Right To Die - Jeremiah Healy Read online

  "Well, yes, I guess so."

  "You guess so."

  "I mean, yes. Definitely."

  "Definitely. Mr. Zimmer, definitely for you also?"

  "Yes."

  "Very well, then. Mr. Zimmer, a deranged man has kidnapped a four-year-old girl from outside a day care center. He has placed her in a homemade coffin, with only a limited air supply. By great luck, someone saw the man near the center, and the police have arrested him. There is no doubt the man in custody is the kidnapper. He even boasts that the girl has only three hours of air remaining. You are the highest-ranking police officer available, Mr. Zimmer. Do you authorize torture to extract from the man the location of the girl in the coffin'?"

  Zimmer looked at Queenan, but she was staring at her notebook as though it were the Holy Grail.

  "Mr. Zimmer, yes or no?"

  "No. I'd have my cops search his house and all first."

  "Excellent idea, Mr. Zimmer. Ms. Queenan. same hypothetical, only now you are the police commander and the search has come up empty. Any other suggestions. or is it torture?"

  "No." Queenan seemed to spark a little, even copying the rhythm of Andrus' speech pattern. "No, it's never torture."

  "Never."

  "That's right."

  "You'd never break your rule of no torture."

  "That's right."

  "And why is that, again?"

  "Because human life is sacred."

  "All human life."

  "Yes."

  "Including the little girl's?"

  Queenan pondered that.

  "Ms. Queenan?"

  Zimmer spoke. "That's not fair."

  Andrus turned on him, but more excited than angry. "What's not fair, Mr. Zimmer?"

  "You're putting her in an impossible position."

  "Am I?"

  "Yes. You're asking her to sacrifice her principle."

  "No, I'm not. I've been asking Ms. Queenan, and you, if you agree with a given rule of society, and then I've been asking you about the ethic you have that drives that rule, that justifies it. Both of you seem to think that the no-torture rule makes sense, and both apparently for the same ethical reason, the sanctity of human life. Now I'm just asking Ms. Queenan a simple question. Ms. Queenan, how about it? Is the kidnapper's life more important than the little girl's?"

  "No. I mean, they're equally important."

  "Equally," said Andrus. "Let me get this straight. No doubt that the girl will die from lack of air if the police don't find her."

  "All right."

  "And no doubt that the police have the right man. Both an eyewitness and his own confirming confession."

  "Yes."

  "But still no torture?"

  Queenan looked around the room. For the last few minutes every head had moved to each player in turn, like a tennis audience at match point.

  Queenan said, "If I use torture, I save this girl, but I open up a lot of people to torture in the future."

  "So you let the girl die."

  "I have to. I mean, otherwise I break this rule and everybody might get tortured."

  "Mr. Zimmer. Do you let the girl die?"

  Zimmer took a very deep breath. "No."

  "No?"

  "No. I torture the guy to save her."

  "You do? Why?"

  "Because she's more innocent than he is. Also, if I torture him, maybe nobody dies. If I don't, we know she'll die."

  "Ms. Queenan, does Mr. Zimmer's new logic persuade you?"

  "No. I mean, no, it's not new logic. Now he's sacrificing his principle."

  "Sacrificing his principle. Mr. Zimmer, are you doing that?"

  "No. If the principle behind the rule is to have the government protect human life, then torturing him advances that principle."

  "How, Mr. Zimmer?"

  "Torturing the kidnapper saves her life without killing him."

  Andrus said, "Ms. Queenan, if you don't save the girl by torture, haven't you let your rule control the reason or ethic behind the rule instead of the other way around, instead of the ethic or reason controlling the rule?"

  Queenan shook her head. "I don't know."

  "Not acceptable, Ms. Queenan. That answer is not acceptable in this class. You must always come up with a response to an opponent's argument. Otherwise, the opponent has won. To close this hour, let me make an argument you might have made, an argument I'll be asking several of you to pursue next time. Mr. Zimmer?"

  "Yes?"

  "Mr. Zimmer, what if he dies?"

  "What . . . ?"

  "What if, in torturing the kidnapper, he has a heart attack and dies before telling you where the girl is?"

  Zimmer opened and closed his mouth twice before saying, "Then I broke the rule and got nothing for it."

  For the first time since she'd left the stage at the beginning of the class, Andrus returned to the podium. "Did you'? Or did you, and Ms. Queenan, find yourselves in a conflict between rule and purpose, between the rule you use to protect society and the purpose you had in mind in imposing the rule on society to protect it. These conflicts will arise, and you must learn to reason them through even if they present unattractive alternatives for action. We shall see you next time."

  Andrus closed her own notes and exited the classroom immediately. Manolo of the Pompadour jumped up and elbowed a male student out of the way to follow her.

  A black woman sitting next to Zimmer stood, clapping him on the shoulder. "Hey, Zim. Gonna be a long season, I'm thinking."

  * * *

  With the change of class, more students were milling around in the halls. By the time I found my prospective client's office, Andrus was nowhere in sight. Manolo was sitting in the anteroom, next to a desk with a little brass pup tent on it saying Inés L. ROJA. Eyes on me and palms on his knees, he pushed himself to a standing position that blocked access to an inner doorway behind him. Roja came quickly through the inner door. stepping between us. Reluctantly, Manolo's face left me to look at her.

  Moving her lips very slowly and using some kind of sign language, Roja said, "He is here to help the professor."

  After watching carefully, Manolo moved his head up and down once. More a wrenching than a nod, accompanied by an abrupt hand signal. Simmering, he sat down, again palms to knees. Roja said to me, "Manolo is very protective of the professor."

  "Is he armed?"

  "No. But helping her is his purpose in life."

  "And every life should have a purpose."

  Roja didn't seem sure I wasn't joking. "Yes, I believe that." She reached to her telephone console and pushed a button twice. "You may go in now."

  I opened the inner door and entered an office that was awash in papers. Some were stacked haphazardly on tables and chairs. Other piles had slumped against walls and onto windowsills. Trapped in a corner was a computer that seemed accessible only by helicopter. On the desk in front of Maisy Andrus several books peeked out from a mass of yellow legal pads, pink message slips, and dog-eared photocopies.

  Andrus stood and smiled in a receiving-line way. "Mr. Cuddy."

  "Not 'male detective, gray suit'?"

  Shaking hands, the smile went lopsided. "Sit, please."

  Back in her chair, Andrus fixed me with an interrogation look.

  "You don't care for my teaching technique?"

  "That depends."

  "On what?"

  "On what level students you're using it with."

  Andrus picked up a pencil. "Would you explain what you mean?"

  "It seems to me that what you were doing in there was boot camp. Kind of tear them down before you build them back up."

  "Let's assume you're correct. Therefore?"

  "Therefore I'd think it was something you'd do with first-year students, not upper-level kids taking a short course on ethics and society."

  Andrus tapped the pencil silently on the only corner of her desk blotter visible under the mess. "You attended law school, Mr. Cuddy."

  "Yes."

 
"Where?"

  "Here."

  "But you never graduated."

  "That's right."

  "Are you curious how I knew these things?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "Ms. Andrus, it's your nickel, so we can play around as much as you'd like. I used the expression 'first-year' instead of 'freshman.' I knew Ethics and Society would be an upper-level course. Accordingly. it's a good bet I attended law school. But I went here, and you hadn't heard of me, which probably means I'm not a grad who decided to become a detective, because that's the kind of oddity that would get around the halls. So you could have deduced that I attended but didn't graduate law school, or you could just have asked Tommy Kramer. Either way, I'm not curious about how you know these things."

  Andrus appeared pensive. "You're acting out a bit. Could it be because you feel a little uncomfortable being back at your old, almost alma mater?"

  She had a point. "Maybe. Sorry."

  "Nothing to be sorry about. Tell me, why did you leave law school?"

  "I didn't think it had all the answers."

  "Is 'it' law school or the law itself?"

  "Both."

  Andrus shook her head. "Losing faith in law school is all right. We must occasionally lose faith in most means in order to eventually I improve both means and end. But the law itself, you must never lose your faith in the law, Mr. Cuddy. The law is what protects us all."

  "St. Thomas More?"

  The lopsided smile again. "Yes."

  "Pre — Henry the Eighth, anyway."

  Andrus gave me a real smile, one that made her seem ten years younger with aggressive good looks. "Alec has always had a capacity for finding good people. Tell me truly, what did you think of the class just now?"

  Let the games continue. "I've never seen people have to stand before."

  "It helps get them over the butterflies of presenting in public. Also, I'm terrible with names, and making them stand helps me to remember them, at least in the short term. But I really meant, what did you think of my hypothetical'?"

  "The Dirty Harry thing?"

  "I can no longer rely on the students having read the classics, Mr. Cuddy. So, I disguise subliminally familiar movies or television shows as my hypos. Again, what did you think of it?"

  "I think torture is a serious matter. I think you do your students a disservice by abstracting it and then making it seem they have no way out of an intellectual puzzle."

  "Have you ever witnessed torture, Mr. Cuddy?"

  I thought back to the basement of a National Police substation in Saigon. Suspected Viet Cong subjected to bamboo switches, lit cigarettes, telephone crank boxes and wires. Walls seeping dampness, the mixed stench of body wastes and disinfectant, the screams-

  "Mr. Cuddy?"

  "No, Professor, I've never seen torture."

  She looked at me more carefully, her lips pursing. "I'm sorry. Truly."

  "Like you said before, nothing to be sorry about."

  Andrus exhaled once. "The notes I received, Mr. Cuddy. What is your professional opinion of them?"

  "I'm no lab technician, and I haven't talked to the police about what they may have found on the originals."

  "I meant . . . do you believe I have anything to fear from the author?"

  "Nobody could tell you that, even psychiatrists after examining the guy."

  "You're assuming it's a man."

  "From the words used to describe you, yes."

  A nod. "Mr. Cuddy, I have received many threats. Half the unsolicited mail that arrives here disagrees with my position in a way that could be interpreted as threatening."

  "But most sign their names, and all are delivered here by mail, not to your house by hand."

  Back to tapping the pencil. "That is correct. I would still like to hear whatever analysis you can give me of the notes."

  " 'Analysis' may be too scientific a word."

  "That's all right."

  "Notes don't usually make sense if somebody's rationally trying to kill you. They're just an additional warning and possibly a lead the police can follow back to the killer. Notes do make sense if the guy is just a nut trying to get his jollies from scaring you. Or if he wants to get some publicity from you going to the cops and the notes becoming a media football."

  "Which is why I was opposed to Alec and Inés going to the police in the first place."

  "Yes, but our guy didn't send the notes to the press or tack them to your office door. As I understand it, two were mailed to you here, and one was in your mailbox on Beacon Hill. For your eyes only, so to speak."

  "How do those facts fit your theory?"

  "They fit if we have a nut who wants to scare you."

  "And if we have a 'nut' who wants to scare me and kill me?"

  "It's a possibility, but that brings us back to the psychiatrists, Ms. Andrus."

  "I wonder, could we drop the 'Ms. Andrus"?" It makes me feel like Our Miss Brooks."

  "Professor, then?"

  "I call my students by their last names, and I expect the same from them, because I'm preparing them for a world in which formality, especially in the courtroom, is necessary to avoid the appearance of favoritism or sexism. I call my secretary Inés, but even after six months on the job, she can't get over using Professor for me. Something from the respect someone her age in the old Cuba was supposed to show for university teachers. So be it. For us, how about Maisy and John?"

  "It's still your nickel."

  The face hardened a little. "Yes. Yes, it is. Tell me, John, what do you think of my position?"

  "Your position."

  Andrus dropped the pencil and all of the smile. "What do you think of my position on the right to die?"

  "You think that's relevant to my working for you?"

  "No, I don't. But I am curious."

  I cleared my throat. "You know about my wife."

  "Alec told me that she died of cancer."

  "Brain tumor. She lingered for a long time, months. In and out of awareness, a lot of pain. We didn't end it, the doctors and I."

  I had the feeling that I'd stopped too soon, that Andrus was hanging on my starting again.

  I said, "That's it. We waited, and she died."

  "What did you . . . feel about that?"

  "About her dying?"

  "Yes."

  None of your business. "I think I'd still like to keep my own counsel on that."

  Andrus smiled sympathetically, but in a practiced way. "Then let me tell you about my spouse, John." She squared the chair around, elbows on the desk.

  "Working for a large law firm in Washington, D.C. , I represented hospitals, among other clients. I met Enrique at an interdisciplinary conference in London. Medical-legal issues, that sort of thing. Enrique was fifty, a respected doctor in northern Spain. I was barely thirty, only fifteen years older than his son. I had no Spanish, no ear for languages at all. Enrique's English was wonderful, and if I'd still been a virgin, the romance novels would say he carried me away on a wave of passion. But that really was how it felt. I left the firm for a teaching position at a law school in a D.C. suburb, just to have summers off to be with him."

  "You and he were married but didn't live together?"

  "During the school year. At Christmas and summers I'd fly to him, or he'd somehow make time to fly over to me. Anyway, we'd been married for two years, doing this transatlantic shuttle — money was no object, we were both quite comfortable — when Enrique had a stroke. Now, you have to understand, he had been a saint to the poor people of his area, noblesse oblige, during much of Franco's dictatorship. Manolo is a good example."

  "The guy in the anteroom?"

  "Yes. Manolo was born deaf. His parents cast him out. Literally. Enrique took him in, taught him rudimentary signing, and made him a sort of houseman/orderly to help with the patients he saw. In any case, Enrique had the stroke. Incapacitating. He was paralyzed, could barely sign to Manolo, seemed to forget his Spanish, and only I could understand
him, in terribly garbled English."

  "Where was his son?"

  A muscle jumped in her jaw. "His son, Ramon, was over here, in the States. Studying. I told him he should come back, it was his duty. But he didn't, not until almost the end. And then . . ."

  I gave Andrus time.

  "Sorry. Enrique was deteriorating, horribly. Bodily functions . . . as a doctor, he knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he couldn't get any better, and he had too much pride, too much respect for the human spirit, to drift into getting worse. One night, he asked me, begged me to end it for him. I refused. For weeks I watched him decline, his begging now reduced to a single word, John. 'Needle'."

  The tic again. "Ramon finally arrived. Repelled by his father's condition, he couldn't even sit in the same room with him, his own father. I wasn't getting much sleep, but I was doing a lot of thinking. I decided that what Enrique was asking me to do was illegal but not immoral. Finally, one night, I found a bottle with a label on it that I could read, and I injected him."

  Her voice quavered. "Enrique was aware of what I was doing. He smiled at me, John. He slipped away blessing me."

  Andrus used the edge of her index finger to wipe her eye. It was so like Nancy's gesture that I started a little in my chair, but the professor didn't notice.

  "That should have been the end of it. But I didn't know much about Spanish politics. General Franco had just died, and the leftists were trying to push the Franquistas out of government. The undertaker saw the needle marks, how awkward I must have been when I helped Enrique. There was an autopsy. The prosecutor — Spain has a different system, but what we'd call the prosecutor was a Franquista. Except for Enrique's funeral, I never met him, but apparently my husband had once saved the life of the prosecutor's wife. So the man felt indebted to us and basically sat on the autopsy report. I returned to the States, trying to put my life back together while some Spanish lawyers probated Enrique's estate."

  Andrus shook her head. "A journalist, a real left winger, got a whiff of the autopsy results, showing that Enrique died from an overdose of drugs. When it turned out the Franquista had covered it up, there was a scandal. Worse, it was made to look like corruption, as though I had somehow bribed the man. The prosecutor was ruined, and I became a fugitive, though my lawyers here were able to fight the halfhearted extradition effort. I never even lost my holdings as Enrique's widow in Spain."