Dying Wishes (25 page)

She touched her earlobes and laughed
merrily. A couple of half-hearted chuckles could be heard in the background.

“Sorry, that’s the vodka talking. It
helps the pills work faster, you know, especially on a practically empty
stomach. Anyway, I decided weeks ago that I was not going to blow up to two
hundred pounds and die half out of my head on morphine with fluid oozing out of
the pores in my legs.
 
All I asked was to
die with a few shreds of dignity, but that is only legally possible these days
in Oregon, Washington, and a few other locations I’ve forgotten, and there
wasn’t enough time for me to establish residence in those places. So I asked my
physician, Dr. Lars Petersen, for a lethal dose of barbiturates, but can you
believe it? He flatly refused to do it. He would attest to my soundness of mind
as of a few days ago, but that was all. I made him feel really bad about it,
but he wouldn’t budge. In a way, I hope he does see this recording. If he
learns how much he added to my troubles instead of helping me when I needed him
most, maybe he won’t take such a hard line with the next poor soul who turns to
him.” She shook her head angrily.

“Fortunately, I was able to purchase
what I needed elsewhere, one hundred capsules of
Seconal
sodium. I’ve emptied the contents into this glass.” She held it up. “Nobody did
it for me. I took care of it myself ten minutes ago, and now I’m going to add
six ounces of room temperature water, stir it up and drink it. I should be
asleep and headed for a coma within two minutes and at my final destination in
an hour or so. I’ve asked a few friends to see me out and see that everything
is tidied away before the discovery of my remains sometime this weekend.”

Margaret consulted the card in her
hand one more time. “Oh, yes. You need to know that this is entirely my
decision, and no, I do not wish to change my mind. I shall drink this mixture,
which I am well aware is lethal, of my own free will.
And so,
farewell.”

The camera left Margaret’s face and
moved down to a small table. She poured a pre-measured amount of water into the
glass of
Seconal
powder and stirred vigorously. Then
she stood and carried the glass to her bed just a few feet away. She climbed
onto it and arranged several pillows behind her, then held up the glass in a
toast to her off-camera friends. “I have to do this fairly quickly now. Thank
you all so very much for your friendship. I love you all. God bless you.”

Without hesitation she put the glass
to her lips and drank down the contents in one smooth sequence. It took her
perhaps ten seconds to empty the glass.

“Godspeed, Sweetie,” said Janet
MacRae
.

“Have a safe trip,” added Bitsy
Grant.

“See you when we get there,”
followed up a baritone voice that I felt sure belonged to Douglas Grant.

“Yuck,” was Margaret’s only comment.
“Kind of woody tasting but not as nasty as I was led to
believe.”
Her eyes were already closing as she handed the empty glass to
someone. In just a few seconds, she sighed deeply. “Oh, this is so easy,” she
murmured. “People need to know how easy it is. Nobody needs to suffer at the
end. Thank you for my wonderful day.”

When it became clear that those
would be Margaret’s last words, the camera moved away from her face and backed
off. The operator appeared to sit in the chair Margaret had occupied
previously, and the recording continued, uninterrupted, until Margaret drew her
last breath some twenty-five minutes later.

~

Armando
and I sat in the double recliner with Jasmine curled up between us. Despite the
peacefulness of the scene we had just witnessed, we felt chilled and craved the
warmth of our fireplace and some wine, which we now sipped as Gracie enjoyed
the blaze. A wood fire was still a novel experience for her, and she watched
the play of the flames with fascination as her ears swiveled at every snap and
crackle.

Armando’s
eyes had a faraway expression as he idly stroked the old cat’s fur.

“Would
you do that for me if I needed you to?” I asked him.

“If
the alternative was as ugly as that described by Senora Butler, and it was your
wish, of course,
Cara
. It is my hope
that it will not come to that for either of us.”

“We
all hope that,” I agreed, and we were quiet again for a time.

“What
will you tell your business manager friend about what we have seen this
evening?” he asked after a while.

“I’ll
tell her the truth. That’s what she says she wants, and that’s what I’m going
to give her.”

“You
will tell her everything?” I knew his question referred to the voices I had
heard and identified at the end of the recording.

“I’ll
tell her only what she needs to know, that I saw a recording of what transpired
in Margaret’s apartment on the evening of October ninth. I saw Margaret consume
a lethal dose of barbiturates entirely voluntarily to spare herself an
otherwise miserable and unavoidable death. Nothing illegal occurred on Vista
View premises, and that’s all she needs to know. There’s no sadistic maniac
preying on the single female residents and no suicide cult in operation.
Period, end of story.”

“And
when she asks where you obtained this recording?”

“I’ll
make it perfectly clear right up front that I’m not going to reveal that
information. Journalists have the right to protect their sources, and so do I,”
I laughed, “even if I’m not a reporter for
The
Hartford Courant
.”

He
chuckled with me. “Do you think there will finally be an end to this then?”

I
thought about the last conversation I’d had with Ginny and how much more
reasonable she had seemed, but I knew appearances could be deceiving.

“I
really hope so, but I can’t say for certain. All I can do is tell her the truth
and hope it puts her mind at ease about the legality, if not the morality, of
what happened. Even she will have to agree that people have the right to make
their own moral judgments.” I paused. “Although there is one loose end I need
to tie up for my own peace of mind.”

A
slow smile spread across Armando’s face, and he nodded to himself with
satisfaction. “I was wondering how long that would take to come to the surface.
You need to know from whom Senora Butler obtained the prescription medication,
since her physician would not accommodate her, is that not it?”

I
looked at him in amazement. “That’s it exactly, but I think I may already have
the answer or at least a part of it. There was a piece of paper Ginny showed me
that she found in Margaret’s apartment when she was packing things up.”

Again
Armando surprised me. “The notation about the appointment for sex, or so she
thought, with the handsome young Latino may have been for something else
altogether,” he smiled.

“You’re
getting awfully good at this detective stuff,” I told him. “Even I didn’t think
of that until thirty seconds ago.”

“That
is because you are not Latina. All of us South Americans are drug dealers, did
you not know? At least that is what you will learn from the police television
shows.” He shrugged with good humor.

I
looked at him with affection and put down my wine glass. “Then I think you
should definitely change fields. You’re not making full use of your true
talents. So what do you say,
Handsome
, can I make an
appointment with you?”

His
hand left Jasmine and strayed to my thigh as he smiled into my eyes. “I believe
I may have some time available right now, if that is convenient.”

“Works
for me,” I assured him, happy to return to the land of the very much alive.

Nineteen

Late
Thursday morning I telephoned Gerald
MacRae
. He
picked up the phone immediately, almost as if he had been waiting for my call.
“Why don’t you come by now?” he suggested. “Shirley is heating up some
delicious Italian wedding soup for lunch, and if I know Shirley, there’s plenty
to share.”

Promising
Strutter
that I would return in an hour, I dashed to
my car through the cold, steady rain that had moved up the eastern seaboard
overnight. Shirley’s soup was sounding better and better.

“Thank
you so much. This looks and smells just wonderful,” I told her as she brought
steaming mugs in to Gerald and me. I was making an extra effort to be gracious
after my surliness of the previous day.

“Oh,
it is,” she replied serenely, fussing with spoons and napkins. “I made it
myself from the recipe my mother gave to me on my wedding day nearly sixty
years ago. My husband still loves it.”

I
swallowed my astonishment as I imagined a union lasting six decades. “Then it
must be very special,” I managed with my warmest smile, and she left
MacRae’s
office, pink-cheeked with pleasure.

“You’re
feeling better,”
MacRae
observed. He sat in the
second visitors’ chair companionably and stirred his soup to cool it a bit.

I
nodded as I blew across the top of my own mug.
“In one way,
yes.
In another, not so much.”

“Would
you care to elaborate? Anything you say here is protected by attorney-client
privilege, so you can speak freely.”

I
considered what I wanted to say to him. “Watching a woman deliberately end her
life is not something I ever want to do again. She had to make a
heart-wrenching choice between a horrible, so-called natural death from liver
cancer and voluntary suicide, which has to be an oxymoron. Nobody commits
suicide voluntarily. They feel compelled to do it when the alternative, living
with their physical or emotional burdens, is too terrible to bear and has no
chance of improving. So I’m glad she at least had some choice. I just wish she
hadn’t had to feel like a criminal whose friends might be accused of abetting
her in some heinous act, or worse, influencing her to do this thing. The poor
woman had more than enough to deal with already. In this case, she was still
able to mix and drink the lethal potion herself, but what if her symptoms had
made it impossible for her to do that? What if she waited too long and had to
ask one of her loyal friends or relatives to help her and risk imprisonment?”

MacRae
nodded as
he cautiously sipped some soup. “I’m sure that’s already happened, because
assisted suicide is still against the law in Connecticut, unfortunately.”

“That
sacred law you’ve sworn to uphold no matter what,” I reminded him.

“The
law a lot of good, caring people are
working very hard
to change, just as it’s already been changed in other states. I’m confident
that it will happen here, too. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Time
Margaret didn’t have,” I said sadly. “She seemed to be a lovely person, someone
I easily could have befriended.” I cut my eyes at him. “Were she and Bitsy and
your wife friends for a long time?”

He
put down his mug and wiped his mouth carefully on the napkin Shirley had
provided.

“Margaret
was a beautiful person inside and out,” he chuckled, “and didn’t she just know
it? We have all been friends since college. Margaret was so pretty and
lively—funny, too—that the fellows were always swarming around her, even when
she whipped them on the tennis court,” he recalled fondly.

“I
have a daughter just like that. Margaret never married?”

“She
came close once, but her fiancé was killed in Vietnam. That damned, senseless
war decimated the male population of an entire generation,” he muttered
angrily.

“You
and Douglas Grant were luckier?”

He
tapped his left ear. “A partial hearing loss from a childhood accident saved my
skin. For Douglas, it was a combination of graduate school and a very high
draft number. Tom, Margaret’s fiancé, wasn’t much of a student, and he was in
perfect health. Look where that got him.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “He
was a hell of a good guy. Margaret never really got over it.”

My
heart bled for Margaret all over again. “But you remained good friends, the
best of friends, judging from the others’ willingness to be with her on October
ninth.”

He
met my eyes defiantly. “I would have been there, too, believe me, but Margaret
wouldn’t hear of it. She said it was too risky for someone in my line of work
to give even the appearance of involvement, that I had to live to fight the
good fight another day. Those were her words.” His voice was raw with emotion.
“She kissed my cheek and went out the door with the others at nine-thirty just
as if it
were
any other evening, and I never saw her
again.”

“Did
you know what was about to take place?”

“I
suspected, because we had obviously discussed her wishes before then, but she
wouldn’t tell me specifically when. They all said they were going to watch some
PBS travelogue, and they knew I had work I had to do. Janet told me the truth
when she returned shortly before midnight.”