Death Sentence

by Sharkey, Joe;

  “We just got acquainted and seemed to hit it off,” Wetmore recalled many years later. “How it grew, I don’t know. He would keep coming up to me with questions. He seemed to be real interested in my life. I told him it wasn’t much: ‘I spent time in hobo jungles, skid rows, cow camps, cheap jail houses and a few pretty decent houses of ill repute,’ I says, and he’s all ears at this. He wanted to know all about my life up in the North Park. Life was rugged, but it suited me all right for a while, I told him. ‘I only got in two fights, and I was lucky enough to win both of them, right there in a bar.’ Well, Bob was extremely interested in that. It was like he never met someone who ever got into a tangle.”

  Soon, true to tradition, Wetmore was gleefully embellishing mountain stories for his wide-eyed new friend on the night shift.

  “He was the sort, if you’d piss down his neck and tell him it was raining, he’d believe it,” Wetmore said.

  “He had this funny way of laughing. It wasn’t really a laugh, it was sort of a little ‘heh, heh, heh.’ But I did enjoy talking to him.” That is, about anything except religion. “You’d get him on religion, and sometimes he would start,” said Wetmore. “You get this bullshit from them people about a loving God. ‘Well,’ I’d say, ‘where the fuck is this loving God when he lets a little child die some godawful death?’ I’d ask him these questions and he’d get this real sad look on his face. Pretty soon we didn’t talk much about that subject.”

  Another subject Wetmore learned to avoid was Bob’s past.

  Late one night, they were sitting together at a booth in the dining room while on a break. Except for a waitress smoking a cigarette by the cash register, they were the only people in the room.

  “Where did you say you was from before?” Wetmore asked in the midst of idle chat over coffee before they went back to work.

  “Michigan.”

  “You went to college is my guess. You’re too intelligent not to have.”

  “Yes, Michigan.”

  “What about your relatives back there?” Wetmore enquired casually.

  Bob stiffened. “There aren’t any!” he snapped. Wetmore was surprised enough to remember it clearly eighteen years later. Bob had never seemed agitated before about anything, let alone a simple everyday question. Wetmore never forgot how oddly Bob had reacted: “That was the only time I remember him showing emotion,” he recalled. “We were sitting there in the booth, but he snapped back. He pulled his hands off from the table real fast, like he’d been hit by something.”

  Like many others who knew Bob Clark in the early years of his new life in Denver, Wetmore recalled a man of no apparent extremes, save for his penchant for detail. Bob didn’t curse, but he didn’t make a point out of it, Wetmore noticed. He didn’t seem to drink much, but again, he didn’t make a point of it. Wetmore could recall a few occasions when Bob quaffed a beer or two, but never more. He did seem to be something of a hypochondriac, always complaining of one ache or another. He popped a lot of pills, it seemed to Wetmore, who once asked him: “Why do you, a man with no overt illness, have to take about eighteen different kinds of pills?”

  “They’re vitamins,” Bob replied simply.

  And he had chronic problems with his feet, but he wouldn’t consider going to a physician. “His feet was bruised, sore, it was the only thing he really bitched about much,” Wetmore said. “It was always ‘I got to go to the foot doctor. I got to go to the foot doctor.’ A chiropractor, he told me.”

  And when he puts his mind to it, Wetmore remembers unsolicited kindnesses on several occasions when Bob seemed to sense that things were tight.

  “How’s the money?” Bob would ask.

  “Oh, I’m getting by.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, truth to tell, I’m a little short this week.”

  And Bob would discreetly palm over a ten-dollar bill.

  “I always paid him back,” Wetmore recalled. “In all, it was probably a total of less than a hundred dollars over a couple of years. But he wasn’t making all that much, and I was always grateful for how thoughtful he had been toward me.”

  In the early 1970s, as more Americans took to the roads, and more often with skis strapped to their rooftops, business was thriving at the Holiday Inn West, which drew not only from the interstate but also from the growth that had pushed Denver’s suburbs out beyond Wheatridge all the way to the foothills at Golden.

  In late 1973, the hotel brought in a new general manager to manage the growth. The new boss brought with him a new chef, Gary Morrison, a man in his early thirties with a good reputation in the local food-service industry not only as a cook but, more important, as a manager. An axiom in the food business is that the best cook in the world isn’t worth much if he or she cannot efficiently keep the kitchen running. Gary knew that one of the first things he had to do was to identify those people he could depend on.

  The tall, bespectacled, middle-aged night cook weighed in at the top of Gary’s list.

  “I took over as chef,” Gary explained, “and generally you find going into a situation like that, people kind of like the guy they used to work for, the old chef, who in this case happened to be a very nice guy. Someone new comes in, it’s a new regime, a new set of rules. People start to buck the system.

  “Bob wasn’t that way. He was extremely cooperative from the first time I met him, and it didn’t take long for us to develop a bond without laying ground rules.

  “I accepted him as a professional who knew his job and didn’t hesitate to do it, so immediately there was the camaraderie that comes from withstanding the daily pressures and being able to smile and talk as friends at the end of the day. He was night cook. That meant not only the dining room, but the coffee shop and room service.

  “Bob showed a remarkable amount of skill in that business, plus he lived in that little trailer park just across the street, which gave him a great deal of flexibility.”

  In short, the new boss had found himself an assistant. And when, as is inevitable in the restaurant business, the chef ultimately moved on to another establishment, he took Bob Clark with him.

  The move occurred in late 1974, when Gary was offered the job as head chef at the sprawling Pinery Golf and Country Club in the suburbs southeast of the city. Gary invited Bob along as his deputy, with the title sous chef. At Bob’s request, Wetmore was invited to come along as a kitchen steward.

  Sometime before Christmas, Wetmore drove his pickup truck to the trailer park where Bob lived to help his friend move to a new place on Columbine Street, near the University of Denver, not far from where Gary was living. This way, Bob, who had no car, could commute to work with Gary. The apartment was a furnished place in a three-story complex that looked like a motel and was called Columbine Plaza. Across the street was a fraternity house, Zeta Beta Tau. The front door of Bob’s new apartment opened onto a small courtyard with a swimming pool in the center. The rent was $150 a month. On average, tenants stayed about six months. Bob would stay there for three years.

  Wetmore had never been inside Bob’s old trailer, a nine-by-eighteen-footer with windows that looked like portholes on a ferry boat. Wetmore was surprised that all of Bob’s things fit into the flatbed of the pickup in one trip, with room to spare. Besides some lamps, a small television, and things like kitchen utensils, Bob’s possessions were all neatly stacked in cardboard boxes. For a man with so few other worldly possessions, Wetmore thought, Bob seemed to have an inordinate amount of clothes.

  Soon, as Bob and Gary began riding to work together, a drive that took about thirty minutes, Gary discovered that Bob shared his interest in classical music and news. The music station of choice was KVOD-FM, which called itself “The Fine Arts Voice of Denver.” Gary found they even liked the same composers—the nineteenth-century Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt was a mutual favorite. And at the top of the hour, the radio would be switched to the all-news station for a few minutes.

  “He had to know what was g
oing on in the news,” Gary said. “If it came up in the news, we would discuss it. He wouldn’t compromise and I wouldn’t either, but we could discuss things in such a way—‘Well, this is the way I feel about this, and I think I’m absolutely right …” and ‘Well, I feel this way, and I believe I am absolutely right …’”

  Years later, Gary was angry to read some newspaper accounts that depicted his friend as arrogant and dogmatic. Bob was nothing of the sort, he said. Unlike Bob Wetmore, Gary never baited Bob Clark on matters of religion, but he did discuss it with him often over the years they were friends in Denver. “There was an ease about him with regard to religion,” he said. “He never spoke out or in any way indicated that he was an extremely devout religious person, but you knew that he drew a lot of strength from his religious beliefs.”

  He added, “Bob in some ways is very difficult to describe, because the relationship that we had very trusting, in ways very close, but at the same time it was not intrusive.

  “If I had something that I wanted to tell Bob, I would tell him, and he would me, but neither one of us would pry. As a result, there’s a lot about Bob that I wish I had asked about.

  “When you have a friendship, it doesn’t come with rules. When you put rules on a friendship, you’ve lost it. We had a lot of times sitting talking, driving to and from work, or when things would quiet down at work, and we discussed a lot of things. There were things that we both had an interest in—history, music, the news. We always had something to talk about. It was a friendship that didn’t require a lot of personal questions.”

  Bob had known that he would need a new Social Security number to find secure work in Denver, and obtaining one had been no problem. But so far, he hadn’t had any need for a job résumé in the restaurant business. Gary hadn’t even asked Bob about his work experience when he invited him to be his assistant at the Pinery. The restaurant business is famously fickle, with tremendous turnover in every job from head chef to dishwasher. Gary knew all about Bob’s work habits that he needed to know.

  “I never required references from my people,” Gary said. “You go by skill. I already knew Bob had skill because I had worked beside the man. You go by what a man can do, not what he might have done somewhere else. You could work at McDonald’s for six years and put down on a résumé that you’d had six years experience cooking. I had already seen for myself what Bob could do.

  “I had offered him the position of sous chef, the equivalent of assistant manager, because he had shown the ability to keep things under control.

  “As a cook, the guy was a natural. It was amazing for me to learn over the course of our relationship that he was actually an accountant by training and had never really had much experience in a kitchen.”

  Also, it was useful having an accountant on the payroll, even one who worked behind the stove, because the ability to keep numbers straight is crucial to running a profitable kitchen. And Bob seemed to be as adept with numbers as he was with dishing up a ham-and-cheese omelet while making sure the steak didn’t burn. “Bob had this natural aptitude for numbers,” Gary recalled. “As a chef, of course, you are also responsible for food costs, labor costs, figuring your overhead, profit margins, and so on. There were a lot of times, once I knew he had this aptitude, that I just dumped figures on him.”

  Even in the car on their way to work, “he’d run percentages for me in his head. He enjoyed it.”

  To his bemused new boss, the man also appeared to be unflappable, in an environment where intense pressure coexists with a general understanding that, on occasion, tempers will flare; that every so often, under the right circumstances, one could expect a childish outburst, a slammed door, even the occasional pot crashing against the kitchen wall.

  Yet no matter how many clamoring waiters were tugging at his sleeve, no matter how many extra customers had shown up unexpectedly to empty the buffet, or how many busboys or helpers had called in sick on a Saturday night, Bob just kept his eye on the ball. Unperturbed, Bob got the job done. No fuss, no problem.

  Gary was amazed. “The commercial food service industry has to be one of the most high-pressure businesses in the world,” he said. “That’s because you have these intense peaks during the day. You have a tremendous push to meet a lunch opening, for example. You go like mad and then, immediately, the pressure stops. Lunch is over. But dinner is up ahead. It’s an emotional roller coaster, and every single day is built that way. There are very few people who can stand up to the continuous emotional build and always hold their cool.”

  Nor is losing it necessarily shocking. “The way I was trained, I didn’t have to hold my cool,” Gary said. “I served my apprenticeship under a super European chef, and part of the makeup of a chef is, if you don’t like something, you lose your temper, you blow it off.”

  At first he was curious. How was Bob really dealing with the frustrations? He couldn’t be that controlled. He didn’t appear to drink. Like Wetmore, Gary never saw him take more than a beer or two, once in a very great while. He didn’t seem to be holding anger inside, festering just below the surface. He obviously wasn’t oblivious to his external environment—just the opposite, actually. He didn’t seem to miss a single beat of the circus-band rhythm of a kitchen going full tilt.

  He just seemed singularly at peace with it and with himself, passive and unaffected.

  “I think you find very few people who can withstand the pressure, especially in a new job, and not crack in front of people,” Gary said. “Bob was a person who could take the pressure and change that would go on, on a minute-by-minute basis, and remain in control of his temper. Unless you’ve lived through a week or two in a good restaurant kitchen, it’s very difficult to know how unusual that is.”

  In the kitchen, Bob also showed a talent he had never before exhibited and never again would: the ability to innovate on short notice. Even the best chefs can lack that. One example came to be known to Gary as the Chicken Capistrano incident.

  It was buffet night, a weekly event at the Pinery, where the neat presentation of hot and cold dishes on a long, linen-draped table belied the feverish activity in the kitchen. On this particular night, more than the usual number of early arrivals had shown up, well-dressed but hungry people trying to be discreet as they eyed the offerings on the buffet and waited for the first person to take a dish from the stacked plates. With so many people on hand early, Gary realized that he had miscalculated. More food would be needed, especially one additional hot entree. There was nothing ready in the kitchen in the required quantity.

  He banged through the swinging doors and mentioned the dilemma to Bob, who was busy with some pots.

  “I don’t know what we are going to come up with at this point,” Gary muttered as workers bustled around to at least get more salads and condiments onto trays.

  Bob seemed unconcerned. “You handle out there,” he told his boss, walking over to the double doors of a refrigerator and peering in. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Gary got busy outside as the first customers began moving along the buffet table. Twenty minutes later, he realized he had been right: there wasn’t going to be enough hot food. When he edged nervously back into the kitchen, however, he was astonished to find Bob beaming over a great vat of food he had obviously just prepared. It appeared to be big chunks of braised chicken with a light sauce, on a bed of shiny white rice, with tiny bits of red and green peppers and other things. It looked wonderful.

  Gary got a spoon out and tried it. He loved it. It was delicious, the chicken cooked just right, the sauce just tangy enough. What’s more, there appeared to be a ton of it.

  “What in the world do you call this?” he asked Bob.

  His assistant shrugged. “It’s just something I put together from the refrigerator.”

  Gary dipped a clean spoon in and ate some more. “Bob, this is real good,” he said, ordering a kitchen helper to move it out onto the buffet. When the food was rushed off, he told Bob, “Usually, you know, you
have to experiment with something a few times before you can put it out. But you nailed it the first time. Dead on. Not only is it good, but it fits in with everything else we’re serving out there.”

  Bob smiled and went back to work without a word.

  A couple of hours later, he and Gary were finishing up in the kitchen when a regular customer came back, as some diners will do, to ask for a recipe.

  She said everybody at her table had raved about the new chicken dish. “What was it called?” she wanted to know.

  Bob stepped right up. “Oh, that was chicken … Chicken Capistrano,” he said affably. It was obvious to Gary that he had just invented the name.

  Two weeks later, the woman was back.

  “I’ve gone through every recipe book I can find, and I can’t find anything called Chicken Capistrano,” she told Gary, who had Bob write out the recipe for her.

  Gary later recalled that several years after that, he was eating lunch at a downtown Denver hotel when he noticed something listed as a daily special that made him laugh: “Chicken Capistrano.”

  Before too long, Bob moved more into public. Gradually, as Gary depended on him more to manage the operation, Bob was emerging from the confines of the kitchen to the dining rooms themselves, where he would greet and socialize with the customers. One night, during a luau buffet at the Pinery, Bob even donned a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and draped a lei around his neck to preside, mingling with the guests—“lawyers like you wouldn’t believe,” Gary said, “well-known local people who came in week after week and were getting to know him”—carving the pineappled ham and having a grand time of it.

  “He was great with people,” Gary said. “He wasn’t keeping a low profile, he wasn’t hiding, and he wasn’t shy. If you are responsible, as I was, for a kitchen operation, who do you want out there in public in your place? You can have the best food in the world, and put someone out there with a crappy attitude, and everything goes down the tubes.”