The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

“They’ve figured it out that if the children think they’re stupid, the children won’t try so hard to put something over on them, and thus they get to know what’s going on.”

“You really think my mother knows about us?”

“Knows? No. Not unless she’s climbed the fire escape to look in the window—which I suppose is possible. But does she have deep, and justifiable, suspicions? Hell, yes, she does.”

“I don’t believe that!”

“Susan, you told your mother you were out with me listening to jazz in Philadelphia until six in the morning. You don’t really think she believes that, do you? That all we were doing was holding hands, snapping our fingers to the music, and having good clean fun?”

Susan’s face showed that she had never considered this before.

“Do you really believe this, or are you just saying it to get me to stay?”

“I really believe it; and I’m saying it because I don’t want you to go. And what the hell difference does it make? In three days, maybe—probably—much sooner, the fact that we’ve been playing Hide the Salami won’t seem at all important to your mother—or, for that matter, your father. When the problem has become how to keep their Presbyterian princess out of the slam, the fact that she has been—”

“Oh, God!” Susan said. “God, you can be cruel! Sometimes I hate you!”

He looked up at her and was as astonished by the wave of fury that suddenly swept through him as he was by what he heard himself say.

“Well, fuck you, too, Susan!”

“What did you say?” she asked, horrified.

“I said ‘Fuck you.’ Goddamn you, go home and play the goddamn game with your goddamned mommy!”

He jumped out of bed and marched angrily into the bathroom.

He half expected her to come knock at the bathroom door. Or throw something at it. Or scream at him.

There was no response from the bedroom at all.

He looked at the closed door and decided the gentlemanly thing to do would be to give her the time to get dressed and make a dignified withdrawal from the scene of battle.

That gentlemanly decision lasted approximately ninety seconds.

Fuck it! Why should I wait in here? Screw her!

He pulled the door open.

Susan, still naked, was sitting on the bed, talking on the telephone.

“Be sure to give Mommy my best regards!” Matt said nastily.

“Thank you,” Susan said into the telephone, and hung up.

She looked at Matt. He saw there were tears in her eyes.

“I was ordering our breakfast,” she said.

Captain David Pekach was at the urinal mounted on the wall of the bathroom of the master suite of the Peebles mansion on Glengarry Lane when the telephone rang.

He had been examining his reflected image in the mirror that lined the upper half of the wall. He was wearing silk pajamas, because he had come to understand that Martha—although she had said nothing—thought that his pre-Martha sleeping attire—a T-shirt—was a little crude.

The pajamas bore the label of A. Sulka & Company, Rue de Castiglione, Paris. Pekach had never been to Paris, although Martha thought it would be a nice place to spend at least a few days of their upcoming honeymoon.

The pajamas had been purchased by Martha’s late father in Paris, and then brought home and apparently forgotten. When Pekach found them in what was now his dresser (Martha called it a chest of drawers), they were still in their cellophane packaging.

The truth was, he had just concluded when the telephone began to buzz (not ring), that he really liked the pajamas, although the buttons had been a little hard to get used to at first, and woke him up when he rolled over onto his belly. And he also liked taking a leak in the urinal, the first he had ever seen in a private home.