Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (32 page)

“In this case,” Dennis asked, “who exactly is ‘we’?”

“The Water Board, whose emergency committee I chair. We were in charge, although we conferred with as many people in town as we could.

“One team went straight up to Pearl Pass and camped in the eastern bottleneck. That was the only way out of the area in the direction of Independence Pass and Leadville and Denver, unless you intend to head back down to Aspen by way of Difficult Campground. Peter Frazee was leader of that group. I went with a second team—with my cousin Amos McKee and Dan Crenshaw, who runs the gym, and Louise Hubbard, Grace’s daughter by her first marriage. Nominally I was the leader, although Amos is a real mountain man and Dan was the oldest among us. But I’m the mayor—as you’ve begun to realize, that’s quite a bit more than just a pencil-pushing sinecure.

“My parents, with Oliver Cone and Shirlene Hubbard, made up the third team. Dad’s a great tracker, Oliver is a bowman, Shirlene’s a geologist, and they were the ones who found the Lovells’ camp. They found it in the evening but didn’t go in until dawn. They had to kill the dog. That was unfortunate, but when it was discussed at the meeting before we left for Pearl Pass we all agreed that if the dog alerted the Lovells, Henry might do something foolish. Everyone remembered the debacle in Mexico with Julian Rice and poor Sam Hubbard. Henry Lovell had a rifle—that Remington which they foolishly left up there and was found with my father’s fingerprints on it. We didn’t think Henry would use it in anger, but we didn’t dare take the risk.”

Dennis bent to stir the fire again. He placed a thick oak log atop the others.

“My parents and the Lovells sat down and talked. Harped, as we say in Springling. It’s a way of reasoning through a problem that tries to put the good of the community above all else—in a humanist and communal way, if you’ll accept the use of those two words linked together. Because for us,
community
isn’t a glorious abstraction, like
the state
in Marxism, or
all freedom-loving peoples
in that government claptrap we’ve heard for decades. This community is a specific group of people who have names and faces. Three hundred and seventy linked human beings, and their unborn descendants.

“They harped for a couple of hours. Henry began to come round, to see it, to be willing. And to be gracious, not angry. But not Susan. The funny thing is, what really got her back up was not so much my father’s gentle insistence that she and Henry had to depart now, that day, for the general good, but that Oliver had put an arrow through the heart of their old dog, Geronimo. Susan kept saying, ‘How can you be so all-fired high-and-mighty about the good of the community when you’ve just killed an innocent dog that wouldn’t even harm a cat? You did that on behalf of the community? What kind of community that’s of any lasting value does such a brutal thing?’ It was remarkable—she carried on about that dog for the better part of an hour, and it was one of the last few hours of her life.”

“How do you know those details?” Dennis asked.

“I was there by then, with my team. At the harping I didn’t talk much. I listened. And my parents had no decent answer for that question of Susan’s. It was just one of those many things that ‘had to be.’ After a while the discussion petered out, because it was clear from the beginning that there could be only one outcome. If the Lovells said no, some sort of force, however mild, would have to be used. That was a hateful idea. That’s what we were trying to avoid at almost any cost.”

“You were trying,” Dennis said, “to get them to ratify their own murder.”

“Their
murder?”
Sophie looked pale for a moment, but then recovered. “No, Dennis, not their murder. Their death, yes. Their departure. That universal act to which all of us without exception are doomed. It’s ordained as part of life. It can’t be escaped. It’s just a question of
when.
So, no, my darling, my dear lawyer husband, not their murder. Their voluntary acceptance of the end of their life at the age of one hundred. Don’t you see the difference? It’s vast. Forget that they’d sworn to it seventy-nine years ago—forget even that, because I’m sure the law would not regard that oath as a binding contract. Just remember everything I’ve told you. Balance their deaths against the life of the community they and we both loved and wanted to perpetuate.”

“I’m trying,” Dennis said, “but I’m not quite succeeding. You’re right that the law wouldn’t see this assisted suicide pact as a binding contract. And the law wouldn’t see their deaths under these circumstances as anything but murder. It’s not even euthanasia. For God’s sake, they weren’t suffering—they were
healthy.
So it’s the willful and deliberate taking of two fit lives. How can you call that anything but murder?”

“Because this act, which you call assisted suicide,” Sophie said, a little heatedly, “goes beyond the narrow world of law. It goes beyond any prudent or useful definition of justice, which is what you lawyers are always trying to define and make happen—with results that all sane people agree are ridiculous bordering on disgusting. Yes! It goes to the heart of human life. It goes to what we all dream of when we dare to dream.”

“No. I don’t see it.”

“Because you
daren’t,
Dennis. Not yet. Listen to me carefully. Think before you answer. Can you do that?”

Dennis nodded. He could try.

“If you”—Sophie leaned forward—
“you,
Dennis Conway—today, at your present age of forty-nine, were given the opportunity—barring accident or foul play, or any nasty disease that your body might already be harboring—to live to the age of one hundred, in a harmonious environment among your loved ones—to live with physical vitality and sexual power and a ripening intelligence, right through to the very end of your days on your hundredth birthday—provided that you would vow to submit to a humane, peaceful death at that end— would you say yes or no? Would you make that bargain? Or would you rather take your chances like your Aunt Jennie?”

Dennis stared at her.

“Your look speaks volumes,” Sophie said. “It’s not the devil asking Faust to give up his soul for eternal life. You’re getting a hundred-year guarantee of health. It costs you nothing.”

Still Dennis did not reply, and Sophie went on: “Another codicil to the bargain is this. You’d be ensuring that your children would have the same opportunity to live that way, and that long. Barring the unforeseen accidents that make this an imperfect and often cruel world, you’d be guaranteeing them a hundred years of healthy life. What they make of it, of course, no one can guarantee. Think about it! Is there any evil in that bargain? Where is the wrong? The injustice? You tell me. I don’t see any. Except perhaps for this one thing: that when your time came to depart, your friends and family would have to help you on the journey, because you can’t really do it alone. Yes, in the eyes of the law of the state of Colorado and the other forty-nine states and the federal government and all those other wonderful governments the world over, the loyal people who helped you to keep your promise to depart at the age of one hundred would be committing the crime of murder under section such-and-such of the penal code. How sinful. How inhumane. But is it, Dennis? Is it murder most foul? Or is it life most fortunate and death most enlightened? And if it were offered to you—you personally—would you say yes or no?”

“I’m not sure,” Dennis said. “It’s hard to answer something like that in theory.”

“In theory?”
Sophie laughed with great gusto; he loved her laugh, even now, at a moment like this. “What makes you think it’s a theoretical question? We don’t take strangers into the community often. There have only been three in my lifetime. One died relatively young, of leukemia, which we found out he’d had before he began drinking the water from the spring. The second one is Harry Parrot, your friend and my former father-in-law, who’s just about at the end of his hundred years now—in fact, we’re going to talk to him and plan the departure ceremony this week. And the third one, my darling, is
you.

We decided a long time ago that we wouldn’t accept immigrants. Couldn’t control them. But if anyone came into our midst through marriage, that was a different story: we would welcome them. We would have a kind of probation period of a year, and if we saw by then that they measured up to our pretty moderate view of what a civilized human being should be, we’d offer them the same opportunity as if they’d been born and bred in Springhill. They would be offered the water. They’d be offered the same pact we were offered when we were younger. One hundred years.

“So it’s not theoretical, Dennis. It’s
real.
Your year has already passed. The offer wasn’t made to you on time because it didn’t seem wise to bludgeon your mind with all those facts while you were getting ready to defend my parents for a murder they didn’t commit but would certainly have committed if they’d had to. ‘Wait,’ everyone said, ‘until after the trial.’ I had to abide by that. I had to be silent, even though I hated every moment of it.

“Not theoretical. Real. You can choose. Go back into the world and take your chances with biology, or stay with me in Springhill, in
our
world, and live to be a hundred. And then die voluntarily. You’d be starting late on the water, so you might only make it into your mid-nineties. No guarantee on that. Is it a hard choice? I doubt it. You just haven’t confronted it yet as reality—you’re still viewing all this as a kind of fantasy. But it’s not. Soon, when you’ve spoken to more people among us and asked more questions, it will become real for you. And when you’re ready to choose, you’ll tell me.”

“Wait,” Dennis said, “before we get to that—if I’m able to get to it, because I’m reeling—I need to ask you something. You said a minute ago that the offer wasn’t made to me before because it didn’t seem the right time to do it, while I was getting ready to defend your parents for a murder they didn’t commit. A murder they didn’t commit? Sophie, I know they committed it. I fought for your mother in court, and I won, but I knew she did it. She told me she didn’t, but I knew she was lying. She was guilty under the law I’ve sworn to uphold. And you’ve admitted to me today, right here, that they did it. They harped, you said, but everyone knew there could be only one outcome. Your mother gave a lethal injection to the Lovells. The trial’s over, there’s no double jeopardy. Why bother to deny it now?”

“Shirlene Hubbard hadn’t really wanted to go along in the first place,” Sophie said, “and my mother finally decided she didn’t want to do it, even though by that stage of the proceedings both Henry and Susan were willing—although not what I’d call thrilled at the idea. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be facetious. It was an extraordinary discussion that took place in that tent at Pearl Pass. It clarified all the ideas we’d ever had. But Bibsy went through a kind of crisis. She’d known Susie Lovell too long.”

“Nevertheless,” Dennis said, his glance shifting away to probe the shadows cast by the fire, “she overcame her reluctance. She hastened their departure, to use your euphemism.”

He looked back at Sophie then—at his thirty-eight-year-old wife who was claiming to be sixty-four.

“No.” Leaning forward, Sophie clasped her hands over her knees, like a child. “My mother didn’t have to. There was someone else there who could do it, and was willing to do it and save that wound to my mother’s conscience. I was there. I had the training from her, years ago. I injected both of them. First with the sedatives, then with the potassium. By your law, I murdered them.”

Chapter 26
Choice

DENNIS ATE FOOD and hardly tasted it; he played hearts and chess with Lucy and Brian and tutored them in American history and studied the solar system with them; he drove back and forth between home and his office in Aspen. He found time one morning, after they had agreed not to discuss the trial or the case, to ski the back of Aspen Mountain with Josh Gamble. (“It’s not my job to be pissed off at lawyers for doing their job,” the sheriff said. “It’s my job to do my job.”) He began work on two new run-of-the-mill cases—but all the time he felt that he was elsewhere: he was with Sophie, the snow silently falling, listening to her tale and watching the pale oval of her face against the blackness of the forest. Or framed against the crackling of the fire. Or in the spring, where he had taken his first sip of the water that could keep him alive for another fifty years.

Was it possible? Was it a dream?

Whenever he was alone he talked to himself aloud. He asked questions and struggled to answer them. He had studied her Colorado birth certificate. The date was November 5,1930. She snapped off the rubber band and unrolled her A.B. degree from Cornell University— the graduation date was June 1952. She handed him a magnifying glass and he bent in the brilliant halogen glare of her desk lamp to once again inspect the sepia-tinted photograph of William Lovell’s sixty-fifth birthday party. Unless she was identifying the faces falsely, they were exactly as she had described them. A yellowed, brittle, and well- thumbed copy of the Tunisian Sheikh Nefzawi’s
The Perfumed Garden
nested in the back of the safe. It had been published in London in 1846, its translator unnamed. In the flyleaf Dennis traced a scrawl in turquoise-colored ink:
This marvelous book is the property of Larissa Orlov McKee.

He thought again about the Lovells’ teeth—the gold fillings and the old-style amalgam that the forensic odontologist swore had to have been put in before 1910, at a time when Susan Lovell, born Susan Crenshaw, and Henry Lovell Sr., were in their teens. Henry Lovell Sr.—Caleb’s son, and William’s grandson …

If Dennis decided not to believe, then he was married to a charlatan, a woman with a twisted mind and the resolve to accomplish her ends at any cost. A fantasist and a murderer. If he elected to believe that his wife, the woman he loved, was sixty-four years old, then a door swung open into an amazing future. A new world beckoned. He could reject it, slam shut the door, and walk away to a normal life with its risks and possibilities—or walk through the portal and be part of a hitherto undreamed-of destiny: live to be a hundred, then willingly die. And until that moment of departure, not only guard the secret of the town, but ensure that it remain a secret. He understood he would have to help, because that was part of the pact: everyone helped. In the matter of the Lovells’ death, everyone had helped cover up the truth. None believed they had done wrong.