Washington let it ring until it penetrated Matt’s concentration and he reached for it.
“Detective Payne,” he said.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV demanded.
“If you want to talk to me, Chad, you call me.”
“That’s what secretaries are for,” Nesbitt said.
“Now that you have me, what’s on your mind?”
“Tonight.”
“As a matter of fact, I was just about to call you, myself, about tonight.”
“You are coming?”
“That’s what I was going to call about. I will not be coming.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I seem to have come down with a virus.”
“What kind of a virus?”
“Some kind of Asiatic flu. Not to worry, it will only last twenty-four hours. They call it, ‘The Don’t Go To Chad’s Birthday Party Virus.’ ”
“You want to tell me why not?”
“You really want to know?”
“I really want to know.”
“Okay. Daffy will try to fix me up with one of her airheaded friends.”
“I promise that won’t happen.”
“Reason number two: At least one of our friends will ask me to fix a little ticket he got for running through a red light into a busload of nuns while under the influence.”
“If that happens, tell him to go fuck himself. You’re very good at that.”
“Reason three: Daffy, carried away with her notions of having become a wife, mother, and homemaker, will probably try to cook.”
“It’s being catered, of course. So you will be there, right?”
“Chad, I don’t want to.”
“Do it for me, buddy. We’ve been going to each other’s birthday parties since we were in diapers. And hell, we never see each other anymore. Penelope Alice is your goddaughter.”
That was all true. Chad Nesbitt had been Matt Payne’s best friend since they had worn short pants. And they rarely got together anymore. And Penelope Alice Nesbitt, Chad and Daffy’s firstborn, named after the late Penelope Alice Detweiler, with whom, before she inserted too much—or bad—heroin into her veins, Matt had fancied himself in love, was indeed his goddaughter.
He sighed.
“I’ll be there,” Matt said. “Against my better judgment.”
He hung up before Chad could reply and went back to work.
The festivities that would commemorate the birth twenty-five years before of Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV were, in the opinions of his mother and his mother-in-law (Mrs. Soames T. Browne), far more important than a simple birthday party.
It would, so to speak, if not introduce, then reintroduce the young couple to Philadelphia society. There had been a number of problems. For one thing, Chad had gone off into the Marines three days after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.
A suitable wedding, given that, would have been difficult under any circumstances, but it had been further complicated by the unfortunate business of Daffy’s best friend—Penny Detweiler, who was to have been her maid of honor—getting herself involved with drugs and gangsters.
Their hearts went out, of course, to Grace and Dick Detweiler, who were old and dear friends, but that didn’t change the fact that Penny not being Daphne’s maid of honor because she was in Hahnemann Hospital recuperating from being shot did cast a pall upon a wedding.
And then the Marines had sent Chad off to Okinawa, without Daffy, for more than two years. She had waited for him in her parents’ home in Merion—married woman or not, her taking an apartment alone didn’t make any sense—and then Chad had come home, and the second thing he’d done after taking off his hat was to get her in the family way.
And while she was pregnant, Chad had gone to work for Nesfoods, starting at the bottom, of course, as a retail salesman. His father—now chairman of the Executive Committee of Nesfoods International—had started out that way. And, for that matter, so had his grandfather. And Dick Detweiler, Nesfood’s chief executive officer. And his father.
But you can’t really have much of a social life when you’re working as a retail salesman at the bottom of the corporate ladder, and with a pregnant wife.
Things were a good deal better now. Chad had proved his worth, and shortly before the baby was born, had been promoted. He was now an assistant vice president, Sales.
And the baby was healthy and adorable. Chad and Daffy had named her Penelope Alice, after Penny Detweiler, who had broken everyone’s heart, not just her parents’, by taking one illegal drug too many and killing herself.
Both Grandmother Nesbitt and Grandmother Browne believed that naming the baby after poor Penny wasn’t the wise thing to do, but there’s no talking to young people.