In The Neighborhood

by Peter Lovenheim

  “None of them,” he continued, “were of any help to me with Edie, with the ambulances coming at night. No one cares; no one wants to be bothered. They are not neighbors in the truest sense of the word. There are no neighbors here.”

  Lou said he had tried to befriend a family who moved in a few houses down.

  “At noon one day I took over a fish fry in a box from some takeout place,” he said. “The guy takes the fish and we talked a little and he says, ‘You’ll have to come over and have a beer,’ but I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

  “How long ago was that?” I asked.

  “About two years,” he said.

  A man devotes his whole life to serving his community as a physician—racing in the middle of the night to pull lead out of people’s stomachs—and for that, in his old age, he’s left alone, isolated from his most immediate neighbors? Seems like in the most primitive cultures the medicine man would be revered right up until the day he died. But here, amid this affluence, our medicine man can’t even get invited for beer in return for a box of fish fry. He sits in a wet bed in the middle of the night because he’s got no one closer to call for help than his daughter who lives several towns away. And why didn’t the simple act of having a meal together ever occur to me before?

  “Lou,” I said, “if you wake up at night again and can’t move, I want you to call me.”

  “Now I can call you,” he agreed, “and you can call me. We know each other.” Then he added, “Do you know how to get into my house?”

  I didn’t, so he told me which door he keeps unlocked. And I told him where I hide a house key.

  AS Lou and I began clearing the table, for the first time that day the phone rang. The unfamiliar sound was jarring.

  It was Dianne, Lou’s second eldest daughter. She and her children live in a distant suburb. Dianne is the daughter who most resembles her mother: dark hair, slender, and attractive, she was her college’s Homecoming Queen.

  Dianne had a problem. She’d leased a car but was over the mileage limit and didn’t know whether to continue the lease, buy a new car, or buy a used one.

  “Get rid of the lease and find a decent used car for yourself,” Lou advised as I finished clearing the table. He told her he’d call tomorrow and help her work it out.

  At a few minutes before 8 p.m., Lou said he was going to the garage for another smoke. I sensed he was tired after a day of almost nonstop talking. It seemed like the right time for me to leave.

  I picked up my overnight bag, put on my coat, patted Heidi on the head, and thanked Lou for letting me spend the day with him. I left by the side door. As I began the short walk home, I glanced back at Lou’s house. The only light visible was the one in the kitchen. From the sidewalk, you can see the cloth curtains that Edie made covering the kitchen window. But you can’t see the bottles of Lou’s pills lined up on the table, or the bottles of gin and scotch inside the cabinet. You can’t see the letter in the living room about Mary Lou’s apartment in California, and you can’t see Edie’s old license plate hanging on the wall in the garage, or Lou, standing alone beside it, smoking half a cigarette. To see any of this, you have to be inside Lou’s house.

  2

  “A Considerable Trauma”

  NOT long after my sleepover at Lou Guzzetta’s, I came across on the Internet this fragment from a biography of Conrad Aiken, the twentieth-century American poet and novelist: “In his childhood Aiken experienced a considerable trauma when he found the bodies of his parents after his physician father had killed his mother and committed suicide.”

  That reminded me of the tragedy that had occurred on my own street: when Bob Wills, a physician, killed his wife, Renan Beckman Wills (also a physician), and then committed suicide. The couple had two children: Emily, thirteen, and Peter, twelve.

  Aiken, a poet, had won the Pulitzer Prize.

  I printed out the item and put it aside. For weeks it sat on my desk. Then, one afternoon I looked up the phone number for Renan Wills’s mother; I’d heard she and her husband were now living in town, caring for their orphaned grandchildren.

  Hesitantly, I called and introduced myself. I said I’d found something about an American poet that I thought might be of interest to her, and perhaps some comfort to her and her grandchildren. I offered to put it in the mail, but she said she wasn’t busy and, if I wanted to, I could come over right then—she lived just a few minutes away.

  Before their daughter’s murder, Ertem and Robert Beckman, both in their seventies, lived in Point Chautauqua, New York, a small town in the westernmost part of New York State. Robert worked as finance director for Chautauqua County. But after the murder, they bought a house in Brighton—just about a mile from Sandringham Road—so their grandchildren could stay in town and finish at the public school.

  When I arrived at the house, Ertem Beckman showed me to a sitting room toward the back. This was a home, I thought, that Ertem never expected to live in with grandchildren she never expected to raise. Books and photographs lined many shelves, but my eye settled on a baby photo on the wall. Below, it said, “Renan Beckman, b. 2001, 6 lb. 15 oz.”

  I was confused. “This is . . . ?” I asked.

  “My granddaughter,” she said. “They named her Renan.”

  This was the baby daughter of Ertem’s youngest son, Orhan. He and his wife had named the child after his late sister.

  “She’s lovely,” I said as Ertem and I took seats on matching sofas.

  “You brought me something?” she asked. Ertem’s voice was pitched high, with a slight accent reflecting her upbringing in Turkey. She spoke slowly and deliberately. In dress and manner, she was unpretentious; she’d fit in on a college campus, maybe as chair of the English Department. Yet there was also something about the way she carried herself that was nearly regal. I didn’t think it came from any sense of self- importance, more from worldliness and intelligence.

  I handed Ertem the printout about Conrad Aiken, nervous because I was unsure how she might react.

  She read it, put it down, and said nothing. I feared I’d made a mistake. Then she thanked me, and said she would keep it for the children when they were older.

  “We think these things do not happen to us,” she said, her voice quavering but her body remaining still. “We think they happen to other people. But then they do happen to us and we are shocked.”

  Ertem was born and raised in Istanbul. In the 1950s, she came to the United States, attended college, and met her husband, who was then in business school. Her college major, Ertem told me, was sociology. This gave me an opening to ask about how we live as neighbors today and specifically how her daughter had lived on Sandringham Road.

  “Sandringham is the crème de la crème, the most affluent, most upper-crust street in town,” she said. “When Renan bought the house there, I came over and looked around and said to myself, ‘My goodness.’ People on that street drive out of their driveways in the morning and then the trucks come and the little green men—you know, the lawn care people—get out and make an awful racket and then leave, and then there’s no one around until the afternoon when the big cars come back at the end of the day.”

  Did she think Renan had been lonely on the street?

  “I don’t know if I’d say ‘lonely,’” Ertem answered, “but certainly she was somewhat isolated. That night she called her best friend, Ayesha, but could not reach her in time.”

  “She called who?” I asked. I hadn’t heard about Renan trying to reach anyone the night of the murder, nor did I quite catch the best friend’s name.

  “Ayesha,” she said, pronouncing the name EYE-sha. “She was born in India.”

  “Why was Renan calling Ayesha?” I asked. “Did she think she was in danger?”

  Ertem said yes, her daughter had felt some danger. She was calling Ayesha to see if she could go to her house with the children.

  “Did Ayesha live nearby?” I asked.

  “No, not so close,” said Ertem. �
��Not in Brighton.”

  Immediately, I thought of Lou Guzzetta—how he had woken in the middle of the night with a back spasm and waited nearly an hour for his daughter to drive in from a distant suburb to help.

  “Maybe if Renan had known someone else in the neighborhood,” I offered, “she could have found shelter closer by.”

  I knew this might be hurtful to suggest—that her daughter might not have been killed if she’d been able to go to a neighbor’s for help—but I was curious if Ertem had ever had the same thought.

  “Maybe if she knew someone in the neighborhood, I suppose so,” said Ertem. “Don’t you think that everyone really wants to know their neighbors? But that is not how most of us live. We know people, but we speak superficially. To really know another person takes time, and we’re not willing to do that. But I do believe Bob would have gotten her eventually.”

  WITH Ertem Beckman’s permission, I spoke with many of Renan Wills’s family members and friends. From those conversations, and from documents released—also with the Beckmans’ permission—by the Town of Brighton, I pieced together the following account of what happened Tuesday, February 29, 2000—Leap Day—inside my neighbors’ house:

  The day had not begun well for Renan Wills (pronounced re-NON, like baton). A family physician, she needed to get to her medical office, but her minivan, parked in the driveway of her home on Sandringham Road, wouldn’t start. At 8:18 a.m., Renan made the first of a series of calls to her best friend, Ayesha Mayadas, a metal sculptor and jeweler. The two had met a couple of years earlier at a local tennis club. But when Renan called her friend that morning, Ayesha wasn’t home. Renan didn’t know it, but Ayesha had left early on a day trip to Toronto and wouldn’t be back until evening. Renan left a message. We know what it said because Ayesha never erased the tape. Renan’s low-pitched voice was firm and calm, and she spoke in short, declarative sentences as she might while dictating patient reports.

  “Hi, Ayesha. It’s Renan. It’s early. I guess you guys are already out, though. My battery’s dead. I think Bob ran it down or something. I don’t know if he’ll help me start it. Maybe he will, though. Here he comes. Thanks.”

  Apparently, Bob did start Renan’s van because she arrived at her office in time to see her morning patients.

  At forty-three, Renan was a petite woman with dark eyes, a narrow face, and straight, short black hair. The eldest of three children, she had been determined since childhood to become a doctor, and pushed herself to succeed. “Talk about sibling rivalry,” recalled Orhan, her youngest brother. “Renan was gifted, way out on the bell curve—many standard deviations above the mean.” She graduated high school with straight A’s and was a National Merit Scholar. Later, at MIT, she excelled not only academically—graduating Phi Beta Kappa—but athletically, too. She captained the varsity crew, even though she stood just 5 foot 4 and weighed less than 110 pounds. Teammates still remember that when they hoisted the shell onto their shoulders to carry it to the boathouse, Renan couldn’t reach it. Medical school took her to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she completed dual residencies in anesthesiology and internal medicine.

  On the last day of her life, Renan saw patients until early afternoon, then stopped home, perhaps for a late lunch. If she had taken the most direct route from her office to her house, she would have passed within sight of Dick’s Sporting Goods, a retailer of athletic and outdoor equipment. Renan didn’t know it, but six weeks earlier—a week after she had served Bob, her husband of seventeen years, with divorce papers, Bob had stopped at Dick’s to buy a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun.

  Renan pulled into the driveway of the redbrick Tudor home at 52 Sandringham Road that she and Bob had bought seven years earlier. Inside the house, she discovered in Bob’s upstairs study a note listing their children’s names and information on a flight to Colorado leaving early that evening. Bob’s parents lived in Colorado; Renan feared Bob was planning to run off with Emily and Peter. If so, it would not have surprised her. Their marriage had a long history of conflicts and betrayals.

  They’d met at medical school. Like Renan, Bob was bright and athletic. A large man—6 foot 1 and 190 pounds—he especially liked outdoor sports, such as rock climbing and skiing. Renan and Bob married and moved out West, to Washington State, where Bob would specialize in orthopedics and sports medicine and have plenty of opportunity to ski and climb. Both the children were born there.

  But the marriage soon fell into trouble. Bob had difficulty getting along with colleagues, and then a nanny stole money and accused Bob of demanding sex from her. They moved to another city for a fresh start, but Bob had more trouble at work, and admitted to an affair with a nurse.

  In 1996, with both her husband’s career and her marriage in jeopardy, Renan insisted they move back East to be nearer her family. They both found work in Rochester, just a three-hour drive from Point Chautauqua, where Renan’s parents had settled.

  But if the move helped the marriage, it was only temporary. In 1999, following an argument with her husband, Renan showed up at work bruised and asked her nurse to take X- rays. Early the next year, after Renan filed divorce papers, Bob one evening threatened suicide. Renan called 911, but when police arrived, they couldn’t find him. Afterward, he said he’d been hiding in bushes behind the house. Some nights later, while Renan slept, Bob stole her ID card and broke into her medical office. He listened to her voice mail and read her diary.

  That February afternoon, worried over the note with the children’s names on it that she’d found in Bob’s study, Renan called her parents. Her mother urged her to come to Point Chautauqua, but Renan declined. Emily and Peter had school the next day and she wanted to stay in town. Instead, she picked her children up from school. After a stop at her lawyer’s office, she tried to make a call, only to discover that Bob had canceled her cell phone service. She took the children out to dinner, then to the library to start their homework. From a pay phone, she again tried to reach Ayesha. It was 7:15 p.m. Compared to the earlier message, she spoke faster; the “uh” and “okays” hint at a growing unease.

  “Hi, Ayesha. This is Renan. I’ll try to call you back later. I’m not at home, okay. I’m out with the kids, uh, I’ll call you later and explain. Okay, thanks, bye.”

  At 7:57 p.m., Renan called again, but there was still no answer. Like the previous message, this one lasted just ten seconds, but she spoke more rapidly.

  “Hi, Ayesha. This is Renan. I’m going to try you again in about a half an hour, okay? I hope I can catch you at home. I’m not at home. I don’t have a cell phone because Bob canceled it. So, I’ll try you again. Okay, thanks.”

  Later, Emily would tell an aunt, “Mom wanted us to go stay at Ayesha’s, but Ayesha wasn’t there.”

  At 8 p.m., Renan called her mother.

  “We’re going home, Mom,” she said.

  “Please don’t,” Ertem pleaded. “Come here.”

  Maybe the kids began getting tired, or maybe Renan herself was getting tired—she’d been going all day under increasing pressure: a van that wouldn’t start, then Bob’s note, then a dead cell phone. She put the kids in the van and headed back to Sandringham.

  When they got home, Bob wasn’t there. Tuesday nights he often went to a friend’s home to rock climb in a basement gym. Renan told Emily and Peter to get ready for bed. Emily’s room was on the second floor; Peter’s was in the finished attic.

  At around 9:30, the phone rang. It was Ayesha, back from Toronto. She’d heard Renan’s messages and called right away.

  Renan told her all that had happened that day, but said she didn’t feel physically unsafe and that the kids had already gone to their rooms for the night. Nevertheless, Ayesha sensed that Renan was panicked. She advised her not to confront Bob when he got home. They ended the call around 9:50.

  Ten minutes later, Bob pulled into the driveway. Renan went upstairs to a guest room—she’d moved out of the master bedroom several months earlier. Soon, she smelled smoke. C
oming downstairs, she found Bob in the living room feeding their mortgage papers and other documents into the fireplace.

  From her room upstairs, Emily heard her parents arguing.

  Renan ran back upstairs.

  It was 10:20 p.m.

  In the basement, Bob cut the phone wires and, on an elaborate stereo system, put on the soundtrack to the violent science-fiction movie The Matrix, turning the volume up as loud as it would go. Then he removed the Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun from its hiding place.

  Upstairs, Renan reached for a phone, only to find it was dead. If she thought now of driving the five miles to Ayesha’s house, it was too late; Bob had pulled the distributor wires off the van. Renan ran into Bob’s study and found his cell phone.

  At 10:30 p.m., she went into the bathroom next to her daughter’s room, closed the door, and called 911.

  Meanwhile, with the music pounding, Bob Wills started up the basement steps. He wore a rock- climbing helmet with a headlamp.

  Emily, in pajamas, came out of her room.

  Her father was coming up the steps to the second floor. His hands were behind his back.

  “Daddy, the music’s too loud. Can you turn it down?” she asked.

  Bob said he would, and told her to go back into her room. But she didn’t. She remained standing at the open door to her bedroom.

  “Nine-one-one emergency operator. How can I help you?”

  Police say when Renan spoke to the 911 operator, she said she feared for her safety and that of her children, but said she did not think her husband had a gun.

  The bathroom door had no lock. Bob pushed it open. He grabbed the cell phone out of his wife’s hand and threw it against the floor, shattering it. He stepped back. In the hallway, Emily moved forward toward the bathroom door, but her father reached over and turned her face to the side. Then he raised the shotgun.