The driver got out and helped her. “He drunk?” the driver asked suspiciously.
“No.”
“I don’t take drunks; I don’t want my cab messed up. I’m very squeamish that way.”
“He’s not drunk.”
“He looks drunk. Dead drunk.”
“Dead maybe, but not drunk,” Mrs. Potter reassured him. She got into the cab beside Penny’s sprawled body.
The driver also got in and they started away from the curb. It was at this moment that the night watchman appeared from the building entrance on the run. “Hey!” he yelled. “Lady! Have you got change of a dollar bill? I lost my dime in the phone and I can’t call the cops!”
“Sorry!” Mrs. Potter called back as the cab turned the corner.
When the taxi dropped them off at Mrs. Potter’s address, she rang Dr. Kilembrio’s bell. Considering Penny’s condition, there was no one else to whom Mrs. Potter felt she could turn. It was Miss Carridge who answered the summons.
She looked for a long moment at the crumpled figure of Penny which the cab driver had helped Mrs. Potter deposit on the front stoop. Then she spoke. “We take no responsibility for defects,” she told Mrs. Potter. “And we don’t allow returns.”
“You don’t understand,” Mrs. Potter told her. “He’s been shot. We need the doctor’s help.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Well, no, but--”
“Doctor’s very busy right now. I don’t think he can see you.”
“But he has to!” Mrs. Potter wailed. “It’s a matter of life and death! A gunshot wound! It could be fatal!”
“That’s not Doctor’s field. He strictly specializes in urinalysis with a little abortion on the side.”
“But this is an emergency!”
“Miss Carridge!” Dr. Kilembrio’s voice came roaring up from the basement.
“Coming, Doctor.”
“Is too late you’re coming now!” he shouted angrily. “When I’m going to the johnny, I’m telling you not under all circumstances leaving the patient alone, and this you’re doing, and now look what’s happening!”
“The doorbell rang, Doctor. I had to answer it,” Miss Carridge retorted hotly.
“So you’re answering the ding-a-ling, I’m losing the patient. Because of you, I’m losing my license could be from the A. A. A.”
“The A. A. A.?” Mrs. Potter was bewildered. “Doesn’t he mean the A. M. A.?”
“No. The A. A. A.,” Miss Carridge explained. “The American Abortionists’ Association. You must have heard of them. They’ve got the weakest lobby in Washington.”
“You getting your heinie down here on the doubling, Miss Carridge!” Dr. Kilembrio called. “You’re seeing for yourself what neglecting the patient is doing.”
“I have to go.” Miss Carridge started to shut the front door in Mrs. Potter’s face.
“I live here!” Mrs. Potter protested.
Miss Carridge shrugged, left the door open and headed for the entrance to the basement. Behind her, outraged Motherhood pumped adrenaline through Mrs. Potter’s glandular system. It lent her the strength of an Atlas — a Charles Atlas, that is. She picked Penny up in her arms like a baby and staggered after the nurse. She reached the entrance to the basement before Miss Carridge could close the door behind her. At the head of the stairs leading down from the door she elbowed Miss Carridge aside and -
And she tripped and sent Penny’s body hurtling down the cement steps, bouncing with the resiliency of a rubber ball, and finally rolling to a stop on the landing at the bottom!
“What’s this you’re doing?” Dr. Kilembrio protested, scrambling out of the way of the bouncing body. “You’re not getting along with your son, doing your fighting in your own apartment! With my neighbors problems, I’m unmixing in!”
“You don’t understand! He’s been hurt!” Mrs. Potter panted at the top of the stairs.
“So throwing him down a case of stairs is making him better? This I’m doubting! Is some kind new treating procedure I never heard from, maybe?”
“It was an accident.”
“From such accidents undertakings are making money, not doctors.”
“Please! Look at him! I think he’s dying!”
Dr. Kilembrio knelt and examined Penny. “As a diagnostician, I could maybe get you on at the medical center,” he told Mrs. Potter. “You’re perfectly correcting. He’s dying.”
“Oh, Doctor, what a shame!” Miss Carridge interjected. “Your first transplant!”
“Easy coming, easy going.” The doctor shrugged. “The body is rejecting the brain, or what?” He asked Mrs. Potter.
“You don’t understand. He’s been shot.”
“Shot?” Dr. Kilembrio bent and examined Penny again. “You know what?” he diagnosed after a moment. “This he-she’s been shot!”
“That’s what I said!” Mrs. Potter was irked. “Don’t be redundant!”
“Without you’re licensing to practice, keep your diagnosis to yourself, Mrs.” He continued examining Penny. “If I’m figuring my geometries right, the angle from dangle of the bullet hole tells the slug is lodging in the heart where it could be giving a heart attack any beat now. Prognosis is this heart is a St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Any second now is copping out on the rest of the orgyism.”
“You mean he’s going to die!” Mrs. Potter wailed.
“You’re picking things up fastly. You got it. The him-her, it’s a dead it-ling.”
“But, Doctor, you have to do something!”
“Lady, I got my own troublings!” Dr. Kilembrio waved a pudgy arm to indicate the figure on the table behind him. It was the figure of a voluptuous, naked, young girl. A revolver dangled from her right hand. There was a hole in her right temple. “Her brains she’s blowing poof when I’m doing my duty and Miss Carridge isn’t and leaves her alone you’re playing Halloween with the doorbell. So here she is, I’m sticking with her, a nice body in good condition, only troubling is a little lead poisoning in the brain. So now you’re wanting I should take on another corpse—to-be. No thanking. Please to picking up your dying duck and taking him somewhere else like the morgue if you’re wanting to save middlemen.”
“But you have to save my Penny!” Mrs. Potter wailed.
“You’re saving your Penny, means my dollars will taking caring from themselves?” the doctor asked avariciously.
“What do you mean?”
“Is costing money, I’m getting the idea killing a pair of sparrows with one brick.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Doctor, you don’t mean--?” There was fire and Zeal and admiration in Miss Carridge’s eyes.
“I mean! I mean! The pricing is right, another transplant I’m doing. The brain in the he-she still okay, and the body in the girl nicely-nicely, we’re putting the he-she brain in the brain-blown body and making me a doubling transplanter. But for this I’m entitling to get moolah.”
“I don’t have any money,” Mrs. Potter confessed tearfully.
“You got a HIP plan maybe?”
“Penny has Blue Cross.”
“It’s doing the job! So I’m operating!”
“But it was a company plan. And he robbed the company. Do you think they might have canceled his hospitalization because of that?”
“Not without they cancel out the whole grouping. Don’t worrying. Blue Cross stands behind their policies, thievlings or no. Now, please, lady, you’re getting out from here while Miss Carridge and I are operating before it’s too late.” Dr. Kilembrio rubbed his hands together and flatulated happily.
Mrs. Potter left. Miss Carridge arranged the two bodies side by side, and then helped Dr. Kilembrio scrub up. All the while he was getting ready, the doctor whistled to himself, keeping the beat with repeated expressions of flatulence.
“Are you nervous, Doctor?” Miss Carridge asked as he bent to his task.
“A little,” he flatulated.