A Right to Die nwo-39

by Rex Stout

  I left it to Lily. At lunch-mushroom chowder, lobster souffle, avocado salad, pineapple mousse-she stuck to ROCC: people, record, policy, program. Susan Brooke knew it all and knew how to tell it. It was a good pitch for almost anybody this side of Governor Wallace or Senator Eastland.

  The question whether Lily should give her a check or stall was for Lily to decide, but the further question, whether to give it to her before getting personal or after, had been left to me. Lily made her decision before we left the table; she rubbed her eye with her middle finger. Yes, on the check. I considered my question. Would she be a better quiz prospect while she was still wondering if she had made a sale, or after it was in the bag? My understanding of attractive young women wouldn’t tell me, so I fingered in my pocket for a quarter, slipped it out, and glanced at it. Heads. I rubbed my left eye and saw that Lily got it.

  Back in the living room, when coffee had been poured, Lily excused herself and left us. In a minute she returned, went to Miss Brooke, and handed her a little rectangle of blue paper. “There,” she said. “It won’t get me into heaven, but it may help a little. Green pastures.”

  Susan Brooke looked at it-not just a glance, a full look. “The lovely lunch and this too,” she said. She had a nice soft voice but ran her words together some. “Many-many thanks, Miss Rowan, but of course they’re not just from me, they’re from all of us. Is it all right to list you as a patron?”

  Lily sat. “Certainly, if you want. My father made that money building sewers with one hand and playing politics with the other.” She picked up her coffee cup and sipped. “Since you can afford to donate your time, I suppose your father knows how to make money too.”

  “Yes, he did.” She closed her bag with the check inside. “Not building sewers, real estate. He died six years ago.”

  “In New York?”

  “No, Wisconsin.”

  “Oh. Omaha?”

  Lily was showing me how smart she was. We had driven across Nebraska on the way to Montana. Miss Brooke politely didn’t smile. “No, Racine,” she said.

  Lily sipped coffee. “I suppose I’m being nosy, but to me it’s-well, you’re fascinating. I’m not lazy or stingy, I’m merely useless. I simply don’t understand you. Do you mind if I try to?”

  “No, of course not.” She tapped her bag. “Your money isn’t useless, Miss Rowan.”

  Lily flipped a hand. “Tax-deductible. But your time and energy aren’t. Have you been doing this ever since you came to New York?”

  “Oh no. Only two years-a little more. There’s nothing fascinating about me, believe me. When I finished college-I barely made it, I’m Radcliffe ‘fifty-nine-I went home to Racine and got good and bored. Then something happened, and-Anyway, my father was dead and only my mother and me in a big house, and we came to New York. My brother was here and he suggested it. But you didn’t ask for my autobiography.”

  “Yes, I did. Practically. You live with your brother?”

  She shook her head. “We did for a while, but then we took an apartment-my mother and I. And I got a job.” She put her empty cup down, and I got up and filled it. I was glad of the chance to contribute something.

  “If you can stand any more,” Lily said, “what kind of a job?”

  “I can stand it if you can. Reading manuscripts for a publisher. It was terrible-you would never believe what some people think is fit to print. Then I got a job at the UN, a desk job. The job was about as bad, but I met a lot of different people, and I realized how silly I was to do dull paying jobs when I didn’t need the pay. It was a girl I met at the UN, a colored girl, who gave me the idea of the ROCC, and I went and asked if I could do something.” She drank coffee.

  “Absolutely fascinating,” Lily declared. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Goodwin?”

  “No,” I said flatly. A business adviser should be tough. “It depends on what satisfies a person, that’s all. You ladies both have all the money you need, and in my opinion you’re both rather selfish. You could make a couple of men secure and happy and comfortable, but you won’t take the trouble. Neither of you is married. At least-you haven’t been married, Miss Brooke?”

  “No.”

  “And don’t intend to be?”

  She laughed, a soft little laugh. “Maybe I will. After what you’ve said, I’ll feel selfish if I don’t. I’ll invite you and Miss Rowan to the wedding.”

  “I’ll accept with pleasure. By the way, which publisher did you read manuscripts for? I had one rejected once, and it may have been you.”

  “Oh, I hope not. The Parthenon Press.”

  “Then it wasn’t you. Another by the way, this will amuse you. When Miss Rowan got the idea of making a contribution to the ROCC she asked me to check a little, and I asked around, and one man said there was probably some Communist influence. Of course people say that about any outfit they don’t like, but he mentioned a name. Dunbar Whipple. He had no evidence, just hearsay. But Whipple might like to know about it. I’d rather not name the man who said it.”

  No flush or fluster. She even looked a little amused. “I hope,” she said, “this isn’t a new way of asking me if I’m a Communist.”

  “It isn’t. I’m plain and simple. I would just say, are you?”

  “And I would just say no. At first, when people tried to ask me if I was a Communist without really asking it I got indignant, but I soon saw that was silly. I handle it better now. Are you a Birchite, Mr. Goodwin?”

  “I refuse to answer. I’m indignant.”

  She laughed a little. “You’ll get over it. As for Dunbar Whipple, he’s special. He’s young and he has a lot to learn, but he’ll be the first Negro mayor of New York City.” She turned. “I warn you, Miss Rowan, some day I may ask you for a different kind of contribution-to the Whipple for Mayor campaign fund. Would you vote for a Negro?”

  Lily said it would depend, that she voted for Democrats only, in respect to the memory of her father. I arose to pour coffee, but Miss Brooke looked at her watch and said she had an appointment. Lily gestured toward the terrace and said it was a day to ignore appointments, but Miss Brooke said she couldn’t, it was a meeting about a school boycott. She gave Lily a healthy thank-you handshake, but not me, which was proper, since I hadn’t said definitely that I wasn’t a Birchite. As Lily convoyed her to the foyer I filled my cup and took it to the glass doors to admire the weather.

  Lily came to join me. “Quite a gal,” she said. “Fighting her way through that to talk school boycott. If she’s fascinating, it’s lucky for me I’m not.”

  “It’s one of your best points,” I said, “that you’re not fascinating.” I put the cup on a plant stand.

  “And that I’m rather selfish. Look me in the eye, Escamillo. Take that back about making you secure and happy and comfortable.”

  “Not me. I merely said a man.”

  “Name one.”

  “Nero Wolfe.”

  “Ha. What will you bet I couldn’t?”

  “Not a dime. I know him, but I know you too. No bet.”

  “You would have to move out.” She had a look in her eye, I would say the look of a tiger stalking a herd of deer if I had ever seen a tiger stalk deer. “We would fire Fritz, and of course Theodore. He would read aloud to me. We would ditch the orchids and take out the partitions in the plant rooms and have dancing parties, and you wouldn’t be invited. For lunch we would have peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and-”

  I clapped a palm over her mouth with my other hand at the back of her head. With no effort to break away, she tried to bite. I said, “When you’re ready to discuss the subject, shut your right eye.”

  She shut her right eye, and I took my hands away. “Well?”

  “I stand pat,” she said. “She’s fascinating.”

  “To you. It’s perfectly simple. She’s a status-seeker. She wants to be the mayor’s wife.”

  “Uhuh. I always laugh at your cracks to make you secure and happy and comfortable, but may I skip that one? You’re tr
ying to get something on her that will keep that colored man from marrying her. Right?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Then two things. First, I don’t think you’ll get anything unless you invent it, and I know you wouldn’t. I don’t think there’s anything to get-anything bad enough to count. Second, if there is, I hope you don’t get it through anything you heard here. I couldn’t blame you, but I would blame me. If she and that Negro want to get married they may be darned fools, of course I think they are, but it’s their lookout. So do me a favor. If you stop it, and something you heard here got you started on what stops it, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. That’s me. You know?”

  “Sure.” I looked at my wrist: a quarter to three. “If I had any personal feelings about it they would be about the same as yours, but I haven’t. Rights all over the place. She has a right to marry him. He has a right to marry her. The father and mother have a right to butt in, they’ve been doing it for ten thousand years. Nero Wolfe has a right to meet an obligation to a man. I have a right to earn my pay by doing what I’m told, providing it doesn’t clash with my right to stay out of jail. So I’ll run along and drop in at the office of the Parthenon Press, which is only a few blocks from here.”

  “There won’t be anyone there. Look at that snow. I can beat you at gin. Don’t they send people home?”

  I looked. “They might at that. May I use the phone?” She was right. I got an answer, but not from the switchboard girl. Some man told me that everybody had gone. When I hung up Lily called through an open door, “I’m in here. Come on. I have a right to win enough to pay for the lunch.”

  She did, about.

  3

  That was a new experience. Over the years I have checked on a lot of people-a thousand, two thousand-but always after something specific, anything from an alibi to a motive for murder. With Susan Brooke I was simply checking. Because I am interested in me, I would give two bits to know which I would have preferred, to dig up something that would brand her good, or to find nothing at all worth mentioning. At the time I was just doing a job, and enjoying it carefree because there was nothing at stake for Wolfe or me.

  I spent three days, parts of them, and three evenings at it. It didn’t take long to cross off the Parthenon Press lead. She hadn’t done her reading at the office, and only three people, two editors and a stenographer, had known her. One of the editors hadn’t liked her, but I gathered, from a remark by the stenographer, that he had made a pass at her and missed.

  The UN lead took longer; it took half a day to find out where she had worked. It would take another half a day for me to write, and you half an hour to read, all the items I collected. According to one source, she had got tight at a farewell luncheon for some Greek. According to another source, she hadn’t. She had been so friendly with a Polish girl that she actually took her to the country for a summer weekend. Three times, or maybe four or five, she had been taken to lunch in the delegates’ dining room by a Frenchman with a reputation. I followed that one up a little, but it fizzled out. She had once been seen leaving the building with a Moroccan girl, a Hungarian, and a Swede. And so forth and so on. It was very educational. The UN is wonderful for broadening a man’s outlook. For instance, Turkish girls have short legs and Indian girls have flat feet.

  At ten o’clock Saturday evening I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone, used my key to get in, put my coat and hat on the rack, and went down the hall to the office. Wolfe was behind his desk in the only chair in the world that really suits him, with a book, William Shakespeare, by A. L. Rowse. I stood while he finished a paragraph. He looked up.

  I spoke. “You know, I don’t think I have ever known you to take so long with a book.”

  He put it down. “I’m reviewing his dating of Cymbeline. I think he’s wrong.”

  “Then let’s send it back.” I spun my chair around and sat. “I took a Moroccan girl to dinner at Rusterman’s. On me. She doesn’t dance, so I took her home. Today was merely more of the same, not worth reporting. Tomorrow is Sunday. I don’t mind this caper, I’m enjoying it, but it’s a washout. I suggest that you tell Whipple that if there’s something wrong with Miss Brooke it’s buried deep.”

  He grunted. “You like her.”

  “Not especially. I told you Wednesday evening that my guess was that she is comparatively clean. It still is.”

  “How candid are you?”

  “So-so. I’m trying.”

  “Where is Racine?”

  “Between Chicago and Milwaukee. On the lake.”

  He pushed his chair back, raised his bulk, walked over to the globe, which was twice as big around as he was, whirled it, and found Wisconsin.

  He turned. “It’s closer to Milwaukee. Is there an airplane to Milwaukee?”

  “Sure.” I stared. “The fare would be around eighty bucks, and then thirty bucks a day. Or more. Whipple might object.”

  “He will have no occasion.” He returned to his chair and sat. “Veblen called it instinct of workmanship. Mine was committed when I engaged to serve Mr. Whipple. In your conversation with Miss Rowan and Miss Brooke, which you reported Wednesday evening verbatim, did you note nothing suggestive? Surely not.”

  “You could call it suggestive. After she said she got good and bored in Racine she said, “Then something happened, and-‘ And she cut. Okay, suggestive. Maybe the roof in the big house started to leak.”

  “Pfui. What if Miss Brooke’s past were a vital element in an investigation of great moment?”

  “I would probably be in Racine now.”

  “Then you will go. Tomorrow. Confound it, I’m committed.”

  I shook my head. “Objection. Tomorrow’s Sunday and I have a personal commitment.”

  He settled for Monday, and for Chicago instead of Milwaukee because there were more planes.

  It was three above zero at twenty minutes past five Monday afternoon when I parked the car, which I had rented in Chicago, in a lot a block away from the office of the Racine Globe and two blocks from the hotel where I had a reservation. I have not left the parking to the hotel since the day, a few years back, when I lost an important contact because it took them nearly half an hour to bring the car. I walked the two blocks with my bag, checked in, and went out again.

  I had no appointment at the Globe, but Lon Cohen of the New York Gazette had made a phone call for me Sunday evening, and a man named James E. Leamis, the managing editor, knew I was coming. After two waits, one downstairs and one on the third floor, I was taken to him in a room that had his name on the door. He left his chair to shake hands, took my coat and hat and put them on a couch, and said it was a pleasure to meet a New York newspaperman. We sat and exchanged some remarks, and I explained that I wasn’t a newspaperman; I was a private investigator doing a job for the Gazette. I said I supposed that Mr. Cohen had told him that the Gazette was thinking of running a series on the Rights of Citizens Committee, and he said no, he had told him only that I would come to ask for some information.

  “But you know what the Rights of Citizens Committee is.

  “Of course. There are branches in Chicago and Milwaukee, but none in Racine. Why do you come here?”

  “I’m checking on a certain individual. The series will focus on the people at the New York headquarters, and one of the important ones is a young woman named Susan Brooke. I understand she’s from Racine. Isn’t she?”

  “Yes. My God, the Gazette sent you out here just to check on Susan Brooke? Why?”

  “No special reason. They want to fill in the background, that’s all. Do you know her? Or did you?”

  “I can’t say I knew her. Say I was acquainted with her. I knew her brother Kenneth fairly well. Of course she’s another generation. I’m twice her age.”

  He looked it, with his hair losing color and getting thin, and his wrinkles. He was in his shirt sleeves, with a vest, unbuttoned. I asked, “How was she regarded in Racine?”

  “Well…all right. One of my dau
ghters was in her class at high school. Then she went away to college-if I knew which one, I’ve forgotten-”

  “Radcliffe.”

  “Oh. So actually her only background in Racine was her childhood. Her father had Racine background, and how. He was the smartest real-estate operator in southern Wisconsin. He owned this building. The family still does. I’m afraid I can’t help you much, Mr. Goodwin. If what you want is dirt, I know I can’t.”

  I had intended to ask him if anything newsworthy had happened to Susan Brooke, or about her, in the summer or fall of 1959, but I didn’t. She was the Globe’s landlady, and they might be behind on the rent. So I told him I wasn’t after dirt specifically, just the picture, whatever it was. He started asking questions about the ROOC and what people in New York thought about Rockefeller and Goldwater, and I answered them to be polite.

  It was dark when I emerged to the sidewalk, and the wind would freeze anything that was bare. I went back to the hotel and up to my room, where I was expecting company at six-thirty. In Chicago I had called on a man who had traded professional errands with Wolfe now and then. According to him, there was only one in Racine that was any good, by name Otto Drucker, and he had phoned him and made an appointment for me. In my nice warm room I took off my shoes and stretched out on the bed, but soon got up again. After only two blocks of that zero wind I would have been asleep in three minutes.

  He was punctual, only five minutes late. As I shook hands with him at the door I didn’t let my surprise show. I would never have picked him for an operative; he would have looked right at home at the desk of an assistant vice-president of a bank, with his neat well-arranged face and his friendly careful eyes. When I turned from putting his coat and hat on the bed, he asked in a friendly careful voice, “And how is Mr. Nero Wolfe?”