WLT (53 page)

The only clue—and it was a slim one—was a page of yellow legal-size paper, folded three times, on which somebody—presumably the unknown man—had written notes that referred, apparently, to the television-news celebrity Frank White. The notes did not make sense, being all about White's suicide, and White was very much alive. In fact, he was staying nearby at the St. Moritz. The detectives went up to see him. They apologized. They were sorry to bother him, extremely sorry, but he invited them in, sat them down, set out a couple glasses of Evian and a fruit plate, chatted with them. Their names were Vince and Sean. They asked him to look at the notes.

White took the folded yellow sheet. They were sorry, it was an unpleasant business, but could he think of anybody who might write such things about him? Anybody? White read the notes—about his mother, the old sign-off, his depression, his death wish—and looked up and grinned. “There's been a lot of negative stuff written about me,” he said, “and this is the first I've read that didn't have some truth to it.” He had no idea who could've written it.

They heard a key in the lock and the door opened and a woman appeared, lugging a trunk. “It was only forty dollars, it's built like a safe, you could ship rocks in it,” she said. She was out of breath. She was tall, rangy like a runner, with cropped gray hair and bright green eyes, and she wore a black ribbed sweater and blue jeans and hiking shoes. Dark glasses propped on top of her head. “My wife Maria,” he said. The detectives stood up to go. They apologized again for bothering him. The man had been struck by a truck, was incoherent, the paper was the only clue to who he was.

“What paper?” asked Maria. Vince showed her the paper and she read it. “It's got to be that man who's writing the book about you,” she said. “Who else would care about this nonsense? It's that poor man Shell.”

And so Richard Shell was identified. Lenox Hill was paid $220,000 by his health insurance company, and he was returned to New Hampshire, to a nursing home a few miles from the college, where, after his savings were used up, the state and the county paid for him to be fed and bathed and walked every day. His students looked high and low for the book manuscript, and found it on a disc in his desk at home, and there was talk of editing it for publication, as a memorial to him, but then school let out and everybody went home.