A Right To Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    There was no hint anywhere of any covering up. The three eyewitnesses had been interviewed, and there were no discrepancies or contradictions. The porch was in plain view from the sidewalk; the two women had seen him with the gun in his hand before he had raised it, and one of them had yelled at him. The man had run across the street and had got to the porch as Mrs. Brooke and Susan emerged from the house. Susan had refused to be interviewed that