Chad propelled Matt to the table.
“I need a little liquid courage myself to face up to going in there,” Chad said, indicating to the manservant to produce a bottle of cognac. “Straight up, Matt? Or do you want something to cut it with?”
I don’t want any at all, strangely enough. I don’t need any liquid courage to go in there and look at Penny’s body. For one thing, it’s not Penny. Just a body. And I’m used to bodies. Just the other day, I saw two of them, both with their brains blown all over the room. If that didn’t bother me, this certainly won’t. I am not anywhere close to the near-state of emotional collapse that everyone seems to think I’m in.
“It’s a little early for me, Chad,” Matt said. “Maybe later.”
“Suit yourself,” Chad said, taking the cognac bottle from the man behind the table, pouring half an inch of it into a snifter, and tossing it down.
“I wish I could have one of those,” Daffy said.
“Baby, you can’t,” Chad said sympathetically.
“If it’s a girl, I want to name her Penelope,” Daffy said.
Matt saw this idea didn’t please the prospective father, but that he was wise enough not to argue with his wife here.
“You’re not having anything?” Amanda asked, at Matt’s elbow.
“Probably later,” he said.
“Let’s get it over with,” Chad said.
“That’s a terrible thing…” Daffy protested.
“Unless you want to go in alone first, Matt?” Chad asked solicitously.
Anything to get away from these three. Go in there alone, stay what seems to be an appropriate period for profound introspection and grief, and then get the hell out.
“Thank you,” Matt said softly.
“ Thank you,” the hypocrite said, with what he judged to be what his audience expected in grief-stricken tone and facial demeanor.
He smiled wanly at Chad, Daffy, and Amanda and walked away from them, out of the library, across the foyer and into the sitting room. There was a line of people, maybe half a dozen, waiting for their last look at the mortal remains of Miss Penelope Detweiler. He took his place with them, and slowly made his way to the casket, looking for, and finally finding, behind the casket, a floral display bearing a card reading “Matthew Mark Payne” and then noticing the strange mingled smells of expensive perfume on the woman in front of him and from the flowers, and comparing it with what he had smelled in the office of the Inferno Lounge, the last time he’d looked at mortal remains. There it had been the sick sweet smell of the pools of blood under the bodies, mingled with the foul odors of feces and urine released in death.
And then it was his turn to look down at Penny in her coffin.
She looks as if she’s asleep, he thought, which is the effect the cosmetic technologist at the undertaker’s was struggling to achieve.
And then, like a wall falling on him, and without warning, his chest contracted painfully, a wailing moan saying “Oh, shit!” in a voice he recognized as his own came out of it, and his chest began to heave with sobs.
He next became aware that someone was pulling him away from the casket, where his right hand was caressing the cool, unmoving flesh of Penny’s cheeks, and then that the someone was Chad, gently saying, “Come on, ol’ buddy. Just come along with us,” and then that Daffy’s swollen belly was pressing against him as they led him out of the sitting room past those next in line, and that, when he looked at her, tears were running down her cheeks, cutting courses through her pancake makeup.
“Inspector Wohl,” Peter answered his telephone.
“The funeral’s over,” Amy said.
“I was hoping you’d call. How did it go?”
“Matt has a way with words. When we got here, he said it was ‘intimate friends, and the morbidly curious, with a soupcon of social climbers thrown in for good measure.’”
“How did he handle it?”
“He broke down when he saw her in the casket. Really broke down. Chad Nesbitt and his very pregnant wife had to practically carry him out of the room.”
There was a moment’s silence before Wohl said:
“You said last night you expected something like that to happen.”
“That was a clinical opinion; professionally, I’m relieved. It’s the first step, acceptance, in managing grief. Personally, he’s my little brother. It was awful. I felt so damned sorry for him.”
“How’s he now? Where is he now?”
“Oh, now he’s got his stiff upper lip back in place. He and Chad are into the booze. There’s quite a post-interment party going on out here.”
“You want me to send someone out there and get him? I sent Tiny Lewis to sit on him, but…”
“I know,” Amy said. “What I was hoping to hear was you volunteering to come out here and get the both of us.”
“It was bad for you?”
“As we were coming back here from the cemetery-I thought Grace Detweiler might need me, so I rode with them-I caught her looking at me as if she had just realized that if I had done my job, Penny would still be here.”
“That could be an overactive imagination.”
“I don’t think so. I got the same look here in the house when I was getting a tranquilizer out of my purse for her. She’s decided-seeing how Matt collapsed completely probably had a lot to do with it-that he’s still an irresponsible boy, who can’t be blamed. She needs somebody to blame. I make a fine candidate to be the real villain, because I really didn’t help Penny at all.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Wohl said, “I’m on my way, Amy,” and the line went dead in her ear.
“It’s a good thing I know you’re a doctor,” Inspector Peter Wohl said to Dr. Amelia Payne as they came off the elevator into the lobby of the Delaware Valley Cancer Society Building on Rittenhouse Square.
“Meaning what?”
“The folklore among us laypersons is don’t mix booze and pills.”
“That’s a good general rule of thumb,” Amy said. “What I gave Matt is what we doctor persons prescribe as a sedative when the patient person has been soaking up cognac like a sponge. It is my professional opinion that that patient person will be out like a light for the next twelve to eighteen hours without side effects. Any other questions, layperson?”
Wohl smiled at her.
“How about dinner tonight?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I guess that makes breakfast tomorrow out of the question.”
“I didn’t say that,” Amy said. “I said no dinner. I have to make my rounds, and then there’s a very sick young woman I want to spend some time with. But I didn’t say anything about breakfast, or, for that matter, a midnight supper with candles and wine, being out of any question.”
“My place or yours, doctor person?”
She didn’t reply directly.
“We left my car at the Detweilers’s.”
“Give me the keys. I’ll have someone run me out there, and I’ll drop it by-where? The hospital? Your place?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you took it to your place? When I leave the hospital, I’ll catch a cab out there. It’ll probably be after eleven.”
“Done,” he said, putting his hand out for the keys.
“You’re headed for the hospital now?” he asked. She nodded. “You want a ride?”
“Where are you going?”
“Wherever you need to go is right on my way.”
“I’ll catch a cab,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
Their eyes met, and held. Somewhat hesitantly, Wohl moved his face closer to hers.
“Don’t push me, Peter,” Amy said, and then moved her face closer to his and kissed him on the lips.
Then she quickly walked away from him, out the door and onto Rittenhouse Square. He started to follow her, then changed his mind.
He went to the receptionist’s desk and asked to use her telephone.