by Thomas Page
The phone rang in the tight little cabin, its sound amplified by the wood floor to the point where the ring sounded like thunder. Jameson let it ring twice before answering.
A woman’s voice said, “Mr. George Crosby, please?”
“This is George Crosby,” replied Arnold Jameson. “May I ask who’s calling?”
“Hold the line for Edward Hausmann, please.”
Hausmann had a well-modulated voice, much like Forrester’s, a deal-maker’s voice. “Mr. Crosby.”
“Yes.”
“I read the stuff you sent us. Passed it around. I can say I’m interested, without, however, committing myself. I cannot say positively what the market is on a book like yours but it’s usually a stable one. The question is whether this Jameson’s career is true. Verification would have to be made . . .”
“It’s true. Jameson has been posing as a doctor for eleven years. He has made and lost over a million dollars in his career, during which he has devised surgical techniques that were cited in the AMA journal.”
“The word ‘posing’ is a little harsh. He is practically a doctor.”
Dammit, now he wasn’t crooked enough. Hausmann wanted a great con-man story. “It’s a fraud. Look, he quit college because he couldn’t afford the tuition. He joined the Army as a medic in Viet Nam. He devised treatments for cholera and dysentery which the Army has since adopted. But he isn’t a doctor, he hasn’t got the sheepskin.”
“Why not?”
Jameson’s voice grated with bitterness. “Jameson is entirely too fond of money, that’s why. After the Army he figured he could go back to medical school on the GI Bill but instead he accepted an offer from a friend to play around on Wall Street. Inside of one year, he made a million and a half. Good-bye medical school. Then came the recession of ’74 and he was wiped out. Totaled, Hausmann, and investigated for stock-rigging. He was carrying a thousand acres of land, one of his partners dropped out, the tax people were after him, and he needed money fast. He put together a faked medical history and bullshitted his way to a residency in St. Louis. He was there two months before they caught on. He’s been to Atlanta, Little Rock. . . . He has to keep moving, you see.”
“I can imagine.”
“What’s really weird about it, Hausmann, is that he’d stack up well against any doctor you can find in the phone book, and better. But he never interned and he never got his degree.”
“Why didn’t he go back to school?”
“There are just some things you can’t do, Hausmann. He’s pushing forty and it’s too late to start over from scratch. You can’t go home again.”
“Where is he now, Mr. Crosby? Are you in touch with him?”
Jameson felt a wave of exhaustion swamp him. “He’s on a goddamned treadmill, that’s where he is. He wants to get out of medicine but he needs the cash flow to deal in land, and if he doesn’t watch himself, he’ll wind up in the slammer.”
“Twentieth-century angst,” mused Hausmann. “That’s an angle . . . even the con men are feeling the pinch. There’s one problem, Mr. Crosby. The great scam artists pull a variety of cons. He’s posed as a doctor but he’s never been a politician or a monk or a lawyer. Has he ever done anything else noteworthy?”
“He murdered a man.” Jameson blurted it out. He sensed the book idea was not so hot after all.
“I see,” replied Hausmann in a measured voice. “Who?”
“A nobody. A salesman recognized him from St. Louis. He panicked, Hausmann. He sabotaged a chartered plane by putting a spoonful of sugar in the gas tank. The plane crashed and nobody has suspected anything so far.”
“It would help to know who the vic . . .”
Jameson slammed the phone back into the cradle. To hell with it. He was a bright man, he’d figure out something in Canada. It was time to get going. He was lugging the second suitcase out the door when the phone rang again. This time the falling ax had hit wood. He was not expecting any more calls.
It was Evan Branch at the clinic.
“Hello, sir, what’s up?”
Jameson could tell when Branch was forcing his voice to be light. “Oh, I’m not sure. We got some peculiar things in the mail today concerning you. Some references on your background from St. Louis . . . I was wondering if I could talk to you about it.”
“Certainly, I’ll be in in the morning. Any problem?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so, no, no. In the morning you said? Excellent. See you tomorrow.”
“By the way, sir, what is Forrester’s condition?”
“He’s been in arrest for the past twenty minutes actually. Why?”
“I was just curious. It doesn’t seem like he’ll ever stay dead, does it? Perhaps we could rig up a mausoleum with a revolving door for him.”
“See you in the morning, Arnold, bye-bye.”
It was the first time Branch had ever addressed Jameson by his first name. Jameson knew the game was over.
He packed his car and shut off all the lights in his cabin. He looked at the lake that bounded his property and saw reeds sway at the edge.
Was somebody out there watching him? He could swear a man ducked into the bushes. Then again he probably had a paranoia hangover. Just to feel safe, he put the Purdy shotgun on the seat next to him as he drove down to the airfield.
At the airfield, the tower controller said, “By the way, Doc, some guy was asking after you.”
Jameson was penciling in flight-plan notes. Without looking up, he asked, “Oh?”
“He said you’d know him. He didn’t leave his name.”
“A grateful patient with loose stitches no doubt. What did he look like?”
“Nice-looking guy. Tall. Blond. With a suntan. He had on a blue jacket and said he was from California.”
Jameson’s eyes narrowed. His pencil hovered over the paper. “Are you putting me on?”
“No. He could have been from planet X for all I know.”
Jameson went back to writing. After a moment he looked up again, his face sour. “Come on. Are you sure you’re not kidding me?”
The controller reacted with displeased surprise. “I said no. He was just a guy, he came in and asked when you were leaving. I thought you knew him.”
“Well, I don’t know him. I don’t know anybody like that.” Jameson caught himself before he could make an issue of it. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself. Next to money and his medical skills, he valued his dignity above all. The visitor was probably an IRS burr.
“Have a nice flight,” the controller grumped as he walked out.
“I’ll bring you back some cooked goose,” Jameson replied, hoisting his shotgun.
It was a clear, bright, moonlit night. The town sparkled in a canyon of blackness, above which towered the serrated snowy mountain peaks. Jameson circled the town twice, committing it to memory. Barring some unforeseen reincarnation in the future, this would be the last time he would ever see it. He would not be traveling this way again. Yearly the world shrank, there were more and more places he could not visit a second time. But Jameson was nothing if not resourceful. He would get by, he was always interested in what lay ahead.
He climbed to twelve thousand feet, feeling updrafts jolt the plane’s belly. The mountains slid slowly by. Canada lay a couple of hours north and the stars seemed close through the windshield. Jameson liked flying, maybe because it made him feel godlike.
Jameson noticed the cockpit temperature was turning cold. Pushing the heater to full strength did nothing, the cold grew heavier. Jameson slipped on his sweater but that did not help either. It was a hell of a time for his aircraft to foul up on him.
As he reached for his fleece-lined coat, he glanced out the port window. Standing on the wing of the airplane was a man. The moon shone down on his unruffled blue coat and gray pants. His blond hair, unblown, neatly brushed,
was frosted by the moonlight, and behind him a mountain peak was sliding into view like a lazy, giant slug.
Arnold Jameson sat upright in his seat and gazed straight ahead at the mountains. From the top edge of the windscreen, Daniel Forrester’s face, upside down, peeped over the frame and looked at him. Jameson could even see the class ring on one of his fingers. Daniel Forrester watched Jameson’s hand slide the Purdy shotgun from the passenger seat and uncock the safety.
Jameson put the plane on auto pilot. Gripping the shotgun in both hands, he listened to the measured footsteps walk the length of the fuselage, then turn and walk out on the starboard wing. At the very tip, Daniel Forrester paused as if enjoying the high-altitude view, then looked back at Jameson and smiled.
Arnold Jameson threw the auto pilot off and slipped the plane into a nasty starboard dive. The wing dropped from under Daniel Forrester’s feet. As the plane peeled off, Daniel Forrester’s body gracefully cartwheeled in the thin air, passed in silhouette before the moon in a perfect arc over the fuselage, and landed neatly feet first on the other wingtip.
Jameson’s mind seemed to burst into fragments. This was a ghost. He did not doubt it for an instant. Forrester’s ghost looked exactly like Forrester did in life. After the shock there came shattering terror at the realization that Forrester was after him. Then, after the terror froze into fatalism, Jameson experienced a kind of righteous outrage that life seemed to have made it impossible for him to get away with anything for long. This was all ridiculously unfair!—he had actually saved lives despite his fraudulent position. Finally Jameson settled on resignation. However monstrous this thing on the wing of the plane was, Jameson knew justice was involved. Jameson had killed Forrester so cleverly that no police or investigator would catch him. No one would know it except Forrester himself. It was this resignation that made Jameson’s actions in the next few seconds quite cool and rational, even though he felt as if he’d gone stark mad.
When Jameson heard the footsteps walking toward him again, he leveled the plane off. The instruments were jumping neurotically all over the panel, as though electrical circuits were shorting out inside. His speed and altimeter gauges were useless.
Jameson switched on the radio and tried to pick up Clayton through the static and mountain interference. “Hello, Clayton, this is a Mayday. This is Arnold Jameson. I’ve got a stowaway. Is anybody reading me? Is anything there? Mayday, Mayday . . .”
Daniel Forrester looked at him through the windshield. He raised his right arm and punched his fist through the reinforced glass. Through this hand-sized opening screamed a solid tube of shrieking air which blasted the inside of the plane into a lethal, hellish bedlam.
Daniel Forrester slid his two-hundred-pound, six-foot form through this small hole onto the passenger seat next to Jameson. He cocked a thumb at his chest and said, “Remember me, buddy boy?”
Arnold Jameson put away the microphone and picked up his Purdy shotgun again. Two cartridges were already in the breech. He aimed the muzzle at Forrester’s chest and fired both barrels at once. Behind Forrester a ragged hole opened in the door. The buckshot had gone clean through him without making a single mark.
Not knowing what else to do, Jameson fumbled two more shells into the shotgun. He had just closed the breech when his plane piled into the side of a mountain in a spectacular geyser of fire that strewed pulverized metal, gas-soaked prop blades, and clothing all over the rocky ground. The fire hissed into a cloud of steam that was easily visible at the Ranger station on the next peak north.
It was one of the quietest meetings Dutton had ever attended in Branch’s office. They read the materials about Arnold Jameson that had arrived the night before. All but Jones were rendered speechless by the contents as well as by the news of Jameson’s death.
“How could he do such a thing?” Branch asked Jones.
“Nothing to it, sir. Medical fraud is spreading like a plague these days.”
“I didn’t mean how could he. I meant how could he? In conscience?”
Dutton chimed in, “Jameson never made one single mistake that I know of. I can think of lots made by certified doctors. He knew what he was doing and he had the sense to stay clear of areas he didn’t know about.”
Jones’s narrow face had a thoughtful expression. “Tell somebody you’re a doctor and they kiss your ass first, then check records later. Obviously Forrester spotted him right off. Did they ever figure out why Forrester’s plane crashed?”
Dutton said, “The gas line froze up, didn’t it?”
“I have a suspicious mind. The last time I talked to Jameson he was very interested in the fact his plane was next to Forrester’s . . .”
“Now that is absurd,” snorted Branch. “Give the man credit for basic humanity.”
“I am. He had all the appetites of basic humanity.”
“There is no proof, Jones,” said Branch. “And there never will be, so put it out of your head. I’m rather more interested in why Jameson’s plane went down. He’d logged some two thousand hours in that craft, hadn’t he?”
“And they didn’t find a second body,” Dutton finished. There would be a delay in burying the late nondoctor because of the presence of an empty shotgun, a piece of fuselage full of pellet holes, and a very weird Mayday call in which, the tower operator swore, Jameson reported a stowaway.
Branch waved an idle hand. “Oh, they will. Or else the stowaway bailed out.”
Jones wiped a hank of hair back from his forehead and paused twice before deciding to speak. “I spoke with the controller this morning. He said someone had been at the airfield looking for Jameson around one-thirty yesterday.”
“Did he inform the police?” asked Branch.
“Oh, sure.” Jones swallowed and clicked the button of his ballpoint pen, his version of twiddling his thumbs.
“All right, Jones,” said Dutton. “We give up. Was it Judge Crater?”
“Better than that,” answered Jones. “It was a six-foot man with blond hair, blue blazer, and a suntan.”
“Shit,” exploded Dutton succinctly, turning away in his chair and crossing his legs.
“Ask him yourself, Dutton,” said Jones.
“Jones, I just had the strangest feeling you’d say that. You’re a walking stack of bullshit.”
For once an obscenity did not bother Branch. “Pray, who was it?”
“It sounds to me like one of our patients here.”
“Jones,” said Branch in a low voice. “Stick to facts. Weigh them. Then shoot your trap off.”
“Sorry, sir. It’s perfectly obvious what happened. Forrester woke up, pulled the IVs from his arms, pushed open the hermetically sealed one-hundred-pound canopy, got out, bought some clothes in Clayton, sneaked over to the airfield to inquire after Jameson, came back, undressed, climbed into the machine . . .”
Branch’s face was turning a mottled gray. “You’re a little late for your rounds, Jones.”
“. . . arrested again at seven-fifteen, sneaked out again, got into the plane, crashed a second time in a week, and made his way cross-country back here. . . . Sir. The tower operator described Daniel Forrester to a T. And he was in arrest from twelve-fifty-five to one-fifty-six yesterday when the operator spoke with Jameson. The police won’t find another body or a sign of one. The body is right here in this clinic.”
“The patient is comatose,” Branch said in measured tones.
Dutton added, “How come he didn’t wear a sheet when he saw the controller?”
“One of the popular misconceptions about ghosts is that they are transparent like little pink nighties and fly round the ceiling. In point of fact, if you put a real ghost next to a human you couldn’t tell them apart. If I had died twenty years ago and was a ghost, you wouldn’t suspect it.”
“Jones,” Branch nearly yelled, “don’t you ever ever use the word ghost in a public cli
nic in my presence!”
“Begging your pardon, sir, this is an endowed clinic.”
“Thirty percent endowed!” Branch bellowed. He tried to calm himself so he wouldn’t rupture a blood vessel. One of his staff physicians was turning into a schizo before his horrified eyes. “You seem to be informed about the the strangest subjects, Jones. How do you know so much about ghosts?”
“I’ve been reading up on it, sir,” Jones replied.
“Since when?” asked Dutton.
“Since Forrester put the machine in here. Since I read about Mrs. Cody’s experiences and saw that magnetic field form over his forehead the day he first arrested.” Jones stopped himself before he could describe Nurse Raskin and the etheric body.
“Why?” asked Dutton helplessly. “Even supposing Forrester was a ghost, why would he kill Jameson?”
“Come on, Dutton, it’s downright classical! Forrester was going to blow the whistle on him. Jameson knew it the minute they recognized each other. Jameson hated Forrester, he was absolutely terrified of him. You should have seen him the other night talking about him. . . .”
Branch interrupted, “Get to work, physician! Heal somebody.”
Jones slunk out the door, winking at Dutton as he left.
Branch breathed deeply and steadily before speaking to Dutton. “Lawrence. That man makes me angrier than any other living human I’ve ever met. I believe he was put on earth solely to shorten my life.”
“I must admit I’ll be glad when Forrester is transferred.”
“He’s going to Denver Mercy this Friday, machine and all. Bickel and his crew will take him. By the way, some people will be coming in to look at the whole case. Denenberg’s flying in from Harvard, Kampmeier from Rockefeller. I’m going to host a little cocktail party Friday evening. I say, Dutton.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I expect Stendhal Holmes won’t think much of this place if they learn Jameson was a fraud. I expect nobody will.”
“Sir, he took in everybody. St. Louis, Atlanta . . .”