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And today was another exception. Andrew C. Tellman, Esq.—known in their days at the University of Michigan Law School as “Randy Andy”—was in town from De troit and had called suggesting they get together.
Randy Andy was now a senior partner—he had sent Davis the engraved announcement—of the enormous De troit law firm he had joined right out of law school, when Davis had gone to Quantico to the FBI Academy.
The stiff price of taking Randy Andy to lunch at the Rittenhouse seemed justified, as sort of a statement that he hadn’t done so badly himself, and the proof of that seemed to have come immediately.
“Oh, you belong to the Rittenhouse, do you?” Randy Andy had asked when Davis had suggested “one-ish at the Rittenhouse.”
Davis had taken this further, arriving at the club on Rittenhouse Square a few minutes after 12:30. He wanted Randy Andy to have to ask the porter—a master of snobbery—to ask for him, and then be led into the oak-paneled lounge where he would be sitting at one of the small tables.
“I’m expecting a guest,” he said to the porter, a dignified black man in his sixties.
“Yes, sir. And who are you, sir?”
“Walter Davis.”
“Ah, yes, Mr. Davis. And your guest’s name, Mr. Davis?”
“Tellman. Andrew C. Tellman.”
“You’ll be in the lounge, Mr. Davis?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take care of it, sir,” the porter said.
He then went to a large board behind his porter’s stand. On it were listed, alphabetically, the names of the three-hundred-odd members of the Rittenhouse Club. Beside each name was an inch-long piece of brass, which could be slid back and forth in a track. When the marker was next to the member’s name, this indicated he was on the premises; when away from it, that he was not.
He moved the piece of brass to indicate that Davis, W. was now on the premises.
Davis examined the board. The names listed represented the power structure of Philadelphia. And their children. Both Nesbitt, C. III and Nesbitt, C. IV had small brass plates. As did Payne, B. and Payne, M.
Davis knew Payne, B. only by reputation, that of a founding partner of the most prestigious law firm in Philadelphia, Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester.
Payne, M. he had met. Payne, M. was a policeman. Davis had once taken Inspector Peter Wohl to lunch. They had gone in Wohl’s car, which had been driven by a Philadelphia police officer—Payne—in plainclothes. Officer Payne had played straight man to Wohl, while Wohl vented his annoyance at being kept waiting for Davis with “witty” remarks, and by taking him to a closet-size Italian greasy spoon in South Philadelphia for lunch, instead of to the elegant Ristorante Alfredo in Center City.
Davis had subsequently learned, from Isaiah J. Towne, his ASAC (Assistant Special Agent in Charge) for counterintelligence, just who Payne was. Not only that he was Brewster Cortland Payne’s son, or that he was the policeman who had, in Towne’s somewhat admiring description, “blown the brains of the Northeast Serial Rapist all over the inside of his van with his service revolver,” but why he had become a policeman instead of following in his father’s prestigious footsteps in the practice of law.
Towne, a tall, hawk-featured, thirty-nine-year-old balding Mormon, who took his religion seriously and who had once told Davis, dead serious, that he regarded the Com munists as the Antichrist, was in charge of what were called, somewhat confusingly, FBIs. The acronym stood for Full Background Investigation. FBIs were run before the issuance of federal security clearances, and before young men were commissioned into one of the Armed Forces.
An FBI had been run on Matthew Mark Payne during his last year at the University of Pennsylvania. He had then been enrolled in the USMC Platoon Leaders’ Program, which would see him commissioned a second lieutenant on his graduation.
At the last minute, young Payne had failed the precom missioning physical, and had not gone into the Marine Corps.
Towne’s FBI on him, however, had already been run, and it had provided some very interesting details about Payne, Matthew Mark. For one thing, he was a very wealthy young man, largely because of an investment program established for him at age three and administered—and generously contributed to—by his father thereafter.
It also revealed that he was not Brewster Cortland Payne II’s biological son. He was the biological son of Sergeant John Francis Xavier Moffitt, of the Philadelphia Police Department, who had been shot to death answering a silent burglar alarm call months before his only child was born.
The Widow Moffitt had gone to secretarial school and found employment with Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne, a top Philadelphia legal firm, as a typist.
Shortly thereafter, she had met the just-widowered Brewster Cortland Payne II, the son of the founding partner—and heir apparent to the Payne real estate fortune. Mrs. Brewster Cortland Payne II had been killed in an automobile accident returning from their summer home in the Pocono Mountains, leaving her husband and two infant children.
Brewster Cortland Payne II’s reaction to his father’s description of Patricia Moffitt as a gold-digging Irish trollop and his absence from their wedding had been to resign from Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne and strike out on his own.
Shortly after the birth of their first child—which coincided with the death of Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt, Jr., the chairman of the board of Nesfoods International; the assumption by Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt III, Brewster Payne’s best friend, to that position; and the retention of what was then Payne & Mawson as Nesfood International’s Counsel—Brewster Cortland Payne went to his wife and announced that since he loved Matt as well as his other children, it seemed only logical that he adopt him, and requested her permission to do so.
Matthew Mark Payne’s rejection by the Marine Corps had been shortly followed by the death of his uncle, his biological father’s brother, another policeman, Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt. Moffitt, a colorful character, who had been the commanding officer of the Highway Patrol, had, off-duty, walked in on a holdup of the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard, and been shot to death trying to talk the robber, a drug addict, into handing over his .22-caliber pistol.
When Matthew Mark Payne had applied for appointment as a Philadelphia police officer immediately thereafter—the only graduate, summa cum laude, of the University of Pennsylvania to do so in anyone’s memory—it was generally agreed both that it was understandable—Matt’s masculinity, challenged by rejection by the Marines, would be restored by his becoming a policeman; and he probably had some childish idea about getting revenge for both his biological father and his uncle—and that his police career would end just as soon as he came to his senses.
