Death of a Tall Man (3 page)

“Damn,” Dr. Gordon said, as he said at approximately five seconds after ten twenty-two
A.M.
on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. He put the unopened package of cigarettes back in his pocket. He said, “Thank you, Nurse,” with the calculated bitterness which was part of the formula. Then he smiled.

“Compensation cases again at noon,” Grace Spencer said. “It's Monday.”

Dr. Gordon nodded; this was a formula recurrent only twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. He said he remembered. He said he would probably be a little late.

“Probably,” Grace Spencer agreed.

Dr. Gordon already had his light topcoat back across his arm and was moving toward the door. He still held most of the letters, open now. At Deborah's desk he paused and dropped them in front of her.

“Appointments, Debbie,” he said. “Nothing Friday afternoon.” He started away. He turned back. “Unless it seems to be really urgent,” he said.

Deborah said she knew. Dr. Gordon went on across the waiting room, but at the front door he paused again.

“Give the boy my love when you see him,” he said, and went out. It was between ten twenty-five and ten thirty.

For the next two hours, both Grace Spencer and Deborah Brooks afterward agreed, nothing out of the ordinary happened. There was the usual number of telephone calls—some for appointments, which Deborah handled; some for advice and counsel, which went to Grace. Mrs. Fleming did call. Grace Spencer assured her that it was essential to continue to wear the dark glasses, even if they did make her look like an owl. Deborah made half a dozen appointments for the next two days and refused one for Friday afternoon. She answered letters and typed up the office records of the compensation cases.

At eleven thirty a small elderly man in a neat blue suit and an immaculate white shirt, slightly frayed at the collar, came into the office. He came hesitantly and stood just inside the door, peering down the room at Deborah. Deborah smiled at him and, encouraged, he came to her desk. He peered at her through red, swollen eyes. He spoke doubtfully, hesitantly.

“I was sent here,” he said. “The insurance people, they—”

Deborah's smile and nodding head made him welcome.

“Of course,” she said. “You're a little early, Mr.—”

“Weber,” he said. “Fritz Weber. I didn't want to keep anybody waiting, miss.”

Deborah smiled at him again and he smiled back. He was an unusually nice little man, Deborah thought. He held a card out to her; she took it, recorded it, and returned it, telling him it was to go with him into the examining room. He was, she told him, to go to room No. 1, and the nurse would show him where it was. But for the time being, he was to find a comfortable chair somewhere and—Deborah checked herself. From the looks of his eyes, she had better not tell him to find himself something to read.

“Just rest for a while,” she said.

Between eleven thirty-five when Mr. Weber was attended to, and eleven fifty-five, five more men came—men varying in size and manner, three of whom were wearing dark glasses and one other of whom, judging by the lesion in his right lower lid, should have been; all looking like men who worked for a living with their hands. They identified themselves as Robert Oakes, John Dunnigan, George Cooper, Henry Flint and Jose Garcia; they appeared in that order and were assigned examining rooms in the order of their arrival, Weber going to the first room, Oakes to the second and so on. At noon, Grace Spencer came to the door and said, “If you gentlemen—” and they stood up, with varying alacrity, differing degrees of confidence. Grace took their cards, which Deborah had numbered in pencil in accordance with the room assigned. Grace took them into the corridor and, moving down it, dropped them off at the appropriate cubicles. Then, beginning in Room 6, she worked back, leaving in each room the card of the man occupying it. She then retraced her steps, working back from Room 1, dimming the lights in the rooms of the men wearing the dark glasses and gently lifting away the glasses; putting drops which stung and caused tears in the eyes of Henry Flint, No. 5, and John Dunnigan, No. 3.

She finished at twelve fifteen. When she emerged from Room 6, she found Dr. Gordon coming in by the back door. She watched him leave his hat and coat in the front closet. She thought he looked unusually well and pleased; she deduced that the operation had gone well. As he went down the longer corridor to his office he lighted a cigarette. He stopped at the door leading to the reception room long enough to raise his eyebrows enquiringly at Deborah and to hear her say, “Nothing important, Doctor.” Then he went on into his office and closed the door behind him. It was assumed afterward that, during the next three or four minutes, he washed up in his private lavatory and put on the fresh white coat left ready for him by Nurse Spencer. It was about twelve twenty, a minute one way or the other, when he opened the door from his office into Room 1 and began his examinations.

Whatever preoccupations Dr. Andrew Gordon had when he opened the door leading from his office to the first of the examining rooms vanished as he closed the door behind him and looked down at the first waiting patient—little Fritz Weber, blinking his red and swollen eyes. He must, it was realized afterward, have had at least as many personal problems, sharp-edged worries, churning in his mind as most men have. He must have been thinking about Dan, and of the girl of twenty—their Debbie—who loved Dan. He must have been thinking, at some time that morning, about the fact that Dan Gordon would be twenty-five in a few months' time, and about what that birthday would mean. And as he thought of that, he may have had memories—with what emotions no one could more than guess—of a woman dead for almost a decade, and of that woman's brother, who was anything but dead. Dr. Gordon must have thought about Evelyn Gordon, eighteen years his junior and his wife, and of their Eileen, who was only six and had hair as soft and bright as her mother's. One of these thoughts would have led to another and all of these would have led to others still—to thoughts of Lawrence Westcott and, perhaps, of Grace Spencer. A man's mind can become a clutter of thoughts and worries, like a storeroom long unordered.

But when Dr. Gordon stepped into the first of the six examining rooms and looked with entirely professional interest at Mr. Weber, and, of Mr. Weber, only at Mr. Weber's eyes, he was able to sweep all this clutter out. It was that ability to concentrate—the unjealous among his confreres had long ago decided—which made him so very, so exceptionally, good at his job. At a given moment, Andrew Gordon could eliminate everything else and become a doctor—a man in a white coat. Possibly, Grace Spencer had sometimes thought, the wearing of the white coat helped; perhaps it was in some degree a symbol. A good many oculists, working in their own offices, worked in tweeds and blue cheviots. Andrew Gordon never did. The act of putting on the crisp white over his suit coat may have been his way of dramatizing, for himself, a step across some invisible line, on one side of which he was a man of fifty with the ordinary worries of his kind, and on the other only a doctor, with eyes only to observe and a mind only to diagnose. And there was also the fact, of course, that the white coat had a desirable effect on many of his patients, lending them assurance that all was as it should be. Like other people, although usually with more difficulty, Dr. Gordon's patients read the better magazines and knew that oculists wear white coats as inevitably as they wear reflectors strapped to their foreheads.

Now, as science in a white coat, he examined Fritz Weber's card, noting the provisional diagnosis of the insurance physician who had referred Weber to a specialist, no doubt in the hope that the specialist would find Weber's eyes in ideal condition and that hence the insurance company would have no liability in behalf of the firm for which Weber worked and in whose shop Weber had incurred an eye injury which had left him, so far, half blind. Science in a white coat looked at the card and then at Weber, who said, uneasily, “Good morning, Doctor.” Science, impartial as between Weber and an insurance company, examined Weber's eyes; it made notes on Weber's card. It told Weber, with impersonal friendliness, that he should leave his card, that Dr. Mergrim of the insurance company would be communicated with, and that Weber should go home and avoid using his eyes. “Wear dark glasses for a few days,” science advised Mr. Weber, who blinked and nodded. Science in the white coat moved on.

“Good morning, Doctor,” the patient in Room 2 said, also uneasily, and the man in the white coat—the man who represented science—looked into his eyes. “Hello, Doctor,” the man in Room 3 said. The man in Room 5 said “Hello, Doc,” and there was a kind of asperity—of challenge—in his voice. The man in Room 6, who spoke with an accent, said “Good morning, sir.” In each of the six rooms the representative of abstract science examined eyes and made notes on a card and undertook to communicate findings to the physician representing the insurance company. And each patient, following instructions, left his card behind, to be picked up later by Nurse Spencer, to find its way eventually to Dr. Gordon's desk and to serve as a memorandum of diagnosis.

Grace Spencer, after she had checked the patients in advance of the doctor, relieved Deborah Brooks at the reception desk in the waiting room. That was a minute or two, as nearly as she could afterward decide, after Dr. Gordon had returned from the hospital—she guessed it as about seventeen or eighteen minutes after twelve. Deborah Brooks went through the storeroom and bathroom—pausing to powder her nose and to worry briefly about the sunburn on it—and then out the back door. It took her, she thought, two or three minutes. At a guess—the guess of Lieutenant William Weigand of the Homicide Squad—she went out the back door about the time Dr. Gordon entered the first examining room. She had met no one as she left.

Debbie returned from lunch at twelve fifty by Grace's watch. Grace thought she looked a little worried, but she could guess why the girl might be worried and had not mentioned it. She had turned the reception desk over to Debbie and had gone through storeroom and bathroom, pausing to wash her hands, and then to her desk in the examining corridor. She had reached it, she thought, at about five minutes before one.

Her statement covering the next quarter of an hour, made partly in answer to questions by Lieutenant Weigand, read as follows:

Miss Spencer: I sat at my desk so that I would be available if the doctor needed me. He sometimes did. I never went to lunch on compensation days until he had finished his examinations. I—

Q. Compensation days?

A. The days he examines patients sent to him by insurance doctors. They come in two groups, morning and afternoon. He always started the second group a little after noon and then went directly to lunch.

Q. Thank you, Miss Spencer. And he was still examining when you were relieved by Miss—Brooks, is that right?

A. Yes. He had finished examining four of the patients and they had gone. He was examining the fifth.

Q. Let's see. Did you go into the rooms?

A. Oh, no. I wouldn't do that. Not unless he called me. Of course, we never bothered him when he was examining.

Q. Then how did you know—?

A. Oh, I see what you mean. Why, the patients were told to leave as soon as the doctor had finished with them. I checked the rooms, and the doors of four of them were open. The doors to the corridor, I mean. And the rooms were empty. So I knew he had finished with those patients and they had gone.

Q. I see. But the door—the corridor door—of the fifth room was still closed. I take it, incidentally, that when you speak of the rooms by number, you begin numbering from the doctor's office?

A. Yes. And the door of the fifth room was closed. Then I sat at my desk. And in a few minutes the door of the fifth room opened and the patient came out. I directed him to go out the back door.

Q. Thank you, Miss Spencer. Then?

A. I just sat there, keeping one eye on the door into the corridor—what we call the “back-door hall”—from Room 6. The doctor didn't call me. There is a call button in each examining room, so that he can get me, if he needs me. He didn't. Then at one seven—

Q. You noticed the time exactly?

A. I was in—I wanted to do an errand on my lunch hour. And I had to be back by two. It depended on him whether I had time.

Q. Right.

A. He came out at one seven. The door opens out toward me, so I only got a glimpse of him. He got his hat and coat and—

Q. Please, Miss Spencer. I'd like to get all the details just here.

A. Details? Well—he just came out into the hall from Room 6, went across the hall to the closet and—well, just took off his hospital coat, got his hat and went out. Through the back door. That's all I can think of—all the details, I mean.

Q. Right. How long did this take, would you say?

A. Not long. Two minutes perhaps.

Q. That long? Two minutes is really a rather long time, under certain circumstances.

A. Oh—perhaps a minute, then.

Q. So you would think that he went out—out of the office entirely, I mean—at about eight minutes after one. Nine minutes at the most. Right?

A. I'd think so.

Q. I hope your watch is accurate, Miss Spencer.

A. Oh, it is. I'm sure it is. I haven't changed it and—what time is it now?

Q. Four thirty-three.

A. Then mine's right if yours is.

Q. Right. Then? After the doctor went out?

A. I decided I would have time to do my errand—easily.

Q. (By Sergeant Aloysius Mullins) What was your errand, Miss?

A. I wanted to buy a pair of stockings.

Q. (By Sergeant Mullins) Oh.

Q. (By Lieutenant Weigand) And then?

A. I went to the other closet. The one nearer the bathroom door. You know? I got my own hat and coat—I just put my coat on over my uniform—and went out. I suppose it took me another two minutes. Or one minute.