Bottom Line td-37

by Warren Murphy

At the door, she turned and said, "Goodbye, Randall. And I do mean goodbye."

  She smiled for a moment. Lippincott's eyes showed his confusion and fright. Then she laughed aloud, throwing her head back and tossing her long red hair, before she walked from the room.

  In the hallway, she glanced to her right. Standing in front of the nurse's desk, their backs to her, she saw the young white man and the old Oriental she had seen that morning at Elmer Lippincott's estate. She quickly walked across the hall and disappeared through an exit door.

  She walked down two flights of stairs, and then into another patient area of the clinic. In the patient lounge, she found a pay phone and placed a thirty-five-cent call.

  When the phone was answered, she said:

  "This is Elena. He'll be gone in five minutes."

  Then she hung up.

  The nurse had never had anybody as important as a Lippincott on her floor before. On the other hand, no one had ever looked into her eyes like the thin dark-haired man who stood smiling in front of her. His eyes were deep pools of darkness, and they seemed to act like vacuums, sucking her emotion out of her, through her eyes, and she pointed down the hall toward Lippincott's room.

  "Room twenty-two-twelve," she said.

  "Thanks," Remo said. "I'll remember this."

  "You're coming back, aren't you?" the nurse asked.

  "Nothing would keep me away," Remo said. Chiun smirked.

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  "When?" the nurse asked. "You coming right back?

  "Well, I've got a couple of things to do first," Remo said, "but then I'll be back. You can count on it."

  "I work till 12:30. I get off then," the nurse said. "I don't live alone but my roommate's a stewardess for Pan-Am and she's in Guam or someplace like that. There's nobody at my place. Except me. And whoever I bring."

  "Sounds good to me," Remo said. He took Chiun's arm and led him down the hall.

  "This country is exceeding strange," Chiun said.

  "Why?" Remo asked.

  "The adoration from that girl. Why, with all the people in this country, most of them better looking than you and all of them smarter than you, why does she choose you to fall in love with?"

  "Must be my native charm," Remo said.

  "I would have suggested brain damage," Chiun said.

  "You're jealous," Remo said. "That's all. The green-eyed monster has got you."

  "One does not overly concern oneself with the doings of nincompoops," Chiun said.

  Inside Room 2212, Randall Lippincott had the sheet inside his mouth. He was trying to bite his way through it.

  Remo came to his bedside and took the sheet out of his mouth.

  "You don't know us," he said, "but we work for your father. What happened tonight?"

  "Sheets," Lippincott hissed. "Got to get them off me. Suffocating. Too much clothes." His eyes were

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  wild and flashing from side to side, blinking rapidly. Remo looked to Chiun and the tiny Oriental moved quickly to the bed and released Lippincott's wrist restraints. The man's hands, once freed, pulled the sheet from his body and then began to claw at the neck of his long hospital gown.

  The gown separated as his pale white hands pulled off the buttons and he yanked the gown from his shoulders and lay naked on the bed. He looked around him, eyes darting feverishly, a cornered rat looking for an escape route.

  "Heavy," he hissed. "Heavy."

  "You are all right now," Chiun said. "Nothing will harm you." To Remo, he said softly, "He is most seriously ill."

  "Heavy, heavy," Lippincott said again. "The air. Coming down. Crushing me." He began to flail his arms in the air above his head.

  "What's going on, Chiun?" asked Remo, feeling helpless as he stood at the foot of the bed, watching the sick man.

  "Some evil medicine has been worked on him," Chiun said. "Very evil."

  Lippincott waved his arms as if trying to swipe his way through a cloud of summer gnats. Saliva dribbled down the side of his mouth. His pasty face turned blotchy, then began to grow deep red.

  "What do we do?" asked Remo.

  Chiun touched the fingertips of his right hand to Lippincott's solar plexus. He probed for a moment. Lippincott ignored him, as if he did not know there was anyone else in the room.

  Chiun nodded to himself, then grabbed Lippincott's left wrist. The nailing arm stopped as if it had

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  abruptly punched into a pool of tar. Chiun looked at the inside joint of the elbow, then nodded toward Remo, who leaned over and saw the small pinprick of a hypodermic in the joint of the elbow.

  Chiun released Lippincott's hand, which began swinging about his head again. His wispy white hair fluttering about his head, Chiun moved quickly. He touched a finger into the left side of Lippincott's throat. The arms continued to flail, the eyes to roll, the saliva to flow, but then the arms began to slow down and the eyes began to steady.

  Chiun pressed for a few seconds more and Lippincott's eyes closed. His arms dropped heavily onto the bed.

  "There is a poison in his body," Chiun said, "and it attacks his brain. All his motions have helped to pump that poison into his brain." "Can we do anything?"

  Chiun moved around to the other side of the bed. "We must close off the brain so no more poison gets in. Then we can hope that his body can cleanse itself of the evil."

  He pressed his fingers into the right side of Lippincott's throat. The man was already asleep, but slowly the red color began to drain from his face.

  Chiun held the pressure for exactly ten seconds, then leaned across Lippincott's body to thrust his fingers into the millionaire's left armpit.

  Chiun hissed under his breath. Remo recognized the Korean word for "live." Chiun pronounced it as an order.

  Remo nodded as he saw that Chiun was closing off, one by one, the major blood vessels in Lippincott's body. It was an old Sinanju technique to pre-

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  vent poison from coursing freely through a victim's body. When Chiun had first explained it to Remo, Remo had called it a "touch tourniquet," and Chiun, surprised that Remo had actually understood something, had nodded and smiled. The pressure applications had to be done precisely, and in exact order, so that the major blood vessels that carried the poison were sealed off temporarily, but the auxiliary blood vessels still carried enough fresh blood and oxygen to the brain to keep it alive. In a surgical amphitheater, the procedure would have taken six medical specialists, a dozen technicians, and a million dollars worth of equipment. Chiun did it with his fingertips.

  Remo had never learned the sequence but now as he watched Chiun work over Lippincott from throat to ankle, he saw for the first time the specific logic of it. Left side, right side, left side, right side, top to bottom. Sixteen points that had to be hit. And one error could cause almost instant death from oxygen starvation of the brain.

  Without thinking, he said, "Be careful, Chiun."

  The Oriental turned his hazel eyes on Remo, staring at him with disdain, while digging his fingers deep into Lippincott's left thigh muscle.

  "Careful?" he hissed. "If you had learned this when it was offered you, it would be done twice as quickly and he would have more chance to live. If it goes wrong, do not blame me," he said. "I know how to do it. Because I have bothered to learn. It is just that I can never rely upon cheap white help for any-' thing."

  "Right, right, right, right," said Remo. "Stay with it, Chiun."

  To keep himself busy, Remo went to the front of

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  the bed and began to monitor Lippincott's pulse. As he stood alongside the man, a flowery smell insinuated itself into his senses. It was a smell he had encountered before. Sweet and musky. He put it out of his mind, and with his hand on Lippincott's chest, monitored the heart rate and breathing rate simultaneously. When Chiun finished with the large vein in Lippincott's right ankle, the man's pulse was beating at only thirty beats a minute, his respiration rate was only one breath every sixteen seconds.

&nb
sp; Chiun stopped and looked up. Remo lifted his hand from Lippincott's chest. "Will he live?" Remo asked. "If he does, I hope he never has to suffer the indignity of trying to teach something to some person who does not wish to learn, and who rejects the gift as if it were the f ootmud of a ..."

  "Will he live, Chiun?" Remo asked again. "I do not know. The poison was much in his system. It depends on how much he wishes to live."

  "You keep saying poison," Remo said. "What kind of poison?"

  Chiun shook his head. "This is a thing I do not know, a poison that does not injure the body but changes the mind. This fighting one's clothing. This feeling that the air itself is a heavy blanket. These things I do not understand."

  "It happened to his brother too," Remo said. "Afraid of Japanese."

  Chiun looked at Remo quizzically. "We are talking about poison of the brain. What does that have to do with it?"

  "His brother. He couldn't stand being in a room with Japanese," Remo said.

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  "That is not mind poison," Chiun said. "That is just good taste. Can you not tell the difference?"

  "Please, Chiun, no lectures about the pushy Japanese. Anyway, this guy's brother dove out a window because he couldn't stand them."

  "How high a window?" Chiun asked.

  "Six stories."

  "And the doors to this room were not nailed shut?" Chiun asked.

  "No."

  "Well, perhaps that was a little extreme," Chiun said. "Six stories." He thought about it for a moment. "Yes, that was extreme. About three stories extreme," he said. "No one should ever jump out a window more than three stories high to avoid the Japanese, if the windows and doors are not bolted and nailed phut."

  Remo watched Lippincott carefully. A sense of peace seemed to have overtaken his body. The tenseness that had bunched up his shoulders and hips was slowly passing from his body, which was softening into a relaxed and deep sleep.

  "I think he's going to be all right, Chiun," Remo offered.

  "Silence," thundered Chiun. "What do you know?" He touched Lippincott's throat, and then the pit of his stomach, probing deeply with the balls of his fingers.

  "He is going to be all right," Chiun said.

  "I wonder if that injection in the arm had anything to do with this," Remo said.

  Chiun shrugged. "I do not understand your western medicine, ever since I stopped watching Rad Rex

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  as Dr. Bruce Barton, when the show became vile and obscene. Since then, nothing is the same."

  "I wonder who his doctor was," Remo said. He went back to the nurse's station, but the nurse only knew that every doctor in the hospital had looked in on Lippincott. She had a list of names a full page long.

  Remo nodded and began to walk away. "When will I see you?" the nurse asked. "Very soon," Remo said with a smile. Lippincott was stiill sleeping when Remo returned and Chiun was watching him, a pleased and self-satisfied look on his face. Remo used the telephone in the room to dial a number that reported on the winning lottery numbers hi the 463 separate lotteries held in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area. To get all the numbers, a person at a pay phone had to drop nine dimes into the coin box. Remo listened as the tape recorded voice began to spin out the winning combinations of numbers, and Remo said deliberately: "Blue and Gold. Silver and Gray," and then gave the number he read on the base of Lippincott's telephone.

  He hung up and within a minute, the telephone rang.

  "Smitty?" Remo said as he lifted the receiver. " "Yes, what is it?"

  "Randall Lippincott's in the hospital. He went some kind of crazy. I think it might be like his brother."

  "Yes, I know," said Smith. "How is he?" "Chiun says he'll live. But he needs a guard here. Can you get somebody from the family or something?"

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  "Yes," Smith said. "Ill have somebody there soon."

  "We'll wait for him. Another thing. Check what you've got on the Lippincotts. There was a doctor here who might have shot Randall up with something to kill him. See if you can find any link among the Lippincotts. Same doctor or something." The smell of flowers was again strong in Remo's nose.

  "All right," Smith said.

  "Anything from Ruby yet?" Remo asked.

  "Not a word."

  "Hah. So much for women," said Remo.

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  CHAPTER NINE

  Elena Gladstone was asleep in the third floor bedroom of the brownstone on East Eighty-first Street. She slept naked and when the private telephone rang, she sat up in bed and cradled the telephone against her shoulder. The sheet slid from her body.

  "This is Dr. Gladstone," she said. She listened as she heard a familiar voice, then sat straight up in bed, away from the headboard, as if startled.

  "Alive?" she said. "He can't be. I administered the shot myself."

  She listened again. "I saw them there but they couldn't ..."

  "I don't know," she said. "I'll have to think about it. They are still at the clinic?"

  She paused and pondered. "I'll talk to you tomorrow," she said.

  After she replaced the telephone, she remained sitting up in bed. She could not understand how the old Oriental and the young white man had saved Randall Lippincott's life. It wasn't possible, not with the shot she had given him. But they had done it, and even now guards were on then: way to protect Lippincott. If he recovered, he would be sure to talk.

  Something would have to be done about him. And

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  about the two intruders, because she still had more Lippincotts to kill.

  She thought of the two. The Oriental. The young American. And as she thought of Remo and his deep eyes and the smile that bared his teeth and moved his lips but never extended to his eyes, she shuddered involuntarily and pulled the sheet up around her body.

  They had to go. In the case of the American, it was a shame, but she could do it. She reached for the telephone.

  Ruby Gonzalez had hit every saloon on Twenty-second Street searching for Flossie. She hadn't realized that white folks had so many saloons, that white saloons had so many drunks and that so many drunks thought they were God's gift to young unescorted black women. Not that any of them throught so much about it that they would buy her a drink. She had bought her own in the first six saloons, a vile concoction of orange juice and wine. She had been raised on it as orange juice and champagne but there was no champagne to be found in these Twenty-second Street saloons.

  She had started out by hanging out in the taverns, hoping to get someone in conversation and find out about Flossie, but that hadn't worked, and so, after six bars and twelve OJ and wines, she had stopped drinking and stopped hanging out. Instead, she walked into the bar, accosted the bartender and asked if he knew where she could find Flossie.

  Bartender: "Who wants to know?"

  Ruby: "You know who she is?"

  Bartender: "No."

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  Ruby: "Big fat woman. Blonde."

  Bartender: "Why you want her?"

  Ruby: "You know her?"

  Bartender: "No. What do you want her for?"

  Ruby: "She's my nanny, sucker, and I come to take her back home to Tara."

  Bartender: "Oh, yeah?"

  Next bar.

  And now she was down to the last bar on Twenty-second Street, as far west as one could go without falling into the Hudson River. Or, more accurately, onto it because the river debris was so thick, the water had the consistency of limestone. If the river were any dirtier, you could ice skate on it in July.

  She walked into the final bar.

  Pay dirt.

  At the end of the bar, she saw a blonde woman partially sitting on the stool.

  The woman overflowed the stool, her giant buttocks surrounding it, covering the top and hiding it from view. She wore a red and blue flowered dress. Her upper arms were massive and her hair a tangled mass of every-which-way strings. Ruby thought that if it hadn't been for the fat and the dirt and the ugly dress and the uncombed ha
ir and the bleary blue eyes and the double and triple chins and the arms that were shaped like legs of lamb, big legs of lamb, Flossie would still have been homely. Her nose was too broad and her mouth too small and her eyes were set too close together in her head. Even at her best, she would have been pretty bad, Ruby decided.

  Ruby ignored the surprised look of the bartender and the greetings of four bums sitting at the bar and

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  walked toward the back and sat on the stool next to Flossie.

  The fat woman turned to stare at her. Ruby Gonzalez smiled, that quick sudden smile that could melt people's hearts and turn stranger into life-long friend. "Hi, Flossie," she said. "Have a drink?" Ruby nodded toward the empty beer glass and took a five dollar bill from her jacket pocket where she kept saloon money. It invited trouble to open a purse and fish in a wallet for cash in places like this. Too many people watched and wondered.

  Flossie nodded. "Sure," she said. "Roger," she called. "A drink for me and my friend." She turned back to Ruby. "Do I know you?" she asked thickly. "I don't think so 'cause I don't have too many friends of the black persuasion."

  Her voice was slurred and she spoke slowly, as if trying to make sure that she said nothing wrong, nothing offensive, at least until the beer was bought and paid for.

  "Sure," Ruby said. "I met you once with Zack." "Zack? Zack? Oh, yeah. Zack. No, you didn't. I never met you with Zack. Zack doesn't like Negroes."

  "I know," Ruby said. "He and I, well, we were never friends but we worked together on a case once."

  The bartender appeared. Ruby ordered two beers. Flossie was still shaking her head. "Never saw you," she said. "Woulda remembered. Remember everybody as skinny as I used to be."

  "I'll tell you when it was," Ruby said. "It was one night, maybe three, four months ago. I bumped into Zack down near Seventh Street where he lives, and

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  we rode up to Twenty-third Street on the subway, and he said he was going to see you and we walked over near your place, and he met you downstairs, and we just waved at each other. I think you were going to get something to eat."

  "Not Zack," Flossie said. "Zack never buys a meal."

  "Maybe you were buying," Ruby said.

  "Probably," Flossie agreed. "Give a man everything, best years of your life and have to feed him too."