"Why not?"

"Because if I have to hurt, you have to ache a little too. Just keep your knickers on."

She laughed again as she hung up.

6.

IT DIDN'T SEEM POSSIBLE, but the man in the light gray suit was the doctor, all right. It was his face, nicely tanned and cleanly shaved with a styled haircut that gave him a professional touch only old doctors could wear properly. The suit was new and expensive and evidently tailor made.

"You clean up real good," I said.

"There was more money in my account than I expected."

"How's the car?"

"A real dreamboat, like we used to say."

"No trouble?"

He shook his head. "You were right about everything. All the paperwork is in order and n.o.body said a word about the past. I think Florida is a good place for doctors."

"Well, they have a lot of prospective patients in the retiree group."

"How have you been feeling?"

"It's been exciting, but I'm not hustling any. n.o.body's punched me in the ribs or tried to kill me."

"You know," he said with a clinical touch in his voice, "you shouldn't even be getting stressed out, Mike."

"Now you tell me."

"Coming back here may kill you, my friend. That wouldn't make me very happy at all."

From the corner of the room Velda said, "Me either."

"I'm referring to you as well as some of the other company he keeps, young lady," Dr. Morgan said to her. "There are times when tender loving care can get out of hand."

"It beats getting blown up," she snapped back.

"What?"

"Someone doped up the engine of his car. One turn of the key and we would have been history," she added.

He glanced at me for confirmation and I nodded. "The key didn't get turned, doc-we're still here."

His eyes narrowed somewhat. "Did it have to do with this . . . Ponti affair?"

"I don't think it was the old man."

"Ugo, then?"

"How'd you know about him?"

"I researched everything I could on the incident. I even went into some of the events of the past. As a matter of fact, I have even met some of the don's a.s.sociates in the Metro Health Club I belong to."

"What kind of club was that?"

"Mainly doctors and lawyers who got light exercise and a lot of talk when they got fed up with business. The lawyers had some of their clients along on occasions and we were introduced."

"Remember any of them?"

"It wouldn't matter," he said. "They're all dead now. They were powerhouses in their businesses, but every one was pretty old. Harris was probably the youngest and he was crowding eighty when he got killed."

It was Velda who asked it. "Harris who?"

"Oh, they called him something like bad back."

"Could it have been Slipped Disk?"

Morgan's eyebrows rose in a gesture of approval. "Right you are, young lady. That is what they called him. He never seemed to mind, though."

"What did you know about him?" Velda persisted.

"He had money, that was for sure. A little rough around the edges, but I guess you'd have to be when you're selling liquor in New York." He looked over at me. "You know this man?"

"I only know about him, doc. What can you tell me?"

"He had mighty good booze, all Canadian, that's for sure. He was able to sell it at incredibly low prices to select places in the city. Everybody figured he had a hijacking operation going, but there was no report of anything being stolen."

"How long did he operate?"

"That I don't know, but he called it quits about six months before he died."

"You know, for a doctor you kept some strange company too," I said.

"Doctors never meet normal people. Everybody's always sick."

"Harris too?"

"No, not him. He had a rugged look, tanned up, broken nose, that sort of thing. He even dressed like a country boy. When I met him he had on a plaid woolen shirt and corduroy pants. It didn't seem to matter, though. He had as much money as anybody else."

"He pretty friendly with Ponti?"

"Beats me, Mike. I kind of got the idea that it was Ponti who introduced him around. Just something I heard." He squinted at me and added, "Why?"

"Because Slipped Disk Harris buddied up with my old friend who got himself killed."

"What was wrong with that?"

"It was an unlikely combination. Marcos Dooley didn't have hoods for pals."

"Mike . . . there was a time when a real bootlegger wasn't a hood. He could be nothing more than a friendly neighborhood distributor of an item the federal government took away from you."

I grinned at him. Coming from an old rummy, it was nicely put.

Velda was leaning forward on her seat now. There was a set to her face that meant that something was clicking in her mind. All I had to do was stare at her and she said, "Suppose I probe around a little, Mike."

"Be careful."

"Look who's talking. Will you be at the office?"

"Probably. If I'm not, leave a message."

She told us both so long and left.

When the door shut, Morgan said, "Take off your shirt, Mike."

"Come on, doc, I'm okay. All I need are the pills."

"You know better than that. Let me take a look at you."

I didn't argue. I did as I was told, stripped down and let him poke all around the ugly sore spot that was still inflamed and grisly looking. He did what he had to do and bandaged the wound. From the sounds he was making I knew things weren't as good as they could have been.

"You should have stayed in Florida, Mike."

"No choice, doc."

"You can choose to die too. I told you . . . absolute rest is vital. You're right back in the kind of mess that can do you in for good."

"Pal," I said, "your bedside manner is still lousy."

"So's your att.i.tude."

"I'm taking it easy. I told you that."

"The h.e.l.l you are. That wound is starting to open again. Antibiotics can take it down, but you're going to have to make up your own mind what you're going to do. If you were back in the army you'd be hospitalized and strapped down to a bed. As for me, all I can do is give you advice that you don't want to take."

"Is it that bad?"

He made a face. He didn't have to tell me the rest. Finally he said, "If you really want to marry that girl, you'd better think hard on what I'm telling you." From his pocket he took out a pad of prescription blanks, wrote on two of them and held them out. At least I could read his writing. "That's in case you run out of these." He gave me two vials, both containing my usual medication.

"Suppose something does happen, doc . . . if that thing gets ripped open or somebody really creams me?"

"You have your famous .45 with you?"

"Handy enough."

"Save the last bullet for yourself."

"Boy," I told him, "you're about as consoling as a mongoose is to a cobra."

I wasn't in my office more than a minute when Pat called me from his car phone. He was on the way uptown and his voice sounded tight when he said it was imperative that we talk. While I waited for him I sketched out a few notes in outline form to keep all the details in order and when I finished page four I heard the front door open.

Pat walked in, his mouth grim, but it was the man with him that got me a little edgy. I nodded to Pat and said to Homer Watson, "Well, good to see you again." I waved to the chairs and they both sat down. Neither one of them was holding paperwork, so I asked, "You recording this interview?"

Watson smiled gently and patted his pocket.

I opened my desk drawer and took out my miniature Sony, put it in front of me, touched the on b.u.t.ton, gave the date and occasion and asked them, "Then you don't mind if I do?" Neither one answered.

Finally Pat said, "Do you know what you're into, Mike?"

"Unless somebody tells me, I'm running blank. But let's cut to the chase. You and Homer here are scratching for something and you have me right in the dirt. Somehow all this seems to center around Marcos Dooley, and I wasn't there when he was shot. I came back to New York to pay my last respects before he died because we had been in the same war together."

"And you two had a big talk together before he went," Pat reminded me.

"Right. It was at your instigation, pal, so what's the beef?"

"The gist of your conversation," Homer said quietly.

"We went through all this before."

"No, we only touched on the edges."

I held up my hand and stopped him. "You know, back in the eighties when all of the agencies were pushing the RICO statute to hit the Mafia, you got bugs into the private and protected home of Paul Castellano, you bugged Tony Corallo's Jaguar, you had super-scopes and parabolic microphones to keep everybody under surveillance and you couldn't even cover one shot-up war veteran in a city hospital? Come on, what do I look like, a spy of spies?"

"You look like somebody who stumbled into something accidentally."

"And you want to know what it is?"

There was a short pause, and Watson said, "That's right."

"Quid pro quo," I told him. "You tell me."

His nod was imperceptible, but it was there. "There seems to be some soul-searching among the families in the mob. There are several high-ranking firms of attorneys and financial houses investigating illegal activities."

I grinned at him and said, "And they can't find out where the money went."

Curtly, he said, "No." I waited a moment and he added, "It started disappearing about 1986, it seems."

"That's not very definite."

"Our inside sources couldn't do any better." I was about to say something, but he antic.i.p.ated it with a smile. "They sent me. It seems that my superiors think I have a terrier mentality with an uncanny smell for money."