Page 163

"Charley Gilmer?" Payne asked.

"President of Connecticut General Commercial Assurance. He's on the board of directors, trustees, whatever, of that place."

"Whose name, if you were thinking clearly," Grace Detweiler said, "you should have thought of yourself. We've known the Gilmers for years."

H. Richard Detweiler ignored his wife's comment.

"It was not very pleasant," H. Richard Detweiler said, "having to call a man I have known for years to tell him that my daughter has a drug problem and I need his help to get her into a mental institution."

"Is that all you're worried about, your precious reputation?" Grace Detweiler snarled. "Dick, you make me sick!"

"I don't give a good goddamn about my reputation-or yours, either, for that matter. I'm concerned for our daughter, goddamn you!"

"If you were really concerned, you'd leave the booze alone!"

"Both of you, shut up!" Brewster C. Payne said sharply. Neither was used to being talked to in those words or that manner and looked at him with genuine surprise.

"Penny is the problem here. Let's deal with that," Payne said. " Unless you came here for an arena, instead of for my advice."

"I'm upset," H. Richard Detweiler said.

"And I'm not?" Grace snapped.

"Grace, shut up," Payne said. "Both of you, shut up."

They both glowered at him for a moment, the silence broken when Grace Detweiler walked to the bar and poured an inch and a half of Scotch in the bottom of a glass.

She turned from the bar, leaned against the bookcase, took a swallow of the whiskey, and looked at both of the men.

"Okay, let's deal with the problem," she said.

"We're sending Penny up there tomorrow, Colonel Mawson," Detweiler said, "to the Institute of Living, in an ambulance. It's a six-week program, beginning with detoxification and then followed by counseling."

"They know how to deal with the problem," Mawson replied. "It's an illness. It can be cured."

"That'snot the goddamn problem!" Grace flared. "We're talking about Penny and thegoddamn gangsters!"

"Excuse me?" Colonel H. Dunlop Mawson asked.

"Let me fill you in, Dunlop," Payne said, and explained the statement Matt had taken and Penny's determination to testify against the man whom she had seen shoot Anthony J. DeZego.

Colonel Mawson immediately put many of the Detweilers' concerns to rest. He told them that no assistant district attorney more than six weeks out of law school would go into court with a witness who had a " medical history of chemical abuse."

The statement taken by Matt Payne, in any event, he said, was of virtually no validity, taken as it was from a witness he knew was not in full possession of her mental faculties, and not even taking into consideration that he had completely ignored all the legal t's that had to be crossed, and i's dotted, in connection with taking a statement.

"And I think, Mr. Detweiler," Colonel Mawson concluded, "that there is even a very good chance that we can get the statement your daughter signed back from the police. If we can, then it will be as if she'd never signed it, as if it had never existed."

"How are you going to get it back?"

"Commissioner Czernick is a reasonable man," Colonel Mawson said. "He's a friend of mine. And by a fortunate happenstance, at the moment he owes me one."

"He owes you one what?" Grace Detweiler demanded.

Brewster C. Payne was glad she had asked the question. He didn't like what Mawson had just said, and would have asked precisely the same question himself.

"A favor," Mawson said, a trifle smugly. "A scratch of my back in return, so to speak."

"What kind of a scratch, Dunlop?" Payne asked, a hint of ice in his voice.