Her eyes opened and the pain in her neck was real. It felt like the bite of a June bottle fly and she tried to move her right hand up to the left side of her throat to touch the sore spot but she couldn't. She craned her head and saw that her right hand was strapped down. So was the left hand. So was she. She was lying on a hospital cot, with thick broad bands of canvas holding her down she she couldn't move. And
147
it all came back to her. The Mace in the face as she tried to escape. And there, across the room, hanging up the telephone was Dr. Elena Gladstone who had a broad smile on" her face as she turned toward Ruby and walked toward her. The room was brightly lighted with overhead fluorescent fixtures. Ruby had seen that kind of lighting SQmewhere recently. Where? She shuddered as she remembered. In the city morgue, when she was examining corpses.
"How are you feeling, Miss Gonzalez?"
"How'd you know my name?" asked Ruby. . "I know a great deal about you. Your name. Who you work for. What you do. The identities of the American and the Oriental who have been bothering me. Your suspicions about the Lippincott tragedies and the death of Mr. Meadows."
"You drugged me," Ruby said. It was not a question, but more a silent grudging acceptance of an unpleasant fact.
"Yes, dear, I did. Now how would you like to die?
"Either of two ways," Ruby said. "Not much and not at all."
"Neither of those is acceptable," Dr. Gladstone said. "We'll have to find something better."
"Take your time. I'm in no hurry." Ruby's cautious cat's eyes had prowled the entire room. The walls of the room were lined with more cages, holding rats and hamsters. She saw a scalpel on a table across the room. Maybe there was a chance.
"You seemTto have figured out everything about me," Ruby said. "I'm sure impressed by all that science stuff, but I can't figure out what you're doing at all."
148
"It's not surprising," Dr. Gladstone said. "Few could."
Pickaninny wouldn't work, Ruby decided. Maybe vanity.
"The advances you've made with peptides are really a breakthrough," Ruby said.
Dr. Gladstone's eyebrows lifted. "Peptides? My, you are well read."
Ruby nodded and ignored the patronizing. "I just don't understand how you can synthesize compounds from one species and make them work in a totally different species."
The redheaded doctor's eyes sparkled with interest. "I don't synthesize them. I use natural compounds. What I synthesized and what made it all work, was . . . well, you recall in organ transplants, the necessity to use anti-rejection medicines so or-" gans from one person would be accept by another's body?"
"I remember," Ruby said.
"I synthesized the basic components that prevent rejection, and found out how to bind those to the peptide compounds. I can move substances from one species to another with one hundred percent effectiveness."
"Incredible," Ruby said. "What got me too was the range of responses you can program. I can see training an animal to be afraid of the dark or of water. But of Orientals? Of clothing or restraints? That's amazing."
"Not really. It's just the natural outgrowth of simple behavioral training. Use an Oriental assistant to abuse animals. When you inflict pain on him, make sure his environment is yellow-colored. They will
149
react soon enough. Clothing? You just couple some kind of blanket with electric shock. Then switch to other fabric coverings. Before long, the rats learn. Anything covering them means a painful jolt of electricity, and that knowledge creates peptide compounds in the brain, and those can make a man afraid of the same thing."
"Like Randall Lippincott?" asked Ruby.
"Exactly like Randall Lippincott," Dr. Gladstone's eyes narrowed as she realized the woman strapped to the hospital cot in front of her was still the enemy.
"But why? Why the Lippincotts?" asked Ruby.
"Because we're going to get rid of all of them," said Dr. Gladstone, "and then what they've got is ours."
"Their heirs might have something to say about that," Ruby said.
"They will. They will. And now, dear, if twenty questions is done, I think we have to decide what to do with you."
The telephone rang. Dr. Gladstone answered it, then said "I'll be right there."
She replaced the phone and told Ruby: "Your friends have arrived. This Remo and Chiun. I have to go chase them first and then I'll be back to take care of you."
"I don't mind waiting," Ruby said.
"By the way, if you wish to yell, feel free. But this place is ten feet below the brownstone and is quite soundproof. No one will hear you yell, just as no one will hear you scream."
The doctor left and Ruby let out a hiss of air. That was one mean woman. With no time to waste, she began rocking her body back and forth on the hospi-
150
tal cot. She hoped that the wheels had not been locked in place.
They hadn't and a sudden jerk of her body was rewarded by the cot rolling two inches closer to the counter on which she saw the scalpel.
Two inches down. Ten feet to go. Ruby kept rocking.
Elena Gladstone smiled automatically as she walked into her book-lined main office in the front of the brownstone and saw Remo and Chiun sitting before her desk.
"How do you do?" she said. "I'm Dr. Gladstone. I understand you've been sent by Mr. Elmer Lippincott, Senior."
"That's right," Remo said. "My name is Williams. This is Chiun."
"You can call me Master," Chiun said.
"I'm pleased to meet you both," she said. She brushed past Remo as she walked behind her desk. She gave off a heavy femine scent, a scent her body deserved even if the stark white laboratory clothing she was wearing did not. He knew that scent from somewhere.
"What can I do for you?" she asked as she sat down.
"First, it was Lem Lippincott and then Randall," Remo said. "We wondered if you have any explanation for why they did what they did. Mr. Lippincott told us you're the family doctor."
"That's right," Elena said, but shook her head. "I don't know what happened to them. They were both in good health, or as good as sedentary men can be. They had no serious emotional problems that I know
151
of. They weren't on drugs or any medication. I don't know what happened to them."
"Randall Lippincott was afraid of clothing," Remo said. "He couldn't stand having anything on his body."
"And I just don't understand that," Elena said. "I've never, in all these years, heard of such an irrational fear."
"You think you could have helped him?" Remo asked.
"I don't know. Perhaps. I would have tried. But I wasn't called when he became ill."
"What kind of work do you do here?" Remo asked.
"This is a life preservation facility. We try to find illnesses before they flare up. We do physical examinations whose goal is to prevent serious illness. If we find someone is losing the tone in his back muscles, for instance, and we have sophisticated ways of measuring that, we prescribe for them a series of exercise that will prevent the trouble before it begins."
"A big place just to look for bad backs," Remo said.
Elena Gladstone smiled at him. Her broad smile usually brought a response from men, an eagerness to please her. From this Remo Williams, it brought nothing but a deepening of his eyes, already dark pools sunk deep into his skull. He looked vaguely Oriental himself, she thought, and wondered if he were somehow related to the old Oriental who sat silently at her desk, examining the sharpened pencils in her pencil holder.
"It's not just bad backs," she said. "We work the entire range of potential health problems. Hearts,
152
blood pressure, chemical deficiencies in the body, arterial problems. Everything."
"And that's all you do?" Remo was obviously unimpressed, she thought.
"And we do some basic research on lab animals. That's more a hobby of mine than one of our main functions," she said. "Mr. Lippincott has been very generous in suppor
ting our work."
Chiun had touched the tips of two pencils together, sharpened tip to sharpened tip. He was holding them together with just his index fingers on the rubber erasers. The two pencils were spread out in front of him, like one long pencil, with two points in the center and an eraser on each end. He seemed intent on the pencils. Remo looked at him and seemed annoyed.
Dr. Gladstone was interested. She had never seen that done before.
"With two of the Lippincott sons dead," Remo said, and she snapped back to attention toward him, "we have to worry about the third son."
"Douglas," she said.
Remo nodded. "Right. Douglas. Does he have any medical problems we should know about?"
"None. He's the youngest son. He exercises regularly and he's in good shape. I'd be very surprised if Douglas should turn up sick somehow."
Chiun was moving his hands in front of him, still holding the pencils, point to point. His hands made large circles in front of him and he was making small sounds under his breath, as if imitating an airplane engine.
"I see," said Remo. He was running out of subtle
153
questions. "We're looking for a black woman. Have you see her?"
"A black woman? Here? No. Was she supposed to be here?" Elena Gladstone felt the hazel eyes of the old Korean burning into her face.
"Not really," Remo said. "She's kind of an associate of ours and she said she might be here to meet us."
"Sorry. I haven't seen her yet. Can I give her a message if she comes?"
"No, that's all right," Remo said. He rose. "Chiun," he said.
Chiun turned his right hand palm up and slowly moved his left hand around so that the two palms faced each other, the distance of two pencils apart. As Dr. Gladstone watched, he removed his left hand and the two pencils touching only at their points remained balanced in the air above Chiun's right hand. Then he flipped the index finger on which they rested and the two pencils popped up into the air. Each turned one slow revolution and landed in the small opening of her pencilholder cup.
She clapped her hands in appreciative glee.
"Stop fooling around, Chiun," Remo snarled. "We've got work to do."
Chiun rose slowly to his feet.
"On your way out, I'll show you the rest of our operation," Dr. Gladstone said, also rising. She led them out into the reception room. "My living quarters are upstairs," she said. She turned down the hallway toward the lab. "On the sides here are our examination rooms. Here we do physicals and EKGs and monitor heart rates, stress tests, blood tests and such."
154
The doors to all the small offices were open and Ruby was not in any of them, Remo could see.
Remo again smelled the heady flowery scent of Elena Gladstone's perfume as she pushed through a door into a large, light laboratory, lined on both sides with cages of mice and rats and monkeys. The din was earsplitting.
"These are our laboratory animals," she said. "What do you use them for?" "We're trying to develop a new anti-stress drug," she said. "And of course you have to make animal tests. We're years away, I'm afraid."
Remo followed her along the line of cages. Chiun was walking behind him and he could hear Chiun thumping his feet. Remo wondered why.
"And that's it," Dr. Gladstone said. "The whole place."
"Thanks for your time, doctor," Remo said. He looked around the laboratory. His eyes rested on Chiun who had a faint smile on his face.
"What's down there?" Remo said, pointing down a short corridor.
"That's my lab office," Dr. Gladstone said. "Where I keep records of our experiments here. The office up front is for when I play administrator. This one is for when I'm playing researcher."
She smiled broadly at Remo who returned the smile.
"Sometime we'll have to get together to play doctor," he said.
"Yes," Elena Gladstone said, looking directly into his eyes. "Yes." Her body tingled.
She took Remo by the arm and led him back toward the front of the bunding. Chiun followed,
155
stomping. Remo was ready to tell him to knock it off. The receptionist smiled at the two men as Dr. Gladstone led them to the front door.
"I hope to see you again," she said as Remo and Chiun stepped outside.
"I hope so," said Remo.
"You shall," said Chiun.
Dr. Gladstone closed the door behind them and when she saw through the peephole that they had walked down the steps of the building, she quietly locked the door.
"Call everyone scheduled today, Hazel, and cancel their appointments. I'm going to be very busy."
"I understand."
Outside, Remo and Chiun made a pretense of walking away from the house, but stopped hi front of the next building. . "What do you think, Little Father?" Remo asked.
"She is lying, of course."
"I know. I recognized that perfume of hers. It was the smell in Randall Lippincott's room at the hopsi-tal. She was the doctor who drugged him."
Chiun nodded. "The lady has a little vein visible in her neck. When you asked her about the black woman, the vein began to throb almost twice as fast as before. She was lying."
"Then Ruby's in there," Remo said.
"Correct."
"Where, I wonder?"
"In the basement," Chiun said.
"That's why you were^ stomping?" Remo said.
"Yes. There is a large room below the laboratory. I imagine that we will find Ruby there," Chiun said.
156
"I think we better go back and collect Ruby," Remo said.
"She will like that," said Chiun.
Ruby Gonzalez had gotten her right hand around the scalpel when she heard footsteps coming down the stairs.
With the small amount of freedom allowed her feet and legs, she braced her feet against the counter and pushed as hard as she could. The hospital cot rolled back across the floor to a slow stop. She was three feet shy of where she had started and she hoped Dr. Gladstone wouldn't notice.
Carefully, being sure not to drop it, Ruby turned the scalpel around in her right hand, so that its blade pointed toward her shoulder and slowly she began to saw at the canvas band that pinned down her right arm.
Dr. Gladstone came back into the large bright room.
"Your two friends have just left," she said.
Ruby looked at her but said nothing.
"They said there was no message for you in case you should arrive after they left." She smiled.
"They turkeys," Ruby said.
"Probably true," Dr. Gladstone said. "And now we have to take care of you."
She walked to the counter. Ruby saw her take a disposable hypodermic from a cabinet and root around in the cabinet until she found a vial of clear liquid.
She had her back to Ruby and Ruby sawed furiously with the scalpel at the band on her right wrist. She could feel the canvas weakening, then she felt
157
the warm ooze of liquid down her hand. She had cut her wrist with the scalpel. She kept sawing.
Dr. Gladstone spoke with her back to Ruby. "I'd really like for you to go out in style. I could have tried something new and unusual. Perhaps a pathological fear of automobiles. Then put you into the middle of Times Square."
"Ain't nothing wrong with being afraid of cars in this town," Ruby said.
Dr. Gladstone filled the hypodermic with the clear fluid, then replaced the vial in the cabinet.
"No, I guess that's true enough," she said. "But we won't have time for that. It'll have to be something simple and direct, like curare in the bloodstream."
Ruby gave one last furious jab at the canvas band and felt it separate. She began to raise her right hand to cut away the band on her left wrist, but Dr. Gladstone turned and Ruby dropped her right hand to her side.
Dr. Gladstone, holding the hypodermic in front of her eyes, examining it, walked back toward Ruby.
With her left hand, she felt for the vein on the inside of Ruby's left el
bow. She found it and pressed down the surrounding skin with her fingertips to make the vein protrude. She lowered the syringe to it.
"I'm sorry, my dear," she said.
"You sure are," Ruby said. She swung her right hand up from her side, putting as much force into it as she could with her body anchored. The scalpel glinted as it flashed past her eyes and then it bit into the left side of Elena Gladstone's neck and Ruby snapped her wrist on the follow-through as if she were wristing a little pitch shot onto the green.
158
The hypodermic fell to the highly-waxed white tile floor. Dr. Gladstone's eyes opened wide as she realized what had happened. A gusher of blood pumped from the side of her slashed throat.
She tried to scream, but all she could produce was a bubbling high-pitched shriek as she fell.
Outside, moving down the steps they had found behind the filing cabinet in Elena Gladstone's office, Remo and Chiun heard the sound.
Remo said, "Hurry, Chiun." He ran down the steps.
Chiun slowed up and smiled. "It is too late, Remo. Ruby does not need us."
Remo didn't hear him. He pushed his way through the heavy metal fire door into the large bright room.
Elena Gladstone lay on the floor, her dead body still pumping blood onto the tiles.
Ruby was using the bloodied scalpel to saw away the band on her left wrist.
She looked up as Remo came through the door. He stood there speechless.
"Remind me never to count on you for anything," Ruby screeched. Remo smiled and took the earplugs from his pocket and put them in his ears.
"Oh, shut up," he said with a smile.
Chiun came up behind him. He saw Ruby strapped to the cot and whispered to Remo:
"If you wish, I will leave and you can take advantage of her while she is a prisoner. But remember, the baby is mine."
"If you think I'm going near a black chick with a knife, you're crazy."
"Will you two stop jawing, and get me out of here? I'm tired of sawing," Ruby hollered.
159
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dr. Jesse Beers took the telephone call from Hazel, the young receptionist at the Lifeline Laboratory, in his room, two doors away from the master bedroom of Elmer Lippincott Sr. and his young wife, Gloria.
His face turned white as he listened. Then he said, "All right, Hazel. Just close up the lab. Lock everything up. Leave everything where it is." He paused. "Yes, her too. Just you lock up and go home and I'll come up later and take care of everything. No, no, don't call the police. I'll explain it all to you when I come to your house." He forced a smile. "I haven't been to your house for a while, sweetmeat, and I'm about ready."
Bottom Line td-37 Page 12