Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“All right,” Payne said. “Give me a minute, and then show he

r in.”

“I think you should,” Irene Craig said, and walked out of the office.

“Damn,” Brewster C. Payne said. He slipped the thick brief he had in his lap and the notes he had made on the desk into the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. Then he stood up, rolled down and buttoned his cuffs, buttoned his collar, pulled up his tie, and put his suit jacket on.

Then he walked to the double doors to his office and pulled the right one open.

A woman, a young one (he guessed thirty, maybe thirty-two or -three) looked at him. She was simply but well dressed. Her light brown hair was cut fashionably short, and she wore short white gloves. She was almost, but not quite, good-looking.

Without thinking consciously about it, Brewster C. Payne categorized her as a lady. What he thought, consciously, was that she, with her brother, held essentially all of the stock in Tamaqua Mining, and that that stock was worth somewhere between twenty and twenty-five million dollars.

No wonder Irene made me see her.

“Miss Peebles, I’m Brewster Payne. I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting. Would you please come in?”

Martha Peebles smiled and stood up and walked past him into his office. Payne smelled her perfume. He didn’t know the name of it, but it was, he thought, the same kind his wife used.

“May I offer you a cup of coffee? Or perhaps tea?” Payne asked.

“That would be very nice,” Martha Peebles said. “Coffee, please.”

Payne looked at Irene Craig and saw that she had heard. He pushed the door closed, and ushered Martha Peebles onto a couch against the wall, and settled himself into a matching armchair. A long teakwood coffee table with drawers separated them.

“I’m very sorry that Mr. Foster is not here,” Payne said. “He was called to Washington.”

“It was very good of you to see me,” Martha Peebles said. “I’m grateful to you.”

“It’s my pleasure, Miss Peebles. Now, how may I be of assistance?”

“Well,” she said, “I have been robbed…and there’s more.”

“Miss Peebles, before we go any further, how would you feel about my turning on a recording machine? It’s sometimes very helpful….”

“A recording machine?” she asked.

“A recording is often very helpful,” Payne said.

She looked at him strangely, then said, “If you think it would be helpful, of course.”

Payne tapped the switch of the tape recorder, under the coffee table, with the toe of his shoe.

“You say you were robbed?”

“I thought you said you were going to record this,” Martha Peebles said, almost a challenge.

“I am,” he said. “I just turned it on. The switch is under the table. The microphone is in that little box on the table.”

“Oh, really?” she said, looking first at the box and then under the coffee table. “How clever!”

“You were saying you were robbed?”

“You could have turned it on without asking, couldn’t you?” Martha Peebles said. “I would never have known.”

“That would have been unethical,” he said. “I would never do something like that.”

“But you could have, couldn’t you?”