“Heavens, no. My office, of course. And I think I can have your uncle’s remains disposed of for you, as well. There’s a crematorium in West Liberty that does good work. They can pick your uncle up tomorrow afternoon, I’m sure.”
“Won’t they notice Planner had his ‘coronary’ in a rather peculiar way?” Jon asked, on his fourth glass of vodka and pop.
“Well, perhaps I’d best go downstairs now and bandage your uncle. That way anyone glancing in won’t see anything, even if the poor man gets stripped of his clothes... though that shouldn’t happen, as these West Liberty folks do good, discreet work, mind you.”
“Whatever you think.”
“And have you a nice suit of your uncle’s? You and I had probably best put one of his suits on him.”
“Oh Christ. That won’t be pleasant.”
“A tragedy like this one rarely is. And as for me, well, I was a friend of your uncle’s, and you’ve both done a lot of business with me, you and your uncle and that friend Mr. Nolan of yours as well, so you do whatever you think is fair.”
Jon got up and went to the silverware drawer to get the combination to Planner’s wall safe.
The doctor put two pillows under Charlie’s feet. He took the pulse of his unconscious patient, casting a cursory glance at the wounded thigh. Then he gave Walter a brief smile — one of those meaningless smiles doled out by doctors like another pill — and walked to a sink across the room to wash up.
Walter stood at his father’s upraised feet, wishing he could do something to help, watching the doctor’s every action, wondering why the man moved so damn slow.
Or maybe it was just him. Maybe the doctor wasn’t slow at all. Walter couldn’t be sure. His sense of time was fouled up. Was that business at the antique shop just this afternoon? It seemed years ago.
Moments earlier — or was it hours? — the doctor had offered to give Walter a hand carrying Charlie, but Walter had refused, wanting to bear both the weight and responsibility of his father in his own arms, following the doctor through the darkened waiting room and down a short narrow hall and into a closet of a room, where Walter had eased his father onto a padded examining table that sat high off the floor, like a sacrificial altar. The table was white porcelain with its padded, contoured surface black but mostly covered by white crinkly tissue paper. In fact, almost everything in the room was white: stucco walls, mosaic stone floor, ceiling tile overhead, counters, cabinets, sink, everything.
Except the doctor’s clothes. Walter thought the blue sweater and yellow slacks were grossly inappropriate. He would’ve felt more secure if his father’s welfare were in the hands of a man in traditional white; he had the feeling this guy wouldn’t know the Hippocratic oath if he tripped over it.
The doctor removed his sweater and folded it neatly and deposited it on a chair by the sink and began ceremoniously to wash his hands. Jesus, Walter thought, what does he think he is, a damn brain surgeon? The shirt beneath the sweater turned out to be white, but that was no consolation to Walter, as it was an off-white, sporty Banlon, with rings of sweat under the arms and wrinkled from eighteen holes of golf.
The doctor dried his hands and moved from the sink to a counter, where he filled a modest-sized hypo from a small bottle of something.
“What’s that?” Walter said.
“Morphine,” the doctor said cheerfully, beaming at Walter with all the sincerity of a politician. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
“All right,” Walter said. There was a chair directly behind him and he backed into it and sat.
The doctor administered the hypo, then went back to the counter and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of cloudy liquid. He dabbed some of the liquid onto a folded strip of gauze.
“Ammonia,” the doctor said, anticipating Walter’s question. He walked across the room and held the gauze under Charlie’s nose and Charlie came around quickly, thrashing his arms like a man waking from a nightmare, finally pushing himself to a sitting position with the heels of his hands.
“Goddamn shit,” he said to the doctor, “what’d you hold under my nose? Who... who the hell are you? Where the hell am I? What’s going on?”
The doctor smiled again. He did that a lot. He said, “You’ll have to ask your young friend here about that.”
Walter got up and came around the other side of the table and squeezed his father’s shoulder. “You’re going to be all right, Dad.”
“Of course I’m going to be all right,” Charlie said, his speech slightly muddy. “I’m all right
“You should,” the doctor said, “you’re full of morphine.”
Suddenly Charlie noticed his wound, said, “Jesus,” and settled back down on the table.
