“She’s the door prize?”
Chad laughed.
“I can’t imagine why,” Daffy said. “But she really likes you. She asked if you would be coming.”
Now, that’s interesting!
Detective Lassiter’s cellular phone was reported out of service. And messages left on her answering machine and at Northwest Detectives asking that she call him had brought no response.
“Tell me more,” Matt said.
“You could take Terry to the Colt dinner at the Four Seasons and then to La Famiglia.”
“Whose idea is that?”
“Mine,” Daffy said. “She’s not throwing herself at you.”
“Well, I don’t know. I like it better when they throw themselves at me.”
“Suit yourself, you bastard,” Daffy said.
“What time is this drunken brawl of yours?”
“Five-ish,” Daffy said.
“What was that all about?” Dr. Payne inquired, asking the question her mother had just, reluctantly, decided was none of her business and couldn’t ask.
“Daffy wants me to go by Society Hill before the Colt dinner at the Four Seasons. They’re having people in. What I think they really want is for me to entertain one and all by telling them all about Homer C. Daniels.”
“That’s unkind, Matt,” Patricia Payne said. “They’re your oldest friends.”
“And they’re playing cupid again,” Matt said, “trying to pair me off with Terry Davis.”
“So you’re not going?” Amy asked.
“As Mother says, Chad and I go back a long way,” Matt said, realizing as he said it that it sounded transparently lame.
At 11:48, when Matt Payne left La Famiglia-an upscale restaurant on South Front Street just below Market Street, overlooking the Delaware River-he was just about convinced that he was going to get lucky with Terry Davis.
Everything had gone well, from his immediately being able to put his hands on the little box with the studs for his dress shirt when he hastily changed into a dinner jacket at his apartment-that almost never happened-through the drinks at Chad and Daffy’s place until now.
Terry had looked very good indeed when he went into the party, and she did in fact seem glad to see him. And he’d even gotten along with the people Chad and Daffy had in. Many of them he’d known all his life. Usually, however, when he saw them socially, they gave him the impression that he’d done something terrible that had moved him far below the salt. Like being a cop. So he didn’t often see them socially. When he did, he often, in Daffy’s words, showed his ass, and embarrassed everybody.
Tonight there had been none of that, with one minor exception.
“I didn’t know, Payne, until I saw you on the tube, that you were a sergeant,” J. Andrew Stansfield III had said, coming up to where Matt was looking out the windows onto the Delaware.
“That’s right, Stansfield.”
Matthew M. Payne, Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, and J. Andrew Stansfield III had graduated from Episcopal Academy together. Stansfield had gone on to Princeton, then the Harvard School of Business Administration, and then found employment with Stansfield amp; Stansfield, Commercial Realtors.
“I’m afraid I actually don’t know what that means,” Stansfield said.
“It means I make four percent more than I made when I was detective,” Matt said. “It comes to right over two thousand a year.”
“That’s all?” Stansfield said, genuinely surprised.
Then his face showed that he suspected Payne was pulling his leg.