Death Sentence

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Later, after being formally introduced when the boxes all were unloaded, Wanda realized that Delores had been more concerned about her thinking that Bob was moving in before the wedding, which he was not, than that it might seem odd that she would never have mentioned to a good friend the fact that she was seriously contemplating marriage in the first place. Other people’s sexual hang-ups amused Wanda.

  The wedding was set for the Saturday before Thanksgiving, in Maryland, where Delores had close relatives. As the date approached, it occurred to Wanda, who had seen her own daughter married and who loved the trappings of weddings, that Delores seemed more apprehensive than joyful. “Bob wanted to get married something awful, but Delores, you could tell she wasn’t as sure,” Wanda said. “She had her qualms.”

  On several occasions, Delores sought assurance from Wanda that marrying Bob was a good idea.

  “Well, you know him, honey, I don’t,” Wanda told her gently. She was uneasy about getting involved in such a situation. She liked Bob well enough, but who could say, except the person who presumably wished to spend the rest of her life with him?“It’s up to you,” Wanda advised her. “You have to decide for yourself.”

  “Well, I just don’t know,” Delores said on one occasion. “What I’d really like to do is run, just get away from it all.”

  As the wedding date approached, though, Bob became even more affectionate. He always had a bouquet of flowers in his hands when he showed up. Finally, Delores’s misgivings gave way to an excitement that was infectious to Wanda, who was thrilled to be taking part once more in the happy preparations for the wedding of someone she loved.

  Delores chirped happily that her entire family would be at the wedding, which was to take place back East. Together, the two women went shopping to choose the trousseau, a beige gown with delicate lace and a champagne-colored trailer. The high heels also were beige.

  Wanda, whose husband was disabled and confined to bed, cited the prohibitively expensive air fare as the reason she couldn’t accept the invitation to the wedding. But she saw Delores and Bob off before their flight.

  On November 23, 1985, Delores and Bob were married in a Lutheran church in Reistertown, Maryland, where Delores’s mother and several other relatives lived. Only one member of the wedding party could have known at the time that a mere twenty miles away, in another Lutheran church in Baltimore thirty-four years earlier, John and Helen List had exchanged their wedding vows.

  After the week-long wedding trip, Bob moved in with Delores. One of the first things Bob did next was to transfer his church enrollment from St. Paul’s, where he would be much missed by the pastor and other elders and where he was saddened to have to relinquish his proud post as treasurer, to Delores’s parish, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Aurora. That church was affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a conservative branch with a somewhat less rigid interpretation of the immutability of Scripture than the Missouri Synod.

  At St. Mark’s, Delores already was a well-liked Bible class teacher. Enthusiastically, Bob decided to plunge into his new parish life, volunteering to teach a Sunday school class for adolescents. But his skills as a catechistic taskmaster weren’t appreciated in Denver. Within a short time, his Sunday school students were dropping out and complaining to their parents. The new teacher was too strict, drilling them in their lessons and insisting on disciplined attention to every detail. He was a tyrant. It was done quietly to save embarrassment, but Bob’s new career as a Sunday school teacher came to an end almost as soon as it started.

  This failure was soon followed by another. By the time he married Delores, Bob had been promoted to comptroller at All Packaging, where he was now earning $490 a week.

  But in April 1986, five months after the wedding, his job at All Packaging also came to an end. Bob was fired.

  As usual, no one really had a bad word to say about him. It was simply that he had failed to … keep up with changing challenges , company officials would say later. The business world had evolved. Creative responses to new competition required new ways of thinking, of using computer technology and market information as a weapon, not as merely a tool. “Marketplace” was the buzzword, sometimes preceded by the word “global.” The structure of the marketplace was changing, even bewildered small businessmen such as the producers of meat wrappers were being told in a flock of avidly read national business publications that were sounding the alarm. No one was quite sure what the new way was, exactly. But as the eighties reached critical mass, people saw clearly that the old way was out. It was a shame to lose a decent man like Bob Clark. But Bob, Bob was old way.

  “Bob’s job grew, but he didn’t,” is how his boss, Robert Bassler, a vice president, explained it.

  Again, the rules had changed in the middle of the game. Bob Clark walked off the field in silent defeat.

  Several years later, when All Packaging officials went to the files out of curiosity to examine Bob Clark’s records, they found his folder empty.

  Delores had been very proud of Bob’s promotion to a job with an important title. Some friends said it was the deciding factor that caused her to agree to marry him in the first place. Neither of the newlyweds had an inkling that he would be thrown out of work like that, days short of his fifty-fifth birthday, just at a time when the man was starting to look like a winner again.

  Delores was unhappy not only at the misfortune that had befallen a man she loved, but at the unfair strain it placed on a wife, financially and even socially, who has to go off to work each morning, to a job she loathes, while her spouse stays home and “does the cooking,” as she contemptuously put it to a friend.

  Not that Bob was sitting around watching television all day. True to form, he threw himself feverishly into the task of finding a new job. Each morning, he would get up with Delores. Just as she dressed in her work clothes, so did he. Attired in a suit or in neatly pressed slacks and a sports coat, with his tie in place and his shoes shined, he sat at the kitchen table and pored over the want ads. He wrote. He would call. Rebuffed again and again, he dusted himself off and trooped to the next interview for a low-paying accounting job.

  But Denver’s economy was in trouble. Employers weren’t so eager anymore to hire just any competent person who walked in the door with a good attitude. They wouldn’t say so, of course, but a man in his late fifties was not the most alluring prospect anyway. There was a litany of unspoken prejudices against such an applicant. “Unflexible” and “demanding” were among them, even before the applicant sat down for an interview. Likely to be a drain on the already strained health benefits was another. Many people would give up after a few months of rejection. Bob kept at it, day after day.

  Now, with Bob at home so much next door, Wanda got to know him better. She felt sorry for him when she saw him in his best suit, with that look of goofy determination on his face, headed off for another job interview. He never went out on an interview without looking “immaculate,” she noted.

  “How’d it go today, Bob?” she would ask sympathetically when he got home after being turned down for another job that, thirty years earlier, he would have been insulted even to have been offered.

  “Oh, you know. It won’t be too long,” he would say and crack that mirthless grin.

  All day long, even when he was cooking dinner or, as she once was surprised to see, sitting in the kitchen playing checkers alone, Bob would keep on his tie and coat.

  When they spoke “I noticed that I would be the one doing most of the talking,” Wanda said. “I started to like him real well during that time, the poor guy. He was really trying to succeed. I tried to make him laugh and things, and sometimes he would seem to, but it was hard to say because he was so awfully quiet, too quiet, really, I see now. It was obvious that no one was really close to him.”

  It was on one of these chats that Wanda picked up her first indication that there might be a darker layer beneath that cordial but opaque exterior. From the first day they had
met, she suspected that Bob was older than he claimed to be. Since he had recently celebrated a birthday, she was bold enough to try to pin him down.

  “How old did you say you were on your birthday?” she asked.

  “Why, fifty-five. Why?” Bob said, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head in that way he had.

  “Oh,” Wanda replied, her face full of Irish good humor. “Well, you sure don’t look fifty-five, Bob.”

  Bob seemed to take this as a compliment, but that wasn’t how Wanda meant it. She meant he looked five or six years older than that, and she thought it very odd that an ordinary man not connected with show business or some similar field would fib about his age.

  This was one noticeably tinny echo Wanda got back from Bob from those normal social soundings people send out in the process of evaluating acquaintances. But over time, as Bob and Delores settled into the routine of married life next door, there were others. While Wanda needed little prompting to discuss her grandchildren, whose photographs she kept atop her television, or to talk about growing up in Kansas City, or any of those unremarkable things that make up a normal life, Bob didn’t seem to have a past that extended back much before meeting Delores. In fact, he was unnerved and even outright evasive when asked conversational questions about any aspects of his life other than Delores.

  “Were you ever married before?” Wanda asked him once during a friendly chat over the waist-high fence that separated their little back patios.

  He stiffened. “My first wife died,” he replied. “She was very ill.” He looked her right in the eye. “It was very tragic.”

  “I’m awful sorry, Bob. No children?”

  “No children,” he said, turning away from her with a quick, jerky motion that positioned him for retreat back into his house.

  She never brought up that subject again, and Bob never gave her any reason to devote any serious thought to it. Even though she considered Bob oddly rigid and controlled, a little courtesy and kindness went a long way with Wanda; Bob was courteous to her and obviously kind to Delores. The truth is, she was actually fond of the man. She knew she wouldn’t ever have considered doing what Delores did, which was to marry him, but she liked him well enough.

  As Bob floundered looking for a new job, he kept hoping that he might be able to establish his own business as a consultant. Robert Clark Associates was reborn, but every time Bob spent money on it, for supplies or postage, Wanda said the strain seemed to grow worse. “He would spend money right and left when he was working, and now he was still spending, and that riled Delores, who wasn’t a spender,” Wanda said. “He had typewriters, computers, you name it.”

  By the fall of 1986, with Bob still out of work and unemployment benefits exhausted, Delores’s tolerance was reaching some limits, and she let Bob know it. “I’m sick and tired of this,” she said loudly over the back fence one Saturday. Wanda noticed that Bob was sitting just inside with the door wide open, and could clearly hear his wife. “If he doesn’t find a job pretty soon, I’m leaving him.”

  The tension showed in other ways. “Once, Delores bought him a new pair of pants for his job interviews, and he didn’t especially like them. Bob was real particular about his clothes. And she said to him, right there in front of me: “Well, you don’t look good in anything.”

  Finally, Wanda decided her neighbors desperately needed to get out for a day to forget their troubles. In October, she suggested the three of them take a drive to a German October festival in a little mountain town not far away. She was delighted when they accepted, and happier still when they began making their usual elaborate plans for the outing. For a time, it was the old Delores and Bob, touching each others’ hands, murmuring encouragement, acting like newlyweds.

  “They seemed to be having a ball,” Wanda said. “Bob meticulously, and I mean meticulously, planned every move. He was going to fry some chicken, this many pieces, exactly. She was going to cook this many potatoes. They were going to wear such and such clothes. We would leave exactly at such a time.”

  It was a glorious fall day, and Wanda had never seen Delores and Bob so at ease. At the festival, brass bands pumped out polkas and Bavarian marches. Beer flowed and frothed over mug handles, sauerkraut spilled from paper plates, mobs of people grew increasingly festive and friendly as the sunny afternoon wore on in the mile-high air. Bob bought Delores a big floppy hat, and she pulled the brim all the way down so that it looked like a bonnet. Two merry Lithuanians across the table who had been drinking all day informed her that since this was exactly how one would wear such a hat in Lithuania, she must then be Lithuanian. They insisted on speaking to her only in that language until she admitted it. Finally she did, though she was nothing of the sort. “We were in stitches,” Wanda said. “On our way out, she even stopped to buy her mother the same kind of hat.”

  The laughter didn’t last, of course. As 1987 arrived, nothing was improving. Bob had no job prospects, and Delores was hating her own job more than ever. And as is so often the case with misfortune, when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did.

  The source of this trouble was the condominium. As the savings-and-loan industry began collapsing from its own cupidity, the house of cards it had constructed in the wild days of free lending also began tumbling down. Entire shopping malls, which never had any business being built in the first place, were deserted. Residents of condominium complexes like the Clarks opened the mail every few months to find a different, unfamiliar bank demanding the mortgage payment. Upkeep of the common property declined. Improvements weren’t made. Equity began to disappear. Dreams of retirement in a pleasant community where responsible property owners puttered in well-tended small gardens, smiled at each other in the neat, shrub-lined communal areas, and adhered to the social contract had started to become nightmares.

  The first sign of trouble was the official-looking papers that began appearing on the front doors of some of the neighbors who had moved away. “NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE,” they declared in red letters. “BE IT SO KNOWN …” There were only a few at first, but within a couple of years a resident couldn’t walk from apartment to car without passing a flurry of them, ragged and torn on the doors, snapping in the wind like warning pennants beside windows covered with sheets of plywood.

  So much for equity. Then came the drug dealers and other troublesome characters, lured by cheap rents offered by banks anxious to generate revenue on foreclosed mortgages. The plastic trash bag was the moving container of choice for the new arrivals, people roaring up with those radios blasting. A siren couldn’t have been sounding a more compelling alarm to the property owners who were holding on, like Wanda and the Clarks.

  At the Clarks’ apartment, classical music often played. But it wouldn’t be blasting through the walls. Now there were times that the older tenants couldn’t even think straight, with rock music thumping into their consciousness like war drums.

  “Do you hear that?” Delores would moan when she came over for a cigarette after dinner some nights. “Do you hear that?”

  One weekend afternoon, Delores spent hours searching for her dog, a little mutt that had managed to get out through the back gate. She found it dead. It hadn’t been run over by a car. It had been beaten to death.

  The next major trouble began in the winter of 1987. Wanda later laid the blame for it squarely on what she considered to be an embarrassing but explainable habit: Every week when she made her regular trip to the supermarket, she would buy several of those weekly tabloid newspapers—“those crazy ones with stories about Elvis working behind the counter of a 7-Eleven,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh. The supermarket tabloids clamored for attention at checkout counters with headlines trumpeting not only quirks of the behavior of celebrities, dead or alive, but miraculous weight-loss techniques, oddities of human physique, and, occasionally, unusual crime stories.

  For a couple of dollars, and with at least more assurance of satisfaction than the purchase of a scratch-off lottery ticket,
Wanda would tote home these newspapers each week, scooping up the ones with the most outlandish headlines, for the good laugh that increasingly she had come to believe she deserved.

  So it was that Bob’s next-door neighbor, looking for nothing more than a chuckle or two on one such shopping day in February 1987, snapped abruptly to attention while thumbing through the February 17 issue of a tabloid called the Weekly World News. She had come upon an article well inside the paper that indicated to her with compelling persuasiveness that Bob Clark bore a startling resemblance, in physical appearance, in demeanor and habits, to a notorious mass murderer who, the paper said, had been on the loose since killing his wife, children, and mother in 1971.

  “The Perfect Crime,” the headline read over a story that described the most confounding murder case police in New Jersey had worked on since the Lindbergh kidnapping. Wanda proceeded to read the terrible account of John Emil List and that gruesome day in New Jersey in November 1971. John List, who had murdered his family, those women and those children, and then disappeared into thin air.

  In point of fact, Wanda probably would have scanned this particular story just briefly and, shrugging off a coincidence, flipped through the pages to something less depressing. But as she glanced up idly from the photograph of the wanted man that accompanied the story, she gazed out her back window and encountered an image on the patio that made her blink several times. It was only old Bob, fussing with the lid on his trash can out there. But to Wanda, it appeared as if John List himself were standing there.

  Her eyes darted from Bob to the newspaper and back. She read the story all the way through.