It was, she decided, in Brewster C. Payne II’s best interests to wait until the ideal tenant—in Irene’s mind’s eye, a sixtyish widow who worked in the Franklin Institute—came along. And she waited.
And then Matt Payne had come along, needing a residence inside the city limits to meet a civil service regulation, and about to be evicted from his fraternity house. She called the Director of Administration at the Cancer Society and told him that the apartment had been rented, and that, as he had been previously informed, the two parking spaces in the garage behind the building, which they had until now been permitted to use temporarily, would no longer be available to them.
She assured him that the new tenant was a gentleman whose presence in the building would hardly be noticed, and devoutly hoped that would be the case.
Air conditioning had also been an afterthought, or more accurately an after-afterthought. Not only was their insufficient capacity in the main unit already installed, but there was no room to install the duct work that would have been necessary. Two 2.5-ton window units had been installed, one through the side wall, the second in the bedroom in the rear.
The wave of hot muggy air that greeted Matt Payne when he trotted up the narrow stairway from the third floor and unlocked his door told him that he had forgotten to leave either unit on when he had last been home.
He put the carton of requisition forms on the desk in the living room and quickly turned both units on high. The desk, like the IBM typewriter sitting on it, had been “surplus” to the needs of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester. With a great deal of difficulty, four burly movers had been able to maneuver the heavy mahogany desk up the narrow stairs from the third floor, but, short of tearing down a wall, there had been no chance of getting it into the bedroom, as originally planned.
He then stripped off his clothes and took a shower. Despite the valiant efforts of the air conditioners, the apartment was still hot when he had toweled himself dry. If he got dressed now, he would be sweaty again. Officer Charley McFadden had told him, in response to Matt’s question as to how he should dress while they sought to locate Mr. Walton Williams, “Nice. Like you are now. He’s an arty fag, not the leather and chains kind.”
Matt then did what seemed at the moment to be entirely logical. He went into the living room in his birthday suit, sat down behind the IBM typewriter in that condition, and started typing up the forms.
He had been at it for just over an hour when his concentration was distracted by a soft two-toned bonging noise that he recognized only after a moment as his doorbell.
He decided it was his father, who not only had a key to the downstairs, but was a gentleman, who would sound the doorbell rather than just let himself in.
He trotted naked to the door and pulled it open.
It was not his father. It was Amelia Alice Payne, M.D., Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists, his big sister.
“Jesus Christ, Amy! Wait till I get my goddamned pants on.”
“I really hope I’m interrupting something,” Amy said as she entered the apartment. She smirked at the sight of her naked brother trotting into his bedroom and then looked around.
Amy Payne was twenty-seven, petite and intense, a wholesome but not quite pretty woman who looked a good deal like her father. She was in fact not related to Matt except in the law. Her mother had been killed in an automobile accident. Six months later, her father had married Matt’s widowed mother, and Brewster
Payne had subsequently adopted Matthew Mark Moffitt, her infant son. Patricia Moffitt Payne and Matt had been around as far back as Amy could remember.
In Amy’s mind, Patricia Moffitt Payne was her mother, and Matt her little brother.
Matt returned to the living room bare-chested and zipping up a pair of khaki pants.
“How’d you get inside?” he asked.
“Dad gave me a key so that I could use the garage,” she said. “It also opens the door downstairs, as I just found out.”
“Not to the apartment?” he challenged.
“No, not to the apartment,” Amy said.
“To what do I owe the honor of your presence?” Matt asked. “You want a beer or a Coke or something?”
“I want to talk to you, Matt.”
“Why does that cause me to think I’m not going to like this? The tone of your voice, maybe?”
“I don’t care if you like what I have to say or not,” she said. “But you’re going to listen to me.”
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
He looked at the desk, and then at the clock, and then decided he had typed the last form he was going to have to type tonight, and he could thus have a beer.
He walked to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Heineken. He held it up.
“You want one of these?”