Эллери Куин - Kill as Directed

HARRISON BROWN, M.D. — His passion for money taught him that the right office in the right neighborhood makes for meeting the “right” people

TONY MITCHELL, LL.B. — Kurt Gresham’s dapper attorney, a criminal lawyer who was especially “civil” to a client

KURT GRESHAM — Cherubic looking multimillionaire, who was as harmless as a big fat round H-Bomb

KAREN GRESHAM — Kurt’s copper-haired, green-eyed wife, who wouldn’t deal unless she had the whole deck

DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT GALIVAN — The pipe-smoking “fatherly” type, who upset routines with routine investigations

DR. ALFRED MCGEE STONE — Tall, thin director of the Taugus Institute, he “had no fat”

DR. PETER GROSS — Respected pedagogue, he was one of Harrison Brown’s biggest boosters

MRS. BERNICE STONE — Wife of Dr. Stone, a quick-eyed, plump little hen, who “had no lean”

UNCLE JOE — Always ready to do a favor for a friend — for a price

FRANKLIN GREGORY ARCHIBALD SMITH — The mortician who arranged for the disposal of “Uncle Joe’s brother’s ashes”; he knew how to urn a fast buck

MR. O’BRIEN — A giant of a house detective with a broken nose, who found a crowd in a suite for one

Shoulders, back, chest and thighs, arms and hands and feet — Dr. Brown was big in all departments. Even his nose was big. Once it had been big and straight. Now it was big and crooked, his football trophy.

Dr. Brown had dark eyes and dark hair. His look was dark, too, a chronic darkness; sullen, quite boyishly sullen. It went with his hair, darkly rumpled from running his big fingers through it in chronic desperation.

Dr. Brown’s friends called him Harry. Dr. Harry (for Harrison) Brown was thirty years old, and he considered himself a failure. Had he been able, like many fellow-healers of his acquaintance, to sock it away in a safe-deposit box, he would have considered himself a success. Yet Dr. Harry (for Harrison) Brown was not a shallow man. He was simply in the grip of a disease that strikes men, shallow or deep, impartially.

Dr. Harry Brown’s passion for money came from a lifetime of not having enough of it. “Not enough” is a relative term; Harry Brown’s not-enough had been relative to a background of exposure to too many too-much people. The friends of his father had been rich, and Harry’s friends had been their sons. Harry had gone to a rich man’s prep school on a scholarship; scholarships did not provide convertibles, charge accounts and fat allowances. At his Ivy League college he had roomed with the sons of the rich and dated the daughters of the rich; on holidays he had been seduced into their homes. He had been fed by their French chefs and served by their English butlers. He had slept on their silk sheets, and under them. He had sat on their antiques, buried his shoes in their rugs, gaped at their art investments, driven their foreign cars, ridden their thoroughbreds, taken the helm of their yachts. He had grown up swallowing daily doses of envy as others swallowed vitamin pills. Envy had sustained him and given him the strength to envy more. Envy had sent him through medical school. Envy had chosen and furnished his office.

But there its efficacy had stopped. Envy seemed powerless to provide him with a practice.

Dr. Harry Brown was intelligent. He knew that a practice, a lucrative New York practice, was merely a matter of time. He was only two years out of his residency. But time meant patience, and patience could not be cultivated in the acid soil of envy. Intelligence did not help; it was an empty watering can.

Dr. Harry Brown sat alone in his office, his spacious office with the private street entrance, in the impressive apartment building on Central Park West; sat alone in the office gleaming with the latest and most expensive medical equipment; sat alone waiting for the telephone call.

It was seven o’clock of a pleasant evening in May. Outside, the city was beginning to wrap itself in the warm dusk. He sat in a dusk of his own; only his desk lamp was on, and he had swiveled its business end toward the wall. He was slumped in his genuine leather swivel-chair, long legs sprawled under the desk, morose, glowering, in a tension sweat.

Who would have believed it? Two years of getting nowhere.

Patients today: two. A kid from the next apartment house with an infected finger; a pregnant teenager who wanted an abortion — this one he had sent packing without even charging a fee. One patient yesterday, a passer-by off the street with something in his eye. None at all the day before. And the day before that, the repeater. Hallelujah. The guy hadn’t yet paid for his first visit two months ago. The dead beats smelled out the new doctors. Even assuming that this character paid, that made the grand total of $30 gross for four days. $7.50 a day. Big deal. The rawest office boy these days would turn that down with a sneer.

Who would have believed it? Two years not merely of getting nowhere, but of sliding downhill. Two years of watching the thirty thousand dollars from his father’s life insurance shrink like ice on a hot tin roof. It was all gone, and a lot besides. He was over his head in debt.

Who would have believed it? Unmarried. No family hanging around his neck. No one to look out for but himself. And he couldn’t do even that.

It wasn’t as if he were an incompetent. He was a good doctor. He had proved that in his residency. But how did you spread the gospel? Maybe I should have set up in Los Angeles, he thought wryly, where some doctors use neon signs and advertise in the newspapers.

It was evident now that he had made a bad mistake in opening an office in New York. The yawpers about the “shortage of doctors” had never tried to make a go of it in Manhattan. Why, there were two other doctors in this very building, established men. Seven, excluding himself, in two short blocks. And this kind of office, in this kind of neighborhood, produced a chain reaction. The address dictated expensive clothes, perfect grooming. The clothes and the address made a glittering new car mandatory. And all for what? To impress whom? The kid with the finger? The transient with the eye? The terrified girl with the illegal belly? The dead beat? And to maintain this empty show he had to live in a hole in Greenwich Village, with hardly enough furnishings for a monk’s cell...

The phone rang.

“Harry?” It was Tony Mitchell, all right.

“Yes,” Dr. Brown said.

“Oh, in one of those moods.”

“What’s the score, Tony?” he asked abruptly.

“Dinner at eight. At the Big Dipper. Reservation in the name of Gresham — they lay out the purple carpet instead of the red when you mention it, and purple’s my favorite color. So put on your best bib and tucker, Harry.”

“How many of us?”

“Three. You, me, delicious Mrs. Gresham.”

“What about Gresham?”

“Did I leave the old boy out? Maybe he’ll come, maybe he won’t. You know Kurt — business before pleasure. Pleased?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Dr. Harry Brown said.

“Sure you don’t,” Tony Mitchell chuckled. “Look, son, don’t horse around with little ol’ me. I’m chaperoning tonight, and I know it, and I know you know I know it.”

“Stop it, Tony.”

“Shall I prescribe, Doctor? Four or five vodka martinis and our radiant Karen of Gresh as a chaser. Whoops! That slipped out. Who is the hunter, O Physician, and who the hunted?”

In spite of himself, Harry Brown felt better. “Sounds to me as if you’ve had your four or five already.”

“And so I have, and so I have. Listen, pal, I’ve got to go get pretty. See you at eight.”