Right To Die

"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-