"If he knew-"
"If he knew," I said, "maybe he's the one who put the cyanide in the scotch. That would explain how Will managed to walk through walls and get in and out of a burglar-proof apartment. He was never there at all. Whitfield killed himself."
"Is that what you think happened?"
"I don't know what I think," I said, and got up to answer the phone.
It was Wally Donn, with the same question. "The son of a bitch was dying," he said. "What do you figure, Matt? You knew him pretty well."
"I hardly knew him at all."
"Well, you knew him better than I did, for Christ's sake. Was he the type to kill himself?"
"I don't know what type that is."
"The most I can get out of Dahlgren is he was moody. The hell, I'd be moody myself if I got a letter from Will. I'd be twice as moody if I had what Whitfield had."
"If he knew he had it."
"For that you'd need his medical records, and his doctor's out of town for the weekend. They'll be getting in touch with him tomorrow and we'll know a little more. I'm just picturing this son of a bitch, deliberately taking poison right in front of a young fellow who's getting paid to protect his life."
"You know," I said, "you're calling him a son of a bitch, but if it wasn't suicide…"
"Then I'm maligning a man after I already failed to protect him, and that makes me the son of a bitch." He sighed. "The world's a confusing fucking place to be in, and don't let anybody tell you different."
"I wouldn't dream of it."
"What'd he be doing, anyway, committing some Polish version of suicide? Trying to disguise it, make it look like murder?"
"Usually it's the other way around."
"Guys killing people, trying to fix it so it looks like they killed themselves. Why would you turn it around? Insurance?"
"That would only make sense if there's a policy he took out recently. The clause that excludes suicide only applies for a certain amount of time."
"Usually a year, isn't it?"
"I think so. It's to prevent a person from deliberately bilking them by taking out a policy with the intent of killing himself. But when you've got a policy holder who's been paying premiums for twenty years, you can't weasel out of your obligation to him just because he got depressed and took a dive in front of the F train."
"I don't know," he said. "We've done enough insurance work over the years to convince me they'll weasel out of anything they can. They're the worst when it comes to questioning items when we bill them for our services. Force of habit, it must be."
"Speaking of bills, if it turns out he did it himself-"
"What, I can bill the estate? We signed on to protect him and we couldn't even protect him from himself? I'd rather eat it than try to collect it."
When there's enough media attention, you can't find a place to hide where somebody won't come after you. Will seemed to be managing so far, but Philip M. Bushing, M.D., didn't have an equal talent for concealment. He'd gone fishing in Georgian Bay, and some enterprising reporter had managed to track him down.
Bushing was Adrian Whitfield's physician, specializing in internal medicine-a term, Elaine pointed out, that you would think ought to cover just about everything but dermatology. He evidently confined doctor-patient privilege to those patients who were still breathing, and so felt free to disclose that he had diagnosed Adrian Whitfield's illness in the spring, and had had the sad task of communicating that fact to the patient.
Whitfield had taken it well, Bushing recalled, ultimately treating the physician as a hostile witness. He'd forced Bushing to admit that neither surgery nor chemotherapy offered any prospect of curing his condition, and got him to estimate how much time he had left. Six months to a year, Bushing told him, and referred him to an oncologist at Sloan-Kettering.
Whitfield called that man, a Dr. Ronald Patel, and made and kept an appointment with him. Patel confirmed Bushing's diagnosis and proposed an aggressive protocol of radiation and chemotherapy, which he felt might win the patient another year of life. Whitfield thanked him and left, and Patel never heard from him again.
"I assumed he wanted another opinion," Patel said.
If he wanted an opinion on anything, he was in the right town for it. Everybody had one, and by Tuesday morning I think I'd heard them all. The general consensus seemed to hold that Whitfield's death was suicide, and one authority on the topic described it as an opportunistic act of self-destruction. I knew what he meant, but it struck me as a curious phrase.
More than a few people were bothered by the method he chose, regarding it as showing little consideration for others-or, for that matter, for Whitfield himself. Cyanide brought an end that was a long way from painless. You did not drift off dreamily into that sleep from which there was no awakening. All that was to be said for it, really, was that you went fast.
"Still," I told Elaine, "there aren't that many gentle paths out of this world, and a surprising number of people pick a rocky road for themselves. Cops eat their guns with such regularity you'd think the barrels were dipped in chocolate."
"I think it makes a statement, don't you? 'I'm using my service revolver, therefore the job killed me.' "
"That fits," I agreed, "but by now I think it's just part of the tradition. And it's quick and it's certain, unless the bullet takes a bad hop. And the means is close at hand."
A local television personality quoted Dorothy Parker:
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you
And drugs cause cramp;
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful-
You might as well live.
This brought a rejoinder, predictably enough, from a spokeswoman for the Hemlock Society, who felt the need to point out just how far we'd come since Parker wrote those lines. There were, she was pleased to report, several carefree ways one could do away with oneself, and the two of which she seemed fondest consisted of gassing yourself in the garage with carbon monoxide or suffocating yourself with a plastic bag.
"Unfortunately," she said, "not everybody has a car."
"Sad but true," said Elaine, talking back to the television set. "Fortunately, however, just about everybody has a plastic bag. 'Dad, can I borrow the car tonight? No? Well, can I borrow the plastic bag?"
The real victim, someone else maintained, was Kevin Dahlgren, who'd been subjected to no end of stress by virtue of the fact that Whitfield had been inconsiderate enough to drop dead in front of him. At least one talk show included a psychologist and a trauma expert talking about the possible short- and long-term impact of the incident upon Dahlgren.
Dahlgren ducked most interviews, and acquitted himself creditably when he was cornered. He had, he said, no opinion as to whether he'd witnessed an act of suicide or murder. His only regret was that there'd been nothing he could do to save the man's life.
If Dahlgren didn't want the victim role, a man named Irwin Atkins was eager to snatch it up for himself. Atkins was Adrian Whitfield's final client, the brawler who'd decided to plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge just hours before Adrian Whitfield went off to argue his own case before a higher court. Building on the speculation that Whitfield had felt free to end his life once the case had been disposed of, Atkins served notice of his intention to file an appeal on the grounds that he'd been improperly served by counsel.
"He's got two arguments," Ray Gruliow told me. "One, Whitfield deliberately talked him into pleading because he was in a rush to go home and drink rat poison, or whatever the hell it was. Two, Whitfield's suicidal state of mind impaired his judgment and rendered him incapable of furnishing sound legal advice. He could buttress his second argument by pointing out that Whitfield was sufficiently unbalanced as to take on a mutt like him for a client."
"You think it'll work?"
"I think they'll let him withdraw the plea," he said, "and I think he'll regret it, the silly son of a bitch, when his retrial ends in a conviction."
"And will it?"
"Oh, I'd say so. You pull something like that, withdraw an eleventh-hour plea, and you invite the widespread perception that you're a pain in the ass. I think it's all a load of crap anyway. Adrian didn't kill himself."
"No?"
"I'd never argue it'd be a bad choice, or that it wasn't his choice to make. And I think he might have done it sooner or later. He could very well have been contemplating the act, might even have had it on his mind while he poured himself that drink. But I don't believe he had the faintest idea there was anything in that bottle but good scotch whiskey."
"Why?"
"Because what in the hell is the point? If Adrian was going to kill himself he'd damn well leave a note, and I wouldn't have put it past him to get the document notarized. Anything else would have been inconsistent with the man."
I'd thought as much myself.
"I'm not saying he lacked a sense of the dramatic. He was a trial lawyer, after all. If we didn't like to be in the spotlight we'd spend our lives writing briefs in back rooms. I can imagine Adrian killing himself, and I can even see him doing it in front of witnesses. Remember Harmon Ruttenstein?"
"Vividly."
"Invited some friends over, sat them down, gave them drinks, and told them he wanted them around so there wouldn't be any horseshit about what happened. And then he took a header out the window. I'm committing suicide, he was saying, and I want you fellows here to attest to it. That's completely different from what they say Adrian did."
"He made it look like murder."
"Exactly, and why? That's the question nobody bothers to ask, maybe because nobody can answer it. Because there's a stigma attached to it? Adrian wasn't raised Catholic, and as far as I know the only thing he believed in absolutely was collecting fees in advance in criminal cases. Because he didn't want to invalidate his insurance policies? They keep floating that in the press and on television, as if suicide automatically had that effect."
"I was talking about that the other day," I said. "It's a pretty common misconception."
"And of course it doesn't apply, because Adrian's coverage consisted entirely of policies which had been in force for years. He hadn't applied for additional coverage since the doctor gave him the bad news. This all came out yesterday, but they're still prattling about insurance. I just heard a new wrinkle. Double indemnity."
"For accidental death?"
"Right. As far as the insurance companies are concerned, murder is an accident. It qualifies in that respect if the policy contains a clause specifying a two-hundred-percent payout for accidental death. Stupid clause, incidentally. You're buying financial protection, what the hell's the difference if you fall out of the hay loft or flake away with terminal psoriasis? If anything, you'd think it should be the other way around. It's slow natural deaths that run up the costs for the family, so that's when they'd need extra protection."
"I gather suicide's not considered accidental."
"Well, you can't argue it's natural death, either, but it's excluded from double-indemnity coverage in every policy I ever heard of. So it's within the realm of possibility that a man would be sufficiently moved by consideration of his family's financial well-being to commit suicide in such a manner as to resemble accidental death." He took a breath. "Whew. Did you hear that? I sounded like a goddam lawyer."