Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  John Hill did not abandon the religion of his youth. Indeed that was another source of occasional conflict between him and his wife. Joan was, after all, Ash’s daughter, and she had been raised to the thunder of his atheistic disapproval of the Church and how it imprisoned people. When social conversation turned to religion, Joan fell silent, but John perked up, for he contended it was a dominant factor in his life. He did not swear, he did not smoke, he drank lightly, he felt it obligatory to attend church each Sunday morning, where he often led the singing. And Joan occasionally, though reluctantly, went with him. She did not believe in the teachings of the Church, but she felt they did no harm, and if it contented her husband, then she would sit beside him in a prominent pew. Once it occurred to her that their attendance was not bad for business, because John operated on several members of the congregation.

  The partnership between Nathan Roth and John Hill dissolved in bitterness and a lawsuit a little more than three years after it had begun.

  From the beginning, Roth held misgivings about the new man and collected grievances against him. The matter of John’s record-keeping, for example, drove Roth batty. Hill kept terrible records, scattered over his office, in the trunk of his car, stuffed into coat pockets. Since the two doctors acted in concert on many patients, Roth grew angry when he could not find a certain case history or the bookkeeper could not send out a statement on time. Regular “summit meetings” were held in which he demanded that Hill straighten out his papers. Always John would humble himself, promising to do as the older man asked. Indeed he would try but within a few months the Hill desk and car trunk were once again a mass of unfiled papers.

  And there was John’s habit of asking Roth to “cover for him,” not unknown in the doctoring business, but the senior man felt the junior man abused the practice. “If a man has a legitimate reason to ask me to take over for him in the veritable middle of an operation, I will do it,” stormed Roth, “but when that reason is to go play with a chamber music group for a grade school PTA meeting, then the reason is unprofessional.” It further distressed Roth that John was not bringing in the carriage trade. Oh, occasionally a wealthy patient would lie down on the junior man’s table, but the bulk of his practice was secretaries, or musical friends, or “those god damn convicts.” In the beginning, Roth had anticipated that, between him and his attractive partner, “we would lock up this town.” But the parking lot checks that the secretary validated were more often for Chevrolets than Cadillacs.

  Roth found himself wincing every time he saw the tasteless seascapes on his partner’s wall, every time he heard a sonata being played for a female patient, every time he spent a maddening half hour on the telephone trying to find his partner. The original agreement gave John ten per cent of the first year’s profits, twenty per cent the second year, and by the fifth year they would split revenues fifty-fifty. In 1967 Roth summoned John Hill into his office and broke the partnership. He would not have the day come when, out of every dollar he made, half would go to a man whom he now considered unprofessional and undependable. Immediately Hill charged breach of contract, that back moneys were due him, that he held a sheaf of grievances against Roth as well. Angrily the two plastic surgeons tore apart the small shreds of respect and friendship that had bound them. They became bitter enemies.

  John Hill took an elaborate suite of offices in the same Hermann Professional Building where he had worked with Roth. His new quarters had five patient treatment rooms and an imposing office for the doctor to place his baby grand.

  The new independence wrought immediate changes in John Hill. He warmed. He assembled a staff who enjoyed working for him. To straw-boss the office he employed a salty veteran medical secretary named Frances Johnston, whose lay husband was a member of the Heartbeats, the band for which John played tuba. “We ran an incredibly busy shop,” she recalled. “John had a heavy case load, he operated beyond human endurance. But he was trying to prove that he could be his own man.” Although Joan was now openly complaining to her friends that John was stingy and never bought her a gift of any sort, he was generous with his staff. Nurses were paid $700 a month, considerably above average. On their birthdays the boss personally set up a party table with a linen cloth and cake and, as a gift, a jewel box from Neiman-Marcus. There were substantial bonuses at Christmas, and when an employee went away on vacation Dr. Hill gave her a hundred-dollar check to spend. “Use it selfishly,” he instructed, “eat it up or drink it up. Don’t use it on your children or on your house.”

  By the end of his first year in practice by himself, John Hill grossed $168,000, an admirable ledger for a man but thirty-seven years old and less than five years away from his residency.

  The year was financially prosperous, but it was also the year in which John Hill’s life began to fall apart.

  With the money starting to come, with a limitless financial horizon, it was time for realization of John’s dream. Casually he mentioned to Joan one night that he wanted to create a music room in their home. “Don’t we already have one?” asked Joan. There was a piano in the living room, recorders in the bedroom, and even stacks of sheet music on the floor beside the toilet. No, it was his idea to build a completely new room, in the unfinished servants’ quarters above the garage. It would be soundproofed, acoustically perfect, with a high-fidelity system built into the walls. A place to practice and gather friends for musicales. “How much will it cost?” asked Joan pertinently, for she was under the impression that their income was modest. Her husband had expended more than $30,000 to establish his practice, and the bank loan to cover it was yet unpaid. And although John had raised her monthly stipend to $700, she found it difficult if not impossible to cover the expenses of running the big house with that sum. Every time she requested more, John had told her that there was no more.

  He already had estimates, said John carefully, and it should come in for under $10,000. “Where will we get $10,000?” asked Joan. Her husband’s answer was a gesture down the street, toward the home of Ash Robinson.

  Ash refused. He would not lend any more money to his son-in-law, pointing out that he already held a $12,000 second mortgage on the home, the amount he had lent the young people for the down payment. Furthermore, a music room sounded like foolishness, said Ash, whose melodic bent was confined to country and western or Dixieland, if he was in New Orleans. Joan pleaded with her father, but he was adamant. “God almighty,” he swore, “I’ve given your husband the sun and the moon. Now he wants the stars!” Annoyed, John arranged a bank loan sufficient to retire his father-in-law’s second mortgage, with $10,000 remaining to commence work on the music room. But that would be hardly enough to buy the carpets for what would soon become a place of palatial intent.

  “I want the finest music room since Renaissance Italy,” John Hill instructed a sound engineer named Louis Erath. “Since I was a little boy, it has been my dream to build such a room. A perfect room! It will be a room where great music can be played and listened to under superb conditions. Money is no object. The only goal is perfection.”

  Erath nodded, drawing his breath at the challenge.

  “Don’t accept this commission unless you can deliver exactly what I want,” cautioned the surgeon.

  John Hill, remembered Louis Erath long after this first meeting, seemed possessed.

  NINE

  “Perhaps” is a fragile if not useless word, but the fact remains that perhaps it would not have happened quite the way it did, that perhaps so many lives would not have been torn and wrecked, had not John Hill gone to pick up his son at the summer camp that torrid August day in 1968. He had not intended to make the journey. Operations were scheduled, he had appointments with several craftsmen at work on the music room, he needed to practice a Mozart piece that he was booked to play at a church recital. Driving to Camp Rio Vista in the hill country of Central Texas was not his design. Joan could go get the boy.

  But Joan would not go alone. The boy hardly knows he has a father, she snapp
ed. John never took him anywhere, didn’t throw footballs with him, or go fishing with him the way other fathers did. The only time he ever saw his father was at those god damn concerts, where the child had to sit up straight like a soldier on inspection.

  The Hills had argued earlier in the spring over whether their son should even attend the very proper summer camp. Joan felt that the boy was, at eight, too young. He was frail, slim, quiet, slow to make friends. He seemed to have inherited small amount of his mother’s gregariousness, and much of his father’s stiffness. But John had insisted that Boot go off for a four-week session with anticipation that the outdoor life would toughen him. Moreover, it was the thing to do for people in his class; if one lives in River Oaks, one sends one’s youngsters off to this expensive camp. Now, on the concluding day, parents were invited to fetch their children and watch them swim, canoe, play softball, and shoot bows and arrows.

  “This day is important to Boot,” snapped Joan. “Can you remember how lonely it was to be eight years old?”

  Stung, John denied his wife’s accusations that he was inattentive to their son. But the worry was enough for him to cancel his medical and musical schedules, clearing two days for the trip by Cadillac to Boot’s big day.

  Another parent drove from Houston that same day to collect her children. She arrived at the wheel of a Thunderbird, and when she stepped out and walked across the campgrounds, more than one daddy temporarily took his eyes off his son’s cabin inspection to watch. One husband, a doctor who lived in John Hill’s neighborhood, remembered the moment well. “Here comes this old gal wearing a tight T-shirt and hip huggers that showed off her equipment rather well. She was most provocatively attired. And when she saw some kids swinging on this rope out over the lake, she had to try it too. Of course she fell into the lake, and when she got out she was more provocatively attired. Bone dry, she was the femme fatale of the day. Dripping wet, she was the sex bomb of Camp Rio Vista.”

  Her name was Ann Kurth, and though she was that day in close reach of her fortieth birthday, she was sexy and lush. Since the day two decades prior when she had been a campus beauty at Southern Methodist University, she had dedicated herself toward enhancing her appearance, and from her collection of paints, powders, oils, dyes, and creams, she daily assembled a remarkable package. People often told her she looked like Elizabeth Taylor, and the resemblance was there—raven-black hair teased and lacquered, eyes accented by purplish-blue pools of color, soft little girl voice, a button or two calculatedly undone to call attention to a richly endowed bosom. Her social credentials were strong as well. The daughter of a prominent Houston architect, she had attended the right private schools and moved in the country club crowd with assurance. Thrice married, thrice divorced, and the mother of three sons, she was uncharacteristically without a husband at the moment she fell into the lake. But she was not without admirers.

  John Hill and Ann Kurth would later tell two different stories of how they met and how their curious relationship developed. He would claim that she made the opening play. Conversely, she would contend that he pursued her hotly, with the reckless enthusiasm of a teen-age swain. Whatever, Dr. John Hill leaned over from his lunch table and smiled at Ann Kurth and one of her sons. “I’m Dr. Hill,” he said cheerfully.

  “I’m Ann Kurth,” the woman said, “and this is one of my sons, Grant. Are you a father?”

  Yes, he had a son in camp, an eight-year-old boy named Robert, nicknamed Boot, who was at that moment with his mother somewhere off looking at horses.

  Later, during an afternoon Indian pageant, Ann Kurth looked across the war-whooping youngsters and noticed John Hill again. Now he was with a striking woman with platinum-blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail. It all clicked. She had paid his name no particular heed before—Dr. Hill was an attractive man, certainly, but only one of many she had seen that day—but she instantly recognized the woman beside him. Joan Robinson! Ann had, in fact, attended Stephens College just before Joan, and they had numerous friends in common—although the two women had never actually met. She looked back at John. So he was the famous prince consort.

  Quickly bored with the Indians, Ann took her children and slipped away to the quietness of the lake. They found a canoe and paddled out, the sun cooking their backs. Within moments, one of her boys noted that another canoe was approaching, with a single adult man at the paddle.

  “Hello, boys, I’m Dr. Hill,” called out the solitary canoeman. John waved merrily at the youngsters and their mother, who recognized immediately that this was not a man out for exercise alone. “Mind if I take some pictures?” he asked, standing up and attempting to steady himself as he began snapping away.

  Immediately the canoe tipped and spilled John Hill into the lake while Ann Kurth burst into laughter. Undaunted, Hill rose from the depths with camera held above his head, still clicking pictures. Ann Kurth remembered: “We were collapsing with laughter, but when we saw that he was okay and not drowning, we waved so long and paddled back to shore. Here comes this madman, squish, squish, squish, after us, back to the camp, walking around wet the rest of the afternoon with people looking at him like he’s demented. But he’s completely saturated and oblivious of everybody else. All he wanted to do was take our pictures.”

  At evening’s end, when the last farewell had been sung, Ann found herself standing next to Joan Robinson Hill, who smiled and muttered, “I can’t seem to find my husband.”

  “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll find him,” thought Ann to herself.

  Back in Houston, before the week was out, John rang up Ann Kurth and said he had his developed pictures and wanted to show them to her. His camera had not been damaged in the capsizing.

  “All right,” said Ann, “you can come over tonight.” And to herself: we’ll let this melodrama play one more scene before I pull down the curtain on Dr. John Hill.

  The plastic surgeon arrived at Ann’s home in the Memorial section of Houston, one rung down from River Oaks in social caste, at 7 P.M. He did not leave until the next morning just before dawn, and only then because he had surgery scheduled at 7 A.M. Before he scrubbed in to operate, he telephoned Ann from the hospital to wish her a cheery good morning. He called again two hours later, after his first procedure. By this moment Ann Kurth was groggy and feeling caught up in an adolescent quest. The next day, at an intimate lunch, John placed, for him, extraordinary cards on the table. As Ann would later recall: “He informed me that, from this moment on, I was to consider my time fully taken up by Dr. John Hill.”

  “But what of your wife?” asked Ann. That is over, answered John. It is just a matter of time. “He told me,” Ann reported to a friend, “that he was trapped in a marriage he had to get out of. Joan’s life, her whole life, was horses. His was music and medicine. And he kept telling me that his life was meaningless because he had no one to share it with.”

  John Hill seemed not an impulsive man, rather one who planned his life carefully, rarely making a decision unless he had circled round and round it like a dog preparing to lie down. Years later his mother, Myra Hill, who would grow to despise Ann Kurth, asked John what he had originally seen in the woman. “She was very desirable,” her son answered, “the attraction was physical.”

  By the end of August, John and Ann were lovers. When Joan returned to the mansion on Kirby Drive after a horse show away from the city, she found a terse note left on her dresser. It was from her husband. “Things are not good between us,” it said. “I’ve gone away for a few days to find myself.”

  Joan Hill stared at the letter in disbelief. She raced to the telephone and called her husband’s office. He was in surgery. She left her name. He did not call back. She called seven times. He did not call back.

  For a few days she alternated between tears and anger, keeping the news from Pa each day when he came for coffee. Finally, standing at the stove one morning watching the pot perk, she broke down.

  “The son of a bitch walked out on me,” she said.
r />   Ash felt the anger swell within him. No one walked out on his daughter. Where was John?

  She had no idea.

  Well, sir, Ash reckoned something could be found out. A private detective could turn John Hill’s life inside out within a few days.

  No! Joan did not want a detective set loose on her husband. Not yet. In her hours of secret torment, the idea had come that a temporary separation might warm the marital climate for both of them.

  Ash took his daughter in his arms and felt her body jerk and tremble. At that moment he would have knocked his son-in-law against the nearest wall had he come in reach of his fist.

  Now that she had told someone, Joan spread the news of her abandonment. Crying, cursing, she rose early and stayed on the telephone until past midnight. Her best friend and across-the-street neighbor, a doctor’s wife named Vann Maxwell, grew concerned over Joan’s emotional condition. “She’s like a wild woman,” Vann told her husband. “She won’t sleep or eat. She’s like some animal going through the death throes. If somebody called up and tried to sell her encylopedias on the telephone, she’d tell him first her husband had walked out on her.”

  Suddenly, after two weeks of silence, John called. Almost formally he requested an appointment with his wife to “talk things over.” They agreed to meet at noon in the big house. Excitedly Joan dialed Vann Maxwell and instructed her to be on “standby”—available for immediate counsel on what John proposed.