“Just old. Fifty years ago he might have been all right. A horse-and-buggy doctor. I guess he thinks trepanning is something to do with opening a can of beans.”
“Well, isn’t it?”
The clerk laughed.
“Depends on whose head we’re talking about.”
“Yeah. So he’s just an old washed-up croaker, huh?”
“That describes him. Still, he’s not doing any harm. I don’t suppose he has more than a dozen patients now.” He scratched the side of his ear and looked owlishly at me. “Working on something?”
“I never work,” I said. “See you some time. So long.”
I went down the steps into the hard sunlight, slowly and thoughtfully. A girl worth a million dies suddenly and they call in an old horse-and-buggy man. Not quite the millionaire touch. One would have expected a fleet of the most expensive medicine men in town to have been in on a kill as important as hers.
I crawled into the Buick and trod on the starter. Parked against the traffic, across the way, was an olive-green Dodge limousine. Seated behind the wheel was a man in a fawn-coloured hat, around which was a plaited cord. He was reading a newspaper. I wouldn’t have noticed him or the car if he hadn’t looked up suddenly and, seeing me, hastily tossed the newspaper on to the back seat and started his engine. Then I did look at him, wondering why he had so suddenly lost interest in his paper. He seemed a big man with shoulders about as wide as a barn door. His head sat squarely on his shoulders without any sign of a neck. He wore a pencil-lined black moustache and his eyes were hooded. His nose and one ear had been hit very hard at one time and had never fully recovered. He looked the kind of tough you see so often in a Warner Brothers’ tough movie: the kind who make a drop-cloth for Humphrey Bogart.
I steered the Buick into the stream of traffic and drove East, up Centre Avenue, not hurrying, and keeping one eye on the driving-mirror.