“Mr. Dillon,” Dawn Morris cooed. “Let me check. I’m sure the doctor would like to talk to you if it’s at all possible.”
“Thank you,” Jake Dillon said.
She left her desk and walked down a corridor into a suite of rooms that Dr. Barthelmy liked to refer to as his “surgery.”
After his undergraduate years at the University of Iowa, and before completing his medical training at Tulane in New Orleans, Dr. Barthelmy spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. As a result, he’d cultivated a certain British manner: He’d grown a pencil-line mustache, and acquired a collection of massive pipes and a wardrobe heavy with tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. And he now spelled his Christian name with two ‘a’s and addressed most females as “dear girl” and most males as “old sport.”
The surgery was half a dozen consulting rooms, opening off a thickly carpeted corridor furnished with leather armchairs and turn-of-the-century lithographs of Englishmen shooting pheasants and riding to hounds.
Dawn knew immediately where to find Dr. Barthelmy. One of his nurses, a real one, an old blue-haired battle-ax, was standing outside one of the consulting cubicles. This was standard procedure whenever Dr. Barthelmy had to ask a female patient to take off her clothes. A woman had once accused Dr. Barthelmy of getting fresh while he was examining her; he was determined this would never happen again.
“I have to see the doctor right away,” Dawn said to the nurse.
“He’s with a patient,” the nurse said.
“This is an emergency,” Dawn said firmly.
The nurse rapped on the consulting-room door with her knuckles.
“Not now, if you please!” a deep male voice replied in annoyance.
“Doctor, it’s Mr. Jake Dillon,” Dawn called. “He said it’s very important.”
There was a long silence, and then the door opened. Dr. Barthelmy looked at her.
“Mr. Dillon said it’s very important, Doctor,” Dawn said. “I thought I should tell you.”
“Would you ask Mr. Dillon to hold, my girl?” Dr. Barthelmy said. “I’ll be with him in half a mo.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Dawn said.
The consulting-room door closed.
“He’s on line five, Doctor,” Dawn called through it, and then went quickly back to her desk.
She picked up the telephone.
“Mr. Dillon, Dr. Barthelmy will be with you in just a moment. Would you hold, please?”
“Yeah, I’ll hold,” Dillon replied. “Thanks, honey, but you stay on the line.”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Dillon.”
“Jake, old sport, how good to hear your voice.”
“Harry, what do you know about malaria?”
“Very little, thank God.”
“Harry, goddamn it, I’m serious.”
“It is transmitted by mosquitoes, and the treatment is quinine, or some new medicine the name of which at the moment escapes me. You have malaria, old boy?”
“A friend of mine does.”
“And you want me to see your friend? Of course, dear boy.”
“I’m twenty minutes out of San Diego. By the time I get to my house, I want you there with the new medicine (it’s called Atabrine, by the way), a nurse, or nurses, and whatever else you need.”
There was a just-perceptible pause before Dr. Barthelmy replied: “That sounded like an order, old sport. I’m not in the Marine Corps, as you may have noticed.”
“Harry, goddamn it…”
“Which house, old boy? Holmby Hills or Malibu?”
“Malibu. I leased the Holmby Hills place to Metro-Magnum for the duration.”
“Your contribution to the war effort, I gather?”
“Fuck you, Harry. Just be there,” Dillon said, and hung up.
Dawn waited until she heard the click when Dr. Barthelmy hung up, and then hung up herself.
There are not many people, she thought, who would dare talk to Dr. Harold Barthelmy that way. Or, for that matter, call him “Harry. ” Only someone with a lot of power. And getting to know someone with a lot of power is what I have been looking for all along. The question is, how am I going to get to meet Jake Dillon?
Dr. Harald Barthelmy himself answered the question five minutes later. He came into the reception area, smiled at waiting patients, and said, “May I speak to you a moment, Miss Morris?”
“Yes, of course, Doctor,” Dawn said, rising up from behind her desk and stepping into the surgery corridor with him. He motioned her into one of the consulting rooms.