Fugitive Nights by Joseph Wambaugh Read Free Book Online Page A

bill for shooting my knee with a needle like a railroad spike. And he tells me he has to charge me a hundred ’n fifty bucks for asking, ‘Does it hurt?’ Far as I’m concerned, my doctor’s just a lawyer with a stethoscope.”
    â€œShe thinks maybe Doctor Blanchard was ordered by Clive Devon to keep mum about the semen sample.”
    â€œSo whaddaya want me to do?”
    â€œI was thinking you might go there as a patient and say that you and your wife’re considering in vitro fertilization and you need to have your sperm checked out. You could consult with him and casually mention that an acquaintance of yours is a patient. You could go with the flow and see where the conversation leads.”
    â€œWhat if he wants the sample?”
    â€œYou give it to him. That’s one of the reasons I need a man helping me with this one.”
    â€œForget it! I’m not gonna lay there and give up my little pollywogs to some stranger! Besides, it’s humiliating!”
    â€œDon’t be stupid.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t work anyway. My second and last-ever wife insisted I get a vasectomy. My little swimmers’re in dry dock. One look under a microscope and he’d wonder what’s up.”
    â€œOkay, I guess I can still use you on a surveillance. I’ve got a couple other cases going or I’d do it myself. How are you at surveillance?”
    â€œI can cope.”
    â€œTomorrow morning,” she said. “Mrs. Devon said her husband leaves the house at seven A.M. and doesn’t come back till four-thirty. He wears hiking boots and takes a canteen. When she goes to L.A. he doesn’t seem to go on these hikes. So maybe he can’t stand his wife and gets the hell out when she’s at the Palm Springs house.”
    â€œSeven A.M. !”
    â€œHey, you don’t make a thousand bucks tax-free by staying in bed unless you’re working at one of those chicken ranches in Nevada.”
    â€œWhat if he really goes hiking? You don’t expect me to tail him out on the open desert without being spotted?”
    â€œJust stay with his car and wait,” she said. “I’ve got some good binoculars I’ll let you use. Never let the car get out of sight till he goes home.”
    â€œHow about after momma goes back to L.A.?”
    â€œSame thing. We’ll tail him in the daylight hours and in the evening if he goes out. When he goes nighty-night we go home.”
    â€œWhat if he goes out later in the night?”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe to a hot little sperm receptacle for another donation. How do you know he can’t get it up? Maybe with his wife he’s limp, but with his private squeeze he’s Rasputin.”
    â€œWhy the need for a sperm bank then?”
    â€œWhy not? Maybe his friend can’t conceive in the normal way. Maybe they decided that test-tubing’s the only way to go.”
    â€œLet’s try it for a few days and see how it goes, okay?”
    â€œIf I wasn’t totally bankrupt I wouldn’t touch this crap,” he said. “That’ll teach me to let Charles Keating do my income tax.”
    â€œDo you go around just pissing off people on purpose? Are you tough enough for that?”
    â€œYeah, I’m a tough guy,” he said. “Except on Tuesdays when I have to get my legs waxed. Is this Tuesday, by the way?”
    Breda Burrows’ office consisted of a pair of rooms on the second floor of a commercial building just off Indian Avenue. The other tenants included a children’s photographer, a C.P.A., an optometrist, and an office for the landlord, who used the digs as a place to clip coupons and get away from his wife, who’d become as touchy as cholla cactus after turning seventy.
    The anteroom of Breda’s office was really a cubbyhole with a couple of chairs, a small table, and a lamp, all bought at a second-hand store. Her inner office