I thought about it as I drove away. Didn’t even stop to watch the baseball game on the field next to the hospital. And the more I thought about it the less I liked it.
I stopped at a drugstore for coffee and brought my notes up to date. Then I extracted a dime and a name and went to the phone in the back. The name was Walter Weston, John Pighee’s lawyer. His secretary seemed disinclined to commit him to seeing me if I came right over. But I gathered he was in and before I hung up I mentioned John Pighee’s name. According to Mrs. Thomas, they’d been buddies from college and I hoped that might carry some weight.
For whatever reason, I got to see Weston as soon as I walked into his firm’s premises, in a relatively fashionable part of the unfashionable near eastside. It was about a quarter to four.
“A private investigator,” he said when I identified myself “So?”
He was a very short and slight man, with straight black hair hanging in a shock over his forehead and almost into his eyes.
“I’ve been asked by Mrs. Dorothea Thomas to find out why—”
He interrupted, “Why she can’t visit her brother John. She’s still at that, is she?” He threw his head sideways to get the hair out of his eyes. It didn’t work.
“You make me feel a bit foolish,” I said. “As if it’s not a real problem. It’s serious enough for Mrs. Thomas.”
“She collared me about it once in the spring. She caught up with me as I was leaving Mrs. Pighee and she wouldn’t let me go. It started to rain, but she was very insistent.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know what the hell she’s bothered about. Poor John is in a coma; there’s nothing she could do for him.”
“She’s entitled to be interested,” I said. “I went to the Loftus Clinic this morning myself, and the reception I got was hardly reassuring.”
“Really?”
“A no-help receptionist and a resident bouncer. Why can’t they say, ‘Sorry, doctor’s orders’ and smile sympathetically as a consolation prize?”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“All right,” I said. “You were a friend of John Pighee’s?”
“I still am.”
“What exactly happened to him?”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Pighee was—is—a salesman. What was he doing in a research building, getting blown up?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” he said carefully, but not as if it concerned him.
“You were—are—his lawyer?”
“And his wife’s lawyer. And his milkman’s lawyer. Yes.”
“And though he’s in a violent accident, you don’t know exactly what happened to him?”
Weston took a deep breath and said, “You don’t know John.”
I couldn’t argue.
“John was”—he smiled, correcting himself—“is a man with a great deal of drive. Personal ambition. He studied chemistry in college. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“He had been at Loftus for five years. He took the job in the sales department because he couldn’t get a job on the science side and because he was more interested in getting on in life than in science.”
“But you handled the legal side of what happened?”
He hesitated, choosing careful words. “I certainly handled Mrs. Pighee’s side of the compensation arrangement.”
“Compensation? All done before you know whether the guy is going to live or die?”
“Compensation for injury, with a variety of contingency clauses.”
“But you negotiated for the Pighees with the insurance company?”
“No. I am very close to the limit of what I feel I can tell you without Mrs. Pighee’s expressed wish that I go farther, but I said that I ‘handled Mrs. Pighee’s side of the compensation arrangement.’No insurance company was involved.”
“No insurance? I don’t understand. There must have been some kind of insurance connection.”
“How Loftus deals, ultimately, with its liabilities is not my problem.”
“But that will mean that there was no insurance investigation.”
“As I say . . .”
“But you never saw the result of any insurance investigation?”
“Mr. Samson. The terms offered, the financial details on all contingencies have been accepted. They are certainly adequate. All things considered. But it is hardly up to me to take you through the relevant considerations. These matters are certainly none of your business.”
He cooled me a little bit. I said, “O.K., but can you tell me in words of two syllables or less why his sister can’t get a closer look at John Pighee if that’s her pleasure?”
“Because the right of access is completely in the hands of the Loftus Pharmaceutical Company, and because, presumably, their medical people think it’s better for John not to have visitors. In any case, Mrs. Pighee has agreed to leave all medical questions in their hands. So you must leave it to them. It’s not a legal question.” He made it clear that he was at the end of his willingness to talk to me.
“Only one more question,” I said. “You say you don’t know what John Pighee was doing when the accident happened. Is it possible that he became infected in the incident—presumably with something they were working on in the lab—and that he is still infectious and that is the reason he is not being allowed visitors?”
For the first time, Weston seemed to have to think slightly about something. “It’s conceivable,” he said coolly.
“But you’re not concerned?”
“You’ve had your one question,” he said. “But if it were so, it would be a pretty good reason not to allow visitors, wouldn’t it?”