Now the next question. Was it a double precaution? If they wanted to knock off Boster they had to take a chance on a miss. But anyone interested in Boster, they’d be interested in too, and no matter who he was, they’d want him out of the way. So... who was the primary target?
I grinned a little, knowing that someplace an ear was glued to a receiver listening to the hum the oscillator was giving off, realizing that the second it stopped it meant the dynamite charge had done its work. I dropped the gimmick on the ground where it stayed activated, sending out its signal, and backed the car out of the drive, then turned and headed toward Dr. George Carlson’s clinic a mile away.
The building was a one story affair, sprawled out like a T, of white brick with a red ceramic tile roof. The receptionist at the desk was a young girl with a tired smile who was just finishing stamping a pile of papers when I walked in.
“Yes?”
“Dr. Carlson, please.”
“Are you a patient?”
“No, this is personal business. I’m not a salesman either.”
“May I have your name?”
“Mann. I’m from New York. Am I interrupting anything?”
“No, I’m sure the doctor can see you.” She smiled, dialed the phone and made a call that came over an intercom system from the closed doors behind her. There was a moment’s conversation before she put the phone back and said, “Dr. Carlson will be right here.”
“Thanks.”
Dr. George Carlson was a tall, slim man in his early thirties, dressed in typical hospital garb, his eyes reflecting the things all doctors have seen and hope to achieve. He came through the doors, nodded to me and pointed to a door on my left marked Private.
Inside, he sat behind his desk and wiped his face with his hands in a tired gesture and said, “Long night. Two emergencies. Damn speeders.” He looked up at me and leaned forward on his elbows, hands clasped together. “Now...”
“Doctor,” I said, “I’m going to omit details unless you want them just to save time. I’m looking for Louis Agrounsky, who was formerly employed at the space project...”
“I know him,” he interrupted.
“He’s disappeared. It’s imperative that he be found.”
Carlson made a wry face. “He was a patient of mine. That’s all I can offer.”
“Then let’s put it this way. You can forget the doctor-patient relationship.”
“No I can’t, Mr. Mann.”
“Then check on me.” I gave him the same details I did Claude Boster and waited while he did the same thing and watched him while he hung up and nodded slowly.
“All right,” he told me. “Shoot.”
“First... his accident.”
“Nothing serious... for most people, that is. The normal recovery period would have been much shorter, but with Agrounsky it was different.”
“How?”
“Know what a pain level is?”
“Too well,” I said.
“He was very low. This man could take any type of mental pressure... up to a point like any of us, but his physical pain tolerance was lower than most.”
“Was he hurt?”
“Not too badly. You or I could have taken it and been ambulatory in a matter of days, but his acceptance of pain wasn’t like ours.”
“That’s why he stayed here so long?”
“It wasn’t the curing. It was the un-curing. His physical condition was fine, but in treating him we used morphine to ease the pain he undoubtedly felt and he turned out to be one of those rare specimens who become addicted almost immediately. Most of his stay here was devoted to taking him off the narcotic addiction.”
I had it then. It was starting to fall into place.
“Did he ever talk to you?”
“Never about his work, if that’s what you mean. He wouldn’t speak about the space project at all.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
Carlson waved his hands absently. “Oh, occasionally he’d go off into some vague ramblings. It wasn’t the first I had heard. Look at how many scientists engaged in the original Manhattan Project suddenly became total humanitarians after they saw the damage inflicted at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. You can’t engage in destructive enterprises without developing a guilt complex somewhere along the line.”
“And what was his?”
“Worry about the world. He was afraid it would destroy itself and he was the one who gave it the means. Baloney. I tried to talk him out of it and I think I succeeded.”
“You didn’t,” I told him.
His lips turned into a tight, thin line.
“Agrounsky’s ready to do the job himself,” I said.
For ten seconds he looked at me, then muttered, “Son of a bitch!”
“He was capable of it, you know.”
Carlson nodded again. “Yes, I know. He was one of the great ones. What happened?”
“I don’t know, but you might have a plausible lead. This addiction of his... how serious was it?”
“We caught it in time. It was all controlled and his treatment was the usual one prescribed in such cases.”
“And when he left here... was he cured?”
Carlson licked his lips, chose his words and said, “I was sure of it.”
“No recurrence?”
“There’s always that possibility. It’s like having an alcoholic teetotaler taste whiskey without realizing he’s an incipient alcoholic. There’s always that taste to remember. I never thought...”
“It isn’t your fault.”
“It is. I should have insisted on further checks.”
“Look... you’re a doctor... you know things and hear things. What’s the situation on narcotic sales in this area?”
“Oh, hell, you have that disease in every damn city in the world.”
“I’m talking about here.”
“I’ve treated several,” he said.
“Children... teen-agers?”
“No. Always adults. They came through the police courts.”
“What’s the source?”
Carlson made a negative gesture with his head.
“Guess.”
“Imported,” he said. “No reported incidents of break-ins that I know of. I’ve asked around several times and I’ve never heard of any. Listen... you get where money is big and you find vice...”
“I know all that.”
“And do you know that for some reason professional people seem attracted to addiction? They take a jolt now and then to keep going, to make up for the lack of sleep, the missed meals, the mental distress they undergo. Do you know...?”
I said, “I know all that too.” Then added, “You aren’t one, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“And what do you think Agrounsky’s chances of remaining an addict are?”
“Too big,” he told me. “If he stays away from the stuff he’ll be all right, but if he found a taste for it he will wind up total. I gave him credit for having more sense than that.”
“It’s a disease, Doctor,” I said sympathetically. “They haven’t found a cure for the common cold yet, so don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t something you did. He had it in him all the time without knowing it.”
“Nuts.”
“I can give you some big names who are hooked right now if you’d like to hear them. It would surprise you.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Thanks for the information,” I said.
He didn’t answer me.
The police had a report on the .38 used last night. Ballistics had come up negative and nothing useful had been found in the grounds outside the shop. It was supposed the gun had been a revolver since no ejected shells had been located, and it made a front page story for the local paper with the intimation that it was another robbery attempt, interrupted this time, by Boster and a friend appearing in the doorway and startling the heister. There were squibs in the Miami sheets and a brief recap on the TV news broadcast, but that was as far as it went.