Right To Die

"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."

Andrus came forward in her chair. "That's the perversity of it all, John. I helped a man I loved move through the pain and hopelessness of incurable illness to the peace that follows. Everyone who tried to do the right thing in that direction was vilified by the system, but in the end nothing changed in the society."