Стюарт Стерлинг - The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Then suddenly anger seemed to strike at her, as though held in leash until now. As though she had not thought it worthwhile to waste it on just one onlooker, desired a larger audience. She flung the door open and stormed indignantly out. Her raised voice filled the corridor with angry remonstrance.

“I won’t be subjected to such an experience again! It’s outrageous and inconsiderate! I wouldn’t have agreed to come down here in the first place if I’d known that was what was wanted of me! It’s an imposition!”

Butler clicked off the dictaphone in the adjoining room, straightened up, with a lopsided mouth. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” he murmured pensively. “She only got sore after she was outside in the hall where she could be heard.”

He picked up a phone on the desk, said to the Headquarters operator: “Get me the office address of a Dr. Meredith, Bradley Meredith.” It rang back shortly and he jotted something down, said, “Thanks.” He started to pick it up a second time, then thought better of it, put on his hat instead and went out of the room.

He had to travel a considerable distance uptown to reach his destination. The doctor’s office turned out to be his home too. He wasn’t, judging by the appearance of the McKinley-era apartment building it was located in, prospering. That, reflected Butler, pushing the bell of the ground-floor rear flat, was nothing against a man these days.

A young housewife opened the door after a wait of several minutes; Meredith couldn’t even afford an office assistant, evidently.

“Dr. Bradley Meredith?”

“You just missed him!” she said regretfully. “He was called away, stepped out only a minute or two before you got here. It was an emergency call, but I don’t believe he’ll be gone long. Would you care to come in and wait?” She motioned him into a forlorn little waiting-room, snapped on a bleak light that didn’t dress it up much. “Did you have an appointment?” she asked. “The doctor’s without an assistant right now and — er, sometimes things get a little mixed up.”

“I’m not a patient,” he said, to ease her embarrassment. He didn’t tell her he was from Headquarters either, in order not to frighten her unnecessarily. “But as long as I’m here, I wonder if you could tell me whether he had a patient by the name of Jerome Swanson? I want to make sure I’ve come to the right man.”

“I’ll look among the unpaid bills; that’s the quickest way of finding out. Most of them are un—” She didn’t finish it, but she didn’t have to.

There must have been an awful lot of unpaid bills to wade through; it took her a good five or ten minutes to riffle through them. Finally she came out again, said, “Yes, there’s a Jerome Swanson down among his patients. I can’t find any record of his calls, though.” She sniffed the air suspiciously. “Oh, the doctor’s supper!” she wailed. “Excuse me!” and ran down a long inner hall to the back.

Butler shook his head pityingly. This Meredith couldn’t be anything but a square-shooter, to let his patients get away with their bills the way he seemed to. He killed time thumbing through a number of 1935 magazines strewn about the waiting-room. Fifteen minutes went by. Half an hour. Not once did the phone ring, nor the doorbell.

The little housewife ventured back again finally, anxiously twisting her apron. “Didn’t he come back yet? I can’t understand it. He told me he’d be back in five or ten minutes at the most. These are supposed to be his office hours, and I know he wouldn’t stay out at this time of the day if he could possibly avoid it.”

Butler was beginning to have an uneasy feeling himself, that he couldn’t understand and at the same time couldn’t quite shake off. “Was the call from one of his usual patients?” he asked her.

“I don’t believe so, or he would have mentioned the name to me. He simply said it was some woman whose child had swallowed something; it simply needed to be stood on its head and spanked. He took the call himself; I was in the back.”

“Where was he to go? Take a look, will you, and see if he jotted it down on his pad.”

She came back with it in her hand. “The pad’s blank. He must have torn off the top leaf and stuffed it in his pocket, to make sure of not forgetting the address.”

The uneasy feeling was deepening in Butler minute by minute. “Let me have that pad a minute just as it is. Can you get me a pinch of coal dust or soot of some kind from your kitchen, any dark substance?”

She came hurrying back with a little held in the hollow of a torn scrap of paper. He took it from her, sifted it over the top of the pad, then breathed on that very lightly, barely enough to clear it off again. It remained seamed in the identations left by the doctor’s pencil point pressing down on the leaf above. A gray tracery, faint but not too indistinguishable to be read, was the result.

“Karpus,” he said, squinting closely at it, “270 Hanson Road. That’s a little far out, isn’t it, for an emergency call to an unknown doctor? Does he use a car when he goes out on calls?”

“Yes. It’s not much of one, but it gets him there.”

“Then all the more reason why he should have been back by now. Let me have its license number.” He got to his feet and started for the door. “I’m going out there myself and see what’s what. If I miss him and he comes back while I’m gone, have him wait here for me. But—” He felt like saying, “But something tells me he won’t come back,” but he didn’t; she was badly enough frightened already without that.

He flagged a cab, said: “Get me out to 270 Hanson Road, and get me there fast; this is police business!”

They drew a motorcycle cop presently, by the rate at which they were bulleting along, but Butler changed him into an escort by a flash of his badge and a shout of explanation from the cab window.

It was way out, in a half-built-up, weed-grown sector. “Somebody’s handed you a bum steer, guv’nor,” said the driver, tapering off uncertainly and pointing.

Butler had already seen the vacancy sign tacked up on the door-frame, himself, and noted the decrepit condition of the place. “Yeah, it was a bum steer, all right,” he said, “but it wasn’t me it was handed to.”

The cop had circled and come back. “That place is vacant,” he called out unnecessarily, from the opposite side of the dirt-surfaced street.

Butler got out and started through the ankle-high weeds toward the door. “I only wish it was,” he hollered back. “Put in a call for me from the nearest box. Then scout around until you dig up a second-hand car; here’s the license number. It ought to be around here somewhere not very far away.”

He climbed the two creaky wooden steps of the frame place, tried the door. The knob promptly came off in his hand, and he was able to get the rest of it out of the way with one good, swift kick.

There was a man’s huddled body lying just a couple of yards away from where he was standing, just far in enough to let the door swing past.

Butler just nodded his head as he crouched down by him, turned him over on his back. The blood hadn’t altogether coagulated yet from the three bullet wounds he counted, it had been so recently done. His instrument case was a little further on, where it had fallen from his hand.

He noticed an ordinary watchman’s oil lamp, that had probably been appropriated from some street excavation, hanging from a nail on the wall. He tested the chimney with his knuckles, and the glass was still faintly warm, as though that, too, had only recently been in use. He went outside and inspected the vacancy sign. It wasn’t nailed down fast, just punched on over a nail in the door-frame.