Warren Murphy - Bottom Line

She locked the bathroom door behind her, turned the water on fast, then picked up the telephone on the wall next to the sink.

She dialed three digits.

When the telephone was picked up, she spoke two words: "Kill him."

She hung up the telephone, washed her hands and went back to her husband.

After Randall, she thought, there were only two Lippincotts to go. The third son, Douglas.

And, of course, the old man.

Elmer Lippincott took the news from Dr. Beers very hard. His son, Randall, had expired in the night. Neither he nor Dr. Gladstone had been able to do anything about it.

"One moment he was fine. And the next moment, he stopped breathing. I'm sorry, Mr. Lippincott."

"You're not to blame," Lippincott said. "I am." His heart was heavy until breaking. Fortunately, his young wife Gloria comforted him, and then she went to sleep.

Very soundly.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ruby couldn't sleep. Even at 2 A.M., the traffic noises in the street below her hotel window annoyed her. The whirring of the heater in the'room annoyed her. And the thought that Remo might be ahead of her in this case annoyed her most of all.

She turned on the bed lamp and dialed Smith's home number. The special telephone was installed in Smith's bedroom. It had no bell and when a call came in, a small red light flashed at the base of the receiver. Smith, who had spent his maturing years with the O.S.S. and then with the CIA, before being selected to head CURE, slept so lightly the red flash woke him instantly.

He lifted the phone off the base, listened for a moment to his wife's heavy regular snoring, and whispered: "Hold on, please."

He put the call on hold, then picked it up on another telephone in the bathroom.

"Smith," he said.

"This is Ruby. I'm sorry for calling you so late but I couldn't sleep."

"Neither could I," Smith lied. He did not like to make people feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable

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people took longer to get to the point. "Have you learned anything?" he asked.

"Well, I'm glad I didn't wake you," Ruby said. "Remember that detective, Meadows? He's definitely the one who wrote the letter to The Man. And he's been missing for about two weeks. The plot against the Lippincotts has something to do with someplace on the East Side. Called Lifeline Laboratory. And there was another guy with Meadows."

"How'd you find this out?" Smith asked.

"I got my hands on Meadows's throwaway sheets when he was writing that letter. They had more information than the letter did."

"What do you think happened to Meadows?"

"My guess is that he bought the farm," Ruby said.

"It would seem likely," Smith said.

"What about the dodo? He find anything?"

"Remo? A little, but it ties in with what you told me." Quickly, Smith filled her in on the attempt to murder Remo and Chiun, and the poisoning of Randall Lippincott, and the fact that the two men who attacked Remo and Chiun were wearing hospital type clothing. Remo suggested a medical tie-in among the Lippincotts.

"Shoot, he getting close," Ruby said.

"I put it in the computers before I left Folcroft," Smith said. "Hold on."

He pressed the hold button and dialed a number that connected directly into the massive computer banks at Folcroft Sanitarium, CURE's headquarters. A mechanical computer voice answered. Smith pushed the buttons on the telephone receiver in a numerical pattern that triggered the computer's readout mechanism. The computer voice recited some infor-

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mation mechanically to Smith, who hung up after first saying his habitual Thank You before picking up Ruby's call again.

"You're right," he told her. "Lifeline Laboratory is funded by Lippincott money. It's headed by two doctors, Elena Gladstone and Loren Beers. They are also private physicians who treat the Lippincott f am-ily."

"What they do at the laboratory?" Ruby asked.

"Some kind of esoteric research. Behavioral studies."

"Esoteric?" asked Ruby.

"Far out," explained Smith.

"Got it. Where's the dodo staying?"

Smith gave Ruby Remo's hotel.

"What are you going to do now?" he asked.

"I was going to visit the laboratory."

"I wouldn't recommend your going there alone. Contact Remo," Smith said.

"He dumb," Ruby said. "He can't find anything out. He'll go barging in and messing up everything, breaking furniture and playing the fool. Then we never find out anything."

"Now you know the cross I've had to bear," Smith said patiently. "But I don't want anything to happen to you."

He was silent. There was a pause at the other end of the line.

"All right," Ruby said. "I'll get together with Remo."

"Good," said Smith. "Keep in touch."

He hung up. Ruby hung up and said softly to herself: "Booshit." She sat on the edge of the bed. It wasn't that she didn't like Remo. She did. In fact,

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sometimes she tingled when she thought of him and if it hadn't been for the fact that Chiun was always trying to push them into bed together so they could produce a tan baby for him, she and Remo probably would have gotten it on by now.

Now, that would be a baby, Ruby thought. Homo superior. If it got Remo's physical ability and her brains. But what if the baby had Remo's brains? What a burden to lay on a child.

She'd worry about that when the time came.

Ruby dressed quickly and checked the wallet inside her large pocketbook to make sure she was carrying the right kind of identification. Downstairs, she called a cab.

"City morgue," she told the driver.

"Gee, lady," he said. "You don't have to commit suicide. I'll marry you."

"I already got one loser," Ruby said. "Drive."

Her Justice Department identification got her through the string of clerks that manned the morgue, even at 2:45 A.M. New York might be bankrupt, but they never seemed to run out of money to hire more clerks, she realized. At the morgue, she passed through seven layers of personnel before she finally got to what was called "the storage room."

A bored policeman checked her identification carefully, moving his lips as he read it, then asked her who she was looking for. The cop smelled of cheap whiskey. His belt pressed into his huge belly like a knife into an unbaked biscuit. Ruby wondered whose brother-in-law he was to get a job indoors in winter.

She took a picture of Zack Meadows from her pocketbook.

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"This one," she said.

"I don't recognize hún," the cop said. "But a lot of them don't look like much anymore. When'd he come in?"

Ruby shrugged. "Sometime in the last two weeks."

"Oh, jeez," the policeman said. "Can't you narrow it down any more than that?"

"No," Ruby said, "I can't. How many unidentified bodies you got coming in in the last two weeks anyway?"

"A couple of dozen, for Christ sake. This ain't Connecticut, you know. This is New York."

"Yeah, I know," said Ruby. "Let's look at them."

The bodies were kept in lockers with large stainless steel doors. They were put in head first. Each body was covered with a sheet and there were cardboard tags tied to the left big toe. With bodies that had been identified, the tags carried that information. Name, age, address. With unidentified bodies, the tags carried when and where the body was found and referred back to a police file number. Most of the unidentified dead were victims of gunshot wounds.

"Don't you send prints to Washington for identification?" Ruby asked the cop, as she shook her head "no" and he slid another corpse back into the freezer locker. The overhead lighting was bright, nonglare fluorescent. She was able to see the faces very clearly.

"Sure. When we get around to it. But we got a lot of things to do and we don't always get around to it in a hurry. This is New York, you know." *