Donald Westlake - Smoke

The immediate interior impression was of the entry to an Edith Wharton novel. Emotionally constipated people should now come down those carpeted stairs into this flocked-wallpaper entryway, not telling one another the important things. Instead, the slender black girl, having risen from her desk, appeared in the doorway to the right, hands clasped at her waist as she said, "Yes?"

"I'm Mr. Leethe, I phoned earlier."

"Oh, yes, the doctors are expecting you. I'll tell them you're here."

She receded back into her room, and he followed into the doorway, where he gazed around at the neatly efficient office while she murmured briefly into the phone. When she hung up, he said, "You had a robbery."

"Yes, we did," she agreed, with a wry little smile; someone she would not have approved of had gained entry.

"All the equipment is new," he explained, displaying his powers of observation.

"I'm still not used to it all yet." Her fleeting smile came and went. "I thought technological obsolescence was fast. Robbery's faster."

"I suppose it is."

"The doctors are one flight up. You'll see them, just at the top of the stairs."

"Thank you."

Mordon climbed the stairs, thinking that in fact he would not be revealing any emotional privacies in this coming meeting, nor could he expect — or want — any from the doctors Loomis and Heimhocker, so the Wharton setting would be honored, after all.

Dr. David Loomis, the blond one with the baby fat, stood at the head of the stairs, smiling nervously and offering a hand, which trembled when Mordon shook it. "It's good to see you, Mr. Leethe."

"And you," Mordon lied.

Loomis gestured with his spastic hand. "We can talk in the conference room."

"Of course."

Loomis led him down the hall, and the conference room turned out to be Edith Wharton's parlor, without the ferns and plant stands. Two red Victorian sofas set at a welcoming angle flanked the fireplace with its polished brass andirons and tools. Tall windows overlooking Forty-ninth Street were discreetly curtained. Garden prints hung on the dark-papered walls.

Dr. Heimhocker, the skinny one with the Afro, rose from one of the sofas as Loomis and Mordon entered. "You have news, I guess," he suggested, coming forward to offer a firmer handshake.

"Possibly," Mordon said. "A start, anyway, or we think so."

"Tea?" asked the skittish Loomis. "Perrier?"

"No, thank you." Mordon had no desire to elongate this meeting into a social call, Edith Wharton be damned.

Heimhocker, who seemed to have better antennae than his partner, said, "Sit down, Mr. Leethe. What kind of start?"

Mordon took the sofa on the right. Heimhocker (relaxed) and Loomis (tense) sat across from him. An elaborate low Oriental table with inlaid teak filled much of the space between the sofas. Taking a small manila envelope from his inner jacket pocket, Mordon said, "We think we've identified your burglar." He shook out the mug shots onto the Oriental table, slid them across to the others. "He told you his name was Freddie, and that much was true."

There were two sets of the mug shots, front and side views, about five years old, courtesy of the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney's office. Each doctor picked up a set. Loomis gasped, "That's him! Peter, that's him!"

" "Fredric Urban Noon,' " read Heimhocker, and raised an eyebrow at Mordon. "Urban?"

"I believe that was a pope. Perhaps more than one."

"That explains it," Heimhocker agreed, and looked at the pictures some more. "He wasn't happy when these were taken, was he?"

"He was going to jail."

"Of course." Heimhocker placed the mug shots before him on the table. "When do we go talk to Mr. Noon?"

Mordon looked blank. "We?"

"David and I are his doctors," Heimhocker said.

"Oh, come now."

"We gave him the injection, that makes—"

"One moment, Doctor," Mordon said. Reaching across the table, he picked up the one set of mug shots from its surface and plucked the other from Loomis's trembling hand. "You met this fellow once," he pointed out, "as he was robbing your offices. You gave him one injection, one unethical and probably illegal injection. You can't—"

"The patient left our care without our approval," Heimhocker interrupted. It seemed he could be as steely cold as Mordon himself. Mordon waited, alert, and Heimhocker went on, "It was never our intention to leave him without proper medical care, without thorough medical observation. We brought the problem of his disappearance to you, which makes you our agent in this matter. You now say—"

"Hardly, Doctor, hardly your agent. I'm employed by—"

"You were talking, a minute ago, about ethics?"

A slippery slope here. Mordon asked himself, Do I want to make enemies of these people? What's the profit in it? On the other hand, what do they want? He said, "Dr. Heimhocker, I don't believe we have a disparity of interest here. You want to see the result of your experiment, naturally, and NAABOR wants to see if the result of your experiment is useful in any other way."

Heimhocker's reaction was to display even greater hostility and suspicion. " What other way?"

Mordon's irritation broke the surface of his professional calm. "Nothing to do with you," he snapped. "We're not talking vivisection here, for God's sake."

"What are you talking?"

"I don't see in what way that matters to you. The fellow's a thief, he robbed you, he stole all your office equipment, what are you trying to protect him for?"

"All we're trying to protect," Heimhocker said, while beside him Loomis's head bobbed in frantic agreement, "is the integrity of our experiment. What we are thinking about, quite frankly, Mr. Leethe, David and I, what we are thinking about is the judgment of our peers, our peers, when we publish. We made a mistake, I grant you that, but the mistake wasn't using whatsisname, Fredric Noon, Fredric Urban Noon, using him for our experimental subject. The mistake was in letting him get away. You say you know where he is, and we say, we're not going to let—"

"No, I didn't say that."

"— him get away again. What do you mean? Of course that's what you said."

"I did not."

"We heard you," Loomis chimed in. "We both heard you."

"What I said," Mordon carefully explained, "was that we know who he is. He left fingerprints in your guest room, our expert lifted them—"

" And left a mess behind."

"Irrelevant, David."

"Still."

Mordon said, "May I go on?"

" I'm sorry," Loomis said. "Yes, please do. You know who he is, but you don't know where he is? That's silly."

"Is it? The man is not on parole, not wanted for any crime—"

"Except the burglary here," Heimhocker interrupted.

"Well, no," Mordon said. "In the first place, it was a robbery, not a burglary, and in—"

Loomis said, "What's the difference? It's the same thing."

"A burglary is a theft in unoccupied premises," Mordon explained. "If the premises are occupied, it's robbery, a more serious crime. Whether or not the occupants and the criminal interact."

"Then he's wanted for robbery," Heimhocker said.

"The robbery was reported, by you," Mordon told him, "but there's been no official report linking Fredric Noon to the crime."

"For God's sake, why not?"

"Well, just from your point of view," Mordon said, "how much do you want Fredric Noon in jail from now on, for the rest of his life, absolutely unavailable to you for observation and experimentation?"

"We've done the experiment."

"And the observation?"

Loomis said, "Peter, he's right." Turning to Mordon, he said, "But the fingerprint man was from the police."