Trace (Trace 1) by Warren Murphy Page A

life. No rest. No place to put my head. Until I finally confess.”
    “Confession’s good for the soul,” Trace said. “’Fess up.”
    “I’ve got nothing to confess.”
    “You mean I’ve wasted this whole trip?” Trace said.
    “Have you talked to my lawyer yet?”
    “No, who’s he?”
    “She. Jeannie Callahan. She’s got an office in town.”
    “No,” Trace said. “I’ll talk to her next if you want. I just wanted to get a sense of what you were like.”
    “Just exactly what do you do?”
    “Sometimes I check out claims for good old Gone Fishing.”
    “Gone fishing?”
    “Garrison Fidelity,” Trace explained. “We heard about the suit the Plessers are filing, and since it all looks like it’s going to wind up in court, they wanted me to check it out and find out what’s going on. Nothing sinister. No accusations. Do you mind if I turn down this damned screaming?”
    “No, go ahead. You don’t like Gilbert and Sullivan?”
    “They’re to music what hockey is to sports,” Trace said. He turned the tape player down to a faint hum.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You ever watch a hockey game? I used to watch them. I watched them for a while and then I realized I never saw a goal being scored. Then I used to watch them on the TV news, and I never saw a goal. Even on the instant replays, the slo-mo, I still couldn’t see the goal, it was all just too fast. Gilbert and Sullivan are like that. I’ve never heard one of their lyrics. It’s just an exercise with words, to see how many words you can fit into four beats. It’s a trick, like a hockey goal. Ya-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. That’s not music; it’s articulated noise. I hate Gilbert and Sullivan. You were going to tell me what’s going on.”
    “What’s going on is this—You mind if I smoke?” Dr. Matteson said.
    “It’s your office. I don’t care if you tap-dance on the desk,” Trace said.
    “I know it’s my office, but a lot of people don’t like smoking nowadays. I don’t smoke but once in a while, it’s good.”
    “If people don’t like it, let them stand outside your window and yell in to you,” Trace said.
    “You’ve got a good attitude on life,” Matteson said. He lit a cigarette and took a deep inhalation and his face glowed. Trace wondered if he himself ever looked that content and happy. He lit a cigarette too and coughed.
    “I was saying, what happened is this. Frederick Plesser came into the hospital. He was suffering from general atherosclerosis that—”
    “Hardening of the arteries,” Trace said.
    “Right. Call it that. It was reducing the blood supply to his brain and that gives off symptoms like senility. At least, that’s the theory we work under. We were treating him with heavy oxygen therapy. That’s what we do here. We try to saturate the brain with oxygen to try to minimize, maybe even reverse, any damage that might have been done. Also we put our patients on a good stiff exercise program so their heart and blood system improve and they can start pushing oxygen to the brain better by themselves.”
    Trace nodded.
    “Anyway, Plesser was making really good progress. Did I tell you he was a nice man?”
    “No.”
    “He was a sweet guy. He helped out a lot around the hospital, helping other patients, talking to them. A nice man. I thought he could probably go home and continue his therapy there. We had him pretty well straightened out. But he didn’t want to go home.”
    “Did he say why?” Trace asked.
    “Kind of.”
    “Why was that?”
    “He said that he didn’t have any fun at home and he liked being here. It was still covered by his hospitalization insurance and his company, so I let him stay. And, er, Tracy, right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It wasn’t like I was gouging Blue Cross or anything for extra money for the hospital. The simple fact is that any other hospital in the world might have kept him in forever. I had good-enough medical reasons for letting him stay.”
    “I