A Right to Die

Chapter 11

Like everyone else, including you, I frequently make assumptions on insufficient grounds. All I knew about William Magnus was what Rae Kallman had told me, that he was a student at the NYU law school in Washington Square, and that he had arranged a meeting for Susan Brooke to plug civil rights and the ROCC. So I knew what he would be like: earnest and honest, of course, and dedicated; probably underfed, but the fire of freedom in his eyes; either a sweater and unpressed pants, or, if he knew the importance of correct appearance, an almost-clean white shirt and gray tie and a dark gray suit, a little worn but without a spot. Perhaps I should mention that I wouldn’t be caught dead in a white shirt except when an evening requires the uniform.

Therefore when the doorbell rang a little before five o’clock and I went to the hall and saw a handsome half-back in a two-hundred-dollar camel’s-hair coat, of course it wasn’t Magnus. But it was. I went and opened the door. His handshake was firm and friendly, but not dedicated. His voice was full and friendly, but not pushy. When I turned from hanging the coat up, I saw as much of a custom-made blue-and-yellow-checked shirt as a two-button brown tweed jacket would let me see. When I took him to the office he flopped into the red leather chair as if it belonged to him. That made it complicated, because at my desk I would be twelve feet away, so I went and took Wolfe’s chair, and he grinned and said, “You don’t belong there, do you?”

I gave him the grin back. “I always belong wherever I am.”

He frowned. “Who said that?”

“I did.”

“No, really. You read that somewhere.”

“Nope. You fed me a slider and I just happened to connect.”

He grinned. “Okay, you’re on base. Shall I try to pick you off?”

“I might steal on you. Let me toss one. Did Susan Brooke make a phone call at a quarter past five on Monday, March second?”

He leaned back and crossed his legs. His dark brown socks, with light brown stripes, had set him, or his old man, back four bucks. “The trouble is,” he said, “that when I am asked questions I get an irresistible itch to give trick answers. It’s probably a neurosis. You’d better just let me tell it. The cop that tried me first, and the lawyer — what’s his name, wait a minute, Oster, that’s it — and the assistant district attorney, they all insisted on asking questions, and I’m afraid they got somewhat confused. I don’t want to confuse you too. I wish you’d tell me who said that about always belonging wherever you are. Or wrote it.”

“Damn it, I did. If anyone beat me to it, I don’t know who or when or where. Tell me about Susan Brooke and the phone call.”

“Sure. I’m enjoying this. Nero Wolfe’s office.” He looked around. “That’s the biggest globe I ever saw. Nice rug. Books and books. I’d love to spend a week going through all those files. It would probably teach me more than a year at law school. Anyway, I’m going into politics. I’m going to be governor of New York.” Having uncrossed his legs to look around, he crossed them again. “But you want to hear about Susan Brooke.”

“That was the idea.”

“Did you know her?”

“No. I met her once. Five days before she died.”

“I met her a year ago. She was a lovely little dame, but I’m going to wait until I’m thirty to marry. It was on account of her I got on to civil rights. I wanted to help her, and anyway, if you’re in politics you’re in civil rights whether you like it or not. I set up that meeting for her that day. I am now telling you.”

He uncrossed his legs, and his face changed completely. He was working. “It was in a room across the hall from an office used by members of the faculty. There’s a phone in the office, extension seven-nine-three, and I had arranged to use it from four-thirty on and pay for the calls. I’m disposing of that factor. Twelve local calls were made on that phone between four-thirty and six-thirty, and I made three of them. Two of my calls were to the ROCC, but neither of them was anywhere near a quarter past five. No record was kept at the switchboard of the numbers called or the exact times. Is that covered?”

“Trick answer. Yes.”

“I expected about forty people, and at five o’clock about forty were there, students and three or four faculty members. Only a few were seated. It’s a big room, and we were moving around, groups here and there. I didn’t call the meeting to order until Susan came, and she was late. I don’t know exactly what time she arrived, and apparently no one does. I was over by a window, talking with four or five students, and she came and said, ‘Here I am, late as usual.’ I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes past five. So there it is. To my knowledge, it’s possible that she had used the phone across the hall, but did she? I don’t know. I have asked around, and I haven’t found anyone who does know. Questions.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking a question. If I did, it wouldn’t be about the phone call; you’ve wrapped that up. It would be about how long the meeting lasted and when did Susan leave and so on.”

He grinned. “You know how to handle me. If you go into politics, you can be senator and I’ll be governor. The meeting adjourned at six-thirty, but a few of us stuck around a little while. Susan and I left at six-forty. My car was in a nearby garage, and I drove her home. By ‘home’ I mean the address on Park Avenue where she lives with her mother. I didn’t know about the apartment in Harlem. Of course I do now. Everybody does. To finish, we arrived a little after seven, say ten after. That, as they put it in questions, was the last time I saw her alive. Alive or dead. Why did Nero Wolfe decide that Whipple didn’t kill her?”

I grinned. “You’re inviting it.”

“Sure. Let’s hear it.”

“Because he knows you did.”

He shook his head. “That’s not very good. Try another. What was my motive?”

“You thought she was pregnant, thanks to you, and it would louse up your political career.”

“That’s a little better. Why wasn’t I seen? My superb physique, my noble countenance, why wasn’t I noticed there in the middle of Harlem?”

“Burnt cork.”

He threw his head back and laughed. “Wonderful! You’re all right. You be governor and I’ll be senator. Does Nero Wolfe think he knows who killed her?”

Wolfe wouldn’t be down from the plant rooms for nearly an hour, so I permitted him to stay and enjoy himself a while longer. Also he was now a candidate, though at the bottom of the list, since he had called Susan a lovely dame and implied that he might have married her if he hadn’t had other ideas. Since he was deliberately planning to go into the roughest game on earth, politics, nothing was beyond or beneath him, even clubbing a lovely dame, if he had a good enough reason.

When he had gone I got busy at the typewriter. Wolfe had told Dolly Brooke that it was possible that the police would never know about her trip to Harlem, but it looked to me like very long odds, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a record, made while it was fresh, of what had been said, both at her apartment and in the office. If withholding evidence got to be an issue, I would be in it as deep as he was. In the Bastille I would have plenty of time to write my memoirs, and it would be helpful to have notes if I could smuggle them in. I was banging away and had got to where Wolfe said, ‘I made it as brief as possible,’ by six o’clock, when he came. He went to his desk and sat, and didn’t pick up his book, so I swiveled to face him.

“Mr. Magnus?” he asked.

I nodded. “It’s too bad you missed him. I don’t know what he would be worth stripped, but fully dressed he represents an outlay of about a grand. He’s big and beaming and very chatty, but he can report almost as well as I can. Like this.”

I told it, omitting all the mere chatter except the questions to which I had given trick answers. Wolfe’s frown got deeper as I went along.

“So,” I finished, “in a week of plugging you might find that she made the phone call, but probably you could never prove that she didn’t. Oster was right when he said you wouldn’t get anything conclusive. It could be that Magnus was in the office across the hall when she came, and heard her make the call, and knew that Whipple wouldn’t be there until nine o’clock, and drove her there and killed her, but I doubt it. His skull is not empty. It would be a cinch to check on where he was at a quarter past five.”

“She didn’t make the call.”

“Yeah, I know. You have two ways of deciding things. One, on the strength of evidence and deduction. Two, on the strength of genius and to hell with deduction. Which in this case means to hell with Maud Jordan.”

“She was committed. She had signed a statement. Hadn’t she?”

“Sure. To get away from the DA’s office without signing a statement you have to thumb your nose. She would sign.”

“It would be convenient to know if Mrs. Brooke has shown talent as a mimic. Mr. Vaughn could have told you this morning.”

“I knew that would be mentioned sooner or later. He could barely walk. Right now he’s pounding his ear. Is it urgent?”

“No.” His eyes were narrowed at me. “I presume you’re aware of the situation.”

“I am. First, if Dolly Brooke killed her we had better prove it quick or turn that document over to Cramer. That document is hot. But we can’t possibly prove it. We’ve got her at the door, but we can’t get her inside unless we dig up a motive with legs. Do we put Saul and Fred and Orrie on that for a month or so?”

He made a face. “No.”

“Second, Beth Tiger, and on her I must get personal. I have some idea, from things you’ve said these two weeks, how you feel about a colored man marrying a white girl. You don’t feel. How about a white man marrying a colored girl?”

“Pfui.”

“You may have a surprise coming. So far it may be only lust, but as I ate breakfast this morning I caught myself wondering if she can make Creole fritters, and you know what that may mean — or I suppose you don’t. My room would do for both of us for a while, until the little ones start to come, and as for their color of course I can’t say. As for the professional situation, she too was in the building, and she had a much better motive than Mrs. Brooke; she wanted to marry Dunbar herself.”

“Presumably.”

“Not presumably, certainly. That will be a problem for me, but I’ll manage. Professionally, the problem is to get her down one flight and into the apartment. Have you any suggestions?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. If Mrs. Brooke and Miss Tiger are filed, it could have been someone else who lives in the building. Saul and Fred and Orrie could check on all the tenants in a few days, and if they drew a blank we would know that the murderer probably entered the building around eight o’clock or soon after, and left it before Mrs. Brooke arrived. Someone in the neighborhood probably saw him coming or going. Saul and Fred and Orrie would be handicapped for that combing job by their color, so it would be better to use three or four Negro operatives. There are quite a few available. Okay?”

“No.”

“I agree. That was third. Fourth, have Saul and Fred and Orrie check the alibis of the ROCC staff. Not just the ones who were here, all thirty-four of them. Some of them may have felt as Ewing did about Dunbar marrying a white girl, only more so. Any of them might have known about the phone call. One of the females might have been able to imitate Susan’s voice, and she might have left at five o’clock. But the main thing, check all their alibis. Three weeks should do it, or maybe four. Does that appeal to you?”

“No.”

“Very well. You presumed that I am aware of the situation and I said I am. There isn’t one single solitary sensible thing that you can do or I can do or Saul and Fred and Orrie can do.”

He nodded. “You’re right.” He switched the reading light on and picked up the book he was just starting, Science: The Glorious Entertainment, by Jacques Barzun.

I glared at him. He had made a monkey of me. One of my main functions, perhaps the mainest, is to ride him if and when he lies down on the job, and he had muzzled me. My intention, of course, had been to dare him to suggest a move, to show how much smarter he was than me, and he knew it.

“Go to hell,” I said emphatically and turned to the typewriter and banged.

I don’t know how long he would have stalled on that one — a day or a week or forever. At dinner he started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn’t. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words. We were still at it when we got up to cross to the office for coffee, and were in the hall when the doorbell rang.

It was Paul Whipple. Wolfe, seeing him through the one-way glass, let out a growl; he hadn’t finished with automation. But it was the client, and besides, since we had no notion of what to do next, we had better see if he had.

No. All he had was a question. Being polite, he didn’t ask it until Fritz had brought the coffee, and Wolfe had poured and I had passed, and he had taken a couple of sips. The steam dimmed his black-rimmed cheaters, and he got out a handkerchief to wipe them.

“My two friends told me what happened,” he said. “They said you didn’t tell them not to.”

Wolfe was trying to look as if he didn’t mind having unexpected company and not succeeding. “I told them they could tell you but no one else.”

“They won’t. You said there might be a development that would show promise. Did it?”

“Yes and no.” Wolfe drank, put his cup down, and took a deep breath. “Mr. Whipple. I intended to reserve this, and if you had telephoned I would have. But you troubled to come, and you have a right to your question. Your son could be out tomorrow. Perhaps on bail, but at liberty.”

The cheaters dropped to the floor, but the rug is soft. “My God,” he said, just loud enough to hear. “I knew it. I knew you could do it.”

“I haven’t done much. I won’t give you the particulars; I’ll only tell you that I have verifiable information which makes it highly unlikely that Susan Brooke was alive when your son arrived at the apartment. It is sufficiently persuasive to convince the police that it would be inadvisable to hold your son on a murder charge. But it doesn’t give the murderer’s name or even hint at it.”

Whipple was staring, concentrating. Without his glasses he looked older. “But I don’t— If she was dead when he got there...”

“Yes. The information makes that conclusion hard to challenge. I can have him released, probably under bail as a material witness. Then the police will be galled. They will suspect you and your wife, and everyone associated with the Rights of Citizens Committee. They will suspect your son, not of actually doing the deed but of being implicated. He can be conclusively cleared only by producing the murderer, and that will be much more difficult with the police everywhere, harassing everyone, including me. Especially me. I don’t want to give them the information I have. I want them to keep your son in custody, satisfied that they have the culprit. You can of course make that impossible. You can tell me that if I withhold the information you’ll tell them I have it. If you do, I’ll have to give it to them at once and quit. Have I made it clear?”

“Yes.” Whipple lowered his head. I had seen many people, sitting in that chair, lower or turn their heads when they found how hard it was to use their brains while they were meeting Wolfe’s eyes. Seeing the glasses on the floor, he bent over to pick them up, got his handkerchief out again, and rubbed, slow motion.

“I won’t urge you,” Wolfe said.

He looked up. “Oh, you don’t have to. I was thinking about my wife. If she knew he could be home tomorrow — but she doesn’t have to know.” He jerked his shoulders up. “I won’t tell her,” He put the glasses on. “The information — will it keep? Can you still use it, if...”

“I can use it at any time. I have it in writing, a signed statement, by the woman your friends saw here this afternoon.”

“Will they be involved?”

“No.”

“Do I know her?”

“I doubt it. I won’t name her.”

“I–I’m going to ask a question.”

“You have already asked three. I may answer it.”

“Do you know — I mean do you think you know — who killed her?”

“No. I have no inkling. I have no plan. I have only a commitment, and I intend to meet it, though at the moment I have no idea when or how. How many times has the answer to some bothersome question come while you were brushing your teeth?”

“More than once.”

“I’ll be brushing mine in a couple of hours. Not with an electric thing; with that machine the fear of electrocution would squelch all mental processes. As an anthropologist, are you concerned with the menace of automation?”

“As an anthropologist, no.”

“As a man you are.”

“Why... yes.”

“Your son is twenty-one years old. Are you aware that by averting this calamity for him we will be compelling him inevitably to suffer a worse one?”

Very neat. Confronted by a father worried sick about a son locked up for the big one, he had dealt with that in less than a quarter of an hour and steered him to automation; a fresh audience, better than me, since he had had me at dinner. Neat.