Ask the Right Question Page 15

  “May I ask the nature of the problem you want to discuss with the doctor?”

  “It’s, well, it’s a male problem.”

  “I understand.” She understood! “If you can come in tomorrow at about two, we’ll try not to keep you waiting too long. May I have your name and address please?”

  I nearly blew it by calling myself Henry. “It’s Harry, that is, Harrison Keindly.” I spelled it for her. “But everybody calls me Harry.”

  “All right, Harry, you come in tomorrow around two. Thank you for calling.”

  Very kindly. Now and then, a voice just seems to do it for you. I spent dinner wondering what I should wear.

  My postprandial preslumber period I spent very virtuously working in the office. Going through Crystal’s tax records and bills. I picked up each photograph, studied each sheet through my magnifying glass and tried as hard as I could to figure out what the hell it could possibly mean.

  I didn’t do very well. My familiarity with the paper trappings of money is rudimentary. When I was involved in such things, for my brief period of affluence in the late fifties, I had a tax accountant to do all that stuff. I just signed. I was fighting the crowd I found myself running in, professional people of all sorts except finance who spent all their time talking about the manipulations of money. I fought them successfully; all the way home to Indianapolis. It’s another reason I hesitated over starting to go through Crystal’s stuff carefully. It sort of meant more to me than itself, but once started.…

  I found three pieces of information I recognized. Deeds and purchase agreements to two properties and records of sale of a third.

  The sale was the property “known as Graham House” on North Meridian Street. It brought the tidy bundle of $96,500 in August, 1955. At about the same time the house at 7019 Jefferson Boulevard was bought for $58,000.

  The third property I was also familiar with, a house on Fiftieth Street on a 47- by 64-foot lot. Mrs. Forebush’s house. Crystal bought it in September, 1953. He paid thirteen thousand dollars. That seemed high to me. Not far off what the house would bring now.

  Attached to the deed were bills for adding an electric opener for the garage, landscaping to the extent of adding tall shrubs, and inside the house, cleaning it out, installing furniture, twin beds, and new locks on all doors.

  Very ambitious. I could understand it, the deed and the improvements, I mean, if not exactly why. It occurred to me that Mrs. Forebush might have some wisdoms on the subject.

  It also occurred to me that for several hours I had not given a thought to the fifty thousand dollars.

  I was pouring a glass of orange juice when the phone rang. It was Leander Crystal. He did the talking.

  “I’m sorry to bother you at this late hour, Mr. Samson, but I was thinking about you and it occurred to me that I might have overlooked something that might be worrying you. The matter of the check I gave you. If you would prefer, and I think you probably should, I can give you all or part of the money in cash.”

  “That’s a lot of money to have lying around the house.”

  “I don’t mean to be gross, Mr. Samson, but when there is a certain amount of capital around, such things can be done fairly easily.”

  “I see. I appreciate your telling me. That isn’t what has been holding me up, though I probably would have got to it.”

  There was an intratelephonic pause. I sensed he wanted to speak and was trying to find the words. He found them. “Again, I don’t mean to apply even the slightest pressure, but I wondered if I might be of any assistance in resolving whatever it is that is holding you up.”

  “Now it’s my turn to want not to be gross, Mr. Crystal. But to be frank I have never been bought off a case before and I am the sort of person that I have to be absolutely certain that it is what I want to do.”

  “I see. In fact, the delay should be a comfort to me. It is a testimony to your scrupulousness. Well, shall I leave it at this? If you have any questions that I can help you with, or if you want to talk about the matter I called about, then call me.”

  “I shall.”

  “I just want you to know, Mr. Samson, I appreciate a man with scruples.”

  “So do I, Mr. Crystal.”

  I adjourned for the evening, I spent so long daydreaming about little cottages by Kentucky lakes and adjacent vegetables gardens and tax-free dollars that it took me until past one in the morning to understand that he was sweetening the pot by implying that my “scruples” might lead to subsequent employment and financial benefit.

  By the time I got to wondering if he was a member of the Mafia I knew that I had hit bedtime. I mean, Fleur on drugs was one thing, but me becoming a gangland pawn was another.

  29

  Late to bed, and late to rise. I had sort of hoped to be able to take a few side trips. My mother’s parents came from the territory between Lafayette and Indianapolis. Kokomo, but more specifically such metropolises as Camden and Deer “Crick” and Flora and Delphi. Where she grew up, Logansport was the big city. You know, where the city slickers come from.

  But I had no time to stop and renew acquaintance with the land of my origins. I had to hustle to get to Chivian’s Lafayette office by two.

  His office was not merely an office, however. But a clinic with doctor’s name riding high. One Crystal thing must have led to another. The cat was doing pretty well.

  My golden-voiced secretary was a disappointment. I hadn’t really thought she would be. I had prepared myself for a beast, or possibly, outside chance, a beauty. But no. Just an ordinary old Hoosier lady of about thirty. Definitely middle-of-the-road.

  Until she spoke, of course, but I was a little too nervous to admire her vocal qualities. I had trouble following the things she said.

  Like “Mr. Keindly?” It nearly threw me. It was not said with a great sense of recognition, and I had been thinking of other things.

  So I nodded.

  “Doctor will see you when he’s finished with the patient he’s with. Will you take a seat please? It’ll only be a few minutes.

  I was alone in a strange waiting room. Somehow one always expects to be sitting along with other people in a doctor’s waiting room. I idled away the time with magazines. One has to be very careful about a doctor’s magazines. They have the usual picture, entertainment and news publications sprinkled around, but the nitty gritty of the magazine budget goes for medical journals of various sorts which then do double duty in the waiting room. If you’re not very careful you will pick up one of them and find yourself reading about the types of cancer commonly found in children and how little there is you can do about three-quarters of them. Not highly constructive for parents bringing kiddy-kid to see doc-doc about that lump-lump on his head.

  Or for detectives who haven’t seen their daughters for a long time. I go on record against cancer in children.

  A very attractive brunette-type broad left what I presumed to be the doctor’s chamber. She was about the same age as my secretary, but everything that I had hoped my secretary was going to be. As the door closed behind the brunette, I turned back to the lady at the desk. It gave me the opportunity and motivation to evaluate her face, the suntan makeup pancaked over the pimple scars.

  Then our eyes met. An extraordinary thing happened. “As a matter of fact, they’re from chicken pox I had when I was eighteen.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was, terribly. “Would you come out with me tonight?”

  She held up her left hand, a finger of which bore the answer to my question. Her intercom buzzed.

  “I am a fool,” I said.

  “Yes.” she said. “Doctor will see you now.” The doctor’s door opened and Henry Chivian strode out, right hand extended.

  “Mr.—um, Keindly, I believe. I’m Doctor Chivian. Come in, won’t you.”

  I came in. Chivian was average height, but with a dark, real tan, bushy eyebrows and a thick head of black hair. He moved back to his desk quickly, almost ruthlessly. There was som
ething about him.

  I spent a few moments looking around the office, a prosperous office of a modern cut, but with a medical degree framed at the right, in the position on the wall which is a medical compromise—where both patient and doctor can look at it. So I looked at it. University of Oklahoma, January, 1943. I didn’t know by how much, but that made him older than Leander Crystal. He didn’t look it.

  The rest of the office, books on an open shelf, some cupboards, quite trim, and a few pictures on the top of the bookshelf below the medical degree. One an Army picture, two others, both of the doctor with other men, apparently in distinguished settings. I couldn’t quite make out what. But I didn’t have a lot of time.

  The doctor was looking businesslike. “Mrs. Rogers says that you have some sort of male problem, Mr. Keindly. That can cover a lot of ground.”

  “I want to be frank with you, Doctor. I didn’t come to see you about myself. I have a rather delicate problem and I hoped that you could help me solve it.”

  His lips curled into a slight smile. Perhaps he liked delicate problems. He sat back, the better to enjoy. “Go on.”

  “I have a feeling you’ve guessed,” I said. “but I’ll say it anyway. My daughter has gotten herself in trouble, I mean pregnant. I hoped that you would help us or send us to someone who could.”

  “But why do you choose me to come to? Surely no one is going around saying that I do abortions.” The trace of a smile remained in place. And I was getting information.

  “No, but a friend of mine, well.… The thing is that we’re pretty desperate. Lucy, that is, my daughter, left it kind of late to tell us about, and we don’t really know much about this sort of thing. We never expected … that is, we spoke to a friend and she said that she didn’t know but that you were a nice doctor, and that you might conceivably help us, or tell me where we could go to get help.”

  “How exactly did Lucy get herself in this kind of trouble?” He let the question dangle for a moment, wading in the implications. But he stepped out just as I was about to tell him about the hayride I unwisely let little Lucy go on in the spring. He said, “I mean, didn’t Lucy know such a thing might happen, or is she the type of girl who is quite careless with her affections and her defenses?” Oh, he was enjoying it all right.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I said.

  “Now, Mr. Keindly, surely you are a worldly enough man to have realized that nobody’s daughter is safe in this world of the flesh, surely not without education, preparation and warning. Surely you could at least have shown her how to use a diaphragm, just in case, or pills or something.”

  I was rapidly coming to feel uncomfortable in the guise in which I’d come to the man. But that was like locking the barn after the horse. The same type of help he was offering Lucy.

  “All the regrets in the world can’t undo what is done,” I said. “Will you help us, or will you not?”

  “You are absolutely right, absolutely.” He took his prescription pad and spent several moments writing a couple of lines. He tore the top sheet off, and folded it and extended it halfway toward me.

  “You are right, Mr. Keindly. And I am sorry if I have seemed unhelpful. I’ll help you, all right. I’ve written on this page the name of a man who should be able to offer you some assistance. His office may seem a little seamy, and he may come after your daughter with sharpened coat hangers and—” He cut himself off by dropping the paper on the desk in front of me and leaning way back in his chair and laughing.

  Loud, vulgar peels of laughter, through which he had to hold the top of his head. He frightened me. But loud noises and nonsequiturs usually do.

  I picked up his prescription for my problems, and opened it. It read:

  Albert Samson

  Indianapolis, Indiana

  U.S.A. World

  The bastard knew all along who I was.

  There are times in this business when all the words in the world cannot express exactly what has gone on in the shortest period of time.

  There was nothing I could do but wait until he had had his laugh. Usually I try to be a good sport, but it is a fairly well-established fact that I do not take big jokes on me all that well. Leander Crystal’s last chance of buying me off went up in gales of laughter in Lafayette, Indiana, that afternoon.

  By the time he was snuffing to control himself I was looking at his pictures. One was not of him at all, I didn’t know who. One looked like a newspaper shot of him receiving a plaque or something from somebody. And the third was of the doctor in his full-dress Army uniform. There was something wrong about that picture. I didn’t know what.

  Chivian had just cooled down; I was heated up.

  “Nice little joke, Doc,” I said with my best Bogart voice, and my best Cagney stare.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Samson. But I’d been warned you might come around and I’ve been checking the names and addresses of new patients against the phone book and a Lafayette address register. Mr. Keindly had neither a phone nor an address. I would have let you go on, but I just don’t have any more time today to see how a real private eye works.” He was smirking, the bastard.

  “At this point do you answer questions or do you play cute?”

  “It should depend on the questions, I know. But I have to balance the fact that I have nothing in my life to hide against the balls you have coming here to ask me questions at all.”

  “It depends on how good a friend of Leander Crystal’s you are.”

  “Does this mean that you are accepting his offer?”

  “Not necessarily, but you have already answered that question.”

  “I know.” He sighed. “I had hoped for some style from you, Samson, but all I get is two-bit games. Leander and I were in the Army together. We kept in touch, and when he settled in Indianapolis, he invited me to try it too. I did and became his family’s doctor. After a while I decided I wanted to open a clinic in the area, he helped me get the loan, we got a good deal here and here I have remained. I go to Indianapolis, usually once every other week, to see Fleur. Then I play golf with Leander in the afternoon. Sometimes I don’t stay the afternoons. Is there anything else you want to know? If so, please make it brief. I have patients waiting.”

  “Nothing else,” I said.

  I got up and left the room, closing the door quietly behind me.

  There were no patients in the waiting room. There was only Mrs. Rogers.

  She spoke as I walked by. “Did you give him the good time you had in store for me? He needed it. He’s been pretty nervous the last few.…”

  I didn’t hear the end of her solicitude. I had closed the outer door, and at the same time she had stopped talking. I heard the echo of laughter as I went out to my car, but that might just have been my imagination.

  I drove like hell to get back to Indianapolis. Combination of mood and circumstances. If Leander Crystal had friends like that, I figured he didn’t need enemies. In the first half of the trip I also thought up many other novel notions.

  But I was relaxing some by the time I got to the city. It was pushing five, and coming into town during the rush hour going out made me feel better. More reflective. Reflective enough to figure out what had been wrong with that Army picture. Basically nothing. It had not lied at all. It must have been when Chivian was something like, thirty years old, what with medical school and all.

  Nearly thirty and with a receding hairline. Much more recessed than it was today. I realized why he had had to hold onto his head even during his moment of triumph. The bastard was bald, bald as an egg.

  Bald, one might say, as Leander Crystal. The Doublemint twins.

  I laughed aloud from Kessler Boulevard all the way to Thirty-eighth Street, no mean distance. And I only stopped then because I was getting tired and a traffic cop looked at me kind of funny.

  The rest of the way in I figured out that without the wig and the tan Chivian would look pretty much like Leander. Superficial description anyway. Chivian a little taller, and a little
heavier and a little older. And a lot nastier.

  Somehow I didn’t figure Crystal for the nasties. It was as if Chivian were sort of the poor relation, the pale imitation, the crude Crystal.

  And it passed through my mind that they might be more closely related than friends; a notion I decided was worth a little effort. I made a note.

  I had no traffic all the way home.

  But I had had heavy traffic at home.

  The mail was on the floor as usual, and I ground it into the floorboards as I came in. There was something of interest, a letter from the New York Birth Certificates Office.

  But other things were riot right. My office desk drawers were open. The same at the desk and bureau in my living room. I always close my drawers all the way. It’s not something I am careless about in my dotage.

  I had had little visitors.

  I went to my files. They do not lock. I’ve never needed a lock.

  I opened to C. The Crystal file was missing. The folder containing the negatives and the prints so kindly supplied by the officers of the law, as well as my Fishman records and Graham letters.

  I was nearly in shock. I ran back to my office desk on which there resided one beautiful, gorgeous, exquisite set of prints of the Crystal office papers, in ten organized piles. My working copy. Sitting on the desk, beautiful and gorgeous, and ready for work. If I needed anything else to get me down to business, this was it. What a ridiculous game—two grown men playing “let’s raid each other’s office!”

  My only salvation was that Crystal had not known that Miller gave me two sets of prints, not one. And I thanked Crystal for his added message: there is something in them. I presumed my visitor was Crystal.

  I opened the letter from New York and examined the birth certificate of Eloise Crystal. Delivering physician was Henry Chivian. Surprise, surprise.

  That certificate started the new Crystal file, and a picture of it started the new safety file which would remain undeveloped, on film, and hidden. Unless needed.

  I sat at my desk and addressed an envelope to Leander Crystal. Into it I tearfully put his check for fifty thousand dollars. I had the passing thought that instead, I should ask him for lots more. What would he do?