Yet certain facts persisted and he couldn't wish them away: Sonja Andersen's deafness had been verified time and again by audiometry, and now she could hear; Mrs. Westin had found the breast mass herself and he had confirmed its presence, yet it was gone now.
Something was up.
And in each case the turning point seemed to be his touch.
There was no sane explanation here.
With a growl of frustration, disgust, and bafflement, Alan threw down his napkin and headed out to make late rounds at the hospital.
Alan turned toward his office on the way back from the hospital. Tony DeMarco had left a message with the answering service that he wanted to see him—a fortunate coincidence, because Alan wanted to talk to Tony. He had a job for him.
On the way, he found he was hungry and looked for a place to eat. He almost pulled into a downtown sandwich shop but turned away when he remembered that he had treated the owner a number of times for various venereal diseases… and the owner made the sandwiches. He decided instead on Memison's, where he ordered a fish dinner.
As he pulled into his parking lot of the free-standing building he half-owned, he saw that the lights were still on in the law office. Tony answered Alan's knock.
"Ay! Alan! C'mon in."
Alan smiled at the man who was perhaps his closest friend, his partner in the office building they shared, and whom he hardly ever saw. Shorter than Alan, with close-cropped dark hair and a mustache, Tony was still whipcord lean as only an unmarried chain-smoker could be at his age.
"Just finished up some dictation and was about to call it a day. Drink?"
"Yeah. I could use one."
Tony handed Alan a glass with two fingers of Dewar's, neat. "Brooklyn," he said, lifting his glass.
"And a new Ebbets Field," Alan said, lifting his.
"And the return of da Bums."
They both drank and Alan let it burn down the back of his throat. Oh, that was good. He looked around the lavishly appointed office. He and Tony had both come a long way from their roots in Brooklyn—only a few miles on the map, but income and prestigewise they had traveled light-years.
They small-talked, and then Alan asked Tony, "You wanted to see me?"
"Yeah," Tony said, indicating a chair and lighting a cigarette as he seated himself behind his desk. "Two things. First— know what today is?"
Alan didn't have the foggiest.
"It's our eighth anniversary, you dumb shit!"
Alan smiled at the ease with which Tony reverted to his Brooklyn accent and the street patois of their youth. Alan had quickly learned in medical school in New England that with his Brooklyn accent he could discuss baseball or hot dogs or streetlife with authority, but shouldn't say anything about internal medicine, because nobody who talked like that could know anything about internal medicine. So he developed a neutral, regionless brand of English that was now as much an integral part of him as the way he walked.
Tony used his "lawyer English," as he called it, only when he was being a lawyer. When he was relaxing with friends, he was the old Tony DeMarco, street fighter and toughest kid on the block.
"Really? That long?"
Alan found it hard to believe eight years had gone by since he had picked out Tony's name under the Lawyers listing in the phone book—his office had been the most convenient for a lunchtime appointment then—and had learned to his delight that they had grown up only a few blocks apart in Brooklyn.
He had asked Tony about getting out of his practice agreement with Lou Alberts. Personally, he got along fine with Lou, but their styles of practice didn't mesh. Alan had found it utterly impossible to keep Lou's pace, which was eight patients an hour on an average day, and ten or more per hour when things got busy. Lou's technique was to hit the patient's most immediate problem with an injection or a prescription, then shoo him out to make room for the next. He was a doctor with his hand forever on the doorknob. Trying to emulate him had made Alan feel like a pieceworker on an assembly line. Not at all the brand of medicine he wanted to practice.
But Alan didn't want to break his contract unless Lou hadn't been holding up his end of it. Unfortunately, Tony's analysis revealed that Lou had been living up to the letter of the contract. But that was no problem—Tony could get him out of it and slide him past any of the restrictive covenants described therein.
"Yeah. Eight years ago you changed my life when you said you were going to finish out your second contract year with Lou Alberts."
"Get out!"
"I'm serious, man! I offered you half a dozen finagles out of your contract and you sat there with your white-bread mouth and said, 'No. I signed my name and so that's it.' Do you know how you made me feel? Like a scumbag! Never had a client say that to me. Never! You didn't care if you had a legal escape hatch—you'd given your word and you were gonna stick by it. I felt like slipping down under the table and crawling out the door."
"You hid it well," Alan said, amazed at the revelation. He had never imagined—
"So from that day on I changed my style. No more weasel shit like that. I've lost clients because of it, but I can sit in the same room with you now."
Something was suddenly made clear to Alan in that moment. He had never known why Tony had called him only a month or so after that first meeting and asked him if he wanted to go into partnership on a small office building on the other end of town, exactly one tenth of a mile outside that radius of the restrictive covenant in Alan's contract with Lou Alberts. They could both share the first floor and maybe even find a tenant for the second.
He and Tony had been close friends and partners ever since. He wished they could spend more time together. He felt more kinship with this feisty lawyer than with any of his fellow physicians.
"Tony… I never realized—"
"Forget it!" he said with a wave of his hand. "But on to the second thing: I overheard some real weird shit today."
"Like what?"
"I was having a drink with this lawyer friend while he was waiting for a client. When the client came in they took the booth right behind where we had been sitting, so while I'm finishing my drink I hear this dapper dude, who happens to be a doctor, tell my friend that he wants to sue another doctor— a guy by the name of Alan Bulmer. I later call my friend and in my casual roundabout way find out that this doctor's name is Larkin." He stared at Alan a moment. "So how come you don't look too damn surprised?"
Alan told him about his conversation with Fred Larkin that morning.
Tony shook his head. "You can be a real jerk at times, Alan. I did a quick check on this Larkin guy. He's a bigshot, has lot of influence with the hospital Board of Trustees. Never know when you're gonna need a friend or two in high places."
"What for?" Alan said. "I've no intention of ever running for chief of staff, even if I had the time for it. Hospital politics bore me to tears."
"Still, never hurts to have a friendly contact."
"That's the politician in you talking."
"Ay! Don't call me no fucking politician!"
"Scratch any lawyer and you'll find a nascent politician," Alan said with a laugh.
"Don't act so high and mighty about friends in high places. How do you think you got into that high-class club?"
Alan shrugged. Lou had been his partner then and Lou had been serving on the club membership committee. "Wasn't my idea. Ginny wanted it… I just went along."
"Yeah, but it was connections that got you in—that and not having your name end in a vowel or a '-berg.' "
Alan shrugged again. His practice left him little time for tennis or yachting, so he was almost a stranger at the club. "Anyway, you're a friend, aren't you, Tony?"