Warren Murphy - Bottom Line

"Will he live, Chiun?" Remo asked again. "I do not know. The poison was much in his system. It depends on how much he wishes to live."

"You keep saying poison," Remo said. "What kind of poison?"

Chiun shook his head. "This is a thing I do not know, a poison that does not injure the body but changes the mind. This fighting one's clothing. This feeling that the air itself is a heavy blanket. These things I do not understand."

"It happened to his brother too," Remo said. "Afraid of Japanese."

Chiun looked at Remo quizzically. "We are talking about poison of the brain. What does that have to do with it?"

"His brother. He couldn't stand being in a room with Japanese," Remo said.

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"That is not mind poison," Chiun said. "That is just good taste. Can you not tell the difference?"

"Please, Chiun, no lectures about the pushy Japanese. Anyway, this guy's brother dove out a window because he couldn't stand them."

"How high a window?" Chiun asked.

"Six stories."

"And the doors to this room were not nailed shut?" Chiun asked.

"No."

"Well, perhaps that was a little extreme," Chiun said. "Six stories." He thought about it for a moment. "Yes, that was extreme. About three stories extreme," he said. "No one should ever jump out a window more than three stories high to avoid the Japanese, if the windows and doors are not bolted and nailed phut."

Remo watched Lippincott carefully. A sense of peace seemed to have overtaken his body. The tenseness that had bunched up his shoulders and hips was slowly passing from his body, which was softening into a relaxed and deep sleep.

"I think he's going to be all right, Chiun," Remo offered.

"Silence," thundered Chiun. "What do you know?" He touched Lippincott's throat, and then the pit of his stomach, probing deeply with the balls of his fingers.

"He is going to be all right," Chiun said.

"I wonder if that injection in the arm had anything to do with this," Remo said.

Chiun shrugged. "I do not understand your western medicine, ever since I stopped watching Rad Rex

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as Dr. Bruce Barton, when the show became vile and obscene. Since then, nothing is the same."

"I wonder who his doctor was," Remo said. He went back to the nurse's station, but the nurse only knew that every doctor in the hospital had looked in on Lippincott. She had a list of names a full page long.

Remo nodded and began to walk away. "When will I see you?" the nurse asked. "Very soon," Remo said with a smile. Lippincott was stiill sleeping when Remo returned and Chiun was watching him, a pleased and self-satisfied look on his face. Remo used the telephone in the room to dial a number that reported on the winning lottery numbers hi the 463 separate lotteries held in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area. To get all the numbers, a person at a pay phone had to drop nine dimes into the coin box. Remo listened as the tape recorded voice began to spin out the winning combinations of numbers, and Remo said deliberately: "Blue and Gold. Silver and Gray," and then gave the number he read on the base of Lippincott's telephone.

He hung up and within a minute, the telephone rang.

"Smitty?" Remo said as he lifted the receiver. " "Yes, what is it?"

"Randall Lippincott's in the hospital. He went some kind of crazy. I think it might be like his brother."

"Yes, I know," said Smith. "How is he?" "Chiun says he'll live. But he needs a guard here. Can you get somebody from the family or something?"

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"Yes," Smith said. "Ill have somebody there soon."

"We'll wait for him. Another thing. Check what you've got on the Lippincotts. There was a doctor here who might have shot Randall up with something to kill him. See if you can find any link among the Lippincotts. Same doctor or something." The smell of flowers was again strong in Remo's nose.

"All right," Smith said.

"Anything from Ruby yet?" Remo asked.

"Not a word."

"Hah. So much for women," said Remo.

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CHAPTER NINE

Elena Gladstone was asleep in the third floor bedroom of the brownstone on East Eighty-first Street. She slept naked and when the private telephone rang, she sat up in bed and cradled the telephone against her shoulder. The sheet slid from her body.

"This is Dr. Gladstone," she said. She listened as she heard a familiar voice, then sat straight up in bed, away from the headboard, as if startled.

"Alive?" she said. "He can't be. I administered the shot myself."

She listened again. "I saw them there but they couldn't ..."

"I don't know," she said. "I'll have to think about it. They are still at the clinic?"

She paused and pondered. "I'll talk to you tomorrow," she said.

After she replaced the telephone, she remained sitting up in bed. She could not understand how the old Oriental and the young white man had saved Randall Lippincott's life. It wasn't possible, not with the shot she had given him. But they had done it, and even now guards were on then: way to protect Lippincott. If he recovered, he would be sure to talk.

Something would have to be done about him. And

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about the two intruders, because she still had more Lippincotts to kill.

She thought of the two. The Oriental. The young American. And as she thought of Remo and his deep eyes and the smile that bared his teeth and moved his lips but never extended to his eyes, she shuddered involuntarily and pulled the sheet up around her body.

They had to go. In the case of the American, it was a shame, but she could do it. She reached for the telephone.

Ruby Gonzalez had hit every saloon on Twenty-second Street searching for Flossie. She hadn't realized that white folks had so many saloons, that white saloons had so many drunks and that so many drunks thought they were God's gift to young unescorted black women. Not that any of them throught so much about it that they would buy her a drink. She had bought her own in the first six saloons, a vile concoction of orange juice and wine. She had been raised on it as orange juice and champagne but there was no champagne to be found in these Twenty-second Street saloons.

She had started out by hanging out in the taverns, hoping to get someone in conversation and find out about Flossie, but that hadn't worked, and so, after six bars and twelve OJ and wines, she had stopped drinking and stopped hanging out. Instead, she walked into the bar, accosted the bartender and asked if he knew where she could find Flossie.

Bartender: "Who wants to know?"

Ruby: "You know who she is?"

Bartender: "No."

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Ruby: "Big fat woman. Blonde."

Bartender: "Why you want her?"

Ruby: "You know her?"

Bartender: "No. What do you want her for?"

Ruby: "She's my nanny, sucker, and I come to take her back home to Tara."

Bartender: "Oh, yeah?"

Next bar.

And now she was down to the last bar on Twenty-second Street, as far west as one could go without falling into the Hudson River. Or, more accurately, onto it because the river debris was so thick, the water had the consistency of limestone. If the river were any dirtier, you could ice skate on it in July.

She walked into the final bar.

Pay dirt.

At the end of the bar, she saw a blonde woman partially sitting on the stool.

The woman overflowed the stool, her giant buttocks surrounding it, covering the top and hiding it from view. She wore a red and blue flowered dress. Her upper arms were massive and her hair a tangled mass of every-which-way strings. Ruby thought that if it hadn't been for the fat and the dirt and the ugly dress and the uncombed hair and the bleary blue eyes and the double and triple chins and the arms that were shaped like legs of lamb, big legs of lamb, Flossie would still have been homely. Her nose was too broad and her mouth too small and her eyes were set too close together in her head. Even at her best, she would have been pretty bad, Ruby decided.