John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

The body was on the table in the treatment room. The left sleeve of the white shirt had been rolled up. A length of rubber tubing that had apparently been knotted around the left arm above the elbow to make the vein more accessible was unfastened but held there by the weight of the arm upon it. Over the countertop was an empty container and an empty syringe with injection needle attached. Both the small bottle with the rubber diaphragm top and the syringe showed traces of morphine. The drug safe was unlocked. The key was in his pocket. His fragmentary prints were found on the syringe and the bottle. Beside the empty bottle was a small wad of surgical cotton with a streak of blood diluted by alcohol on it. The autopsy conducted by the county medical examiner showed that the death, to a reasonable medical certainty, was due to a massive overdose of morphine. According to Penny, nothing else was missing from the drag safe, or from the other stocks of drugs used in the treatment of patients. But she could not tell whether anything was missing from the back room stocks especially ordered by Dr. Stewart Sherman and used in his experimentations.

She had unlocked the door when she arrived.

By then I had unwired Rick Holton. His attitude was a lot better and the wire had been painful.

He said, “At one time I was the assistant state attorney here in Courtney County. The way it works, the state attorney has a whole judicial district, five counties, so he has an assistant prosecutor in each county. It’s elective. I’d decided not to run again. The state attorney is still the same guy. Ben Gaffner. The day I heard that Stew Sherman was supposed to have killed himself, I told Ben that I would just never believe it. Well, dammit, they had the autopsy, and Sheriff Turk investigated and he turned the file over to Ben Gaffner, and Ben said there was no reason in the world why he should make a jackass of himself by trying to present it to the grand jury as something other than suicide, which it damn well was-according to him.”

“The doctor couldn’t have killed himself!” Penny said.

“That’s what I felt,” Rick said. “So because they were closing the file, I thought what I’d do was use what time I could spare to do some digging. Ben gave me his unofficial blessing. The first time I interviewed Penny, I found out she felt exactly the same way.”

So that was how their affair had started. From what I had heard while pretending to be unconscious, I knew it was going sour. And now they were very stiff with each other, harboring delicious resentments.

As I thought the tensions between them might inhibit their communicating with me, I tried to take them off the hook. I told Holton that when the taste of the gin had clued me, I decided to give her some real reason to be jumpy and maybe teach her that pretending to be a hooker could be a messy little game, so I had peeled her out of her dress and bra. “She put up a good fight,” I said.

He looked a little happier. “I see. So you made me so goddamn mad at her, I gave you an opening. You’re pretty good, McGee.”

“If I’d known you were a member of the bar and every lunch club in town, I wouldn’t have tried you. It was a very small opening and you carry a very damaging caliber. If you’d had the hammer back, I wouldn’t have tried you. But why me? Like I told you, I never heard of the doctor.”

He summarized what he had been able to dig up. He had an orderly mind and professional knowledge of the rules of evidence. With Penny’s help he had located two people who had seen a very tall man let himself out of Dr. Sherman’s offices late Saturday night. One guessed eleven thirty. The other guessed a little after midnight. Penny knew that when the doctor was working on his research projects, he would not answer the office phone. The answering service had recorded no calls for the doctor that evening. One witness said that the man had gotten into a dark blue or black car parked diagonally across the street, a new-looking car, and had driven away. That witness had the impression that the car bore Florida plates but had a single digit before the hyphen rather than the double digit designating Courtney County. He had taken affidavits and put them in his private file on the case.

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