Read Ebook: The Borough Treasurer by Fletcher J S Joseph Smith

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Ebook has 1477 lines and 78522 words, and 30 pages

We left Dennithy clinking quarters, trying to determine how he might figure into a possible scandal. In the elevator to the basement garage I commented acidly, "You must have known this was inevitable, of course?"

"To the contrary," she parried, "I had a notion that a genuine M.P. sleuth would be ninety-two years old and wear a white coat with a stethoscope in his side pocket. You seem to have youth and a rather charming virility, Doctor."

"Cut the flattery," I said. "Let's find your car."

The address was over in New Brooklyn. She slipped the light blue sedan into the proper cross-town tunnel entrance, adjusted the automatics and turned upon me suddenly. The dim reflection of the headlights from the dull-painted walls of the one-way tunnel gave her face a ghostly loveliness. I had just become sharply aware of this phenomenon, when she brushed a light, experimental kiss across my lips.

Volume II, of Dr. Bankawaya's "Twenty-First Century Emotional Reactions to the Love Stimulus" notwithstanding, my socially-adjusted, medically-trained and professionally-restrained instincts played a rotten trick on me. Instead of staring at her with a cool eye and calming her with a proper, chilling remark, I responded like a frog's leg to an electric shock.

My chin jerked out to follow the sweetest sensation I could remember. It didn't have far to go. She had retreated only three inches.

The tunnel curved right there, and the car lurched. I made a bad connection with only half her mouth, but a slight correction on her part squared us off to what is outrageously described in the texts as a basic, or primary, wooing gesture.

After the first, delirious second I knew it was a frame. After the second moment, I didn't care. But it wasn't until several minutes had elapsed that Doctor Calicoo's cool resolve collapsed, and I learned what a kiss could really mean from a woman who meant it, herself.

She tore out of my arms with a little cry. "Look out!" Then I became aware that the warning light had been flashing unnoticed. We were coming to the tunnel's exit where manual vehicle control became necessary. With trembling hands she gripped the controls until her knuckles were white knobs.

As we flashed past the patrol station and two alert faces checked the interior of our car, I said, "I think I know what you had in mind. You had me hooked on but good. Why didn't you go through with it?" I referred to the easy possibility of our shooting from the tube in each other's arms and thereby violating the safety code for tube passage. Such a simple frame would have put M.P. Investigator Klinghammer on the tabloid front page, if his feminine companion had chosen to file a complaint--with police witnesses to the act. Exit Klinghammer to a hobby of his own, probably less lucrative than building phantom symptom machines.

"I guess I overdid it," she said simply. She began to cry. Her white blouse quivered.

She shook her head. "When we went into the tunnel I was in love with John Cunningham. I kissed you to frame you, all right, but it was my own idea. I'm impulsive, I guess." The only part I caught was the past tense of her first sentence.

"You mean you can change loves in the middle of a tunnel?" I blurted. Whereupon I learned one more "don't" that was never mentioned in lecture. The car slewed to the curb. She jabbed the emergency stop switch, leaned across me and slapped open my door.

"Walk!" she commanded. The remaining tears were fairly steaming from her red cheeks. I was smart enough not to fumble for an apology. I walked.

When I found a cab, I had no chance to think clearly. The cabby bored me the whole way with the excited news of the opening of the Brooklyn Centennial Celebration. Brooklyn in the spring meant baseball, and the Bums were celebrating their one-hundredth year in the league.

"Only we're changing the name from 'de Bums' to 'de Boids.' 'De Blueboids' woulda been prettier, but a hockey team got to that name foist."

Brooklyn in the spring. Baseball. Love out of the blue. Blueboids. Platitudinous slot-machines.

When I stood before the gray, translucent door of Dr. John Cunningham's penthouse apartment, I was something less than the eager, efficient, young Dr. Klinghammer of the remarkable stability. From bed-rock to quicksand in one easy tunnel.

A man answered. He was at least one cut above the most adored idol of video and movie screen, his slacks even more unpressed and his beach shirt even gaudier. He looked me in the eye for a moment and said, "Dr. Sledgehammer, I presume?"

"Klinghammer," I corrected.

"Sorry. Sue seemed a little confused on several details. Come in, please."

Sue. Sue Calicoo. Out of the blue. Blueboids. John Cunningham. This was a disrupting thought. So this is the guy she's really in love with. Malpractice? Without a doubt.

I followed him into a spacious, skylighted room, a corner of which instantly caught my eye, first, because it contained Sue, and second, because it was the only orderly spot in the whole littered place. Sue sat in the tiny office-space at a small desk, furiously filing a fingernail over a blue wastebasket. She didn't look up.

The look of tidiness ended there. The balance of the chamber gave a fair impression of a wholesale video-repair shop on moving day. Benches and racks were spaced at random, and each was loaded with electronic gear, meters, cable and tools. Unassembled units squatted in a semicircle before a large framework at the far end of the laboratory.

"May we be alone?" I asked.

"Alone?"

"Your girl friend, there," I said bitterly.

Cunningham tossed his blond head back and laughed. "Girl friend? That little fiend who calls herself my partner? Huh-uh! My girl friends are in there. Let's go introduce you." He started through a side door, and the unmistakable revelry of a cocktail party burst into the room.

Cunningham, himself, was not sober. I looked at Dr. Sue Calicoo. She hissed, "If you mention anything about the tunnel I'll brain you! Anything! Do you understand?"

I chased after Cunningham, hauled back with one hand and clipped him carefully with the other. I slammed the door and told Sue, "Help me sober him up."

She whistled softly. "He's not that drunk. Bring him to and you'll find out."

I worked on his heavy neck for a moment until his eyes flickered. I was in no mood to make him comfortable, so I just propped his back against a packing-case and took off on him. "What kind of a travesty on the practice of medicine do you call this?" I began.

Sue yawned and went to join the party. "Call me when the patty-cake is baked," she said as she closed the door.

The glare of hostility gradually vanished from Cunningham's handsome face. Without it he looked better. He lit a cigarette, thought for a moment and smiled at me. "Have you been kissing my partner?"

I blurbled in my throat.

He went on, "You are acting as strangely as Sue did. I have often conjectured that if you could bottle Sue's kisses adrenalin would be obsolete."

"You--kiss her--often?" I asked against my will.

"Only twice. The day she came to work, and two weeks later when they took the stitches out of my head. The second one was just to show there were no hard feelings."

"She loves you," I said with inane persistence.

He shrugged, "Could be. But she means matrimony. I flunked that once. Won't take the test again. But now, Doctor, you didn't come here to make a match, surely. Sue reports that the M.P. board takes a dim view of my Symptometers. Have you filed a report yet?" he asked warily.

"Not quite yet," I admitted. Blueboids. Sue Calicoo. Brooklyn in the Spring.

"And when your respiration becomes normal again," Cunningham assured me, "I think you will realize that such a report will be difficult to file. Am I right?" He hoisted himself from the carpet. "You know," he went on, "this investigation was sure to come. I knew it. And I guess it threw me a little more than I thought it would. Now that it's here I'm relieved. I think they sent the right man, Doctor Klinghammer."

He fished a bottle from the debris on one of the benches and offered it to me. He did it in such a neighborly manner that in my preoccupation I accepted and tilted down at least a deciliter before coming to my senses. Then it was too late. A remarkable thing happened when that liquefied plutonium hit bottom. I twanged like a sixty-pound bow, and I began laughing. I felt sorry for this poor, misguided Romeo. The solution to his whole problem spread before me like an atlas.

Slowly his smile vanished. "Before we discuss this further, I'd like to impress a point or two. Those coin machines are only a means to an end." He pulled heavily at the bottle, took me by the arm and led me over to the huge, half-created machine at the end of the lab.

"This is my life's work," he said solemnly. "Between my exwife and this mechanical monster, I ran through a rather substantial family fortune. I had to have funds. So I excised a few of the simple circuits from this contraption, threw on some window dressing and turned them loose in a few key locations where women congregate. Yesterday, after three weeks of operation, sixty of those gadgets coughed up ,000. Unfortunately, I had to borrow almost a hundred thousand dollars to build them. In another week I'll show a profit."

"In another week," I told him, "you'll be held for malpractice and indicted for fraud--unless--"

"Unless I cut you in, I suppose," he sneered.

"Unless you give me another drink," I said after a suitable dramatic pause.

Cunningham pulled one eyebrow down, nonplussed, but he handed over the liquor. I choked on a swallow as Sue's voice cut over my shoulder, "I left you to play patty-cake, and now it's spin-the-bottle. Are you down to business, or shall I leave again?"

John said, "Stay here, kid, Doctor Hammerhead has an idea."

She came over and deliberately leaned up against him. He put his arm around her waist in what I tried to believe was a fraternal gesture.

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