“Yes?” the girl with the glasses said. She sounded only a bit nervous about visitors coming this late.
“We’d like to speak with Dr. Kern.”
“I’m afraid he’s busy right now,” she said. A smidgen of chocolate malt in the right hand tuck of her stern but erotic mouth spoiled her seriousness somewhat.
“It’s very important,” Donna said. “It could be life and death.”
“Oh,” the girl said. Surprisingly, she didn’t move or even say anything — just that little neutral “Oh.” She stood before us, chocolate smidgen and all, thinking it over. “Then I suppose I’d better get him, hadn’t I?”
“If you would, please,” Donna said.
“Come in then.”
While the girl went down a white hail long enough to approximate a near-death experience, we stood dripping in the vestibule. Donna took my hand. Her skin was hard from the cold. She looked around, then shoved it in my pocket. “Sorry. It’s the only way I can get my hand warm.” When she finished with the left, she inserted the right. At least she was careful about the exact placement of her hand. She didn’t lead me on.
Dr. Kern wore an English hunting jacket and an open white shirt. His mussed hair spoiled the effect of casual control he wanted his clothes to give. So did his frenzied glance. He looked as if he’d just finished helping deliver triplets.
“I really don’t have time to see you,” he said, obviously annoyed at our presence.
The girl smiled, pleased that he disliked us as much as she did.
I took the TRUEBLOOD MEDICAL SUPPLY business card from my pocket and showed it to him. “We found this tonight on the body of an ex-convict named Lockhart. I believe you know him.”
All he said was, “Marsha, why don’t you go back to making your rounds?”
“Really, Doctor?” She was tremendously disappointed.
“Really, Marsha.”
She went back down the white tunnel. Maybe at the end of it she’d find beings more to her liking than we’d been.
Kern said, “I was going to call you — or somebody.”
“Me?”
He glanced around, as if somebody might be eavesdropping. “My life has started to come unraveled and I don’t have any control over it at all.”
“If you wanted to talk to me, why did you look so aggravated when you saw us a minute ago?”
He ran a shaky hand through his hair, then waved the hand toward another part of the sanitarium. “Evelyn and her friend Keech are here. They’ve been telling me things—” He shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m not reacting well to pressure tonight. When I saw you, I thought maybe you were here to help Evelyn. I’m not thinking clearly.”
“Help Evelyn. What does that mean?”
“She’s accused me of trying to talk her mother into confessing.”
“To what?”
He brushed a hand on his jacket and said, “Why don’t we go into the small study? Evelyn and Keech are in the larger one down the hall.”
“All right.”
We followed him. In the study were a fireplace and enough books to start a small-town library. He poured us brandy from a cut-glass decanter. For some reason, my first taste of it made me sneeze. Donna made a production out of pantomiming a big “God bless you.” She considered it terrible luck to miss a “God bless you” in these circumstances.
When he was seated in a leather chair, Dr. Kern said, “Evelyn thinks I want her mother to go to the police and confess.”
“Confess to what?”
“To Michael Reeves’s murder.”
“Do you think she’s guilty?”
He studied his brandy, then raised his head. “I think it’s a possibility.”
“So do we,” Donna said. She explained how Reeves’s neighbor had told us about seeing Sylvia Ashton there not long before the murder.
“My God,” Kern said.
I leaned forward in my chair. “Now I want to know about your relationship with Lockhart.”
He smiled unhappily. “Until Evelyn brought him up half an hour ago, I didn’t even know I had such a relationship. I thought she’d just come out here because it’s her birthday today. She usually drives out. I’m her godfather. But Lockhart — I’d never heard of him till today.”
“I don’t follow you.”
He got up and poured himself more brandy. We declined his offer of another round. He sat down and said, “In high school, Evelyn worked at the medical supply house I own half of.”
“Trueblood.”
“Yes.”
“I’m surprised a girl as wealthy as Evelyn would work there.”
“That was David’s point. He’s always been of two minds about the money he married into. On the one hand he likes it, on the other he feels that it inspires many false values. He wanted his daughter to know ‘the real world,’ as he always calls it. So he asked if she could work at the medical supply house, and of course I said yes. She was a very good worker. She came back three different summers during her college years. All the employees liked her a great deal. That’s why it was so easy for her and Lockhart to find somebody to help her.”
“With what?”
He studied his brandy. “What I’m going to tell you may prejudice your thinking. It puts Evelyn in a bad light, I’m afraid.”
“There’s a man in jail tonight who’s in terrible shape, Doctor. Right now, he’s who I’m thinking about.”
He finished his brandy. “I assume by now you know about the ‘truth’ games Michael Reeves liked to play?”
“Yes.”
“They were very characteristic of a certain kind of psychosis, the sort you find in many powerful people in our society. Presidents who want the FBI to spy on private citizens, corporate heads who sic detectives on their employees so they can know what their people do in off hours, members of Congress who are always pushing for loyalty tests of various kinds. Michael Reeves was a lot like that — but he went further.”
“How so?”
“Were you aware that some of the ex-convicts in his acting class used mescaline?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he went even further than that. He convinced Evelyn to help him obtain Sodium Pentothal — what people call ‘truth serum’ — which is one of the things Trueblood happens to stock. Because Evelyn knew everybody there, she didn’t have any trouble finding an employee who needed money and bribing him into giving her Pentothal. This went on for some time. Evelyn got scared, so Lockhart started paying the man off himself, getting the Pentothal, and bringing it back to his good friend Reeves.”
“Where does Keech fit into all this?”
“Keech, for all his crusty surface, even for all his psychotic tendencies, is actually in search of a reasonable life. He’s been in love with Evelyn for quite some time. Of course, he had to pretend otherwise in order to save his ego — he knew of her affair with Reeves. But yesterday he went to her and told her how he feels.”
I thought of what the director of the halfway house had said about Keech. Keech’s supposed affection for Evelyn could be a clever ploy to cover up his own complicity in the murder. “Do you believe him?”
“I guess so. Why?”
“I’m just considering all the possibilities.”
“Well, when I tell you about the Sodium Pentothal, you’ll see even more possibilities,” he said.
“Reeves used it on his acting class?”
“Yes. At first, anyway. When they were under the influence of the mescaline and supposedly pushing toward the ‘truth’ he wanted them to find, it was no problem for Lockhart to inject them with it.”
“He’d been an orderly in the prison infirmary.”
“Exactly.”
I was beginning to see the inevitable direction of what he was saying. “But he didn’t stop with his acting class, did he?”