The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) Read Online Free

one looked directly at them,
those little sort of glowing greenish bell-pepper somethings
dancing in what appeared to be an orange’s electrified aura.
Nonetheless, it pleased me.
    “ No Hazel,” I said stiffly.
“Not any more. And I am shocked that you have so little respect for
the recently deceased.” Then I turned and stalked down the hallway,
ignoring Hazel’s queries as to whether it had died giving birth to
those square pickles, and other dumb things.
    Then I unlocked my office
door, went inside, and said hello to the fish.
     
    * * * * * *
     
    The office of Dr. Henry
Hernandez was, to be charitable, modest.
    About the only times I’ve
gone to see doctors have been occasions when I was shot, or hit
unpleasantly upon the head, and thus have gone involuntarily and
with little interest in my surroundings. Even so, I have become
accustomed to offices and medical clinics in high-rent districts,
many of them resembling small Taj Mahals or high-tech temples. But
this, if I was not mistaken, appeared to be a house. A regular,
ordinary, residential-area house.
    That’s what it was. Except
for a four-foot-wide patch of recently-turned earth parallel to the
curb where I’d parked, in which brown soil several dozen little
plants of some kind were struggling to grow—and the small wooden
sign suspended from a post near the sidewalk, neatly painted with
the name HENRY HERNANDEZ, M.D., and below that the words
“Homeopathy and Preventive Holistic Medicine”—it was little
different from the other residences set back behind green lawns on
Mulberry Street.
    Hernandez must not be a
very successful medic, I thought, if he couldn’t afford an office
separate from his home. But as I looked at the sign, and beyond it
the freshly painted off-white house with neat green trim, something
stirred in memory. Hernandez. I’d heard that name before, or had
read about a “Dr. Hernandez,” several months ago, in connection
with some kind of medical brouhaha or scandal.
    And then I remembered
having had a brief conversation with my friend, Paul Anson, over
drinks in a Wilshire Boulevard saloon we both frequented, during
which dialogue he had mentioned something about charges of
“quackery” and “unauthorized medical treatments.” I didn’t recall
the details now, but I was fairly sure Paul had been referring to a
physician named Hernandez; and my fuzzy recollection was that Paul
had been on his side, supportive of whatever it was the doc had
been doing.
    If so, that was a pretty
good recommendation, because Paul is not only my very good friend,
who lives just down the hall from me, but a physician himself. I
seldom thought of him as Paul Anson, M.D., although the name was
well known and respected among Beverly Hills hypochondriacs and
Hollywood movie people worried about their post-adolescent acne or
less-than-cosmic-orgasms—and among his medical confreres as well. I
usually thought of him simply as my good buddy Paul, a long lanky
full-of-life guy able to drink even me under the table and at least
as enamored of the loveliness of lissome ladies as was
I.
    So, maybe I’d check with
Paul tonight—if Dr. Hernandez became my client. That question
wasn’t yet settled. After feeding the fish—more flashily colorful
guppies in the ten-gallon tank at my office—I’d phoned Hernandez
and learned he had more on his mind than a missing dog; Hazel had
been right, as usual. The doctor believed somebody had already
tried to kill him; but he hadn’t been able to convince the police,
or anybody else, of that alleged fact. So what I was really here
for was to determine if Hernandez was a sane and sensible guy with
a problem, or merely another paranoid weirdo picking up Martian
broadcasts through mercury-amalgam fillings in his
molars.
    I left my car at the curb,
walked past the doctor’s wooden sign and up a cement walk to the
front door. Two lines of black letters on a small brass plate above
the bell said “Please enter,” and