Dead-Bang (34 page)

Homicide detectives took care of Dave. A doctor—a very nice, capable, helpful, charming efficient, and
welcome
medical doctor, and loyal member of the AMA, by the way—took care of me.

He looked at me sorrowfully, and shook his head in the way those fellows sometimes do, and for a moment I wondered if he was an undertaker. But then he gave me a shot in the—put it this way: by then I was wearing Ed Loeffler's pants, and as though my tailor-made curse had struck again, I had to take
Ed's
pants off, or at least down. It was a large shot of very suspicious-looking gunk from a huge and deadly syringe, and half an hour later instead of dying from whatever FDA-approved embalming fluid he'd preserved me with I was feeling better. Quite a bit better. The pains were much diminished. I had stopped grunting. Which probably meant I was going to live.

Perhaps the shot affected my disposition, or mental balance, as well. Because I began to have a warm feeling—not merely for the good doctor, but for Organized Medicine, the AMA even, but especially for my pal, the MD.

For after all, had he not—well, almost—made a house call?

26

Captain Phil Samson rubbed his sledgehammer jaw, shook his head, and said again—we'd been talking in his office for half an hour—“I don't know. I just don't know. I'm
beginning
to understand why you had to commit mayhem on a police officer. Nonetheless, a judge is going to rule on the wisdom of that act. I will even admit if you'd been brought in we'd have kept you at least a week, if not forever, and probably I would personally have beaten you with a stick. And I realize that from
your
unique point of view—you had to avoid being jugged at all costs.”

“Not jugged, Sam. Jailed, yes. But a jug—”

“Jesus, can't you think of anything else? Tell me, why in hell did you go to that church, and … Shell, now with
hindsight
, it can't be denied those ten Citizens FOR protesters were in a bad spot, might have been seriously injured. Or worse—I've had more experience with mobs even than you. But you couldn't have
known
before the fact—”

“I had a hunch, Sam. I mean, a real zinger—”

“Very scientific. Let me finish.” He got one of his black cigars from the desk drawer, stuck it into his wide mouth, and growled around it. “I'm really trying to be fair, to understand. If it was a lovely day and you had nothing else to do and decided to visit the church and say hi to the marchers,
that
I can understand. But full of the stuff Cassiday shot into you, with your blood dissolving, the LAPD, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police looking for you, what possessed you under
those
circumstances to think you and only you had to help those people?”

“Why, they were girls, Sam—”

“
I know they were girls!
Even girls in some danger. Good lookers. No clothes on. I'm sure you took all that into consideration. But what other weighty factors influenced you? What else?”

“What do you mean, what else?”

He flipped his hands into the air. “I don't know,” he repeated yet again. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”

“I've told you a dozen times. Just sympathize with my delicate condition, thank me for all my good works, and let me—”

“Will you shut up? I'll jail you for littering the air. And don't give me any more of that bleeder baloney—ah, I'll admit you were in serious difficulty for a while. But I talked to Frank Killem and he told me you've got to be one of the most amazing physical specimens he's ever seen. An hour under observation in Central Receiving and you were almost back to normal, which for you must be abnormal. He said you've got hyperactive glands or something—”

“I had a hunch. Why, I was telling Dru.… Who's this Killem?”

“Dr. Frank Killem. He's the man I sent in the helicopter to save your miserable—”

“Killem? Sam, you sent me a doctor named
Killem?
Now I see you in your true colors—black and blue. You can't get me legally, so—”

“Will you shut—”

“Keerist, what must happen to Frank's patients in hospitals? Guy's waiting for an operation, shot full of various cruds, half dead, nurse says, ‘Is Dr. Baranowski going to operate on this dying man?' and a cold voice replies, ‘No. Killem.' Why, the guy could kick the bucket. Reminds me of the sad case of Dr. Curtin. Patient was being given the usual formaldehyde before surgery and somebody asked, ‘Is Dr. Baranowski going to operate on this hopeless case?' and a cold voice said, ‘No. It's Curtin's.' Patient let out a little squeak and expired right …”

Samson was wiggling a finger at somebody in the outer office. A plainclothes lieutenant came inside. Sam looked at him, then pointed a thick rigid finger at me.

“Arrest that man,” he said in a cold voice. “Dead or alive.”

It was a narrow squeak, but I got out of the police building by ten
P
.
M
. Samson let me go, but insisted the police officer I'd socked on the Santa Ana Freeway should, and would, press an awesome battery of charges against me. Mitigating circumstances, if any, could be presented in court to the judge—but all that was in the future.

At the present, I was swinging right off the freeway at the turn to Monterey Park, on my way to see Emmanuel Bruno. I had phoned him from the police building, hit a few high points of recent hours—including the fact that police officers had already found in Festus Lemming's office the “kit” Dave Cassiday had indeed hidden there—and accepted the Doc's warm invitation to visit him before going home.

This time Bruno's trees and shrubs, his “garden,” were illumined by colored spotlights and several paper-covered lanterns hanging from tree limbs. The grounds looked warm, very festive and inviting, but the Doc greeted me outside his door and led me into the house. We got settled in his front room, which was also warm and festive but looked more like a den or library crowded with odd-looking idols, unusual furniture, fearsome masks, and peculiarly compelling paintings on two of the walls. The other two walls were lined with books, some in bright new jackets and others obviously very old. There were also three or four terribly pornographic bits of statuary, which I admired.

He mixed a bourbon and water for me, poured a glug of brandy into a snifter, listened—with for him unusual restraint—while I explained in more detail the afternoon's events. Restraint, in that he refrained from getting his mouth into gear and shifting it from low to second to high and higher; but not silence. Because several times toward the end he whooped and shouted such things as “Glorious!” and “Splendid, Sheldon—splendid!” and as I finished my summation, he actually slapped his thigh several times. I found this a most refreshing contrast to Captain Samson's excessive restraint.

“Well, that's pretty much the size of it,” I said.

“Ah, thank you for telling me, Sheldon. How I wish I could have been there. For all of it, needless to say, but especially when, alone, you confronted the army of Lemmings clad in your shoes, shorts, and sports shirt. The thought of that confrontation is one I shall cherish. It will strengthen me during earthquakes, floods, and the coming Ice Age.”

He rose to his full six feet, five inches, voice gradually gaining in volume and power like when they turn on those big generators down at the electric light company. “But if
only
, at such a significant and symbolic moment, you could have gone forth entirely naked to smite the fearful foe—not alone, but borne on the shoulders of your nudist troops—a naked general charging from the church and down the greensward, your ten bare privates bouncing along beneath and behind you.”

I had a hunch the Doc was pretty well wound up. Of course, I'd never seen him when he wasn't. I had a hunch, too, that letting me speak so long without interruption must have been a strain on him. Like some of my other hunches, that one was right on the button.

He slashed an arm through the air as if it were the Singing Sword and continued oracularly, “I can see it now! The brave little band of nuts thundering down into the Valley of Death, shouting four-letter words and scattering Lemmings in a charge the like of which the world has not seen—The Charge at the I've-Seen-the-Light Brigade.
Ah
, what a charge!

“Canons to the right of them, canons to the left of them—from pulpit and pew they follied and blundered! Stormed at and shot was Shell, but bravely he rode, and, well … tolling the ding-dong bell? Bang-BANG! BOOM-bang—hell, I can't remember the bloody poem. Haven't read Tennyson since I was nine years old.”

“Uh-huh. Didn't happen that way, though. Too bad. I guess.”

He took my empty glass and filled it, added brandy to his snifter, and sat in a chair near me. “Where did you say you took the ten lovely ladies?” he asked, all calmed down.

“I didn't say. But I left them at a rather isolated cabin owned by a friend of mine. It's got almost everything, except a means of communication … and clothes.”

“Then I presume you intend to visit the ladies eventually, inform them of what occurred during your absence.”

“I had thought about it. Yes, I had. Uh, eventually. Like in half an hour, maybe.”

“Hmm.” He stood up, left the room, came back with a dark-brown pint bottle and a tablespoon. “You'd better have some of this right away, then, Sheldon.” He paused, while I poured the spoon full, then took back the bottle, saying, “It will—also—replenish some of the elements in your bloodstream assuredly depleted by the ravages of this day. Erovite is immensely rich in the vitamins, minerals, and trace elements necessary for optimum functioning of the human organism. The base is composed of concentrated extracts from liver, brewer's yeast, wheat germ, and seaweed, among other things.”

“Seaweed? Ye Gods, that's what Dave—”

“Never fear. Sea water, seaweed, and kelp contain all the minerals and trace elements of our nourishing Earth. All of which are also, though many in microscopic quantities, found in the body. The blood is very similar to sea water, you know.”

“No, I didn't know that.”

“Now you do.”

I hadn't swallowed the stuff yet, was still holding the brimming tablespoon in the air before my chops. Before tossing it down I focused my eyes on it, looked at the thick brownish nondescript gunk with an odd, complex mixture of emotions.

The spoon was full, more than full, liquid arching well above the spoon's edges in what was obviously defiance of the law of gravity, if only the law of gravity were considered and all other laws ignored. It certainly did appear that Erovite was breaking the law, though. Definitely criminal stuff. The ceiling light and the glow of a table lamp were reflected in it, glittering like dots of warmth or life or little suns or even bright little bugs. Which for a moment made me imagine a wee Festus Lemming in there, and a church and a cross, a scalpel and a caduceus, and me, and even little girlies. Then I opened my mouth and gobbled it all down.

“This is quite a moment for me, Doc,” I said. “It really is.” I smacked my lips. “So that's Erovite, huh? That's what the whooping and hullabaloo are about? It didn't hurt a bit—doesn't taste bad at all.”

“I find it delicious, myself. It's a food, really. Erovite, Sheldon, is essentially—about ninety percent—concentrated nutrition. The average American in this rich land is not, despite propaganda to the contrary, well-fed. He is, to a significant degree, starving. Tragically, he fails to realize it. Adding insult to injury, and in support of the status quo and their own imbecility, the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration announce every hour on the hour that Americans are the best-fed people in the world, that no U.S. citizen eating the mythical normal well-balanced diet requires any additional vitamins or minerals or food supplements designed to provide him with the nutrients and nutrition eliminated from his food, and that Peter Pan is alive and well in Argentina.
And
that it has been revealed to them from the source of all wisdom that Erovite is the product of quackery designed for faddists and must therefore be excommunicated.”

He got up, walked across the room, and poured himself a bit of brandy, saying, “If a man is to resist with minimal success the countless stresses of modern society, plus the effects of poisons in the earth, in the waters, in the air,
and
in his mind, then that with which he feeds his body, his cells and nerves and blood and brain, must not
add
to the poisons and wastes and stresses afflicting him. It must in every possible way feed, strengthen, nourish him. Since it does not, Erovite—or something like it—is not only desirable but essential.”

“So,” I said. “Erovite is simply steak and potatoes and a vitamin pill. Plus seaweed.”

“Not—” he grinned at me, satanically, I thought—“exactly. I said it was ninety percent nutritional, Sheldon. There is that other ten percent. While the ninety slowly but surely feeds the cells, often cells starved for most or all of a lifetime, the ten feeds the spirit and soul—in a way. I have, in a long life, a long and joyous life.…”

Still standing, he cocked his massive head on one side, as if glancing back over the years, and I asked, sort of automatically, “How long a life, Doc? How old are you, anyway? About sixty? Of course, if you're
older
you can tell me it's none of my—”

“Why, I'm eighty-four—”

“You're
what?”

“Eighty-four. Last month. Didn't you know?”

I didn't say anything because I was speechless. I was sure he had no reason to lie, but.… Suddenly I wasn't speechless. “If you're eighty-four, how old is Dru?”

“She's thirty-eight. Be thirty-nine in—”

“Jesus Christ!”