“I just didn’t know,” he said. “I’d give anything I have, anything on this earth, if I could bring her back.… I told her that morning when you left that I was going to take her to the hospital. But she didn’t want to go. You know how she always was about hospitals.”
Diane would remember shaking her head in disbelief. “No, John. I don’t know how Joan was about hospitals.”
“She didn’t like them. Always felt that way. I had to practically carry her down the stairs.”
“Then I’d like to know one thing. If Joan was sick enough to die a few hours after she got to the hospital, then why did it take so long for you to decide to take her there? It’s pretty god damn strange, John. Nothing makes sense.”
Later that evening it would be noted that Diane Settegast returned to the home of Ash Robinson and dropped onto the arm of the old man’s chair. The two were immersed in deep conversation for almost an hour. It was also noted that Ash’s cheek muscle tightened and his eyes narrowed. A tic jerked his face furiously. He nodded often, taking it all in. Then he rose abruptly, slammed his Stetson on his head, and rushed out alone, into the night.
On Friday, March 21, 1969, at midday, the funeral of Joan Robinson Hill was to be held. And Verna Bee Cummings’ prediction of a “goat roping” was accurate. All morning long, attendants set up extra folding chairs in hallways and outside, on the lawns. Florist delivery trucks fought for space at the delivery entrance. More than two hundred floral tributes from all over America, but particularly the deep South, arrived, their combined perfumes of carnations and lilies and roses an almost overwhelming scent. “There’s not a rose to be found in Houston or New Orleans,” said one florist, and the remark was passed on to Ash, who found comfort therein.
In the two days since his daughter died so abruptly, Ash had scarcely slept. Through the hours of the night he made telephone calls, hurrying out to speak with doctors in all-night coffee shops, with nurses outside emergency rooms, carrying a large envelope spilling over with newspaper clippings and notes scribbled on lined paper. On the morning of the funeral, long before dawn, somewhere in the blackness of 3 or 4 A.M., Ash went to the One’s-A-Meal Coffee Shop near his home and spent two hours reading through his scribbled notes, drinking many cups of coffee. One of the regulars noted that he seemed to be wrestling with a decision.
At 9 A.M., when Assistant District Attorney I. D. McMaster arrived at his office in the Harris County courthouse, he was informed that a man named Ash Robinson was waiting to see him. And who was that?
The father of Joan Robinson Hill. The society woman who died this week. All over the newspapers. Funeral’s this morning. The old man’s with Fred Parks.
McMaster whistled to himself. It sounded troublesome. What was the father of Joan Robinson Hill doing in the district attorney’s office on the very morning of his daughter’s funeral? And in the company of Fred Parks, one of the town’s most respected, old-line civil lawyers? It was a lot to digest in the first hour of the last day of the week. Send them in.
Ash went directly to his purpose. “I have reason to believe that my son-in-law murdered my only child.” The accusation was not emotional, only cold, the old man locking his glacier eyes dead on with the prosecutor. Ash hurried into his presentation; he had been rehearsing it most of the night. “This is going to sound a little unbelievable,” he said. “But it’s true.” He threw out his facts:
—His daughter was a healthy woman and a superbly conditioned rider of high-spirited horses.
—She fell ill abruptly after eating French pastries served to her by her husband, John Hill, a plastic surgeon. Two house guests would testify to the curious pastry ritual.
—She ran a fever, suffered vomiting and diarrhea at home, but her husband did not call in another doctor, nor did he allow anyone to enter her sickroom.
—Dr. Hill took her finally to Sharpstown Hospital, where he promised that she would be placed in “intensive care and treated like a queen.” Instead, the hospital had no intensive care unit, no one seemed to know she was coming, she was treated by a doctor who had never met her professionally before.
—She died approximately fifteen hours after admission, and her body was “whisked out of the hospital and onto the embalmer’s table” before an autopsy could be done. The autopsy, performed only after all blood and vital fluids were drained and replaced by embalming fluid, showed she died of pancreatitis.
“I have checked with some of the most prominent doctors in Houston, and they say it is highly unlikely she died of pancreatitis,” said Ash.
McMaster listened to the accusations carefully. At first he thought the old man to be “your standard nut case, but important enough to let him get it all out of his system.” But by the end of the tale, the random facts were tantalizing. Farfetched. But tantalizing. They could not be auomatically dismissed, coming as they did from a man with Ash Robinson’s pocketbook, address, and in the company of a silk-stocking lawyer like Fred Parks.
“Okay,” answered McMaster slowly. He was the lean, rawboned Texan who spoke carefully, only when it was necessary. “I’ll look into it. Call you next week.”
Ash shook his head in sudden agitation. He raised his hands and they trembled, clawing the air. “No!” he demanded. “That’ll be too late. I want you to get the coroner out there before they close the coffin. Don’t you understand? What John Hill wants is to get that girl into the ground as soon as possible.”
When the old man left, weeping and almost incoherent, McMaster promptly telephoned Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, the feisty and highly respected coroner of Harris County. Until Jachimczyk assumed office in the middle 1950s, Houston’s coroner system was so primitive as to be beyond belief. Bodies were pronounced officially dead by justices of the peace who were not required by law to possess either legal or medical educations. (They still are not, giving certain criminal proceedings in Texas towns a decided Judge Roy Bean frontier flavor.) Before the coming of Jachimczyk, who held both legal and medical degrees, many suspicious homicides were overlooked by ignorant justices. “Without a doubt, a lot of ‘fatal heart attacks’ were brought on by undiscovered ice-pick wounds in the chest,” said the coroner at the time, who rapidly moved to institute more modern methods of investigating death.
When Dr. Jachimczyk received the urgent telephone call from the district attorney’s office this Friday morning, it was the first hint that the death of Joan Robinson Hill was anything but routine and natural.
“What do you want me to do?” asked the medical examiner.
Go out to the funeral home and look at her body and—here I. D. McMaster hesitated briefly at the enormity of what he was about to suggest—if necessary, “Stop the god damned funeral.”
“I’m supposed to tell everybody to go home and come back another day?” snapped Dr. Jachimczyk. Did the DA’s office really want him to barge into the city’s fanciest funeral home, moments before one of the town’s most prominent women was to be eulogized and buried, and “if necessary” cart away her body?
“Just go out there and have a look, Joe,” soothed McMaster.
Justifiably angry, Dr. Jachimczyk slammed down the phone and began writing notes to himself. He asked a secretary to find the news clippings about Joan Hill’s death. Then he called Sharpstown Hospital and spoke to the administrator, a Stanley Hill (no relation to John). The administrator confirmed that the woman had died in his hospital, that she was removed to the Settegast-Kopf Funeral Home, and that the hospital’s own pathologist, Dr. Arthur Morse, performed his autopsy there.
“May I go on record as reminding you that this is a violation of Article 49.25, the Medical Examiners Law of the State of Texas, by failing to report this case to my office?” said the coroner.
Administrator Hill assured him that it would not happen again.
Jachimczyk hung up and glanced at his watch. It was now near 10 A.M. He had a morning full of work already scheduled—three autopsies and a dozen reports to dictate. How would he find ti
me to drop everything and run out to a funeral home on the whim of a rich old man?
Next he called Dr. Morse, the Sharpstown pathologist, a highly embarrassed young doctor. His gross findings, reported the Sharpstown pathologist, had at first revealed a beefy red pancreas, a good likelihood of pancreatitis. But microscopic slides revealed this to be postmortem autolysis—or a breakdown of pancreatic tissue by enzymes the way meat tenderizer works on roast beef. The autopsy had further shown hemorrhaging in the esophagus, massive edema (fluids) in the lungs, and a bladder with not a drop of urine. The case, all in all, was puzzling but, at this point, not very sinister. Cause of death? Still unknown.
“What tissues do you still have?” asked Dr. Jachimczyk.
Some pancreas, frozen kidney, liver, and a small amount of stomach content.
Urine? Blood samples? Surely both were taken upon this patient’s admission to the hospital.
They were, said Dr. Morse. But they had already been “discarded.”
Brusquely the county coroner ordered the Sharpstown pathologist to turn over all specimens obtained in the autopsy at the funeral home and a copy of his preliminary report. And one more question, said the coroner. How in God’s name did it happen that the dead body of the famous wife of a doctor, of all people, was rushed out of the hospital and embalmed before the autopsy was done?
“I don’t know,” answered Dr. Morse. “It was just a screw-up all around.”
For several minutes Dr. Jachimczyk stood beside the coffin of Joan Hill and gazed at her remains in the glittery gold gown. He was making mental notes as to the appearance and condition of the corpse. Bowing his head respectfully from time to time, he tried not to betray the fact that he was anything but a friend and mourner. Others were filing by the casket and the chapel was filling up, even though the funeral service was more than an hour away. Perhaps no one would have paid any attention to the short, serious-looking man with the severe crew cut and the thick glasses. But one of John Hill’s doctor friends noted the presence of the county coroner, and he whispered to his wife, “That’s Dr. Joe. What is he doing standing so long over the casket?” The doctor’s wife looked hurriedly at the famous pathologist. Her eyes went to his white laboratory shoes, flecks of dried blood on them. She went outside to telephone a friend with this choice piece of news. Within minutes the gossip was dancing around River Oaks that the county coroner was inspecting Joan Hill’s body.
Dr. Jachimczyk was satisfied that enough material still existed from Morse’s post-mortem to conduct his own autopsy. And from his casual inspection of the fully clothed body in its coffin he elected not to stop the funeral. He slipped out quietly, feeling incorrectly that no one knew he had come to the undertaking parlor with that possibility in mind.
“Here is tragedy in the classical sense of Greek drama,” intoned the preacher, the Rev. Pat Harrell of the Church of Christ, where John Hill was a member. “A person, a unique, extraordinary person, falls victim to circumstances beyond human control, but does not merely suffer. In struggling against fate, in recognizing fate, deeper meaning is found.
“Everyone I’ve spoken to in these last few days, and my own experience would agree, recognized that here was such a unique person, one, to some degree, who seemed out of step with mankind. The truth of the matter is that mankind was out of step with her. For those qualities which set her apart, which we admired most in her, were those very qualities which should be universal in us all, but sadly are not.”
The Rev. Mr. Harrell preached to a full house, with every folding chair in the halls taken, and a large crowd gathered in the driveway outside where his words were broadcast on speakers. Two Houston television stations sent cameras, and there were representatives from the radio and newspapers. John Hill sat with his arm around his son, crying softly but audibly enough so that those near him could hear. Ash Robinson had no tears. His face was not committed to any emotion save blankness. He stared continuously at his daughter’s coffin, now closed, and only once did anyone see him move his attention. When Dr. Harrell mentioned the grief of Joan’s “talented and devoted young husband,” Ash Robinson turned to look sharply at his son-in-law.
The eulogy was brief and—the opinion was unanimous among her friends—indicative of Joan. Four qualities were unique about her, said the preacher. “Her friendliness … in sharp contrast to the closedness of our society where we build elaborate defenses to keep people at a distance. Her devotion … she was loyal, tenaciously loyal, with a special capacity to sustain others, to carry the load for others, to care. We who find it so difficult to move beyond the island of our own self stand in amazement. Thirdly, she gave of herself. She was always busy with civic and charity causes on behalf of others. And, finally, her genuineness. There was about Joan no façade, no pretense.
“Those of us who are fortunate to have faith can even find a deeper meaning in her life. One of the metaphors for death in the Bible is that of a pale horse. That brings back memories, doesn’t it? A gray horse. Surely Joan was too accomplished a rider not to leave the wider ring of life without grace and poise and dignity.”
Outside the chapel, when the funeral cars were being filled with family members for the ride to the cemetery, Ash Robinson and his wife got into the lead Cadillac limousine and shut the door. When the old man saw John Hill approaching, he said urgently to the driver, “I don’t want him in this car. Lock the doors.” But John Hill was quick. He opened the door and gently nudged Ma over until he had a place.
At the cemetery, not far from Chatsworth Farm, Ash turned his head away and did not look at the coffin. Instead he burned his gaze at the broken figure of John Hill. And as he walked away, toward the Cadillac, with one arm supporting his sobbing wife, the old man muttered, in a voice strong enough for those nearby to hear, in a voice more chilling than the March wind that whipped about him, the old man said, “If the law doesn’t get the son of a bitch, I will.”
Book Two
JOHN
“… Behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death …”
FOURTEEN
Assistant District Attorney I. D. McMaster was a low-key man of great patience, but a fortnight after Joan Robinson Hill was in her grave, he was fed up. “That damned old man,” he told a colleague, “is obsessed.” Several times each day, it seemed, Ash was on the telephone, with some new and damaging tidbit to report. Finally McMaster told the bothersome caller that nothing could be done until Dr. Jachimczyk released the results of his second autopsy. Until then, there was nothing to investigate. A licensed physician—Bertinot—signed the woman’s death certificate, and a qualified hospital pathologist—Morse—did an autopsy, even though the conditions were admittedly abnormal.
Ash would not be subdued, no more than a pot of water would cease boiling when flames licked beneath it. His personal loss was enormous, but there was another factor at work: excitement had been injected into an old and eroding life. A mystery to solve! His home became command headquarters to which Ash summoned first his own doctor, a general practitioner named Ed Gouldin, then others who had been friends of John and Joan Hill. The heart surgeon Grady Hallman was one of the first to come, the Mozart-playing Jim Oates was another. They pored over the Sharpstown Hospital case history and discussed the case. The men of medicine agreed that Joan’s death was both tragic and unusual but that, until the county coroner made an official ruling, speculating was not only harmful but potentially slanderous.
Very well. In the meantime Ash would not just sit in his easy chair and wait for what surely would be a bolt of lightning from the medical examiner’s office. There was no law against assembling material that might be useful someday. He began telephoning people who reportedly had “information” and he scribbled it all down on the pieces of lined notebook paper that were soon spilling from his pockets. His dining-room table became a blizzard of documents, medical charts, textbooks, scraps with cryptic messages that only he could read.
These were some
of the stories that Ash pulled out of people while he waited for the coroner:
“I went by John’s house the night of the funeral to pay my respects,” said a young widow who had often played bridge with Joan, “and there were just a few people there. John, his mother, Boot, some other doctor and his wife I didn’t know. We all sat around drinking coffee, then people started drifting away and it was only John and me left. I made excuses to leave, but he insisted on showing me around the house. We went into that damned music room—most incredible place I ever saw in my life—and I told him that I had already seen it. But he played with all the gadgets and insisted that I sit down.
“There was one straight-backed chair in the middle of the room and he put me there—dead center. Then he puts his music on, some sentimental number about Honey living and Honey dying, and I begged him to let me leave. He made me stay thirty minutes, the god damn music crashing all around me. I didn’t know what he was going to do.”
From a psychiatrist who had lived near the Hills: “When I got over to John’s the night of the funeral, he was all alone. Right away he started talking about insurance and business matters. He didn’t seem to be grieving much at all. In fact, he was smiling. From his attitude that night, Joan’s death seemed to have no more impact on him than the Oilers losing a game—and he was certainly not an Oiler fan. He was much more interested in showing me the music room than in talking about Joan’s disease. Mr. Ash, we didn’t talk about Joan’s disease at all! And the reason is clear to me. This was a man who had walked out on his wife when she was in terminal shock—and he knew that I, as a doctor, knew it.”
From a nurse who passed along a conversation she overheard in the surgeons’ lounge at St. Luke’s Hospital: “One doctor says, ‘I always suspected old John wanted to get rid of his wife. Wonder what he gave her?’ And the other doctor said, ‘Maybe an overdose of insulin. It’s a natural body substance and impossible to trace.’”
Blood and Money Page 17