Хал Эллсон - Mink Is for a Minx

“Randall,” he said to me very softly, his face reflecting some kind of inner shame, “when we check out the doctors who weren’t in Riverside sixteen years ago, we can forget everybody but general practitioners and neurosurgeons.”

“How come?” I asked him. “What’s happened to eliminate all the dentists and vets?”

“I’ll show you,” he said, “if you’ll come to the morgue with me.”

I went, of course. Doc Sanderson led me to the slab where John Smith lay. He pulled on an overhead bulb and drew the white sheet down from the corpse’s shoulders, so that when he turned the body over its back was exposed. He pointed to a white, slightly crinkled scar that ran down the dead man’s spinal column for several inches with suture marks on each side of it.

“See that?” he asked. I nodded. “That’s from an operation of some sort,” Doc Sanderson said. “Spinal fusion, I’d say.”

I asked, “What about it?”

Doc said, “Just look at this.” He took an X-ray negative from the big envelope under his arm and pointed. “That’s what’s under the scar,” he said. “I took this X-ray of his back a few minutes ago. Just thought of it when we were talking about those hysterectomies.”

I looked with a layman’s puzzled eyes at the vertebrae that the X-ray negative showed. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

“Exactly!” he replied almost exultantly. “There’s nothing to see. That’s just the point! This man, John Smith or whoever he is, has an operation scar on his back, and under the scar there is absolutely no sign at all that the bones have ever been touched by a surgeon!”

“Ah,” I said finally. “Now I get it, Doc. Thanks. This should do it for us.”

And it did.

First, we checked the general surgeons and neurosurgeons in Riverside, the only ones that might have done a back operation. There were only a handful altogether, as it turned out, and only one who had come to Riverside from another city and been practicing here for less than sixteen years.

This was Dr. Jonas Ridley, a distinguished, civic-minded man, head of the surgical staff at Riverside Hospital, and a highly respected member of the American College of Surgeons.

Next, we got John Smith, our man in the morgue, quickly identified from his photograph by two cousins and an aunt, in the southern city from which Dr. Jonas Ridley had moved to Riverside, as — yes — John Smith, their cousin and nephew respectively.

And finally, to cap it all, the hospital to which Dr. Ridley had been attached there, found in its archives a record of a spinal fusion operation performed sixteen years before by Dr. Jonas Ridley on a patient named John Smith.

So John Smith, it seemed pretty certain, had recently discovered, through a casual insurance physical examination perhaps, that he had paid Dr. Ridley seven hundred and fifty hard-earned dollars sixteen years ago to perform on him a back operation that hadn’t been necessary at all. And that Dr. Ridley had never, in fact, undertaken — except to make a surface incision.

When I faced him with all this, Dr. Ridley stoutly maintained that he knew nothing whatever about anybody called John Smith, or about his murder.

But the jury did not agree with him, for four good reasons. Reason one was that I found a flashlight behind the front seat of Dr. Ridley’s car that had demonstrably been used to bash in Smith’s head, since it still bore a few of his hairs and some spots of his blood on it.

Reason two was that I found in the back seat of Dr. Ridley’s car a men’s-store label that had been cut from John Smith’s inside jacket pocket.

Reason three was that Dr. Ridley could not satisfactorily account for his time on the night of the murder.

And reason four was that old Doc Sanderson testified so persuasively about Dr. Ridley’s deliberate malpractice sixteen years before, as revealed by his X-ray of John Smith’s back.

So we managed to convict Dr. Ridley, all right.

But both Doc Sanderson and I were a little ashamed of ourselves for not seeing right away that John Smith’s note had really contained the whole truth of the case in just two simple words: ‘back payment.’

Realizing the uselessness of further effort, Ralph Bradley, lately M. D., drew away from the girl. Full-length on the rickety table in the shabby room, she had hemorrhaged prodigiously. Now she was quite dead.

Bradley stood looking at her with eyes that burned in the swarthy strip of flesh between white surgical cap and mask. He felt no guilt or remorse. She had come to him of her own free will. He’d required not even her name, only the two hundred dollars she’d extracted from her purse and passed to him with a trembling hand. She’d known what she was doing, the chance she was taking.

Who else had known?

The question lay scalpel-sharp in Bradley’s mind. Timid and guilt-ridden, she most probably had kept her condition secret from her family, if she had any. The man responsible, Bradley assumed, was either married and in circumstances legally beyond her reach, or a punk kid who’d run out on her.

The man had rejected her, or she wouldn’t have reached the desperation that drove her to an abortion.

There was a good chance she had come here without telling anyone. However—

Oh yes, Bradley thought angrily, there is always a however — or a but — or an if—

Someone was going to miss the thin, over-anxious girl with the mouse-tan hair. Someone would start looking. And it was possible her movements could be traced.

Bradley despised the sight of her, of what she now represented. He turned away from her and went behind the dusty Japanese screen in the corner. His mind was busy while he stripped off his rubber gloves and smock.

Consider the worst, he told himself. Project into a future in which a big, cynical detective knocks on the door. You open the door. “Yes?”

He shows his credentials. “I want to talk to you. May I come in?”

You shrug and stand aside for him to enter. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a girl.” He calls her by name, a name you have honestly never heard before.

“I don’t know her,” you say. “I’ve never heard the name before.”

He describes her. Then: “She came here. We know she was coming here. We have traced her to your office.”

“Your information is incomplete,” you say. “Such a girl never came here. Why should she?”

“She was pregnant.”

“Oh?”

“She wanted an abortion.”

You look at him coolly. “I resent the implication.”

“I don’t care what you resent. I want to know where the girl is.”

“And I have no idea. Look around. Satisfy yourself.”

You are neither a help nor a hindrance as he goes through the apartment. Finally, he has completed the circuit, returned to the front door. There is frustration in his eyes.

“You’re the same Ralph Bradley,” he says, “who was involved in the recent dope traffic scandal.”

“Yes,” you say, “and my defense bankrupted me, ruined my reputation, and ended my career.”

“I suspect you have a new career, doctor. Illegal medicine.”

“Perhaps you suspect,” you say, “because I am convenient, easy to suspect. Because you haven’t the imagination or mental acuity to find out what happened to the girl. Maybe she decided to simply run away.”

Then you close the door in his face. His suspicions constitute no threat — so long as he doesn’t have proof.

And therein, Bradley thought as he scrubbed his hands at the screened basin, lies the biggest if that has arisen in my entire life. The proof lies dead on the table. The final scene will not go at all as I have imagined it — unless I get rid of the proof.