The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

He got as far as the bank of pay phones before he had second thoughts about that. He realized he had a growing feeling—cop’s intuition—that something was not entirely kosher here.

It wouldn’t hurt to have a look at her room.

He walked across the lobby and got on one of the elevators.

He stopped before room 706 and knocked at the door. When there was no answer, he called, “Susan, it’s Matt Payne. If you’re in there, please open the door.”

When there was still no answer, he took the passkey from his pocket and unlocked the door and walked in.

There was no one in the room.

The bed had not been slept in. The cover had not been pulled down, and it was not mussed, as if Susan had not lain down on it.

A matching brassiere and scanty underpants, a slip, and a sweater and skirt were on the bed.

The bathroom was a mess. Tidiness was apparently not among Susan’s many virtues. She had apparently showered before going to Daffy and Chad’s. Discarded towels were on the floor. And she had shaved her legs and/or armpits. Her lady’s-model razor was in the sink.

And it was apparently that time of the month, for there was an open carton of Tampax on the shelf, beside a bottle of perfume, a stick of deodorant, and other feminine beauty supplies and tools.

He first decided that when Susan had left her room, she had had absolutely no intention of bringing anyone male with her when she returned, otherwise she wouldn’t have left all the junk out in the open, and then he had the some what ungallant and immodest thought that the reason she had put him down so firmly was that, under the circumstances, there was no way they could have done anything about it.

And then he was suddenly very uncomfortable, to the point of shame, with the sense of being an intruder on her very personal life.

I’ve got absolutely no right to be in here. What the hell was I thinking about? Jesus Christ, what would I have done if she suddenly had walked in here?

He walked quickly out of the bathroom, and through the bedroom to the corridor, carefully closing the door behind him. As he turned toward the elevator, he saw two women of the housekeeping staff examining him carefully.

Shit!

He rode down to the lobby, walked quickly through the lobby and out onto South Broad, and got into his car.

On the way to Wallingford, he pulled into a gas station and called Chad from a pay phone. He didn’t want his parents to overhear him, as they probably would if he called from what he thought of as home.

He told Chad what he knew, that when he called from the lobby of the Bellvue-Stratford, she didn’t answer her telephone, and that the rent-a-cop at the parking garage told him he remembered seeing a blonde in a red Porsche 911 leaving early the previous evening.

He did not mention to Chad that she had apparently not spent the night in her room—the unmade bed suggested that—because that would have meant letting Chad know he’d gone into her room.

He now recognized that going into her room was another item on his long list of Dumb Things I Have Done Without Thinking First.

The whole incident should be finished and done with, but once again he had that feeling that something wasn’t kosher and that the incident was not closed.

FIVE

Patricia Payne found her husband on the flagstone patio outside the kitchen, comfortably sprawled on a cast-aluminum lounge, and, surprising her not at all, with a thick legal brief in his hands.

“Guess who’s coming to breakfast?” she asked.

Mr. and Mrs. Brewster Cortland Payne lived in a large, rambling house on four acres on Providence Road, in Wallingford, on Pennsylvania Route 252. It was a museum, Payne often thought gratefully, that Patricia had turned, with love, into a home.

What was now the kitchen and the sewing room had been the whole house when it had been built of fieldstone before the Revolution. Additions and modifications over two centuries had turned it into a large rambling structure that fit no specific architectural category, although a real estate saleswoman had once remarked in the hearing of Patricia that “the Payne place just looked like old, old money.”

The house was comfortable, even luxurious

, but not ostentatious. There was neither swimming pool nor tennis court, but there was, in what a century before had been a stable, a four-car garage. The Payne family swam, as well as rode, at the Rose Tree Hunt Club. They had a summer house in Cape May, New Jersey, which did have a tennis court, as well as a berth for their boat, a thirty-eight-foot Hatteras, called Final Tort IV.

The only thing wrong with it, Brewster Payne now thought, was that the children were now gone.

“Not Amy,” he said. “I just talked to her.”