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“Mr. Schraeder’s office.”
“My name is Brewster C. Payne. I’m calling for Mr. Richard Detweiler. Mr. Schraeder, please.”
“Good morning, Mr. Payne. How can I help you?”
“Mr. Schraeder, just as soon as you can, will you please send some security officers to Mr. Detweiler’s home? Six, or eight. I think their services will be required, day and night, for the next four or five days, so I suggest you plan for that.”
“I’ll have someone there in half an hour, Mr. Payne,” Schraeder said. “Would you care to tell me the nature of the problem? Or should I come out there myself?”
“I think it would be helpful if you came here, Mr. Schraeder,” Payne said.
“I’m on my way, sir,” Schraeder said.
Payne put the telephone back in its cradle and turned from the alcove in the wall.
Captain O’Connor was standing there.
“Dr. Amelia Payne is on her way here,” Payne said. “As is my wife. They will wish to be with the Detweilers.”
“I understand, sir. No problem.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Payne said.
“Mr. Detweiler is in there,” O’Connor said, pointing toward the downstairs sitting room. “I believe Mrs. Detweiler is upstairs.”
“Thank you,” Payne said, and walked to the downstairs sitting room and pushed the door open.
H. Richard Detweiler was sitting in a red leather chair—his chair—with his hands folded in his lap, looking at the floor. He raised his eyes.
“Brew,” he said, and smiled.
“Dick.”
“Everything was going just fine, Brew. The night before last, Penny and Matt had dinner with Chad and Daffy to celebrate Chad’s promotion. And last night, they were at Martha Peebles’s. And one day, three, four days ago, Matt came out and the two of them made cheese dogs for us. You know, you slit the hot dog and put cheese inside and then wrap it in bacon. They made them for us on the charcoal thing. And then they went to the movies. She seemed so happy, Brew. And now this.”
“I’m very sorry, Dick.”
“Oh, goddamn it all to hell, Brew,” H. Richard Detweiler said. He started to sob. “When I went in there, her eyes were open, but I knew.”
He started to weep.
Brewster Cortland Payne went to him and put his arms around him.
“Steady, lad,” he said, somewhat brokenly as tears ran down his own cheeks. “Steady.”
The Buick station wagon in which Amelia Payne, M.D., drove through the gates of the Detweiler estate was identical in model, color, and even the Rose Tree Hunt and Merion Cricket Club parking decalcomanias on the rear window to the one her father had driven through the gates five minutes before, except that it was two ye
ars older, had a large number of dings and dents on the body, a badly damaged right front fender, and was sorely in need of a passage through a car wash.The car had, in fact, been Dr. Payne’s father’s car. He had made it available to his daughter at a very good price because, he said, the trade-in allowance on his new car had been grossly inadequate. That was not the whole truth. While Brewster Payne had been quietly incensed at the trade-in price offered for a two-year-old car with less that 15,000 miles on the odometer and in showroom condition, the real reason was that the skillful chauffeuring of an automobile was not among his daughter’s many skills and accomplishments.
“She needs something substantial, like the Buick, something that will survive a crash,” he confided to his wife. “If I could, I’d get her a tank or an armored car. When Amy gets behind the wheel, she reminds me of that comic-strip character with the black cloud of inevitable disaster floating over his head.”
It was not that she was reckless, or had a heavy foot on the accelerator, but rather that she simply didn’t seem to care. Her father had decided that this was because Amy had—always had had—things on her mind far more important than the possibility of a dented fender, hers or someone else’s.
In the third grade when Amy had been sent to see a psychiatrist for her behavior in class (when she wasn’t causing all sorts of trouble, she was in the habit of taking a nap) the psychiatrist quickly determined the cause. She was, according to the three different tests to which he subjected her, a genius. She was bored with the third grade.
At ten, she was admitted to a high school for the intellectually gifted operated by the University of Pennsylvania, and matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of thirteen, because of her extraordinary mathematical ability.
“Theoretical mathematics, of course,” her father joked to intimate friends. “Double Doctor Payne is absolutely unable to balance a checkbook.”
