Doc - Mary Doria Russell [100]
For a time, Wyatt stood silently, watching Bat. “Thanks, Doc,” he said before walking on. “I’ll stop by after work, like you said.”
Kate came outside, her scowl aimed at Wyatt’s broad back. “I don’t trust him,” she said. She was making a cigarette: licking the edge of the tissue paper, sealing the tobacco in. “He don’t drink. He goes to church! Never trust a lawman who goes to church.”
“Why, Miss Kate, you are philosophical this evenin’.”
Doc scratched a match against the rough wood of a hitching rail and lit her cigarette. Kate inhaled deeply and blew out a plume of smoke.
“You shouldn’t trust him neither, Doc. He’s no good.”
“I believe you have misjudged the gentleman, but I shall certainly take your opinion under consideration.”
“Buy me a drink, Doc. I need a drink.”
“My pleasure, darlin’.”
She took the cigarette out of her mouth and reached up, placing it between Doc’s lips, her eyes on his, with the flat, challenging stare he was coming to appreciate. He drew in carefully, but still choked slightly on the smoke.
“Where’s the money tonight?” he asked.
“The Saratoga,” she said as they strolled down Front, arm in arm, the boardwalk hollow-sounding beneath their feet. “You feeling lucky, Doc?”
“Always, darlin’, when you are at my side.”
He rarely heard from Martha Anne these days, and Georgia was very far away.
Reform, he thought, just might be overrated.
“So Raskolnikoff was planning to kill that old lady all along?” Morgan asked. “He planned it up ahead of time, like it was a bank robbery?”
“That is my readin’ of the affair, yes,” Doc said.
Morgan shook his head. In his experience, killings were the result of momentary fury, or drunken foolishness, or plain clumsiness even. Thinking a murder through was so cold-blooded … “Must be like hanging a man,” he mused. “That’s awful.”
Doc was measuring the gap where Wyatt’s front teeth would have been, if Morgan had done as he was told and picked those berries instead of sneaking up to the barn with a book.
“That’s all I need from you, Wyatt,” Doc said after he wrote the numbers down and made some notes to himself. “I’ll get the rest from Morgan.”
“And you think somebody planned up killing Johnnie like that?” Morgan asked, swapping places with his brother in Doc’s barber chair.
“Well, now, it might not have been so thought out. More a matter of a sore loser decidin’ to get his money back, I imagine.”
“Get him into the barn for some reason, then bash him,” Wyatt said.
“Set fire to the barn,” Morg said. “Make it look like an accident.”
“That is my guess,” Doc confirmed. “Open.”
For a while, Doc poked around, measuring things. When he had what he needed, he sat at the desk and began to sketch Morg’s front teeth. The drawing was remarkable, down to tiny little bumps along the bottom edge of the teeth that Morgan had never noticed.
“Mamelons,” Doc told him. “From the Greek: small rounded mounds. Same root as ‘mammary,’ ” he said, cupping his hands in front of his chest.
Morgan laughed. Then it struck him. “Is that where ‘mamma’ comes from?”
“Or vice versa … The dental structures wear to a straight edge as you age. Yours are still visible. I expect Wyatt’s would be as well. I am requestin’ replacements that match.”
Wyatt asked, “When can we get started?”
“Gettin’ eager? I can begin the repair work tomorrow.” Doc added the diagram to an envelope addressed to Robert Holliday, D.D.S., and handed it to Morgan. “Mail this for me, son.”
Morg got a kick out of how Doc called him son even though Morg was actually a few months older.
“Heat taking the starch out of you, old man?” Morg asked him.
“Morgan, I am flourishin’,” Doc said, but the dentist looked pasty this morning. It was pretty close in the office, and Doc went to stand by the window, leaning his bony hips against the sill and resting one hand high on the frame. “How does that horse of yours run in this weather, Wyatt?”
The Fourth of July race was coming up. Everybody was handicapping the entries.
“He’ll do,” Wyatt said. “Nothing seems to bother Dick.”
Morgan snickered.
“Always