“I suppose it is,” she said slowly, watching his face. “Mr. Voisier, you have a remarkably easy way about you.”
“I? Thank you.”
“You’re easy to talk with, and you talk easily. You divert the conversation to your chosen ways so very easily. You have still not told me why you want to locate Robin English.”
“Everyone wants to know where Robin English is. Don’t you read the papers?”
“I doubt, somehow, that you are motivated by intellectual curiosity. I don’t think you want to produce another play of his, particularly, or sell a story to the press and scoop the town, or—obviously not this—give him pointers on his new business ventures. I hate to be blunt with anyone,” she said with a sudden rush of warmth, “but I must ask you—what are you after?”
He spread his hands. “I like the boy. Brilliant as he is, he is getting himself into a little hot water with certain of the interests with which he is competing. In the business world, as in the world of nations, there is room enough for everybody, providing everybody will co-operate. It is impossible to co-operate with a man who cannot be reached.”
“It is impossible to retaliate, also.”
Voisier held up a deploring hand. “Retaliate is too strong a term. Active as he is, it is inconceivable that he can keep himself hidden much longer. It is infinitely more desirable that I get to him before any of the others—I who have demonstrated so conclusively that I have his interests at heart. I like the boy.”
“You like the boy.” The picture of Robin in the union hall rose before her eyes. That was no boy. “Mr. Voisier, you are telling me that he is in danger, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “He is playing a dangerous game.”
“Dangerous game? Danger from what?”
“I have not made up a roster, doctor.”
She stared at him. “Mr. Voisier—just what business are you in?”
“I’m a producer. Surely you know that.”
“Yes. I have just remembered that I heard you once mentioned in connection with the trucking business, and again, there was something to do with drugs—”
“You have a proclivity,” said Voisier casually, “of connecting yourself, in one way or another, with remarkable people. I, like Robin English, am a man of some diversification.”
She sat quietly for a moment, and thought. As Voisier had predicted, little pieces were beginning to fit here and there. Robin’s progress had been so carefully charted, and prognosis made in such detail, that the information Voisier had given her was highly indicative. If she could talk it over with Mel—
“I can’t piece all this together on the spot,” she said.
“Why don’t you get in touch with your associate, Dr. Warfield?”
“You must be psychic,” she said wryly. “Let me phone him.”
Without seeming to move quickly, Voisier was on his feet and assisting her out of the chair before she knew she was moving. “By all means,” he said. “And if you can impress the urgency of the matter on him, it will be to Robin’s benefit.”
“I’ll see,” she said.
She went to the phone booth and called, and Mel was out, and when she returned to the table Voisier was gone. So was his limousine. So was Robin’s case history.
“Mel, I don’t know how I could have been such a fantastic idiot,” she said brokenly.
She was in his office, hunched up in a big wing chair, and for the first time in years looking small and childish and frightened.
“Don’t blame yourself, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “No one would expect that kind of prank from a man like that.”
“It w-was awful,” she almost whispered. “He made such a fool of me! I called the waiter immediately, of course, and he acted surprised to see me at all. He absolutely denied having seen such a thing as that case book at all. So did the head waiter. So did the doorman. They simply looked at me as if I were crazy, exchanging wondering glances at each other in between times. Mel… Mel, I don’t like that man, that Voisier!”
“I wouldn’t wonder.”
“No—aside from that slick little piece of larceny. There’s something evil about him.”
“That’s an understatement, if ever I heard one,” Mel said. “I don’t know much about that man—no one does—but the things I know aren’t too good. I wonder if you knew that Chickering Chemical was his?”
“That drug firm that was peddling hashish as a tonic?”
“Not a tonic. A facial—mud pack, I think it was. It didn’t harm the skin. Didn’t do it any good, either. It was sold in small and adulterated quantities at a fantastic price, but it was hashish all right.”
“But all the officers of that company are in jail?”
“All they could get anything on.”
“How do you know this?”
“One of their lab assistants went to pharmaceutical school with me. Silly fool, he was, but a very likable character. He could be bought, and he was. He was paid well, and he didn’t care. I did what I could to help him when the whole mess happened, but he was in too deep. He had no cause to lie to me, and he told me that Voisier was the man behind the whole rotten deal.”
“Why didn’t he give some evidence against Voisier?”
“No evidence. Not a scrap. Voisier’s much too clever to leave loose ends around. Witness the trick he pulled on you. And besides—my imbecile of a friend rather admires him.”
“Admires him—and Voisier got him into the penitentiary?”
“He blames only himself. And it seems that Voisier has a certain likable something about him—”
Peg thought of that saturnine face, and the compelling eyes of the man. She remembered his tactile glance, and the incredible flexibility of his voice. “Oh.” She shook herself. “I can’t afford the luxury of sitting here and saying how awful it all is,” she said firmly, putting away her handkerchief. “What are we going to do?”
“Why do anything? Robin English is no longer our responsibility, if it’s Robin you’re worried about. As far as the book is concerned, I have the original, so that’s a small loss.”
“When does your responsibility to a person end?” she demanded hotly.
“That depends,” he said, looking at the ceiling, “on what the person in question means to you. If it’s a patient, and that patient, of sound mind, decides to go to another doctor or to stop treatment altogether, there is no law or ethic which demands that I try to hold him. If, on the other hand, the person is a… well, of personal interest, it’s a different matter.”
“And you feel that Robin can look out for himself?”
“He’s demonstrated that pretty well so far. He must include self-preservation and the ability to act on it among his other talents.”
“Mel—this isn’t like you!”
“Isn’t it, though!”
“Mel!” she cried, shocked, “If it weren’t for us he wouldn’t be in this trouble! He’s hooked up with Voisier in some way, and—”
Mel put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back in her chair. He looked at her somberly and then sighed. “Peg,” he said finally, “I’ve got to say this. I deeply regret the day I ever set eyes on Robin English. You haven’t been yourself since the day you met him.”
She thought of the extraordinary statement Robin had made at tea that day, about Mel Warfield’s desire to kill him. She looked up at Warfield with horror in her face.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re all tangled up in your emotions, and you can’t think straight. You think Robin’s mixed up with Voisier in some business way. Isn’t it obvious what Robin is doing? You know that Voisier is mixed up in a dozen different businesses, two-thirds of which are shady in some way or another. You were told by Voisier himself that Robin is engaged in some of these same fields. I think you’ll find that Robin is engaged in all of them. I think that if you are fool enough to mix yourself into anything this big and this dirty, you’ll discover that Robin is out to undercut Voisier in everything the man is doing.”