by John Lutz
“But not your husband?”
“Oh, no. They might think so, but they’re mistaken. They won’t outlast Saint Benedict!” She slammed down the lid on the suitcase, lifted it slightly for a second to poke a corner of material back inside, then latched it and tried to drag the suitcase off the side of the bed and onto the floor.
It was too heavy for her, and she emitted a frustrated, boozy sigh. Carver walked to the bed and helped her stand the suitcase on the floor. He saw that it had plastic wheels. She unfolded a small handle from it and rolled it into the living room to leave it near the garment bag.
Carver followed. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he told her, “you seem too angry to be thinking clearly right now. Maybe you should calm down, then see if you still want to leave.”
She stared at him, her lower lip trembling. “Men! You think this is sudden, that the geeks outside are the final straw and I broke. Mister, I’ve been contemplating this for months. Years!” She walked to a walnut desk and pulled open a large drawer. From the drawer she pulled out a sheaf of newspaper clippings and handed them to Carver. “Look at this—my collection. You’ll get some idea what our marriage has been like for the past year, and even before that. You’ll understand why I’ve had my fill and have to get out.”
There was a burst of noise from the demonstrators, then the sound of a car in the driveway. A horn gave two curtailed beeps, as if not wanting to further disturb the neighbors.
Leona opened the front door about six inches and peered out. “That’s my cab,” she said. She opened the door all the way and stood in the doorway.
A few seconds later she backed up a step, and a wizened, gray cab driver appeared and entered the house. He glanced at Carver, then hoisted the garment bag and heavy hard-sided suitcase and lugged them toward his cab, out of sight.
Leona paused for a moment in the doorway, looking at Carver, who was standing with newspapers clippings in each hand.
“If you see my husband,” she said in a flat, decisive voice, “tell him I didn’t say good-bye to him or this house or this city. Tell him I walked away and didn’t look back.”
She picked up a large white purse from a nearby chair and stalked out, leaving the door hanging open as she disappeared from sight. For a woman who’d obviously drunk way too much, and on such a hot morning, she moved steadily and in a straight line. Carver guessed she’d been a regular drinker for a long time, and he wondered if Dr. Benedict, busy with his calling and his patients, had noticed.
He heard car doors slam, then the cab drive away. There was another burst of shouting from the mouth of the driveway as the vehicle slowed and made its turn into the street. The man with the bullhorn shouted something Carver couldn’t make out.
The demonstrators might not know it yet, but they’d achieved at least a partial victory in their ongoing war. They’d contributed to the breakup of an abortion doctor’s marriage.
Carver sat down on the white leather sofa, the mass of newspaper clippings in his lap. In the bright light streaming through the open door, he leafed through the clippings. They covered more than two years and were all from the Gazette-Dispatch, articles about protests, threats, demonstrations that had gotten out of hand. There were plenty of photographs. In one, Carver noticed white wooden crosses and what looked like a duplicate of the dead fetus sign the girl outside was carrying, but the sign in the photo was being waved at a terrified-looking young woman by a man with a beard. Another photo was of two groups of people yelling at each other, some of them throwing what appeared to be rocks and bottles, some in the foreground blurred by their motion as they ran toward each other. One group was carrying pro-life signs, the other pro-choice. They appeared equally angry with tortured faces, their mouths distorted by the insults and challenges they were hurling at each other. At the left edge of the photo, uniformed police were visible, apparently recently arrived on the scene. The photo’s caption identified the groups as demonstrators from Operation Alive and angry pro-choicers from a local chapter of the National Alliance of Women.
He was about to put the photo aside when he noticed in the photo’s background a tall man looming above those around him, possibly leaning against a car. He caught Carver’s eye because he appeared to be smiling. The photo was grainy, and the man wasn’t wearing horn-rimmed glasses, but Carver was sure he was looking at a likeness of the WASP. And he didn’t figure to be a member of the National Alliance of Women. Or a cop.
Which left Operation Alive.
Carver folded the clipping carefully, so the face of the tall man in the photo wouldn’t be creased, and slid it into his shirt pocket.
After quickly thumbing through the other clippings, he got up and replaced them in the desk drawer. He looked around the peaceful, well-furnished house and thought it was a shame two people couldn’t find happiness here. Then he went out, setting the latch so the door would lock behind him.
The guy with the bullhorn was quiet, and no one said anything to Carver as he walked from the driveway and made his way to where he’d left the Olds parked. He half expected to find the car vandalized, paint sprayed on it or its tires or the convertible top slashed, but the vehicle sat level and unmarked, and its taut canvas top was unmarred by any new stains or slashes.
As he drove past the Operation Alive demonstrators, they stood motionless and stared at him in the heat with a kind of dull but unmistakable hostility, as if he might be hauling lions to the Colosseum.
At his office, Carver put the photograph of the WASP in an envelope and wrote a short note on the back of one of his business cards to accompany it.
Then he addressed the envelope to Desoto and left to find a mailbox with an early pick-up time.
As he drove along streets so hot that rising vapor danced on them, the screaming voice of the man with the bullhorn echoed around the back of his skull. Along with Leona Benedict’s words before climbing into a cab and abandoning her world: “Eventually they win.”
30
CARVER FOUND DR. BENEDICT at the hospital that afternoon, seated on the sofa in the cool lobby where they’d talked the day of Linda Lapella’s death. He was reading a newspaper, but when he saw Carver approach, he glanced up and smiled.
“Our conversation shouldn’t be so tragic this time,” he said.
It hit Carver with a rush of sadness and dread: Benedict didn’t yet know about his wife’s departure.
“I was at your house this morning,” Carver said, sitting down next to Benedict. He didn’t want to tell Benedict about Leona leaving him, but neither did he think he should neglect to mention it. At some point the doctor would find out about the scene with the departing Leona and realize that Carver had known.
“Operation Alive is picketing my home,” Benedict said.
“I couldn’t help noticing,”
“That’s part of their strategy, to hound abortion doctors, not allow us any peace at work or at home, put pressure on our families. How’s Leona holding up? I told her to ignore them and stay away from the doors and windows. The heat will get to them eventually and they’ll go away.”
“I’m afraid she’s the one who went away,” Carver said.
Benedict looked puzzled, “Leona? Really? That wasn’t wise. Where was she going?”
“She, er, left,” Carver said.
“Yes, you told me that.”
“I mean . . . left for good. That’s what she said.”
Benedict set aside the paper he’d been reading. Words were becoming thoughts that were boring in, changing his life. The sports page slid from the sofa onto the lobby floor. Carver felt sorry for him. He looked as stunned as if he’d been struck with a hammer.
“I assumed you meant she left the house. But you meant she left me?” He still couldn’t quite let the idea into his mind to stay.
“When I got there, she was packing. I’m sure she’d been drinking.”
Benedict made a little back-and-forth wiping motion with his hand, as if erasing a scene on a blac
kboard. “No, no, Leona never drinks.”
Carver knew better than to argue with him. Secret alcoholics were among the most devious of marriage partners. “A cab came and picked her up, and she left with her luggage.”
“She didn’t say why?” Benedict was still hoping.
“She said why,” Carver told him. “It’s your work. She said she couldn’t stand the strain and the threats. Before she walked out, she handed me a stack of newspaper clippings about demonstrations and harassment of abortion doctors. You spend too much time away from her, mentally and physically. That’s more or less what she said. She thinks your cause is more important to you than your marriage.”
Benedict sat silently for a while. A nurse walked by and said hello to him, but he didn’t so much as glance up at her. He was lost in the labyrinth of this, his life’s latest tragedy, and possibly contemplating a bleak future alone.
“I thought she understood,” he said finally.
You also thought she didn’t drink. “She understands that you’ll never quit.”
“Do you think she’ll come back?”
The question surprised Carver. Why should he have any insight into the Benedict marriage? He’d merely happened to be on the scene when Leona walked from the house and took a cab. “I don’t know. She seemed sure of what she was doing. She told me it wasn’t all of a sudden, that the pressure had built over time and she’d been thinking about it.”
“And you’re sure she didn’t tell you her real reason for leaving?”
Real reason? Benedict was still resisting what had happened; he saw himself as a fighter and a winner and didn’t want to be the cause of his marriage’s failure.
“What she said seemed real to me,” Carver said. “It was the pressure of your work, what it did to your lives. That’s what she told me, anyway.” It always amazed him how a man like Benedict, who held and nurtured a grand vision, could be blind to what was going on immediately around him.
Benedict sat forward and leaned down, resting his head between his knees. It was what doctors told you to do when you felt faint. When he straightened up several seconds later, he looked sick.
“You going to be all right?” Carver asked.
“I’ll have to be,” Benedict said in a thin voice. “I have to see a patient in less than an hour.” He looked at Carver and tried to smile. “You understand that, don’t you, that I have to see a patient? You understand how important it is? Not just to me, but to her?”
Carver had gotten the message: he, Carver, understood but Leona hadn’t; every problem in the Benedict marriage stemmed from that and was her responsibility.
“If you’re ill,” Carver said, “you could cancel. Your patient could come back another day.”
“Unfortunately, there are no ‘other’ days! Too many of us have been run out of business by the radicals who are picketing my house at this moment. And I have Dr. Grimm’s patients now, the appointments he’ll never be able to keep.” He stood up from the sofa, swaying slightly, then steadied himself. Wiping his fingertips lightly across his eyes as if to correct some minor vision problem, he said, “God, what a business, what a world this is!”
“I’ve thought that, too,” Carver said, “in my business, in my world. Nobody has much choice but to keep pushing on.”
“That I can do,” Benedict said. He stood straighter and buttoned his suit coat. “That I can damned well do!”
He made a good show of walking away toward the elevators, pace steady, shoulders squared. To look at him from behind, you wouldn’t guess he had a care or a want.
But Carver knew Benedict had a want.
He was sure that right now the doctor wanted to scream.
At nine that evening, Beth returned from following Nate Posey.
Carver, sitting on the sofa and watching the light over the ocean dim beyond the cottage’s wide window, turned his head when she came in and thought immediately that she looked tired. He wouldn’t say anything to her about that, or about his having to clean up the mess in the cottage because Al had had no way of going outside to relieve himself.
“Why are you staring at me?” she asked as she set her computer case on the counter, She carried the little notebook computer almost everywhere these days.
He decided not to tell her how he thought she might still be too weak to be out shadowing players in a murder investigation. He knew she’d simply brush away his words, or possibly get angry and argue. Like him, she resented being vulnerable and having it pointed out.
“You’re a magnet to my eyes,” he said.
“Very romantic, Fred.” Her tone of voice suggested she didn’t believe him.
Looking again at the ocean and darkening sky, he waited silently while she went into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened, altering the pattern of light and shadow on that side of the cottage, then closed.
“Too dim in here to see much of anything,” Beth said a few minutes later, sitting down in a chair opposite him. But she made no move to switch on a lamp or suggest that Carver do so. She had a glass of milk in one hand, a chocolate chip cookie in the other. After kicking off her leather sandals, she wriggled lower into the chair, scooting her rump forward, then stretched her long legs out in front of her and crossed them at the ankles.
“I was watching the ocean and sky,” Carver said. “The stars will be out soon.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “There’s been another casualty from the clinic bombing.”
“Oh?”
“The Benedicts’ marriage. Leona Benedict left the doctor this morning,” He related to her what had happened at the Benedict house.
Beth listened silently, chewing bites of cookie and occasionally taking a swig of milk.
When Carver was finished, she wiped away a milk mustache and set her glass on the floor beside the chair. “Maybe Leona can’t be blamed,” she said. “Pro-life extremist groups like Operation Alive are relentless in badgering and torturing doctors who perform abortions, and the rest of the family’s made miserable in the process. Under the kind of pressure an abortion doctor’s spouse has to endure, Leona probably wore down to her raw nerve ends, and her ability to resist left her.” She brushed crumbs from her fingers almost angrily, probably thinking about Operation Alive. “How’d Benedict take it when you told him she’d left?”
“He seemed shattered. Surprised. He couldn’t believe the pressure in their lives had resulted in her leaving. He asked me what her real reason was. I told him again why she left, but he didn’t like hearing it or believing it, even though he knew he had no choice. Then he sucked up his pain and walked away to tend to a patient who was coming in. I had to admire that.”
“Sure you did, being you. Is he considering quitting?”
“I doubt it. My guess is he’s more determined than ever to stay on the job, despite Martin Freel and Operation Alive.”
Though moonlight was filtering in from outside, the cottage’s interior was becoming too dark to see anything clearly. Carver reached over and switched on a lamp by the sofa. Beth winced at the sudden onslaught of light, looking worse than when she’d walked in.
“What about your day?” he asked. “Learn anything from following Nate Posey?”
Al, who had been awakened from a nap behind the sofa, ambled around and stretched out near Beth’s chair. He puffed himself up then let out a long sigh. She leaned down and scratched him behind the ears before answering Carver.
“Posey stayed in his apartment most of the day,” Beth said. “Left only to run a few errands. And even though he’s on vacation time, he stopped by Second Sailor and talked for a while with some employees who were working on a dry-docked yacht. After picking up supper to go at a McDonald’s, he drove home and ate it, then a little while later came out dressed in fresh clothes, looking like a dandy.”
Carver’s interest stirred. Maybe following Nate Posey might lead somewhere at that, “On his way to meet the other woman you suspect is in his life?”
“No,” she said, “I
followed him to church. That big one on Shell Avenue with the huge steeple.”
Carver knew the church she meant. Despite the fact that it was constructed only a few years ago, it looked like a converted warehouse on which someone had stuck a new roof with a steeple and cross, probably because of the scarcity of windows in its plain brick walls.
“I waited outside,” Beth continued, “watching other people go into the church for what a sign said was a prayer meeting to aid world refugees. About an hour later, Posey came out, walking with a slim woman with black hair and a long neck. They went to a pizza place and Posey picked at a small salad and drank beer while she ate a pizza about the size of a saucer.”
Carver remembered now the young woman who’d been consoling Posey in the hospital cafeteria the day of the bombing. “Love interfering with appetite?”
“I’d like to think so,” Beth said, “but they didn’t act that close to each other during dinner. They talked and didn’t touch. And there was none of the body language, the unconscious imitation of gestures, you see when people are in love or lust. After dinner, Posey drove her back to the church, where she’d left her car. They didn’t embrace or kiss when they said good-bye, and she got out of his car and into hers.”
“The night was still young,” Carver pointed out.
“Not for Posey. He drove home, and I saw him outside a little later watering his geraniums, wearing shorts and a red net muscle shirt.” She leaned over and scratched Al behind the ears again. “That’s when I gave it up and came here.”
“What about tomorrow?” Carver asked, remembering that Anderson was no longer on the job.