A Right To Die (3 page)

That was a new experience. Over the years I have checked on a lot of people-a thousand, two thousand-but always after something specific, anything from an alibi to a motive for murder. With Susan Brooke I was simply checking. Because I am interested in me, I would give two bits to know which I would have preferred, to dig up something that would brand her good, or to find nothing at all worth mentioning. At the time I was just doing a job, and enjoying it carefree because there was nothing at stake for Wolfe or me.

I spent three days, parts of them, and three evenings at it. It didn’t take long to cross off the Parthenon Press lead. She hadn’t done her reading at the office, and only three people, two editors and a stenographer, had known her. One of the editors hadn’t liked her, but I gathered, from a remark by the stenographer, that he had made a pass at her and missed.

The UN lead took longer; it took half a day to find out where she had worked. It would take another half a day for me to write, and you half an hour to read, all the items I collected. According to one source, she had got tight at a farewell luncheon for some Greek. According to another source, she hadn’t. She had been so friendly with a Polish girl that she actually took her to the country for a summer weekend. Three times, or maybe four or five, she had been taken to lunch in the delegates’ dining room by a Frenchman with a reputation. I followed that one up a little, but it fizzled out. She had once been seen leaving the building with a Moroccan girl, a Hungarian, and a Swede. And so forth and so on. It was very educational. The UN is wonderful for broadening a man’s outlook. For instance, Turkish girls have short legs and Indian girls have flat feet.

At ten o’clock Saturday evening I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone, used my key to get in, put my coat and hat on the rack, and went down the hall to the office. Wolfe was behind his desk in the only chair in the world that really suits him, with a book, _William Shakespeare_, by A. L. Rowse. I stood while he finished a paragraph. He looked up.

I spoke. “You know, I don’t think I have ever known you to take so long with a book.”

He put it down. “I’m reviewing his dating of Cymbeline. I think he’s wrong.”

“Then let’s send it back.” I spun my chair around and sat. “I took a Moroccan girl to dinner at Rusterman’s. On me. She doesn’t dance, so I took her home. Today was merely more of the same, not worth reporting. Tomorrow is Sunday. I don’t mind this caper, I’m enjoying it, but it’s a washout. I suggest that you tell Whipple that if there’s something wrong with Miss Brooke it’s buried deep.”

He grunted. “You like her.”

“Not especially. I told you Wednesday evening that my guess was that she is comparatively clean. It still is.”

“How candid are you?”

“So-so. I’m trying.”

“Where is Racine?”

“Between Chicago and Milwaukee. On the lake.”

He pushed his chair back, raised his bulk, walked over to the globe, which was twice as big around as he was, whirled it, and found Wisconsin.

He turned. “It’s closer to Milwaukee. Is there an airplane to Milwaukee?”

“Sure.” I stared. “The fare would be around eighty bucks, and then thirty bucks a day. Or more. Whipple might object.”

“He will have no occasion.” He returned to his chair and sat. “Veblen called it instinct of workmanship. Mine was committed when I engaged to serve Mr. Whipple. In your conversation with Miss Rowan and Miss Brooke, which you reported Wednesday evening verbatim, did you note nothing suggestive'Surely not.”

“You could call it suggestive. After she said she got good and bored in Racine she said, “Then something happened, and-’ And she cut. Okay, suggestive. Maybe the roof in the big house started to leak.”

“Pfui. What if Miss Brooke’s past were a vital element in an investigation of great moment?”

“I would probably be in Racine now.”

“Then you will go. Tomorrow. Confound it, I’m committed.”

I shook my head. “Objection. Tomorrow’s Sunday and I have a personal commitment.”

He settled for Monday, and for Chicago instead of Milwaukee because there were more planes.

It was three above zero at twenty minutes past five Monday afternoon when I parked the car, which I had rented in Chicago, in a lot a block away from the office of the Racine Globe and two blocks from the hotel where I had a reservation. I have not left the parking to the hotel since the day, a few years back, when I lost an important contact because it took them nearly half an hour to bring the car. I walked the two blocks with my bag, checked in, and went out again.

I had no appointment at the Globe, but Lon Cohen of the New York Gazette had made a phone call for me Sunday evening, and a man named James E. Leamis, the managing editor, knew I was coming. After two waits, one downstairs and one on the third floor, I was taken to him in a room that had his name on the door. He left his chair to shake hands, took my coat and hat and put them on a couch, and said it was a pleasure to meet a New York newspaperman. We sat and exchanged some remarks, and I explained that I wasn’t a newspaperman; I was a private investigator doing a job for the Gazette. I said I supposed that Mr. Cohen had told him that the Gazette was thinking of running a series on the Rights of Citizens Committee, and he said no, he had told him only that I would come to ask for some information.

“But you know what the Rights of Citizens Committee is.

“Of course. There are branches in Chicago and Milwaukee, but none in Racine. Why do you come here?”

“I’m checking on a certain individual. The series will focus on the people at the New York headquarters, and one of the important ones is a young woman named Susan Brooke. I understand she’s from Racine. Isn’t she?”

“Yes. My God, the Gazette sent you out here just to check on Susan Brooke'Why?”

“No special reason. They want to fill in the background, that’s all. Do you know her'Or did you?”

“I can’t say I knew her. Say I was acquainted with her. I knew her brother Kenneth fairly well. Of course she’s another generation. I’m twice her age.”

He looked it, with his hair losing color and getting thin, and his wrinkles. He was in his shirt sleeves, with a vest, unbuttoned. I asked, “How was she regarded in Racine?”

“Well& all right. One of my daughters was in her class at high school. Then she went away to college-if I knew which one, I’ve forgotten-“

“Radcliffe.”

“Oh. So actually her only background in Racine was her childhood. Her father had Racine background, and how. He was the smartest real-estate operator in southern Wisconsin. He owned this building. The family still does. I’m afraid I can’t help you much, Mr. Goodwin. If what you want is dirt, I know I can’t.”

I had intended to ask him if anything newsworthy had happened to Susan Brooke, or about her, in the summer or fall of 1959, but I didn’t. She was the Globe’s landlady, and they might be behind on the rent. So I told him I wasn’t after dirt specifically, just the picture, whatever it was. He started asking questions about the ROOC and what people in New York thought about Rockefeller and Goldwater, and I answered them to be polite.

It was dark when I emerged to the sidewalk, and the wind would freeze anything that was bare. I went back to the hotel and up to my room, where I was expecting company at six-thirty. In Chicago I had called on a man who had traded professional errands with Wolfe now and then. According to him, there was only one in Racine that was any good, by name Otto Drucker, and he had phoned him and made an appointment for me. In my nice warm room I took off my shoes and stretched out on the bed, but soon got up again. After only two blocks of that zero wind I would have been asleep in three minutes.

He was punctual, only five minutes late. As I shook hands with him at the door I didn’t let my surprise show. I would never have picked him for an operative; he would have looked right at home at the desk of an assistant vice-president of a bank, with his neat well-arranged face and his friendly careful eyes. When I turned from putting his coat and hat on the bed, he asked in a friendly careful voice, “And how is Mr. Nero Wolfe?”

He was almost certainly a distinguished citizen. It had never occurred to me that a private detective could get away with it. Not Nero Wolfe. He’s a citizen, and he’s distinguished, but a distinguished citizen, no.

It was a very pleasant evening. He liked the idea of eating in the room. When I said I would phone room service for a menu, he said it wasn’t necessary because the only things they knew how to cook were roast beef, hashed brown potatoes, and apple pie. If I reported the whole evening for you, you wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I did, because mostly we talked shop. Take tailing. He knew all the tricks I had ever heard of, and, because he had been working in Racine for twenty years and everybody knew him, he had had to invent some twists that even Saul Panzer would be glad to use.

But of course the point was Susan Brooke. I didn’t mention her until after we had got acquainted and had finished with the meal, which was okay, and the dishes had been taken away. All I told him was that a client was considering taking her as a partner in an important project, that anything he could tell me about her would be strictly confidential, and that he would not be quoted. I would have been disappointed in him if he hadn’t asked who the client was. He did. He would have been disappointed in me if I had told him. I didn’t.

He took his pipe from his mouth and tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. “Memories,” he said. He plumbed his head. “I did some jobs for Susan Brooke’s father. Quite a few. I could give you a line on him, but he’s dead. She was just one of the kids around town, even if her name was Brooke, and as far as I know she was never in any trouble worth mentioning. I suppose you know she went away to college.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And then New York. The years she was at college she wasn’t here much even in the summers; she and her mother took trips. In the last eight or nine years I don’t think Susan Brooke has been in Racine more than four or five months altogether. The past four years she hasn’t been here at all.”

“Then I’m wasting the client’s money. But I understand she came here, came home, when she finished college. In nineteen fifty-nine. But maybe you wouldn’t know; her father was dead then. Not long after that they left for New York. Do you happen to know how long after?”

He pulled on his pipe, found it was out, and lit it. Through the smoke screen he said, “I don’t know why you’re trying to sneak up on me like this. If you want to ask me about that man that killed himself, go ahead and ask, but I don’t know much.”

I usually manage my face fairly well, but with him there was no reason to be on gaard, and it showed. What showed was how that “man that killed himself” hit me. Here, all of a sudden, was dirt. It might even be the blackest dirt, such as that she had killed a man and got it passed off as suicide. The way it hit me, it was obvious that not only had I not expected to find anything much, I hadn’t wanted to.

Drucker asked, “What’s the matter'Did you think I wouldn’t know I was being played?”

I produced a grin. “You don’t. Even if I wanted to try playing you, for practice, I know damn well I couldn’t. I know nothing about the man that killed himself. I was merely checking on Susan Brooke in Racine. Maybe you’re playing me?”

“No. As soon as you mentioned Susan Brooke, naturally I supposed that was the item you were checking on.”

“It wasn’t. I knew nothing about it. You said go ahead and ask. Okay, I ask.”

“Well.” He pulled at the pipe. “It was that summer when she was back from college. A young man came to town to see her, and he was seeing her, or trying to. At twenty minutes to six in the afternoon of Friday, August fourteenth, nineteen fifty-nine, he came out of the house, the Brooke house, stood on the parch, pulled a gun from his pocket, a Marley thirty-eight, and shot himself in the temple. You say you didn’t know about it?”

“Yes. I did not. Was there any doubt about it?”

“None at all. Three people saw it happen. Two women on the sidewalk in front of the house and a man across the street. You would like to know about Susan Brooke, where did she fit in, but I can’t tell you of my own knowledge. I only know what was printed and what a friend of mine told me who was in a position to know. The man was a college boy, Harvard. He had been pestering her to marry him, and he came to Racine to pester her some more, and she and her mother gave him the boot, so he checked out. As you know, that happens, though personally it is beyond what I can understand. There may be good and sufficient reasons for a man to kill himself, but I will never see that one of them is a woman saying no. Of course it’s a form of disease. You’re not married.”

“No. Are you?”

“I was. She left me. It hurt my pride, but I’ve slept better ever since. Another thing, if a man and wife are together the way they should be, it’s natural and healthy for them to talk about his work, and a private detective can’t do that. Can he?”

We started talking shop and kept at it for more than an hour. I didn’t try to get him back on Susan Brooke. But when he left, around ten o’clock, I told myself that the Globe was a morning paper, so the staff would be there now, and if her past was a vital element in an investigation of great moment, I would go and take a look. So used the phone, got Leamis, and received permission to inspect the back file.

The wind had eased up some, but the cold hadn’t, and it pinched my nose. In the Globe building the prees had started; there was vibration on the ground floor, and even more on the second, where I was taken to a dim and dusty room and turned over to an old geezer with no teeth, or anyway not enough. He warned me to do no clipping or tearing and led me to a bank of shelves marked 1959.

The light was bad, but I have good eyes. I started at August 7, a week before the date Drucker had named, to see if there was any mention of a Harvard man’s arrival or presence in town, but there wasn’t. On the fifteenth, there it was, front page. His name was Richard Ault and his home town was Evansville, Indiana. It was front page again on Sunday the sixteenth, but on Monday it was inside and on Tuesday there was nothing. I went on and finished the week but drew blanks, then went back to the first three days and read them again.