I have to find out what box he’s going into.
Calhoun was no longer in sight.
Matt looked across the lobby toward the office of Vice President James C. Chase. It was empty.
He quickly scanned the desktop looking for a list of telephone numbers under the plate glass. There was none. He pulled out first the left, then the right, shelf on the desk, and on the right found a list of telephone numbers.
Chase, James C. was not on it.
Of course not, stupid. The guy whose desk this is damned well knows the boss’s extension number by heart.
He punched one of the buttons on the telephone and punched in the numbers listed on the phone.
“Good morning, First Harrisburg!”
“Mr. Chase, please.”
“Mr. Chase’s office.”
“My name is Matthew Payne. . . .”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Payne. How can I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Chase, if that’s possible.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, but it’s not. Mr. Chase won’t be in until this afternoon. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“It’ll wait. Thank you very much.”
“Mr. Chase left instructions that you’re to have anything you need.”
Somehow, I don’t think that includes asking you to walk across the lobby and find out what box the guy in the blue jeans and athletic jacket is going into.
And, Christ! They keep a record of who goes into what box, and the time. I don’t need her.
“It’s not important,” Matt said. “It’ll wait. Thank you.”
“I’ll tell him you called.”
“Thank you,” Matt said and hung up and looked at his watch. It was five to twelve.
He looked at the door through which Calhoun had disappeared. No Calhoun. He looked through the lobby.
Susan was at one of the stand-up desks, looking—nervously—his way.
What do I do? Send her in there with him? They’re liable to both come out at the same time, and being normal, Calhoun will take a look at her tail, and then maybe spot me in here.
He fixed what he hoped was a smile of confidence on his face and winked at Susan.
She smiled in relief, and his heart melted.
What did you tell her about Poor Pathetic Jennie? That when Jennie knew what was going down was really wrong, she had a choice to make, and made the wrong one? Does that have an application here?
He watched Susan until she disappeared from sight, then got out the list of names of relatives of Officer Timothy J. Calhoun and stared at it, wondering again whether he had screwed up, or the name of the box Calhoun was going into wasn’t one of his names.
He looked up, from behind the hand shielding his face, and saw Calhoun coming back into the lobby. Calhoun looked quickly around the lobby—a little nervously, Matt thought—and then walked out of the bank.
But I’ve got you, you son of a bitch!
Said Detective Payne, literally in the middle of the commission of a felony, with monumental hypocritical self-righteousness.
He shrugged, and reached for the telephone.
“Special Operations Investigation, Sergeant Washington.”
“Officer Calhoun, Timothy J., just went into—at 11:54—a safe-deposit box at the First Harrisburg Bank and Trust.”
“I am almost as glad to hear that as I am to hear your voice, Matthew. You have the number of the box? That will permit me to have the search warrant all ready for the signature of a judge at the auspicious time.”
“Not yet.”
“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that banks keep records in minute detail of the time their clients gain access to their boxes?”
“That’s right. You don’t. But I want to get it—I want the guy from the bank to get it for me. He’ll be in this afternoon.”
“And you will relay the number to me immediately after you have it?”
“Yes, sure.”
“And how are other things going in Harrisburg, Matthew? Mr. Matthews tells me you had dinner in Hershey.”
“That’s going slowly.”
“And carefully, Matthew? I devoutly hope carefully. You’ve heard the gentleman has added gunsmith to the long list of his other skills and accomplishments?”
“Matthews told me.”
“Then let ‘caution, caution, toujours caution’ be your creed, Matthew.”
“That’s audacity, not caution. ‘L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.’ ”
“Don’t correct me, please. I’m a sergeant, and sergeants are never wrong. And the one thing I absolutely do not want from you is audacity. I will, with more or less bated breath, await your next call.”
“Sometime this afternoon,” Matt said.
The line went dead.
Matt hung up and looked into the lobby.
Susan, looking uncomfortable, was walking across the lobby toward his office.
He started to get up, then changed his mind. His newly acquired attaché case was in the well of the desk. He planned—while he hoped anyone looking would think he was tying his shoe—to transfer the bank loot from Susan’s purse there.
“Ready for lunch?” Susan asked at the door.
“Come into my office, my dear, and I will explain why the bank has to repossess your Porsche.”
He waved her into the chair beside the desk. She put her purse on the floor in front of her. Matt bent over, grabbed the purse, and put it into the desk well. Then he opened the attaché case, went into Susan’s purse, and moved the money, noticing as he did that some of the stacks of currency were bound with paper strips bearing the names of the banks from which they had been stolen.
These people are really stupid! Those currency wrappers would really tie them to the robberies. Didn’t Chenowith think about that? Or did he simply assume that Susan would take care of getting rid of the wrappers and she was too stupid to do it?
He closed the briefcase and ran his finger over the combination lock.
Jesus, if the combination wasn’t set at 000, I’m going to have to break the lock to get back into it. That wasn’t too smart, Matthew!
He slid Susan’s purse back across the floor to her, then straightened up.
“Done,” he said and smiled.
She nervously smiled back.
Not too stupid to get rid of the currency wrappers; she’s not stupid. Naive. That’s the word. Naive.
“Well, let’s go,” Matt said. “For some reason, I’m starved.”
“That’s because you didn’t eat any breakfast,” she said.
“After you left, I did,” Matt said. “It was cold, but I needed the strength of good red meat.”
He waved her ahead of him out of the office.
When they passed Mr. Chase’s office, his “girl”—she was at least forty—smiled approvingly at them.
“I wish I had more time, Peter, to enjoy this,” Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin said indicating the Rittenhouse Grill Room’s “Today’s Luncheon Specials”—a mixed grill—a waiter had just set before them.
That’s not a simple expression of regret, Wohl thought, that he is a busy man who had trouble fitting lunch with me at the Rittenhouse Club into his busy schedule. I don’t know what the hell he really means, but let’s get whatever the hell it is—from half a dozen possibilities—out in the open.
“I belong here now,” Peter said.
“I thought that might be the case when you invited me here,” Coughlin said.
“Matt’s father—maybe I should say Amy’s father—called me up and said he would like to put me up for membership. I told him I’d like to think it over, and then I thought it over, and decided, what the hell, why not? It is a good place to have discreet little talks . . . like now. So I told him, ‘Yes, thank you.’ ”
Coughlin nodded.
“You should have said ‘Matt and Amy’s father,’ ” Coughlin said. “The background of that is Matt went to his father about getting you in here. He
didn’t want it to look as if he had his nose up your rear end. Amy went to her dad, and asked him what about getting you in here like I’m in here, what do they call it?—ex officio, it comes with the job.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“So Brewster Payne came to me and said he’d be delighted to get you in, provided you never found out that Matt asked him, or that it wouldn’t get you in trouble with the department. For being too big for your britches, in other words. There’s a lot of chief inspectors who don’t get to join. As a matter of fact, it’s only me and Lowenstein. He said that he’s been thinking about it, aside from Matt and Amy, for some time. He said there’s a lot of people, including him, who think that somewhere down the pike, you should be police commissioner . . .”
“Jesus!” Peter blurted.
“. . . and he wondered if getting you in here, now, would help or hurt that. He also said he didn’t want you to get the idea he was doing it to make points with you about Matt. He asked me to think it over and get back to him. So I thought it over, and I got back to him, and told him I thought it was a good idea, and that I felt sure you would come to me, ask me about it, and I would tell you that.”
“Chief . . .”
“It’s a good idea, Peter,” Coughlin said.
“I didn’t want to put you on a spot,” Wohl said.
“I gave you the benefit of that doubt. So far I’ve seen no signs that you’re getting too big for your britches. But I think there are—I know there are—some people in the department who do, and will take you being in here as proof of that.”
He sliced off a piece of his lamb chop and put it in his mouth.
“Before you tell me what you want to tell me, Peter, did you hear this Chenowith character has got himself a sawed-off fully automatic carbine?”
Wohl nodded. “I heard.”
“Presumably Matty has been told?”
“He’s been told.”
“You think he’s going to obey his orders?”
“You read the riot act to him, I read the riot act to him, and Washington read the riot act to him. I’ve been telling myself we are the three people whose orders he’s most likely to obey.”
Coughlin nodded.
“He called Washington first thing this morning,” Wohl went on, “and told him he had just seen Officer Timothy J. Calhoun of Five Squad going into the safe-deposit box vault of the First Harrisburg Bank and Trust.”
“I . . . I was about to say I don’t think Calhoun’s about to take a shot at him, but remembering that telephone call to the Widow Kellog, maybe I shouldn’t. I’m more concerned about this Chenowith character. He knows he’s facing life anyway, so why worry about shooting a cop? And he’s crazy.”
“So far as I know, Matt is still trying to gain the Reynolds woman’s confidence. I think he understands the situation.”
“I hope you’re right. What happens next with Calhoun?”
“Matt’s supposed to call later with the name of the safe-deposit box number. Jason’s going to do everything about a search warrant but hand it to a judge for his signature.”
Coughlin nodded.
Wohl handed him the sheet of paper on which Dr. Martinez had written, “Miss Cynthia Longwood was stripped naked and orally raped by a policeman under circumstances that were themselves traumatic.”
Coughlin’s eyebrows went up, and he looked at Wohl for amplification.
“Amy gave me that this morning,” Wohl said.
Coughlin went off on a tangent.
“You’ve been seeing a lot of Amy, haven’t you?”
“How do you define ‘a lot’?”
“You know how to define ‘a lot,’ ” Coughlin said. “Does Amy believe this?”
Wohl nodded.
“This is a patient of hers?”
Wohl nodded again, and added, “And she’s Vincenzo Savarese’s granddaughter.”
“I heard his daughter had married a Main Line guy,” Coughlin said “but I didn’t make the connection until just now. Longwood is the builder, right?”
Wohl nodded.
“You think Savarese knows about this?”
“I think that message—it was phoned in to the hospital for Amy in the wee hours this morning—came from Savarese.”
“Savarese called the hospital?”
“More likely one of his goons. I talked to the doctor and the nurse who talked to them. Both agreed the guy on the phone didn’t use the kind of vocabulary in the message.”
“Anything else?”
“Amy is concerned about violating medical ethics, and when I told her I was going to talk to you about this, asked me to tell you this girl is about to get shoved off the cliff into schizophrenia, and please be careful.”
“That’s all?”
“She found traces of hard stuff in the girl’s blood, making her—and me—think there’s a drug connection.”
Coughlin grunted, read the message again, then raised his eyes to Wohl.
“You thinking what I’m thinking, Peter?”
“I hope so,” Wohl said.
Coughlin made a “give it to me” gesture with his hand. “There was a drug bust. That’s the ‘already traumatic circumstances.’ Then this animal did this to her, and let her go. What is she going to do? Walk into a district and tell the desk sergeant, ‘I was making a buy, and one of your cops’ . . . ?”
“You think Savarese has also figured that out?”
“No one has ever accused Savarese of being slow.”
“Anybody but you know about this?”
“Washington.”
Coughlin’s eyebrows rose in question.
“There’s a boyfriend. He has not called the hospital. I told Jason to find out who he is.”
“But not to talk to him?”
“Not to talk to him.”
“And next?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Chief. How do I handle this?”
“You talk to the boyfriend. Do you think Washington has anything yet?”
“He’s had two hours. Let me find a phone, and I’ll find out.”
He started to push himself away from the table. Coughlin waved him back into it.
“Now that you’ve joined the upper crust, Peter,” Coughlin said smiling at him, “let me show you how the upper crust finds a telephone.”
He twisted around in his chair, caught a waiter’s eye, and put his balled fist next to his ear, miming someone holding a telephone. The waiter nodded and immediately brought a telephone to their table, plugging it into a socket on the table leg.
“Thank you,” Coughlin said smiling at Wohl, then dialed a number from memory.
Wohl thought it interesting that Coughlin had not found it necessary to ask for Washington’s number.
He either has a great memory—which is of course possible—or he has been calling that number frequently.
“How much were you able to learn about the boyfriend?” Coughlin began the conversation without any other opening comment.
Wohl smiled. He knew that Jason Washington had begun his police career walking a beat in Center City under Lieutenant Dennis V. Coughlin. They had been friends—and mutual admirers—ever since. Polite opening comments were not necessary. Washington would immediately recognize Coughlin’s voice and know what Coughlin wanted to know.
Coughlin, in an automatic action, had taken a small leather-bound notebook and a pencil from his pocket. He scribbled quickly on it as Washington replied.
“Sit on it until I get back to you. I’m with Wohl,” Coughlin said and hung up.
Now it was Peter Wohl’s turn to look at Coughlin with a question on his face.
“One boyfriend,” Coughlin said. “Ronald R. Ketcham, twenty-five, five-ten, brown hair, 165 pounds, no record except for traffic violations, lives in one of the garden apartments on Overbrook Avenue near Episcopal Academy . . .”
He looked at Wohl until Wohl indicated he knew the garden apartment complex, and then went on:
“. . . works for Wendell, Wilson, the stockbrokers in Bala Cynwyd. Has not been to work for three days, and has not been seen around his apartment. His car, a Buick coupe, is locked up in the garage. There are no signs of forcible entry into his apartment, and no signs of any kind of a struggle inside the apartment. He could, of course, be in Atlantic City.”
“Or passed through Atlantic City on his way to swim with the fishes,” Peter said.
“You think?”
“If Savarese found out this guy was with his granddaughter when she was raped.”
“How could Savarese know that?” Coughlin asked.
“How could he know she was raped?” Peter countered.
“Maybe he found this guy before Jason did.”
“If that’s the case . . .” Peter said.
“Yeah,” Coughlin said. “Savarese is now looking for the cop.”
“I’m tempted to say let him have him,” Peter said.
“You don’t even want to start thinking things like that, Peter,” Coughlin said almost paternally.
“The other thought I have been having, if this went down the way I think it did, was that—”
“It sounds like something an already dirty Five Squad cop would do?”
Wohl nodded.
“Knowing that another dirty cop would not turn him in,” Coughlin agreed.
Both of them fell silent for nearly a full minute.
“You open to suggestion, Peter?” Coughlin finally asked.
“Wide open,” Wohl said.
“Okay. Tell Jason to find out what else he can about Mr. Ketcham. I’ll put out a Locate, Do Not Detain on him. And I will think about what to do about our friend Vincenzo.”
“For example?”
“I know that you think it would probably be a good thing, but we really can’t permit Savarese to cut the limbs off this scumbag one at a time with a dull knife,” Coughlin said.
“My mouth ran away with me,” Peter said.
“So long as it wasn’t your heart,” Coughlin said.
“I wish we had more than ‘seems likely’ to tie somebody on Five Squad to the oral rape—”
“We don’t even have ‘seems likely,’ all we have is ‘could be,’ ” Coughlin interrupted. “What are you thinking?”
The Investigators Page 38