First I had to face Norton, and tell him what I knew, or anyway what I was supposed to know. I told him how I propositioned Nirdlinger about the accident policy, and how his wife and daughter opposed it, and how I dropped it that night but went over to his office a couple of days later to give him another whirl. That would check with what the secretary saw. I told him how I sold him, then, but only after I promised not to say anything to the wife and daughter about it. I told how I took his application, then when the policy came through, delivered it, and got his check. Then we went down in Keyes' office and we went all over it again. It took all morning, you understand. All while we were talking phone calls and telegrams kept coming in, from San Francisco, where Keyes had our investigators interviewing people that were on the train, from the police, from the secretary, from Lola, after they got her on the phone to find out what she knew. -They tried to get Phyllis, but she had strict instruction from me not to come to the phone, so she didn't. They got hold of the coroner, and arranged for an autopsy. There's generally a hook-up between insurance companies and coroners, so they can get an autopsy if they want it. They could demand it, under a clause in their policy, but that would mean going to court for an order, and would tip it that the deceased was insured, and that's bad all the way around. The get it on the quiet, and in this case they had to have it. Because if Nirdlinger died of apoplexy, or heart failure, and fell off the train, then it wouldn't any longer be accident, but death from natural causes, and they wouldn't be liable. About the middle of the afternoon they got the medical report. Death was from a broken neck. When they heard that they got the inquest postponed two days.
By four o'clock, the memos and telegrams were piled on Keyes' desk so he had to put a weight on top of them to keep them from falling over, and he was mopping his brow and so peevish nobody could talk to him. But Norton was getting more cheerful by the minute. He took a San Francisco call from somebody named Jackson, and I could tell from what he said that it was this guy I had got rid of on the observation platform before I dropped off. When he hung up he put one more memo on top of the others and turned to Keyes. "Clear case of suicide."
If it was suicide, you see, the company wouldn't be liable either. This policy only covered accident.
"Yeah?"
"All right, watch me while I check it over. First, he took out this policy. He took it out in secret. He didn't tell his wife, he didn't tell his daughter, he didn't tell his secretary, he didn't tell anybody. If Huff here, had been on the job, he might have known-"
"Known what?"
"No need to get sore, Huff. But you've got to admit it looked funny."
"It didn't look funny at all. It happens every day. Now if they had tried to insure him, without him knowing, that would have looked funny."
"That's right. Leave Huff out of it."
"All I'm saying, Keyes, is that-"
"Huffs record shows that if there had been anything funny, he'd have noted it and we'd have known it. You better find out something about your own agents."
"All right, skip it. He takes out this policy in absolute secrecy. Why? Because he knew that if his family knew what he had done, they would know what he was up to. They knew what was on his mind, we can depend on that, and when we go into his books and his history, we'll find out what the trouble was. All right, next point, he fractured his leg, but didn't put a claim in. Why? That looks funny, don't it, that a man had an accident policy, and didn't put a claim in for a broken leg? Because he knew he was going to do this, and he was afraid if he put a claim in the family would find out about this policy and block him off."
"How?"
"If they called us up, we'd cancel on him wouldn't we? You bet we would. We'd return his unused premium so fast you couldn't see our dust, and he knew it. Oh no, he wasn't taking a chance on our doctor going out there to look at his leg and tipping things off. That's a big point."
"Go on."
"All right, he figures an excuse to take a train. He takes his wife with him to the station, he gets on the train, he gets rid of her. She goes. He's ready to do it. But he runs into trouble. There's a guy out there, on the observation platform, and for this he don't want any company. You bet he doesn't. So what does he do? He gets rid of him, by putting some kind of a story about not having his ticket, and leaving it in his briefcase, and as soon as this guy goes, he takes his dive. That was the guy I just talked to, a man by the name of Jackson that went up to Frisco on a business trip and is coming back tomorrow. He says there's no question about it, he had the feeling even when he offered to get Nirdlinger's briefcase for him that he was trying to get rid of him, but he didn't quite have the heart to say no to a cripple. In my mind, that clinches it. It's a clear case of suicide. You can't take any other view of it."
"So what?"
"Our next step is the inquest. We can't appear there, of course, because if a jury finds out a dead man is insured they'll murder us. We can send an investigator or two, perhaps, to sit in there, but nothing more than that. But Jackson says he'll be glad to appear and tell what he knows, and there's a chance, just a chance, but still a chance, that we may get a suicide verdict anyway. If we do, we're in. If we don't, then we've got to consider what we do. However, one thing at a time. The inquest first, and you can't tell what the police may find out; we may win right in the first round."
Keyes mopped his head some more. He was so fat he really suffered in the heat. He lit a cigarette. He drooped down and looked away from Norton like it was some schoolboy and he didn't want to show his disgust. Then he spoke. "It was not suicide."
"What are you talking about. It's a clear case."
"It was not suicide."
He opened his bookcase and began throwing thick books on the table. "Mr. Norton, here's what the actuaries have to say about suicide. You study them, you might find out something about the insurance business."
"I was raised in the insurance business, Keyes."
"You were raised in private schools, Groton, and Harvard. While you were learning how to pull bow oars there, I was studying these tables. Take a look at them. Here's suicide by race, by color, by occupation, by sex, by locality, by seasons of the year, by time of day when committed. Here's suicide by method of accomplishment. Here's method of accomplishment subdivided by poisons, by firearms, by gas, by drowning, by leaps. Here's suicide by poisons subdivided by sex, by race, by age, by time of day. Here's suicide by poisons subdivided by cyanide, by mercury, by strychnine, by thirty-eight other poisons, sixteen of them no longer procurable at prescription pharmacies. And here-here, Mr. Norton-are leaps subdivided by leaps from high places, under wheels of moving trains, under wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But there's not one case here out of all these millions of cases of a leap from the rear end of a moving train. That's just one way they don't do it."
"They could."
"Could they? That train, at the point where the body was found, moves at a maximum of fifteen miles an hour. Could any man jump off it there with any real expectation of killing himself?"
"He might dive off. This man had a broken neck."
"Don't trifle with me. He wasn't an acrobat."
"Then what are you trying to tell me? That it was on the up-and-up?"
"Listen, Mr. Norton. When a man takes out an insurance policy, an insurance policy that's worth $50,000 if he's killed in a railroad accident, and then three months later he is killed in a railroad accident, it's not on the up-and-up. It can't be. If the train got wrecked it might be, but even then it would be a mighty suspicious coincidence. A mighty suspicious coincidence. No, it's not on the up-and-up. But it's not suicide."