“Thanks,” he said, “and now that the interview is over, you can call me doc, if you want to. I was establishing prestige over you, in the cant of my trade.”
I stood up, put out my hand. “What does Olga call you?”
He laughed, more gently than before, and with a quick look at Miss Crowther. “When she was my assistant she called me ‘prof.’ when she liked me and ‘Dockie’ when she was mad.”
“Then, thanks, prof.”
He took my hand and then he held it. He looked at the ceiling. “The subject of status,” he said. “It’s one I’d like to talk about at length with you.”
“We’ll do that, prof. But just at the moment, I’m on duty. I’ve wasted too much time on myself now.”
But he hung on to my hand. “What makes a man become a teacher?” he asked the ceiling. “For the same investment in time and money, he could have gotten a law degree or a medical one, both paying much better than teaching does.”
“Maybe he lives in a town where there’s a teacher’s college and not a law school.”
Dr. Barnhart shook his head. “That’s a sort of superficial answer. But assuming something like that, how does it feel to be a high school principal, or a school superintendent, and to be at the beck and call – to coin a phrase – of every rich ass in town, when you’re educated and think you’re successful?”
“Sounds like you’re acquainted with Bailey Spratt, prof.”
He shook his head. “The car dealer? I just know his name on the window of his garage or agency or whatever it is.”
I am not fast. I was never trained to be fast, except with a gun or my fist, or a nightstick. I was trained to take it easy, to absorb one fact at a time, to be sure of everything I said before I said it, and not to judge by appearances or jump to conclusions. That is what makes a good policeman, not being brilliant, or running around faster than anyone else. But I was beginning to get something, fast or not, smart or not. “Doctor, do you know Walt Adams?”
He nodded.
I said: “Is there something you want to tell me?”
Dr. Barnhart shook his head. He said: “What a doctor learns from a patient is as sacred as what a priest learns from a confessing communicant. I imagine there are things picked up in police work that can never be disclosed to anyone. This conversation, lieutenant, cannot continue without getting into unethical country.”
“Well, thanks for the advice.”
“Advice always pleasures the giver more than the receiver. You say Miss Crowther’s roommate will be home soon?”
Nodding, I asked: “How long has she been a patient of yours?”
He shrugged, and turned away, and went to sit next to her. Me, I went out and got in my car and sat there and was almost sick to my stomach. Something had finally penetrated my thick brain.
Walt Adams my friend, was now prime suspect in the assault of Nora Patterson.
Chapter Thirteen
My drive to Walt’s house was slow. I did not relish what I was about to do, what I had to do: take the bandage off Walt’s face, and, if he was scratched up, take him into custody.
The long dreary procedure stretched ahead of me. The interview with the district attorney. The examination of Walt by Sergeant Ernen, possibly by official doctors. The press interviews. . . .
And – oh, God – the arrest of Dr. Hal Levy, Harold Levy, M.D. Because if Walt’s face was scratched, Hal had withheld police information. He had been told we were looking for a man in Naranjo Vista whose face was scratched; he had been told it by me, officially.
The law is very specific. What a patient tells a doctor is sacred, all right, unless the patient tells it to a doctor employed by the police or the district attorney, and knows at the time whom the doctor is working for.
But what a doctor sees, that is different. Failure to report a gunshot wound is withholding information from the police, and under some situations has been construed as harbouring a fugitive.
Failure to report a scratched face when informed that the police are looking for a man with a scratched face would be withholding information, harbouring and aiding a criminal, and possibly becoming an accessory after the fact. Hal Levy would be indicted, and he probably would lose his medical licence or his membership in the county Medical Association or both.
The accessory charge was a felony rap.
So it was no wonder I drove slowly. I had been worried about Olga and Hal Levy; I was still not sure that there wasn’t something there. Had Dr. Barnhart been trying to tell me not to let Olga go into partnership with Hal, or I’d lose her? The prof. was not a straight talker; I wasn’t sure.
But what I had to do, I’d do. I was not about to let a molester go because he was a friend of mine, or because I didn’t want my wife getting angry with me for making trouble for her friend.
There was the Adams house, and the Adams driveway. I parked the car and went in to do my duty, and let the friends fall where they fall. I hadn’t chosen to be an MP, but I had surer than hell made my own choice about going on with a police career, and here we paid for it.
I rang the Adams’s bell.
Ellie came to the door. Her face lit up with a real smile when she saw me. She put both hands on my forearm, and gave me a little squeeze. “Andy, how nice to see you. Have you come to see Walt? He’s asleep, thank goodness.”
“Wake him up,” I said.
Her smile faded. “Why, Andy, are you out of your mind? You know how Walt is when he’s just got a cold and –”
“May I see him, Mrs. Adams? I can get a warrant if I have to.”
Her face was awful – pale and staring and wan. I pushed past her and into the master bedroom, Plan C-2, Bartlett Construction Company.
The bed was empty. It was not only empty, it was made up, unruffled.
Ellie had hold of my arm again, but not now in friendship or in flirtation. She was babbling nonsense.
I shook her off and looked in the guest room, just to be sure, but he wasn’t there. I said: “When did he scram?”
She shrieked. “You Cossack,” at me. I have been called that before.
Her shoulders were knobs under my hands as I grabbed her and shook her. “Make sense, Ellie. The longer he runs, the worse the case against him gets.”
She struck at my face. She didn’t claw, I noticed, as I weaved my head to avoid her; she made fists and tried to strike like a man. It wasn’t very effective.
Finally I shoved her away from me, and crossed to the phone. She collapsed into a big chair – Walt’s favourite – and began to cry, a thin, horrible, wailing noise.
The number of the police station had gone out of my head. I think I was more shocked by that than by anything else that had happened. I had to look in the phone book, and there it was, on the first page under Emergency Listings and I dialled it.
Sergeant McRaine was on duty. He said: “Naranjo Vista Police,” loud and clear, and his sensible, everyday voice brought me back to earth. “This is Lieutenant Bastian,” I said.
At once he said: “Captain Davis has been looking for you,” and his switches clicked and his lines buzzed, and Jack Davis said: “Andy, get in here at once.”
“Listen, Jack –”
“I said at once, damn it,” and the phone clicked.
The instrument was heavy in my hands. I hung it back in its cradle and turned back. “Listen, Ellie, you’ve got to help me. It’ll be much easier on Walt if I can find him and say he surrendered to me than if I have to put out an All Points Bulletin. You can see that.”
She wailed: “I don’t know. He’s just – he just said that everything was ruined and I was never to see him again, and he ran out.”
“When was this?”
“About nine-thirty this morning.”
So now I knew who had burned the desk in Walt’s office; Walt himself. Who’d notice something so common as the principal going into the principal’s office? There wouldn’t be time to sort out whatever evidence about Eleanor Crowther and N
ora Patterson was in the desk – so burn the whole thing.
“Where do you think he’d run to?” But she was crying again.
Then, through her wet fingers, she blurted: “He took his gun. His service automatic.”
I stared at her. I patted her back. There wasn’t anything to say, so I left without saying it.
My police chief had ordered me into the station fast; I’d better go. As I trotted for my car, I looked at my watch. Olga would be home from college in an hour; I’d send her over to be with Ellie. It was no job for a nurse, and Hal Levy was the Adams’s doctor. Dr. Levy would not be available. Someone else would have to take his calls.
I didn’t have to use the siren or the red light to get to the station; Naranjo Vista was in a quiet, trafficless mood. I coasted into the basement garage and used the stairs to get up to the street level.
The patrolman in Jack Davis’s office jerked a thumb at the inner door, and I went on through.
Jack Davis was not alone. There was a small, very dapper old gent in one of his visitor’s chairs, a burly, athletic looking guy of about thirty-five in the other.
Jack’s greeting wasn’t like him: “Where the hell have you been, lieutenant?”
I pulled myself up, threw him a ball, though I was in plainclothes. “Out on duty, sir. The Patterson case. I want to see you alone, at once, sir.”
“Let that all go,” Jack Davis said. “This is Mr. Wright. This is his lawyer, Mr. Leonard. Mr. Wright is the father of the prisoner who calls himself John Davis.”
Mr. Wright said: “I don’t understand that. Not at all. As though he was ashamed of his name.”
“It’s my name,” Jack said. “He probably thought it was funny, giving the police chief’s name for the blotter. They –”
Whoever “they” were or what “they” did, he decided not to talk about. He looked red-faced and angry. He glared at me. “Get yourself a chair, lieutenant.”
He’d never called me that before. “I’ll stand.”
Mr. Wright said: “He had a great sense of humour, Junie did. . . . We called him Junie, for Junior, lieutenant. He was always laughing.”
They always are, on Skid Row. Light, empty, meaningless giggles are the theme song of the lush, the bum and the moocher. It had been many years since I had thought that laughter meant they were happy.
“How could you do it?” Mr. Wright asked, suddenly. “You had my boy in charge. How could you let him get shot?”
I said: “Captain, could I see you outside a minute?”
Jack Davis said: “We have visitors, Bastian. I –” I guess he could read the rising anger in my face. “Excuse me gentlemen?”
When we got outside, he blared out at me: “Where the hell have you been? I’ve had the worst half-hour of my life with that old foop. You picked a fine time to go corking off someplace.”
“I’m not a rookie patrolman, Jack. I’m not a raw recruit out of high school. Listen. Walt Adams has taken it on the lam, and I think he attacked the Patterson girl.” I gave it to him hard and straight. I made an official report out of it, the way we had been trained to do. The only thing I left out was Dr. Barnhart’s part: it didn’t seem to apply, and the doctor had been slightly unethical in tipping me off. He’d been disclosing information he’d gotten while treating Miss Crowther. I let Jack think that Miss Crowther had used Nora Patterson’s name, but she hadn’t, she’d only referred to a young bitch, or words to that effect.
My neck was out again.
Jack Davis nodded, and leaned against the corridor wall. The red was ebbing out of his face. He fished in his pockets – he was wearing a suntan uniform – and got out cigarettes and matches. He held my light for me. Then he cleared his throat, and said: “You’re the hell of a police officer, aren’t you, Andy? You can smell your way through a case, and come up with the right answer when all the rest of us are looking around for our shoes to put on.”
“No. You told me to take Miss Crowther home. I did. When I got there, she didn’t seem in shape to leave alone. So I stayed, and she talked.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “You put out an APB yet?”
“No. Half an hour doesn’t matter. Walt Adams isn’t going to go assaulting anyone else. And if he was going to kill himself, he would have done it before I ever heard of it.”
Jack Davis nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.” He walked down the corridor, and opened Drew Lasley’s door without knocking. “Drew, there’s a beef in my office. The father of the punk that Norman Patterson shot. Go talk to him. He’s probably going to sue us, and Andy here in particular, but try and get him to do it for a nice, small amount.”
“Jack,” I said, as Drew went by us to take the duty, “I’m glad you think this is funny.”
“We got to decide what to do about Walt,” Jack Davis said. “C’mon in your office.”
So we went there. I was beginning to get the pitch. It was all my grief. Jack Davis was the chief, he was captain of our jolly little force, but if Walt Adams got away, it was because I hadn’t put him on the air as soon as I suspected him. If, on the other hand, he was picked up and proved innocent, it was all my fault, too.
Jack rambled along, saying nothing, but issuing a number of words. I reached for my phone. “Get me Dr. Levy.”
Jack Davis was saying: “Mr. Bartlett said he’d back you all the way. Maybe a private detective agency instead –”
“Captain, either check this to me, or don’t.”
I’d never spoken to him that way. He got red in the face again, and then he said: “I’m your superior officer.”
“Don’t I –” I broke off. We sounded childish.
Dr. Levy’s phone had been ringing. Now the ringing stopped, and his voice said name and title. I said my own name, without title, but I added: “This is police business. Walt Adams has skipped.”
Dr. Harold Levy waited a second and then said: “Oh.”
“There’s a strong chance you’re in trouble, doctor. Was his face scratched?”
A longer silence and then: “Yes. It could have been fingernails. He could also have run into a tree in the dark. There are some locust saplings on the school grounds. . . .”
“Cut it, doc. Why didn’t you report this?”
No waiting at all this time. Hal said: “Because Walt Adams could never assault a girl in a million years, no matter how much the provocation. And I didn’t want him framed.”
“This department doesn’t frame people.”
“No,” he said, “but it jumps to conclusions, just like all cops, everywhere and every place. And having made its conclusions, it backs them up. If cops were professional men with some training, some education, I might have told you. But you – they – are simple guys with broad shoulders and long legs and blackjacks and guns. I don’t believe in turning my friends over to them.”
And there it was. This was what the world thought of us, this was what Olga’s friends really thought of Olga’s husband. When the chips were down, a cop was all alone in a world that didn’t like him.
“Got any idea where Walt is, doctor?”
“No.”
“Okay, pal. I’ll find him. And when I do I’ll probably get a confession out of him. And if that confession includes a statement that he told you where he was going, I’ll take a keen, professional pleasure in chopping that M.D. off the end of your name so quick you’ll think a surgeon with twenty years of education did it, Okay?”
He slammed the phone down on the other end of the wire.
Jack Davis said: “Hey, Andy, Dr. Levy’s a big man in Naranjo Visto.”
“Don’t I know it, captain? Don’t I just know it?”
Chapter Fourteen
Now it was necessary to go back into Jack Davis’s office and soothe Mr. Wright. It was our fault that his son was a wino and a peeping Tom and generally no good.
Everything in me wanted to take off in all directions at once and chase Walt Adams. But I couldn’t do it; my loyalty to Jack demanded that I get
Mr. Wright off his neck first.
Sure. I should have sent out a bulletin on Walt. But I thought, if one of those gun-hipped cops up in the city walked up on him, Walt was likely to kill himself. I didn’t know what poisons would be in a high school chemistry lab, but if there were any, he would have helped himself.
And, with Walt dead, this case would fall apart again, as it had fallen apart when Sergeant Ernen ruled out little Junior Wright, the wino, as the man Nora Patterson had scratched.
One more mistake, and I was through. This was the third strike.
So I put on my best face, and went back to Jack’s office. Mr. Wright was still sitting; but his lawyer, Mr. Leonard, had gone around behind the captain’s desk, and was staring out the window. His fingernails were drumming on the sill. Drew Lasley went out, fast.
Mr. Wright said: “Really, this is unpardonable. We’ve been waiting and waiting, and my boy is lying in a hospital at death’s door.”
Jack Davis said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Wright. Something came up. You know how it is when you’re running a police department.”
Reasonably enough, Mr. Wright said he didn’t know. “And I don’t think you’re running this one very well, letting my boy get shot.”
Jack Davis let that one go over his shoulder, and said: “Well, as I told you, this is Lieutenant Bastian’s case. I’m sure that he’ll see you’re taken care of.” Whatever that meant. “Use the office as long as you want, Andy,” and he scrammed.
I sat down at Jack’s desk. I made a speech: “Mr. Wright, you are not a taxpayer here in Naranjo Vista. You have, so far as I know, no political influence. Your lawyer here, Mr. Leonard, has, perhaps, told you that under such circumstances, you can expect little cooperation from this force.” My God, listen to me. I should have been a preacher. Actually, I guess, I had been listening when the black coats lectured us kids in the orphanage. “He couldn’t be more wrong,” I went on. “I want you to treat me exactly as though I worked for you. Tell me what you want, and if I can’t do it, I’ll tell you why.” I sat back and started to make a steeple out of my fingers, and then thought better of it.
A Nice Girl Like You (Lt. Andy Bastian Mysteries Book 2) Page 12