We sat like that for about a minute or two with me panting softly and wondering if my rib was broken. Phil’s chest rose and fell more than usual. His brows were down and he found the pencil to play with again. He turned it over and over again.
“Feel better?” I finally said.
“Yeah,” said Phil.
“Good,” I said, touching the tender flesh over the raw rib. “Shall we go on?”
Phil smiled. It was a genuine smile. He tried to hide it behind an open palm over his mouth, but he couldn’t. His hand came down and he shook his head, smiling.
“I knew I could cheer you up,” I said seriously. “What’s a brother for?”
Seidman kicked the desk, which apparently sent a shiver of pain into his jaw. He let out a little grunt and walked back to the corner saying, “You’re both nuts, crazy nuts. I’m not getting between you again. You both remember that. I wash my hands of you.”
“Olson,” Phil said, small smile still on his lips.
“I’ve got a real lead,” I said. “Sure thing, tonight. You said I had till tomorrow night. Let’s stay with that. I’ll give you Olson’s killer, tell you where Jane Poslik is, and maybe where to find the fake Mrs. Olson.”
“Get out,” Phil said, waving his hand. “I’ve got shoe stores to protect. Are you hurt?”
“Hell yes,” I said.
“Good,” he answered, still smiling. “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m getting old and soft.”
Cawelti was in the hall, arms folded, leaning against the dirty wall. He shook his head and said quietly with false sympathy, “Can you use some help getting down the stairs?”
“Only if we can go piggy-back and I can put the spurs to you if you go too slow,” I said, walking away from him as normally as I could. It took me about a week to get out of the station, a week during which my entire life crawled before my eyes like a too-long French novel. The Mexican woman and her kid were gone and the old desk cop was on the phone, looking over his glasses at an advancing couple in their sixties. The man was cradling a big brown paper bag in his arms. I didn’t want to know what was in that bag so I hurried out into the late afternoon, but before the door closed I heard the old woman’s voice say, “I insist that we see Captain Pevsner immediately.”
Getting into my Ford was lots of fun. It kept me from thinking. Driving to Doc Hodgdon’s house was even more fun. Even Harriet Hilliard singing “This Love of Mine” on the radio didn’t diminish the joy I was feeling. By the time I pulled in front of the frame house where Hodgdon lived, I was so tickled that I could barely move, but I managed to get out, groan my way up the walk and stairs and into the house, the first floor of which had been converted by Doc Hodgdon to offices for his orthopedic practice back in 1919 before anyone used the word orthopedic.
Hodgdon’s secretary-receptionist Myra, who had miraculously escaped the tar pits in the Pleistocene Period, gave me a sour look. No one was in the waiting room and she looked like she was packing her broomstick to go home.
“Doctor’s office hours are over at four on Monday,” she said.
“I’m dying,” I said. “He took an oath.”
“Doctor will be available in the morning,” she said. “I can give you an emergency appointment at noon.”
I put my hand on a nearby chair to steady myself.
“By noon tomorrow, I will have died of wounds,” I continued, not wanting to end our pleasant repartee. “Maybe he has time to give me a Vitalis sixty-second workout.”
“Mocking the war is not in good taste,” she said. “You will just have to-”
“What is all the noise about?” said Hodgdon, sticking his head out of his office door. His sleeves were rolled up and he held something that looked like a roll of tape in his hand. He was gray, almost sixty-six, and hard as a tree stump. He was also the man I had never beaten at handball. He spotted me and shook his head. Everyone seemed to be shaking their heads at me this week, a pitiful specimen who should have been pickled and put on exhibition with a little sign underneath saying, “Here but for the grace of God, go you.”
“Come in, come in,” he said, holding the door open to his office. Then to his secretary-receptionist, “And you go home, Myra.”
“Office hours are over,” she said, giving me a dirty look as I eased my way across the room and into his office.
“Mr. Peters is not a patient,” he said, making way for me. “He is a curio, a specimen, a phenomenon always worth another look.”
With that he closed the door and helped me to his examining table.
“The back,” he said.
“Ribs too,” I added.
He helped me get my shirt off, touched the back, and felt the ribs. None of it made me grin.
“Nothing’s broken this time,” he said. “Now I’m going to tape you up and give you something for the pain.”
“I’ve got something good,” I said.
“What I give you will be less likely to destroy your organs,” he said, selecting the proper tape. “Then, when I finish taping, I’m going to tell you to go home, get in bed, do nothing for three or four days, and come back to see me. Knowing you, you will neither go to bed nor come back to see me unless the pain becomes unbearable or you have some other task you feel has to be performed.”
“I’m trying to save the president’s dog,” I explained as he plastered a thick slab of tape around my chest.
“Noble,” he muttered, working away and clearly not believing me. “If you’d take better care of yourself, we’d be playing more handball. Someday my bones are not going to be able to support my musculature. I’ll start the process of rapid aging, brittleness. Might even have further eye trouble. Then you might stand a chance of winning a game if you’re still capble of normal speech and movement. It is, by the way, difficult though not impossible to apply this tape around a pistol.”
I apologized and took off the gun, and he went on working.
“There,” he said, standing back to examine me and rolling up his sleeves.
“Thanks,” I said, putting my shirt back on. The soreness was there, but it wasn’t bad and I knew I could move. Hodgdon went to his glass cabinet, opened it, found a bottle and took some pills from it and put them into a smaller bottle, which he handed to me.
“Take one now and then every four hours,” he said. “Since you are not going to go home, but will be out looking for stray dogs, how’d you like to share dinner with me? I’ve got a leftover meatloaf and a bottle of Burgundy.”
“Any beer?” I said.
“There is beer,” he said.
We ate a meatloaf dinner with a sliced tomato and a lot of Italian bread washed down by a couple of cans of Falstaff. I found out for the first time that Hodgdon had a son who was a doctor back in Indianapolis and a daughter who had married an insurance salesman in Chicago. I already knew that Hodgdon’s wife had died almost ten years earlier.
“Toby,” he said after dinner, “no joke this time. Your body can’t hold up under all the abuse you give it.”
“Doc,” I said, “I’ve tried to stop, but there’s a not too bright rabbit inside me who won’t stay still.”
“And he can wind up getting you crippled, or worse; let him out,” said Hodgdon, starting to pile the nonmatching china dishes in the sink. The kitchen, like the house and the man, was getting old.
“Time to go,” I said. “Thanks for dinner. Have Edna Mae Oliver send me the bill.”
The sun was down by the time I left Doc Hodgdon’s house. We had talked longer than I had planned, but the tape, food, pills, and beer had taken away the pain, at least enough for me to get back in the Ford and head for Olson’s clinic.
I got there three hours early, parked two blocks away, and went in through the same window I’d gone in before. Then I made a phone call and settled down, not in the animal room, but in Olson’s operating room, the one where Anne Lyle and I had operated two days earlier.
After checking my.38, I sat down on the single straight-back chair, listened to the animals sending out bleats, barks, shrieks, and murmurs of fear, and wondered who had been taking care of them.
