Ask Chad about that. And besides, we have to stick together, don’t we? Help each other out?”

  Oh, do we ever!

  “Right,” Susan said. “See you Saturday.”

  Then Susan called her mother and told her that she had changed her mind about going to Chad Nesbitt’s birthday party in Philadelphia over the weekend.

  “Well, baby, I’m very glad to hear that,” Susan’s mother replied.

  “Mother, would you call the Bellvue and see about a room? It’s so close to the weekend that I’m afraid—”

  “No, I won’t,” her mother replied. “But I will call Mrs. Samuelson. She’s very good at that sort of thing.”

  Mrs. Dorothy Samuelson was her father’s executive assistant, and she was, indeed, very good at things like that. It was what Susan had hoped her mother would do, pass the buck to Mrs. Samuelson.

  Now that she had committed herself to Jennie, she would need to have a room in the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel.

  TWO

  From where Officer Herbert Prasko of the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department had stationed himself on the second-floor balcony of the Howard Johnson motel on Roosevelt Boulevard, he had an extraordinarily good view of the vehicle he was surveilling.

  The new four-door Chevrolet sedan was parked, nose out, in front of a row of rooms in the rear of the motel. It was a Hertz rental, picked up at the Philadelphia International Airport four hours before by Ronald R. Ketcham, white male, twenty-five, five-ten, brown hair, 165 pounds, no previous arrests, who resided in a luxury apartment on Overbrook Avenue not far from the Episcopal Academy, of which he was a graduate.

  Mr. Ketcham, who was not quite as smart as he believed himself to be, was laboring under the misimpression that the use of a rental automobile rather than his Buick coupe was one more clever thing he had done to conceal both his illegal activity and identity from both the police and other criminals.

  Officer Prasko didn’t know if the other criminals involved knew Mr. Ketcham’s identity—the scumbags probably couldn’t care less—but his identity had been known to Five Squad for five weeks, from the time they had first followed Amos J. Williams, black male
, thirty-two, six-three, 180 pounds, twenty-eight previous arrests, and four of his goons to a delivery rendezvous with Mr. Ketcham, who seemed to be one of his better customers.

  For a number of reasons, it had been decided not to make an arrest at that time, but it had not been hard at all to trace the customer’s rental car back through the Hertz main office to their airport rental operation, and from the rental agreement to identify Mr. Ketcham in some detail.

  Hertz had been very cooperative. They had promised to notify Five Squad the next time Mr. Ketcham rented a car, and had done so today. Officer Prasko thought that was pretty dumb on Mr. Ketcham’s part, to go back to Hertz; he should have changed to Avis, or somebody else. And it was also dumb for him to go back to the Howard Johnson motel. There were a lot of other motels. If he had set up this meet someplace else, he would not be about to find his ass in a very deep crack.

  Five Squad had come up with a plan after the first time they had followed Mr. Williams to his rendezvous with Mr. Ketcham. On being notified by Hertz that Mr. Ketcham had again rented an automobile, a Five Squad plainclothes officer—who turned out to be Officer Prasko—would proceed to the Howard Johnson motel, and there await the possible arrival of Mr. Ketcham.

  Herb Prasko, en route to the motel in an undercover car—a two-year-old Mercury, formerly the property of another drug dealer scumbag—had thought the odds were that he would be pissing in the wind. But you never could really tell. Sometimes people were really stupid, as Mr. Ketcham had turned out to be by returning to the same Howard Johnson motel instead of going someplace else to do his business.

  But he had waited, parked just inside the motel, slumped down on the front seat of the Mercury, watching the entrance to the motel, for nearly three hours, before Ketcham had shown up.

  He had a dame with him, white female, early twenties, 120 pounds, blonde, nice figure, who sat in the car while Mr. Ketcham went in the motel office for the key. Officer Prasko slipped down all the way on the seat of the Mercury as they drove past him, and then watched where they were going in the rearview mirror.