Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

I was turning the question over and over in my mind, trying to form an answer, when I felt her breath on my cheek and her lips brushing mine.

“Sleep tight,” she said.

The big news over the weekend had to do with the results of the autopsy performed on Adrian Whitfield. The cause of death was no surprise. It had been confirmed as having resulted from the ingestion of a dose of potassium cyanide which, according to the Post, would have been enough to kill a dozen lawyers. (Monday night Leno read that item in his opening monologue, rolled his eyes heavenward, and got a laugh without saying a word.)

What the autopsy also established was that Will had done little more than anticipate Nature. At the time of his death, Adrian Whitfield had already been stricken with a malignant tumor that had metastasized from its initial site on one of the adrenal glands and invaded the lymph system. Will had cheated him, at most, out of a year of life.

“I wonder if he knew,” I said to Elaine. “It would have been largely asymptomatic, according to the story in the Times.”

“Had he been to the doctor?”

“His doctor’s out of town. Nobody can get hold of him.”

“Doctors,” she said with feeling. “He never said anything?”

“He said something. What was it?” I closed my eyes for a moment. “The last time I talked with him, right before he drank the poison, he said something about wishing we’d had more time. To get to know each other, was what he meant. Or maybe he meant he wished he’d had more time in general.”

“If he knew—”

“If he knew,” I said, “maybe he’s the one who put the cyanide in the scotch. That would explain how Will managed to walk through walls and get in and out of a burglar-proof apartment. He was never there at all. Whitfield killed himself.”

“Is that what you think happened?”

“I don’t know what I think,” I said, and got up to answer the phone.

It was Wally Donn, with the same question. “The son of a bitch was dying,” he said. “What do you figure, Matt? You knew him pretty well.”

“I hardly knew him at all.”

“Well, you knew him better than I did, for Christ’s sake. Was he the type to kill himself?”

“I don’t know what type that is.”

“The most I can get out of Dahlgren is he was moody. The hell, I’d be moody myself if I got a letter from Will. I’d be twice as moody if I had what Whitfield had.”

“If he knew he had it.”

“For that you’d need his medical records, and his doctor’s out of town for the weekend. They’ll be getting in touch with him tomorrow and we’ll know a little more. I’m just picturing this son of a bitch, deliberately taking poison right in front of a young fellow who’s getting paid to protect his life.”

“You know,” I said, “you’re calling him a son of a bitch, but if it wasn’t suicide...”

“Then I’m maligning a man after I already failed to protect him, and that makes me the son of a bitch.” He sighed. “The world’s a confusing fucking place to be in, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“What’d he be doing, anyway, committing some Polish version of suicide? Trying to disguise it, make it look like murder?”

“Usually it’s the other way around.”

“Guys killing people, trying to fix it so it looks like they killed themselves. Why would you turn it around? Insurance?”

“That would only make sense if there’s a policy he took out recently. The clause that excludes suicide only applies for a certain amount of time.”

“Usually a year, isn’t it?”

“I think so. It’s to prevent a person from deliberately bilking them by taking out a policy with the intent of killing himself. But when you’ve got a policy holder who’s been paying premiums for twenty years, you can’t weasel out of your obligation to him just because he got depressed and took a dive in front of the F train.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve done enough insurance work over the years to convince me they’ll weasel out of anything they can. They’re the worst when it comes to questioning items when we bill them for our services. Force of habit, it must be.”

“Speaking of bills, if it turns out he did it himself—”

“What, I can bill the estate? We signed on to protect him and we couldn’t even protect him from himself? I’d rather eat it than try to collect it.”

When there’s enough media attention, you can’t find a place to hide where somebody won’t come after you. Will seemed to be managing so far, but Philip M. Bushing, M.D., didn’t have an equal talent for concealment. He’d gone fishing in Georgian Bay, and some enterprising reporter had managed to track him down.

Bushing was Adrian Whitfield’s physician, specializing in internal medicine — a term, Elaine pointed out, that you would think ought to cover just about everything but dermatology. He evidently confined doctor-patient privilege to those patients who were still breathing, and so felt free to disclose that he had diagnosed Adrian Whitfield’s illness in the spring, and had had the sad task of communicating that fact to the patient.

Whitfield had taken it well, Bushing recalled, ultimately treating the physician as a hostile witness. He’d forced Bushing to admit that neither surgery nor chemotherapy offered any prospect of curing his condition, and got him to estimate how much time he had left. Six months to a year, Bushing told him, and referred him to an oncologist at Sloan-Kettering.

Whitfield called that man, a Dr. Ronald Patel, and made and kept an appointment with him. Patel confirmed Bushing’s diagnosis and proposed an aggressive protocol of radiation and chemotherapy, which he felt might win the patient another year of life. Whitfield thanked him and left, and Patel never heard from him again.

“I assumed he wanted another opinion,” Patel said.

If he wanted an opinion on anything, he was in the right town for it. Everybody had one, and by Tuesday morning I think I’d heard them all. The general consensus seemed to hold that Whitfield’s death was suicide, and one authority on the topic described it as an opportunistic act of self-destruction. I knew what he meant, but it struck me as a curious phrase.

More than a few people were bothered by the method he chose, regarding it as showing little consideration for others — or, for that matter, for Whitfield himself. Cyanide brought an end that was a long way from painless. You did not drift off dreamily into that sleep from which there was no awakening. All that was to be said for it, really, was that you went fast.

“Still,” I told Elaine, “there aren’t that many gentle paths out of this world, and a surprising number of people pick a rocky road for themselves. Cops eat their guns with such regularity you’d think the barrels were dipped in chocolate.”

“I think it makes a statement, don’t you? ‘I’m using my service revolver, therefore the job killed me.’”

“That fits,” I agreed, “but by now I think it’s just part of the tradition. And it’s quick and it’s certain, unless the bullet takes a bad hop. And the means is close at hand.”

A local television personality quoted Dorothy Parker:

This brought a rejoinder, predictably enough, from a spokeswoman for the Hemlock Society, who felt the need to point out just how far we’d come since Parker wrote those lines. There were, she was pleased to report, several carefree ways one could do away with oneself, and the two of which she seemed fondest consisted of gassing yourself in the garage with carbon monoxide or suffocating yourself with a plastic bag.