But my selling technique was off. He didn’t even look at the hand I held out to him. He said: “You calling me a dog, copper?”
“You know better than that.”
“You let a filthy assaulter get away last night,” Spratt said. “You pulled my gang off the streets to show what a big shot you are, and the rat got away. I got a lot of money invested in Naranjo Vista; you knocked some of it off. Houses are not worth much in a town where girls can get attacked.”
That wasn’t what he was sore about, of course. It was my running down his honorary deputy’s badge, making it look like nothing at all. But I still had a job to do; I couldn’t mention that. I couldn’t mention the fact that he ran his own home so badly his son robbed it. I said: “I still want to get along with you, Mr. Spratt. Let me put it this way: You have a business. I have nothing to do but enforce the law. Leave it to me, leave it to the department. If you had a hot prospect for a car sale, you’d hate to drop him and have to go running around the streets, chasing crooks or traffic violators.”
But I’d said the wrong thing; his eyes had lit up. Of course, there was nothing he’d like better than to take a prospect along with him as he went, swinging through the streets at ninety miles an hour, siren open, red light glowing. But the California Highway Patrol wouldn’t let him have a red light; they don’t permit them on posse members’ cars.
Poor little Bailey Spratt, with no red light, not even a siren. Of course, with his automobile agency, he could start an ambulance service, and drive the ambulance himself on the chauffeur’s day off.
Now Bailey Spratt said: “Who’s the dame? You’re married, I met your wife one time. Who’s the dame you’re smooching around with on city time?”
Coming from that red, angry face, the juvenile expression was too much for me. “Live happy, Mr. Spratt,” I said. “Don’t be mad all the time. It’ll shorten your life.” It was flippant, but it left him silent long enough for me to get back in the car and back away; if I’d gone forward, I’d have ruined some paint for the city and for Mr. Spratt’s car – a demonstrator, I suppose.
Miss Crowther was still asleep in the car as I got to her house. It was a C-3 model, and I noticed something; there were two names on the door. She lived with some other girl.
C-3s have two bedrooms. I couldn’t tell which was hers, though they had different colour schemes. If I’d known more about women, I would have been able to tell what colours a brunette would choose, I suppose, but then I didn’t know much about women. . . .
Finally, I just put her down on the couch in the living room, pulled a pink throw-blanket from the foot of one of the beds, and covered her over. On second thought, I took her shoes off. First aid procedure said I should loosen any light clothing, like a girdle or brassiére. I didn’t.
Now I was worried. I’d called her doctor when she looked tired and maybe in danger of having a breakdown; what she had now was much more serious. So I called Dr. Barnhart’s number, and got his office nurse. Dr. Barnhart was still in the city. I asked: “Who takes his calls? Dr. Levy?”
“Why, no. Dr. Crossen.”
“He’s a pediatrician.”
The nurse said she knew that. She sounded a little annoyed with me. Then she said: “Dr. Barnhart has started home from the hospital. He ought to be here in a few minutes. He’s a very fast driver.”
Then she said: “Oh, I mean, he never exceeds the speed limit, of course –”
“Okay, okay. I leave traffic to my betters.”
“You just stay there, lieutenant, and I’ll send the doctor around the minute he shows up.”
I got a chair and pulled it over by the couch. Miss Crowther was rolling around a little, and moaning.
When she flung her arm out, the hand groping, I took her hand and held it tight. She returned the pressure, and it seemed to calm her. She said, very clearly: “Oh, Walt, you’ve come back to me,” and brought my hand up to her mouth and kissed it.
Now I wanted to get out of there. This was something I had no right to hear. Walt Adams was my friend, Ellie Adams was my friend. If Walt was having an affair with his assistant, I wanted to hear it from him or not at all.
The half-conscious dame was getting restless; I suppose she could feel my attention slipping away from her. Her legs thrashed, and the throw rug fell away, disclosing long legs in beige nylons. I had been right; she had a girdle on, and according to the first aid manual this was not good for people in comas or semi-comas. But I was damned if I’d take it off her.
The way my luck was running, the Ladies Guild of the United Churches of Naranjo Vista would walk in and catch me right in the middle of the act.
“She’s just a snot-nosed brat,” the lady assistant principal said. “I knew you’d see through her, Walt dear. I’m so happy.”
I reached down and covered her attractive legs. The thing to do was to phone for our public nurse, Miss Hellman. Or look up the housemate and get her to come home.
The educator on the couch was dropping into reminiscence.
The phone was there in the living room. If I could spare Miss Hellman, I ought to; we’d routed her out last night for the Pattersons.
I opened the front door, read the housemate’s name again. Virginia McManus. The phone book had her listed only for this address, no business phone. There was a personal telephone directory, hand written; but she wasn’t under V or M. . .-. I phoned the station, told the duty sergeant to get a business address for Virginia McManus, and gave him the number where I was, which I should have done the minute I got out of the car and off the short-wave radio.
Miss Crowther was now detailing all the things she would like to or was willing to do for Walt. A whore in West Berlin had given me the same line when I was twenty. Miss Crowther certainly had an M.A. in order to be assistant principal of a high school. Maybe she had a Ph.D. But she was no more original than a guttersnipe.
The station called back. No business number for Virginia McManus. They had checked with the fire department and in case of fire Miss Eleanor Crowther was to be notified at the high school.
Of course, many men were named Walter.
So I had a right and a duty to search the place. And, dammit, I should have done it before. Except that a Walt-Eleanor-Ellie triangle was none of my business. That is, not police business.
But I wanted to know. I wanted to prove to myself that the Walt of Miss Crowther’s mutterings was not my friend, but a completely different Walter. Maybe Walter Ulbricht, or Walter Reuther.
Of course, it wasn’t. The second bureau drawer I opened had a picture of Walt in it, in a silver frame, lying on its back among handkerchiefs and bobby pins and so on.
Which proved I was in the wrong room to find out about Miss (Mrs.?) Virginia McManus. It also proved some other things.
In the other room, the pink and silver one, a very quick search turned up an envelope addressed to Miss Virginia, at Industrial Statistics, Inc., in the city. My high-powered detective training carried me back to the phone book, and my highly-trained finger dialled the long distance necessary to get I.S., Inc., and Miss McManus was in.
A good enough girl for a policeman to call. She didn’t squawk when I told her that there’d been a fire at the high school and her roommate had had a collapse and needed help, preferably feminine help. She said she’d be home within the hour.
For the ninetieth time, I regretted that Jack Davis’s prejudices had kept us from replacing some policewomen who had gone sour on us. We had to get Miss Hellman on the rare occasions when we wanted to search a female. A nice blue-skirted cop would have been a lovely thing to check this mess to.
I had not given Miss Crowther the pills that Dr. Barnhart advised. She didn’t seem to need sedation; she was as dopey as necessary already.
If anything, she needed something to stimulate her, but all that could wait till Barnhart got there. Me, I needed stimulation, too. I went into the kitchen. Nothing but powdered coffee – two dames, living alone, with no man to cook f
or – but it would do; I put on water.
Then I took a look at the patient. Legs and girdle were again visible, and as before, they did little for me. Last night I had liked this girl, but not now, which was silly.
No, not silly. Silly – Olga was bringing me up to her level – was an omnibus word. The word I wanted was prudish. Because this girl had fallen in love with a married man, because she attempted to be ingenious in trying to hold him, I had no right to look down on her. I was a cop, not a reformer. People’s sex lives were their own, so long as they didn’t endanger the public peace.
My water was boiling. I took a cup of the powdered brew straight, scalding hot. It made little beads of sweat pop out on my forehead, but it made me feel better. I was washing the cup when the front doorbell rang.
Doctor – thank God – Barnhart. I told him who I was, let him in, and led him to the couch. I said: “I’m checking it to you, doctor. I’ve called her housemate, Miss McManus. She’s on her way home.”
He nodded. “Do I smell coffee, lieutenant?”
“Powdered. In the kitchen. I just had a cup.”
“Make me one, will you? One sugar, no cream.”
It wasn’t an order. He was just used to having a nurse or an intern or an orderly or someone following him; when he wanted something he asked for it: “Scalpel. Coffee. Handkerchief. Forceps.”
This was a time when Andy Bastian needed all the friends he could make. I went and boiled more water, and brought him his cup.
He was just putting a needle back in his black bag, pulling the covers over Miss Crowther’s much-viewed legs. He said: “You know when they go into one of these withdrawal-from-reality kicks, it’s best to help them really get there. It’s something your wife will never be able to do, it seems?”
Probably I said: “Huh?”
“You’re Olga Bastian’s husband, aren’t you? Sit down, Andy. You don’t mind my calling you that? I’m quite a lot older than you are.”
“Probably not.” He had a little white at the temples, but all the hair was there, and what wrinkles he had looked like they’d come from laughing. “I’m twelve years older than Olga.”
“And twelve years younger than I am. Also, you are nine feet tall, four feet across at the shoulders, have an I.Q. of 2043, are slightly handsomer than any movie star, and should be the head of the combined FBI, CIA and possibly the President’s Cabinet. Olga talks about you often.”
So I sat down, and tried to pull my eyebrows down at the same time.
“Olga has had courses under me,” he explained. “In fact, the year before she met you, she was my teaching assistant.”
“That makes me a hell of a cop. Barnhart isn’t so common a name that I shouldn’t have figured it out. Professor Barnhart, Doctor Barnhart. Sure. The same guy.”
He laughed. “All right. I’ve wanted to talk to you. Hal Levy said he would, has he?”
“I know Hal. We talk about a lot of things.”
The professor stared at me until I was a little ashamed of getting hard-nosed. But until I saw where this was going, I wanted to play it cosy.
“Well, this,” he said. “We both think it’s a shame that Olga doesn’t try for her M.D. Hal says she doesn’t because she doesn’t want to be a perpetual schoolgirl, and a burden on you, financially.”
“The money doesn’t mean a damned thing,” I said. “I make plenty. Levy’s offered her a partnership.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Hal doesn’t know the first thing about psychiatry. I suspect that in a few years, Olga would be the important partner. . . . But she should have her own medical degree.” He gestured towards the couch. “What would she do if one of her patients were in this condition? Phone for an intern? As a lay analyst, a clinical psychologist, she’d never have the right to use a needle, or even prescribe a pill.”
“When I phoned you, I thought you were Miss Crowther’s family doctor,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were a screw-tightener.”
“There’s a flattering term, flatfoot.”
We both grinned. I should have been thinking of Olga, but I wasn’t. The knowledge that Miss Crowther was having mental trouble – not the right term, but it will do – and an affair with Walt Adams was very possibly police business. Crime prevention department.
High schools are focal points for crime. Maybe they didn’t used to be, but they are now. Ours didn’t seem to be in the best hands – a principal who had had an affair with his assistant and then with some other girl, and an assistant principal with a breakdown because she had been spurned for a younger woman. This did not make for the close attention school kids, high school kids particularly, need. I got ready to pump Dr. Barnhart. I wanted to find out just how unstable Miss Crowther was.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time,” Dr. Barnhart was saying.
My mind came back to my own problems, away from those of the police department. “If I lay a little – whatsit, a psychologic block – problem in your lap, doctor, do I get sent a bill?”
He let me make what I wanted to out of a smile.
“This, then. I’m very anxious for Olga to go for her medical degree. It would take about four years, wouldn’t it?”
“Including her internship, yes. But I don’t see the problem. You and I are in complete agreement.”
“Without trying to use any of the terms Olga’s taught me, my motives are pretty badly mixed. In fact, when I take a good look at them, I come up thinking I’m a stinker . . . Like this, doc. So long as Olga’s a student and I’m a big shot assistant police chief. I’m high muckamuck around her house. When she’s a practicing doctor, M.D. or Ph.D., I’m just her lowbrow cop husband. So I’d like her to keep studying for the next twenty or thirty years. In other words, I’m a stinker.”
His head went back to laugh, exposing his strong throat. On the couch, Miss Crowther stirred, and the doctor choked his laugh off, went to take her hand, feel her pulse. Then he poked one of her eyelids up, and shook his head. “She’s fighting the sedative,” he said. “That’s one of the things a double-doctor like Olga could find out about. A straight M.D. like Hal Levy, now, has to go on the assumption that dosage is dosage, no matter what the mental condition of the patient is. That simply isn’t so.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Well, I’ll answer one of them; you don’t get a bill. . . . The other one is more difficult. Let me start out by saying I’m flattered you brought it to me. . . .”
“But –”
He raised his hand. “Unlike Olga, I am neither a clinical psychologist nor a psychoanalyst. I’m a psychiatrist, which really means just a medical man who has decided to specialize in mental and nervous disorders. I should have had many more courses in philosophy, for instance, before being confronted with a problem like yours. Let me talk around it for awhile.”
“Go ahead,” I said. But I was thinking, here I am on duty, and wasting time talking about myself and my wife. Bailey Spratt ought to know about this; he could really make something of it.
“Our Russian friends say that the end justifies the means,” Dr. Barnhart said. “So if Olga goes to medical school, the reason doesn’t matter. But we’re not in Russia. If we were, I imagine you wouldn’t have the problem, anyway. A police officer would be so much higher than anyone else, he wouldn’t have to worry.”
“When you say you’re going to talk around a subject, you mean way around, don’t you, doc?”
“Please don’t call me doc. Al, if you must be intimate.”
He wasn’t being funny. I got red in the face; I’m not used to being put in my place that way. But it was like his order to make him a cup of coffee; it was said and forgotten as soon as he’d said it. By him, at least. I remembered it.
“We in the United States are under a very peculiar system,” the doctor went on. “A cop is as good as an atomic physicist, the milkman can catch as many fish as the banker. Only, of course, it’s not so. The physicist calls up the police chief, o
r the mayor, and the cop is in trouble; the banker owns the trout stream, and the milkman is arrested for trespassing.”
“Doctor, doctor, come down to earth.”
He nodded. “Money and status are the carrots that make the American run,” he said. “First money. I don’t imagine the top ranking police officer in the United States, the head of the FBI or the New York Police Department, makes more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year. As the sort of practitioner I expect Olga to become, she could readily make three times that much. I don’t think she will, because she is Olga, and before she reaches that goal, she is going to start devoting most of her time to clinical and research work, which doesn’t pay at all. But she’ll undoubtedly be able to make more than you.”
He was levelling with me at last. I owed him a slow answer; I turned one over in my mind, until I was satisfied with it, and then spoke it. “Not too important. I’ll be paying my own way. And I can always remind myself that my earnings paid her way through college.”
“Good answer,” he said, putting me back in the orphan school again. “Very good answer. Now, status. Unless you’ve lost confidence in yourself, you ought to be more important four years from now than you are now. And you’re pretty important, now. Even an ex-ambulance rider like me is slightly awed by a police lieutenant. Now, we face a simple question, and then we’re done: do you think you’ll be a bigger man four years from now, or don’t you? Because if you do, your motives are pure; if you don’t, you’re simply postponing a decision, which means eventual trouble and probably the breakup of your marriage.”
“If I didn’t think I was getting some place, I’d go back in the Army and buck for colonel,” I said.
And then I realized that he had solved my problem for me, by making me do it myself, and all at once I realized what Olga’s profession was all about. I felt fine, and I said: “I know now why you’re a professor.”
A Nice Girl Like You (Lt. Andy Bastian Mysteries Book 2) Page 11