Right to Die by Jeremiah Healy Read Free Book Online

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—
    “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