Right to Die

to think I’m fixated on this Kimberly thing.”
    “But?”
    “Well, if somebody like Strock has the eye now, it wouldn’t surprise me that he’s had it for a while.”
    “And not for just law students?”
    “There are a lot of stories you hear, about how... how well a divorce lawyer can do sexually with all the distraught people who come to him, or her, I suppose, as a client.”
    “And you figure Strock might have been like that?”
    “I don’t know. But if he was, and he’s not getting the opportunities from practice anymore, maybe there’ve been some other Kimberlys.”
    I thanked Nina Russo and gathered up my box of files. As I said good-bye to Bandy, the deejay promised his faithful listeners a program entitled “Throbbing Gristle, a Retrospective.”

    I was able to hail a taxi on Columbus Avenue , giving the driver the address for my condo because it was closer than my office. I made a ham sandwich on rye and washed it down with more ice water as I began reading the Andrus files. I decided to save the anonymous folder for last, focusing first on the letters with identified names and addresses. The tones ranged from fastidious politeness to unintelligible harangue. Doctoral candidates expounding from Ivy League schools to functional illiterates exploding in Walpole State Prison. Every letter containing the buzz word “cunt” or “slut” came from a man. Those using “bitch” were all male except for a woman from Alberta .
    It grew redundant quickly, so I started flipping faster, pulling out the ones I wanted to read more carefully, especially any repeat correspondents. Then I turned to the anonymous file. None used snipped-out words or letters. Many of them were block-printed with frequent misspellings.
    After sifting and sorting, I was left with three people who had written more than one signed letter, were reasonably local, and had used one or more of the buzz words. The first was named Steven O’Brien, a rabid pro-lifer from Providence , Rhode Island . O’Brien believed Andrus to be part of an “international atheist plot to overthrow all that is decent.” He referred often to the incident in Spain , calling Andrus a “slut” for doing in her own husband.
    The second repeater was Louis Doleman, showing an address in West Roxbury . His letters, six over four months, chronicled the decline and “premature” death of his daughter from leukemia. Apparently “Heidi” had taken up the “sudo-religion” that the “Devil’s bitch” Andrus “esposed.” After reading the professor’s “witchery,” the daughter had taken her own life.
    The third repeater’s name was Gunther Yary. His smudgy letterhead proclaimed him Grand Marshal of the American Trust, some kind of skinhead group. The return address sounded like a storefront in a white section of Dorchester . It seemed Gunther and his “folowers” believed strongly in “heterosexuity” and not in the “preverted” hoax of “mercy death” that “Zionists, Faggots, and Niggers” created to wipe out the last “vesttiges” of native Aryan stock. Yary employed all three buzz words and more.
    I wedged the correspondence of O’Brien, Doleman, and Yary into a waterproof plastic portfolio and had copies made at one of the Copy Cops on Boylston Street . Then I deposited the Andrus check in my client’s account at the Shawmut and continued toward police headquarters on Berkeley .

    Even though the door was ajar, I knocked on the frame before looking in. Lieutenant Robert Murphy was cradling the telephone receiver on his left shoulder, signing a series of documents while somebody on the other end of the line talked to him. Murphy motioned me in. His black hand provided a photographer’s backdrop for the gold pen he held.
    I didn’t like it when Murphy smiled at me.
    Into the receiver, he said, “No problem... happy to help... right, right. Bye.” As the receiver slid down his chest, Murphy caught it in his left hand. “You must be getting psychic, Cuddy.”
    “Who was it?”
    “Don’t suppose you know a Met sergeant named Nick Russo?”
    “You’re the second person who’s asked me that today.”
    Murphy hung up. “Yeah, well, it seems he got a call from that first person after she talked to you. Seems that first person had second thoughts about your word being your bond.”
    “I plied her with strong drink.”
    “I bet you did. Think a cop’s kid’d be smarter than to talk with a P.I., even without law school