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

I could get in touch with neither Janice Holton nor D. Wintin Hardahee, so I backtracked to pick up a loose end that would probably turn into nothing. I placed a call to Dr. Bill Dyckes, the surgeon who had operated on Helena Pearson Trescott. A girl in his office told me he was operating but would probably phone in when he was through, so I did not leave a message but drove over to the hospital to see if I could make contact with him there.

A very obliging switchboard girl put a call through to the doctors’ lounge on the third floor in the surgical wing and caught him there and motioned me to a phone. I said I was an old friend of Helena Trescott and just wanted to ask him a couple of questions about her. He hesitated and then told me to come on up, and gave me directions.

He came out of the lounge and we walked down the corridor to a small waiting room. He wore a green cotton smock and trousers and a green skullcap. There was a spray of drying blood across the belly of the smock, and he smelled of disinfectants. He was squat and broad and younger than I had expected. His hands were thick, with short, strong-looking ringers, curly reddish hair on his wrists, backs of his hands, and down to the first knuckle of the fingers.

He dropped heavily onto a sofa in the waiting room, sighing, stretching, then pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked up at the wall clock. “Next one’ll be all prepped by eleven fifteen, and please God it will be nice, straight, clean, and simple because I’m scheduled for a son of a bitch this afternoon. What’d you want to know about Mrs. Trescott, Mr. McGee?”

“Did she ever have any chance at all?”

“Not by the time I went in the first time. Big juicy metastasized carcinoma right on the large bowel with filaments going out in every direction. Got the main mass of it and as much more as I could. Left some radioactive pellets in there to slow it some.”

“Did you tell her she wouldn’t make it?”

“I tell each one as much as I think they can safely take, when it’s bad news. I realized later I could have told her the works. But I didn’t know her well enough then to know how gutsy and staunch she was. So I said I thought I’d gotten it all, but I couldn’t be sure, so we’d go into some other treatment to make sure. I didn’t tell the daughters because I figured she could read them loud and clear. Told Tom Pike so that he could help cushion it for the girls when the time came.”

“Then, how was she the second time?”

“Downhill. Had to go in to clear a stoppage. Damned jungle in there by then. Nothing like the anatomy books. Malignant is quite a word. Turned a good experienced operating-room nurse queasy. Then by the last time there wasn’t anything about her that wasn’t changed by it, in one way or another, except her eyes. Great eyes on that woman. Like the eyes of a young girl.”

“Too bad that Maureen is in such condition now.”

“I didn’t get in on that. It isn’t something you go after with a knife. But just about everybody else has had a piece of the action. She’s had every test anybody around here has ever heard of, and some I think they made up. It would take two men to lift her lab files.”

“Does it boil down to some specific area?”

“If by that you mean her head, yes. If you mean neurology, yes. No physical trauma, no tumor, no inhibition of nourishment. Something is screwing up the little circuits in there, the synapses. Tissue deterioration? Rare virus infection? Some new kind of withdrawal that’s psychologically oriented? Some deficiency from birth that didn’t show until now? Secretion imbalance? Rare allergy? My personal guess, which nobody will listen to because it’s not my field, is that the trouble is in some psychiatric area. That fits the suicide impulse. But the shrinkers have gone through that and out the other side, they say. Series of shock treatments, no dice. Sodium Pentothal, no dice. Conversation on the couch, nothing. I thought you were interested in Mrs. Trescott.”

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