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“You don’t want to tell me now?”

“I’d better come up with a plan,” Jennie said, giggling.

“Okay. I’ll be at the hotel after twelve, I guess. Why don’t you call me about one?”

“I will.”

“Is there anything I can bring you?”

“No. Thank you, but no. We’re doing fine.”

Said the noble bride from the deck of the sinking ship.

“Well, then, I’ll see you over the weekend,” Susan said.

“I really love you, you know that,” Jennie said, and the phone went dead.

Susan made two more telephone calls before going back to her office. The first was to Daphne Elizabeth Browne Nesbitt, who was also in the photograph of the Bennington girls on Susan’s bookshelf. She told Daffy that her plans had changed and that she now could come to Chad’s party, if that would be all right.

Daffy said she would have the crème de la crème of Philadelphia’s bachelors lined up for her selection.

I was afraid of that. It was another reason I didn’t want to come to your asshole of a husband’s birthday party.

“I would rather snag my men on my own hook, Daffy. Thank you just the same.”

“Don’t be silly,” Daffy said. “Advertising pays. Ask Chad about that. And besides, we have to stick together, don’t we? Help each other out?”

Oh, do we ever!

“Right,” Susan said. “See you Saturday.”

Then Susan called her mother and told her that she had changed her mind about going to Chad Nesbitt’s birthday party in Philadelphia over the weekend.

“Well, baby, I’m very glad to hear that,” Susan’s mother replied.

“Mother, would you call the Bellvue and see about a room? It’s so close to the weekend that I’m afraid—”

“No, I won’t,” her mother replied. “But I will call Mrs. Samuelson. She’s very good at that sort of thing.”

Mrs. Dorothy Samuelson was her father’s executive assistant, and she was, indeed, very good at things like that. It was what Susan had hoped her mother would do, pass the buck to Mrs. Samuelson.

Now that she had committed herself to Jennie, she would need to have a room in the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel.

TWO

From where Officer Herbert Prasko of the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department had stationed himself on the second-floor balcony of the Howard Johnson motel on Roosevelt Boulevard, he had an extraordinarily good view of the vehicle he was surveilling.

The new four-door Chevrolet sedan was parked, nose out, in front of a row of rooms in the rear of the motel. It was a Hertz rental, picked up at the Philadelphia International Airport four hours before by Ronald R. Ketcham, white male, twenty-five, five-ten, brown hair, 165 pounds, no previous arrests, who resided in a luxury apartment on Overbrook Avenue not far from the Episcopal Academy, of which he was a graduate.

Mr. Ketcham, who was not quite as smart as he believed himself to be, was laboring under the misimpression that the use of a rental automobile rather than his Buick coupe was one more clever thing he had done to conceal both his illegal activity and identity from both the police and other criminals.

Officer Prasko didn’t know if the other criminals involved knew Mr. Ketcham’s identity—the scumbags probably couldn’t care less—but his identity had been known to Five Squad for five weeks, from the time they had first followed Amos J. Williams, black male

, thirty-two, six-three, 180 pounds, twenty-eight previous arrests, and four of his goons to a delivery rendezvous with Mr. Ketcham, who seemed to be one of his better customers.

For a number of reasons, it had been decided not to make an arrest at that time, but it had not been hard at all to trace the customer’s rental car back through the Hertz main office to their airport rental operation, and from the rental agreement to identify Mr. Ketcham in some detail.

Hertz had been very cooperative. They had promised to notify Five Squad the next time Mr. Ketcham rented a car, and had done so today. Officer Prasko thought that was pretty dumb on Mr. Ketcham’s part, to go back to Hertz; he should have changed to Avis, or somebody else. And it was also dumb for him to go back to the Howard Johnson motel. There were a lot of other motels. If he had set up this meet someplace else, he would not be about to find his ass in a very deep crack.