Mystery

The doctor straightened his back and tugged at his vest. “You have to live in this world with the rest of us,” the doctor said. He looked at his watch. “I want us both to forget this conversation. I still have a lot to do today. Please give my regards to your mother and your grandfather.” He looked sharply up at Tom, still agitated, stepped around him, and began to walk back to the lobby. After a few steps, he stopped and faced Tom again. “By the way, Nurse Vetiver has been suspended. Let the whole matter drop, Tom.”

“What about Hattie Bascombe?” Tom asked.

This time, the doctor laughed. “Hattie Bascombe! I imagine she’s in the old slave quarter, if she’s still alive. Retired years ago. Mumbling over a chicken bone and casting spells, I suppose. Quite a character, wasn’t she?”

“Quite a character,” Tom said to the doctor’s retreating back.

“I wonder if you’d like to go on an excursion with me,” Tom said. He was talking on the telephone to Sarah Spence, and it was just past four o’clock. His father was still at his office on Calle Hoffmann—or doing whatever he did when he was not at home—and Gloria Pasmore was upstairs in her room. When Tom returned from the hospital, he had opened her bedroom door on a wave of soft music and whiskey fumes and looked in to see her sprawled out asleep on her bed. It was her “afternoon nap.”

“That sounds interesting, but I’m kind of busy,” Sarah said. “Mom and I are getting ready to go up north. Dad suddenly announced that we’re going early this year, so now we only have two days to pack. Well, what he said was that we’re going up in the Redwings’ private plane. And I can’t find Bingo anywhere, but of course it’s ridiculous to worry about Bingo.” After a pause, she said, “What kind of excursion?”

“I thought we might walk somewhere.”

“You won’t suddenly gasp and turn pale and run away if I say something absolutely doltish?”

Tom laughed. “No, and I won’t suddenly remember that I have to go somewhere else.”

“So you want to begin all over again where we left off? I like that idea.”

“I was thinking of going somewhere new,” Tom said. “The old slave quarter.”

“I’ve never even been there.”

“Me neither. No one from the far east end has ever even thought of going there.”

“Isn’t it a long way away?”

“Not that far. We wouldn’t spend more than half an hour there.”

“Doing what? Investigating opium dens, or organizing a white slavery ring, or tracking down stolen Treasury money, or—”

“What kind of books do you read?”

“Mainly the trash I see you carrying through the halls. I just finished Red Harvest. What do you want to do?”

“I want to look up an old friend of mine,” Tom said.

“Is this an excursion or an adventure? I wonder. And I wonder who the old friend could be.”

“Someone I used to know. Someone from the hospital.”

“That nurse who thought you were so cute? I remember her. Why would she be living in the old slave quarter? Maybe you want to set her free from a haunt of vice, and you need me to distract the Tuaregs and lascars.”

“No, not that nurse, another one,” Tom said, amused and disconcerted. “Named Hattie Bascombe. But she might be able to tell me something about the other one.”

“Aha!” Sarah said. “I knew it. Okay, I’ll come along, just to protect you. Are you bringing your gat, or should I pack mine?”

“Let’s both pack our gats,” Tom said.

“One more thing. I think this will be an automotive excursion, not a walking trip.”

“I can’t drive.”

“But I can,” Sarah said. “I’m an ace. I could barrel through a passel of gunsels as well as anybody in Dashiell Hammett. And this way I can look out for Bingo on the way.”

“Should I come over there, or—”

“Be outside of your house in fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’ll be the doll in the shades and the snap-brim hat behind the wheel of the ostentatious car.”

Twenty minutes later he was seated in the leather bucket seat of a little white Mercedes convertible with what seemed to him an abnormally loud engine, watching Sarah Spence downshift as she accelerated through a yellow light and turned on Calle Drosselmayer. “Bingo doesn’t do things like this,” she was saying. “He’s not really a very adventurous dog. He seems to worry a lot about whether or not we’re going to feed him.”

“What happens to him when you go up north?”

“We put him in a kennel.”

“Then he probably figured out that he was going back to the kennel in two days, and he wandered away to brood about it. I bet he’ll be back by dinnertime.”

“That’s brilliant!” she said. “Even if it’s not true, I feel better already.” Then: “Bingo doesn’t brood much, actually.”