The Three Dollar Phoenix - Walt Sautter (best way to read e books .txt) 📗

name of his doctor though, it was Dr. Robert Alpert, phone 693-8818.
Ed dialed the number as soon as he hung up from the hospital call.
“Dr. Alpert’s office” a woman’s voice answered.
“Hello, this is Dr. Ed Bennett. Is Dr. Alpert available?”
“I’ll find out doctor” she replied.
After a brief moment, Ed was greeted pleasantly by “Hello, this is Dr. Alpert speaking.”
“Hello, this is Ed Bennett. Do you have a few minutes?”
“Sure, I’m calling about one of your patients, Al Druse.”
“I don’t have a patient by that name” Alpert responded instantaneously in an irritated manner. It was as if the name had suddenly changed light into darkness.
“He was hospitalized by you last week according to the business office at St. Anne’s,” said Ed.
There was a pause.
“Well, he’s not a patient of mine now” replied Alpert.
There was another even longer pause.
“I’ll have to check my records. I’m pretty busy right now. Give my girl your number and I’ll get back to you.”
“Can you give me any information about…”
Ed suddenly realized Alpert had put the phone on hold.
“Now what is your number Dr. Bennett?” the woman’s voice interrupted the silence.
Ed was puzzled as he mechanically recited his phone number. Why did Alpert go from Jekyll to Hyde when he heard Druse’s name? How could he not remember the name of a patient he had hospitalized only three days before? As he put down the phone, Ed stared into space. It was very strange to say the least. Ed didn’t remember the drive to work that morning. It was as if he was Captain Kirk rather than Ed Bennett and had been beamed to the clinic. During the trip, he was thinking about conversations he had just had with Alpert.
“Oh, it was a routine call about a patient and Alpert would call back and that would be that” he told himself in an unconvincing manner.
He was glad that this was Rita’s morning on the road, making house calls. It allowed him to answer the phone. Every time it rang he expected to hear Alpert’s voice. It never was. His curiosity rose with each ring.
He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was one o’clock now. She would be back any minute. Soon he heard the familiar sound of Sam’s Caddy. Seconds later they entered. It looked like beauty and the beast. Rita’s petite good looks stood in sharp contrast to those of Sam. Sam was a huge, bearded, black man with thick protruding scars on his face and upper arms. His mere presence cast an aura of intimidation.
Sam was Rita’s self appointed body guard and chauffeur. It was his way of paying a debt. Sam did more than just driving her around on her calls. He was also the reason that the clinic was the only operating store front in twenty blocks that didn’t need pull down window gratings or Fort Knox type security equipment. He had been Ed and Rita’s “main man” as he called himself, almost since they started.
He had come stumbling through the door about three years ago. It was early on a Saturday morning and Rita had only been there about ten minutes when suddenly she heard a thud on the front window. A man was leaning against the glass and sliding towards the door. As he moved across the pane a stripe of blood traced a zigzag line behind him.
He flung the door open and stood tottering its opening. She instinctively drew back at first, but then reached towards him and guided him to a cot at the rear of the room. A large red blotch covered the upper left shoulder and arm. He spoke weakly but in a demanding tone.
“Get my arm fixed and I’ll get goin’.”
Rita opened the shirt to examine the wound.
“I can’t just fix your arm. It’s a mess. You’ve got to go to a hospital for this” she said.
“I don’t want no hospital shit. This is a bullet in my arm, girl. Can’t you see? Hospitals mean cops and I don’t need no cops in my life” he said in a loud voice as he struggled vainly to get up. It was clear that he was not going to a hospital.
Rita must have worked on his arm for two hours.
Three days later Sam got up from that cot. Rita had stayed by him for the entire time. She never told him how close he’d come but somehow he must have known. He drilled a hole in the bullet and put it on a chain around his neck for a good luck charm. Sam never told anybody how he got shot that Friday night and no one ever dared ask. Ed thought he knew what had probably happened though. In the three years since the incident he had picked up bits and pieces from different people.
Sam was an enforcer for the drug trade or so was told. He made sure that the local dealers didn’t decide to keep some extra profits for themselves. The guy who shot him had some different ideas on free enterprise. Three months after Sam recovered, they found the guy dead of a heroin overdose. The cops never could figure out why he had injected himself through the throat with the needle.
Although Ed really never knew for sure if it was all true, things did add up. Sam dressed well, drove a year old Eldorado, always had a pocket full of money and never held a job. Rita said that every once in a while when they were making calls, he would drive to an out of the way spot, down off Feylinghesuen Ave. and meet a couple of white guys in a black Mercedes. They would talk for fifteen or twenty minutes while she waited in Sam’s car. He always returned with a box of expensive cigars and a smile. She often wondered if there were really cigars in the box. She had never seen him smoke one in all the time she knew him.
Ed didn’t care about Sam’s sordid business affairs. All he knew is that without him things would be much tougher than they were already. Sam had laid a protective veil over the clinic and its people. He saved its life as surely as Rita had saved his. Every mugger and drug addict in the city knew him and his reputation and he knew them. The word was out, don’t screw around with Sam’s people.
As the two of them stood in the doorway, the phone began to ring. Ed gestured a welcome as he quickly snatched the receiver from its cradle. It was Charlie, “I just called Al’s wife for the four hundredth time and I finally got her. She had been up at the hospital by Al. She said he was moved up there the day before yesterday and she tried to call me before she left but didn’t get an answer. She says she doesn’t understand what’s going on.”
“Is she home now?” asked Ed.
“Yeah, she had to come back because she couldn’t afford to stay in the motel any more. She said she’s going to go up on weekends if she can. She wants to talk to you” said Charlie.
“O.K., I’ll go over and talk to her. What’s her address?”
He hesitantly jotted it down as he hung up the phone.
Rita had removed her coat and was beginning to fill out one of the many forms which made up the daily routine. Sam was gone. He probably went to “collect his eggs” as he put it.
“That was Charlie” he said as he looked up.
“Let me tell you about what’s been happening.” He proceeded to explain about Charlie’s call the previous evening, the trip to St. Anne’s and the conversation with Alpert. Rita listened intently. She agreed that some of it did seem a bit peculiar but dismissed much of it as his over active imagination.
“Do you think you can hold down the fort here for a while?” asked Ed.
“I’m going to take a run over to see what Al’s wife can tell me. I’d like to see her in person. I think she might need some hand holding about now.”
“If it’ll make you feel better then you better go. I’ll be OK here” replied Rita.

Chapter II

It was an old neighborhood with well kept closely spaced two family houses shaded by an occasional tree sprouting from the sidewalk. Cars lined both sides of the street. One ninety two one ninety four, one ninety six. It was a yellow house with aluminum siding. A statue of the Virgin stood in the front surrounded by a bunch of plastic daisies. He found a parking spot, walked up the gray wooden steps to the door and rang the bell. In a few minutes the door opened. A short woman, with long brown hair and a round face greeted him in a heavy accent. He couldn’t quite decide if it was Spanish or Portuguese.
“Mrs. Druse?” she nodded.
“I’m Ed Bennett, a friend of Charlie Rode “ he said.
“Dr. Bennett?” she replied.
“Yes, Charlie and I tried to see Al at St. Anne’s last night.”
“He’s not there” she said as she turned and began to walk in to the house.
“Come on in” she shouted over she shoulder from the halfway down the hall. Ed followed her into the living room.
“Can I give you a drink?.”
His host hurriedly picked up several newspapers from the floor and attempted to straighten the bunched up slip cover on an adjacent easy chair. Then she disappeared into the kitchen shouting as she did so, “A soda, beer, ice tea?”
“Soda’s OK” he replied as he sat down on the sofa. He looked around the room while he waited. His eve caught several pictures, in small frames on the mantle.
They looked like children’s school pictures and family snapshots. There was one that looked like a New Year’s Eve picture of Al and his wife. Well, he assumed it was Al anyway. They were wearing hats and a banner in the background read “Welcome 1980”
Al’s wife returned carrying a tray with two glasses of soda.
“My name’s Angie” she said as she put down the tray.
“Tell me what happened to Al, Angie” he said.
Angie began to explain the events of the past several weeks. She spoke in a staccato like fashion. Her speech was punctuated by pauses during which she searched for the right words to be used in the next phrase.
“Al” she began, “He didn’t feel too good the week before last.”
She told of his beginning to feel fatigued and nauseous Evidently, he had been feeling poorly on and off for some time. It finally came to a point where she persuaded him to see a doctor.
“We went to Dr. Alpert last week. He took a lot of tests, blood and stuff.”
She continued, “Last week he really started to get bad, sick almost every day, so I called the doctor again and he put him in the hospital.”
“Did the doctor say what was wrong with him?” asked Ed.
“He said he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know” she replied.
“What happened at the hospital?”
“Al was there for about three days. Then one day Dr. Alpert called me. He said that he should be moved to a hospital in upstate New York. He said he knew what was wrong