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know?”
    “I do.”
    “Personally?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m a friend of Art Lee.”
    “They got him on this? I heard that, but I didn’t believe it. I always thought Lee was too smart—”
    “Lew, what happened last night?”
    Carr sighed. “Christ, it’s a mess. A real stinking hell of a mess. They blew it in outpatient.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I can’t talk about this now,” Carr said. “You’d better come over and see me.”
    “All right,” I said. “Where is the body now? Do your people have it?”
    “No, it’s gone to the City.”
    “Have they performed the post yet?”
    “I haven’t any idea.”
    “O.K.,” I said. “I’ll stop by in a few hours. Any chance of getting her chart?”
    “I doubt it,” Carr said. “The old man has it now.”
    “Can’t spring it free?”
    “I doubt it,” he said.
    “O.K.,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”
    I hung up, put in another dime, and called the morgue at the City. The secretary confirmed that they had received the body. The secretary, Alice, was a hypothyroid; she had a voice as if she had swallowed a bass fiddle.
    “Done the post yet?” I said.
    “They’re just starting.”
    “Will they hold it? I’d like to be there.”
    “I don’t think it’s possible,” Alice said, in her rumbling voice. “We have an eager beaver from the Mem.”
    She advised me to hurry down. I said I would.
    1 This happens a lot in medicine. For example, a patient presents with fever, leukocytosis—increased numbers of white cells—and pain in the right-lower quadrant of the abdomen. The obvious diagnosis is appendicitis. The surgeon may perform an appendectomy only to find that the appendix is normal. But he is vindicated, so long as he is not overhasty, because the evidence is consistent with appendicitis, and delay may be fatal.

FIVE
    I T IS WIDELY BELIEVED IN BOSTON that the best medical care in the world is found here. It is so universally acknowledged among the citizens of the city that there is hardly any debate.
    The best hospital in Boston is, however, a question subject to hot and passionate debate. There are three major contenders: the General, the Brigham, and the Mem. Defenders of the Mem will tell you that the General is too large and the Brigham too small; and the General is too coldly clinical and the Brigham too coldly scientific; that the General neglects surgery at the expense of medicine and the Brigham the reverse. And finally you will be told solemnly that the house staffs of the General and the Brigham are simply inferior in training and intelligence to those of the Mem.
    But on anybody’s list of hospitals, the Boston City comes near the bottom. I drove toward it, passing the Prudential Center, the proudest monument to what the politicians call the New Boston. It is a vast complex of skyscrapers, hotels, shops, and plazas, with lots of fountains and wasted space, giving it a modern look. It stands within a few minutes’ lustful walk of the red-light district, which is neither modern nor new, but like the Prudential Center, functional in its way.
    The red-light district lies on the outskirts of the Negro slums of Roxbury, as does the Boston City. I bounced along from one pothole to another and thought that I was far from Randall territory.
    It was natural that the Randalls would practice at the Mem. In Boston the Randalls were known as an old family, which meant that they could claim at least one seasick Pilgrim, straight off the Mayflower, contributing to the gene pool. They had been a family of doctors for hundreds of years: in 1776, Wilson Randall had died on Bunker Hill.
    In more recent history, they had produced a long line of eminent physicians. Joshua Randall had been a famous brain surgeon early in the century, a man who had done as much as anyone, even Cushing, to advance neurosurgery in America. He was a stern, dogmatic man; a famous, though apocryphal, story had passed into medical