Instead of heading into the hospital, House made a beeline for the group by the Rolls. Krishna watched with astonishment as the scruffy, brooding lunatic from New Jersey transformed himself into a tall, self-deprecating charmer with bright blue eyes in the fifty paces it took him to travel from planter to curbside. By the time he reached the patient's wife, House was beaming gently, leaning a little more than necessary on his cane as he offered his right hand. To Krishna, who witnessed their first meeting, the most amazing change of all came over the wife's face: from guarded attention to something approaching warmth and sympathy.
He glanced over at the driver, who stood stiffly off to the side, watching the wife as if waiting to be dismissed. He was short but strikingly handsome, with dark skin and black hair and eyes, and he glowered at House as if he were poaching on his territory. Krishna suddenly understood why his presence had galvanized the older doctor.
"I'm Dr. House," Krishna heard him saying to the wife. "I want to apologize for the awkwardness of our meeting last night. I'd just blown into town, all excited about meeting your husband—I'm a huge fan—and I wasn't thinking. Here, let me take that for you." House relieved her of the children's backpacks, deftly transferring them to Krishna. "I was on my way to see your husband anyway, let me walk with you."
The wife turned to the driver and murmured something in Spanish. He nodded and touched his hat, all the while keeping his eyes fixed on House. Then he got into the car and drove off.
House led the way into the hospital, the wife walking companionably beside him, the daughters right behind them. Krishna brought up the rear, thinking Whitbred was wrong: House knew perfectly well how to conduct himself like a professional. He didn't need Krishna to moderate his dealings with patients.
The charm offensive lasted until they were all in the patient's room. The girls were sent off with a nurse and two dollars each from House to find a vending machine with "good candy." Then House got down to business.
"The driver; been with you for a long time?"
"Six months," said the wife, growing wary again.
"Seems like a devoted guy. He from Brazil?"
"Venezuala," said the wife, pronouncing the "v" as a "b."
"Been in this country long? Does he live in the house with you?"
"Less than a year. He has an apartment over the garage."
House nodded. The patient eyed him suspiciously. "What does Rico have to do with this?"
"Maybe nothing," House shrugged. "But I've gotta tell you, when it comes to figuring out what's ailing you, I'm running out of domestic suspects. I see this guy, and he seems close to your family, so I wonder: did he bring anything into the country besides that white, white smile, and pass it along to you?"
"What are you implying?" the patient asked, a dangerous vibration in his tone,
"I'm not implying anything," said House. "When I have a question, I come right out and ask it. Does he take either of you for rides that don't involve the Rolls?"
"GET OUT." The patient's face was white with fury.
"You can throw me out," House observed, "but that doesn't get rid of the bug, whatever it is."
"OUT!"
Sick with embarrasssment, Krishna put a hand on House's sleeve. House didn't budge. "Let's drop the act, okay? Anyone who keeps naked pictures of his teenaged co-stars has some experience with the kinky stuff. Not that I care. This won't go beyond this room—"
"I'm calling Security." The patient fumbled for his intercom button.
"You're 70 years old, for chrissake! If some spirochete or virus is shutting down your plumbing, your kidneys are going to take the hit—"
The wife looked at the patient with real fear in her eyes. "Maybe we'd better—"
"You're crazy," the patient hissed; whether to his wife or his doctor or both wasn't clear. He pointed an unambiguous finger at House: "You had them draw blood for syphilis and scrape my dick for herpes. You think I didn't know what that was all about? You're a sick bastard trying to make a buck on my reputation. You're fired. And if you aren't out of this room in ten seconds, I'm calling the cops."
"Okay," House said calmly. "I'll leave you two to talk it over." He left the room, Krishna trailing hangdog in his wake.
Outside, feeling the eyes of the staff at the nursing station on them, Krishna opened his mouth to commiserate, but House was already checking his cellphone.
"Dammit! They did call at two, but my ringer was off," he muttered. "It's almost four, they'll be sneaking out early by now. I'll just have to finish this case without them." He flipped the phone shut and turned to Krishna. "What're your thoughts?" House headed toward the elevator bank.
His thoughts? Krishna only had one, which was that Dr. House must have misunderstood what the patient had said. He was fired—there was no case!
The elevator arrived and they stepped inside. Even before the doors shut, House said, in a carrying voice, "Okay, which one is doing the driver? Fifty bucks says it's her, and I bet he films them. Now, is it syph or the big H?"
He kept up in this vein, not seeming to notice that Krishna was incapable of doing anything but opening and closing his mouth, until they arrived in Whitbred's conference room. The man himself was there, a crocodilian smile on his face.
"Dr. House. You have exceeded my every expectation. Not only has the patient asked—no, demanded—to have you taken off his case—"
"He'll get over it when he starts feeling better," House said airily.
"—but when he sees that the tests for venereal disease that you insisted on running are negative, he may have excellent grounds for a lawsuit. It pains me to say it," Whitbred added, looking very pleased for a man in pain, "but I advise you to return to Princeton immediately and start looking for a very good lawyer."
House turned to Krishna. "What're you doing about dinner?"
"Dr. House—"
"I heard you, Whitbred. I'm fired. Thanks, I already got that from the patient. I also heard you say he's tested clear. Why don't you hurry along and give him the good news? You can toss spitballs at me from his window while I drag my sorry ass back to New Jersey."
Whitbred was livid. "The patient has had quite enough turmoil for one day, thanks to you," he foamed. "I plan to let him rest tonight and notify him of the results first thing in the morning."
"Great. Then what'll you tell him? 'We don't know what's wrong with you, Sir, but it isn't VD, so let's count our blessings while we teach you how to catherize yourself and show you some nifty diaper rash remedies.'"
Whitbred drew himself up as if to deliver a searing rebuttal; then wheeled and strode out of the room. They heard the door to his office slam.
House perched on the edge of the table and helped himself to a pill. "I always thought New Yorkers were obnoxious, in-your-face types," he said. "I never expected to see one turn pussy like that."
"He's from Connecticut," Krishna murmured.
House laughed. "Figures."
"Dr. House—" Krishna hesitated, aware that their relationship was, technically, terminated, then plunged ahead. "Why did you force such an unpleasant conversation on the patient and his wife? Why not just give him broad-spectrum antibiotics, anti-virals, whatever, and hope that clears it up? Why risk getting fired unnecessarily?"
House looked him over, no longer amused. "Then he goes home, they resume whatever it was they were doing, and because the wife and the driver are still infected, he's back here in three months peeing into a tube again," he said. "He's 70 years old; his system can't take it."
"But the tests came back negative," Krishna pleaded, almost weeping with shame for him.
"Those tests came back negative. Two tests. There are a lot of other STIs in the sea."
"But now you can't help him at all!"
"Sure we can," House said, sliding off the table and slinging an arm around the resident's shoulders. "We just have to figure out how."
-0-
Krishna gave the cab driver an address in the Village House had never heard of, but he didn't protest, preferring to save his energy for the ride ahead. The driver was not as suicidal as some he'd known, but he still found himself bracing one hand against the ceiling, one against the door, his good leg jammed into the seat back, as the cab twisted through rush-hour traffic, slammed to a halt at red lights, and became airborne over potholes the size of the Long Island Sound.
They reached their destination in more or less working order. Krishna paid the driver as House leaned on his cane and peered at the sign over the door: Brokeback Mountin'. He swung on Krish with a look of alarm.
"I am not gay," Krishna assured him. "But the food here is very good, and there is cheap beer, and pinball."
The interior was done up in Western resort ghost-town saloon style, with a piano in one corner and a row of spitoons at the bar. House and Krish slid into a booth and ordered cheeseburgers and beer. Krishna proved a reliable restaurant critic; the food really was very good, and the beer—while not cheap by Princeton standards—was a great deal more affordable than uptown.
"Will Whitbred really wait until morning to rat me out?" House asked, through a mouthful of french fries. He waved the waiter over and ordered more beer.
"Oh, yes," said Krish, matter-of-factly. "Tuesday is his wife's night out with her lady friends, and he always leaves the hospital right at 4:30 to go see his mistress in Brooklyn."
House grinned. "No kidding. That sneaky old SOB. And from the look of him I'd have sworn he hadn't had sex since the second Reagan Administration."
"Perhaps he has not moved his bowels since then," Krishna suggested, and they both laughed like second graders at an overbearing teacher.
"Seriously, though," said House, sobering a little, "if syphilis is out, and herpes is out, what else can it be?"
"Why are you so sure it is related to sex?" Krishna asked. "It is perfectly possible that they are telling the truth; they are in a monogamous relationship, there is no STI."
"It's possible," House shrugged. "It's not probable. You saw the driver; you saw them together. Did he strike you as the old family retainer type?"
"Is that all you have to go on?"
"Of course not," said House. "There's also the exam I did this morning. He had a lesion on his weinie; it was almost healed, and he claimed he didn't even know it was there. There was also some thickening in his groin, like he might be working up to an abscess."
Krishna held up a hand for silence. In his mind, House's words and what he knew about the driver were like puzzle pieces; he mentally turned them this way and that, looking to see if they fit together, searched for others that might complete the picture…
"How are his bowel movements?" he asked.
House raised his eyebrows. "He says it's uncomfortable. That could be constipation. He's not a high fiber kind of guy."
Krishna shook his head, delighted; the last piece of the puzzle had clicked into place. "Lymphogranuloma venereum," he pronounced.
House was impressed. "LGV! Good old Chlamydia trachomatis; just rare enough up North so we don't automatically think of it—"
"—but still going strong in South America!" Krishna finished triumphantly. They toasted each other with beer and ordered another round.
"Now," said House, "all we have to do is get access to his bodily fluids so we can run a few tests. Then all we have to do is persuade him, the wife, and the driver to get treatment. Then we treat the bladder thing, and we can wrap the whole thing up in time for the weekend."
"How do we get back into his good graces after the scene today?" wondered Krishna.
"I dunno," said House, draining his glass. "You're the one on a roll; you tell me."
They ordered another round and talked. They ordered another round and played some pinball to clear their heads. The place was starting to fill up with men in various degrees of Western costumary, some of whom annoyed House by loudly admiring his skill in terms dripping with double entendre. Krishna noticed this and worried, but the pressure of several quarts of beer made it impossible to watch him every minute. Reluctantly he slipped away to the restroom, returning in haste but not fast enough—House was in the center of a ring of spectators, nose to nose with a fellow in a Stetson and ostrich-skin boots, and he was waving his cane with a menacing air.
"If you make that joke about playing with your balls one more time, I'm gonna push this hook down your throat and pull 'em out by the roots," he was saying.
The fellow in the Stetson turned red. "There's no need to get snippy," he said.
"Snippy? What kinda talk is that for a cowpoke?" taunted House. "You wouldn't make a good pimple on a real cowboy's ass."
And before Krishna could intervene, Stetson disproved that theory by hauling off and socking Dr. House in the eye.
-0-
The phrase "rang his bell" applied with a vengeance in House's case; he literally heard a ringing noise as Krishna and the bar owner pushed their way through the crowd and knelt beside him. He was still groggy a few minutes later as they propped him in a booth and applied ice to his face. He focussed his good eye on Krishna, who shook his head mournfully.
"Oh, Dr. House," he said. "Why must you always lead with your mouth?"
The bar owner, meanwhile, was chastizing Stetson in no uncertain terms.
"Davy, I canNOT have this kind of thing happening; you'll get us shut down," he complained. "You made almost the same joke to Ken the other day; how can you hit someone else for saying it to you?"
Davy held his hat in his hands and looked remorsefully at House. "I don't know what got into me," he admitted. "Can I buy you a drink and make it up to you?"
"You can buy me a drink," House said cautiously. Within seconds, a double scotch appeared at his elbow. When he had drained that, a second showed up without intermission.
Fifteen minutes later, House was again at the center of a crowd. This time he was at the piano, pounding out requests, mostly Motown, as the delighted patrons sang along. Krishna joined him for a competitive version of "My Girl," in which he and House sang the original refrain and the rest of the group substituted "guy" for "girl."
By one o'clock they were out on the sidewalk, bidding affectionate farewells in all directions while the bar owner called them a cab. They drove off during a final volley of blown kisses. Krishna's head was swimming, but House sat up straight, gripping his cane with both hands, his eyes gleaming in the dark interior.
"Okay," he said. "Here's what we're gonna do."