The Investigators Part 36

"I'm going to call the club now, so they'll expect you. I want you to feel free to use it. The food's good."

"Maybe Susie would go to dinner with me there," Matt said.

"All she can say is no. But I think she'd like that."

The garage door opened and Susan's Porsche emerged.

Matt shook Daddy's hand again and got into his Plymouth.

Susan drove off down the driveway so fast that Matt wondered for a moment if she was trying to lose him. On reflection, under the circ.u.mstances, that didn't seem likely.

Five minutes later, by which time Matt had decided Princess Susie had a really heavy foot, the red and blue lights of a bubble-gum machine appeared in his rear window.

s.h.i.+t! That's all I need!

He flicked on the turn signal, slowed, and moved to the shoulder of the road.

The patrol car-there was a reflective HARRISBURG POLICE sign on the trunk-went by him without slowing. Matt pulled back onto the pavement and saw, five hundred yards or so down the road, that the uniform had pulled the Porsche over.

He drove the five hundred yards and pulled in behind the patrol car. He took his ID folder from his jacket pocket and got from behind the wheel, holding the ID so the badge would be visible.

The uniform looked concerned. When he walked toward Matt, he had his right hand where it could quickly un-holster his pistol.

Susan, Matt saw, had not gotten out of her Porsche.

Matt held out the ID so the uniform could see it.

"What can I do for you?" the uniform-a football-tackle type, with a ruddy complexion-asked after he had given the ID and Matt a good look.

"Philadelphia, huh?" the uniform said, then looked back at Matt's car and added, "Blue Plymouth. We got the word on you."

"What word is that?"

"That you're up here looking for some money some dirty cop in Philadelphia's trying to hide up here, and we should leave you alone."

"Guilty."

"This is part of that?"

"No. This is personal. You are about to ruin my romantic evening. How does the Harrisburg Police Department feel about professional courtesy?"

"You know how fast she was going?"

"Too fast for me to take my eyes off the road to look for speed-limit signs."

"Sixty-five. This is zoned forty."

"I understand. If you feel that duty requires you toss her in the slam and ruin the best chance I've had in six months, I will understand."

The uniform laughed.

"If you put it that way, how could I run her in?"

"You could be a p.r.i.c.k like my corporal when I was in Highway."

"Have a word with her," the uniform said, chuckling.

"I will," Matt said, and put out his hand. "Thanks, I appreciate it."

"Good luck," the uniform said, and got back in his car.

Matt walked up to Susan's car. The window was down, but she didn't say anything. She looked a little frightened.

"I just got you off," he said. "Say, 'Thank you, Matthew. ' "

"I heard," she said. "Everything. I think I'd rather have gotten the ticket."

"You're welcome," Matt said.

The window whooshed up.

"Drive slow," Matt muttered a little bitterly and then walked back to the Plymouth.

When he flicked the Plymouth's headlights, the Porsche moved off the shoulder and down the road and he followed it.

He had a sudden insight: She was not being routinely rude. She was frightened. But why? I just got the uniform not to pinch her. And she knew that. She said she "heard everything."

In which case, she heard the uniform verify my story about why I'm in Harrisburg. That should have put her mind at rest about me, if indeed Daddy had turned on her alarm system and she was wondering if I was really here looking for hidden money.

But if I was involved in something like she is, and a police car with its bubble-gum machine flas.h.i.+ng pulled me over, I'd be p.i.s.sing my pants, too. And while Wohl is probably right-Chenowith, who robs banks with a sawed-off shotgun, and the sc.u.mbag with the acne are dangerous-from what I've seen tonight, Susan is more a Presbyterian Princess who calls her parents "Mommy" and "Daddy," than a cold-blooded terrorist.

She didn't blow up the Biological Sciences building. If she had, the FBI would have said so. Helping those lunatics makes her an accessory after the fact, sure, but it doesn't mean she's as cold-blooded as they are.

Can I use that somehow?

FOURTEEN.

If he saw it at all, Mr. Ronald R. Ketcham paid little attention to the black GMC Suburban truck parked near the elevator in the bas.e.m.e.nt garage of his garden apartment building on Overbrook Avenue.

The truck was inconspicuous, and intended to be that way. It was painted black, and all but the winds.h.i.+eld and front-seat windows had been painted over. There were no signs on its doors or sides indicating its owners.h.i.+p or purpose; it was cla.s.sified as a "Not For Hire" vehicle, and none were required by law.

The inconspicuous Suburban was normally used to carry the remains of the recently deceased from their place of death-usually a hospital, but sometimes from the Medical Examiner's office, if the deceased had died at home, or for some other reason was subject to an official autopsy-to a funeral home.

Larger undertaking establishments often had their own discreet vehicles for the purpose of collecting bodies and bringing them to their places of business, as they had their own fleets of hea.r.s.es, flower cars, and limousines to carry the dear departed, his/her floral tributes, and his/her mourners to his/her final resting place. But many-perhaps most-of Philadelphia's smaller funeral homes had found it good business to take advantage of the corpse pickup service and delivery service offered by Cla.s.sic Livery, Inc., which owned the Suburban Mr. Ketcham did not notice as he drove his Buick into his garage.

Even the larger undertaking establishments, when business was good, often used one of the four black Suburbans Cla.s.sic Livery had made available to the trade, as they similarly availed themselves of hea.r.s.es, flower cars, and limousines from Cla.s.sic Livery's fleet when their own equipment was not sufficient to meet the demands of that particular day's service to the deceased and bereaved.

Cla.s.sic Livery, Inc., also owned the black Lincoln sedan parked among the rows of cars in the bas.e.m.e.nt garage of Ketcham's garden apartment, and the four men in it-who had been waiting for Ketcham for two hours before the s.h.i.+t-a.s.s finally showed up-were longtime employees of Cla.s.sic Livery.

Ketcham parked his Buick coupe in the place reserved for it, got out, reached in and took his briefcase from the rear seat, and walked toward the elevator.

As Ketcham did so, everyone in the Lincoln sedan except the driver got out, and the driver of the remains-transporting Suburban started his engine.

The three men from the Lincoln reached the door to the elevator at about the time Ketcham reached it. One of them, a well-dressed thirty-five-year-old of Sicilian ancestry, smiled at Ketcham and waved him into the open elevator door. When Ketcham had entered the elevator, the three men got into it with him.

The elevator door closed.

The driver of the black Suburban drove to the door of the elevator and backed up to it. The doors were opened from the inside.

The elevator door opened again not quite a full minute later. Ketcham, the upper part of his body now concealed in an overcoat, and staggering, as if he had been subjected to some sort of blow to the head, emerged from the elevator, supported by two of the three men who had entered the elevator with him.

Ketcham was a.s.sisted into the Suburban, and one of the three men from the Lincoln got in with him. Ketcham was dragged toward the front of the Suburban-all but the front seat, of course, had been removed, so there would be room for a cadaver-where he lay upon his stomach. The doors were closed.

The other two men walked unhurriedly back to the Lincoln and got in. When the black Suburban drove away from the elevator door toward the entrance of the garage, the Lincoln followed it.

"What the h.e.l.l's going on here?" Ketcham asked, his voice somewhat m.u.f.fled by the overcoat over his head and shoulders.

The man who had opened the doors from the inside, and was now half sitting on a small ledge in the side of the Suburban, kicked him in the face.

"Shut your f.u.c.king face," he said.

He then proceeded to wrap two-inch-wide white surgical-or perhaps "morticians and embalmers"-white gauze around Ketcham's neck, in such a manner that the overcoat would not become dislodged.

Next, he used the tape to bind Ketcham's wrists together, and then his ankles.

Approximately five minutes later, Ketcham, who sounded close to tears, said one word: "Please . . ."

This earned him two sharp kicks, one in the ear from the man in the front, and a second in the b.u.t.tocks, delivered by the man who had smiled at him as he had entered the elevator and who had gotten into the Suburban with him.

Ketcham said nothing else during the rest of the journey, which took approximately forty minutes, and neither did either of the two men with him in the rear of the remains-transporting Suburban.

Ketcham tried to recognize, and make sense of, the sounds and noises he heard during the trip. From the frequent stops and starts, and the sounds of automobiles accelerating and s.h.i.+fting gears, Ketcham deduced they were in traffic somewhere.

He searched his memory, very hard, in an attempt to guess who was doing this to him and why, but to no avail. The first thing that occurred to him, perhaps naturally, was that it had something to do with Mr. Amos J. Williams.

At first-Ketcham was understandably upset and not thinking too clearly, although the two lines of cocaine he had nasally ingested in the men's room of the Blue Rock Tavern on his way home gave him a feeling of euphoria about all things, including a sense that his mind was really firing on all twelve cylinders-that seemed the most logical inference to draw.

Williams-and his thugs-had been arrested at the Howard Johnson motel on Roosevelt Boulevard, and I wasn't. That d.a.m.ned well might have made him suspicious, maybe made him think I had set him up with the police. And his getting arrested had also caused him to lose the cocaine he had intended to sell me. Even if he had paid only half of what he was going to sell it to me for, that's still ten thousand dollars, and he would be very unhappy about losing that much money.

And if he has decided-he's not intelligent, obviously, so he's liable to decide anything-that I had something to do with his arrest, then this may be my punishment for that.

Unlikely. The first thing he would do-intelligent or not, he has a certain criminal cunning-would be to recoup his losses. At least the ten thousand he had invested, and possibly the entire twenty I had agreed to pay him. Once he had done that, he might well kill me. But what would be the purpose?

If it's money he wants, I'll promise to get it for him. Under these circ.u.mstances, I will be certainly motivated to find it somewhere.

But wait a minute! If this, whatever this is, has something to do with Amos Williams & Company, he would have sent his man Baby Brownlee. The people who are doing this to me are white men!

Could this be a case of mistaken ident.i.ty?

For that matter, could I be hallucinating? This does feel like a bad dream. Am I going to wake up in just a minute?

Or could I really be hallucinating? I did a couple of lines . . . what, forty minutes ago? Was it bad stuff?

No. That was from my next-to-last packet of emergency supplies. I've been into it twenty, perhaps thirty, times without anything unpleasant happening.

Ketcham became aware that the sound of the vehicle's pa.s.sageway over the roadway had changed. For one thing, he sensed that they were moving more slowly than they had been.

The vehicle stopped.

Ketcham heard the sound of the vehicle's door opening, and then it moved as if someone had gotten out.

He heard a metallic screech and decided, after a moment, that it was the sound of a door opening, and then changed that to suspect strongly that it was the sound a gate in a Cyclone fence-as those surrounding a tennis court-makes when being opened.

The vehicle moved a short distance forward. Ketcham heard the sound of the squeaking gate again. The vehicle tilted as if someone had gotten in the front seat. The door slammed shut and the vehicle drove off.

Ketcham sensed that they were no longer on a paved road, and confirmation of this came when the vehicle, moving slowly, encountered one hole in the road after another.

What are they doing? Taking me out in the woods someplace to kill me?

But if they wanted to kill me, they had ample opportunity in my garage.

If they're not going to kill me, then what? They must want something from me. What?

If this is a case of mistaken ident.i.ty, which seems as likely an answer as anything else I've been able to come up with, then there will be the opportunity to clear things up, to let them know I'm not who they are looking for.

Or, even if it's not a case of mistaken ident.i.ty, if they want something from me-maybe they know I'm a stockbroker, and think we keep large amounts of cash around the office. They're Italian, they could be the Mafia. That sounds like something the Mafia would do. And they might not know the only cash around the office is in the petty-cash box, and I don't even know of any negotiable instruments at all. Anyway, if they do want something from me, there will certainly be an opportunity to talk, to negotiate.

Those thoughts made Ketcham feel better.

After two or three minutes of lurching down what Ketcham was now convinced was an unpaved road, the vehicle moved onto a solid, flat, and thus presumably paved surface and stopped.

There was the sound of two doors being opened, the sense of s.h.i.+fting as if two persons had left the vehicle, and the doors slammed shut.

Then Ketcham heard the rear doors of the vehicle being opened.

"Cut that s.h.i.+t off his legs," a voice ordered.

There was a clicking sound, which Ketcham decided just might be the sound of a switchblade, and a sensation of sawing around his ankles. He felt the pressure that had been holding his ankles together go away.

Ketcham was dragged out of the Suburban and set on his feet. He felt a hand on each arm, as if there was a man on each side of him.

He was pushed into motion. Without quite knowing why, he sensed that he had entered some kind of a building. The sense grew stronger as he was guided down what he now believed to be a corridor, and confirmation came when he was stopped, and heard the sound of a door-a heavy metal door, he deduced. Where am I? In a factory? Or a garage? Where am I? In a factory? Or a garage?-being opened.