Death Kit by Susan Sontag

larger story, an investigation leading to a negligence suit that might put the state’s second wealthiest railroad on trial? Forgetting his original subject, mere Angelo Incardona. But eventually the zealous reporter had to descend to the commonplaces of an obituary; summarizing a life that had only the most schematic existence as far as public records show. Perhaps his rewrite man had to cut away a good deal more pyramiding of supposition about the railroad, to bring the reader smack up against Incardona, as he existed before his abruptly accomplished removal from this world. A few facts, anyway. Not much to tell in this fourth, and last, paragraph.
    Mr. Incardona was born in Utica but moved to this city at the age of fourteen. He graduated from William McKinley High School, where he was a star quarterback in his senior year. After graduation, he enlisted in the army and served in Korea during the Korean War. He was a member of American Legion Post #701 and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way, AFL-CIO. He is survived by his wife, Myra, and a son, Thomas Francis, 11. Services will be held tomorrow at 2:00 at the Floral Gardens Funeral Home, 303 Schuyler Avenue.
    Diddy sat, hands twitching, the coarse sheets of the newspaper agitated beyond his control.
    All doubts resolved: a man had died yesterday. Whose home, by an unspeakable coincidence, was here. The city where Diddy was obliged to remain for a week.
    (Now) Diddy has his sad triumph over Hester. The messy, mortifying uncertainty was over, quelled by the dreary but precise screed of newspaper prose. Undeniable relief to know he was sane. If anyone suffered from absences of mind, it was Hester. And also, he recalls irritably, the man who wrote headlines at the Courier-Gazette. Can’t people read? That headline not merely inaccurate. It contradicted the story. Wasn’t the railroad who was investigating, or proposing to investigate, the incident in the tunnel; it was the police.
    So, everything was certain (now) with respect to the past. But what’s Diddy to do, at this moment? This morning? Present himself to Capt. Mallory, informing the conscientious cop that his suspected case of negligence is actually a murder? Well, perhaps not a true murder in the technical sense. It occurs to Diddy that if he confesses promptly, he might be tried on a reduced charge. Hadn’t he been overdramatizing his crime? From a legal point of view, it wasn’t murder straight and simple. What he’d done to Incardona sounds to Diddy the Layman more like manslaughter, in which the assailant isn’t acquainted with his victim; so that the crime is not premeditated. Than murder, where the killer knows his victim and can plot the crime in advance.
    Could Diddy’s lawyer make that argument stick? So that, at worst, he’d be tried for manslaughter or for murder in the second degree?
    But wait. Diddy is going too fast. Already bargaining with Capt. Mallory, with the sergeant at the station, with the D.A. Somewhat premature, when he has yet to decide bluntly, once and for all, whether he intends to give himself up.
    One ordeal he means to spare himself. That of mockery and derision. It’s possible the police won’t believe him. Diddy the Demented, one of the horde of guilt-stricken folk longing to be punished who stride by the hundreds into police stations each year, to confess loudly to crimes they read about in the papers, perhaps wish they’d committed; but surely didn’t commit. No, his confession must be supported by evidence. Witnesses. His fellow passengers will testify that he was absent from the compartment long enough to commit his crime. Can’t be that the others share Hester’s inexplicable lapse of memory. God, why hadn’t he taken down their names and addresses! Surely they can be traced. And don’t forget that his fingerprints must be smeared all over the crowbar he used on Incardona—unless some idiotic foreman has