'Then I'll try him at home,' Parker told her. He turned around and went away, and behind him she called, 'It won't do you any good. Office hours are not until
He went back around the empty porch to the main door and rang the bell, and after a minute the door was opened by a stocky man in paint-smeared trousers and a grey undershirt. 'Yes? Can I help you?'
'I'm looking for Dr. Rayborn.'
'That's me, oddly enough,' the stocky man said, and smiled down at the clothes he was wearing. 'I've just been puttering around.' He was about fifty, with a sort of professional joviality about him, but not bad enough to be offensive. He looked up from his clothing and said, 'If this is a medical visit, my normal office hours are from two till five. Unless there's some sort of emergency?' He said it with the air of a man not discounting any possibility, no matter how remote or how troublesome.
'It isn't a medical visit,' Parker told him. 'I want to talk to you about one of your patients, Joe Shardin.'
'Oh, Joseph Shardin!' He seemed unaccountably pleased. 'You knew him?'
'We were old friends. My name is Willis, Charles Willis.'
'Come in, then, do come in, I'd love to chat with you.' He smiled, and patted Parker's arm, and closed the door after him. 'This way, come into the parlour.' As he led the way into a large, airy room full of overstuffed furniture and complicated doilies, but with no carpet on the waxed floor, he said, 'Joseph Shardin was a fine man, a fine man. The kind of man you hate to lose, if you know what I mean. Sit down anywhere.'
Parker was assuming that Gliffe had called to warn the doctor Parker was coming. In a town this size, everybody knowing everybody else so well, Gliffe would do that whether there was anything to cover or not. And the doctor would make believe he hadn't got any call; that he was being polite.
Settling himself in an armchair that just kept sagging downward till he was almost sitting on the floor, the doctor said, 'You say you were an old friend of Joseph Shardin?'
'We were in business together,' Parker told him. 'Years ago.' He wasn't being evasive for the hell of it; it was just he didn't know much about Joe Sheer's cover story, what Joe had been claiming around here to have retired from.
The doctor said. 'He was retired now, you know.'
'I know. He retired five or six years ago.'
'When he moved here.' The doctor nodded, as though they'd come to an important agreement about something or other, and then he said, 'I believe he had relatives in Omaha; that's only thirty-five miles from here, you know. Or, no, wait a minute, he didn't have any relatives at all, did he?'
This was complicated, and for a minute Parker wasn't sure how to handle it. Joe Sheer had divided his time between a house in this town here and an apartment down in Omaha. It was in Omaha, in the safer privacy of a good-sized city, that he'd met with old friends from time to time, or occasionally took on the role of advisor to some group planning a tricky score. Here, in this little town, he'd just been a retired old man, a fisherman, a checkers player, a porch sitter, a pipe smoker. If he'd explained his trips to Omaha by letting it be known around town he had relatives down there, then by his death he'd blown that part of his cover sky-high. He didn't have any relatives in Omaha; he didn't have any relatives at all. None that would claim him, anyway.
The best way out of this was to plead ignorance: 'I never knew much about his family.'
'He was a solitary man,' said the doctor, being a trifle portentous now, 'but not a lonely one. That is, he never struck me as being lonely, the way some elderly folk are, wistful, just waiting around for the grave. It never seemed to him he'd had his fill of life, or that's the way it looked to me.'
'Did you treat him long?'
'The last three years, about,' said the doctor, and nodded, agreeing with himself.
'How long-' But the question didn't get to be asked
yet; a telephone started ringing. The doctor raised a hand for silence, and his head to listen. Looking into the middle distance, his head up and alert as a hunting dog, he listened to the phone ring, and then the murmuring silence that followed it. Parker waited with him, not saying anything.
Rubber shoes squeaked in the hallway outside, the nurse appeared in the doorway. She glanced at Parker, was affronted at his having got into the house after all, and turned her head away, saying, 'It's for you, Doctor.'
'Thank you. I'll take it here.'
The nurse went away again, and the doctor got to his feet saying, 'Excuse me just one minute, won't you?'
'Sure.'
The doctor walked over by the windows – the curtains a patterned silhouette cutting off the brightness of the day outside – and sat down on what looked like an uncomfortable antique chair next to a gleaming small table. The telephone, sitting on this table, was for some reason almost invisible; maybe because of the dark wood of the table and the pattern of the curtain behind it.
The doctor picked up the receiver and said, mildly, 'Rayborn here.' He listened, sitting half-turned away from Parker, the bright daylight outside the window making it difficult to make out details of his form or face. Parker had only the voice to go by.
The doctor said, 'Is this who I think it is?' Then he said, 'Yes, he called.' While listening this time, he turned his head and smiled at Parker, reassuring him he wouldn't take long, then turned back and said, 'Yes, he is.' He listened, and said, 'Of course not.' Another space, and he said, 'I'll try. I don't promise anything.' A wait again, and then, 'You do that. Good-bye.
There was no reason to suppose the call had anything to do with Parker, but if it had he could supply the other half of the conversation. If Gliffe and Rayborn and Younger were all in this together, whatever it was, then
