Now O’B was glad she was a quick-minded woman. She was doing his work for him. “And?”
“Eight different phones, four different locations, four different counties, three different area codes — but the same San Francisco doctor. Rob Swigart, M.D.”
“Four Fifty Sutter,” observed O’B. “Doc Swigart must be one tired pup, running around the entire Bay Area on his rounds.”
Doc Swigart had his shingle out at 450 Sutter, a medical-dental building with a prescription pharmacy on the ground floor. At that rent, he was no fly-by-night, so maybe he had been gotten at because he had a reputation to uphold.
Not yet four o’clock, the worthy doctor might still be probing and poking and billing outrageously up there on the fifth floor. He was. The nurse-receptionist was a big woman in a crisp white smock, with laughing eyes and an open face. Dr. Swigart was in but much too busy to see Mr... Morrell, was it? Without an appointment? Out of the question. There were other patients waiting... O’B laid his third P.U.C. card on her desk.
“David Morrell of the Public Utilities Commission,” he said primly. “Investigative branch. Telephone fraud.”
She was frowning, but in puzzlement rather than hostility. She stood up behind her desk. She was nearly six feet tall.
“Well, I’ll go tell him, but I don’t see what—”
“Give him this list, too.” O’B was writing the addresses of the phone rooms on her memo pad. “It might save a little time.”
The addresses obviously meant nothing to her. She disappeared through the door behind her desk. To return two minutes later with the smile gone from her eyes and voice. The addresses obviously had meant something to Doc Swigart.
“The doctor can fit you in now,” she said coldly.
Rob Swigart, M.D., was late 40s, lean, laid-back, sandy-haired, with quizzical eyes and a warm worried style of speech nonetheless conveying that here was a busy man. He came into the examining room holding the P.U.C. card in one hand and O’b’s handwritten list in the other, as if they were urine specimens.
“See here,” he checked the card, “Morrell. I don’t—”
“Whadda the Gyppos got on you, Doc?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re the P.U.C, not the A.M.A. We’re bare-knuckle boys and I don’t like docs, Doc. No old-boys’ network for us, covering up your little peccadillos ’cause you’re one of the club.” He leaned forward and tapped the list of addresses with his finger. “ ‘Sick child’... ‘aged parent’... ‘retarded son’... ‘mother dying of cancer’... This’s phone fraud, Doc, and we can prove it. We can jerk your ticket for that.”
Swigart had turned white. He sat down abruptly in the chair usually reserved for patients.
“Fraud?” he said weakly. “Look, if I explain, can—”
O’B had his hands up, palm-out. “No promises.”
Swigart stood up and began to pace the confined area. O’B hiked himself up on the examining table to get out of the way and let Swigart’s guilts do the talking.
“I... just feel so stupid, that’s all.” He looked at O’B. “Most doctors play golf Wednesday afternoons. I fly planes. Down the Peninsula, Palo Alto Airport.”
This wasn’t going in any direction O’B had expected, so he asked, to keep it going, “Own your own plane?”
“Yes. A Mooney 201. Got a great deal on it, fifty-five thousand used. But I’ve been wanting to get an old biplane. Prewar — from the thirties.”
“I imagine you can afford it.”
In knee-jerk defensiveness, Swigart exclaimed, “Everybody always thinks doctors make a lot of money, but the taxes and malpractice insurance and overhead...”
He’d flown his plane up to a small private airfield in Sonoma County to practice crosswind takeoffs and landings and there had seen an old Belgian Stampe, lovingly restored. He’d admired it aloud to the man and woman up on the reinforced wing panel just about to open the cockpit. They’d climbed back down, delighted at his praise.
“We restored it ourselves,” the man said in Spanish-accented English. He explained that they were from the Argentine, in cattle. “Over a thousand hours to refabric and paint it...”
But now the health of Señor Gonzales’s father was failing and they were going back to take over the estancia; alas, they were going to have to sell the plane. They’d rolled it out of the hangar, in fact, to show a possible buyer they expected in...
Swigart didn’t want to profit from their misfortune, but if there was another possible buyer already interested, ah, what were they asking? They looked at each other, gave simultaneous Latin shrugs, simultaneous rueful Latin laughs. Since he had admired it so, and since they were so pressed for time, $20,000.
“How does that stack up with the going price for that kind of plane in that condition?” asked O’B.
“A steal. A steal. Should have been thirty, at least.”
Old P. T. Barnum hadn’t had it quite right with his “sucker born every minute” remark. Should have said every second.
“So you wrote them a down-payment check right there—”
“Of course. Five thousand dollars.”
They’d given him a receipt, but the next week when he went back up to Sonoma to pay the balance, a stranger had the plane rolled out of the hangar and was about to fly it away. Swigart had been outraged, only to learn that this man owned it! Even worse, the cockpit had been broken into and irreplaceable original equipment had been wrenched right out of the control panel.
O’B couldn’t help laughing. “The Brooklyn Bridge.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Gyppos sold you the Brooklyn Bridge.” He got down off the examining table, still chuckling. “Why in hell didn’t you just report ’em to the cops? Bunco would love to...”
Swigart sat down all-at-once in the patients’ chair again. He grimaced, squeezed his eyes shut as if he could barely face what he had to say. He finally opened them and looked at O’B.
“I... didn’t want my wife to know that I’d been such a fool. Not her... nor my associates... nor the fellows at the club... Besides, those people had just... vanished. I didn’t even know they were Gypsies until...”
“Until they showed up again?” supplied O’B. “Because you didn’t go to the police?”
That had shown them he was vulnerable. So they wanted a “To Whom It May Concern” statement... if he wouldn’t do it, they’d have to tell his wife and friends what a fool he’d been... But then they’d wanted another statement, and another, and another... And now here was the P.U.C. after him anyway, and...
“Did you stop payment on the check?”
“I tried, but it was much too late, of course.”
“Where was it cashed?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders, stuck his hands out in a search-me gesture. “I can’t remember, if I ever knew. I could find out, of course, but I don’t see what good that—”
“Find out.”
“And the rest of it...”
“All I want is information,” said O’B. “Anything you can tell me. Anything you can remember...”
A thin gruel, but suggestive. The airport up in Sonoma... the guy who actually owned the plane... where they had cashed Swigart’s check... Detailed descriptions, of course... All of it, bits of tile in the mosaic...