“Only by reputation. But if we’re talking about the same fellow, Pat and I met his daughter last night.”
“Susan?”
“Yes.”
“Tom knows we’re friends,” Charley Emmons said.
“And how might Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo and Lester be of service to—what’s the name of his company?”
“Tomar, Inc.,” Charley furnished.
“Yes, of course, Tomar, Incorporated. You know our motto, Charley: ‘No case too small, no cause so apparently harebrained, so long as there is an adequate retainer up front.’ ”
Charley Emmons laughed dutifully.
“The thing is, Brew—the firm is in pretty deep with Tomar; otherwise, believe me, I wouldn’t be making this call—about Tom’s daughter.”
“Oh?”
“You were at young Nesbitt’s last night?”
“Yes, we were. I rather thought we’d see you there.”
“The story as I get it, Brew, is that Susan left the party with Matt and hasn’t been seen since.”
There was a perceptible pause before Payne replied.
“Charley, Matt is no longer a child. And neither is that young woman. Matt, you know, has an apartment in the city . . .”
“I understand, I understand,” Charley said. “But the thing is, the girl always telephones her mother when she’s out of town, just before she goes to bed, and she didn’t call last night.”
“How old is the girl? Twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that?”
“Actually, a little older. Twenty-six or twenty-seven.”
“So when it comes to defending my son, I won’t have to worry about statutory rape, will I?”
“Now, take it easy, Brew. No one is suggesting . . .”
“What exactly are you suggesting, Charley?”
“I’m suggesting that I have a very important client—and a friend, too—who is worried about his daughter. You can understand that.”
“All right. What is it you want me to do?”
“Find Matt, and have him have the girl call home. Do you have any idea where he is?”
“What makes Mr. Reynolds so sure his daughter is with Matt?” Payne asked.
“When her mother, in the wee hours, called her hotel—the Bellvue—and there was no answer, she called young Nesbitt’s wife—the girls were at Bennington together—and she told her Matt had taken the girl somewhere to listen to jazz.”
“Charley, I’m more than a little reluctant to intrude in Matt’s personal life.”
“I understand that, Brew. But under the circumstances . . .”
“Does the phrase ‘consenting adults’ ever come up in your practice, Charley?”
“Brew, the girl’s an only child. A Presbyterian Jewish Princess, if you like.”
“That doesn’t sound like Matt’s type,” Payne said, thinking aloud. “As a matter of fact, Charley, Matt’s on his way out here. I will, with great discretion, ask him if he is acquainted with this young woman, and if there is any way he can suggest to her that she should telephone her mother.”
“And you’ll call me, right?”
There was a perceptible pause before Brewster Cortland Payne II replied.
“All right, Charley, I’ll call you.”
He replaced the telephone in its cradle.
“The phrase ‘consenting adults’ caught my attention, darling,” Patricia said.
“You remember the girl we met last night? Talking to Matt?”
“What about her?”
“No one seems to know where she is,” Payne said. “When last seen, she was in the company of one Matthew Payne, headed for some jazz place.”
“No,” Patricia said.
“No?”
“I went looking for Matt last night. I couldn’t find him, but that girl was still there.”
“Maybe he was there and you couldn’t find him.”
“No. I asked Martha Peebles if she had seen Matt, and she said she had seen him leaving. And that was before I saw the girl. Her name is Susan Reynolds, by the way.”
“Apparently, no one knows where Susan Reynolds is. She apparently calls home when she’s away. She didn’t do that last night, and she didn’t answer the telephone at the Bellvue.”
“But someone thinks Matt knows? Is there a problem of some sort?”
“I don’t think so,” Payne said. “Do you think it would be too much to hope that Matt has the whole day free? That he might have time for nine holes?”
“What you could do is ask him,” Patricia said.
Peter Wohl had more than once told his mother, who kept raising the question, that the reason he had not married was that with the Jaguar to support, he obviously could not also afford to support a wife. His mother was not entirely sure that he was pulling her leg.
The Jaguar, on which he had spent a good deal of time and a great deal of money restoring, was an XK-120 Drop Head Coupe. It was now in better mechanical and cosmetic condition than when it had left the Jaguar factory in Coventry, England.