Right to Die

acceptable in this class. You must always come up with a response to an opponent’s argument. Otherwise, the opponent has won. To close this hour, let me make an argument you might have made, an argument I’ll be asking several of you to pursue next time. Mr. Zimmer?”
    “Yes?”
    “Mr. Zimmer, what if he dies?”
    “What...?”
    “What if, in torturing the kidnapper, he has a heart attack and dies before telling you where the girl is?” Zimmer opened and closed his mouth twice before saying, “Then I broke the rule and got nothing for it.”
    For the first time since she’d left the stage at the beginning of the class, Andrus returned to the podium. “Did you? Or did you, and Ms. Queenan, find yourselves in a conflict between rule and purpose, between the rule you use to protect society and the purpose you had in mind in imposing the rule on society to protect it. These conflicts will arise, and you must learn to reason them through even if they present unattractive alternatives for action. We shall see you next time.”
    Andrus closed her own notes and exited the classroom immediately. Manolo of the Pompadour jumped up and elbowed a male student out of the way to follow her.
    A black woman sitting next to Zimmer stood, clapping him on the shoulder. “Hey, Zim. Gonna be a long season, I’m thinking.”

    With the change of class, more students were milling around in the halls. By the time I found my prospective client’s office, Andrus was nowhere in sight. Manolo was sitting in the anteroom, next to a desk with a little brass pup tent on it saying inés l. roja . Eyes on me and palms on his knees, he pushed himself to a standing position that blocked access to an inner doorway behind him.
    Roja came quickly through the inner door, stepping between us. Reluctantly, Manolo’s face left me to look at her.
    Moving her lips very slowly and using some kind of sign language, Roja said, “He is here to help the professor.” After watching carefully, Manolo moved his head up and down once. More a wrenching than a nod, accompanied by an abrupt hand signal. Simmering, he sat down, again palms to knees.
    Roja said to me, “Manolo is very protective of the professor.”
    “Is he armed?”
    “No. But helping her is his purpose in life.”
    “And every life should have a purpose.”
    Roja didn’t seem sure I wasn’t joking. “Yes, I believe that.” She reached to her telephone console and pushed a button twice. “You may go in now.”
    I opened the inner door and entered an office that was awash in papers. Some were stacked haphazardly on tables and chairs. Other piles had slumped against walls and onto windowsills. Trapped in a corner was a computer that seemed accessible only by helicopter. On the desk in front of Maisy Andrus several books peeked out from a mass of yellow legal pads, pink message slips, and dog-eared photocopies.
    Andrus stood and smiled in a receiving-line way. “Mr. Cuddy.”
    “Not ‘male detective, gray suit’?”
    Shaking hands, the smile went lopsided. “Sit, please.” Back in her chair, Andrus fixed me with an interrogation look. “You don’t care for my teaching technique?”
    “That depends.”
    “On what?”
    “On what level students you’re using it with.”
    Andrus picked up a pencil. “Would you explain what you mean?”
    “It seems to me that what you were doing in there was boot camp. Kind of tear them down before you build them back up.”
    “Let’s assume you’re correct. Therefore?”
    “Therefore I’d think it was something you’d do with first-year students, not upper-level kids taking a short course on ethics and society.”
    Andrus tapped the pencil silently on the only corner of her desk blotter visible under the mess. “You attended law school, Mr. Cuddy.”
    “Yes.”
    “Where?”
    “Here.”
    “But you never graduated.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Are you curious how I knew these things?”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    “Ms. Andrus, it’s your nickel, so we can play around as much as you’d like. I used the expression ‘first-year’ instead of ‘freshman.’ I knew Ethics and Society would be an upper-level course. Accordingly, it’s a good bet I attended law school. But I went here, and you hadn’t heard of me, which probably means I’m not a grad who decided to become a detective, because that’s the kind of oddity that would get around the halls. So you could have deduced that I attended but didn’t graduate law school, or