She put her hands on Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and shook her.
“Penny! Penny, honey!”
There was no response.
When Mrs. Rogers removed her hands from Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and let her rest again on the pillows against the headboard, Miss Detweiler started to slowly slide to the right.
Mrs. Rogers tried to stop the movement but could not. She watched in horror as Miss Detweiler came to rest on her side. Her head tilted back, and she seemed to be staring at the canopy of her bed.
Mrs. Rogers turned from the bed and walked to the door. In the corridor, the walk became a trot, and then she was running to the end of the corridor, past an oil portrait of Miss Detweiler in her pink debutante gown, past the wide stairway leading down to the entrance foyer of the mansion, into the corridor of the other wing of the mansion, to the door of the apartment of Miss Detweiler’s parents.
She opened and went through the door leading to the apartment sitting room without knocking, and through it to the closed double doors of the bedroom. She knocked at the left of the double doors, then went through it without waiting for a response.
H. Richard Detweiler, a tall, thin man in his late forties, was sleeping in the oversize bed, on his side, his back to his wife Grace, who was curled up in the bed, one lower leg outside the sheets and blankets, facing away from her husband.
Mr. Detweiler, who slept lightly, opened his eyes as Mrs. Rogers approached the bed.
“Mr. D,” Violet said. “You better come.”
“What is it, Violet?” Mr. Detweiler asked in mingled concern and annoyance.
“It’s Miss Penny.”
H. Richard Detweiler sat up abruptly. He was wearing only pajama bottoms.
“Jesus, now what?”
“You’d better come,” Mrs. Rogers repeated.
He swung his feet out of the bed and reached for the dressing gown he had discarded on the floor before turning out the lights. As he put it on, his feet found a pair of slippers.
Mrs. Detweiler, a finely featured, rather thin woman of forty-six, who looked younger, woke, raised her head, and looked around and then sat up. Her breasts were exposed; she had been sleeping wearing only her underpants.
“What is it, Violet?” she asked as she pulled the sheet over her breasts.
“Miss Penny.”
“What about Miss Penny?”
H. Richard Detweiler was headed for the door, followed by Violet.
“Dick?” Mrs. Detweiler asked, and then, angrily, “Dick!”
He did not reply.
Grace Detweiler got out of bed and retrieved a thick terry-cloth bathrobe from the floor. It was too large for her, it was her husband’s, but she often wore it between the shower and the bed. She put it on, and fumbling with the belt, followed her husband and Violet out of her bedroom.
H. Richard Detweiler entered his daughter’s bedroom.
He saw her lying on her side and muttered something unintelligible, then walked toward the canopied bed.
“Penny?”
“I think she’s gone, Mr. D,” Violet said softly.
He flashed her an almost violently angry glare, then bent over the bed and, grunting, pushed his daughter erect. Her head now lolled to one side.
Detweiler sat on the bed and exhaled audibly.
“Call Jensen,” he ordered. “Tell him we have a medical emergency, and to bring the Cadillac to the front door.”
Violet went to the bedside and punched the button that would ring the telephone in the chauffeur’s apartment over the five-car garage.
H. Richard Detweiler stood up, then squatted and grunted as he picked his daughter up in his arms.
“Call Chestnut Hill Hospital, tell them we’re on the way, and then call Dr. Dotson and tell him to meet us there,” Detweiler said as he started to carry his daughter across the room.
Mrs. Arne-Beatrice-Jensen answered the telephone on the second ring and told Mrs. Rogers her husband had just left in the Cadillac to take it to Merion Cadillac-Olds for service.
“Mr. D,” Mrs. Rogers said, “Jensen took the limousine in for service.”
“Go get the Rolls, please, Violet,” Detweiler said, as calmly as he could manage.
“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Grace Detweiler wailed as she came into the room and saw her husband with their daughter in his arms. “What’s happened?”
“Goddamn it, Grace, don’t go to pieces on me,” Detweiler said. He turned to Violet.
“Not the Rolls, the station wagon,” he said, remembering.
There wasn’t enough room in the goddamned Rolls Royce Corniche for two people and a large-sized cat, but Grace had to have a goddamned convertible.
“What’s the matter with her?” Grace Detweiler asked.
“God only knows what she took this time,” Detweiler said, as much to himself as in reply to his wife.
“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
