Free The Saint Sees It Through by Leslie Charteris

professional standpoint, and it’s my job to find out what
their patients think of. them.”
    “Why pick on me?”
    “You’re a patient of Dr.
Zellermann’s?”.
    “Well—uh, yes.”
    The Saint filed her hesitation away for future
reference.
    “How do you like him?” he asked.
    “He’s rather colossal, in a nauseating
way.”
    “So? I should think a feeling of that
sort would hamper the —er—rapport between doctor and patient.”
    “Oh, it does,” she said, “no
end. He wishes I’d like him. A phony, he.”
    “Really ? I thought he was quite reputable.”
    “What is reputable?” Mrs. Meldon
countered. “Is it what empty-headed bitches say, who are suckers for a patriarchal look and soft hands? Is it what some jerk says—‘Five
hundred dollars I paid, for a single interview’—after he’s stung? He has an M.D., so what? I know an abortionist who has
one.”
    “It helps,” said the Saint.
    “What do you want to know about
him?” Mrs. Meldon asked. “When he was three years old in
Vienna, a butcher slapped his hands because he reached for a sausage. As a
result he puts his nurse in a blue smock. He won’t have a white uni form
around him. He doesn’t know this, of course. He has no idea that the
butcher’s white apron caused a psychic trauma. He says he insists on
blue uniforms because they gladden the eye.”
    “He begins to sound like not our kind of man,” the Saint
put in.
    “Oh, go ahead and pick him,” said
the Egyptian princess. “Who the hell cares? He wouldn’t be the
first mass of psychic trauma picked as an outstanding jerk. No inhibitions, says he. It’s a little tough on somebody who’s put
inhibitions by the board lo these
many moons to go to him as a patient. Shooting fish down a barrel, I calls it.
Another drink? Of course. Mix it yourself.”
    She crossed her lovely legs in such a
fashion that a good por tion of thigh was visible. She didn’t bother
to pull down her dress. She seemed tired of the discussion, even a trifle
embit tered, and a
pattern began to form in the Saint’s mind. He put early conclusions aside in the interest of conviviality and mixed drinks.
    “Tell me,” he said, “how you
expect to get psychiatric help from a man you hold in such disregard?”
    She straightened up.
    “Disregard? Nothing of the sort. He knows
the patter, he has the desk-side manner. He can make you tell things
about yourself you wouldn’t tell yourself. Maybe it helps, I don’t know. Yes, I
must admit it does. It helped me to understand myself, whatever small
consolation that may be. I don’t want to under stand myself. But
Gerry insisted. He wants to keep up with things. Like mink
coats on dogs.”
    “You would say, then, that your
relations with Dr. Zellermann have been pleasant?”
    She looked at him steadily as he handed her
a drink. “Pleasant? What’s that? Sometimes you get caught up in an
emotion. Emotion is a driving power you can’t ignore. When you get caught up in it, whatever you do seems pleasant at the time. Even if you
curse yourself afterwards, and even if you don’t dare talk about it.”
    “Do you mean, then, he isn’t
ethical?”
    She twisted a smile.
    “What’s ethical? Is being human
ethical? You’re born human, you know. You can’t help certain impulses.
See Freud. Or Krafft-Ebing. To err is human.”
    “And he errs?”
    “Of course he does. Even if he is a
so-called witch doctor of the mind. Even if he has studied Adler and Brill and
Jung and Jones. You don’t change a character. All the things that
went into making him what he is are unalterable. They’ve happened. Maybe some
of his professors, or fellow psychiatrists, have helped him to evaluate
those factors in their proper perspective, but he’s still homo sapiens and
subject to the ills they’re heir to.”
    The Saint drank his drink, set the empty glass
on the elabo rate portable bar.
    “We’ve taken enough of your time. Thanks
for being so helpful.”
    Mrs. Meldon rose to