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room. I walked over to the bed and said the usual inanity: “How are you?”
    “Getting better,” he said. He tried to smile at the same time, but his voice and his lips both quavered. He wasn’t very far from tears.
    He had the room to himself; the advantage of being under police guard. In addition to his bed and tray, there was a brown metal bureau against the opposite wall, a television set mounted on a high shelf across from the bed, a very large window covered with a shut Venetian blind but no curtains or drapes, and two tubular chrome chairs with green plastic seats and backs, as though parts of a cheap kitchen set.
    I had been surprised when I came in that he didn’t have the television going, that boon to the bedridden, but now that I could see the screen, it turned out he did have it on, with the sound off. It was a black-and-white set, and the pictures were alternating close-ups of three earnest, intense, handsome and yet somehow artificial faces, one female and two male, apparently in intense discussion with one another. They looked real the way artificial limbs look real.
    Cornell fumbled with a small black box in his right hand, and the television picture imploded in on itself and winked out. “Sit down,” he said. “Thank you for coming.” His voice was odd, different from what I’d remembered, more nasal and higher-pitched. That would be because of the bandages across his nose, of course; nature rarely does anything vicious to us without also, in the process, managing somehow to make us look foolish as well.
    I pulled one of the chairs over by the bed. “My wife told me your situation,” I said.
    “It was very nice of her to come.” She had been good for him, I could see that; his smile almost covered pain and fear completely.
    I said, “Has anything else happened since she was here?”
    “No. My lawyer is supposed to be here soon. Stewart Remington?”
    “He was on the list,” I said. “Your list of suspects.”
    He gave now a smile of helplessness; it covered nothing. “But I have to have a lawyer,” he said. “What else am I going to do?”
    “I know. Kate explained it to me.”
    “Mr. Tobin,” he said earnestly, “I know your wife volunteered you to help me. I won’t hold you to it against your will.”
    He was holding a door open for me, and in many ways it was a door I would gladly have gone through. But how could I, with Kate behind me, with Cornell’s face in front of me? I said, “I’m not here against my will. It would have been easy for me not to come.”
    “I think you’re a more private man than that,” he said. “But I need you too much to offer twice. Thank you for coming.”
    I said, “Is your list of suspects still the same? No additions, no deletions?”
    “It’s still the same.” He rested his head back on the pillow and gazed up at the blank television screen. “You know why I had the sound off when you came in? I was looking at those people talking, and they seemed so sure of themselves, so competent, so able. Whatever problem would face them, they would talk about it among themselves and solve it. Nothing would be too strong for them.” He turned his head to smile sadly at me. “Do you know what I mean?”
    “Yes.”
    He looked back at the screen again. “I was pretending they were talking about me. They were considering my situation, my past, my future, my personality. They were deciding what to do about me. All I had to do was lie here and wait, and they would come up with the decision. I didn’t have to struggle any more, didn’t have to think. They would decide, and act on the decision, and be very sure of themselves.”
    “I’m not them,” I said.
    The sad smile again. “You are to me.”
    “I need them, too. We all do.”
    “You are to me,” he repeated. “That’s why I gave you the chance to walk away. Because I think you feel responsibilities very strongly.”
    “I’ll just warn you now that I’m fallible, that the odds are