From the start of their relationship, Delores was attracted by Bob’s gentle nature. She decided that he was obviously a man of good character. He wasn’t bad looking. While she wasn’t prepared to consider marriage again, not by a long shot, and not to a forty-six-year-old widower (Bob had shaved six years off John List’s age) who didn’t seem to have particularly promising career prospects, Delores kept seeing Bob, who was very persistent and friendly, and in time Delores’s friends simply regarded them as one of those couples whose names would usually be uttered together: Delores and Bob.
“He was always sweet to her, it was like he was almost too sweet,” one of those friends said. “He would practically trip over himself trying to open the door for her. She seemed to like being with him, but it was obvious he was in a bigger hurry to have a serious relationship than she was. After her divorce, she wanted a little breathing space.”
Because she sensed the aura of tragedy around it, Delores didn’t ask a lot of questions about Bob’s background, and she didn’t press the few she did ask, once she had his brief explanation.
“What he told me was, his wife had died of cancer, and she was a very sickly lady,” Delores said in 1989. She never was shown, nor did she ask to see, photos of Bob’s first wife.
Gary, who maintained his close friendship, first saw Bob and Delores together in the late 1970s, well after they began dating regularly. Then recently divorced, Gary had invited them to join him for dinner at the Mount Vernon Country Club in Golden.
“They weren’t members, but I’d made arrangements to get them into the club to have dinner,” he said. “We were having a buffet. He had talked about her for quite a while before then, but this was the first time I met her.”
He knew right away that Bob was deeply in love. “I had never seen a man pay so much attention to a woman,” Gary said. “It beats what you read about chivalry and everything else. There was a genuine feeling that he was concerned about everything she did, every single little thing she said.
“Later on, we went out for dinner quite often, and it was always clear that Bob’s absolutely first order of concern was Delores’s well-being.”
In the autumn of their first year together, Bob invited Delores for a drive into the mountains. They drove into the high country, to a side road, just a gravel driveway, off Route 40 as it curls south of Sawmill Gulch into sleepy Hot Sulphur Springs. At the end of this road was a general store with two battered gas pumps out front. The store’s merchandise ran heavily toward dry goods, clothing for the most part, some of it practical, such as parkas and gloves, some of it frivolous, sweaters and T-shirts for the tourists. But the ranks of tourists who were just passing by had thinned over the years after the opening of Interstate 70, and the general store had fallen on hard times.
Bob Clark and Bob Wetmore had stopped at the same place a year earlier on their own drive into the mountains, for a cold soda before heading into Granby for lunch. Wetmore hadn’t realized it then, in his annoyance over his friend’s imperviousness to beauty, but Bob had made firm note of at least one impression on that trip: the general store was for sale.
In the early glow of courtship, when so much seems possible to accomplish together, he had come back, with Delores beside him, to look at that store and consider a future as its proprietor. While Bob had almost none, Delores had some money. But it turned out to be only about half of what was required for the down payment on the store, $28,000. Like most pipe dreams, it had been a foolish one. Bob turned back onto the road for Denver, where the, safe path would lead into accounting.
Once the fleeting fantasy of being a shopkeeper, as his father had been, was put in its place, Bob was prodded by Delores to move more decisively to regain a foothold in his profession. She strongly approved of his decision to turn down Gary’s offer to work at another country club. Though Bob would work part-time for Gary on occasion, making extra money as a prep cook, and take a temporary job as a short-order cook in the tea room of Denver Dry Goods, a department store, it was apparent that Bob was determined to reestablish his career, even if he, an M.B.A. and a former bank vice president, had to start at the bottom.
With Delores’s encouragement, Bob enrolled for training courses in income-tax preparation sponsored by H&R Block, the national tax service company. At the same time, he began scouring the want ads. The opportunities were there. Even after the early tremors in the oil business in the middle 1970s, Denver was a city with a viable economy, the center of an area where high-technology manufacturing plants had been drawn by an educated workforce, access to great recreation, and a dearth of labor unions. It was also the center for banking and real estate development for a megalopolis that had sprawled over old frontier towns and now encompassed the apron of the entire front range of the Rockies from Pike’s Peak to the Wyoming border.
Delores didn’t press Bob much, but she was curious as to why such a well-educated, sober man of obvious ability would have been working in a kitchen for so long.
Bob’s explanation made sense. She said he told her he needed the mindless routine of kitchen work “to rest from accounting, to get his life back together because of his wife’s illness.”
As he looked for a new job, he moved once more, from Columbine Street to an apartment in Wheatridge, an area where there was a lot of new development and new businesses as the suburbs pressed out to Golden.
Finally, late in 1977, Bob was back in the accounting business. It wasn’t an impressive start, not as Ernst & Ernst had been in Detroit. With new apartments and new offices going up everywhere, companies such as cabinet dealers and carpet wholesalers were doing brisk business. One of them, a firm called Roberto Carpeting, needed someone to keep its bills in order.
Bob didn’t even need a résumé. He had known not to overreach as he got back into accounting. In fact, he seems to have gone to some lengths to impress his new employers with his very lack of status. In his job interview at Roberto Carpeting, he made no claims to being anything other than a man with decent accounting credentials who seemed to have had his own reasons for spending the past five years of his life working in a kitchen. The employee whose talent Gary Morrison had so admired, who could efficiently manage a kitchen, run a buffet, make the customers feel as if they had been royally welcomed, didn’t seem to present himself at Roberto, where his new employers saw only an apparently decent, well-spoken, and neatly dressed man who needed a job. He seemed eager to please, and he didn’t have a lot of demands.
“The job didn’t pay a hell of a lot,” said one former coworker. “All it was, basically, was making sure the billings stayed straight. I barely noticed the guy, except that he seemed to always be watching. You had the impression he wanted to know where everybody was all the time. Other than that, the guy’s a blank. People come and go, some of them you hardly notice.”
Bob stayed for two years. As usual, he impressed some coworkers with his good nature, his punctiliousness, his careful attention to grooming, but little else. The only thing that caused him to stand out in the minds of several other coworkers years later was this:
Bob ate lunch at precisely the same time every day, and almost always in the same manner. He would rise from his desk, pick up the cassette player he kept on it during working hours, and take it with his bagged lunch out to his orange Volkswagen in the parking lot. There he would put a classical music tape cassette into his player, turn the volume up high, and eat his sandwich and fruit with the windows rolled up, summer and winter, lost in thought.
In September 1978, about a year after he started work at the carpet wholesaler, Bob moved to another apartment, Brentwood on the Park, in Aurora, close to where Delores lived. He would stay there for seven years, paying rent of $175 a month initially and about $300 when he left.
During the time he worked at Roberto, he also did some part-time work at income tax time, both for an H&R Block branch office and on his own, at home, thanks to a small network of friends from the restaurant business who brought the
ir tax forms to him.
In October of 1979, two years after he had reemerged as an accountant, Bob found a better job as office manager at All Packaging Company, a Denver firm that made supermarket wrapping and packages. This job did require a résumé, which Bob managed to produce. It correctly listed his current employment at Roberto Carpeting, and his academic background. From 1972 to 1977, it said, he had worked for R. C. Miller & Co., a firm in Wheatridge, Colorado.
There wasn’t any incentive to check the résumé beyond the current employer. If anyone had, it would have been learned that no firm named R. C. Miller & Co. existed in Wheatridge during those years. R. C. were, of course, the initials of Robert Clark, and Miller was Delores’s last name.
Delores, who didn’t know about Bob’s deception on the résumé, was impressed by his steady progress once he decided to throw himself back into accounting full time. Not only that, but the man was no shirker. He had taken courses. When the hours were available, he worked nights and Saturdays. He was a respected man at church. Increasingly, Bob Clark was beginning to look like a solid marriage prospect.
At All Packaging, where his starting pay was $300 a week, he made only a slightly deeper impression than he had at the carpet wholesaler. He had a tiny office, and several coworkers remembered years later that it seemed oddly devoid of personal effects, though no one really remarked upon it at the time. There were no photographs. On his desk, the only item not related to the business of All Packaging was his tape deck, which he kept murmuring at low volume during the work day. As he had at Roberto, he would take it to his car at lunchtime and eat while listening to classical music.
When given half a chance, he was relaxed enough now to talk freely about his religion.
“If you gave him an opening, he’d bore you to the point of tears with talk about religion and church,” one woman who knew him said. “You had to remember not to bring that subject up. Otherwise, he was just sort of there. No one really had a bad word to say about Bob, but no one really seemed to know him. You just got the impression that he was taking everything in, but who knows why? It was basically a very boring job. He seemed perfect for it.”
Gary Morrison also noticed that Bob seemed content. Bob had always been a chess enthusiast, but he went at it with a newfound verve once he was back in his world of numbers and charts. Bob favored a strategy that allowed his opponent to become overly confident. “He would let me get in a couple of moves. Then he’d kill me,” Gary said.
Friends who occasionally visited Bob’s apartment, Gary among them, also noticed that he had begun acquiring military strategy board games and playing them avidly with anyone who could keep up.
Among his favorites were Civil War games, which could be played at a basic and intermediate level. Other games were terribly complex. One, called Third Reich, could take eight hours or longer to complete. It was played on a complicated board the size of a wall map. It had over five hundred counters representing the military forces of twenty nations involved in European theater of World War II. According to its manufacturer, the Avalon Hill Game Company, a division of Monarch Avalon Incorporated, of Baltimore, among the various features in the exhaustively detailed game were strategies on “costs for offensive options, attrition, production, conquests, alliances, intervention, neutrality, breakthrough combat, exploitation, airborne assaults, amphibious assaults, shore bombardment, sea escort, air and naval bases, convoys, strategic warfare.” The company, which produces dozens of strategy games for various skill levels, said it put this one “on every hardcore gamer’s list of best games.”
It seems to have been Bob’s favorite; entire Saturdays were consumed playing it. He always took the side of the Axis powers, with Nazi Germany in charge. When engrossed in the game, his very personality changed. His face became blotchy and he brooked no interruption. By the time the game ended, invariably with the triumph of the Third Reich late in the day, he would be flushed and sweating. Only one friend, a business associate in Denver, had the skill, the time, or the inclination to spend more than one session at Third Reich with Bob. When this man moved East, they continued to play by mail.
Bob had begun to acquire his board games when he worked at the Pinery, Bob Wetmore said. “He’d talk about the strategy. That was part of his psyche, wasn’t it? You’d see him playing that game, all emotionless at first. Then you’d realize this was one cold, calculating son of a bitch,” he said.
Meanwhile, Bob and Delores began seriously envisioning a future together. He wanted to get married, friends saw. But Delores resisted, saying she wasn’t ready for marriage yet.
Nevertheless, they were laying plans. In 1981, on St. Patrick’s Day, the two jointly purchased a two-bedroom condominium in a garden apartment complex on Peoria Street in Montbello, a part of Denver just east of Stapleton International Airport. The price was $26,900.
Delores moved in by herself. Bob continued to live in his apartment, from where he had begun trying to establish his own business as an accounting and tax consultant. To friends, he began complaining that Denver’s economy was souring and that going into business for himself, his dream, was proving more difficult than he had believed. Other than his feet, it was the first time friends in Denver recall Bob really complaining about anything.
Bob worked hard to make his own business into something he could do full time, but the economic tide had turned strongly against him in the 1980s. At one point, sensing opportunity in Wheatridge, the suburb he knew well and a place where the newly unleashed savings-and-loan industry was lending money copiously for the building of new strip malls, office centers, and apartments, Bob dug into his small savings and invested several thousand dollars in the purchase of a franchise for the direct-mail distribution of advertising coupons.
His territory, north of Interstate 70 where the suburban sprawl had begun to push right up onto the curve of North Table Mountain, certainly looked promising. New growth, new shops, new people coming in, lured by proximity to the interstate and cheap rents. But it didn’t have any vitality beneath the surface. Many of the new businesses, which had been built with loans from brand-new banking institutions that hadn’t exercised the caution that had once prevailed in the savings-and-loan business, didn’t quite get off the ground. The bank loans were easy—the bill for that tax-supported gold rush wouldn’t come due for many years. The physical facilities had sprung up, one after the other. But the demand didn’t seem to be so strong for what these businesses were selling. There seemed to be too much business and not enough patronage.
“In his franchise area, there would be a dry cleaners, for example; restaurants, service stations, other shops. You’d get your percentages off when you brought in one of the coupons they issued,” Gary explained. “Bob was good at running the franchise, except the economy and the area that was his franchise made it impossible to come out of it with profit.
“The businessmen would tell him, ‘I can’t pay you this month, but here’s my card. Come in with your wife for a free dinner,’ and ‘I can’t pay you this month, but bring your suit in, we’ll clean it for you.’”
Bob lost what little savings he had in the failed venture.
Yet, as had been the pattern before, he plunged on as the red ink deepened. He turned his attention to his consulting service, Robert Clark Associates. One former neighbor recalled Bob proudly showing him his business card, but conceding that the business so far didn’t have more than a few regular customers like Gary Morrison, who came to Bob for tax work and occasional small jobs like reconciling bank statements.
He was successful in his courting of Delores, however. In the summer of 1985, Delores agreed at last to marry him.
Chapter Twelve
Out by the Denver airport, where wide runways slash through fields that only fifteen years before were thick with weeds, out in the clutter of new condominium complexes and strip shopping malls, Wanda Flanery was paying attention, as usual, to the nuances of life around her. Nice people had started to move o
ut lately, and a rougher breed of tenant was arriving. Renters, not buyers. Whereas she had once seen vans with the names of well-known moving and storage companies emblazoned on them, now she saw people who hauled their belongings in pickups or rented trailers, people with mattresses strapped to the roofs of their cars and loud radios blasting.
So Wanda was very concerned when she noticed cardboard moving boxes stacked up in the adjacent backyard of her neighbor, Delores Miller, one Saturday late in the summer of 1985.
She hurried outside and found, to her relief, that Delores was bringing boxes in, not taking boxes out. A tall, clumsy man with a red face beneath his receding hairline was with her, sweating under the burden of a cumbersome carton that had knocked his eyeglasses askew. Wanda had never seen the man before, though Delores was such a close friend that she thought of her almost as a surrogate daughter. The couple seemed to be trying not to attract attention as they lugged boxes from the back seat and trunk of Delores’s car in the parking lot.
Curious, Wanda went out back when the man was at the car. She gave a short hiss across the fence to get Delores’s attention.
“Hey, what’s going on?” the older woman asked when Delores looked up.
“Oh,” Delores said, blushing. “That’s Mr. Robert Clark. We’re going to get married in a few months. We’re just moving some of Bob’s things in.”
That Delores even had a boyfriend was a surprise to Wanda, a bright-eyed and normally cheerful woman in her early sixties who prided herself—these days, as a matter of safety and prudence—on not missing much of what was going on around her. In their many conversations together, about work, family, money, weather, and whatever, Delores had never mentioned a Bob, let alone a Bob she was about to marry.
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