Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

Like me, he hadn’t been able to locate our friend. Like me, Sheriff had seen Cindy, Tom’s dog, wandering about in bad shape. Unlike me, he had shot the old helpless and dying dog. Tom’s old boat wasn’t at its mooring. We all knew that Tom hardly had any lobster traps left and made his living, or his drinking, rather, by working traps owned by the Sisters.

“The chair?” I asked, for I hadn’t been inside Tom’s trailer for a while. Sheriff had. Tom’s door was unlocked. Tom’s huge old recliner was still there, beer-fart perfumed, in front of the DVD player (Tom didn’t watch TV) with a Pat Metheny DVD in the slot.

“So the Sisters got a chair from the dump?”

“For sure,” Sheriff said. He had seen the dump guy, who said he was missing a discarded recliner that he sometimes used for napping.

Sheriff, as I expected, wasn’t going to be active on the Bleeding Chair mystery. Tom had already been reported as missing. The Sisters would know enough to sink his boat, quietly, at night. It’s a big ocean out there.

Coming home, I vaguely reported non-ascertainable assumptions to my live-in reporter. Elizabeth was working her computer. I glanced at the screen and she was scrutinizing Doc Shanigan’s Web site. Her pencil pointed at a paragraph that mentioned abortions.

“Pregnant?” I asked casually.

“Not today,” she said casually. She kissed me. “I thought you had yourself fixed.”

I had, long ago, after returning from Vietnam, not wanting to cause more babies to become maimed soldiers in the next war.

“Dr. Fastbuck Freddie Shanigan, MD,” Elizabeth said, sitting on the bed after dinner, her long bare legs twisted in the lotus position. “Your beloved doc. He makes good money, does he? His Web site looks appetizing. He performs abortions?”

I thought he did. Summertime sex carelessly enjoyed by the rich folks will lead to creative mishaps. Then the piper is called in and has to be paid.

“You sure?”

Me? I’m never sure of nothing.

Elizabeth kept asking and I kept answering somehow, avoiding specifics. Sure. Doctors can be big earners, big spenders. Shanigan made nothing on us, his mates, and little money on the other locals, but he reputedly made, or used to make, a fortune on the summer crowd in their vacation mansions on the ridge overlooking Bunkport Bay. The rich can afford to believe in, and pay for, hoohaha medicine. Doc learned how to do acupuncture, magic massages, studied homeopathic medications, used his “healing hands” and his “hypnotic” sea-blue eyes to heal hypochondria and psychosomatic symptoms. He also performed shamanism and sold instructions he lifted from the Internet and printed up nicely. Self-published gems, copied by the great Shaman himself. He also became a Rinko master. Rinko? I think that’s the term. I don’t know what Rinko masters do. Probably another variant on bring me your sick and give me your money. That’s all cash on the barrel-head trade, insurance doesn’t pay for any hullabaloo and way-out scary whatdoyoucallit.

Elizabeth was smiling. “I take it you don’t believe in alternative medicine.”

I said I wasn’t quite ready yet. Maybe I was waiting for the light.

“Is Doc in the cosmetic-surgery business, too?” Elizabeth asked. “Tucks and nips?”

Oh, sure.

“Working on the summer residents? But didn’t you say used to?”

Well... I did hear, from the help working for the folks on the hill, and visiting the Dolphin on their evening off, that Doc wasn’t so popular on the Ridge no more. He had been successfully sued for malpractice. Other doctors proved he installed wrong-size bosoms. Some of his treatments caused bad allergies with potentially lethal sideeffects.

The rich folks’ help is local. They have good ears and eyes. They like to gossip about their masters. Doc was out on his ear, the help told us, and there was another healer working the Ridge now: big man with a perfumed beard, a booming New Orleans jazz voice, a Vishnu and Kali MD, graduated out of a Greenland-based correspondence university. The celebrity Ridge dwellers started writing him fat checks, then the ordinary millionaires followed.

“So Shanigan isn’t doing so well now?”

Coming to think of Doc’s show of increasing wealth, I told her, it seemed he was doing even better. Who knows what his inventive genius was whispering in his ear? Was he playing the market? The new airplane (a super-fast Mooney, replacing the still-good Cessna), the new cabin cruiser (same thing there, the high-class boat he traded was only three years old), the refurbishing of his island buildings and gardens, wouldn’t that add up to a million here and there? As the Wall Street Journal says, if you go that way you’re soon talking real money.

Which he may have been borrowing. The banks were easy those days. And then maybe he paid them off, Elizabeth suggested.

“The man interests me,” Elizabeth insisted. “I could write an article if I can get some facts documented. Make some good money. Living at your expense is pleasant but I would like to help out.”