Thinner(31)

'Dunc's had a touch of the flu,' he said in answer to Billy's question - the response had the canned feel of one that has been given many times. 'He hasn't been in for the last couple of days.'

'Oh,' Billy said. 'The flu.'

'That's right,' Foxworth said, and his eyes dared Billy to make something of it.

The receptionist told Billy that Dr Houston was with a patient.

'It's urgent. Please tell him I only need a word or two with him.'

It would have been easier in person, but Halleck hadn't wanted to drive all the way across town. As a result, he was sitting in a telephone booth (an act he wouldn't have been able to manage not long ago) across the street from the police station. At last Houston came on the line.

His voice was cool, distant, more than a bit irritated. Halleck, who was either getting very good at reading subtexts or becoming very paranoid indeed, heard a clear message in that cool tone: You're not my patient anymore, Billy. I smell some irreversible degeneration in you that makes me very, very nervous. Give me something I can diagnose and prescribe for, that's all I ask. If you can't give me that, there's really no basis for commerce between us. We played some pretty good golf together, but I don't think either of us would say we were ever friends. I've got a Sony beeper, $200,000 worth of diagnostic equipment, and a selection of drugs to call on so wide that ... well, if my computer printed them all out, the sheet would stretch from the front doors of the country club all the way down to the intersection of Park Lane and Lantern Drive. With all that going for me, I feel smart. I feel useful. Then you come along and make me look like a seventeenth-century doctor with a bottle of leeches for high blood pressure and a trepanning chisel for headaches. And I don't like to feel that way, big Bill. Not at all. Nothing toot-sweet about that. So get lost. I wash my hands of you. I'll come and see you in your coffin ... unless, of course, my beeper beeps and I have to leave.

'Modern medicine,' Billy muttered.

'What, Billy? You'll have to speak up. I don't want to give you short shrift, but my P.A. called in sick and I'm going out of my skull this morning.'

'Just a single question, Mike,' Billy said. 'What's wrong with Duncan Hopley?'

Utter silence from the other end for almost ten seconds. Then: 'What makes you think anything is?'

'He's not at the station. Rand Foxworth says he has the flu, but Rand Foxworth lies like old people f**k.'

There was another long pause. 'As a lawyer, Billy, I shouldn't have to tell you that you're asking for privileged information. I could get my ass in a sling.'

'If somebody tumbles to what's in that little bottle you keep in your desk, your ass could be in a sling, too. A sling so high it would give a trapeze artist acrophobia.'

More silence. When Houston spoke again, his voice was stiff with anger ... and there was an undercurrent of fear. 'Is that a threat?'

'No,' Billy said wearily. 'Just don't go all prissy on me, Mike. Tell me what's wrong with Hopley and that'll be the end of it.'

-'Why do you want to know?'

'Oh, for Christ's sake. You're living proof that a man can be just as dense as he wants to be, do you know that, Mike?'

'I don't have the slightest idea what

'You've seen three very strange illnesses in Fairview over the last month. You didn't make any connection among them. In a way, that's understandable enough; they were all different in their specifics. On the other hand, they were all similar in the very fact of their strangeness. I have to wonder if another doctor - one who hadn't discovered the pleasure of plugging fifty dollars' worth of cocaine up his pump every day, for instance * might not have made the connection in spite of the diverse symptoms.'

'Now, wait just a goddamn minute!'

'No, I won't. You asked why I wanted to know, and by God, I am going to tell you. I'm losing weight steadily - I go on losing weight even if I stuff eight thousand calories a day down my throat. Cary Rossington has gotten some bizarre skin disease. His wife says he's turning into a

sideshow freak. He's gone to the Mayo Clinic. Now, I want to know what's wrong with Duncan Hopley, and secondarily' I want to know if you've had any other inexplicable cases.'

'Billy, it's not like that at all. You sound like you've got some crazy idea or other. I don't know what it is -'

'No, and that's all right. But I want an answer. If I don't get it from you, I'll get it some other way.'

'Hang on one second. If we're going to talk about this, I want to go into the study. It's a little more private there.'

'Fine.'

There was a click as Houston put Billy on hold. He sat in the phone booth, sweating, wondering if this was Houston's way of ditching him. Then there was another click.

'You still there, Billy?'

'Yes.'

'Okay,' Houston said, the note of disappointment in his voice both unmistakable and somehow comic. Houston sighed. 'Duncan Hopley has got a case of runaway acne.'

Billy got to his feet and opened the door of the phone booth. Suddenly it was too hot in there. 'Acne!'

'Pimples. Blackheads. Whiteheads. That's all. You happy?'.

'Anyone else?'

'No. And, Billy, I don't exactly consider pimples off the-wall. You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there, but it's not like that. Dunc Hopley has got a temporary glandular imbalance, that's all. And it's not exactly a new thing with him, either. He has a history of skin problems going back to the seventh grade.'