Death of a Tall Man Read Free

and spread a fresh one. She switched the light on and switched it off again; the big bulbs burned out quickly. She went on, satisfied, to Room 5, entering it without reentering the corridor outside. She repeated her operations there, and in the next four rooms. Room 1, like the others, had two doors—one into the corridor, and the other leading directly into a large private office. Grace did not enter the office from Room 1. She went instead into the corridor and back along it to her desk. She let down the leaf and moved a memo pad, a file of patients’ cards and two pencils onto it. She had surveyed her country and all was well. It was nine twenty-five and she had five minutes. She went back down the transverse hall, which also ended in a door. That door was a second way into the private office. At the right there was a doorway with no door in it. She turned through that and stood in it, and now she was standing where Daniel Gordon had stood twenty minutes earlier. She looked at Deborah Brooks and smiled. People usually smiled when they looked at Deborah; in a world so filled with unsatisfying objects, and unsatisfying human objects in particular, she provided encouragement.
    â€œHello, baby,” Grace said. “How’s the business girl?”
    The business girl was sorting mail into two piles. She looked up. When she spoke her voice was unanimated. She said, “Hello, Grace.”
    â€œYou got a little burn,” Grace told her. “Too much weekend, baby?”
    Deborah shook her head.
    â€œGrace,” she said, “did you see Dan?”

    Floor Plan of Dr. Andrew Gordon’s Office
    â€œNo,” Grace said. “I didn’t see Dan.”
    â€œHe was just here,” Deborah told her. “He wanted to—to talk to his father. About us. He’s—he’s upset.”
    â€œLook, baby,” Grace said. “Of course he’s upset. It’s nothing to worry about. It won’t last.”
    The girl at the desk shook her head. She said she didn’t mean that. It was more than that.
    â€œHe wants to have it out,” she said. “I told him he couldn’t—not now, anyway. I told him there couldn’t be a worse time. I don’t know whether he paid any attention to what I said. Is—is he in the office?”
    Her voice was anxious.
    Grace Spencer was tall and slender and even in her unpadded white uniform, her shoulders were square. She raised her square shoulders, lowered them. She turned and disappeared for a moment and came back.
    â€œHe’s not in the office,” she said. “And you’d better dust the desk, baby. Or shall I?”
    â€œThen he went,” Deborah said. “I’m glad. He’s—he’s so strange, Grace. Sometimes I feel—”
    She shouldn’t, Grace Spencer told her. Grant that Dan Gordon was strange. But remember it was temporary; remember there was cause.
    â€œJust ride it, baby,” Grace told her. “It’ll all come out in the wash.”
    Grace Spencer grinned as she spoke; it was a pleasant, wide-mouthed grin in a pleasant, rather narrow face. It was not the face that Grace would have chosen, but, after thirty-two years, she was used to it. She looked like Hepburn, only not enough like Hepburn, as she now and then explained. It was the way things were; it worried her only occasionally. There was nothing in her face to show that this was one of the times it was worrying her a little; that it had been worrying her a little for, now, almost a year. Grace grinned at Deborah and, as she grinned, pushed at her short, curling, sandy hair, changing its appearance not at all. Deb smiled at her.
    â€œI know,” Deb said. “But—”
    She did not finish because a door at the far end of the long waiting room opened and Dr. Andrew Gordon came in. He came in through the “front door,” which was unusual. Almost never did any of them use the front door; that