He stood and adjusted his stethoscope, then thrust its dangling end against Barnes’s belly. “Cough!”
Barnes coughed.
“That’s not for your heart, that’s your lungs.” The old doctor put his instrument in half a dozen other places, occasionally rapping Barnes’s ribs with his knuckles. “How long since you’ve had a good physical?”
“Five years, maybe. Six.”
“I thought so. Now I want you to skip in place. Watch how I do it.” He hopped from one leg to the other; Barnes tried to imitate him. “Good enough. You want to see how a sick man walks?” The old doctor hunched one shoulder and lurched about, dragging a leg. “This is sick!” He chuckled fiendishly and clawed with his spotted old man’s hand at Barnes’s bare shoulder. “Yes, Master! Igor will obey!”
Barnes recoiled, and the doctor straightened up and shoved his stethoscope against his chest again. “Nothing like a little anxiety to bring up the pulse rate.”
“I just wanted to ask you about Mr. Free,” Barnes said.
“Ben Free?” Dr. Makee took the earpieces from his ears, walked around his desk, and sat down. “Your heart seems to be pretty good. What did you say your name was?”
“Osgood M. Barnes.”
“Well, I don’t think you have a problem there, Mr. Barnes. Just the same, I’m going to check your blood pressure. Put on your shirt again, and come over here and sit down. Father deceased?”
Taking his shirt from the halltree, Barnes nodded.
“What did he die from?”
“Accidental causes.”
The old doctor sipped his coffee. “You’d just as soon not talk about it, I take it. Fine with me. Sit down here and let me do the blood pressure. You can put on your tie but not your coat. You wanted to ask me something about Ben Free?”
Barnes nodded again.
“Thought you lived with him. I’ve seen you over there, so you ought to know more than I do. Put your arm here, level, on my desk. You got your breath? Heart pretty well slowed down?”
“Yes, fine,” Barnes said. “I did live with him. You’re right about that, Dr. Makee.”
“You were over there when I stitched up the fella that got hit with the ax.”
“Yes, I was. But Mr. Free was gone by then—we didn’t know where he was. We still don’t. We’re hoping you can tell us.”
The old doctor wrapped a rubber cuff around Barnes’s arm. “I won’t, because I don’t know. That satisfy you? Don’t know where he went when they started to wreck his house. Don’t know where I’ll go myself when they start on this one.”
“It’s not a question of my being satisfied, Doctor. We’re worried about him. He’s lost his home. We’d like to help him if we can.”
“Out of the goodness of your hearts? I don’t believe you, Mr. Barnes. People don’t do those things. They think they do, but they don’t. Something happens, and they think if it weren’t for such-and-such I’d do so-and-so. But such-and-such is always there, except when so-and-so might put money in their pockets.”
“Are you saying there aren’t any humanitarians? I’d have said you were one, Doctor. You said you were retired, too. Why do you take care of your patients?”
“Thunderation, somebody’s got to. Besides,” the old doctor chuckled, “because I do, I can get away with just about anything I want around this neighborhood. You notice how I made you take off your shirt soon as you came in here?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I do that with all of them. Make ’em strip so I can check their heart and lungs. For decency’s sake, if a lady or one of these young gals has on a brassiere, I don’t make her take it off. But lots of these young gals don’t wear them now—you know that?”
“Yes,” Barnes said. “I’ve noticed that myself.”
“And when they do, why frequently they have these real lacy, frilly things. I like them damn near as well. You’re too young to recall what it was like in my day, Mr. Barnes. But back when I was a boy, if I saw down the front of a good-looking gal, I’d really seen something. Why, I thought about something like that for a month afterward. Why when we got the Monkey Ward catalog, my ma used to tear out the pages with the ladies’ unmentionables to keep my brothers and me from lookin’ at ’em.”
Barnes grinned. “You’re not really that old, Doctor. You know, you remind me a lot of Mr. Free.”
“Well, I ought to.” The old doctor began to pump the blood-pressure cuff. “He was my son, you know.” Barnes stared at him, and he chuckled again. “Not my actual son—Tommy died a long while ago, and I think Ben was really a few years older than I am. But we used to pretend that way, and we had a lot of fun. I was the dad because of my mustache. Ben shaved his face all over back then. He’s got more hair on his face than I do now.”
Barnes nodded.
“That’s right, you saw him many a time.” The old doctor pressed his stethoscope to the inside of Barnes’s elbow and cocked his head. The air escaping from the cuff made a faint hiss, the sigh of a sleepy serpent. “Started when we were coming home on the bus one time. I’d wrenched my knee a little, and Ben gave me a hand up the steps—your blood pressure’s okay, Mr. Barnes. Good, in fact, for a man like you, because you’re lean. Get plenty of exercise and stay away from rich food, anything sweet or greasy. Never salt a thing.”
“I won’t,” Barnes said. “Thanks for the tip. I hope your knee’s better now.”
“Knee? Oh, sure, the story. Well, sir, Ben helped me up, and then there wasn’t two seats together, so I took
