Final justice - W.E.B. Griffin [203]
Everything had gone well, from his immediately being able to put his hands on the little box with the studs for his dress shirt when he hastily changed into a dinner jacket at his apartment--that almost never happened--through the drinks at Chad and Daffy's place until now.
Terry had looked very good indeed when he went into the party, and she did in fact seem glad to see him. And he'd even gotten along with the people Chad and Daffy had in. Many of them he'd known all his life. Usually, however, when he saw them socially, they gave him the impression that he'd done something terrible that had moved him far below the salt. Like being a cop. So he didn't often see them socially. When he did, he often, in Daffy's words, showed his ass, and embarrassed everybody.
Tonight there had been none of that, with one minor exception.
"I didn't know, Payne, until I saw you on the tube, that you were a sergeant," J. Andrew Stansfield III had said, coming up to where Matt was looking out the windows onto the Delaware.
"That's right, Stansfield."
Matthew M. Payne, Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, and J. Andrew Stansfield III had graduated from Episcopal Academy together. Stansfield had gone on to Princeton, then the Harvard School of Business Administration, and then found employment with Stansfield & Stansfield, Commercial Realtors.
"I'm afraid I actually don't know what that means," Stansfield said.
"It means I make four percent more than I made when I was detective," Matt said. "It comes to right over two thousand a year."
"That's all?" Stansfield said, genuinely surprised.
Then his face showed that he suspected Payne was pulling his leg.
"Well, there are certain professional privileges," Matt said.
"For example?"
"For example, when Terry and I leave here for the Four Seasons, my car is parked right outside on the cobblestones of Stockton Place," Matt said. "If you tried to park there, Stansfield, you'd be towed."
"Yes, I know," J. Andrew Stansfield had said, nodding and seeming a bit confused. Terry Davis had squeezed his arm, and when he looked at her, her eyes were smiling.
And Terry had smelled very nice indeed in his Porsche on the way to the Four Seasons, where he was able--because Sergeant Al Nevins of Dignitary Protection was there awaiting the arrival of Stan Colt and wanted to talk to him--to park very near the door.
"We're playing games later," Nevins said. "The limo will take Colt and the Bolinskis--"
"Bolinski as in 'The Bull'?" Matt interrupted.
Nevins nodded.
"--the limo will take them back to the Ritz, where they will go inside, get on the elevator, go to the basement and out into the alley, where they will get into a Suburban and go to La Famiglia."
"Clever," Matt said.
"With a little luck it will work," Nevins said.
Casimir Bolinski, L.L.D., Esq., whom Matt had never met before, turned out to be a very nice guy who would have been perfectly happy to stay in an anteroom off the dining room with Matt and Terry--whom he knew--during the banquet, had not his wife found him.
"Honey, we're going to La Famiglia after this. I don't want to eat any of that fancy French food. . . ."
"You're going to go in there and sit next to the cardinal and the monsignor, you're going to drink only water, and when they introduce you, you're going to hand him this."
She handed him an envelope containing a check.
"Jesus Christ, Antoinette! That much?"
"You graduated West Catholic," Mrs. Bolinski said. "You owe them. They tossed Mickey and Stan out. They don't. Anyway, it's deductible."
Mrs. Bolinski, looking not unlike a tugboat easing an aircraft carrier down a river, had then escorted her husband into the dining room.
Terry Davis again smelled delightfully in the Porsche on the way from the Four Seasons to La Famiglia, but there he couldn't park the Porsche in front, and instead had to take it to the adjacent parking lot.
There were red plastic cones--the kind used to mark lanes