He coughed and gagged and ma.s.saged his throat. He spoke in a rasping, traumatic whisper. "Back up and sit on the edge of the bed, smarta.s.s. And hold the back of your neck with both hands."

I obeyed, slowly and carefully. Penny was still on her back on the floor. She was making a horrid articulated sound with each inhalation. She had hiked her knees up. Her clenched fists were against her breast. The fall had knocked all the wind out of her.

He went over and looked down at her. Her breathing eased. He gave her his hand and he pulled her up to a sitting position, but she shook her head violently and pulled her hand away. That was as far as she wanted to go for the moment. She hugged her legs, forehead on her knees.

"Two hours you said," he whispered. "Or three."

"He... he must be resistant to it. He had enough for... a full-grown horse."

With his eyes on me, he moved the straight chair over and placed it about five feet from me, the back toward me. He straddled it and rested the short barrel on the back of the chair, centered on my chest. "We'll have a nice little talk, smarta.s.s."

"About what? This lousy setup? I've got eight hundred on me, so take it. Wear it in good health. Leave."

She got to her feet, took one step, and nearly went down again. She hobbled over toward the head of the bed, her face twisted with pain.

"My ankle," she said. She was having a clumsy evening.

"We are going to have a little talk about Doctor Stewart Sherman, smarta.s.s."

I frowned at him, my bafflement entirely genuine. "I never heard of the man in my life. If this is some variation of the badger game, friend, you are making it too complicated."

"And we are going to talk about how you are putting the squeeze on Tom Pike. Want to deny seeing him today?"

"I went to see Maurie and Biddy, the two daughters of Mick Pearson, a friend of mine who died five years, nearly six years ago, not that it is any of your business."

There was a look of uncertainty in his eyes for just a moment. But I needed more advantage than that and, remembering their very personal little squabble, and remembering how she had reported having no trouble at all with me, I thought of an evil way to improve the odds.

"Like I said. Take the eight hundred and leave. Your broad was pretty good, but she wasn't worth eight hundred, but if that's the going rate, let me pay."

"Now, don't get cute," he said. His voice was coming back.

"Man, the very last thing I am going to be is cute. My head hurts from whatever she loaded my drink with. We had this nice little romp and then, instead of settling down, she wants to go out to some saloon. She said we could come back afterward. So I get dressed and she wants a drink, so I fix two drinks and I drink mine, and the last thing I remember is seeing her watching me in a funny way as she's putting her clothes on. Then the lights went out."

"He's making it up! It wasn't like that at all, darling!"

I raised my eyebrows in surprise and tried to look as though a slow understanding was dawning on me. I nodded. "All right. If she's all yours, buddy, then I'm making it up and it wasn't like that at all. Never happened."

The shape of his mouth was uglier. Without taking his watchful stare off me, he said to her, "How could you figure he'd wake up? How could you figure he'd tell me? A little fun on the side, darling?"

"Please!" she said. "Please, you can't believe him. He's trying to-"

"I'm trying to be a nice guy," I said. "It never happened. Okay, Penny?"

"Stop it!" she cried.

"Maybe the only way you can keep me from using this gun is by proving it did happen. Tell me... some things you couldn't know otherwise, smarta.s.s."

"Pale yellow bra and panties with white lace. Freckles, very faint and small but lots of them, across the tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. A brown mole, about the size of a dime, maybe a little smaller, two inches below her left nipple and toward the middle of her, like maybe at seven o'clock. And when she was making out, she called me Rick. If you're not Rick, you've got more problems."

The blood had pone out of his face. Instead of turning his eyes, he turned his whole head toward her.

In a breathy dog-whistle squeak she said, "But he knows because... I never... when he was..."

"You cheap little b.u.m," he said in a pebbly voice. "You dirty little hot-pants s.l.u.t. You..."

And by then his head was turned far enough, and I made the long reach for the kick and put a lot of energy and hope and anxiety in it, because there was so little barrel jutting out over the back of the chair. But I hit it hard enough to numb my toes and hard enough to kick it out of his hand and over his head. It hit the wall and bounded back, spinning along the rug. He pounced very well and even came up with it, but I was moving then, adjusting stride and balance as I moved, and got my turn and my pivot at the right place and, keeping my wrist locked, put my right fist into the perfect middle of that triangle formed by the horizontal line of the belt and the two descending curves of the rib cage. He said a mighty hawff hawff and sat solidly on the floor about four feet behind where he had been standing, rolled his eyes back into his head and slumped like Raggedy Andy. I scooped up the revolver and knelt beside him and checked heart and breathing. It is a mighty nerve center, and fright had added lots and lots of adrenalin to my reaction time, and it can so shock the nervous system that the breathing will stop and the heart go into fibrillation. and sat solidly on the floor about four feet behind where he had been standing, rolled his eyes back into his head and slumped like Raggedy Andy. I scooped up the revolver and knelt beside him and checked heart and breathing. It is a mighty nerve center, and fright had added lots and lots of adrenalin to my reaction time, and it can so shock the nervous system that the breathing will stop and the heart go into fibrillation.

I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye and I lunged for the girl and caught her just as she got her hand on the door. I spun her back into the room, forgetting her bad ankle. She fell and rolled and started to get up, then lay there curled on the floor, making little smothered hopeless sounds of weeping.

Her Rick was too big to fool with, and I found a couple of wire hangers in the closet, leftovers hung in with the wooden kind that fit into nasty little metal slots so you won't steal them. I straightened one into a straight piece of wire, then held his wrists close together by grasping both his arms just above the wrist in the long fingers of my left hand. I put the end of the wire under my left thumb and then quickly and firmly wrapped it around his wrists as many times as it would go, then bent and tucked the two ends under the encircling strands. It is a wickedly effective device. And quick.

I went over to her and picked her up and sat her on the edge of the bed. She sat blubbering like a defeated child. I squatted and examined her ankle. It was solid and shapely, and beginning to puff on the outside, just below the anklebone.

"I 1-1-love him!" she said. "That was a... a wicked... a wicked evil thing for you to do. That was... a wicked evil lie."

Her wig was askew and I reached and plucked it off. She was a sandy redhead with a casual scissor cut. Without the wig her face was in better proportion, but the eye makeup, particularly with much of it making black gutters down her cheeks, look ridiculous.

"Wick-wick-wicked!" she moaned.

"But there's nothing wicked and evil about picking me up and knocking me out with a Mickey? Go wash that goop off your face, girl. Besides, if I busted it up, maybe I did you a favor. He'll never leave Janice and marry you."

I helped her up. She went limping toward the bathroom. She stopped suddenly and stood quite still, then turned and stared at me. "That was right aft-after he came in, that about Jan-Janice! Then you were never... Then you just pretended... all along you knew?" knew?"

"Go wash your dirty face, honey."

When she closed the door, I emptied Rick's pockets and took the stuff over to the desk and looked at it under the light.

The identification startled and alarmed me. I had thumped and wired up one Richard Haslo Holton, Attorney at Law. He was a county Democratic committeeman, an honorary Florida sheriff, past president of the Junior Chamber, holder of many credit cards, member of practically everything from Civitan to Sertoma, from the Quarterback Club to the Baseball Boosters League, from the Civic Symphony a.s.sociation to the Prosecuting Attorneys' a.s.sociation.

He carried a batch of color prints of a smiling slender dark-haired woman and two boys at various ages from about one year to six years. One does not go about needlessly irritating any member in good standing of any local power structure. I had the feeling he was going to wake up in a state of irritation.

Penny came out of the bathroom with her face scrubbed clean and with the big black lashes peeled off and stuffed away somewhere. She had stopped streaming, but she was tragic and snuffly.

Just then Mister Attorney made a sound of growling and an effort to sit up. It seemed useful to leave a small but lasting impression on both of them. So I went over and scooped him up, slung him, and dropped him in a sitting position in the black armchair. It shocked and surprised him. He was meaty and sizable. I had done it effortlessly, of course. It had given me an ache in all my back teeth, ground my vertebrae together, pulled my arms out of the sockets, and started a double hernia. But, by G.o.d, I made it look look easy. easy.

"Now let's all have a nice little chat," I said.

"- your - - - in - -!" he said.

I smiled amiably. "I can phone Mrs. Holton and ask her to come over and join us. Maybe she can help us all communicate."

So we all had a nice little chat.

8.

SEEMS THAT Miss Penny Woertz was the loyal devoted office nurse for one Dr. Stewart Sherman, a man in the general practice of medicine. He was inclined, however, to get so involved in special fields of interest that he often neglected his general practice. Miss Penny Woertz was the loyal devoted office nurse for one Dr. Stewart Sherman, a man in the general practice of medicine. He was inclined, however, to get so involved in special fields of interest that he often neglected his general practice.

In early July, three months ago, Dr. Sherman had gone down to his office on a Sat.u.r.day evening. Penny knew that he had been anxious to get his notes in shape so that he could finish a draft of a paper he was writing on the effects of induced sleep in curing barbiturate addiction.

He was a widower, a man in his middle fifties, with grown children married and living in other states. He lived alone in a small apartment and did some of his research work there and did the rest of it in one of the back rooms of his small suite of offices. The body was not discovered until Penny came to work on Monday morning at ten, as was her customary time.

The body was on the table in the treatment room. The left sleeve of the white shirt had been rolled up. A length of rubber tubing that had apparently been knotted around the left arm above the elbow to make the vein more accessible was unfastened but held there by the weight of the arm upon it. Over the countertop was an empty container and an empty syringe with injection needle attached. Both the small bottle with the rubber diaphragm top and the syringe showed traces of morphine. The drug safe was unlocked. The key was in his pocket. His fragmentary prints were found on the syringe and the bottle. Beside the empty bottle was a small wad of surgical cotton with a streak of blood diluted by alcohol on it. The autopsy conducted by the county medical examiner showed that the death, to a reasonable medical certainty, was due to a ma.s.sive overdose of morphine. According to Penny, nothing else was missing from the drag safe, or from the other stocks of drugs used in the treatment of patients. But she could not tell whether anything was missing from the back room stocks especially ordered by Dr. Stewart Sherman and used in his experimentations.

She had unlocked the door when she arrived.

By then I had unwired Rick Holton. His att.i.tude was a lot better and the wire had been painful.

He said, "At one time I was the a.s.sistant state attorney here in Courtney County. The way it works, the state attorney has a whole judicial district, five counties, so he has an a.s.sistant prosecutor in each county. It's elective. I'd decided not to run again. The state attorney is still the same guy. Ben Gaffner. The day I heard that Stew Sherman was supposed to have killed himself, I told Ben that I would just never believe it. Well, dammit, they had the autopsy, and Sheriff Turk investigated and he turned the file over to Ben Gaffner, and Ben said there was no reason in the world why he should make a jacka.s.s of himself by trying to present it to the grand jury as as something other than suicide, which it d.a.m.n well was-according to him." something other than suicide, which it d.a.m.n well was-according to him."

"The doctor couldn't couldn't have killed himself!" Penny said. have killed himself!" Penny said.

"That's what I felt," Rick said. "So because they were closing the file, I thought what I'd do was use what time I could spare to do some digging. Ben gave me his unofficial blessing. The first time I interviewed Penny, I found out she felt exactly the same way."

So that was how their affair had started. From what I had heard while pretending to be unconscious, I knew it was going sour. And now they were very stiff with each other, harboring delicious resentments.

As I thought the tensions between them might inhibit their communicating with me, I tried to take them off the hook. I told Holton that when the taste of the gin had clued me, I decided to give her some real reason to be jumpy and maybe teach her that pretending to be a hooker could be a messy little game, so I had peeled her out of her dress and bra. "She put up a good fight," I said.

He looked a little happier. "I see. So you made me so G.o.dd.a.m.n mad at her, I gave you an opening. You're pretty good, McGee."

"If I'd known you were a member of the bar and every lunch club in town, I wouldn't have tried you. It was a very small opening and you carry a very damaging caliber. If you'd had the hammer back, I wouldn't have tried you. But why me? Like I told you, I never heard of the doctor."

He summarized what he had been able to dig up. He had an orderly mind and professional knowledge of the rules of evidence. With Penny's help he had located two people who had seen a very tall man let himself out of Dr. Sherman's offices late Sat.u.r.day night. One guessed eleven thirty. The other guessed a little after midnight. Penny knew that when the doctor was working on his research projects, he would not answer the office phone. The answering service had recorded no calls for the doctor that evening. One witness said that the man had gotten into a dark blue or black car parked diagonally across the street, a new-looking car, and had driven away. That witness had the impression that the car bore Florida plates but had a single digit before the hyphen rather than the double digit designating Courtney County. He had taken affidavits and put them in his private file on the case.

"But how does Tom Pike come into the picture?" I asked.

"I was looking for motive. I heard a couple of people saying that Stew had died at one h.e.l.l of an inconvenient time as far as Tom was concerned, and he might take a real bath on some of his deals. So I wondered if maybe somebody had killed the doctor just to put the screws on Tom. You see, Stew Sherman was the Pike family doctor, and when Tom started Development Unlimited two years ago, Stew invested with him in a big way. He'd always made pretty good money in his practice and on top of that he had the money his wife left when she died three years ago. Tom had put together some marvelous opportunities for Stew and the others who went in on the first deals he made. They stood to make really fantastic capital gains. Money is always a good motive. So I had a long talk with Tom. At first he didn't want to tell me anything. He said everything was fine. But when he saw what I was driving at, he got very upset and he opened up. The doctor had been fully committed on three big parcels of land east of town. Tom had put together a fourth deal, and Stew had made preliminary arrangements to borrow a large sum of money from the bank, using his equity in the first three parcels as collateral. Based on the bank's preliminary approval, Tom had gone ahead and committed the group on the fourth deal. Now not only was he going to be badly squeezed on the fourth deal, but the Internal Revenue Service had come in on an estate tax basis and froze the doctor's equities in the other three parcels, and actually could order sale of those equities in order to meet the estate tax bite. Tom told me that Doctor Sherman couldn't have died at a worse time, not only for the sake of his own estate, but also because of what it could do to the others who were in on all four syndicates. He told me that he was going to have to do one h.e.l.l of a lot of scrambling to keep the whole thing from falling apart."

"I a.s.sume he made out all right."

"The word is that he squeaked through, but that it cost him. As a matter of fact, Stew's sons tried to bring some kind of action against Tom because there was a lot less left than they thought there ought to be. But there was no basis for action. I asked Tom if anybody could have killed the doctor in order to mess up the deals he had on the fire. The idea shocked h.e.l.l out of him. He said he could think of some people who might have wanted to, but they would have had no way of knowing how badly it would pinch him. He agreed that it seemed very, very strange that the doctor should kill himself, but he couldn't offer any alternative."

"But some tall man has been putting the squeeze on Tom Pike?"

"That's one of those funny breaks you get, the kind that may mean something or nothing. In late August, Tom Pike drew twenty thousand in cash out of one of his accounts. A lot of real estate deals are cash deals, so it wasn't anything unusual. I found out how much by checking back, quietly, through a friend, after I heard what happened. One of my law partners mail-ordered a big reflector telescope for his twelve-year-old kid's birthday and had it sent to the office. He set it up, tripod and all, and was fooling around putting the different eyepieces on and aiming it out the office window at the shopping plaza a block away. He had it at two hundred and forty power, meaning that something two hundred and forty yards away looks like one yard away. He focused it on a car parked all alone in an empty part of the lot and when he got it sharp and clear, he found he was looking at Tom Pike standing and leaning against the car. He wondered what he was waiting for. Just then another car pulled up and a tall man got out. My partner said he had never seen him before. He had a lot of tan and looked rugged and wore a white sport shirt and khakis. Tom gave the stranger a brown envelope. The stranger opened it and took out a sheaf of bills and riffled the end of the sheaf with his thumb. My partner said he could d.a.m.ned near see the denomination. He then put the brown envelope into his car and took out a white envelope or package and gave it to Tom Pike, who stuffed it away so quickly my partner didn't get much of a look at it. They got into their cars and took off. He mentioned it to me a couple of days later. We were talking about a divorce action we're handling and he said maybe we should invest in a telescope and told me about spying on Tom. There could be a lot of answers. Maybe it was a cash option on ranchland or groveland. Maybe he was buying advance highway information from a road engineer. But maybe it was the tall man who was in Stew's office that night and got into the act somehow."

"So just how did you come up with me?"

"I was at the bar with a client last night when you came in with Tom's sister-in-law. She started crying and you took her out. I told my client I'd be right back. I saw you unlock One-O-nine and took a look at your plate and saw it was a rental number. I got your name at the desk. I have a cop friend I give some work to when he's off duty and he tailed you today and phoned me when you pulled into the Pike house. I met him here and he went through your room while I hung around the house phone to give him a warning call if you got back too soon. He didn't find a thing that would give us a clue. I don't have any official status, of course. And even if I did, I could still get in real trouble taking you in for a shakedown. Penny and I worked out the idea of her seeing if she could pick you up. I knew about the opened bottle from what my cop friend told me. Penny had something she thought would work fast. While you were eating I spiked your bottle."

"How did you get in?"

"With the pa.s.skey from my cop friend. He's got a master key for every big motel in the area."

I looked at them. "You people are very diligent and so on. And d.a.m.ned stupid. So if I didn't want to get picked up? So I wanted to come back here all by myself and kill the bottle?"

"I was five minutes away. She was going to phone me and I was going to come over, use the phone, and get you out of the room on some pretext. She was going to use the pa.s.skey and dump the bottle or steal it."

"Because," she said in a small voice, "to make one drink strong enough, I had to put enough in so that all of it would have killed you, through suppression of the sympathetic nervous system."

"Why did did Pike give you the twenty thousand?" Holton asked. Pike give you the twenty thousand?" Holton asked.

"Amateur to the end," I said. "I never met him until today. Can I prove it? No, sir. I can't prove it. Do I want to try to prove it? No. I can't be bothered. Do you want to try to prove it? Go ahead, Holton." I spun the cylinder of his Police Positive. Full load. I handed it to him. "The doctor was probably a nice guy. And you are probably fairly nice people yourselves. But you two are a nurse and a joiner and if you found somebody who really killed the doctor, he'd probably kill the two of you also. You belong on serial television. If I had killed the doctor, I would rap your skulls, put you in the trunk of the car, and drop you into one of the biggest sinkholes I could find and cave some of the limestone sides down onto you."

He was flushed as he got to his feet, stuffing the revolver into his belt. "I don't need lectures from some d.a.m.ned drifter."

"Stay busier. Join more clubs."

"Do I have your permission to go, Mister Mister McGee!" McGee!"

"Nothing could give me more piercing delight."

"Come on, Pen."

"Go home to Janice," she said. "You've been out enough nights."

"Look, I'm sorry sorry I blew my stack when he said...uh-" I blew my stack when he said...uh-"

"You were so ready, ready, darling. You were just darling. You were just aching aching to believe something like that, something nasty. You want to think that because you got to first, second, third base, and home, anybody can. Anytime. Go to h.e.l.l, Rick. You are a mean lousy little human being and you have a dirty little mind." to believe something like that, something nasty. You want to think that because you got to first, second, third base, and home, anybody can. Anytime. Go to h.e.l.l, Rick. You are a mean lousy little human being and you have a dirty little mind."

"Are you coming with me or aren't you?"

"I'm going to stay right here for a little while, thank you."

"Either you come with me-"

"Or you'll never forgive me, and we're through, and so on. Oh, baby, are we ever through! If there's no trust, there's no nothing at all. Good-bye, Rickie dear. All the way home to Janice you can dwell on all the nasty things you think are probably going on right here on this bed."

He spun around, marched out, and slammed the door viciously.

Her attempt to smile at me was truly ghastly. Her mouth wouldn't hold together. "Hope you didn't mind me... hope it was all right to..." Then the mouth broke and she sprang up and went, "Wow! Hoo Oh waw," "Wow! Hoo Oh waw," as she hobbled into the bathroom. as she hobbled into the bathroom.

Fort Courtney was nice enough if you didn't mind it being full of sobbing women trotting into your bathroom, fifty percent of them running with a limp. I took the ice bucket outside and dumped the water out of it and scooped more cubes out of the machine. I thought of dumping out the spiked gin, then changed my mind, capped it, and put the bottle in a back corner of the closet alcove. I unwrapped a fresh gla.s.s and opened the second bottle of Plymouth and fixed myself a drink. When she finally came out, slumped, small and dispirited, I offered her a drink.

"Thanks, I guess not. I'd better be going."

"Got a car here?"

"No. Rick dropped me off. My car is over at my place. I can phone for a cab from the office."

"Sit down for a minute while I work on this. Then I'll drive you home."

"Okay." She wandered over and got a cigarette from her purse and lit it. She picked up the thick red-blond wig between thumb and finger like somebody picking up a large dead bug. She dropped it back onto the countertop and said, "Fifteen ninety-eight, plus tax, to try to look like a s.e.xpot."

"You didn't do badly."