Рекс Стаут: A Right to Die

So I suggested Lily Rowan, to whom a grand is peanuts, and that was satisfactory. When I rang her, that evening, she said she didn’t like to discuss dirty work on the phone so I had better come in person, and I went, and got back to 35th Street and to bed at a quarter past two. Since I take a full eight hours short of murder, I didn’t get to the office Tuesday morning until after Wolfe had come down from his two hours in the plant rooms — nine to eleven. Around noon Lily phoned. Miss Brooke would be there tomorrow for lunch at one o’clock, and I might come earlier for more briefing.

The two miles crosstown and up to 63rd Street is one of my favorite walks, but that Wednesday it took plenty of man and muscle. When it’s twenty above and at every corner a snowy blast that has been practicing ever since it left Hudson Bay lowers your chin and clamps your mouth shut and bends you nearly double, you have to grit your teeth to go on by all the handy doors to shops and bars and hotel lobbies. When I finally made it, shook the snow off of my coat and hat under the canopy and in the lobby, took the elevator and left it at the top and pushed the button, and Lily opened the door, I said, “The nearest bed.”

She raised a brow, a trick I taught her. “Try next door,” she said. She let me by and shut the door. “You didn’t walk! ”

“Sure. You could call it walking.” I put my hat and coat in the closet. “If they walked up Everest, I walked here.”

We linked arms and entered the living room, with its 19-by-34 Kashan rug, a garden pattern in seven colors, its Renoir and Manet and Cézanne, its off-white piano, and its glass doors to the terrace, where the wind was giving the snow a big play. When we sat she poked her feet out, the shins parallel, and muttered, “Antelope legs.”

“In the first place,” I said, “that was many years ago. In the second place, what I said was that you looked like an antelope in a herd of Guernseys. In a crowd you still do. We will now discuss Miss Brooke, though she probably won’t make it in this weather.”

But she did, only ten minutes late. Lily let the maid admit her but met her at the arch to the foyer. I stood in the middle of the Kashan and was introduced as Mr. Goodwin, her business adviser.

The description that Whipple had given us of her had been biased. She wasn’t skinny. She was small, a couple of inches shorter than Lily, who came up to my nose, with smooth fair skin, brown hair and eyes, and hardly any lipstick on her wide full mouth. Her handshake was firm and friendly without overdoing it. Lily told me afterward that her brown woolen dress was probably Bergdorf, two hundred bucks. She didn’t want a cocktail.

I left it to Lily. At lunch — mushroom chowder, lobster soufflé, 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.”