“Beatrice,” Violet said, “get the keys to the station wagon. I’ll meet you by the door.”

“Oh, my God!” Grace Detweiler said, putting her balled fist to her mouth. “She’s unconscious!”

“Baxley has the station wagon,” Mrs. Jensen reported. “He’s gone shopping.”

Baxley was the Detweiler butler. He prided himself that not one bite of food entered the house that he had not personally selected. H. Richard Detweiler suspected that Baxley had a cozy arrangement with the grocer’s and the butcher’s and so on, but he didn’t press the issue. The food was a good deal better than he had expected it would be when Grace had hired the Englishman.

“Baxley’s gone with the station wagon,” Violet reported.

Goddamn it all to hell! Both of them gone at the same time! And no car, of five, large enough to hold him with Penny in his arms. And nobody to drive the car if there was one.

“Call the police,” H. Richard Detweiler ordered. “Tell them we have a medical emergency, and to send an ambulance immediately.”

He left the bedroom carrying his daughter in his arms, and went down the corridor, past the oil portrait of his daughter in her pink debutante gown and then down the wide staircase to the entrance foyer.

“Police Radio,” Mrs. Leander-Harriet-Polk, a somewhat more than pleasingly plump black lady, said into the microphone of her headset.

“We need an ambulance,” Violet said.

Harriet Polk had worked in the Radio Room in the Police Administration Building for nineteen years. Her long experience had told her from the tone of the caller’s voice that this was a genuine call, not some lunatic with a sick sense of humor.

“Ma’am, what’s the nature of the problem?”

“She’s unconscious, not breathing.”

“Where are you, Ma’am?”

“928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue,” Violet said. “It’s the Detweiler estate.”

Harriet threw a switch on her console which connected her with the Fire Department dispatcher. Fire Department Rescue Squads are equipped with oxygen and resuscitation equipment, and manned by firemen with special Emergency Medical Treatment training.

“Unconscious female at 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue,” she said.

Then she spoke to her caller.

“A rescue squad is on the way, Ma’am,” she said.

“Thank you,” Violet said politely.

Nineteen years on the job had also embedded in Harriet Polk’s memory a map of the City of Philadelphia, overlaid by Police District boundaries. She knew, without thinking about it, that 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue was in the Fourteenth Police District. Her board showed her that Radio Patrol Car Twenty-three of the Fourteenth District was in service.

Harriet moved another switch.

“Fourteen Twenty-three,” she said. “928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue. A hospital case. Rescue en route.”

Police Officer John D. Wells, who also had nineteen years on the job, was sitting in his three-year-old Chevrolet, whose odometer was halfway through its second hundred thousand miles, outside a delicatessen on Germantown Avenue.

He had just failed to have the moral courage to refuse stuffing his face before going off shift and home. He had a wax-paper-wrapped Taylor-ham-and-egg sandwich in his hand, and a large bite from same in his mouth.

He picked up his microphone and, with some difficulty, answered his call: “Fourteen Twenty-three, OK.”

He took off the emergency brake and dropped the gearshift into drive.

He had spent most of his police career in North Philadelphia, and had been transferred to “The Hill” only six months before. He thought of it as being “retired before retiring.” There was far less activity in affluent Chestnut Hill than in North Philly.

He didn’t, in other words, know his district well, but he knew it well enough to instantly recall that West Chestnut Hill Avenue was lined with large houses, mansions, on large plots of ground, very few of which had numbers to identify them.

Where the hell is 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue?

Officer Wells did not turn on either his flashing lights or siren. There was not much traffic in this area at this time of the morning, and he didn’t think it was necessary. But he pressed heavily on the accelerator pedal.

H. Richard Detweiler, now staggering under the hundred-and-nine-pound weight of his daughter, reached the massive oak door of the foyer. He stopped and looked angrily over his shoulder and found his wife.

“Grace, open the goddamned door!”

She did so, and he walked through it, onto the slate-paved area before the door.

Penny was really getting heavy. He looked around, and walked to a wrought-iron couch and sat down in it.

Violet appeared.

“Mr. D,” she said, “the police, the ambulance, is coming,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said.

He looked down at his daughter’s face. Penny was looking at him, but she wasn’t seeing him.

Oh, my God!

“Violet, please call Mr. Payne and tell him what’s happened, and that I’m probably going to need him.”

Violet nodded and went back in the house.

Brewster Cortland Payne II, Esq., a tall, well-built-he had played tackle at Princeton in that memorable year when Princeton had lost sixteen of seventeen games played-man in his early fifties, was having breakfast with his wife, Patricia, on the patio outside the breakfast room of his rambling house on a four-acre plot on Providence Road in Wallingford when Mrs. Elizabeth Newman, the Payne housekeeper, appeared carrying a telephone on a long cord.

“It’s the Detweilers’s Violet,” she said.

Mrs. Payne, an attractive forty-four-year-old blonde, who was wearing a pleated skirt and a sweater, put her coffee cup down as she watched her husband take the telephone.

“For you?” she asked, not really expecting a reply.

“Good morning, Violet,” Brewster C. Payne said. “How are you?”

“Mr. Detweiler asked me to call,” Violet said. “He said he will probably need you.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

Payne, who was a founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, arguably Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm, was both Mr. H. Richard Detweiler’s personal attorney and his most intimate friend. They had been classmates at both Episcopal Academy and Princeton.

Violet told him what the problem was, ending her recitation of what had transpired by almost sobbing, “I think Penny is gone, Mr. Payne. He’s sitting outside holding her in his lap, waiting for the ambulance, but I think she’s gone.”

“Violet, when the ambulance gets there, find out where they’re taking Penny. Call here and tell Elizabeth. I’m leaving right away. When I get into Philadelphia, I’ll call here and Elizabeth can tell me where to go. Tell Mr. Detweiler I’m on my way.”

He broke the connection with his finger, lifted it and waited for a dial tone, and then started dialing again.

“Well, what is it?” Patricia Payne asked.

“Violet went into Penny’s room and found her sitting up in bed with a needle hanging out of her arm,” Payne replied, evenly. “They’re waiting for an ambulance. Violet thinks it’s too late.”

“Oh, my God!”

A metallic female voice came on the telephone: “Dr. Payne is not available at this time. If you will leave your name and number, she will return your call as soon as possible. Please wait for the tone. Thank you.”

He waited for the tone and then said, “Amy, if you’re there, please pick up.”

“Dad?”

“Penny was found by the maid ten minutes ago with a needle in her arm. Violet thinks she’s gone.”

“Damn!”

“I think you had better go out there and deal with Grace,” Brewster Payne said.

“Goddamn!” Dr. Amelia Payne said.

“Tell her I’m coming,” Patricia said.

“Your mother said she’s coming to Chestnut Hill,” Payne said.

“All right,” Amy said, and the connection went dead.

Payne waited for another dial tone and dialed again.