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evening, but had told her story to a reporter Saturday morning and had answered his questions freely.
    Even if I had been hell-bent on getting something on her I would have had to cross that off and look elsewhere. I put the papers back where they belonged, told the guardian I had done no clipping or tearing, returned to the hotel, treated myself to a glass of milk in the coffee shop, and went up to bed.
    I don’t know whether I would have looked any further in Racine or not if there had been no interruption. Probably not, since I had learned what was in her mind when she said “then something happened,” and that was what had sent me. The interruption woke me up Tuesday morning. I had left a call for eight o’clock, and when the phone rang I didn’t believe it and looked at my watch. Ten after seven. I thought, Damn hotels anyway, reached for the phone, and was told I was being called from New York. I said here I am, and was figuring that in New York it was ten after eight, when Wolfe’s voice came.
    “Archie?”
    “Right. Good morning.”
    “It isn’t. Where are you?”
    “In bed.”
    “I do not apologize for disturbing you. Get up and come home. Miss Brooke is dead. Her body was found last evening with the skull battered. She was murdered. Come home.”
    I swallowed with nothing to swallow. I started, “Where was-” and stopped. I swallowed again. “I’ll leave-“
    “When will you get here?”
    “How do I know'Noon, one o’clock.”
    “Very well.” He hung up.
    I permitted myself to sit on the edge of the bed for ten seconds. Then I got erect, dressed, packed the bag, took the elevator down and checked out, walked to the parking lot and got the car, and headed for Chicago. I would get breakfast at the airport.

Nero Wolfe 40 - A Right To Die
    4
    It wasn’t noon, and it wasn’t one o’clock, when I used my key on the door of the old brownstone on West 35th Street. It was five minutes to two. The plane had floated around above a fog bank for half an hour before landing at Idlewild-A mean Kennedy International Airport. I put my bag down and was taking my coat off when Fritz appeared at the end of the hall, from the kitchen, and came.
    “_Grace a Dieu_,” he said. “He called the airport. You know how he is about machines. I’ve kept it hot. Shad roe _fines herbes_, no parsley.”
    “I can use it. But I-“
    A roar came. “Archie!”
    I went to the open door to the dining room, which is across the hall from the office. At the table, Wolfe was putting cheese on a wafer. “Nice day,” I said. “You don’t want to smell the herbs again so I’ll eat in the kitchen with the Times. The one on the plane was the early edition.”
    We get two copies of the Times, one for Wolfe, who has a tray breakfast in his room, and one for me. I proceeded to the kitchen, and there was my Times, propped on the rack, on the little table where I always eat breakfast. Even when I’m away for a week on some errand Fritz probably puts it there every morning. He would. I sat and got it and looked for the headline, but in a moment was interrupted by Fritz with the platter and a hot plate. I helped myself and took a bite of the roe and a piece of crusty roll dabbed in the sauce, which is one of Fritz’s best when he leaves the parsley out.
    The details were about as scanty as in the early edition. Susan Brooke’s corpse had been found shortly before nine o’clock Monday evening in a room on the third floor of a building on 128th Street, a walk-up of course, by a man named Dunbar Whipple, who was on the staff of the Rights of Citizens Committee. Her skull had been crushed by repeated blows. I already knew that much. Also I already knew what the late city edition added: that Susan Brooke had been a volunteer worker for the ROCC, and she had lived with her widowed mother in a Park Avenue apartment; and that Dunbar Whipple was twenty-three years old and was the son of Paul Whipple, an assistant professor of anthropology at