Hazard Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t usually. Usually she liked to make the decision, at least pretend to be making it. Above all, Hazard could never assume that she’d be staying the night or weekend at his place. He always had to stop at her place, giving her the option. Sometimes she let him know immediately by asking, “What are we stopping here for?” Other times she kept silent for a long while, as though thinking herself into it and finally projecting her feelings. “You’ll be lonely if I don’t stay with you tonight, won’t you?”
    It had become routine by now. However, it was not a matter of conscience with her. It couldn’t possibly be, considering she was the one who’d set the terms of their relationship at the very start, telling him, “Let’s keep this on a purely physical basis.”
    This night she got out immediately and went in to return the Yorkshire to its owner. That she came back out was a promising sign but not to be taken as a commitment. She sat there in the Packard eating her ice cream. “I’ve got a good one for you.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWho was the world’s fastest psychiatrist?”
    â€œFastest?”
    She nodded, believing she had him stumped.
    After only a moment’s thought, Hazard told her, “Dr. Albert Weiner of Erlton, New Jersey. He treated as many as fifty patients a day, using simultaneously four or five consultation rooms. His principal methods were narcoanalysis, muscle relaxants, and electroshock. So many of his patients died from his using unsterile needles that he was tried on twelve counts of manslaughter and convicted of same in 1961, December twelfth, to be exact.”
    Keven didn’t know if that was fact or fiction. She’d invented the question because the idea of a fast psychiatrist had seemed funny and impossible. She hadn’t expected a serious response. It was a sort of perpetual game with them, her testing his reservoir of knowledge. At any moment she’d just ask him something, usually something trivial but not infrequently something important. And almost always he’d just reach into his extraordinary mind and recite the answer. At first, Keven was awed by Hazard’s ability to do this and, even now, after hundreds of times, she was impressed. To satisfy her suspicion that he might be bluffing, she went to the library and checked up on some of his answers. She found he was right, practically verbatim right.
    She decided to try another, a piece of trivia she’d read and made a point of remembering especially for this purpose.
    â€œWhat English king had the most legitimate children?”
    He hardly hesitated. “Edward the First. Had sixteen children by his two queens, Eleanor of Castile and Margaret of France. Eddie died in the year 1307 at the age of thirty-five.”
    Keven nodded that he was right.
    â€œWant illegitimate?” he asked.
    â€œOkay, smart ass. Who?”
    â€œHenry the First sired, as they say, twenty-two illegitimate children, ten sons and twelve daughters by six mistresses. And he lived,” added Hazard with appropriate emphasis, “to be sixty-seven, a ripe old age for those days.”
    â€œLet’s go to your place,” she said.
    It was only five blocks away on Park Avenue in the seventies, one of those older, better-preserved buildings. Hazard’s apartment wasn’t large, wasn’t expensive, and actually wasn’t his. It was three rooms that had been sectioned off from a once-spacious fourteen-room flat. It was a cooperative, with a monthly maintenance charge of four hundred and twenty dollars. And the owner had temporarily lost it by having confidence in three queens while Hazard was looking down his opponent’s throat with a club flush. Hazard still had another two years of the three coming to him. The only things in the apartment that belonged to Hazard were his clothes and personal items, a Marc Chagall signed lithograph,