God Save the Mark

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Lot of money,” said the teller dubiously, looking at the check I’d written and shoved across the counter to him.

  “I’ll take it in hundreds,” I said.

  “One moment,” he said, and picked up his phone and checked my account. He seemed troubled by what he heard, put the phone down again, and studied my check with fretful eyes.

  I said, “I have enough to cover it.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, not taking his eyes from the check. “Lot of money,” he repeated.

  “Hundreds,” I repeated. “In a little envelope, if you have one.”

  “One moment,” he repeated, and for a second I thought I was caught in a loop of time, endlessly backing on itself, circling around and around and around and never getting anywhere. But then, instead of picking up the phone and checking my account again, the teller walked away, carrying the check with him.

  I leaned against the counter and waited. The woman behind me, Xmas Club booklet in hand, gave me a dirty look and went off to join another line.

  The teller came back with another man, who was trying to look as dapper as Gus Ricovic but was failing. Of course, he had a gray suit on instead of a white terrycloth bathrobe, which may have made the difference. He smiled at me like a mechanical store-window Santa Claus and said, “Can I be of service?”

  “You could cash my check,” I said. “I’d like hundreds, if you have any.”

  The teller had already given this new one my check.

  The new one looked at it, seemed vaguely disturbed, and said, “Lot of money.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Considering the national debt—” He put my check on the counter and pointed over my shoulder. “I’m afraid you’ll have to have this okayed,” he said. “Mr. Kekkleman over there can help you, I’m sure.”

  “It’s my money,” I pointed out. “I’m just letting you people hold it for me.”

  “Yes, sir, naturally. Mr. Kekkleman will take care of everything for you.”

  So I went over to see Mr. Kekkleman, who sat at a desk behind an altar rail. He looked up at me with the bright expression of a man prepared instantly to make loans for solid collateral, and I said, “I need you to okay this check.”

  He took the check, looked at it, and his expression turned constipated. Before he could say it, I said, “Lot of money.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “Would you have a seat?”

  I sat down in the chair beside the desk. When he picked up the phone I said, “The man over there already checked my account.”

  He gave me a blank distracted smile and checked my account. It took longer this time. I said, conversationally, “I’m thinking of taking all my money out of this stupid bank,” and he gave me the same plastic smile.

  Finally he put the phone down and said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Fitch. Would you give me a specimen signature?”

  I burst out laughing.

  His smile grew pained and puzzled. “Sir?”

  “You just made me think,” I told him, “about the specimens you have to give when you go see the doctor. You know, you take the little bottle into the men’s room and all. And then I remembered a story I read once about some drunks who wrote their names in the snow that way. Specimen signatures, you see?”

  He didn’t think it was funny, and smiled so as to let me know it. Then he extended me a pen and a memo pad and I signed my name the old-fashioned way. He compared this signature with the one on the check, and this satisfied him. I have no idea why this satisfied him, since I’d written that check over on the other side of this same room not five minutes ago. Do crooks’ signatures change every five minutes?

  Well, I didn’t make a fuss. He did some runes on the back of my check, I went over and stood in line behind the woman with the Xmas Club booklet, and in more time than it takes to tell about it I had ten hundred-dollar bills in a tiny manila envelope tucked away inside my wallet.

  Free at last.

  21

  DR. OSBERTSON’S Park Avenue office was everything the Park Avenue office of a Park Avenue doctor should be, and his nurse blended in icy beauty with the décor.

  I sat for a while in the waiting room with three dowagers. Then I sat for a while with two dowagers. Then I sat with one dowager. In the last stage I sat for a period of time alone. But at last the nurse held a door open and looked at me and said, “Mr. Nedick?”

  I was afraid the name would make me blush, if I heard it too often. “Coming,” I mumbled, and put down the copy of Forbes magazine I’d been leafing through—in some amazement, I might add—and followed her down a shiny corridor into a gleaming examination room, all white enamel and stainless steel.

  “The doctor will be with you in just a moment,” she said, and put a folder on a table, and went away, shutting the door behind her. The folder was empty, and on the tab was lettered very carefully in ink: Nedick, F.

  Her idea of a moment was pretty unusual. It was two-thirty when she left me in that room, and ten minutes to three—that’s two-fifty, some people get confused—when Dr. Osbertson came briskly in, rubbing pudgy clean hands together and saying, “Well, now, what seems to be the trouble today?”

  Seldom do people in real life resemble the fictional clichés erected to represent them, but Dr. Osbertson was the exception to the rule. He was fiftyish, distinguished, well padded, complacent and obviously well-off. He had the smile of an evil baby, and I swear I could feel his eyes undressing my wallet, though they seemed to miss the envelope full of hundreds.

  I said, “Doctor, my name is Fitch. I’m—”

  “What’s this? The nurse has given me the wrong folder.” He picked it up and started for the door with it.

  “No, she didn’t,” I said. “I told her my name was Nedick. I didn’t want you to know who I really was until I got here.”

  He stopped with one hand on the doorknob, the other clutching the empty folder, and looked at me with the attentive frown of a baby trying to understand why the watch ticks. Then he said, “I believe you’ve come to the wrong sort of physician. Mental disorders are not my—”

  “Matthew Grierson was my uncle,” I said.

  He blinked at me, very slowly, and then said, “Ah, I see.” He removed his hand from the doorknob, replaced the folder on the table, and smiled falsely at me, saying, “Well, this is a pleasure. Frankly, I don’t understand—” He gestured at the folder.

  “Some odd things have been happening,” I said. “But they aren’t important. The important thing is I want to talk to you about my uncle.”

  “Well, of course, his death wasn’t from natural causes, was it? No, indeed. Actually, I should think the police would be the ones for you to talk to.” He made a smallish movement toward the phone on the wall near the door. “Shall I call them for you?”

  “I’ve already talked to them,” I said. “Twice. Now I want to talk to you.”

  “Yes, of course.” His smile had grown nervous, and he turned with some reluctance away from the phone. Whether this meant he had something to hide or merely thought he was dealing with a potential nut, I couldn’t tell.

  I said, “I understand my uncle had cancer.”

  “Yes, he did, that’s right, that’s what he had. Cancer.” Osbertson was babbling, because of his nervousness, and he was looking around like a man who’s lost something important and can’t quite remember what it is.

  I refused to be sidetracked. Hoping that calm and reasonable questioning would have a beneficial effect on him, so that sooner or later he’d settle down and begin to talk to me, I said, “I understand he’d had the cancer for several years.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Six years, I believe, six years going on seven.” He had drifted over to a side table and was fussily and distractedly moving things around on it: a little bottle, a tongue depressor, a package of disposable rubber gloves.

  I said, “I understand he hadn’t originally been expected to live this long.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s true,” he said forcefully, ac
tually turning around to face me. “Very true,” he said earnestly. “The original prognosis was death within a year. Within a year. Of course, that was a diagnostician in Brazil, but I myself was flown down not long afterwards and examined the subject and I must say I agreed with that diagnosis exactly. And other physicians since then have confirmed the diagnosis. Of course, there can’t be any real precision in cases like this, the literature is full of cases of individuals who lived a greater or lesser time than was assumed in the diagnosis, and this man Grierson merely happened to be one of them. He could have gone at any moment. He would not have lived another six months, that I will state without equivocation. As to the general diagnosis in cases of this sort, no physician presumes to be offering an exact timetable, and the physician can’t be blamed if the individual patient behaves in a manner differing from the norm.”

  Smiling, I said, “Well, I don’t suppose Uncle Matt exactly blamed you for keeping him alive.”

  “Eh?” He’d been caught up in his explanation, and now all at once he seemed to remember whom he was talking to and what the subject was. “Oh, of course,” he said. “Your uncle. Astonishing case, astonishing.” With the return of memory had come the return of distraction; once again he was half-turned from me, pottering among the implements on his table.

  I said, “You were his doctor for a long time, eh? I mean, even before he went to Brazil.”

  “What?” He touched a hypodermic syringe, a thermometer, a stethoscope. “Oh, no, not a bit. Never treated him till I went down to see him in Brazil. No, no, no previous history at all, not with me.”

  “I don’t understand,” I admitted. “How did he happen to pick you to come all the way to Brazil, if you’d never treated him before?”

  He seemed startled. He put on a disposable rubber glove, took it off, disposed of it. “Mutual acquaintance, I suppose,” he muttered, half-swallowing the words. “Some other patient.”

  “Who?”

  “Couldn’t say, couldn’t possibly remember. Have to look it up in the records.” He picked up the syringe, depressed the plunger, put it down. “Might not even be there.”

  “Well,” I said, “I do want to talk to people who knew Uncle Matt. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you take a look and see if you do have it in the records?”

  “Well, of course,” he mumbled, “medical records, it’s all confidential, not supposed to do that sort of thing.” He picked up a bottle marked Alcohol, put it down. “Laymen,” he said.

  “I don’t want to see anybody’s records,” I said. “If I could just know the name of the patient who recommended you to my uncle …”

  He picked up a box of cotton pads, took out a pad, put the box down, put the pad down on the box. “Of course,” he said indistinctly, talking into his chest, “those would be the old records, might be difficult to find …”

  “If you’d look. Would you please look?”

  “I’m not sure I’d—” He broke off, and turned even farther away from me. He picked up a small bottle, picked up the syringe, stuck the needle of the syringe through the stopper of the small bottle. He mumbled something I didn’t catch, though the general rambling nature of it came through clearly enough.

  What was he planning to do, inject me with something? Knock me out? Maybe even kill me. I backed farther away from him, looking around, and on a bench to my left I saw one of those little rubber hammers used by doctors to tap people on the knee. I edged closer to it.

  Meanwhile, the doctor had raised his voice again, was saying, “All of this is most unorthodox, of course. Naturally, you understand a physician must be careful whom he deals with, who gets information and who does not. A physician has an obligation to his patients.” And all the while he was drawing the fluid from the little bottle into the syringe, removing the needle from the bottle, putting the now-full syringe down on the table, discarding the bottle. He was obviously trying to keep me from noticing any of this, keeping his back to me, muttering away, trying to appear random and distracted.

  I was close now to the rubber hammer. If he came toward me with that syringe I could get to the hammer in one leap. With luck I’d knock the syringe from his hand and overpower him before he could do whatever he had in mind. I was his last patient of the day; if necessary I’d hold him prisoner here all night to get the information I wanted, and an explanation for his weird behavior.

  In the interim, I was acting as though unaware of his preparations. I said, “You can understand my interest, I hope. After all, I did profit from my uncle’s death, profited a great deal, and I feel a certain obligation to get to know him, even if it is only posthumously.”

  “Oh, naturally,” he blathered. “Completely understandable, completely.” As he spoke he was rolling up his left shirt sleeve. Was he trying to lull my suspicions, trying to make me think he was a diabetic or some such thing and preparing his normal injection?

  He really went quite far with it, opening the alcohol bottle, wetting the cotton pad, cleaning a patch of skin on his inner left elbow. “Most natural instinct in the world,” he nattered, while doing this. “One feels a certain—kinship—to relatives who leave us money. Particularly a great deal of money. Oh, particularly.”

  He picked up the syringe.

  I edged closer to the rubber hammer.

  He stuck the needle in his arm and injected himself.

  My mouth hung open like a sprung drawbridge. I watched him put the syringe down, place the cotton pad against the injection, bend his elbow, and turn at last away from the table. “I can understand your coming to see me,” he said, still rambling, as he walked over to the paper-covered gray-leather examination table, sat down on it, and then stretched out. “I’m sorry I can be of no real help to you,” he said drowsily.

  More loudly than I’d expected, I shouted, “What have you done?”

  “One hundred,” he said. “Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven.”

  I raced over to him. His eyes were closed, his features relaxed, his hands crossed on his chest. He looked very peaceful. “Wake up!” I shouted. “You’ve got to answer my questions! Wake up!”

  “Ninety-six,” he said. “Ninety-fi. Nine-four. Ni-th. Ni. Nnnnnnn.”

  I shook him. I slapped his cheeks. I screamed in his ear. I half-climbed atop him, straddling him with one leg the better to grasp his shoulders and shake him, and I was in that position when the door opened and the nurse came in.

  She screamed. She shrieked, “Murder!” She went tearing away down the corridor, screaming, “He’s murdered the doctor!”

  Dr. Osbertson slept on, faintly smiling. As for me, I fled.

  22

  MY RETURN HOME bore a marked similarity to Napoleon’s departure from Russia. I had gone out with a head full of grand plans and predetermined goals, and I was coming back without my army. As for my six o’clock appointment with Gus Ricovic, I did not right now have very high hopes.

  I approached my block circumspectly, but once again there was no sign of my would-be assassins. With one last quick look around, I ducked into my doorway.

  The mailbox was full again. I emptied it into my pockets and went on upstairs.

  For once there was no one to greet me at my door, not even Wilkins. I went inside, emptied the mail from my pockets to the table near the door, and went out to the kitchen to prepare myself one of the first pre-sundown drinks of my life.

  If I had ever thought there was any chance of my being a detective, I now knew better. I’d gone out to question two men, and one of them had put himself to sleep rather than answer me. Unconscious, he had routed me.

  Of course, it might be construed as progress of a kind. After all, Dr. Osbertson wouldn’t have knocked himself out if he hadn’t had something to hide, would he?

  I considered briefly the notion that Dr. Osbertson had murdered Uncle Matt himself, in a fit of pique at Uncle Matt’s having proved his diagnosis to be so completely off the beam. To a professional man, it might seem a sort of insult to
say a man will die in a year and then have the man live five years beyond the diagnosis. If Uncle Matt hadn’t been hit on the head with a blunt instrument he might have outlived his physician.

  But that was a fairly silly reason for murder. No, it wouldn’t do. The murder had something to do with money, the money I’d inherited. There was no reason for any of the rest of this, otherwise.

  So what was Dr. Osbertson hiding? The identity of the patient who had recommended him to Uncle Matt? But why would that be something worth hiding?

  The extent of my ignorance in this sea of occurrences sometimes startled me and sometimes disheartened me. At the moment it was doing both.

  How could I find out what Dr. Osbertson knew and didn’t want me to know? If I went back to see him again, God alone knew what he might do. Shoot himself in the foot. Operate on his vocal cords. Inject himself with German measles and put himself in quarantine.

  My first drink didn’t solve any problems, so I had a second. As I sipped at it, I dialed Gertie’s number on the off-chance, but there wasn’t any answer. I then went through today’s inpouring of mail and found it—with one exception—to be another dose of yesterday’s avalanche. I threw the rest away and took a closer look at my exception.

  It was a plain envelope, with no name or address or any other writing on it. Nor a stamp; it hadn’t been mailed but had been dropped into my mailbox by someone while I was out.

  Inside was a small sheet of stationery, folded once. I opened it up and found a typed message inside, short and sweet. It read:

  Call me.

  Professor Kilroy

  CH2-2598

  Professor Kilroy. Where had I heard that name before? Somewhere …

  Gertie. She’d said Professor Kilroy was my Uncle Matt’s partner down in Brazil!

  Maybe at last I’d start finding out what was going on!

  I had the number almost all dialed when caution suddenly reasserted itself. This was a Chelsea number, which meant somewhere in this neighborhood. The note claimed to be from Professor Kilroy, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was a trick, to get me to announce when I was home? The gang could be a block from here, three buildings from here, just waiting for the phone to ring.