“Son, you had a few before you picked me up this noon — and Gayle Corrington wasn’t running up her water bill on those drinks she poured for us.”
Russ veered from the ragged shoulder of the old two-lane blacktop. “If she starts the day customarily with drinks like she was pouring for me, I think I know where her poltergeist comes from.”
“You weren’t impressed?” Stryker sounded amused. “But you’ll admit natural explanations get a little forced and tenuous after a while.”
A stop sign bobbed over the crest of a hill, and Russ hit the brakes hard. Four disc brakes brought the Jensen up almost in its length. Stryker uncovered his eyes.
“Yeah,” Russ went on. “There were a number of damned things she said that sounded like telling points in favor of a poltergeist. But you have to bear in mind that all this is by her unsupported evidence. Hell, we can’t be sure she isn’t hallucinating this stuff, or even just making the whole thing up to string you along. Women do get bored at fortyish — to say nothing of what the thought of starting over the hill does to their libidos.”
“She didn’t look bored — and certainly not headed over the hill. Another few years, my friend, and you’ll stop thinking of womanhood withering at thirty. Hell, it’s just starting to bloom. But do you think she’s unreliable? Seemed to be just the opposite. A level-headed woman who was frankly baffled and a little embarrassed with the entire affair.”
Russ grunted, unwilling to agree offhand — though these were his own impressions as well. “I’m just saying you need to keep everything in perspective. I’ve gotten fooled by too many patients with a smooth façade — even when I was expecting things to be different beneath the surface.”
“But you’ll hazard an opinion that Mrs Corrington is playing straight with us so far as signs indicate?” Stryker persisted.
“Yeah,” Mandarin conceded. “But that’s one tough woman lurking beneath all that sweet Southern Belle charm she knows how to turn on. Watch out.”
He turned onto the Interstate leading into Knoxville’s downtown. In deference to Curtiss’s uneasiness with high speed, he held the needle at 80, safely just over the 75 limit of the time. “What’s your opinion of it all, then?” the author prodded.
“Well, I’ll maintain scientific neutrality. While I consider poltergeists improbable, I’ll accept the improbable when the probable explanations have all been eliminated.”
“Nicely phrased, Holmes,” Stryker chuckled. “And taking a position that will have you coming out sounding correct no matter what.”
“The secret of medical training.”
“I knew you’d come in handy for something.”
“Well, then, what’s your opinion?”
The author decided it was safe to release the dashboard and light his pipe. “Well, I guess I’ve used the supernatural too often in my fiction to accept it as willingly as I might otherwise. Seems every time I start gathering the facts on something like this, I find myself studying it as a fiction plot. You know like those yarns I used to crank out for pulps like Dime Mystery Stories, where when you get to the end you learn that the Phantom of Ghastly Manor was really Cousin Rodney dressed up in a monster suit so he could murder Uncle Ethelred and claim the inheritance before the will was changed. Something like that. I start putting facts together like I was plotting a murder thriller, you know. Kind of spoils the effect for me. This thing, for instance…”
Russ cursed and braked viciously to avoid the traffic stopped ahead at Malfunction Junction. Knoxville’s infamous rush hour tangle had the Interstate blocked solid ahead of them. Swerving onto the shoulder, he darted for the upcoming exit and turned toward the University section. Curtiss seemed about to bite his pipe in two.
“Stop off at the Yardarm? I don’t want to fight this traffic.” Stryker thought he could use a drink.
Safely seated in a back booth, stein of draft in hand, Curtiss regained his color. It was a favorite bar — just off the Strip section of the University area. When Stryker had first come to the area years back, it had been a traditional Rathskeller college bar. Styles had changed, and so had students. Long hair had replaced crewcuts, Zen and revolution had shoved fraternities and football from conversational standards, and there was a faint hint of marijuana discernible through the beer smell. Someone had once suggested changing the name of the Yardarm to the Electric Foreskin or some such, and had been tossed out for his own good.
Stryker didn’t care. He’d been coming here for years — sometimes having a round with his creative writing students. Now — well, if they wanted to talk football, he’d played some; if they wanted to talk revolution, he’d fought in some. The beer was good, and the atmosphere not too frantic for conversation.
His office was a block or two away — an upstairs room in a ramshackle office building only slightly less disreputable in appearance than the dilapidated Edwardian mansion turned community clinic where Russ worked. This was several blocks in the other direction, so the bar made a convenient meeting place for them. Afternoons often found the pair talking over a pitcher of beer (Knoxville bars could not serve liquor at the time), and the bartender — a huge red-bearded Viking named Blackie — knew them both by name.
“You were saying that your faith in the supernatural was fraught with skepticism,” Mandarin reminded, wiping foam from his mustache.
“No. I said it was tempered with rationality,” Stryker hedged. “That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the supernatural. It means I examine facts with several of those famous grains of salt before I offer them to my readers.”
“I take it then you’re going to use this business today in your new book.”
Stryker nodded enthusiastically. “It’s worth a chapter, I’m certain.”
“Well, that’s your judgement, of course,” commented Mandarin, glancing at his watch. “Personally, I didn’t read any irrefutable evidence of the supernatural into all this.”
“Science scoffing under the shadow of truths inadmissible to its system of logic.” Stryker snorted. “You’re as blind in your beliefs as the old-guard priesthood holding the bastions of disease-by-wrath-of-God against the germ-theory heretics.”
“I suppose,” Russ admitted around a belch.
“But then, I forgot that you were back in Libby’s room while I was finishing up the interview with Gayle Corrington,” Stryker said suddenly. “Hell, you missed out on what I considered the most significant and intriguing part of her story. Let me read this off to you.” He fumbled for his notepad.
Mandarin had had enough of hauntings for the day. “Let me have you fill me in later,” he begged off. “I’ve got an evening clinic tonight, and I’d like to run back to the house beforehand and get packed.”
“Going out of town?”
“I need to see my high-priced lawyers in New York tomorrow.”
“That’s right. How’s that look?”
Russ frowned, said with more confidence than he felt: “I think we’ll make our case. Police just can’t burglarize a physician’s confidential files in order to get evidence for a drug bust.”
“Well, I wish you luck,” Stryker allowed. “There’s a few angles I want to check out on this business first, anyway. I’ll probably have the chapter roughed out by the time you’re back in town. Why don’t I give you a carbon then, and let you comment?”
“Fine.” Russ stood up and downed his beer. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
“Thanks — but I’ve got my car parked just down the block. You take it easy driving back though.”
Russ grinned. “Sure. Take it easy yourself.”
Two nights later Mandarin’s phone woke him up. Stryker hadn’t taken it easy.