The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (30 page)

“
Well, my friend,” he said
seriously, “now I have ringings in my ears, audible above the
boiling of my blood. At the moment, Veloris is merely a promising
extra, but I see great things ahead for her. I’d say she’s
thirty-eight, or maybe thirty-nine, twenty-four,
thirty—”

“
Yeah, sure,” I
interrupted. Why should I care? You’ll never let me meet her. But
let’s get serious—4785”

“
You think I’m not? Believe
me, Shell, if Veloris ever gets her meaty parts into a meaty part
she’ll be a star—“

“
Forget Veloris for a
minute.”

“
Forget Veloris? Shell, is
this you? No, this cannot be the Shell Scott I used to know... ah.”
He paused. “Have you injured some of your more important glands?”
Paul smiled benignly. “You can tell me. I’m a doctor.”

“
That’s what I want to ask
you about—another doctor. One I’m doing a job for, in
fact.”

“
Ah,” he said again, but
this time as though with recognition. “I got the definite
impression Henry would call you. You’ve already met him, have
you?”

“
Yes, you mean Dr.
Hernandez, the human whirlwind. But I must know him better than you
do. I call him Hank.”

Paul grinned. “That’s one
of the great things about Henry, never insists ailing patients call
him Doctor, or kiss his ring. Quite the contrary.”

“
Yeah, it’s refreshing.
You’re hired, then? Actually working for him now?”

“
Yeah, since this
morning.”

“
What does he want you to
do?”

I didn’t know why Paul
would be interested in that, but I told him: try to run down the
guy’s who’d tried to run Hank down; look for and hopefully locate
his patients, the Vungers; and, of course, if I got lucky, bring
back his dog, Rusty.

“
Plus,” I continued, “he
keeps reaming out my ears with half an encyclopedia about official
medicine—or allopathy, which he isn’t too fond of—and doctor-type
stuff I’m not too fond of.”

I paused, noting Paul was
smiling, nodding, and for some reason looking quite
pleased.

“
You’d think he wanted me
to take out somebody’s gall bladder,” I went on. “He hired me as an
investigator, so how come all this medical history and
hyperbole...” I stopped. “Are you sitting on some
feathers?”

Paul was chuckling
audibly, wagging his head. “That’s Henry, all right. He must like
you, Shell, or he wouldn’t be trying to-to un-brainwash you, he
might say. Which is probably significant.” Then, more soberly but
still smiling, “A few days ago Henry called and asked me about you,
wanted to know if you’re as good, and unorthodox, an investigator
as he’d heard from a couple of other people. I told him you were
unorthodox enough that he probably wouldn’t be disappointed, but I
had to say that so I could keep drinking your Armagnac. So I knew
he needed a PI for something, but he didn’t tell me for what. I
suspect...”

Paul stopped speaking for
a few seconds, looking past me with half-closed eyes. “If he’s
really trying to educate you—educate you about real medical
practice and politics—I suspect it’s because he’s got considerably
more in mind for you than he may have said so far.” Paul paused
again, then added slowly, “If you want my advice, pal, pay
attention to whatever Henry tells you, even if it doesn’t strike
you as immediately germane. He’s got a good reason, or he wouldn’t
bother.”

“
Pay attention? You mean
it’s possible not to? Paul, do you know what this guy does to
people? When he desires a little, say a hundred percent, of their
attention? Like shooting little lasers out of his eyes, and doing
something with his voice so it hums inside your
ears....”

I guess that’s one of the
things I like about Paul: he laughs a lot. But eventually he said,
“You don’t need to describe it, Shell, it can’t be described. But I
know well what you mean.” Then, more seriously, “I’ll be glad to
tell you what I think of Henry. Actually, I’ve been wanting to do
that ever since he told me he needed a detective, and asked about
you. Okay, Henry Hernandez, M.D., homeopath, student of the Tao and
Ayurveda, and you name it, mystic, gentle genius, magician. Among
other things. The bottom line is, he’s not only the finest
physician I’ve ever met but one of the finest men. And, bar none,
the most brilliant human being I’ve had the pleasure of learning
from.”

It was strange, to hear
Paul—whose opinion I respected—speak so highly of Hank and it
seemed to loosen something that had been wound up in me. I felt a
sense of relief. I already knew I liked Hank Hernandez, enjoyed him
and even his wackier outbursts; and by now I’d come ninety percent
of the way toward accepting the man as genuine, honest, probably
even right most of the time. But there’d always been a kind of
unease, a wondering. What if it turned out he was actually a
brilliant nut, some kind of convincing crackpot or con-man? And
that was highly unlikely if Paul Anson could speak of him with such
complete approval.

We yacked a few minutes
more and I filled Paul in on some events of my day. At mention of
the parking-lot altercation he offered to dress my wound
professionally so I wouldn’t get lockjaw during the conversation,
but I told him I’d doused the cut with diluted calendula extract
and he nodded approvingly. When I told him of tracing the Mercedes
sedan to Hobart Belking, he raised his eyebrows and said he knew a
lot about Belking-Gray Pharmaceuticals but little about Belking
himself—except that he was reputed to be tougher than gristle, both
in his business and personal life.

I mentioned the pile of
info given me by Hank, that I’d just started reading, and Paul said
he’d like to see that material himself. So I got the thick folder
from my bedroom and handed it to Paul. He rested it on his knees,
started thumbing through the pages. A couple of times he said,
“Hmmm,” or “Well, well,” and finally looked at me again.

“
Very interesting,” he
said. “This is remarkable stuff. You haven’t read much of it
yet?”

“
Only the parts about
Wintersong and Belking, flipped through the rest—I’ve never heard
of most of those investigators and their therapies, or machines,
instruments, whatever they are.”

“
Most people haven’t,
Shell, even doctors—especially mainstream doctors. Henry’s got a
ton of this stuff in his personal library, but it looks as if he
selected the cream of the crop and laid a few pounds of it on you.”
Paul swirled the brandy in his glass, took a leisurely swallow,
then continued. “Undoubtedly some of this is connected with what
you’re doing for him, but most of it...” He swirled the brandy
again, looking intently at me. “The rest of it, well, if this
material was widely known, familiar to everyone in the country—all
these exceptional people, and therapies, cures for everything,
cures that have been deliberately hidden, forbidden, suppressed by
the medical-pharmaceutical conspiracy supported by an army of
federal bureaucrats like those in the FDA—it would mean the end of
medical practice as we know it in the U.S.A. The absolute end of
orthodoxy. Which, one might reasonably expect, is why so few people
have heard of these remarkable people and therapies and
cures.”

I blinked at him. “You’re
kidding.”

“
Not this time,
pal.”

“
But, the end of orthodoxy,
of allopathic medicine, kaput, you really mean end?”

He nodded. “Down the
tubes. Vanished, like surgery without anesthesia, like phlogiston,
the Sponteparists, leeches and bleeding, like—well, everything that
didn’t work.”

“
You sound a hell of a lot
like Hank.” I stopped. After a while I continued slowly, “Paul, how
come you know so much about the crazy stuff in there—” I poked a
finger at the thick folder still on his knees— “and, for that
matter, about Hank?”

He started to answer me in
his usual half-nonsensical way, saying, “Why, because I have not
one but two giant brains, one of which I keep in the
refrigerator...” But then he stopped, gazed at me for long seconds,
and said, “Mainly because it never came up before, Shell. But I’ll
tell you this now: Your Hank—my Henry—is the reason I became a
doctor. And the main reason I’m a good one.”

I blinked at him again,
surprised; no, more like astonished. “I’ll be damned,” I said.
“I’ve never heard you even mention Hernandez before.”

“
I’ve never mentioned Dr.
Ed Latterbee, either, but we play golf together every other
Thursday. I interned at the Foster-Wilson Hospital years ago with
Dr. Barry Midland, but there was never any reason to mention Barry
until you phoned from Arizona and asked me to recommend a medical
wizard there—for that brain-shocked client of yours,
remember?”

I did. The client was
named Romanelle, and he’d been virtually comatose following severe
electrical shock, little more than a vegetable. But in less than an
hour Dr. Midland had turned that vegetable back into Romanelle by
giving him an intravenous infusion of vitamin C and a bunch of
colloidal minerals, plus an injection of pentothal and anectine,
and later some under-the-tongue drops of homeopathic
acetylcholine.

“
I sure remember that
wizardry,” I said. “Doc Midland also took care of me for a couple
of weeks, you know, after I got crushed in an avalanche, or
whatever it was that happened to me. It’s mainly because of Barry
Midland—hey, he’s another one who didn’t mind if he wasn’t called
Doctor Doctor, he told me I could call him Doc.”

Paul nodded. “If it makes
you feel superior to your betters, you may call me Doc. And I will
address you as Private Invest.”

“
No, thanks, Doctor.
Anyway, it’s mainly because of Midland that I was able to accept
some of the quackish—apparently quackish—stuff Hank threw at me.
But Midland was also very unorthodox.

I stopped, squinting at
Paul. We’d never talked much about his profession, at least not the
day-to-day details of his practice. I knew he prescribed a lot of
what he’d referred to himself as “horribly expensive placebos for
Hollywood hypochondriacs,” and that among his patients were many
very powerful, and very rich, citizens of Hollywood, Beverly Hills,
and Bel Air. But he’d never discussed specifics of his work, his
treatments or medical philosophy. Maybe because I’d never asked,
since to me Paul was just a great guy, jovial drinking companion, a
good friend I enjoyed and had a lot of laughs with.

So I said, “Hank is so far
out, but you’re a regular physician, aren’t you? I mean—you’re an
allopath, right?”

“
Sure, it’s basically the
only kind of training available in medical schools now, at least
since the AMA squeezed out the homeopaths at the turn of the
century. But, since getting my license, I haven’t really practiced
allopathic medicine—don’t prescribe drugs, for example except in
extraordinary circumstances. But neither do I broadcast that fact,
or call attention to it. So I’m in pretty good standing with my
peers.”

“
You mentioned Hank, and
your becoming a doctor—because of him?”

“
It’s true.” Paul smiled.
“When I was still in High School, we moved from Glendale into the
city, rented a house on Mulberry Street. Our next-door neighbors
were Henry and Eleanora Hernandez—living then in the same house
that’s his office now.”

“
Paul, you’ve flabbergasted
me again. You mean, when I was talking to Hank in his office this
morning, I was next door to where you used to live?”

“
Right. I was sixteen then,
and by the time I graduated from high school I must have spent
hundreds of hours talking with Henry. Or vice-versa. He always had
a few minutes for me, often more, and usually told me some little
thing that didn’t make sense. Didn’t seem to, anyway. Not at first.
But little by little....”

Paul paused and then,
apparently out of left field, asked me, “Are you familiar with
Sturgeon’s Law, Shell?”

“
Not yet,” I said. “Who, or
what, is a Sturgeon?”

“
As everyone except you
illiterates knows, Theodore Sturgeon is a famous science-fiction
writer, damned good one. Also a philosopher at least the equal of
Murphy, for here in six memorable words is Sturgeon’s Law slightly
sanitized: ‘Ninety percent of everything is crud.’ Obviously,
if—”

I laughed, interrupting
him.

“
Don’t laugh!” he said,
frowning exaggeratedly. “your knee-jerk reaction to the disturbing
truth of Sturgeon’s Law is exactly like my youthful reaction to
those crazy things Henry used to say to me. I thought they were
crud at the time, but I finally understood he was gently
introducing me to some of the ten percent that isn’t.”

Paul lifted his snifter,
drained the brandy. “No question, Henry’s ten percent was tough for
a teenager to handle. It wasn’t what my teachers—or even my
parents—had been telling me, and it sure as hell wasn’t what the
medical profession was telling everybody. And that was the hardest
part for me to handle, because by then, certainly by the time I was
ready to enter college, I knew I was going into pre-med, that I
wanted to be a doctor. Which is what eventually happened, of
course, but I would have become a completely different kind of
doctor if Henry hadn’t told me so many things that didn’t make any
sense at all. Not at first.”