to dinner with me, keeps me company while I’m all alone in Harrisburg, so to speak.”
“You blackmailed her, in other words?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“You don’t think pushing yourself on her will make her suspicious?”
“Only that I’m trying to get into her pants.”
“Are you?”
“I am prepared to make any sacrifice in the line of duty,” Matt said.
“That would really be stupid, Matt,” Wohl said.
“Hey, that was a joke. You really think I’m that stupid?”
“I hope not.”
“I’m not,” Matt said firmly.
“Okay. Matt, if it should ever come up, I just now gave you a long, firm lecture on the price you would have to pay for disobeying Denny Coughlin’s clear order to you that you’re not to do anything but locate Chenowith and friends for the FBI.”
“Okay.” Matt said. “Lecture received and duly noted.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m just trying to save time. You disobey that order and I’ll have your ass, Matt. Coughlin’s serious about this, and so am I.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said.
“I’ll bring you up on charges, Matt. Understand that.”
The trouble with that dramatic threat is that Matt knows that it’s empty. If he gets lucky and grabs these people, or any one of them, it’ll be in all the papers, and we’re not going to discipline a policeman for doing something the public expects policemen to do; that gets in the papers, too.
“Yes, sir,” Matt said.
“Keep in touch,” Wohl said. “Have a nice dinner.”
He hung up.
Matt found the Reynolds house, following Mrs. Reynolds’s instructions, with little trouble. She had neglected to tell him it wasn’t visible from the street, and it took him two trips down Schuler Avenue before his headlights picked up a sign by a driveway reading “Reynolds.”
The house, when he’d driven several hundred yards up a macadam drive through a wooded area to it, was a large brick colonial with a house-wide verandah. It looked, however, Matt thought, more like the house of an assistant vice president of Nesfoods International than a house one would expect the chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company to own.
As he stopped the Plymouth, two large brass fixtures on either side of the double front door went on, and just as he got close to the door, it was opened.
“Good evening, sir,” the butler—a middle-aged man wearing a gray cotton jacket—greeted him.
“Good evening,” Matt replied. “My name is Payne.”
“Yes, sir, you’re expected,” the butler said. “This way, please, sir.”
The house was larger inside than it had appeared from the outside. The entrance foyer was large, and stairways on either side of it rose to a second-floor balcony.
The butler led him to a set of double doors under the balcony and opened one of them.
“Mr. Payne, sir,” he announced, and waved Matt inside.
Inside looked like a combination living room and library. Three of the walls held ceiling-high bookcases. The fourth was a wall of sliding glass doors opening onto a patio. Beyond the patio was a lawn stretching down to what Matt supposed was the Susquehanna River.
A stocky, blond-haired man in his fifties, in a well-tailored double-breasted nearly black suit, rose from what looked like his chair and advanced on Matt with his hand extended.
“Matt Payne, I presume?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you see the movie?”
“Sir?”
“ ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’?”
“Let me clear the air,” Matt said. “All I want is a free meal.”
Thomas Reynolds laughed.
“Is taking a little nip among your vices?”
“Among my lesser vices, yes, sir.”
“I was about to make myself another,” Reynolds said, taking Matt’s arm and leading him to a sideboard laid out with bottles and cocktail-hour impedimenta. “What’s your pleasure?”
“A little of that Famous Grouse would go down nicely, thank you.”
“The same family’s been making that stuff for six generations. Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ve been drinking it since college,” Reynolds said as he poured.
“So has my father,” Matt said. “That’s why I drink it, I suppose.”
Reynolds handed Matt a glass.
“There’s ice and water and soda,” he said.
“A little water, please,” Matt said.
When that was done, Reynolds tapped his glass against Matt’s.
“Welcome,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“I admire your courage.”
“Excuse me?”
“Didn’t Susie tell you her mother is furious?”
“Oh. Well, my conscience is clear. I wasn’t the one supposed to call home.”
“And here she is!” Reynolds cried.
Mrs. Thomas Reynolds, who looked, in her simple black dress and single strand of pearls, as if she had been cast from the same mold as Mrs. Soames T. Browne, Daffy’s mother, came into the room from a side door.
“Here he is, Grace,” Reynolds said. “His horns are apparently retracted, so