The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,18
bad health and has to have absolute rest and quiet for a long time. Her fiancé was killed in an automobile crash this spring, and she suffered a nervous breakdown which finally turned into this rare type of anemia. She’s been given up by specialists all over the United States and Europe, so in desperation I finally turned my New York practice over to my assistants and took on the case myself. In all medical history there’ve been only three cases of it, and it’s supposed to be incurable, but it just happened I’d once read an obscure article by Von Hofbrau, the Austrian anemia specialist—”
The man stopped and shook his head. “But there’s no use bothering you with all this medical stuff. The point is that Miss Harrington has to have perfect seclusion, and lots of fresh leafy vegetables and eggs, and outdoor air, and she can’t be disturbed by her family and reporters all the time. So if you think your farm will fit the bill—”
“Oh, sure,” Pop says. “A farm is just what you want. We got slathers of fresh vegetables and eggs, and absolute quiet. Now as to the price—”
Dr Severance waved a hand. “Anything. Anything within reason.”
Pop looked at his clothes and then at the car and the trailer. “Say fif—I mean sixty dollars a month?”
“Quite all right,” Dr Severance says. He Patted his pocket. “Wait’ll I get another pack of cigarettes out of the car.”
He got up and walked around in front of the trailer.
Pop shook his head kind of sad and looked at me. “That’s the hell of it,” he says. “You get out of touch for even a week and you begin to lose the knack and can’t tell within fifty dollars what a client’ll go for.”
Dr Severance came back opening a package of cigarettes.
“You understand, of course,” Pop says, “that’s per head. Since there’s two of you it’ll be a hundred and twenty.”
Dr Severance looked at Pop’s levis and straw sombrero again and says, “Hmmm.” Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Well, that’s all right. Provided the place is what you say it is.”
Pop started to say something, and then just stopped with his mouth hanging open.
The door of the trailer had opened, and a girl was standing in the doorway looked out at us. She was tall and dark-haired, with bright red lips and blue eyes, and she didn’t have anything on but a sort of romper affair which was just a pair of short white pants and this kind of halter thing around her bosom. The pants didn’t cover hardly any of her long legs.
Her hair was tousled a little, like she’d just got up, and she had a long cigarette in her hand. She sure was pretty.
She had a big bosom, as big as a Welfare lady’s, but she was a lot younger, of course.
Somehow she made you think of a real, real ripe peach, the way she filled up those little pants and that bosom thing and stuck out of ‘em all pink and smooth in every direction.
Pop said, “Ho-ly hell,” real low, like he was talking to hisself.
She looked at all of us, and said to Dr Severance, “What’s all this convention of hay-shakers?”
Dr Severance nodded towards her. “My niece, Miss Harrington,” he says. “I’d like you to meet Mr.-uh—”
Pop kind of shook himself, like he was coming out of a trance. “Oh,” he says, “Noonan, lady. Sam Noonan.”
Miss Harrington waved the cigarette at him. “Hi, dad,” she says. “Reel in your tongue. You’re getting your shirt wet.”
Five
Dr Severance’s eyes was colder than ever. “Pamela,” he says, “I thought I told you to stay inside the trailer. Remember your anemia.” “Relax,” Miss Harrington says. “It’s too damn hot in there.”
She sat down in the doorway and stretched out her legs. She took a puff on her cigarette looked at her legs, and then at Pop. “What’s the matter, Zeke? Am I hurt somewhere?”
“Oh,” Pop says, “Uh—no. I just thought for a minute your face was kind of familiar.”
“How would you know?” Miss Harrington asked.
“I was sure sorry to hear about your anemia,” Pop says.
“That’s sweet of you.”
Dr Severance butted in. “Miss Harrington’s anemia is the very worst kind. It doesn’t show. That’s what makes it so hard to diagnose and cure. Just looking at her you wouldn’t think she had anything, would you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” Pop says.
“Look,” Miss Harrington says to the doctor, “what’s with this Hiram type, anyway? We going to adopt him, or