A Right to Die

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 mismash 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.

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