Blunt Darts by Jeremiah Healy Read Free Book Online Page A

center-divider parking spaces, crossed the street, and entered the foyer.
    I found Stein’s door on the fourth floor and opened it. The foyer below and the hallway above were nondescript, but the psychiatrist’s waiting room was elaborately furnished with a comfortable-looking sofa and four easy chairs arranged around a midsized, muted rug. The walls were a soft beige, with non-strident landscapes and seascapes. If Dr. Stein intended his patients’ surroundings to be soothing, his intention was successfully realized.
    As I closed the door, I heard a low-toned bong. There was no receptionist, and indeed no desk nor interior window for one. I was halfway to the inner-office door when it opened.
    “Yes?” said a tallish, slim man about forty. His initial smile of greeting faded as he failed to place me. He had a beard that was redder than the moplike, sand-colored hair on his head.
    “Dr. Stein?” I said.
    “Yes.”
    “I’m John Cuddy. I believe Mrs. Kinnington called you?”
    “Kinnington? She may have. I’ve been in group most of the morning. Kinnington?”
    “I have a letter from her.” I lifted it from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. He looked down at it.
    “Yes, well …” Stein seemed only to skim the letter, but he nevertheless kept it in his hand when he looked back up. “I’ll have to check my service. I never take calls when I’m in group. In another fifteen minutes or so I can see you. Please sit down.”
    Stein withdrew into the inner office and closed the door. I sat down and scanned his eclectic magazine collection. I flipped through two old New Yorker magazines (which I read only for the cartoons) and was halfway through my third Field and Stream article (in their largemouth-bass annual issue) when the inner door reopened and a string of two men and three women of varying ages filed out. From the distrustful looks they passingly gave me, I think the waiting room’s soothing qualities were pretty much wasted on them.
    Stein was last out. He smiled at me and beckoned. I followed him in. Seating himself in a highback chair behind his desk, he bade me sit as well, so I dragged a visitor’s lowback up to the front of the desk.
    “I am sorry about disturbing you before,” I said.
    Stein waved me off as he sank, somewhat relieved, into his desk chair. “Not at all, not at all. In fact, despite what they say in clinic, I think an occasional interruption may be good for a group.” He shot me a mischievous smile. “It’s certainly good for me.”
    I smiled back. He reached for the telephone and hit one button. “Checking my service,” he said to me as an aside.
    Stein spoke with the service for a while, taking down several quick notes on a pad. He said, “She did?” several times, then said thank you and hung up.
    “Well,” he said to me, “it seems your Mrs. Kinnington was quite insistent on reaching me. Virtually threatened my service with legal action if she were not put through.”
    “She’s a very determined woman. And quite concerned about Stephen.”
    “Stephen, Stephen, yes, yes,” Stein said as he looked at Mrs. Kinnington’s letter again, and then rose and crossed to one of six file cabinets in the room. He pulled back a drawer, retrieved a file, and, opening it, came back to his seat.
    Turning the pages of the file, Stein spoke to me. “Mrs. Kinnington says in her note only that Stephen is missing. According to the file here and my recollection as well, Stephen’s father was the family member most involved with Stephen’s … ah, stay at Willow Wood.”
    I chose my words carefully. “Mrs. Kinnington was out of the country at the time. Both she and the judge are doing everything possible to locate him. You are just one link, but perhaps an important one, in that chain.”
    “Yes, yes, of course.” Whatever momentary reticence he had had now seemed to dissolve. “Well then, how can I help you?”
    I breathed an inner sigh of relief and plunged on. “We don’t