Kill as Directed (12 page)

Harry almost laughed. “You mean it's me you're expecting to go with you?”

The pinkish globe crinkled benignly. “On September first I'm leaving on a trip to Europe and the Far East. I'll be gone six weeks, possibly two months. With a bad heart, I naturally want my doctor to accompany me. As my doctor you'll be paid a generous fee; as my guest, all expenses paid. Sound attractive, Harry?”

“And all I have to do is take care of you?”

Gresham chuckled. “There may be another chore or two. We'll cross that bridge when we build it.”

What now? Harry thought. Am I promoted to be one of his executioners? He's been working me in slowly from the very first meeting, spinning the web, tightening, closing it. He's sure of me now; I'm one of his boys.

A perverse impulse made Harry say, “I'm afraid it's not possible, Kurt.”

“Let's not play games, Harry.” The pink deepened, the tone soured.

“I'm a doctor, Kurt. I can't walk out on my patients.”

The cigar was dropped into an ash tray. “You're a difficult young man, aren't you?”

“I don't think so,” Harry said innocently, wondering as he said it what he thought he was doing. Why was he baiting Gresham? He knew he could not win. I'm like a kid playing with matches, he thought—I know it's dangerous, but it excites me.

“Harry, you can be very valuable to me, and I to you. I have big plans for you.” So Big Man was still giving it the soft sell. “So let's not waste time fencing. Think of me as a father …”

Who, Harry thought, is kidding whom? “What about my patients, Dad?”

That did it. He saw Gresham's ears take fire while the rest of the fat face became the color of ash and the unpigmented eyes hardened into slag. “I'm giving you plenty of notice, Harry. Doctors can always turn over their patients to other doctors. Make your arrangements.”

“And if I don't?” I'm trying to commit suicide, Harry thought, that's it. He had an almost overwhelming desire to get up and go around Gresham's desk and tip the big chair over and put his foot on the big round face, and grind.

“Harry.” The prissy voice was now guttural, the grayed jowls shaking, the little womanly red mouth puckering. “You cut out this kid stuff, understand? You'd better take the blinders off. You listen to me.”

So Karen was right. “You talk as if I have no choice.”

“You don't!”

Harry took time out to locate his cigarettes and make a ritual out of lighting one. Then he said quietly, “All right, Kurt, spell it out for me.”

“I'll do just that, Harry. You've been drafted, and your hitch is for life.
My
life, Harry. No, you have no choice. Go AWOL and you're a sudden casualty of the war. Indulge in loose talk, and you'll find yourself up against the wall smoking your last cigarette. But be a good little soldier and do what you're told, and you'll get all sorts of citations.”

“Can you translate that from poetry into prose?”

“All right. I want you, I've got you, I'll pay for you. But all the time you're getting rich you'd better remember one thing: You can't get out. How is my spelling, Harry?”

Harry was silent. Then he said, “I suppose there's nothing left for me to do but ask: How rich?”

The ears faded to their normal shell pink, the ashes took on a glow, the slag melted and became Gresham's eyes again. “Now that's what I've been waiting to hear, Harry! You had me worried for a while. I find myself liking you more and more, I suppose because you stand up on your hind legs and talk back to the old boy.… Why, I should think this first year should gross you more than fifty thousand.” He lit another cigar.

“How do you figure that?”

“Oh, I didn't tell you. Just for going abroad with me, Harry, you're going to earn an extra fee of twenty-five thousand dollars. And that's only the start. Next year you should make at least a hundred thousand. Your take will keep rising, unless I'm all wrong about you, and I don't think I am. I have a feeling you've got the makings of one of my little upstairs group—my board of directors. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if you became a director in record-quick time. Sound good to you, boy?”

“Very good indeed, Pappy.”

“Then I have another goodie for you to think about,” Kurt Gresham beamed. “The moment you're voted onto my board of directors, you're included in my will.”

“Your will?” exclaimed Harry. The surprise in his voice was genuine.

“Ah, that throws you, does it? In our kind of operation I can't work out a pension plan—” out of the fresh cigar smoke came a fat chuckle—“so I provide a form of social security for my faithful inner circle. My nine board members—you'd make the tenth—are down for half a million dollars apiece when I die. Do you know how much I'm worth, Harry?”

“I have no idea.”

“To tell you the truth, neither do I. Probably a hundred million. A lot depends on the state of the market. Most of it is in blue-chip investments. So it means very little to me to leave my best people half a million apiece. Actually, they're all better off having me alive—salaries and bonuses are high, Harry, high. It will pay you to make every effort to keep this pumper of mine operating—your earnings over my lifetime will far exceed the half million you could expect on my death. However, it's comforting to know it will be there when the fountain goes dry—eh, Harry?”

“I … Kurt, I don't know what to say.”

Gresham kept beaming at him.

You liar, Harry thought. You conscienceless, megalomaniacal liar! You're building me up to a dirty job, probably murder—dangling carrots in front of my nose while you lead me to the slaughterhouse.

“Then we understand each other, Harry?” Gresham simpered.

“Yes, Kurt.”

“And you're my doctor?”

“I'm your doctor.”

“All the way?”

“All the way.”

“You're going on a vacation with me?”

“I am.”

“You'll be paid in full before we go. Need any money now?”

“No.”

“That's it, then, boy. I have certain problems, but we'll discuss those during our trip. Today I enjoyed. You're a rough one, kid, you forced my hand. You'll be an asset to Gresham and Company.” The fat man heaved himself out of his chair and came around the desk. Harry rose. “Thank you so much for coming,” Gresham said.

He put an arm around Harry's shoulder and walked him toward the door.

“Love from Karen,” he said in the same warm affectionate tone.

“Oh?” Harry could not suppress a start. If Kurt Gresham felt it, he gave no sign.

“You've been seeing a lot of Karen lately.”

“She's a charming woman,” Harry said stupidly.

“Look out for Tony.”

Harry stammered, “I … beg pardon?”

“Tony Mitchell.”

“Oh,” said Harry.

“Jealousy is an indecent emotion, Harry. It has no respect for the proprieties. Discretion, my boy, discretion and a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Especially husbands. Eh?”

Gresham laughed.

Harry laughed.

The short fat arm around him tightened in a hug that for an instant alarmed Harry.

But then Kurt Gresham let him go.

TWELVE

One Tuesday afternoon, at five o'clock, Dr. Alfred McGee Stone dropped into the office of Dr. Harrison Brown.

“My wife's in town, shopping,” said Dr. Stone. “I was wondering if you could join us for dinner.”

“Sure thing, Doctor,” said Dr. Brown.

“Eight o'clock all right?”

“Fine.”

“By the way, if you have any suggestions … My wife is always looking for new places to eat. If there's some special restaurant you know—”

“How about Giobbe's? It's a wonderful Italian place in Greenwich Village …”

Mrs. Stone turned out to be a plump little hen of a woman with bright, quick eyes. She clucked over every dish at Giobbe's.

“You know, Doctor,” she said to Harry, “I'm here only as Alfred's excuse. Ordinarily a woman would resent being used that way, but this food is so divine—”

“Bernice.” Dr. Stone tapped his lips with his napkin, rather embarrassed. Then he laughed, “well, it's true, Doctor. Have you been giving any thought to my proposal?”

“Yes,” Harry said politely.

“No decision yet, I take it.”

“No.”

“Well, there's plenty of time. When you do come to a decision, though, I hope you'll call me at once.”

“Naturally, Doctor.”

Dr. Stone began talking about the Taugus Institute. “I will admit,” he said after a while, “that the one possible drawback from your standpoint is the matter of income. I take it you're an ambitious young fellow. I don't mean to sound like somebody out of a soap opera, Doctor, but a lot of money and happiness don't necessarily go together.”

“Happiness?” Harry said, holding on to his glass of Chianti. “Do you know a happy man, Dr. Stone?”

“A great many of them. Don't you?”

“He's too young to be happy,” said Bernice Stone.

“Peter Gross is happy,” said Dr. Alfred Stone. “Lewis Blanchette is happy. I'm happy. I love my wife and children and grandchildren. I like my work. I'm not rich, but I have enough to give my family a decent life, with some left over for books and recordings and golf and taking my wife out to overeat occasionally. What more could a man want?”

Harry was silent.

“Aren't you happy, Dr. Brown?” asked the plump little woman.

“I suppose not, Mrs. Stone.”

“You join us at the Institute,” Dr. Stone said. “You're not happy because you're not satisfying your innermost needs. Are you?”

“I suppose not, Dr. Stone.” He felt like a fool.

“May I call you Harry?” the director of the Taugus Institute asked with a smile.

“Of course,” said Harry.

He was committed. He no longer fought it; it was no longer unreal. He was committed to pit himself against a wily old adversary who had all the weapons on his side.

I have only one advantage, Dr. Harrison Brown thought: the adversary doesn't know he's in a fight. To the death. I have no choice—he told me that himself. So I'm locked in the arena, and I've got to kill or be killed—be killed slowly. At least he'll die all at once.… The concept of himself in the role of murderer no longer struck him as psychotic. He could look at himself in the mirror again. He could think his plans out without squirming … well, much.

He was sleeping better, working better, loving better.

He did not talk of his plans to Karen. She knew. She had told him about the Starhurst routine in detail. If she did not realize consciously why she had done that, she knew all the same.

He was committed to murdering Kurt Gresham. As the man's doctor it could be a simple matter. But as the man's doctor it could also be a dangerous matter. And as the man's wife's lover … He stood to gain the widow, the millions, the dream he had dreamed all his life. Gresham's death must not lead, even in theory, to Dr. Harrison Brown's door.

So it had to be murder—crass, vulgar, apparently without finesse. Murder as far removed from Dr. Brown as a Chicago alley mugging. Murder not as a crime of passion by an amateur, but as a deliberate underworld assassination. A doctor would obviously use a doctor's weapon—poison, or an injection, or some pharmacological means deriving from the victim's coronary. Therefore—sudden death by a gangster's weapon.

This, then, was the first problem.

The weapon called for was clearly a gun. But he had no gun. To procure one legally was to invite investigation. The question was therefore how to procure one illegally, without a license. It should be an untraceable gun, if possible, its serial number destroyed beyond resurrection—a professional killer's weapon. Because, clearly, it had to be found near the body to establish the professional nature of the killer.

Where did a physician practicing medicine out of a Central Park West office get hold of such a gun?

THIRTEEN

On a sticky Friday evening, Tony Mitchell phoned. “How about the weekend, Harry, just you and me? I'll take the boat and we'll sail up to Montauk. The Greshams are away for the weekend.”

“I know,” said Harry Brown. “They flew up to some hundred-dollar-a-day joint in Maine.”

“You know everything, don't you, Doctor?”

“You bet,” said Dr. Brown.

“Pick you up early tomorrow?”

“How early?”

“Six o'clock.”

“Brother, that's early. Okay, Tony, I'll be ready.”

Tony Mitchell's boat was a cabin cruiser, deep-sea, roomy, racy. They fished and swam off Montauk and ate and drank on board, and then in the evening they moored at the hotel pier and checked in to a two-room suite. They showered and napped and changed into dinner clothes and had dinner in the outdoor restaurant and flirted with two tanned girls in billowing dresses. In a night club afterward, they danced and tippled and Tony told jokes and the tanned girls laughed, and they danced and tippled some more, and then Tony and his girl disappeared, and Harry went back to the hotel with his girl, kissed her good night and went up to the suite and undressed and showered again and went to sleep. In the morning he awoke once and peered in to Tony's room. When he saw that Tony's bed was undisturbed, Harry went to the bathroom and rinsed his mouth and then got back into bed.

In the afternoon Tony said, “The hell with the boat. Let's live it up here at the hotel. Swim in the pool, leer at the girls in the bikinis. In July it's just too damned hot for fishing. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“You know, I miss the Greshams. That old bastard fascinates me. And Karen
is
lovely.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, we're back on the one-syllable kick. Hangover?”