As usual, Malone managed to sleep better on the plane than he’d been able to do at home. He slept so well, in fact, that he was still groggy when he stepped into the waiting car.
“Good to see you, Ken,” Boyd said briskly, as he shook Malone’s hand.
“You, too, Tom,” Malone said sleepily. “Now what’s all this about?” He looked around apprehensively. “No bugs in this car, I hope?” he said.
Boyd gunned the motor and headed toward the San Francisco Freeway. “Better not be,” he said, “or I’ll fire me a technician or two.”
“Well, then,” Malone said, relaxing against the upholstery, “where is this guy, and who is he? And how did you find him?”
Boyd looked uncomfortable. It was, somehow, both an awe-inspiring and a slightly risible sight. Six feet one and one-half inches tall in his flat feet, Boyd posted around over two hundred and twenty pounds of bone, flesh and muscle. He swung a pot-belly of startling proportions under the silk shirting he wore, and his face, with its wide nose, small eyes and high forehead, was half highly mature, half startlingly childlike. In an apparent effort to erase those childlike qualities, Boyd sported a fringe of beard and a moustache which reminded Malone of somebody he couldn’t quite place.
But whoever the somebody was, his hair hadn’t been black, as Boyd’s was…
He decided it didn’t make any difference. Anyhow, Boyd was speaking.
“In the first place,” he said, “it isn’t a guy. In the second, I’m not exactly sure who it is. And in the third, Ken, I didn’t find it.”
There was a little silence.
“Don’t tell me,” Malone said. “It’s a telepathic horse, isn’t it? Tom, I just don’t think I could stand a telepathic horse…”
“No,” Boyd said hastily. “No. Not at all. No horse. It’s a dame. I mean a lady.” He looked away from the road and flashed a glance at Malone. His eyes seemed to be pleading for something — understanding, possibly, Malone thought. “Frankly,” Boyd said, “I’d rather not tell you anything about her just yet. I’d rather you met her first. Then you could make up your own mind. All right?”
“All right,” Malone said wearily. “Do it your own way. How far do we have to go?”
“Just about an hour’s drive,” Boyd said. “That’s all.”
Malone slumped back in the seat and pushed his hat over his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “Suppose you wake me up when we get there.”
But, groggy as he was, he couldn’t sleep. He wished he’d had some coffee on the plane. Maybe it would have made him feel better.
Then again, coffee was only coffee. True, he had never acquired his father’s taste for gin (and imagined, therefore, that it wasn’t hereditary, like a taste for blondes), but there was always bourbon.
He thought about bourbon for a few minutes. It was a nice thought. It warmed him and made him feel a lot better. After a while, he even felt awake enough to do some talking.
He pushed his hat back and struggled to a reasonable sitting position. “I don’t suppose you have a drink hidden away in the car somewhere?” he said tentatively. “Or would the technicians have found that, too?”
“Better not have,” Boyd said in the same tone as before, “or I’ll fire a couple of technicians.” He grinned without turning. “It’s in the door compartment, next to the forty-five cartridges and the Tommy-gun.”
Malone opened the compartment in the thick door of the car and extracted a bottle. It was Christian Brothers Brandy instead of the bourbon he had been thinking about, but he discovered that he didn’t mind at all. It went down as smoothly as milk.
Boyd glanced at it momentarily as Malone screwed the top back on.
“No,” Malone said in answer to the unspoken question. “You’re driving.” Then he settled back again and tipped his hat forward.
He didn’t sleep a wink. He was perfectly sure of that. But it wasn’t over two seconds later that Boyd said: “We’re here, Ken. Wake up.”
“Whadyamean, wakep,” Malone said. “I wasn’t asleep.” He thumbed his hat back and sat up rapidly. “Where’s ‘here?’”
“Bayview Neuropsychiatric Hospital,” Boyd said. “This is where Dr. Harman works, you know.”
“No,” Malone said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know. You didn’t tell me — remember? And who is Dr. Harman, anyhow?”
The car was moving up a long, curving driveway toward a large, lawn-surrounded building. Boyd spoke without looking away from the road.
“Well,” he said, “this Dr. Wilson Harman is the man who phoned us yesterday. One of my field agents was out here asking around about imbeciles and so on. Found nothing, by the way. And then this Dr. Harman called, later. Said he had someone here I might be interested in. So I came on out myself for a look, yesterday afternoon — after all, we had instructions to follow up every possible lead.”
“I know,” Malone said. “I wrote them.”
“Oh,” Boyd said. “Sure. Well, anyhow, I talked to this dame. Lady.”
“And?”
“And I talked to her,” Boyd said. “I’m not entirely sure of anything myself. But — well, hell. You take a look at her.”
He pulled the car up to a parking space, slid nonchalantly into a slot marked Reserved — Executive Director Sutton, and slid out from under the wheel while Malone got out the other side.
They marched up the broad steps, through the doorway and into the glass-fronted office of the receptionist.
Boyd showed her his little golden badge, and got an appropriate gasp. “FBI,” he said. “Dr. Harman’s expecting us.”
The wait wasn’t over fifteen seconds. Boyd and Malone marched down the hall and around a couple of corners, and came to the doctor’s office. The door was opaqued glass with nothing but a room number stencilled on it. Without ceremony, Boyd pushed the door open. Malone followed him inside.
The office was small but sunny. Dr. Wilson Harman sat behind a blond-wood desk, a little man with crew-cut blond hair and rimless eyeglasses, who looked about thirty-two and couldn’t possibly, Malone thought, have been anywhere near that young. On a second look, Malone noticed a better age indication in the eyes and forehead, and revised his first guess upward between ten and fifteen years.
“Come in, gentlemen,” Dr. Harman called. His voice was that rarity, a really loud high tenor.
“Dr. Harman,” Boyd said, “this is my superior, Mr. Malone. We’d like to have a talk with Miss Thompson, if we might.”
“I anticipated that, sir,” Dr. Harman said. “Miss Thompson is in the next room. Have you explained to Mr. Malone that—”
“I haven’t explained a thing,” Boyd said quickly, and added in what was obviously intended to be a casual tone: “Mr. Malone wants to get a picture of Miss Thompson directly — without any preconceptions.”
“I see,” Dr. Harman said. “Very well, gentlemen. Through this door.”
He opened the door in the right-hand wall of the room, and Malone took one look. It was a long, long look. Standing framed in the doorway, dressed in the starched white of a nurse’s uniform, was the most beautiful blonde he had ever seen.
She had curves. She definitely had curves. As a matter of fact, Malone didn’t really think he had ever seen curves before. These were something new and different and truly three-dimensional. But it wasn’t the curves, or the long straight lines of her legs, or the quiet beauty of her face, that made her so special. After all, Malone had seen legs and bodies and faces before.
At least, he thought he had. Offhand, he couldn’t remember where. Looking at the girl, Malone was ready to write brand-new definitions for every anatomical term. Even a term like “hands.” Malone had never seen anything especially arousing in the human hand before — anyway, not when the hand was just lying around, so to speak, attached to its wrist but not doing anything in particular. But these hands, long, slender and tapering, white and cool-looking…