Rex Stout - A Right to Die

Silence for five seconds, then: "I suppose it's something about-for my son?"

"Certainly, since I'm asking your help. There may be a development that will show promise."

"Thank God."

"He is not its source. Can you supply two such men?"

"I will. You'd better repeat the specifications."

Wolfe did so, but I didn't listen. I was too busy trying to guess what kind of charade was going to have two roughly dressed middle-aged Negroes in the cast. Plus, apparently, Saul Panzer.

We hung up and he turned to me. "Your notebook. On my letterhead, but not a letter. A document. Dated today. Two carbons. Double-spaced. 'I hereby affirm that at or about twenty minutes past eight in the evening of Monday, March second, nineteen sixty-four, I took my motor car from the'-name the garage and its address-'and, comma, unaccompanied, comma, drove it to One Hundred and Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, New York City. I parked the car, comma, walked to the entrance of the building at'-give the address-'entered the building, comma, and ascended two flights of stairs. On the third floor, I…'"

10

At least half of the hallmen in New York apartment houses are either hard of hearing or don't give a damn. I know how to pronounce my name without mumbling, but I have heard myself announced as Godwin, Gooden, Gordon, Goodman, and variations; and with a message of five words or more they're hopeless. So that Tuesday afternoon when I entered the lobby of that sixteen-story Park Avenue palace and crossed the maybe-Oriental carpet to meet the hallman, I was prepared. I had it in my hand. Reaching him, I pointed emphatically to my mouth, shook my head, and handed it to him-a slip of paper on which I had typed:

Please tell Mrs. Kenneth Brooke that Mr. Goodwin is here and wants to go up and tell her the answer to the question which Mr. Wolfe refused to answer last Friday evening.

He looked at me suspiciously and asked, "Deaf and dumb?"

I shook my head.

"Oh, you can hear?"

I nodded.

He read it again, went through a door, used a phone, and came out. "Fourteen A," he said, and I crossed the carpet again, to the elevator. I had saved three minutes and a lot of breath.

I was admitted to Fourteen A, to a foyer bigger than my bedroom, by the lady of the house, the full-sized positive blonde. Since she was now definitely a candidate, she deserved more than mere curiosity. As I disposed of my coat and hat on a chair and followed her through an arch into a room in which a concert-size piano was merely a speck in a corner, I was trying to see a sign of a murderer in her. After all the years I should know better, and I do, but it's automatic and you can't control it.

She crossed to one of two divans at right angles to the fireplace, and when she had sat I took a nearby chair. She looked at me with her round blue eyes as a lady of that much house looks at an article like a private detective and said, "Well?"

"It was just a dodge," I said, "to get up and in."

"A dodge? "

"Yes. Mr. Wolfe wants to see you. You wouldn't be impressed by the reason he had for deciding that Dunbar Whipple was innocent because it was strictly personal. The same with me. Whipple was in the office for more than an hour last Tuesday, a week ago today, and from what he said and the way he said it we were convinced that he hadn't killed Susan Brooke."

She stared. "Just what he said? "

"Right. But now we have a better reason-maybe not actually better, but a different kind. Now we know. Since you stood at the door a while, listening, and heard nothing, and knocked on the door, and stood some more to listen, and knocked again, and got no response, and still heard nothing; and since when you left the building you watched the entrance, and Susan didn't arrive but Whipple did, it's obvious that she wasn't in the apartment alive when he entered. That's simple, isn't it?"

She was fairly good. She had parted her lips, and her frown was okay. But what she said wasn't so hot. She said, "What on earth do you think you're saying? Are you crazy?"

Of course people have word habits, she had asked her husband if he was crazy, but she should have done better. "That's wasted, Mrs. Brooke," I said. "Peter Vaughn couldn't handle his conscience, and we have it all from him-that is, his end of it. We have some from others too-people who saw you."

"You're crazy! What could you have from Peter Vaughn?"

I shook my head. "Really, it's no good. For his part, corroboration to burn. The hallman and elevator man who saw him come and go, and you go and come, your eight-year-old son-but it shouldn't be necessary to drag him in-the man at the garage. Peter's part is solid. It's the other part that Mr. Wolfe wants to discuss with you. I go on talking to give you time to swallow it. He wants to see you, now, and I came to escort you. The other time you wanted to see him, to find out if he knew that you had gone there that evening. Now it's his turn, he wants to see you. Let's go and get it over with."

I thought, as I talked, that she was going to go feminine on me, and so she did. She stretched an arm to put her hand out, but I wasn't close enough for her to touch me without leaving the divan. The feminine was in her eyes, and in her chin as it quivered a little, but that was all, except her saying, "I don't want to go." Pure feminine.

"Of course you don't. So come on." Masculine. I stood up.

"You said 'the other part.' What other part?"

"I'm not sure. It's what Mr. Wolfe wants to ask you about. I advise you to come and find out."

"I'm not… I'll come… later." She got to her feet, took a step, and put her hand on my arm. "Later?"

"It's already later. Whipple has been in the coop four days, and he's innocent and you know it." I took her ann and turned her, masculine but not rough, and she moved. She said she had to tell the maid and headed for a door in the rear, and I thought she might forget to come back, but no. When she returned she had a new look; she had decided to cope. If I had touched her arm I would have been cold-shouldered. But she permitted me to hold her platinum mink and to open and close the door. Down in the lobby, as the hallman opened that door for us, I told him distinctly, "You may keep that slip of paper for a souvenir," and he almost lost his grip on the door. In the taxi she wasn't talking; she kept her head turned, looking out the window. Undoubtedly she was doing what I had told Wolfe she would have time for, deciding on her line.

The charade began when we entered the hall of the old brownstone. The front door on the left, which is to the front room, was ajar half an inch, so I knew the office was empty, and Saul knew we had arrived. The whole ground floor is soundproofed, including the doors. She preferred to keep her coat, and I took her to the oflice, to the red leather chair, told her there would be a brief wait, left, closing the door, and proceeded to the alcove at the end of the hail. Wolfe was there by the hole in the wall with the panel opened. He looked a question, and I nodded. If there had been any important departure from the script, either at his end or mine, we would have had to go to the kitchen to discuss it.

I looked at my watch: 3:18. The wait was to be ten minutes from the time we entered the house, at exactly a quarter past. We stood it out. At 3:24 we both got our eyes at the hole, and it was close quarters. For the twentieth time I decided that the hole must be enlarged.