The Lady and Her Doctor (4 page)

“A hold over the girl, that's what I gain, right? A hold over one hundred and ten thousand bucks.

“I didn't arrange this. I didn't plan this. It happened, and it happened today of all days! Boy, I tell you this much, a hold over anyone, yesterday, maybe tomorrow, would be out of my league, but not today. And it happened today. That counts!

“And just to me. Of all the people in the world it could only happen to me!” It was as if, for once in his life, all the stars in the heavens went and formed a design that spelled his name! A thing like this had never happened before and never would again, probably.

“The way I see this is it's my chance. I'd be a fool not to take it the way things are with me.” He meant no harm to the girl. Morally the girl had killed her mother when she gave her the overdose of placebo, the same as if she had given her potent medicine. The mother had been dying of course (“the breathing”) with less fuss this
A
.
M
. probably than many previous times. The girl wouldn't know that this was the genuine article, the stertorous breathing,
râles
, that this was it. So, she gave her three, and then four more. She had meant to kill, that was the point morally. By telling the girl the facts, he couldn't spare her guilty conscience; all he could do by telling the girl the truth was remove any fear of punishment—which was exactly what he was going to do anyhow.

The first thing he had felt, he reminded himself, was sympathy for the girl. “One kills to live”—he had said that before he knew. He had never felt closer to any girl than he had to her because she wanted to live, like he did. In a way, the two of them were a lot alike. Her mother had kept her in jail and his mother had kept him and the boys in as good as jail. He wanted some icing on his birthday cake, and so did she!

“There's no possible leak,” he said. “Even Jenny doesn't know. Thank God Jenny doesn't know. ‘What are you going to do, Milt? You'll do something crazy?' Well, this isn't crazy. This is my chance. I'm taking it.”

It was funny how the big dim bedroom was different now that he knew how much money the old miser could have had by signing some papers. When you had very little money any room you lived in was a furnished room; your poverty furnished it for you. You were tied down to your pocketbook. Now he looked at the towering headboard of the bedstead with curiosity and respect—the brown wood, the carved yellow flowers inlaid in it. The old woman could have been so much more comfortable in a hospital, or even here in the hospital bed he suggested they rent, which the girl could have raised and lowered and could have made up without so much difficulty. Then she would not have had such a job giving bed baths. It was different now he knew the old lady could have had a private room in the best hospital (and the best doctor, he reminded himself, smiling). He looked at the pleated newspaper shade on the lamp next to the bed, recalling how the old lady always held up her hand to her face because the light had bothered her but she made the girl pleat newspapers and stick them around the bulb until they singed, and then made her pleat a new one.… And there was no easy chair for the girl, just that straight one with the papers on it now. That old lady had handled the girl's life—her lifetime had been handled like the old lady's money! She had locked the girl's life away with the money in this old dark house. He crossed to the door and called out, “You all right there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Be with you in a minute, Miss Folsom.” O.K., he told himself, one minute. Sixty seconds to make up your mind once and for all.
For all?
Milton snickered. For all of two years at the most! Who are you kidding? What have you got to lose?

She was standing exactly as he had left her. Milton turned the cold water faucet off and took a towel from the rack. When she made no move, he began to dry her hands for her. Aristocratic hands, you'd call them. Long, pale, thin fingers, flattened at the tips. Pale nails, rounded not pointed nails, not polished but moon shiny, a narrow palm, a wrist he could put his thumb and second finger around. He looked up from her hand to her face, also aristocratic. (It was not the money which had changed his opinion of her face; her face didn't look different to him since he knew about the money.) Her nose, he thought, wouldn't look so long and thin if she didn't pull her pale hair back so tight, and if she would show her mouth. A girl without lipstick positively had no mouth, he thought. Probably the old lady didn't go for lipsticks. Painted women. (Painted Cissie, he thought. Cissie had a baby nose and Cissie believed he was married to Jenny.) Miss Folsom was wearing a nothing skirt and blouse; all her clothes were nothing clothes—but if she put some of the $110,000 on her back?

She turned her head away from his stare. “Please—”

“O.K.,” he said. “Let's go downstairs. Where's your telephone?”

“Telephone?” She moved out of the bathroom ahead of Milton. “I will show you—” She stopped in the doorway, wheeling. “Oh—the police. I will show you.”

“Not the police, Miss Folsom, the mortician.”

“Mort—”

He gave her a push to start her downstairs again. “Undertaker.” She walked but turned her head back to stare at him. “I was going to recommend Dinton because they give you a decent funeral cheap but I just recalled a certain letter I saw on the chair in your mother's room. One hundred and ten thousand dollars for this house, it said.… If that's so, Miss Folsom, which mortician do you want me to call?” He wanted her to know he had read the letter.

“It doesn't matter, does it?” She held on to the railing, walking carefully.

“Sure?”

“Oh, please!” she said.

Angry at him. He touched her shoulder and she stopped in her tracks, he pressed her shoulder and she turned her face toward him. “Do you understand? I don't think you understand, Miss Folsom, not the police.
No
police. No cops. No suicide note. Do you understand? I'm going to write out a death certificate. Death by natural causes, as we say. Do you get it? Because even if you don't, I do. I get it. I understand. You have my sympathy. I would have done the same thing myself. A door opened in your face and she shut it in your face. I couldn't take it any more than you could, and I have nothing but sympathy for you, Miss Folsom.” He paused expecting—what, he didn't know. Something feminine was as clear as he could get it—that she should bust out crying, something—but she just stood there on the stairs like a log, so he said, “Don't you get it? I'm going to bat for you.” She still didn't give, but—you could see it happening—went limp, and he grabbed her and had to hold her up. “Don't be scared,” he said, “I'm making myself a—what do you call it—accessory. Come on, let's get it over with before I change my mind.” She still didn't do anything feminine, but there was no strength in her so he kept his arm around her in case she'd plunge down the rest of the stairs. But when he got to the bottom and saw the telephone back of the stairs in the hall, he let go of her and she leaned against the stair rail watching him. While he was dialing, he said, “Look, I've never lived either, see? I've been a farm hand since I was knee high to a weed. I worked my way through college and medical school and I've been a doctor. For five years I've supported my sister-in-law and her two kids and today I found out that Jenny's been telling people I'm married to her. Insurance in case I should try to grab a chance to live. Maybe you thought I was married to Jenny, too? She's the one you talk to on the telephone—Mrs. Krop.” She shook her head, which meant she didn't think about him at all, she never gave him a thought. Well, she was giving him a thought now, all right. All the time he was talking to Joe Dinton he felt her thinking about him. You could feel it. He kept sticking his finger in between his collar and his neck because her eyes on him made him uncomfortable. What was she thinking of him? My hero? You saved my life? Damned if he knew.

In the way of business, Joe Dinton, Dinton's Funeral Home, treated Dr. Krop with extreme cordiality and respect. Joe's performance with the bereaved was one thing, but when, as between experts, he got confidential about his work—Maybe the little bastard could forget how soon it would be his personal corpse dumped into a wicker basket and worked over, but—Forget it, forget it, Milton told himself. Maybe now you're going to get a decent chance to forget it, he thought, giving Joe the information he needed, telling Joe the death certificate would be forthcoming.

“Now where can I sit down, Miss Folsom?” When she simply blinked, he walked down the hall, re-entering the room where he had found her with the bottle in her hand, picking up his medical bag from the floor where he had dropped it, moving to the desk where she had left the suicide note. When he opened his bag to take out a death certificate, he saw that there were many papers in the pigeon-holes of the desk. How little they resembled the papers in his own desk. Maybe these were money papers and that was the difference. Behind him, Milton could hear her steps. “Miss Folsom, come on over and give me some facts.”

She came and standing with her hands clenched at her sides answered his questions. Then she said, “Why?”

Milton tapped his pen against the back of his hand, on the black hair that sprang there abundantly, vitally. “Why am I sticking my neck out for you, you mean?”

“Yes, why?”

“I told you. Because you have my complete sympathy, and, to be perfectly frank with you, I don't think I'm sticking it out very far. I was your mother's doctor a long time now. With her condition, she could have died today, tomorrow, five years from now. If I hadn't come in and seen what you wrote, that's what I would have assumed—that her condition killed her.” He saw how she was digging her nails into her palms. “Have you any stimulants in the place?” Her eyes were pale blue.

“Stimulants?”

Wrong word? He had used it to sound high-toned. “Liquor. A shot.” She shook her head. “Well, I'm going to give you a pill before I leave. To calm you down, sedate you.” She shook her head again. “You will have to put yourself in my hands, Miss Folsom, because I've put myself in your hands, haven't I? Tit for tat. I can't have you breaking down when Joe Dinton comes, can I?” Now her eyes were a darker blue.

“No, of course not, of course not.”

He put his pen down and took her hands in his. “Look, I'm on your team. I'm on your side.” Her hands did not respond at all to the pressure of his. Cold hands. “We're pals,” he said, but that sounded so crude, “we're birds of a feather, that's what we are, see?” She blinked and he dropped her hand and continued filling out the certificate in a businesslike way. When it was finished he said, “I could give you an injection—put you out. I could call the mortician, tell them. You could leave the door open and they'd remove her without disturbing you; then when you woke up from the injection it would all be over. How about that?”

She said, “I couldn't. No, thank you.”

He pulled his medical bag toward him and rummaged in it, taking out a sample of sedative. “Then just take this. It won't do more than quiet you down.” She barely nodded. “You have nothing to worry about any more. You understand that, don't you? You have nothing to fear.”

“No, Dr. Krop.”

No, Doctor, yes, Doctor! Why couldn't she be—feminine?

“But I don't like leaving you alone like this. Haven't you got somebody you could call and ask to stay with you?”

“No one.”

“Maybe someone real close wouldn't be such a good idea—You might be tempted to get talkative—How about a distant relative?”

“There is no relative I could call on. Mother avoided relatives.”

“Boy friend? Girl friend? A neighbor?”

She looked astonished. There were no neighbors as far as she was concerned, as far as Miss Folsom was concerned all the people in the apartment houses or in the bungalows didn't exist.

“I get around a lot, naturally,” Milton said. “How about a lady patient of mine? There's a Mrs. Antenelli.…” (Right outside your gate this minute, even if you don't know it!) “She's a good-natured slob, be happy to oblige.” (Jump at the chance to see the inside of the Haunted House.)

“Thank you, but I couldn't. If I'm not—not going to jail, I'll have to get used to being alone.”

From habit, he thought, from the ways forced on her by the old miser. When he got up from the desk, Miss Folsom closed the flap, hiding from him the papers, the letters that looked and smelled like money. He said, “Now, now, you're not alone. You have me.” He snapped his bag shut, giving her the certificate. “Wait a minute, when they're through here—it won't be long, they'll just ask a couple of questions about the funeral arrangements—suppose you lock up and go to a hotel for a while. Go on,” he urged, “I prescribe it. Go to the Waldorf-Astoria, get yourself the royal suite.” She was shaking her head. “Oh, go on, change of air—”

She said firmly, “It would look so odd. I must not do anything that would look odd.”

All Milton could say was that he could see he could trust her. She had begun now to walk toward the front door, and all he could do was follow her. With his patients, he had discovered that the best way was to tell them when he would see them again, but she wasn't his patient, was she? What was she? Standing in front of one of the suits of armor, she held out her hand in a boy kind of way, and when he held his out, shook it.

“It would be absurd to thank you,” she said.

He remembered Cissie thanking him for a lift to the subway, blushing, fluttering, patting. “You don't need to thank me.” It seemed to him then that she gave his hand a little press before she dropped it, and he told himself that this was the same as Cissie kissing his hand, kissing his feet, just that darkening of Miss Folsom's light-blue eyes was the same as Cissie kissing his feet. “So long,” he said.