Death Sentence

by Sharkey, Joe;

  Six thousand dollars and a fussy disposition limited one’s options considerably, Betty knew. Figuring on the minimum ten percent down, that meant the Clarks were limited to the $60,000 range and below, assuming they could come up with the closing costs. This did not augur for the sort of commission that causes a real estate agent to start thinking of that week in the Caribbean, Betty knew.

  Yet she pressed on cheerfully. Townhouses? No, that wouldn’t do. He and Delores had had their fill of that in Denver. How about a detached ranch, out by the arsenal? Bob didn’t like the looks of the neighborhood. And nothing too far out, either. Delores was very concerned about the commute. He himself didn’t mind, of course. But Delores was strict about the amount of time he could spend on the road.

  As they prowled the Richmond suburbs over the course of weeks, Betty learned that Bob’s M.B.A. was from the University of Michigan. Without prompting, he volunteered the information that he had been married before, to a woman “who died of a brain tumor.” There were no children. When his wife died after a long and tragic illness, he said, he went out to Denver to put his life back together.

  “Bob was a nice, sweet, conservative gentleman to me,” Betty said. “He was certainly all of those things.” But, she added in a confidential tone, “He was strange? When he laughed, it was, like, strange? When he smiled, it was like his face would crack? He was, you might say, programmed? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”

  Like so many people who would encounter Bob Clark, she tried to describe the misgivings she realized she had felt only in hindsight: “His voice was very deep, very controlled. When you talked to him on the telephone, it was like he was reading something from a script. You know how people have inflections in their voices, they go up, they go down? He didn’t have that. It wasn’t like he was an automaton or a robot, don’t misunderstand me. But he just didn’t have those inflections.”

  By the end of March, Betty decided she had exhausted all of the possibilities. Bob simply wasn’t going to make a decision without Delores, she felt. But suddenly Delores was reported on her way. Bob said that plans had changed, Delores had quit her job at Fitzsimmons after being told there was no possibility of a transfer to a military facility near Richmond for the foreseeable future. Delores’s mother had flown out to help with the final arrangements, and the two of them were even now driving across country for Richmond, with the furniture en route separately in a moving van. Bob was obviously eagerly awaiting the reunion.

  When Delores got there, she moved into the room with Bob at Wally’s house. They put the furniture in storage at the Extra Attic mini-storage facility in the West End of Denver. Then they were ready to go house-hunting together.

  For Betty, Delores’s arrival brought encouraging news. Not only might a decision be easier to get now, but she learned there was actually more money available, bettering the odds of finding a suitable place. While Bob didn’t have “a dime to his name, himself” Delores had some $14,000, in fact. While she wasn’t willing to commit all of it to a down payment, some of it would be available.

  It was then, however, that the matter of the condominium came to her attention for the first time. A mortgage company considering a loan will tend to raise its eyebrows at one from an applicant whose previous house is still a liability, with six months of past due payments on the mortgage. According to Robert Hatch, a lawyer who represented the condominium management in the foreclosure, Bob had also taken out a second mortgage on the Denver property.

  As Betty saw it, the situation was a microcosm of one aspect of the savings-and-loan crisis: “They hadn’t paid their mortgage payment on it since the previous October because there was some mixup; the mortgage company that had held the mortgage had gone out of business, and there was another bank, and it went bankrupt, and then some other bank bought out that bank; the place was going downhill, the builder hadn’t done what he said was going to do. They withheld their condominium fees. Foreclosure proceedings began. They got a lawyer.” The property also was now worth less, not more, than the principal on the mortgage loan. That was the way these things sometimes went. Who ever said life was fair? The buyer didn’t always come out on top, especially with the lawyers lined up. “They lost,” she said with a shrug.

  Shortly after she got to Richmond, Delores wrote to Wanda Flanery about the condominium, which, she said, “is going to rob us of everything we own.”

  It was the middle of May, after Delores and Bob came back from a Mother’s Day visit to her mother, before the house-hunting resumed, this time with Delores. “If she saw something she liked, Bob would meet us after work and we’d go back,” Betty said.

  Betty noticed something mildly disagreeable on those occasions, with the three of them frustrated at the lack of success in finding a house: “Right in front of Bob,” she recalled, “Delores kept saying what a nice home she and her first husband had, how she had hated to leave it. How she didn’t know how long Bob would be able to keep this new job.”

  Given the problem with the condominium, Betty advised the Clarks that their best hope was to find a house with an assumable mortgage, a transaction that wouldn’t require excessive scrutiny from an anxious new lender.

  Luckily, such a listing arrived in Betty’s office about a week later. It was a three-bedroom, two-bath house in a suburban subdivision she knew fairly well, Brandermill, a new community of homes set back on lots thick with oak and pine, and situated around a 1,700-acre lake below Midlothian. Brandermill was perfect for an older couple who, like Bob and Delores, didn’t have children and wanted a secure environment. A $93 million extension of the Powhite Parkway had recently opened to link Brandermill to the commercial hubbub of suburban Midlothian less than ten miles away. On the new, uncrowded parkway, it was only a thirty-minute drive, with a seventy-five-cent toll, to downtown Richmond. Brandermill’s homes, and there were more than a thousand, in models with prices that ranged from $70,000 to more than $350,000, were all close to the lake. In its slick promotional brochure, illustrated with the smiling happy faces of men, women, and children of all ages (but only one apparent race, Caucasian), the community boasted an eighteen-hole golf course, twenty-four tennis courts, five swimming pools. Brandermill was subdivided into scores of neat, quiet residential “neighborhoods” tied together by loop roads that kept through traffic off the streets where the homes were set back in the trees. Half of Brandermill’s residents, the community’s statistics show, were newcomers to the Richmond area. So physically well executed was the development that it had garnered a citation as the “Best Planned Community in America” in Better Homes & Gardens magazine.

  And the new listing on Betty’s desk also was priced right. The blue-gray ranch home with a porch, at the end of a cul de sac called Sagewood Trace, was listed for $76,500, with an assumable mortgage because the owners had recently bought a house closer to the city and were anxious to sell.

  Betty did some quick arithmetic. Perfect, she decided.

  She was proud of herself for being able to find something so well suited for the Clarks. So Betty was flabbergasted when they drove down there and Delores and Bob turned their noses up at it. It was too far from his office, Bob thought. Delores had a problem with the highway tolls, which she thought were excessive. Neither of them seemed to like the house itself. They thought it was overpriced for such a modest place.

  The sellers, Carolyn and Richard Merkel, wanted to move from Brandermill to a more convenient location on the West Side, where they had already closed on their new house. They thought the price they were selling their Brandermill house for was on the low side. But, Carolyn Merkel said, by the time they had seen the last of Bob Clark, they were ready to give him the house to get him out of their hair.

  After several trips to Brandermill, and almost a month together in the rented room at Wally’s house, Bob and Delores decided at last to go with the house in Brandermill.

  Bob came by frequently, though, before the formal agreement of sale was signed. �
��He would walk around with a notebook, and stand there and read to me from a list of questions he’d prepared. Then he carefully write down my response,” said Carolyn Merkel, a soft-spoken woman in her thirties who was mystified by Bob’s attention to detail. But she overlooked what would have been infuriating in a more aggressive person because he was so diffident and polite, and he seemed so helpless at times.

  Once Bob arrived with his camera to take pictures of the house from all angles, inside and out. On another occasion, he questioned her carefully about the neighbors, after seeing some visitors at a nearby house.

  “He was very concerned about there being a lot of people in the neighborhood,” which in fact is very quiet, Carolyn said. One afternoon, he sat in her living room making a list of each of the ten closest neighbors’ names. In a subsequent encounter, it was clear to Carolyn that he had memorized all of those names.

  “You can come with me to meet the neighbors,” she suggested, trying to be helpful.

  “Well, maybe,” he said, but that was the last he mentioned the neighbors.

  Finally, to Betty’s immense relief, the Clarks offered $72,000 for the house, including the existing, assumable mortgage of $63,000. It was accepted.

  Betty, aware that almost all of the money for the down payment was Delores’s and not Bob’s, suggested casually that perhaps the house might be put in Delores’s name. Actually, she was acting less out of concern about Bob’s credit rating, which didn’t matter so much on an assumable mortgage, than for Delores’s best interests, which she almost instinctively wished to protect. She was surprised when Bob showed not the slightest trace of hesitation about having the property in his wife’s name. The agreement of sale was signed, and the Merkels thought they had seen the last of Bob’s earnest, perpetually fretful face until the date of closing.

  They were wrong. Bob came by more often than the mailman, it seemed, usually on some mission to make a slight amendment to the existing agreement of sale. Richard Merkel, a wiry man with a sense of humor, found that Bob was so unprepossessing that his initial annoyance was giving way to an amused curiosity about just what he would show up asking for next.

  The shelf paper, Bob said sheepishly on the phone one day. Delores was insisting that the shelf paper inside the kitchen cabinets be included in the sale. Carolyn covered the phone and made a face to her husband. “Who in the world asks for the shelf paper?” she said with amazement.

  The bug whacker, Bob said the very next day. The bug whacker on the porch. Fine, Carolyn said, after checking with Richard, who merely shrugged. The bug whacker was included.

  “Thank you,” said Bob, who never forgot his manners.

  Two days passed without a call from Bob to the Merkels, who were under no legal obligation to amend anything in the sales contract. But it didn’t last.

  The trash cans? Bob enquired. Could the trash cans be included?

  At first, Richard bristled at this triviality when Carolyn told him that night. But finally he agreed. The Merkels’ three battered old trash cans would go along with the deal. Surely, that would be the end of it.

  It wasn’t. A few days before closing on the sale, when the phone rang at lunchtime, Carolyn guessed who was calling. Bob said they would need all of the warranty cards and instruction books for the kitchen and laundry appliances. Carolyn, an organized person, happened to have kept all of these in a file. She made a special trip to Bob’s lawyer’s office to drop them off in time for settlement.

  But then it seemed the deal was off.

  Delores called Carolyn the next day and said she had instructed the lawyer to cancel the purchase. Carolyn was virtually speechless and waiting for Richard to come home when the phone rang again. It was Bob, apologizing. “We’ll go through with it,” Bob said.

  Delores had phoned Betty with the same information, however. “She said she wanted to get out of the contract,” said Betty, who was now more concerned about her reputation than her commission. So Betty made the Clarks an offer: “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If you want to sell that house in a year, I’ll sell it for no commission. I’ll write the ad for you—you pay for the ad, and you show the people around the house, but if you find somebody who wants to buy the house, I’ll draw up the contract, take them by the hand, take them to the loan institution, follow them right through just as if there was a fee involved. I don’t want any of my clients ever to say they were unhappy with me.”

  Bob said that would be fine.

  Settlement was the following morning, and Betty used the occasion to reiterate her offer before witnesses.

  The sale closed with no further hitch; and the Clarks took their furniture out of storage and moved down to Brandermill.

  But Bob didn’t disappear from the Merkels’ life as expeditiously as they had hoped. Carolyn began getting phone calls at work, even though she had never told Bob where she was employed. He was always cordial and apologetic. First he wanted to know how the air vents worked. She told him. Next he wanted to know the names of the trees in the yard. She said she wasn’t sure—some pines, an oak or two. He said he was starting a list of the trees and shrubs on the property. Then he called to report that he had just purchased a kerosene space heater, but his wife was unhappy because it was too big. Was it? Carolyn didn’t have any idea. Well, should they leave it on all night?

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she replied tentatively.

  The next time he called, which would be the last, Bob was uncharacteristically testy. It was a side of him Carolyn hadn’t seen before, and she was sure that if she had been exposed to it earlier, her good will would have been considerably less liberally proffered. The utility company had just come and installed some sort of transformer box on the edge of the property, Bob complained. “If we had known this, we would never have moved here!” he snapped.

  Before they considered moving out to Brandermill, Delores and Bob ascertained that a Lutheran church was nearby. Brand-new churches were plentiful in the rural stretches of Chesterfield County, where both the rapidity and the nature of the ongoing change could be seen in the churches built in clearings cut into the woods along two-lane highways, with signs in front that had lettered on them shibboleths of modern evangelical and pentacostal Christianity such as “ministries” and “living word” and “wings of faith.”

  The Clarks’ new congregation, the Lutheran Church of Our Savior on Route 360, was more mainstream Protestant than many of its evangelical neighbors, but not any more established. It was obvious, looking at the clean right angles of the oak-hued wooden exterior of the church, which faced a parking lot whose dividing lines looked as newly painted as the foul lines on a major league baseball field, that the building hadn’t seen many winters. The church was not much over a year old when the Clarks joined. Like their neighbors in the other new little churches in the clearings, the congregation’s 250 members had one thing in common besides their shared religious beliefs: Only a few years earlier, virtually all of them had been strangers to one another.

  Delores quickly found a place in the weekly Bible study group. But Bob didn’t have time yet for involvement in the parish on days other than Sunday. That would come later, when they were more financially stable. Right now, though, he was a man with a $600 a month mortgage and a job that paid only $480 a week.

  Toiling nights and weekends again, he took in free-lance work that often wasn’t economically productive. In one project for a friend’s long-tottering business venture, Bob assiduously put the badly disorganized accounting books into respectable shape after many weeks of after-hours labor. For his work, Bob received not cash but a number of shares of the stock. But having its books in order wasn’t all the business required by the time Bob came into the picture. Within months, it went bankrupt. Bob’s stock was worthless.

  Yet he did not despair. In fact, Bob seemed virtually indifferent to such setbacks. Instead, he would repair most nights after work to the office he had set up in a spare bedroom and go at it, hunched over h
is and other people’s accounts, a penumbra now framed between tall file cabinets in the fluorescent glare of the desk lamp.

  In the early morning, when he didn’t have an early appointment at the chiropractor he saw regularly, Bob made time to tend the roses that had bloomed in some profusion in the back yard. Then, on weekdays, he would leave for work exactly at seven-thirty in his Ford, which had on its rear window a sticker that certified the driver as a contributor to the Fraternal Order of Police, the national labor union for police officers. He would always greet his closest neighbors, Joseph and Jacqueline Stefano, an immigrant couple in their thirties who had moved in next door with their three children, nine months before the Clarks arrived.

  The Stefanos liked having two quiet, older people living next door. But they had to warn their teenage daughter to stop taking a shortcut she favored, strolling across one corner of the Clarks’ property as she left for school. Bob never complained about it, as such. But the girl’s parents noticed that if he happened to be outside when she stepped onto his ground, he would stop what he was doing in his garden and, with his hands on his hips, stand there watching her—it wasn’t clear if he was scowling or just squinting—until she got off the property.

  It took Bob just over a half hour to make the drive to work at Maddrea, Joyner, Kirkham & Woody. The accounting firm had a small suite of offices in a business complex across from a shopping center a few miles from downtown Richmond. The area was cluttered with strip malls, fast-food restaurants, motels, and heavy traffic that moved, even when it moved slowly, in patterns that didn’t change much from day to day. Bob was always at his desk before eight-fifteen A.M., fifteen minutes before starting time. This gave him time to have his coffee and read the morning paper.

  The receptionist at Maddrea, Joyner, a woman named Sandra Silbermann, found herself intrigued with the odd new accountant, whose desk job kept him around all day while the other three accountants often were out of the office, doing audits.