Gresham sounded displeased when Harry finally called. “I said it was important, Harry.”
“I don’t take calls in the middle of an examination, Kurt,” said Harry. “What do you want?”
“I want to see you.”
“You do?” said Harry. “That’s a coincidence. I want to see you, too.”
There was a silence. Then he heard Gresham chuckle. “Well. That makes it cosy. So you figured it out, Harry?”
“Figured what out?”
“About Lynne Maxwell?”
It was Harry’s turn to be silent. He felt confused and angry and helpless all at the same time.
Finally he said curtly, “When and where?”
“Three o’clock? My office?” asked the prissy voice.
“I’ll be there.”
Three
Dr. Harry Brown looked him over. Really for the first time.
He was a big man, globular. He had a round ruddy face, soft, white, womanish hair and eyes clear and colorless as sun on ice. The tip of his big nose was round and the little red-lipped mouth was round. He looked guileless, good-natured, almost cherubic. He was about as harmless as a big fat round H-bomb, Dr. Harry Brown thought.
“Harry,” Kurt Gresham began, “I’m going to make a confession to you. Try to win you over. If I fail, no hard feelings. But I warn you now. If you breach my confidence by so much as a word...” The millionaire shook his head; everything shook with it. “I wouldn’t like that at all. Harry. I’m not a man of violence. Quite the contrary. I consider violence the first resort of the stupid. The only times I have indulged in violence were those times when nothing less would serve — the last resort. Do I make myself clear, Harry?”
“Perfectly. You’re threatening to have me murdered if I don’t keep my mouth shut.”
The girlish lips opened out into a little round smile. “Crude, Harry. But I see we understand each other.”
“The hell we do, Gresham. I don’t give a damn about your ‘confession,’ as you put it. I want to know just one thing: why did you have the dead body of that Maxwell girl planted in my apartment?”
Gresham blinked. “You’re really a very clever young man, Harry. However, I’d like, if I may, to develop this in my own time and way—”
“The hell with your time and way! Answer my question!”
The silky white brows drew together sulkily, the colorless round eyes flattened and slitted. For an absurd moment Harry Brown thought of pediatrics and the baskets of fat little baby-faces just before feedings, preparing to cry. But there was nothing infantile in Gresham’s tone; it was hard, greedy, paranoiac. “You have the gall to talk to me that way? Nobody talks to me that way, Doctor. Nobody. Nobody!” The last word was almost a shout. And then the brows drew apart and the eyes and face became round again. “I’m sorry, Harry. You mustn’t make me angry. A bad heart and a bad temper don’t mix, do they?”
“I’m not here as your doctor. What about Lynne Maxwell?”
“Harry, I admire you. You’re rough and tough. I want you on my side.”
“What about Lynne Maxwell?”
“I’ll come to that, Harry. But first I want to talk to you about myself. About you. About our future together.”
“We have no future together, Gresham.”
“How do you know, my boy?”
“What about Lynne Maxwell?”
“Please, Harry. I beg your attention.”
Dr. Harrison Brown sat back in the enveloping armchair and looked past Gresham’s globular head and out through the wide windows at the blank blue sky. They were high up, on the fifty-fifth floor. He wondered dully what was coming.
“Do you know what business I’m in, Harry?”
“Import-export.” He shook a cigarette from a package, dug in a pocket for matches.
“Do you know the chief product I import?”
“Now how would I know that?” He found the matches, tore one from the packet and struck it.
“Heroin.”
Harry’s hand remained in air, the match flickering.
“Light your cigarette, Harry,” said Kurt Gresham, smiling. “You’ll burn your fingers.”
He lit the cigarette, carefully deposited the charred match in a shiny jade ash tray. “Heroin?” he said. My God, he thought, my God.
“You sound shocked,” said the fat man, still smiling.
“How should I sound, Gresham? Amused?” He jumped up.
The millionaire folded his hands comfortably. “You’re so young, Harry. You have so much to learn. No, sit down, please. I want you to hear me out.”
“I’ve heard all I want to hear!”
“Will it hurt you to listen for a few minutes? Please. Sit down.”
“All right.” Harry flung himself down. “But if you think I’m going to tie myself up to a dope racketeer—! I know what narcotics addiction does to the human body. And I have some idea of how you slugs work. Giving out free samples to high school kids through your pushers, getting them hooked, then pushing them into a life of crime to get the money for their daily fixes—”
“Oh, my, Dr. Brown, you do know a lot, don’t you?” said Kurt Gresham, the whole globe shaking silently. “You know it all. Shall I tell you something, Dr. Brown? You don’t know anything. Not about me, anyway. Not about my kind of narcotics operation.”
“And what kind would that be?” Harry sneered. “Philanthropic?”
“No,” said the millionaire, “but I perform a social service just the same.”
“Social service!” Harry choked.
“Social service,” said Gresham, nodding. “Have you any idea how many hundreds of thousands of habitual users of narcotics in this country are not high school children who were hooked by unscrupulous pushers and dealers? are not degenerates? are not beatniks out for kicks? are not the dirt of society? My clients are all upright, respectable, useful and, in many cases, distinguished people who, in one way or another — a lot of them through illness — became addicted to drugs, just as you’re addicted to that nicotine you’re inhaling right now. I don’t sell to criminals, Harry. I have no connection with the dope rackets or racketeers. I’m a maverick operation. A specialist, you might say, with a specialized trade.”
“Of all the rationalizations—!”
“Realism, Harry. I’m preventing the proliferation of criminals.”
“By engaging in the criminal dope traffic!”
“No; by providing narcotics rations to those respectable people who need them in order to continue to lead useful, respectable lives. If not for me, they’d have to traffic with the criminal element — buy inferior drugs, drastically cut to produce a bigger volume and profit — become prey to underworld blackmail. If not for me, Harry.”
“Oh, so now the supplying of junk is to be considered an act of benevolence? Is that how you’d like me to think of you? As a humanitarian?”
“In a way. Basically, I am a businessman in a large and profitable business. But I’m no less a humanitarian than the successful publisher who makes a profit selling Bibles.”
“That’s one hell of a comparison!”
“As good as any. Psychiatrists think so, the higher echelon of welfare workers think so, the government of England thinks so.”
“Nothing you can say—”
“In Britain an addict is treated not as a criminal, but as a sick man, which is what he is. He needn’t deal with criminals there, or become a criminal himself in order to satisfy the craving induced by the habit. In Britain the addict may go to a doctor and receive his ration of the drug by prescription, all quite legally. Once our federal authorities and Congress realize that that’s the only way to cope with the problem, my services won’t be needed and the underworld will lose a major source of its income.”