Bulgari watches now; the guy in the chimney could be an American.'
'No way,' said her brother.
'Two: you're saying the guys killed Johnny to get the gold cup, or something else valuable? Then why didn't they take the watch? They could sell it easily for a couple hundred bucks. So one, two: you guys are full of it.'
She returned to her magazine and her nails. We didn't exactly know what to say. Leave a woman to screw everything all up. just before Joe left to return to his Beacon Hill bachelor apartment he and I went over the whole thing again, just the two of us. We decided Johnny Robinson's death was a Mob revenge killing after all. So I said good-bye fully expecting to begin making a new bridge for Tom Costello's mouth the next afternoon… and not expecting to see Joe until next weekend. But something unexpected changed all of that. It was a voice. A voice from beyond the grave.
Johnny Robinson's voice. Talking to me.
CHAPTER SIX
I regarded the bloody object that rested on the sterile paper. Clumps of clotted tissue clung to its lower extremities like limpets on a wave-washed rock. Although the patient sitting in my chair would certainly enjoy newfound relief now that the impacted third molar was removed from his lower jaw, I could not help feeling a wee bit like Torquemada every time I clamped my HuFriedy cowhorn forceps securely around an offending tooth and I began to rock it loose from its socket. You do this after you partially lift the tooth with a tool called an elevator; after the forceps are in place you rock the tooth back and forth and then extract it. Sometimes there is a muted crunch of bone or crackle as a root fractures under the strain. But always there is the sickening wet sucking sound of the gum tissue, a sound like that produced when you sink up to your knee in a muddy bog and then pull your leg out. To mute these noises I always have my patient wear earphones playing classical music- on the loud side. My current patient was listening to E. Power Biggs playing Bach's Toccata in E minor. He felt nothing… yet.
The lower portion of Ronald Belknap's tooth was bent at a thirty-degree angle. This dogleg had developed over the years as the tooth tried to push its way up through the gum- in the manner God and nature intended all good teeth to do- and join its fellow teeth in the job of grinding up food. But the tooth could not push its way to the surface because the jawbone was too small and there wasn't room. Our tiny mandible, like our appendix, is a curse of human evolution, So the tooth pushed against the twelve-year molar in front not it at an angle. And as it pushed against the molar, it began to bend. Finally all this pushing and bending leads to inflammation, pressure, and infection. Sometimes you need to section impacted teeth before you remove them, but in Belknap's case I didn't.
'Ohhhhh Jameseeeez,' he moaned, looking at the huge tooth that lay soaking the white paper with blood. 'No wonder that sucker hurt!'
'Yes,' I said, 'and unfortunately, when the local wears off you're going to get some more pain. Notice, Ron, I'm not calling it discomfort, as so many of my colleagues do. I'm calling it pain because that's what it will be. Do you drink?'
'Sure.'
So I gave him a blue card with instructions. For minors, or people who don't drink, I give a white card with a different set of instructions and a prescription for Tylox. But never do I mix instructions, or cards, because booze on top of a pain-killing drug can make some people drop where they stand after one snort. It's very dangerous.
'Hey Doc. This just says to go home and get bombed.'
'Uh-huh. There's a good drink recipe on the back. Stay home tomorrow and watch the tube. You'll be in some pain for the next twenty hours because I had to remove a wee bit of infected jawbone. That's going to smart. Next day return to work and a take aspirin. Keep the packing in your mouth until dinnertime and don't rinse. Good- bye.'
'What about payment?'
'One pain at a time. Susan will bill you.'
He regarded the devastatingly gorgeous Susan Petri, the one who could turn men into stone. Susan Petri should be a controlled substance. He addressed me sotto voce.
'Wow, Doc. If you'll pardon a personal observation, you've got some really nice scenery around here. Must make coming to work uh, less of an ordeal.'
'If you're referring to Ms. Petri's physical attributes'- I sniffed- 'then let me assure you they had next to nothing to do with my hiring her. And, speaking as one twentieth-century man to another, I regret your judging her solely on her physical appearance. It is sexist and archaic. Isn't she dynamite?'
'Yeah, I-OOOO I think I just got the first twinge!'
'You ain't felt nothin' yet, Ron. There's more where that came from. Go home and guzzle; I'll see you Friday.'
I saw him out the door just as the phone rang. It was Joe, returning my call to Ten-Ten Comm. Ave.
'Where the hell have you been? I called you before work.'
'Oh. You mean it was important?'
'Joe, listen: I've got a taped phone message from Johnny. He called me late Friday afternoon and left a message on my machine.'
'Well what's it say?'
'I'll play it over the phone. Hold on.'
I pressed the playback button on my phone answering machine and held the receiver right over the tiny speaker: Hello, Doc? This is Johnny. Johnny Robinson, Dependable. Listen, I got your work from the dental lab but I'll be a little bit late with it. Can you hold on until just before suppertime? Sorry, but I'm totin' somethin' hot for my buddy Andy and I've got a- uh [squeak, flap, squeak] complication, dontcha know… [bark, bark]. Sorry for the delay… I'll stay in touch. [bark, click]
There was a pause on the other end after it was over. Then, Joe asked me to play it again. I did. Then he asked me to play it a third time.
'Okay, I'll be out in an hour. I might bring O'Hearn with me. You hear that squeaking in the background? Phone-booth door… the old type. And the barking? Johnny's dogs. Somebody was tailing him.'
'Who's Andy?'
'That's what we're gonna find out. Stay put.'
Joe and I listened to the tape three more times. We played the end of it over and over again to try and determine what the background noises meant. The problem was that the answering device was a crude recorder, and the speaker was a tiny arrangement barely an inch and a half across. Hardly concert-hall realism. Frustrated, Joe said he needed a big tape deck with three heads so he could make more copies. I had such a deck, but the one at the Concord police station was closer and Joe said he'd like Chief Brian Hannon's opinion of the message.
'You would? Really and truly?'
'Well why not?' asked Joe.
'Well why?'
We nestled ourselves in front of the police department's big Akai tape deck after we'd made four copies of the message, which ran 25.4 seconds, and listened again to the original tape. Brian Hannon sat between us, running his fat fingers through his thinning sand-colored hair as he cocked his ear at the-voice. The details in the background were clearer with the better equipment. The squeak of a door hinge, the faint sounds of traffic and pedestrians and a bell.
The three of us hunkered down there like sparrows on a wire, listening. I was at one end, a bit lean and graying at the temples. Brian, short, stocky, and almost bald, was in the middle. Bringing up the far side was good old Joe, with his paunch and his hound-dog eyes. Then I knew who it was we must've looked like: Larry, Curley, and Moe. The Three Stooges.
'Phone booth,' growled Brian at the squeak, flap, squeak. 'He's opening and closing the door of a phone booth, probably to get a good look at somebody who's tailing him.'
'We agree,' said Joe. 'And the barking we're hearing is Tommy and Susie, who are on their leads right outside the booth. They usually didn't bark. It took a lot to make them squawk. All these things add up to the
