Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (2 page)

“He has, but it isn’t that. Doctor MacRannoch — ” It was an educated voice, in so far as such a thing may be said of a transatlantic inflection, and socially confident. “—Doctor MacRannoch, I know it’s late and our acquaintanceship is of very short standing, but I have a message for you from Sir Bartholomew which I promised to give you tonight. I’ll tell you through the door if you wish, or I’ll telephone you, but I’d appreciate it if you felt able to see me.”

“Just now?” I said. I tied the dressing gown, put the syringe in one pocket, and rang the bell for room service.

“Two minutes?” he said, instilling appeal into his voice. All the same, it was not quite sufficiently flexible, I judged, to be the murmuring voice on the telephone.

“Very well,” I said, and unhooking the chain, drew open the door. “I’ve just rung for some coffee. Perhaps you will join me.”

Mr. Wallace Brady entered, fully dressed I was happy to see, crossed the room, and sat in a distant armchair. He made no attempt whatever to molest me. In fact he seemed, if anything, to find the situation amusing. I put my hands in my dressing-gown pockets and remained standing. “Yes?”

“Do sit down,” he said. “You must be tired, and I’ve interrupted your sleep. And the coffee’s on me. Unless you’d prefer something stronger?”

“The refreshment, so far as I know,” I said, “is on the British Overseas Airways; but please order whatever you wish. I do not take alcohol.”

“Now that,” he said regretfully, “I should have guessed.”

“And the message?” I said. The floor waiter appeared at the open door ; I gave him the order and he disappeared.

“It’s an appeal, really, from patient to doctor,” Wallace Brady said. He had light brown hair and the type of thick skin which browns without burning; his eyes were light gray, almost white, the lids well opened. He was in my view too thin, but not otherwise ill-formed. When I refrained from speaking, his hand moved for the first time to his jacket pocket and then he removed it. “You don’t like smoke in your bedroom, I guess.”

“The air conditioning will remove it,” I said, “if you cannot endure a conversation without it.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, then smiling, leaned to one side and took a cigarette case from his pocket. “You’re a woman who knows her own mind,” he said. “Bart Edgecombe was right.”

I waited.

“The problem is,” said Brady, “that Bart wants to get back to Nassau. His wife’s there, Denise. I gather he doesn’t like to leave her for long. But the hospital isn’t keen.”

“I should think not,” I said. I could see what was coming. I said, “I thought he lived in one of the Out Islands.”

“He does. Great Harbour Cay. I’m working there myself at the moment — that’s how I know him. He came to New York for a couple of days and Denise took off for some shopping in Nassau and expected him back there tonight. The point is, he wants to get the eleven-thirty flight tomorrow morning, and if he does, would you look after him? He’ll go straight into the United Commonwealth, if need be, the moment he arrives.”

The coffee came. I allowed Mr. Brady to tip the waiter, since his presence was entirely his responsibility, and poured. As I had hopes of being allowed to sleep at least part of the night, I made my own mostly hot milk. I said, “The hospital is perfectly right in not wishing Sir Bartholomew to travel. My advice would be to send for Lady Edgecombe instead.”

The man Brady sipped his coffee and then sat and looked into it. “She’s highly strung,” he said. “He’s dead set on getting back with no fuss, and he has a great opinion of your abilities. When he heard what you did at the airport — ” He broke off. “He’s met you, you know. Don’t you remember?”

“I have no clear recollection,” I said.

“He came to the hospital in connection with the New Year parade, and you dealt with him then most efficiently, he says. That’s why he thought you might help him. Of course,” Mr. Brady said quickly, “I shall be on the plane, and Sergeant Trotter, who lent us a hand. But it would really set his mind at rest to have you, I can see that. And… I hope it won’t embarrass you, but I have to say that of course he will make up any difference between your fare and his own. I don’t suppose the hospital lets you travel in luxury.”

They don’t. I only travel in luxury when I am traveling with my father, who used this method among many to promote me into a wealthy and suitable marriage. Since I broke the news to him that I do not intend to marry at all, he has traveled in luxury still more frequently, in an insane ambition to spend all the family wealth before it falls into the hands of his successor, the forty-sixth titular chieftain, one T. K. MacRannoch, a native of Tokyo.

I felt that my broken night’s sleep entitled me at least to a first-class flight to the Bahamas. “Very well,” I said. “If you will kindly arrange to transfer my ticket. Tell Sir Bartholomew I shall call at the hospital at ten-fifteen a.m. The airport should be warned that he is a sick man, and they must waive all formalities.”

“I’ll do that,” said Mr. Brady. He looked a trifle unsettled.

“I should say,” he said, “that I don’t know Bart Edgecombe all that well myself. You know, we play golf occasionally. But I didn’t even know he was in New York until we ran into each other this morning.”

The world is full of people who regard medicine as a public charity. “Oh,” I said. “And is Sergeant Trotter a friend?”

Instead of looking irritated, his expression became merely rueful. “Sergeant Trotter,” he said, “is everyone’s friend, as you will find out. He’s regular army and going to Nassau on business, that’s all I know. But he was the only other man to jump to it when Bart conked out and fell, and he stayed with me till you came. In fact, he’s in the next room to mine now, waiting to hear what you say. Just one of nature’s Samaritans.”

I know that type too. I almost changed my mind; but it was a two-hour flight, that was all, and a first-class passenger lunch would save me buying a supper. I stood up and said, “Since we have an early start, perhaps we should have some sleep then. Good night, Mr. Brady.”

He put down his coffee cup and got up. For a moment I thought he was going to reduce the conversation to personalities ; then he shut his mouth and held out his hand. “Good night, Doctor,” he said.

I put the chain back on the lock and emptied the syringe before getting into bed. It was 11:40
p.m.

There is nothing to sap the moral fiber quite like a first-class flight on a Super VC-10, from the nuts and taped music to the champagne and hot cologne-scented towels which quickly succeed them.

The journey to the airport with Sir Bartholomew, who was quite sensible although unsteady on his feet, had passed without incident, and after installing him in comfort on a double seat on the other side of the gangway, I was able to put my walking shoes on the scarlet plush footrest and receive the menu with pleasure. Hot prawns in butter were passed around. “Looks a bit better than he did yesterday, doesn’t he?” said a London voice in my ear, and I perceived that I was sitting next to Mr. Brady’s helper of the airport lounge, and that Mr. Brady himself was nodding good morning from the seat just behind. “Rodney Trotter,” the cockney voice further volunteered, with accents of boundless good will. “Sergeant Trotter of the Royal Scots. Your part of the world, eh, Miss MacRannoch?”

I smiled slightly, without, I trust, showing my irritation. Behind, Brady’s voice said, “
Doctor
MacRannoch, Trotter. Name, rank, and number, you know?”

The sergeant was a small muscular man, aged perhaps forty-seven, with the lined face of one much given to bawling commands. His voice was rich and unexpectedly carrying. He took Brady’s intervention in good humor. “I thought she was traveling in civvies like myself,” he said. “Don’t want all the world to know you’re a doctor, eh, Doctor? The arguments I’ve got into about the army, so soon as I mention me rank. Besides, a girl wants to be chatted up as a girl, not a bloody meat butcher, don’t she?”

I am aware that I lose color when angry, but I am perfectly capable of keeping my temper under provocation. “If you address me as Doctor,” I said, “I shall be perfectly satisfied.”

His eyes became round, and for a moment I thought he was going to add to his impertinence. However, he merely said, after a moment, “Well, my name’s Rodney, and you can call me that any time you like, Doctor. You did a great job on that chap, anyway. You can quote me for reference.” Then the drinks trolley came around, followed by lunch, and he was snoring before the brandy was finished.

I had caviar, clear turtle soup with sherry, lamb noisettes with truffles, cherry-meringue gâteau with coffee, and two petits fours. Sir Bartholomew, to whom I had given a mild sedative, slumbered peacefully through lunch, and had a little warm milk on awakening. Shortly after this, he expressed a wish to retire, and since both Brady and Trotter were slumbering, he was aided to do so by the steward, assisted by a Turkish youth sitting behind him. I thought when he returned he looked pallid; his pulse rate had risen and his breathing had become rapid and more shallow. He showed no wish to speak. I moved over beside him and had just fastened his seat belt for the descent when he became rigid, and I saw that another attack was imminent, on at least the same scale as the one he had suffered the previous day. I pressed the button for the steward and opened my bag with one hand, supporting him with the other.

The details of what followed are not particularly attractive or even clinically abnormal, given the proper diagnosis, and I shall not dwell on them. Enough to say that the worst was over by the time the ambulance got us from the New Providence airport through Nassau and up the incline to the United Commonwealth Hospital, and that by the time he was settled in the private ward — with the entire staff hanging about chattering, Bahamian style outside his open door — he was conscious and weakly recovering. Indeed he smiled up at me as I bent over him, changed into my white coat. “What was it?” he said.

“Something you ate. Sir Bartholomew, did you have anything to eat or drink on the plane, apart from the warm milk?”

“You know I didn’t,” he said. He had a slow, mannered voice: a remnant perhaps of official days in Britain. I would guess at public school and Cambridge, perhaps. His face changed. “At least — I had an aspirin in the lavatory, from the pack in my pocket. Had a crashing headache.”

“In water?”

“Steward gave me a glass.”

“Do you mind, Sir Bartholomew,” I said, “if I remove the aspirin and subject them to some tests? If food poisoning is at the root of your trouble, we must for everyone’s sake discover the source of bacteria. Contaminated tablets for example might have caused both attacks. There is another thing I wish to ask you. Sir Bartholomew, do you know of anyone in New York with a personal grudge against you?” And I informed him of the telephone call I had received at the Trueman.

“A joke, perhaps,” I said. “On the other hand, there was a degree of menace in the words. They implied, quite clearly, that the caller did not wish your life to be saved.”

He laughed. It was a laugh I had heard many times before when questioning patients. It is important to show no disbelief. He said, “When you said
joke
, I got it. It’s all right. I haven’t got an enemy, but I have a very funny brother-in-law called George. His idea of humor. I’m sorry, Doctor. Did it keep you awake?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I was hardly to know a second occasion would involve me so quickly. Your wife has been sent for. I shall be in to see you again, but I suggest you allow at least two days in bed before you attempt to go home to Great Harbour Cay. Is there anything further you wish done for you?”

“No, thank you,” he said slowly. “At least —”

“Yes?” I had a round of the wards to do in five minutes.

“I have another favor to ask you,” he said. “I’d ask my wife, but she’s… well, she gets easily upset. I’d rather Denise thought it was a bad case of air sickness… something small, something like that. If I’m going to get bills from New York, and maybe inquiries and correspondence, I’d rather a family friend looked after it all. I still have some small business interests, and —”

“You won’t feel like business for a day or two,” I said. “You want me to telephone a friend? Where can I reach him?” I opened my notebook.

He lay scanning my face, and I concealed my impatience. This meant, presumably, a mistress in another part of the island. However, no patient will recover unless his mind is at rest. I waited.

“I want you to take a letter,” he said. “To Coral Harbour. That’s where he is. Or so the papers all said three days ago. He’s Johnson Johnson, the portrait painter, maybe you know the name? And you’ll find him on his yacht, a biggish ketch called the
Dolly
.”

I said I would think about it, and left him to write his letter while I did a tour of my cases. My two stomachs were doing quite well, the perforation having dispensed with his Levine already. We had lost the cervical spine dislocation. An amoebic abscess had come in, and two new tubercular cases; I read the notes on my desk. After a thorough afternoon’s work I walked through the private wing and across the path into the laboratory. There I found a room to myself, and set to analyzing the four samples I had taken from my bag in the hospital. One was of warm milk and the other of aspirin. The remaining two were from the contents of Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe’s stomach after each of his attacks.

The warm milk was innocent, and so was the aspirin. But both the samples from Edgecombe confirmed my own clinical diagnosis. Neither attack had been caused by
B. botulinus
, or
B. enteritidis
, or anything resembling an infected crab sandwich.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe had been poisoned by arsenic.

JAMES ULRIC MACRANNOCH was at home when I called in, on my way to the Coral Harbour marina.

My father, in his efforts to deny to Japanese hands the substance of the MacRannochs, had rented for his sojourn in Nassau a delightful and expensive villa with a white-pillared porch and a swimming pool. Hummingbirds, species Calliphlox evelynale, lurked in the butterfly flowers, and the coconut palms were placed as nicely as sutures.

Inside, he had pink bamboo furniture on pink mohair carpeting, offsetting the large native staff who stood about smiling because of the amount he was paying them. This had all been settled by his friend the Begum long before we arrived, and I took nothing to do with it. I stayed with my father because he needed to be under medical supervision, but I was financially independent of him and intended to remain so, although the cost of living in the Bahamas was reducing my bank account to eunuchoidism.

However, since I had finally made a clean incision in the chain of worthy and well-connected young suitors prepared by my father, I felt that this unfilial action should at least discharge the MacRannoch from the duty of paying for me as a daughter. What he chose to do with his money was therefore his affair, although he made it, such was his excitable nature, all the world’s.

There was in fact a crowd of people on the terrace when I made my way through the house. They had not changed for dinner and from their costume I guessed that there had been a tennis party on our excellent hard court. One couple, from Government House, I recognized, and there was a titled lady from the retired British colony, a banking family, and one or two of the younger moneyed set from Lyford Cay. There was also a tall, hair-sprayed blond lady in a bikini a little too smart for her, for whom my father, in flowered Bermuda shorts and green shirt, was pouring a large Bloody Mary. I noticed that it was more blood than Mary, and after a second hard glance at the lady, diagnosed why. Then he turned around.

“Beltanno! Did you kill ’em off early? Come and get a nice strong tomato juice under the whalebone. You know my daughter Beltanno, Denise, everyone?”

I call myself, as I have said, Dr. B. Douglas MacRannoch, Douglas being my middle name and the surname of my mother. It is unimportant, but perhaps simpler to explain now that I was christened Beltanno, which was the name of Cairbre’s wife, the daughter-in-law of Cormac. Since it conveys nothing but a sense of ridicule to members of an Anglo-Germanic culture, I never use it and dislike hearing it used, as my father well knows. The woman called Denise smiled graciously, and someone said, “Good evening”; then they all returned to their drinks. The MacRannoch said, “Denise here has been deserted by her dear husband. The hotel wouldn’t let her hang on to her room. I’ve said she can stay here till he comes.”

Denise. The white population of Nassau is not all that enormous. I said, “Is his name by any chance Edgecombe?” and received half my tomato juice down my Bri-nylon two-piece as the woman jolted my arm. “He’s in hospital? Bart! Is he hurt?” she said, her voice sliding upward.

Conversation stopped. There was no point in doing anything about the tomato juice. It is in any case possible to put the whole garment into a washing machine. I said briskly, “He is perfectly well: only getting over a fairly sharp stomach upset. The hospital has been trying to reach you, Lady Edgecombe, all afternoon.”

She stared at me, frowning. Her voice was attractively husky: her accent less native, I felt, than the result of an excellent tutor. She said, “Oh, Bart! I had to leave my hotel. He was a day late…” She pressed my wrist again. “You work there! Is he all right? He’s not badly ill? Oh, dear!” She broke off to stare at me as a new danger occurred to her. “I hope he has a good doctor!”

“Does he have a good doctor, Beltanno?” asked my father, his hair a quiff of white above that ridiculous gnome’s face, and the orange and green flowered shorts.

Spasmodic childishness is a feature of my father’s condition. I addressed Lady Edgecombe. “I am his doctor. I am sure my father will arrange for you to go straight to the hospital and find another hotel in Nassau for a day or two. Perhaps your brother George could assist.”

“Who?” said Lady Edgecombe. Her hair, I now saw, was not naturally blond, although it had been skillfully treated, and she wore false eyelashes, though no other make-up. A certain development of the leg muscles, added to the undoubted grace of her carriage, made me think that she had belonged at one time to some branch of the dancing profession. “I haven’t got a brother George,” said Denise Edgecombe.

“Of course,” I said. “It was another patient. I do beg your pardon. Father —”

But Sadie, Father’s big Bahamian driver from Eleuthera, was already waiting to take Lady Edgecombe to see her husband. It was not until after he had gone that I discovered he had used my car. “But you’re not on call?” my father said. “I forgot to tell you they were mending the Chevrolet.” He stood, vodka bottle in hand, and surveyed my juice smeared two-piece. The remaining guests, finishing their drinks, lay about chatting. My father said, reasonably, “I wasn’t to know you had a date to hear Bang Bang Lulu at the Bamboo Conch Club.”

The years have made him, as you can see, inexorably frivolous. I said, “I have an appointment at the Coral Harbour marina.” There was a slight pause, then one of the Lyford Cay group said, “I’ll drive you.” His martini was still three quarters up and the offer was hardly enthusiastic. I accepted, however, politely. After retiring briefly to change my two-piece for a pleated cotton dress I have found comfortable for many years, I returned to the drive where a car was drawn up waiting. My father was nowhere in sight, so I got in. The driver started the engine.

We were halfway to the gates before I realized that the man sitting beside me at the wheel was not the socialite from Lyford Cay. I saw an older man of dark coloring and insignificant features, wearing neither a Bermuda beach outfit nor the briefer assembly of, I understand, St. Tropez. I observed well-worn slacks and a still older shirt made of thick terry toweling. There was a bulge in his left trouser pocket. It could have been caused by a pipe. It was quite possibly due, I considered, to a small firearm of the automatic variety.

I had no syringe with me this time. As we swung onto the road, I gripped my bag hard with one hand and I let my other fall idly close to the door handle just as the driver said, agreeably enough, “I swopped with Booby Swanston. I hope you don’t mind. Who is George?”

“I should like you to stop this car,” I said evenly.

Behind us was a truck piled with bananas and a small horse-drawn surrey full of tourists with
This horse is called Elvis
scrawled on the front board.

“What —
now
?” said my driver. The spectacles he wore covered his eyes, but his tone was justifiably surprised.

“When you have an opportunity.”

The glasses flashed in my direction, and I saw then that he had adjusted presbyopia: his spectacles were bifocal. Why did nothing forewarn me? Why did I think my only danger was physical? He said, “I thought you had a date in Coral Harbour?”

“I have,” I said, “a message to take to a person named Johnson Johnson.”

He put his hand out of the window and waved; the banana truck passed by, and the surrey, and Smiley and the Boys’ Bus Service and a bicycle advertising the Nassau Conference of the Seventh Day Adventists. He slowed, drew into the side, and came to a stop.

Then his arm came around, and I stiffened. But he merely reached to the back of the car, hauled toward him an old corduroy jacket, and emptying the pockets quickly and neatly, laid on the seat between us a driver’s license, a passport, a number of envelopes, and a folder advertising a one-man exhibition of paintings in the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami. “Indeed you do?” he said. “Then you can deliver it. I’m Johnson Johnson.”

I read the documents. While I did so, he drew the object from his pocket, which was indeed a blackened briar pipe, filled it, and struck a match, his eyes all the while watching me, as I was aware. He said, “Does the thought of my bronchial carcinoma upset you?” And as I looked up with impatience, he smiled slightly and applying the match, lit his pipe. “You’re very patient with all us frail humans,” he said. “If I had your message, I might know what’s frightening you.”

“Frightening?” I said.

“Well,” he said, puffing. We had stopped beside the life-sized white horse outside Hobby Horse Hall, between the golf course and the lacto calamine pink of the Emerald Beach Hotel. “How many other times have you jumped into a car and then immediately demanded to get out?”

“Three,” I said shortly. “Once with a depressive case turned hypomanic, once with an intoxicated ambulance driver, and once to escape carbon-monoxide poisoning from a faulty exhaust pipe. The emergency situation is perhaps more frequent in medicine than in portrait painting.”

“You’d be surprised,” said the man Johnson gently. He received back his documents and taking the sealed letter from Bartholomew Edgecombe which I handed over in silence, he read and then pocketed it.

“I understand,” he said. A bus full of tourists passed by. The sun, low in the palm trees, was losing some of its heat. You could smell the sea on the other side of the road. I waited.

After a moment he said, “Bart Edgecombe is an old friend of mine. You did your duty, I know, but I want to thank you nonetheless for dealing with a rather nasty chain of events.” He paused. “Doctor MacRannoch… There are some things I’d rather like to ask you, and perhaps there are some you want to find out from me. Would it scare you to come with me now and share a meal and a talk aboard
Dolly
? I’d run you back afterward. You could phone home from the club if you wanted.”

Johnson Johnson
, the Miami folder had said.
One of the World’s Foremost Portrait Artists Displays His Paintings in Florida. Forty of Society’s Most Prominent Luminaries
. I could see no sign of schizophrenia. It seemed unlikely that a sane man would perpetrate any public illegality before his exhibition. I am not in the least easy to scare. I agreed to dine with Johnson on his yacht
Dolly
.

Coral Harbour is a private development in one of the moneyed quarters of New Providence Island, and about twenty minutes from Nassau. To get to it you have to drive over the hill, where the Bahamians live in huts and houses of clapboard and peeling stucco with dingy netted windows, or with no windows at all, shacks perched up high in the dirt with the crumbling doorstep a gap of three feet away from the threshold. Men were pouring out of the work yards and children were wavering up and down the narrow streets on high-handled American bicycles. I noted a child I had treated the previous week for a cranial lesion; her mother had been told to keep the child indoors and quiet.

Then we passed through Oakesville, by the supermarket and Sir Harry’s monument, and were in a green and white well-kept road network again, ending in the Lyford Cay-Nassau roundabout beyond which were the cone-topped pharos guarding the entrance gate to Coral Harbour’s 2 500 acres of golf course, beaches, villas, and waterways. And the yacht club with
Dolly
.

“… This fashionable community; a wonderland of spacious home sites and silken beaches in the heart of a tax-free, sun-blessed economy. Are you a radical doctor, Doctor?” asked Johnson.

We were driving along a broad avenue lined with bush-cut pines spaced like green wigs on wig stands. A nursery on the right displayed a drilled squad of short potted palms, destined for landscape designing. We passed the golf course. “… Or,” Johnson added, “do your fellow men hold no charm for you, anyway?”

“Very little,” I said calmly. “I prefer to pit my wits against science. My relaxation, for instance, is golf.”

“And bridge? No, not bridge,” Johnson answered himself as it happened, quite accurately. “To depend for success on a partner would be highly unethical. But I’ll take you on at golf sometime, Doctor MacRannoch.”

I felt no need to say anything. We came to the double road, with its spine of hibiscus and palms, and the water-based villas with their polyethylene cars and cruising boats tied up on the patios. A palm roundel with flags stood in front of the club, which was low and modern with a lot of plate glass and crazed stone facing and a white wrought-iron balcony. Johnson parked the car and we went in.

I waited on the fur rug. The scarlet-lit water grotto under the open-tread staircase glowed in the deepening dusk; someone lit a cigarette in one of the group of armchairs. A voice, bodiless above my head, said: “
Don’t do it again, will you? Just don’t do it again
.”

My epidermal hair follicles sprang upright, but I do not give way easily to emotion. I set my foot on the stairs, just as Johnson, arriving suddenly with some letters in his hand said, “What’s the matter?” and a couple, laughing, began to come down the steps over my head. The young woman, in a white-lace trouser suit, said in an American voice, “Sure I’ll do it again, and you’ll stand by and like it. It’s a free world, darling David.”

I stepped back, my hand prodding Johnson, to allow them to pass. Darling David was quite unremarkable, in long shorts and a sweater and graying brown hair. I had never seen him before. Then he said, “Well, come along. Bar’s open,” and the voice was quite different, too, from that caressing voice in the Trueman. Johnson said, “It’s a lovely evening for a sail. You don’t mind, do you, having dinner on board? Spry is quite a good cook.”

“If I might make that phone call first,” I said, and I saw him smile.

“Of course, Doctor. Go ahead. I’ll wait just outside.”

There is no point in being foolishly trusting.

After I had called my father, who displayed a mild interest that Johnson Johnson should have sought my company and no interest whatever in my immediate and future plans, I joined my host outside and we walked along the well-manicured edge of the marina where the cruising yachts lay under the palm trees like bedpans, I thought, in a sterilizer. Johnson said, “Here is
Dolly
,” and led the way up on deck.