Marlowe, selecting from the suture tray, gazed at the masses of scar tissue upon each wrist and shook his head. “Mr Winslow, you managed to do this without anesthetic, and I don’t see why I should waste any in sewing you back together.”
Winslow’s eyes glittered, but he didn’t reply. It was, perhaps, an old game.
“And how many times do I have to tell you,” said Marlowe, drawing the curved needle with difficulty through the layers of scar, “cut lengthwise down your wrist, just here below the thumb — not crosswise.”
Frank Carnell was still in seclusion when Marlowe made rounds through North Unit on Sunday evening, but the ward attendants reported that he had been quiet throughout the day, and he appeared to be ready to come out into the ward. Marlowe found him sitting up on the edge of his bed, staring dazedly at his hands.
“Good evening, Mr Carnell. How are you feeling today?”
“I’m sorry — I’m bad about names. You’re Dr…?”
“Dr Marlowe. Dr Chris Marlowe.”
Carnell struggled to recall. “I remember seeing you, of course. When I was… upset. And when they brought me here from the hospital.”
“Do you remember coming here from the hospital?”
“I must have been completely irrational.” Carnell smiled sheepishly at the memory. “I seemed to believe I had come here as a voluntary patient. I had a cassette recorder, and I was going to take firsthand notes for my dissertation on the inadequacies of our state mental hospitals. I’m a journalism student at State, but then you know all that.”
“I’m sure there’s more than sufficient material there for a number of dissertations,” Marlowe agreed. “And was that actually your topic?”
“One of them,” Carnell confessed. “I had plenty of ideas, just never followed up on them. Guess that was just another of the things that helped my life slide downhill, until…”
He struggled to control his voice. “Well, until I finally pulled out all the pills I had on hand and gobbled them down like Al&M’s. I remember getting sick and passing out, and then I guess I woke up there in the emergency room.”
“You guess?”
Carnell frowned, trying to recall. “To tell the truth, my memory is pretty hazy for the last day or so — all those pills, plus whatever medications you’ve been giving me. There must have been a time there in the emergency room when they were bringing me around after I took all those pills…”
Marlowe waited patiently while he tried to remember.
CarnelPs face began to twist with fear. “Dr Marlowe, I can’t remember anything from the time I blacked out until when I was sitting there in your reception room and…Wait a minute, I was never brought here! I came voluntarily!”
“Indeed, you did,” Marlowe’s smile was almost sympathetic. “And voluntarily, I’m afraid, is unforgivable.”
Carnell started to rush for the door, but it was blocked by Macafee and Sawyer, and he was too weak to put up much of a struggle.
“Don’t worry, Mr Carnell,” said Marlowe soothingly, as the needle plunged home. “It does take time at first to understand, and you have plenty of time.”
It was past 5 am when Marlowe made rounds through South Unit. The sun would be creeping out soon, signaling the dawn of what Marlowe knew would be another Friday, and he would be on call.
“Dr Marlowe,” suggested Wygul, the ward attendant on South, “maybe when you finish signing those ECT orders, could you take a look in on Mr Stallings? He’s been a lot calmer tonight, and we haven’t had to restrain him since Saturday afternoon. I think he’s ready to be let out of seclusion now so we can see how he does on the ward.”
“Mr Wygul,” Marlowe finished his coffee, “I’ve never known your judgment to fail yet. Is the patient awake yet?”
“Yes, Doctor. He was sitting up in bed half an hour ago, and we’ll be waking everybody up in just a minute.”
“All right then, I’ll talk to him.”
Stallings gazed at Marlowe expectantly when he entered the seclusion room. He made no hostile moves.
“Good morning, Mr Stallings. I’m Dr Marlowe.”
“How do you do, Dr Marlowe.” Stallings’ manner was courteous, but in a friendly way, rather than cautious.
“Do you remember me from the night you came here, Mr Stallings?”
“Yes sir, I sure do.” Stallings laughed and shook his head. His hand seemed to want a cigarette to complete the gesture. “Man, I sure was out of my skull on something that night!”
“What do you remember?”
“Well, I remember being carried in here by the deputies, and being tied down and all, and I was cussing and telling the whole world that I was Satan.”
“And did you believe that?”
Stallings nodded in embarrassment, then looked earnestly into Marlowe’s eyes. “Yes sir, I sure did. And then you came into the room, and I looked into your face, and I knew that I was wrong, because I knew that you were Satan.”
“Mr Stallings,” Marlowe smiled sadly, “you appear to have made a rapid recovery”
OLD LOVES
He had loved her for twenty years, and today he would meet her for the first time. Her name was Elisabeth Kent, but to him she would always be Stacey Steele.
Alex Webley had been an undergraduate in the mid-1960s when The Agency premiered on Saturday night television. This had been at the height of the fad for spy shows — James Bond and imitations beyond counting, then countermoves toward either extreme of realism or parody. Upon such a full sea The Agency almost certainly would have sunk unnoticed, had it not been for the series two stars — or more particularly, had it not been for Elisabeth Kent.
In the role of Stacey Steele she played the delightfully eccentric— “kooky” was the expression of the times — partner of secret agent Harrison Dane, portrayed by actor Garrett Channing — an aging matinee idol, to use the expression of an earlier time. The two were employed by an enigmatic organization referred to simply as The Agency, which dispatched Dane and Miss Steele off upon dangerous assignments throughout the world. Again, nothing in the formula to distinguish The Agency from the rest of the pack — except for the charisma of its co-stars and for a certain stylish audacity to its scripts that became more outrageous as the series progressed.
Initially it was to have been a straight secret agent series: strong male lead assisted by curvaceous ingenue whose scatterbrained exploits would provide at least one good capture and rescue per episode. The role of Harrison Dane went to Garrett Channing — a fortuitous piece of contrary-to-type casting of an actor best remembered as the suave villain or debonair hero of various forgettable 1950s programmers. Channing had once been labeled “the poor man’s James Mason,” and perhaps the casting director had recalled that James Mason had been an early choice to portray James Bond. The son of a Bloomsbury greengrocer, Channing’s Hollywood-nurtured sophistication and charm seemed ideal for the role of American super-spy, Harrison Dane.
Then, through a casting miracle that could only have been through chance and not genius, the role of Stacey Steele went to Elisabeth Kent. Miss Kent was a tall, leggy dancer whose acting experience consisted of several on-and-off-Broadway plays and a brief role in the most recent James Bond film. Playboy, as was its custom, ran a pictorial feature on the lovelies of the latest Bond film and devoted two full pages to the blonde Miss Kent — revealing rather more of her than was permitted in the movies of the day. It brought her to the attention of the casting director, and Elisabeth Kent became Stacey Steele.