The Touch

Alan

It began late Friday morning.

The only incident of note before that was the call from Fred Larkin.

Connie buzzed back with the word that Dr. Larkin was calling.

"Dr. Larkin himself, or his secretary?"

Alan already knew the answer. Fred Larkin was the local glamor-boy orthopedist who took in something like $750,000 a year, owned three homes, a forty-two-foot cabin cruiser, and traveled the 35-mile-an-hour roads from his home to the hospital in a 200-mile-an-hour, $90,000 Maserati with license plates that read FRED MD. Alan never referred patients to him, but one of his regulars had somehow landed under Larkin's care in January. He had been expecting this call.

"His" secretary, of course."

"Of course." Fred Larkin was not the type to deign to dial a phone number himself. "Put her on hold and hurry back here for a second."

As Connie bustled her short, plump frame into his office, Alan hit the button on his phone and said, "Hello?" When a female voice on the other end said, "Just a minute, Dr. Buhner," and put him on hold, Alan handed the phone to Connie. She smiled and held it to her ear. After a short pause, she said, "Hold on, Dr. Larkin," and hit the hold button. Giggling, she handed the phone to Alan and hurried out of the office.

Alan waited for a slow count of five and then opened the line.

"Fred! How are you?"

"Fine, Alan," he said in his officious voice. "Listen, I don't want to take up much of your time, but I thought you should know what one of your patients is saying about you."

"Really? Who?" Alan knew who, what, and why, but decided to play dumb.

"Mrs. Marshall."

"Elizabeth? I didn't even know she was mad at me!"

"I don't know about that. But as you know, I arthroscoped her right knee in January and she's refusing to pay the last two-thirds of her bill."

"Probably because she doesn't have the money."

"Well, be that as it may, she says"—he gave a forced laugh here—"that you told her not to pay it. Can you believe that?"

"Sure. In a sense, it's true."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, then:

"You admit it?"

"Uh-huh," Alan said, and waited for the explosion.

"You son of a bitch! I half figured you put her up to it. Where the hell do you get off telling one of my patients not to pay my bill?" He was shouting into the phone.

"To say you charge too much is an understatement, Fred. You gouge. You never gave that old lady a clue that your fee for a look into her joint plus a little trimming of her cartilage would cost her two grand. You did it in twenty minutes in the outpatient surgery department—which meant your overhead was zero, Fred—and you charged her two thousand bucks! Then—and this is the kicker—then she had to come to me for an explanation of exactly what it was you did for her. You charge at a rate of six thousand bucks an hour and I have to do the explaining! Which I couldn't do because as usual you never bothered to send me a copy of the procedure summary."

"I explained everything to her."

"Not so she could understand it, and you probably had four more procedures lined up. Answering a few questions would take too much time. And when she told your office that Medicare and her other insurance only covered six hundred of the bill, she was informed that that was her problem. And you know what she said to me?"

Alan had now arrived at the point that infuriated him the most. He could feel himself coming to a boil. He tried to control it, but knew he could slip into a shouting rage at any minute.

"She said, 'You doctors!' She lumped me with you! And that pissed me off. Ill will from guys like you who treat patients like slabs of meat spills over onto me, and I don't take kindly to that at all."

"Don't give me any of your holier-than-thou crap, Bulmer. Nothing gives you the right to tell a patient not to pay!"

"I didn't tell her that, exactly." Alan's temper was stretched to the breaking point, but he managed to keep his voice low. "I told her to send your bill back to you in the shape of a rectal suppository. Because you're an asshole, Fred."

After a second or two of shocked silence, Larkin said, "I can buy and sell you, Bulmer."

"A rich asshole is still an asshole."

"I'm taking this to the hospital board and to the medical society. You haven't heard the last of this!"

"Yes, I have," Alan said, and hung up.

He was annoyed with himself for sinking to name-calling, but could not deny that he had enjoyed it.

He glanced at his watch. Nine-thirty already. He would be playing catch-up the rest of the morning.

Alan's mood lightened immediately when he saw Sonja Andersen waiting for him in the examining room. He smiled at the pretty little ten-year-old he had been following for the past three years and mentally flipped through her medical history. Sonja had been a normal child until age four when she contracted chicken pox from her older sister. It was not the usual uncomplicated case, however. A varicella meningitis developed, leaving her with a seizure disorder and total hearing loss in her right ear. She was a brave little soul and had been doing well lately. No seizures for the past year, and no visible ill effects from the Dilantin she took twice a day to control them.

She held up a Walkman tape player with lightweight headphones.

"Look what I got, Dr. Bulmer!" Her face was bright and open, her smile unstudied sincerity. She seemed genuinely glad to see him.

Alan was just as happy to see her. He loved pediatrics more than any other facet of his practice. He found something in caring for a child, whether sick or well, that gave him a special satisfaction. Perhaps this communicated itself to the children and their parents, explaining why an unusually large segment of his practice, nearly 40 percent, was devoted to pediatrics.

"Who gave you that?"

"My uncle. For my birthday."

"That's right—you're ten now, aren't you? What kind of music do you like?"

"Rock."

He watched as she put on the headphones and began bouncing to whatever she was hearing. He lifted the left earpiece away from her head and said,

"What's playing?"

"The new song by Polio."

He forced a smile, acutely aware of the generation gap. He'd heard Polio's music—a mindless blend of punk and heavy metal. They made Ozzie Ozbourne sound refined and were one of the reasons he kept the stack of oldies tapes in his car. "What say we turn it off for the moment and let me give you the once-over."

He checked her heart, lungs, blood pressure, checked her gums for the telltale signs of long-term Dilantin therapy. All negative. Good. He turned on the otoscope, fitted it with a speculum, and moved to her ears.

The left looked fine—the canal was clear, the drum normal in color and configuration with no sign of fluid in the middle ear. He came around to the other side. As usual, her right ear looked as normal as the left. Her deafness there was not caused by a structural defect; the auditory nerve simply didn't carry the messages from the middle ear to the brain. He realized with a pang that she would never hear her tapes in stereo—

And that was when it happened.

First the sensation in his left hand where he gripped the auricle of her ear, a tingling, needling pleasure, surging from there through his whole body, making him tremble and break out in a sweat. Sonja whimpered and clutched at her ear with both hands as she lurched away, toppling off the examining table and into her mother's arms.

"What?" was all the startled woman could say as she hugged her child against her.

"My ear! He hurt my ear!"

Weak and more than a little frightened, Alan sagged against the examining table.

The mother came to his defense. "He barely touched you, Sonja!"

"He gave me a shock!"

"It must have been from the rug. Isn't that right, Dr. Bulmer?"

For a second Alan wasn't exactly sure where he was. "Right," he said. He straightened up and hoped he didn't look as pale and shaky as he felt. "That's the only explanation."

What he had felt just now reminded him of the shock he had received from the derelict in the emergency room last night. Only this afternoon he'd felt more pleasure than pain. An instant of searing ecstasy and then… what? Afterglow?

He managed to coax Sonja back up onto the table and complete the examination. He checked the right ear again. No problem this time. No sign of injury, either. Sonja left a few minutes later, still complaining of pain in her ear.

Alan went into his consultation room to sit at his desk for a moment. What the hell had happened in there? He couldn't explain it. He had used the same technique with the same otoscope and speculum in her ear for years without incident. What had gone wrong today? And that feeling… !

Alan didn't like things he couldn't explain. But he forced his mind to file it away for later and rose to his feet. He had a full schedule and had to keep moving.

The next half hour went smoothly. Then Henrietta Westin showed up.

"I just want a checkup."

Alan was immediately alert. He knew Henrietta Westin was not the checkup type. She was a Born-Again Christian who herded her three kids and husband in at the first sign of a cold or fever, but trusted in the Lord for herself. Which meant she usually waited until she was well into bronchitis and on the way to pneumonia or 10 percent dehydrated from an intestinal virus before she dragged herself into the office.

"Anything wrong?" Alan asked.

She shrugged and smiled. "Of course not. A little tired maybe, but what do you expect when you're pushing forty-five next month? I suppose I should praise the Lord I've had my health this long, at least."

That had an ominous ring to it.

Alan checked her over. He found nothing remarkable other than a slight elevation in her blood pressure and pulse rate, the former no doubt secondary to the latter. She had a gynecologist whom she saw regularly "for any female problems" she might have; her last gyn exam had been four months ago and everything had been normal.

Alan leaned back against the counter and looked at her. He had touched her palms and found them slick with perspiration. Those hands were now clutched tightly in her lap, the knuckles white. This woman was about to explode with tension. He decided to arrange some thyroid studies but he doubted that was the problem since her weight hadn't changed in the last two years.

He closed her chart and pointed to his consultation room door. "Get dressed and meet me in there and we'll talk."

She nodded. "All right." As he stepped toward the door she said, "Oh, by the way…"

Here it comes, he thought. The real reason for the visit.

"… I found a lump in my breast."

He flipped her chart back onto the counter and moved to her side.

"Didn't Dr. Anson examine you?" Alan knew her gynecologist to be a painstakingly thorough physician.

"Yes, but it wasn't there then."

"When did you first notice it?"

"Last month."

"You check your breasts monthly?"

She averted her eyes. "No."

So it could have been there three months!

"Why didn't you come in sooner?"

"I… I thought it might go away. But it didn't." A single sob broke through. "It got bigger!"

Alan gently put a hand on her shoulder. "Hang on now. It might be a cyst—which is nothing but a fluid-filled sack— or something equally benign. Let's check."

She unsnapped her bra and pulled it off under the paper cape. Alan lifted the cape and looked at her breasts. He immediately noticed a little dimpling of the skin two inches from the left nipple at two o'clock.

"Which breast?"

"The left."

This was looking worse all the time. "Lie back."

In an effort to stave off the inevitable, Alan examined the right breast first, starting at the outer margin and working toward, around, and finally under the nipple. Normal. He did the same on the other side, but started under her arm. There, beneath the slippery mixture of perspiration, deodorant, and shaven stubble, he felt three distinctly enlarged lymph nodes. Oh, hell! He moved over to the breast itself, where he found a firm, fixed, irregular mass under the dimpled area. His stomach tightened. Malignant as all hell!

—and then it happened again.

The tingling, the ecstasy, the small cry from his patient, the instant of disorientation.

"What was that?" she said, cupping her hands over her left breast.

"I don't… I'm not sure," Alan said, alarmed now. This was the second time in less than an hour. What was—?

"It's gone!" Mrs. Westin cried, frantically running her fingers over her breast. "The lump—praise God!—it's not there anymore!"

"Of course it is," Alan said. "Tu—" He almost said tumors. "Lumps don't just disappear like that." Alan knew the power of denial as a psychological mechanism; the worst thing that could happen now was for her to fool herself into believing that she had no mass in her breast. "Here. I'll show you."

But he couldn't show her.

It was gone.

The mass, the dimpling, the enlarged nodes—gone!

"How did you do it, Doctor?"

"Do it? I didn't do anything."

"Yes, you did. You touched it and it disappeared." Her eyes glowed as she looked at him. "You healed it."

"No-no." He hunted for an explanation. "It must have been a cyst that broke. That's it." He didn't believe that— breast cysts did not rupture and disappear during examination—and from the look on her face, Henrietta Westin didn't believe it either.

"Praise the Lord, He has healed me through you."

"Now just hold on there!" This was getting out of hand. Almost frantic now, Alan rechecked the breast again.

This can't be! It's got to be here!

But it wasn't there. There wasn't a trace of the mass.

"Bless you!"

"Now wait a minute, Henrietta. I want you to have a mammogram at the hospital."

As she straightened up and refastened her bra, her eyes still held that glow. "If you wish, Doctor."

Don't look at me like that!

"Today. I'll call the hospital now."

"Anything you say."

Alan fled the examining room for his desk. He picked up the phone to call the radiology department at Monroe Community Hospital. And stopped. For a few seconds he couldn't think of the hospital's main number, one he called at least a dozen times a day. Then it came back to him. This thing must have shaken him up more than he had realized.

Jack Fisher, the chief radiologist, was not crazy about the idea of squeezing another xeromammography into his schedule, but Alan convinced him of the urgency of this particular request and Jack reluctantly agreed to find a slot for Mrs. Westin.

Alan managed to do a competent job on the rest of the morning's patients, even though he knew he gave a couple of them the bum's rush. He couldn't help it. It was an effort to concentrate on their problems when his mind throbbed with the question of what had happened to the tumor in Henrietta Westin's breast. It had been there! He had felt it! And there was no way it could have been anything less than a malignancy with those nodes in the axilla.

And then it had been gone.

This was crazy!

His state of distraction had one unexpected benefit: He hardly heard Mr. Bradford as he went through his usual catalog of the color, caliber, and frequency of each of his stools since his last visit.

Finally, lunchtime came and he'd made his call-backs and sent Connie and Denise out to eat. He wished Ginny were still working here. She'd started off as his receptionist when he first moved into the building but soon decided it wasn't for her. Maybe she was right. After all, none of the other doctors' wives she hung around with worked for their husbands.

He heard the phone ring up front at Connie's desk, saw a light start blinking on the phone beside him. It was the private line he reserved for the hospital, pharmacists, and other doctors. He stabbed at it.

"Hello."

"Nothing there, Alan." It was Jack Fisher, the radiologist. "A little fibrocystic disease, but no mass, no calcifications, no vascular changes."

"And you checked the axilla like I asked you?"

"Clean. Both sides. Clean."

Alan didn't speak. Couldn't speak.

"Okay, Alan?"

"Yeah. Yeah, sure, Jack. And thanks a lot for squeezing her in. I really appreciate it."

"Anytime. Sometimes the only way to handle these kooks is to humor them."

"Kook?"

"Yeah. The Westin lady. She was going on and on to anyone who'd listen about how you had 'the healing touch.' How she'd had a tumor there for the past month and with a single touch you made it disappear." He laughed. "Every time I think I've heard it all, somebody comes up with a new one."

Alan managed to get off the phone with a modicum of grace, then slumped into his chair and sat staring at the grain in the oak paneling on the opposite wall.

Henrietta Westin now had a left breast that felt normal and showed clean on xeromammography. But that hadn't been the case two hours ago.

He sighed and stood up. No use worrying about it. She wasn't going to lose her breast or her life, that was the important thing. When he had more time he'd try to figure it out. Right now it was time for a bite to eat and then into the afternoon session.

The phone rang again. It was a patient line this time. He hadn't signed out to the answering service yet so he picked it up.

It was Mrs. Andersen and she was sobbing. Something about Sonja. About her ear.

Oh, Christ! Just what he needed now.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "Is she still in pain?"

"No!" the woman wailed. "She can hear out of her right ear again! She can hear!"

"How do I look?"

Alan snapped back to the here and now. He had made it through the afternoon hours without committing any medical negligence, but now that he was home, his mind was constantly tugged toward Sonja Andersen and Henrietta Westin.

He looked up. Ginny was standing at the far side of the kitchen table, modeling slacks and a blouse of different shades of green. "You look great." It was the truth. Clothes fit her perfectly right off the rack. The greens of the fabric caught the green of her contacts. "Really great."

"Then how come I always have to ask?"

"Because you always look great. You should know that."

"A girl likes to be told sometimes."

For perhaps the hundredth time this year—the first time was New Year's Eve—Alan promised to be more attentive to Ginny and less absorbed in his practice. They didn't have much of a life together anymore. To an outsider they probably looked like the perfect couple—all they needed was two and a half children and they'd be the ideal American family. They had talked about getting their lives on the same track again countless times, but all their good intentions seemed to remain intentions. The practice kept demanding more and more of Alan's time, and Ginny seemed to be getting increasingly involved with the club, along with her civic and hospital-related groups. Their paths crossed at breakfast, dinner, and, occasionally, at bedtime.

He would be more attentive and he would be less self-absorbed. Soon. But tonight was certainly a special case, especially after what had happened today.

Ginny set a plate of shrimp salad on a bed of lettuce, plus a loaf of sourdough bread before him.

"You're not eating?" he asked as she continued to buzz around the kitchen.

She shook her head. "No time. Why do you think I'm dressed up? Tonight's the Guild meeting and I've got to give a progress report on the fashion show."

"I thought the Guild met on Thursday nights."

"Tonight's a special meeting because of the fashion show on Sunday. I told you about it."

"Right. You did. Sorry. Just wanted to talk."

Ginny smiled. "Great. Talk."

"Sit," he said, pointing to the chair opposite him.

"Oh, I can't, honey. Josie and Terri are going to be here any minute to pick me up. Can't you tell me quick?"

"I don't think so."

"Give it a try." She sat down across from him.

"Okay. Something weird happened in the office today."

"Mrs. Ellsworth paid her bill?"

Alan almost laughed. "No. Weirder."

Ginny's eyebrows rose. "This ought to be good."

"I don't know if it is or not." He took a deep breath. This wasn't going to be easy. "Somehow, some way, I… I cured two people of incurable illnesses today."

After a short pause, Ginny shook her head slowly, a puzzled expression constricting her features. "I don't get it."

"Neither do I. You see—"

There was a honk from outside in the driveway. Ginny leaped up.

"That's Josie. I've got to go." She came around the table and gave Alan a quick kiss. "We'll talk about it later tonight, okay?"

Alan managed to smile. "Sure."

And then her coat was on and she was out the door.

He jabbed his fork into the shrimp salad and began to eat. Maybe it was just as well. Both he and Ginny knew doctors who had developed God complexes. All he had to do was start talking about healing with a touch and she'd have him ready for the funny farm.

And maybe she'd be right.

He swallowed a mouthful of shrimp, put the fork down, and leaned back. He wasn't hungry; he was just eating so he wouldn't get hungry later.

What right did he have to think he had anything to do with Sonja regaining her hearing or with the disappearance of the lump in Henrietta Westin's breast? Thinking yourself some sort of magical healer was the road to big trouble.

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?"

"Yeah. But I ain't in what you might call a High Place."

Alan had an urge to tell Tony what had happened today. He tried to think of a way to phrase it so he wouldn't sound delusional, but couldn't find one. Damn, this was frustrating! He needed to talk to someone about this, yet he couldn't bring himself to spill it for fear of what people would think. He knew what he would think.

So he turned the conversation away from himself.

"How's business?"

"Great! Too great. Had to pass up a big party this weekend to fly up to Syracuse for a meeting with a client. Hate to miss one of Sylvia Nash's parties."

Alan was startled. "You know Sylvia Nash?"

"Sure. Did a few closings for her around here. That lady either really knows what she's doing with real estate or she's just plain lucky. Everything she touches turns to gold."

"Them that has, gets."

"Well, from what I can gather, she didn't always have. Greg Nash came back from Nam, joined his father's insurance agency, married Sylvia, insured himself to the eyeballs with term, then got blown away in that Seven-Eleven. With double indemnity and all, Sylvia became a millionairess overnight. She's tripled and quadrupled that since then. Good businesswoman. Unfortunately, she doesn't quite live up to her reputation as a loose woman."

"Oh?" Alan said, trying to sound casual.

Tony's eyebrows rose. "Got your interest now, ay?"

"Not really."

"Yeah? You should've seen your eyes bug when I mentioned her name."

"Just wondering how you got to know her."

"Riiiight. You got something goin' with her?"

"You know me better than that. I just treat her little boy, that's all."

"Yeah. I do remember her talking about you—like you could walk on water."

"She's very perceptive. But how do you know she doesn't live up to her reputation?"

"We dated a few times."

The thought of Sylvia in Tony's arms pained him. "And?"

"Never got to first base with her."

That was a relief. "Maybe it's your technique."

"Maybe. But I don't think so. There's a lot of anger in that woman, Alan. A lot of anger."

They both lapsed into silence, Alan thinking about Sylvia and how he had never thought of her as angry. He had only seen her with Jeffy, however, and then there was only love for the child. But Tony was a perceptive guy. Alan couldn't easily brush off his impressions.

Finally, he broached the subject he had wanted to see Tony about.

"Tony… could you look into something for me?"

"Sure. What?"

"It's about a patient who died in the ER last night."

"Malpractice potential?"

"I doubt it." Tonight at the hospital, Alan had taken a look at the pathology report on the derelict. He had been suffering from early lung cancer and end-stage alcoholic cirrhosis. A walking dead man. "His name was Walter Erskine—no identification on him, but his prints were traced through the V. A. He was born in 1946, grew up in Chillicothe, Missouri, and served in Nam in the late sixties. He was treated once for a mental condition at Northport V.A. Hospital in 1970. That's all that's known about him."

"Isn't that enough?"

"No. I want to know more. I want to know what he was like growing up, what happened to him in Nam, and what happened to him since Nam."

"Why?"

Alan shrugged, wishing he could tell Tony. But not yet. He couldn't tell anybody yet.

"It's a personal thing, Tony. Can you help?"

"I think so. I'll have to hire an eye, which is no problem— I use them on occasion."

"Great. I'll pay all expenses."

"You bet your ass you will."

They had a little laugh over that and Alan felt himself relaxing for the first time all night. At least now he felt he was doing something about whatever it was that had happened. In his gut he sensed that this Walter Erskine was the key. He had done something to Alan last night. And somehow, some way, Alan was going to find out just what.