Wednesday the Rabbi got wet

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

On the spur of the moment while on his way home. Lanigan parked his car at the corner instead of entering the street, he winced as he always did when he saw the neon sign, YE OLDE CORNER DRUGGE STORE, JOS. TIMILTY., REG. PHARM., PROP., but he went in nevertheless. Timilty, a short, dark, stout man, came hurrying over. His Russian-style tunic of pale green nylon with Ye Olde Drugge Store stitched on the pocket in dark green had short sleeves, exposing hairy forearms, he was bald, but as though to compensate, he had bushy black eyebrows accentuated by the heavy dark frames of his eyeglasses. Even immediately after shaving, his jowls were bluish; now, late in the afternoon, they were blue-black.

"What can I do for you?" he asked, to emphasize the importance of the customer, as taught in the salesmanship course he was taking, he was new in the area, having bought the store less than a year ago from the Brundages, who had operated it as far back as Lanigan could remember.

Somewhat taken aback at the directness of the approach,

Lanigan cast about for something to buy. His eye swept along the displays, the salted nuts, the boxes of candy, the perfumes; the dog collars, leashes and rawhide chewing bones; canary and lovebird supplies; the children's toys. But he had neither dog nor pet bird, nor child at home and he knew that if he brought home a box of candy or perfume, Amy would think he had been drinking, then he thought of the tiny sample bottle of pills Dr. Cohen had given him and drew it out of his pocket.

"A funny thing happened to me this morning," he said. "I was in my office down at the stationhouse looking over some files, and I bent over, and by God, I couldn't straighten up."

Timilty nodded knowingly. "Sacroiliac," he said positively. "First time it's happened?"

"No, but never like this." He went on to tell of calling Dr. Cohen,".., and these pills he gave me, well, they worked like magic, a half an hour later, I was as good as new." Timilty nodded, smiling the superior smile of the professional at the layman's marveling at the wonders of science.

"Usually it takes me as much as a couple of weeks to get over an attack, but here, in half an hour— nothing. So I was wondering if you had these pills— they are just a sample that Doc Cohen had in the house— Well, I could keep a supply of them handy, then if it happened again, why, I'd have them."

Timilty glanced at the little glass bottle the chief held out to him. "Sure, we've got them, there are a number of preparations that do much the same thing, muscle relaxants we call them. But you want to be careful about driving when you're taking them, they can make you drowsy."

"Do I need a doctor's prescription? Because if I do—"

"No, you don't need a prescription. How many do you want?"

"Gee. I don't know, a dozen?" the chief suggested.

"Sure. You can always get more if you want them." He went to the prescription room in back of the store, and Lanigan followed.

"Gosh, how do you keep track of all these medicines, Joe?"

"Oh, there's no trouble if you have a system." He laughed. "Old Man Brundage used to do it by instinct, I guess." He selected a plastic tube and typed a label. "You understand. I can only put the trade name of the medication on the label," he said. "You can write in the doctor's name and the dosage yourself if you want to. I can't without a prescription."

"Oh, that's all right," Lanigan said easily. "You do a lot of prescriptions?"

"Fifty, sixty a day."

"You pour them out of the big bottles into the little bottles, eh?"

Timilty was about to explain haughtily that there was a great responsibility involved, but he remembered that Lanigan was an important man in the town, so he winked and said with a grin, "That's just about it."

"You never actually have to make up something?"

"Oh sure. Liquid medicines, salves, suppositories, sometimes even pills. Some of the old-timers have their special prescriptions even for pills and I compound them and put them up in plastic capsules. By the time I came into the drug business, the drug houses had got it all organized."

"Ever make a mistake?"

Timilty shook his head gravely. "Never on a drug. No druggist does, he'd go out of business."

"But some pharmacists—"

Timilty shook his head stubbornly. "I'm not one to go around boosting the competition, but no druggist can afford to make a mistake on a prescription. Sometimes, a doctor will specify the drug of a particular pharmaceutical house, say Squibb's, and you're out of it. But you've got the identical formulation from, say, Parke-Davis, well, I've known of druggists who'll give the Parke-Davis. Now that's not really a mistake. It's what you might call unethical, and some doctors will overlook it, while some will raise hell. My rule is that we always contact the doctor and ask him if we can make the change. Otherwise, I just don't dispense it."

"You mean, you just hand the prescription back to the customer and tell him you can't fill it?"

Timilty winked again. "The usual thing is to tell him it will take a little time to fill, and we offer to deliver it."

"I see." Lanigan grinned. "It's happened to me, then I've wondered when I got the pills what there was about them that took time since they were obviously manufactured. I mean the druggist hadn't rolled them himself."

"That's business, a good businessman tries to hold on to his customers."

"Yeah, I guess so. But look here, some druggists must be more reliable than others."

"Not on filling prescriptions accurately," the druggist said. "Not if they're still in business."

"Then how do you people compete with each other?"

"On service, price, location, personality. Just like grocery stores, the Campbell's soup in one store is the same as the Campbell's soup in the other. But one store is cheaper, or it's nearer or cleaner. So you go to that one."

"Or maybe one gives a little more than the other," Lanigan suggested.

"How do you mean?"

"Well, you come in with a prescription for some pills, say. So one guy will fill the bottle and another guy maybe stuffs in a lot of cotton batting."

Timilty shook his head vigorously. "The doctor indicates on the prescription how many he wants, and that's what we give him, there are a lot of medicines where he wants you to take just so many pills and no more. Or he wants you to take the full dosage, no matter how good you feel after you've taken half of them. So we give exactly what the doctor calls for, no more and no less. Besides, with some pills costing seventy or eighty cents a piece, nobody is going to give any extra."

"How about the pharmacists who work for you?"

"They wouldn't be any different when it comes to filling a prescription."

"I suppose each one initials or signs the prescriptions he fills."

"What for? What would be the point?"

"Well, say something went wrong?"

Timilty looked at him in astonishment. "What could go wTong?"