A Right To Die

by Rex Stout

  Wolfe nodded. "I have read the paper, Mr. Whipple. Many people in distress have sat in that chair. Sometimes I cannot supply advice or services, but I can always supply food. I doubt if you have eaten. Have you?"

  "We're not here to eat!" Dunbar blurted. "What did you do?"

  "I'll talk, son," Whipple told him. To Wolfe: "I know what you mean. I made him eat a little just now, on the way here. I felt I had to tell him what I asked you to do, and he wants to know what you said. You understand that he's—uh—overwrought. As you said, in distress. Of course I would like to know too, what you did. You understand that."

  "Yes. I myself have done nothing." Wolfe leaned back, drew in air through his nose, all there was room for, which was plenty, and let it out through his mouth. "Archie. Tell them."

  Dunbar blurted at me, "You're Archie Goodwin."

  "Right." I moved my eyes to Whipple. "Did you tell him exactly what you asked Mr. Wolfe to do?"

  "Yes. Exactly."

  "Okay. A friend of mine named Lily Rowan invited Miss Brooke to lunch, and I was there. At lunch nothing was discussed but the ROCC. After lunch Miss Rowan gave Miss Brooke a check for a thousand dollars for the ROCC and asked her some questions about herself. Nothing cheeky, just the usual line. Miss Brooke mentioned that she had worked for the Parthenon Press and at the UN, and I spent three days checking that, mostly at the UN. I found nothing that you could use, and yesterday I took a plane to Chicago and drove to Racine, Wisconsin. At Racine I talked with two men who had known Miss Brooke and her family, a newspaperman and a private detective, and got no hint of anything you could use. You wanted to find out what was wrong with her. Correct?"

  "Yes."

  "I decided that there was nothing worth mentioning wrong with her and never had been. When I turned in at the hotel last night I intended to leave this morning, and at seven a.m. Mr. Wolfe phoned and told me what had happened, and I left right away and returned to New York. Any questions?"

  Dunbar moved. On his feet, peering down at me, his shoulders hunched, he looked like Sugar Ray starting the tenth round, not ending it. "You're lying," he said, not blurting. "You're covering up, I don't know what, but I'm going to. You know who killed her." He wheeled to Wolfe. "So do you, you fat ape."

  "Sit down," Wolfe said.

  Dunbar put his fists on Wolfe's desk and leaned over at him. "And you're going to tell me," he said through his teeth.

  Wolfe shook his head. "You're driveling, Mr. Whipple. I don't know what you're like when you are in command of your faculties, but I know what you're like now. You're an ass. Neither Mr. Goodwin nor I had ever heard of you or Miss Brooke. I don't suppose you suspect your father of hiring me to arrange for her death, and I doubt if—"

  "That's not—"

  "I'm talking. I doubt if even in your present condition you suspect Mr. Goodwin or me of doing it unbidden. But you may—"

  "I didn't—"

  "I'm talking! You may understandably surmise that in his contacts with various persons Mr. Goodwin unwittingly said or did something which led to a situation that resulted in the death of Miss Brooke. You may even surmise that he was aware of it, or is. In that case, I suggest that you sit down and ask him, civilly. He is fairly headstrong and can't be bullied. I stopped trying years ago. As for me, I know nothing. Mr. Goodwin's plane was late, he arrived only an hour ago, and we haven't discussed it."

  Dunbar backed away, came in contact with the rim of the chair seat, bent his knees, and sat. His head went down and his hands came up to cover his face.

  Whipple said, "Take it easy, son."

  I cleared my throat. "I have had a lot of practice reporting conversations verbatim. Also tones and looks and reactions. I am better at it than anyone around except a man named Saul Panzer. I don't believe that anything I have said or done had anything to do with the death of Susan Brooke, but if Mr. Wolfe tells me to—I was and am working for him—I'll be glad to report it in full. I think it would be a waste of time. As for my covering up, nuts."

  Whipple's jaw was working. "I hope you're right, Mr. Goodwin. God knows I do. If I was responsible—" He couldn't finish it.

  Dunbar's head came up, his face to me. "I'll apologize."

  "You don't have to. Skip it."

  "But maybe you'll tell me who you saw and what was said. Later. I know I'm not in command of my faculties, I haven't got any faculties. I've had no sleep and I don't want to sleep. I answered questions all night and all morning. They think I killed her. By God, they think I killed her!"

  I nodded. "But you didn't?"

  He stared. His eyes were in no condition for staring. "My God, do you think I did?"

  "I don't think. I don't know you. I don't know anything."

  "I know him," the father said. He was looking at Wolfe. "He wanted to come here because he thought … what he said. I didn't know what to think, but I was afraid. I was mortally afraid that I was responsible. Now perhaps I wasn't; I can hope I wasn't. And I wanted to come for another reason. They are going to arrest him. They think he killed her. They are going to charge him with murder. We need your help."

  Wolfe tightened his lips.

  Whipple went on. "I came and asked your help when I shouldn't have. That was wrong, and I bitterly regret it. I thought at the time I was justified, but I wasn't. I hated to tell my son about it, but I had to. He had to know. Now I must ask your help. Now it would be right for me to remind you of that speech. 'But if you shield him because he is your color there is a great deal to say. You are rendering your race a serious disservice. You are helping to perpetuate—'"

  "That's enough," Wolfe snapped. "It isn't pertinent. It has no bearing on the present situation."

  "Not directly. But you persuaded me to help you by prescribing adherence to the agreements of human society. I was an ignorant boy, immature, and you tricked me—I don't complain, it was a legitimate trick. I don't say this is analogous, but you had a problem and asked me to help, and I have one and I'm asking you to help. My son is going to be charged with murder."

  Wolfe's eyes were narrowed at him. "They have questioned him for hours and aren't holding him."

  "They will. When they're ready."

  "Then he will need a lawyer."

  "He'll need more than a lawyer. The way it looks. He'll need you."

  "You may be exaggerating his jeopardy." Wolfe went to Dunbar. "Are you under control, Mr. Whipple?"

  "No, I'm not," he said.

  "I'll try you anyway. You said they think you killed her. Is that merely your fancy or has it a basis?"

  "They think it has a basis, but it hasn't."

  "That begs the question. I'll try again. Why do they think it has a basis?"

  "Because I was there. Because she and I—we were friends. Because she was white and I'm black. Because of the billy, the club that killed her."

  Wolfe grunted. "You'll have to elucidate. First the club. Was it yours?"

  "I had it. It's a club that had been used by a policeman in a town in Alabama to beat up two colored boys. I got it—it doesn't matter how I got it, I had it. I had had it on my desk at the office for several months."

  "Was it on your desk yesterday?"

  "No. Susan—" He stopped.

  "Yes?"

  Dunbar looked at his father and back at Wolfe. "I don't know why I stopped. I've told all this to the police, I knew I had to, because it was known. Miss Brooke had rented and furnished a little apartment on One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street, and the club was there. She had taken it there."

  "When?"

  "About a month ago."

  "Have the police found your fingerprints on it?"

  "I don't know, but I don't think so. I think it had been wiped."

  "Why do you think it had been wiped?"

  "Because they didn't say definitely that it had my fingerprints on it."

  Fair enough. Apparently he had got control. Answering questions will often do that.

  "A reasonable assumption," Wolfe conceded. "So
much for the means. As for the opportunity, you were there, but there is the question of your prior movements yesterday, say from noon on. Of course the police went into that thoroughly. Tell me briefly. I am examining the official assumption that you killed her."

  Dunbar was sitting straighter. "At noon I was at my desk in the office. At a quarter to one I met two men at a restaurant for lunch. I was back at the office a little before three. At four o'clock I went to a conference in the office of Mr. Henchy, the executive director. It ended a little after six, and when I went to my room there was a message on my desk. Miss Brooke and I had arranged to meet at the apartment at eight o'clock, and the message was that she had phoned that she couldn't get there until nine or a little later. That was convenient for me because I had a dinner engagement with one of the men who had been at the conference. It was twenty-five minutes past eight when we parted at the subway entrance on Forty-second Street, and it was five minutes past nine when I got to One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street and entered."

  "And discovered the body."

  "Yes."

  Wolfe glanced up at the clock. "Will it jar you to tell me what you did?"

  "No. She was there on the floor. There was blood, and I got some on my hands and my sleeve. For a while, I don't know how long, I didn't do anything. The club was there on a chair. I didn't touch it. There was no use getting a doctor. I sat on the bed and tried to think, to decide what to do. I suppose you think that wasn't natural, with her there dead on the floor, for me to be worrying about me. Maybe it wasn't, but that's what I did. You wouldn't ever understand because you're white."

  "Pfui. You're a man, and so am I."

  "That's what you say. Words. I knew I had to face it or do something with—with it. I would have, too, but I just barely had sense enough to know I wouldn't get away with it. It couldn't be done. I went and looked in the phone book for the number of police headquarters and dialed it. That was at twenty minutes to ten. I had been there over half an hour."

  "The delay was ill-advised but explicable. You have come to grief, certainly, but a murder charge? What will they do for motive?"

  Dunbar stared. "You don't mean that. A Negro and a white girl?"

  "Nonsense. New York isn't Utopia, but neither is it Dixie."

  "That's right. In Dixie I wouldn't be sitting in a fine big room telling a famous detective about it. Here in New York they're more careful about it; they take their time. But about motive, with a Negro they take motive for granted. He's a shine, he's a mistake, he was born with motives white men don't have. It may be nonsense, but it's the way it is."

  "With the scum, yes. With dolts and idiots."

  "With everybody. Lots of them don't know it. Most of them up here wouldn't say that word, nigger, but they've got that word in them. Everybody. It's in them buried somewhere, but it's not dead. Some of them don't know they've got it and they wouldn't believe it, but it's there. That's what I knew I'd have to face when I sat there on the bed last night and tried to decide what to do."

  "And you made the right decision. Disposing of the body, however ingeniously, would have been fatal." Wolfe shook his head. "As for your comments about that word, nigger, its special significance for you distorts your understanding. Consider the words that are buried in you but not dead. Consider even the ones that are not buried, that you use: for instance, 'fat ape.' May I assume that a man who resembles an ape, or one who is fat, or both, could not expect just treatment or consideration from you? Certainly not. The mind or soul or psyche—take the term you prefer—of any man below the level of consciousness is a preposterous mishmash of cesspool and garden. Heaven only knows what I have in mine as synonyms for 'woman'; I'm glad I don't know."

  He turned to the father. "Mr. Whipple. The best service I could render you, and your son, would be to feed you. Say an omelet with mushrooms and watercress. Twenty minutes. Do you like watercress?"

  Whipple blinked his bleary eyes. "Then you're not going to help us."

  "There's nothing I can do. I can't fend the blow; it has landed. Your assumption that your son will be charged with murder is probably illusory. You're distraught."

  Whipple's mouth twitched. "Mushrooms and watercress. No, thank you." His hand went inside his jacket and came out with a checkfold. He opened it. "How much do I owe you?"

  "Nothing. I owed you."

  "Mr. Goodwin's trip. To Racine."

  "You didn't authorize it. I sent him." Wolfe pushed his chair back and stood up. "You will excuse me. I have an appointment. I'm sorry I undertook that job; it was frivolous. And I deplore your misfortune." He headed for the door.

  He was fudging. It was 3:47, and his afternoon session in the plant rooms was from four to six.

  Chapter 5

  FIFTY HOURS WENT BY.

  Like you and everyone else, I have various sources of information about what goes on: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, taxicab drivers, random talk here and there, friends, and enemies. I also have two special ones: Lon Cohen, confidential assistant to the publisher of the Gazette, and a woman who is on intimate terms, not familial, with a certain highly distinguished citizen, for whom I once did a big favor. But the news of the arrest of Dunbar Whipple came from none of those sources; it came from Inspector Cramer of Homicide South, whom I couldn't exactly call an enemy and wouldn't presume to call a friend.

  During the two days I had not only read the newspapers but had also phoned Lon Cohen a couple of times to ask if there was anything hot about the Susan Brooke murder that wasn't being printed. There wasn't, unless you would call it hot that her brother Kenneth had socked an assistant district attorney on the beak, or that there was nothing to the rumor that it was being hushed up that she had been pregnant. She hadn't been. Of course a lot was being printed: that her handbag, on a table in the apartment, had had more than a hundred dollars in it; that an expensive gold pin had been on her dress and a ring with a big emerald had been on her finger (I had seen the ring); that she had bought a bottle of wine at a package store, and several items at a delicatessen, shortly before eight o'clock; that her mother was prostrated and inaccessible; that everyone at the ROCC had been or was being questioned; and so on. The News came out ahead on shots of Susan Brooke, with one in a bikini on a Puerto Rico beach, but the Gazette had the best one of Dunbar Whipple. Handsome and jaunty.

  I wasn't surprised when, at 6:05 Thursday afternoon, Inspector Cramer showed. I had been expecting him or Sergeant Purley Stebbins, or at least a phone call, since Wednesday noon, when Lily Rowan had phoned to tell me she had had an official caller. Of course they had done a routine check on Susan Brooke's recent activities, of course someone at the ROCC had told them about her lunch with Miss Lily Rowan and Lily's contribution to the cause, of course they had called on Miss Rowan, and of course Lily had told the caller about me, since someone else would—for instance, the hallman—if she didn't. So I had been expecting company, and when the doorbell rang and I saw Cramer's burly figure and round red face and battered old felt hat on the stoop, I went and opened up and said, peeved, "You took your time. We've been expecting you for days."

  He spoke to me as he entered. Sometimes he doesn't; he just tramps down the hall. The fact that he spoke, and even thanked me for taking his hat and coat, showed that he had come not to claim but to ask. When he entered the office, naturally he didn't offer a hand, since he knows that Wolfe is not a shaker, but before he lowered his fanny onto the red leather chair he uttered a polite greeting and actually made a try at being sociable by asking, "And how are the orchids?"

  Wolfe's brows went up. "Passable, thank you. A pot of Miltonia roezli has fourteen scapes."

  "Is that so." Cramer sat and pulled his feet in. "Busy? Am I interrupting something?"

  "No, sir."

  "No case and no client?"

  "Yes. None."

  "I thought possibly you were on a job for Dunbar Whipple. I thought possibly he hired you when he was here Tuesday with his father."

  "No. It d
idn't seem to me that he was sufficiently menaced to require my services."

  Cramer nodded. "That's possible. It's also possible that it seemed to you he was a murderer, so you bowed out. I say 'bowed out' because you did have a client. His father."

  "Did I?"

  "Sure. We know all about that, including Goodwin's trip to Racine. Since you're out of it, I might as well be frank. He's at the district attorney's office and when he leaves he'll be taken to a cell. He'll be formally charged in the morning. I'll—"

  "Murder?"

  "Yes. I'll frankly admit that if you had told me you had taken him on I would have expected answers to a lot of questions, and Goodwin would have been wanted downtown. Now he may not have to go." He turned to me. "In your check on Susan Brooke, what did you find out about her relations with Dunbar Whipple?"

  I looked at Wolfe. He shook his head and looked at Cramer. "If you please. Is the decision definite to hold Dunbar Whipple without bail on a murder charge?"

  "Yes. That's why I'm here."

  "Has he a lawyer?"

  "Yes. He's at the district attorney's office now."

  "His name, please?"

  "Why?"

  Wolfe turned a palm up. "Must I get it from the morning paper?"

  Cramer turned both palms up. "Harold R. Oster. A Negro. Counsel for the Rights of Citizens Committee."

  Wolfe's eyes came to me. "Archie, get Mr. Parker."

  I got the phone. I didn't have to consult the book for either of the numbers, office or home, of Nathaniel Parker, the member of the bar. Knowing he was often at his office after hours I tried that one first and got him. Wolfe took his phone, and I stayed on.

  "Mr. Parker? I need some information confidentially. You will not be quoted. Do you know a lawyer named Harold R. Oster?"

  "I know of him. I've met him. He's with the Rights of Citizens Committee. He handles civil rights cases."

  "Yes. How efficient would he be as counsel for a man charged with murder?"

  "Oh." Pause. "Dunbar Whipple?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you on that?"

  "I merely want information."