So why then was he here? Once again, he remembered his embarrassment during the telephone conversation with Kestler, all the more acute because it was overheard by Lanigan, he wondered uneasily if the police chief knew about the lawsuit over the fence, were the police notified of such things? It suddenly came to him that what really bothered him was the repetition of his failures, he had failed in Delmont, and again in Morrisborough. Was the same thing going to happen in Barnard's Crossing? Was he failure-prone, as some people are accident-prone? Taking the experience in the three towns together, did it mean that he was unsuited to the practice of medicine?
Was he losing faith in himself as a doctor? An uneasy thought occurred to him which he tried to put out of his mind: was it possible that the first time he had prescribed Limpidine for Jacob Kestler, there had been an allergic reaction? He had not consulted his case records before going to see him the night of the storm, relying on his memory, he was sure there had not been but it had been months before and he might have forgotten, and now, standing there alone, he admitted that when he first heard of Kestler's death, the idea had crossed his mind, he had not bothered to verify it, because he was so sure. Or was it because he was afraid?
Although the retreat program called for Sunday dinner and a meeting afterward, he decided not to wait but to leave immediately after the meditation, he must check his records; he would hesitate no longer.
To his roommate, he lied that he had a patient whom he had promised to visit before noon, and he used the same excuse in saying good-bye to Rabbi Mezzik.
"And how did you enjoy your experience?" Mezzik asked. "All right. I guess. I think the rest did me some good." "And the religious experience, did you profit from it?"
He was on the point of making polite acknowledgment, but he still felt aggrieved. "I'm afraid not, Rabbi. It didn't touch me at all. To be perfectly frank with you, I thought it was a lot of nothing."
Surprisingly, Mezzik was not offended, he even smiled. "That's the way it frequently strikes people at first."
"What do you mean, at first?"
Mezzik looked off into the distance, then he eyed the doctor speculatively and said, "When you treat a patient, Doctor, when you give him medicine, is he healed immediately?"
"Sometimes he is. Most of the time not immediately."
"Well, that's the way it is with a religious exercise. Sometimes there is a great and sudden cognition, a revelation, a sudden awareness as though someone had snapped on the light in a dark room, and sometimes it takes a little time, and of course sometimes, as with your medicines, nothing happens. Now you prayed and meditated. I watched you and I think— I have some experience in these matters— that you prayed honestly and sincerely. Believe me, something will come of it.
Maybe tomorrow, or next week, or even next year, but something will happen, I'm sure."
As he drove home Dan Cohen thought of what Mezzik had said, and his face relaxed in a wry grin. It was the old hokum, the fakers who operated medicine shows probably used the same spiel. It gave them time to get out of the county before the wrath of their dupes caught up with them.
Home at last, he had no sooner parked his car when his wife called to him. "Dan? Telephone. It's Chief Lanigan."
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Hello, Dr. Cohen?... My sacroiliac kicked up, but real bad. I was just able to make it back to my desk."
"It's happened before, has it?"
"I can count on an incident about once a year or so. But usually, it's just a gnawing kind of ache like I'm carrying a hundred pounds of lead strapped around my waist. This time. I got a shooting pain and I just couldn't straighten up. I'm down at the stationhouse, at home I got a special belt that I put on when it happens, but I sure can't drive home now."
"Maybe I'd better come and have a look at you. I could at least strap you up."
"I'd appreciate it, Doctor. I know that about all I can do is live with it until the pain wears off, but I’ve never had it so bad before."
"Well, maybe I can give you something. I'll be along in a few minutes."
A little while later, the doctor was looking at the woebegone face of the chief and nodding as he explained, "I wouldn't mind. Doctor, if I had done something foolish like trying to push a car out of the snow. I did that once and my back kicked up. I deserved that, and it was only a mild case as these things go. But here I just leaned forward to return a folder to the file cabinet and, wow! I couldn't move."
Dr. Cohen nodded. "It goes away after a while, doesn't it? Two or three days?"
"It gets easier in a few days, but it lingers on for a couple of weeks usually. But I’ve never had anything like this. Usually, it's a kind of ache, if you know what I mean. This was a sharp shooting pain, and I couldn't move at all for the first few minutes, then I managed to work my way over to my chair by holding onto the cabinet and then the desk."
"I think maybe I'd better give you something," said the doctor, he fished in his bag and came up with a small bottle. "Luckily, I had some samples at home. This is a muscle relaxant. It may make you drowsy, so I wouldn't take a long auto trip if I were you. I've had pretty good luck with these pills, although some of my patients said that they didn't help at all." He went to the little sink in the comer of the office and drew a glass of water. "Here. I'd like you to take a couple of these now, and then a couple every four hours. By the way, are you allergic to anything?"
"Not that I know of," the chief replied as he took the pills from the doctor's outstretched hand, he looked at them curiously for a moment and then popped them into his mouth, and swallowed them with the aid of the water.
"Why do you ask if I'm allergic to anything?" Lanigan asked. "My back problem couldn't be the result of an allergy, could it?"
"Of course not. I was thinking of the medication, there's always a chance of an allergic reaction, sometimes quite severe, from almost any medication you might take. It's especially true these days when we use such highly sophisticated formulations."
"Is that so? Say, is that what happened to old man Kestler? He got an allergic reaction to the pills you prescribed?"
The doctor shrugged. "It's possible. My associate, Dr. DiFrancesca, was inclined to think so. Where there's a known allergy to a particular medicine, of course we don't prescribe it, that's why we always tell patients what the medicine is and ask about their allergies, if any. Normally, for instance, I would have prescribed penicillin for Kestler, but I knew he was allergic to it, so I prescribed one of the tetracyclines, he could have been allergic to that, too, but it was a lot less likely. I mean, a number of people are allergic to penicillin, but not too many to tetracycline, and I'd had him on it before. But even there you can't tell. Sometimes, it's sort of cumulative."
"Any chance the drugstore made a mistake?"
The doctor shook his head. "No, I shouldn't think so, they're terribly careful these days because of this sophisticated formulation I mentioned, a mistake on the part of the druggist is highly unlikely, and the manufacturers cooperate by putting out their pills in all different shapes and colors instead of just round and white the way they used to do years ago, the pill I prescribed for Kestler, for example, was kind of pink oval—"
"Orange, I'd say," said the chief.
"No, pink, well, maybe you could call it salmon-colored. How do you know?"