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.”
Amelia Alice Payne, M.D., was the eldest of the Payne children.
“Matt.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“He called here,” she said. “And he said he would be here in an hour.”
“I wonder what the probability factor of that actually happening is?”
“Maybe he’s got something on his mind,” Patricia said. “He seemed a little strange last night.”
“He didn’t seem strange to me,” he said.
The telephone, sitting on the fieldstone wall that bordered the patio, rang.
Patricia answered it, then handed it to her husband.
“Brewster Payne,” he said.
“Charley Emmons, Brew. How the hell are you?”
Charles M. Emmons, Esq., was a law-school classmate and a frequent golf partner of Brewster Payne, and the senior member of a Wall Street law firm that specialized in corporate mergers.
“Charley, my boy! How the hell are you?”
“At the moment, a little embarrassed, frankly.”
“I can’t believe you want to borrow money, but I will listen with compassion.”
“I don’t have to borrow money from you; I can take all I need from you on the links.”
“Do I detect a challenge?”
“Unfortunately, no. I wish it was something like that.”
“What’s up, Charley? What can I do for you?”
“You don’t know Tom Reynolds, do you?”
Thomas J. Reynolds, if that’s who he’s talking about, Brewster Payne recalled, is chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of—what the hell is the name?—a Fortune 500 company that has been gobbling up independent food manufacturers at what looks like a