Barnes recoiled, and the doctor straightened up and shoved his stethoscope against his chest again. “Nothing like a little anxiety to bring up the pulse rate.”
“I just wanted to ask you about Mr. Free,” Barnes said.
“Ben Free?” Dr. Makee took the earpieces from his ears, walked around his desk, and sat down. “Your heart seems to be pretty good. What did you say your name was?”
“Osgood M. Barnes.”
“Well, I don’t think you have a problem there, Mr. Barnes. Just the same, I’m going to check your blood pressure. Put on your shirt again, and come over here and sit down. Father deceased?”
Taking his shirt from the halltree, Barnes nodded.
“What did he die from?”
“Accidental causes.”
The old doctor sipped his coffee. “You’d just as soon not talk about it, I take it. Fine with me. Sit down here and let me do the blood pressure. You can put on your tie but not your coat. You wanted to ask me something about Ben Free?”
Barnes nodded again.
“Thought you lived with him. I’ve seen you over there, so you ought to know more than I do. Put your arm here, level, on my desk. You got your breath? Heart pretty well slowed down?”
“Yes, fine,” Barnes said. “I did live with him. You’re right about that, Dr. Makee.”
“You were over there when I stitched up the fella that got hit with the ax.”
“Yes, I was. But Mr. Free was gone by then—we didn’t know where he was. We still don’t. We’re hoping you can tell us.”
The old doctor wrapped a rubber cuff around Barnes’s arm. “I won’t, because I don’t know. That satisfy you? Don’t know where he went when they started to wreck his house. Don’t know where I’ll go myself when they start on this one.”
“It’s not a question of my being satisfied, Doctor. We’re worried about him. He’s lost his home. We’d like to help him if we can.”
“Out of the goodness of your hearts? I don’t believe you, Mr. Barnes. People don’t do those things. They think they do, but they don’t. Something happens, and they think if it weren’t for such-and-such I’d do so-and-so. But such-and-such is always there, except when so-and-so might put money in their pockets.”
“Are you saying there aren’t any humanitarians? I’d have said you were one, Doctor. You said you were retired, too. Why do you take care of your patients?”
“Thunderation, somebody’s got to. Besides,” the old doctor chuckled, “because I do, I can get away with just about anything I want around this neighborhood. You notice how I made you take off your shirt soon as you came in here?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I do that with all of them. Make ’em strip so I can check their heart and lungs. For decency’s sake, if a lady or one of these young gals has on a brassiere, I don’t make her take it off. But lots of these young gals don’t wear them now—you know that?”
“Yes,” Barnes said. “I’ve noticed that myself.”
“And when they do, why frequently they have these real lacy, frilly things. I like them damn near as well. You’re too young to recall what it was like in my day, Mr. Barnes. But back when I was a boy, if I saw down the front of a good-looking gal, I’d really seen something. Why, I thought about something like that for a month afterward. Why when we got the Monkey Ward catalog, my ma used to tear out the pages with the ladies’ unmentionables to keep my brothers and me from lookin’ at ’em.”
Barnes grinned. “You’re not really that old, Doctor. You know, you remind me a lot of Mr. Free.”
“Well, I ought to.” The old doctor began to pump the blood-pressure cuff. “He was my son, you know.” Barnes stared at him, and he chuckled again. “Not my actual son—Tommy died a long while ago, and I think Ben was really a few years older than I am. But we used to pretend that way, and we had a lot of fun. I was the dad because of my mustache. Ben shaved his face all over back then. He’s got more hair on his face than I do now.”
Barnes nodded.
“That’s right, you saw him many a time.” The old doctor pressed his stethoscope to the inside of Barnes’s elbow and cocked his head. The air escaping from the cuff made a faint hiss, the sigh of a sleepy serpent. “Started when we were coming home on the bus one time. I’d wrenched my knee a little, and Ben gave me a hand up the steps—your blood pressure’s okay, Mr. Barnes. Good, in fact, for a man like you, because you’re lean. Get plenty of exercise and stay away from rich food, anything sweet or greasy. Never salt a thing.”
“I won’t,” Barnes said. “Thanks for the tip. I hope your knee’s better now.”
“Knee? Oh, sure, the story. Well, sir, Ben helped me up, and then there wasn’t two seats together, so I took the one up front and Ben sat about three rows back, next to a lady about my age.
“And when we were both settled down, she said something like, ‘Will your friend be all right?’ and Ben said something like, ‘Doc’ll be okay.’ Only the lady was a mite deef, and she thought he said Dad’ll be okay. So she said, ‘Oh, is he your father? Such a distinguished looking man!’ Well, Ben’s always a great kidder—you could say just about anything to him and he’d go along with it. So he told her he was sixty-nine and I was ninety-one, and how we’d lived together all our lives, and so on so forth. From then on it’s been a joke we pick up every once in a while.”
“You haven’t really known Mr. Free all your life?” Barnes asked.
“No, of course not. Only since he moved in across the street.”
“How long has that been, Dr. Makee?”
“Just a few years.”
“Dr. Makee, I know you think I’m prying into something that’s really none of my business, but Mr. Free‘s—your friend Ben’s—missing, and all of us who lived there with him are concerned about him. We’re afraid something may have happened to him, and until we find out nothing has, we’re going to keep looking.”
The old doctor nodded, his face expressionless. “Have you called the police?”
“No,” Barnes said. “Not yet.”
“That’s what most people would do, Mr. Barnes.”
“We’re not …” Barnes hesitated.
“Not what?”
“Not the sort of people the police pay much attention to, Doctor. A man in your position—you’re a physician, you own this house, you have a certain status in the community.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.”
“I think—Dr. Makee, I used to be a regional sales manager for the Continental Crusher Division of Yevco Incorporated. I had a house and a wife and kid. Two cars, a gold American Express Card, all that stuff.”
The old doctor nodded. “What happened?”
“A lot of things. The point I want to make is that when I lost all that, I lost it so slowly I hardly noticed it happening. The wife and the kid and the house and one car first. That was all in one lump.”
“I see.”
“Then my job. After that I went through five jobs in a little over a year. Each of them looked nearly as good as the last one—do you know what I mean? I know you’re thinking it was my own fault, but not all of it was. Like, once I was sales manager for a small company. They got bought up by a big one, and I was out. They said I could stay around as a sales trainee if I wanted, and I told them to stuff it. Today I’d jump at that.”
The old doctor nodded again.
“I’m getting way off my point. What I wanted to say was that one day I was making a call at a liquor store. The man who owned it was out front by the register, and he didn’t want any. You know how they do, ‘I ain’t got time, come back next month,’ all that bullshit.”
“I can imagine.”
“While I was standing there trying to tell him about the products I represented, a cop came in. The owner looked at him and said, ‘Throw this guy out.’ I suppose the cop got a fifth of cheap Scotch from him at Christmas; they usually do. Anyway, he grabbed me.”