Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

Irene Craig’s function, as both she and Colonel Mawson and Mr. Payne saw it, was to control the expenditure of their time. It was, after all, the only thing they really had to sell, and it was a finite resource. One of the very few things on which Colonel Mawson and Mr. Payne were in complete agreement was that Mrs. Craig performed her function superbly.

Brewster C. Payne, therefore, was not annoyed when he saw Mrs. Craig enter his office. She knew what he was doing, reviewing a lengthy brief about to be submitted in a rather complicated maritime disaster, and that he did not want to be disturbed unless it was a matter of some import that just wouldn’t wait. She was here, ergo sum, something of bona fide importance demanded his attention.

Brewster Cortland Payne II was a tall, dignified, slim man in his early fifties. He had sharp features and closely cropped gray hair. He was sitting in a high-backed chair, upholstered in blue leather, tilted far back in it, his crossed feet resting on the windowsill of the plate-glass window that offered a view of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and Camden, New Jersey. The jacket of his crisp cord suit was hung over one of the two blue leather upholstered Charles Eames chairs facing his desk. The button-down collar of his shirt was open, and his regimentally striped necktie pulled down. His shirt cuffs were rolled up. He had not been expecting anyone, client or staff, to come into his office.

“The building is gloriously aflame, I gather,” he said, smiling at Irene Craig, “and you are holding the door of the very last elevator?”

“You’re not supposed to do that,” she said. “When there’s a fire, you’re supposed to walk down the stairs.”

“I stand chastised,” he said.

“I hate to do this to you,” she said.

“But?”

“Martha Peebles is outside.”

Brewster C. Payne II’s raised eyebrows made it plain that he had no idea who Martha Peebles was.

“Tamaqua Mining,” Irene Craig said.

“Oh,” Brewster C. Payne said. “She came to us with Mr. Foster?”

“Right.”

One of the factors that had caused the Executive Committee of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester to offer James Whitelaw Foster, Esq., a junior partnership with an implied offer somewhere not too far down the pike of a full partnership was that he would bring with him to the firm the legal business of Tamaqua Mining Company, Inc. It was a closely held corporation with extensive land and mineral holdings in northeast Pennsylvania near, as the name implied, Tamaqua, in the heart of the anthracite region.

“And I gather Mr. Foster is not available?” Payne asked.

“He’s in Washington,” Irene said. “She’s pretty upset. She’s been robbed.”

“Robbed?”

“Robbed. I think you better see her.”

“Where’s the colonel?” Payne asked.

“If he was here, I wouldn’t be in here,” she said. Payne couldn’t tell if she was annoyed with him, or tolerating him. “He’s with Bull Bolinski.”

“With whom?”

“World-famous tennis player,” Irene Craig said.

“I don’t place him, either,” Payne said, after a moment.

“Oh, God,” she said, in smiling exasperation. “Bull Bolinski. He was a tackle for the Green Bay Packers. You really never heard the name, did you?”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t,” Payne said. “And now you have me wholly confused, Irene.”

“The colonel’s at the Bellevue-Stratford, with the Bull, who is now a lawyer and representing a reporter, who’s negotiating a contract with the Bulletin.”

“Why is he doing that?” Payne asked, surprised, and thinking aloud. The legal affairs of the Philadelphia Bulletin were handled by Kenneth L. McAdoo.

“Because he wanted to meet the Bull,” Irene Craig said.

“I think I may be beginning to understand,” Payne said. “You think I should talk to Mrs…. Whatsername?”

“Peebles,” Irene Craig replied. “Miss Martha Peebles.”