Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  Racehorse enjoyed his jousts with the old man. Occasionally he felt he caught a glimmer of glee in his opponent’s yellowing eyes. He returned to his quarters with juices flowing after bantering for hours with Ash. “He’s really incredible,” said Racehorse. “And don’t ever sell him short. He reminds me of a crocodile. Old. Mean. Thick-skinned. Impervious to injury. He sits there sleeping in the sun, dozing, drowsy, about ready to pass on, or so you think. But just you step on him, and he bites your head off. Snap!”

  John and Connie Hill built a quiet but contented life together. She opened the Orpheus Music School where the disciplines of voice, piano, and a few other instruments were taught. He discovered that his medical practice had reached its nadir just before the murder trial, and now that the prospects of a second one were fading, his appointment book was no longer so pristine. One prominent internist wrote the surgeon a moving letter. In it he confessed to having talked bitterly against John in the aftermath of Joan’s death, and he had collected each bit of gossip that came his way. “Then, as you perhaps heard,” wrote the internist, “my own wife fell ill at home. Normally I would have told her to take two aspirins and call the office nurse if she didn’t get better. But after your ordeal, all of us learned a lesson. I put her into Hermann [Hospital] and just in time. She was developing serious problems, but is fine now. I speak for a lot of us around town when I say I am sorry for your troubles, and I devoutly hope they are over.” In the next six weeks the doctor referred two cases to the plastic surgeon.

  Connie Hill dutifully joined a club of medical wives, and although she did not participate in their meetings with keen enthusiasm—hers was not the character for female tribes—it did her husband good for her to attend. That John Hill could have won the love of a woman as poised and charming as Connie earned him support from the wives, some of whom had never really forgiven him for turning up at the Spanish Ball with Ann Kurth on his arm.

  The new couple did not receive many invitations; they were still not accepted in River Oaks’ best homes. Nevertheless, at intermissions in the city’s concert halls, it was not uncommon to see the Hills in the center of a circle of handsome people, and, off to the side, a group twice as large gaping and trying to overhear. Connie wondered if she should plunge more deeply into the social and political seas of John’s medical community. Perhaps hold more parties in the big house for doctors and hospital administrators? John shook his head. Secretly he was afraid no one would come. But he was also tired of playing medical politics. “No,” he said. “What we have together is important. When I’m with you, the room is full.” Their favorite evenings were those at home, alone, together, in the white and gold music room. Finally it was being used for what John had intended—as an elegant setting to hear and play great music. He enjoyed selecting an evening’s concert from his enormous collection of recorded music. Then, sitting blissfully with his wife, head thrown back, eyes closed, he absorbed the power and provocation of the classical repertoire. Their favorite recording remained Schwarzkopf singing Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Neither John nor Connie ever tired of the soprano’s silk and cream voice as she interpreted the final melancholy works of the German master. Sometimes John would snap off the switches and Connie would sing the melodies herself, softly, a capella, just for her husband. It surely did not occur to either that the music they loved best used the metaphors of night, sleep, deepest autumn, and rebirth—symbols of approaching death.

  In September 1972 a national meeting of plastic surgeons was to be held in Las Vegas, and the Hills made plans to go. But first they would fly to Seattle where one of Connie’s cousins was to be married. John and Connie would play duets on the harpsichord and recorder at the ceremony. Now having been married fifteen months, John was an accepted and popular member of Connie’s family. He had especially won the affection of his new mother-in-law, by composing and recording a fanfare that blared a royal welcome when she came to visit the Hills in Houston.

  The three days of wedding festivities passed happily; John and Connie played an exquisite Vivaldi sonata at the ceremony. They drove to the Seattle airport for the flight to Las Vegas with a shared sadness over having to leave the warming embrace of Connie’s people.

  As they hurried toward the departure gate, Connie noted from a flight information sign in the corridor that the plane would make an intermediate stop in San Francisco en route to Las Vegas. Never an impulsive person, and not the kind of woman to crowd her husband with a sudden plea, she nonetheless had a delicious and wicked idea. “Oh, John,” she said, “I haven’t been to San Francisco in years. Let’s get off there and stop just overnight. We can find a cheap hotel room and take buses and eat hamburgers. Wouldn’t it be fun! And they’ll never miss us in Las Vegas. We can get there a day late and nobody will care.”

  John frowned artificially, then broke it with a wide smile. He cared nothing for Las Vegas, Connie even less. Her presence in the gambling city would be like a fine piece of Georgian silver set down on a table of plastic dinnerware. The notion of a secret night in San Francisco was fine by him.

  One night stretched into four—the honeymoon they never had in Europe. At the San Francisco Opera, Connie had to nudge John to keep him from humming along with The Marriage of Figaro. They dined at the Blue Fox, walked up hills until the backs of their legs ached, grabbed cable cars, ordered omelettes in Ghirardelli-Square, browsed through an outdoor exhibition of Norman Rockwell paintings at Golden Gate Park, retired to the luxury of an expensive but romantic room at the Fairmont. They drank champagne and laughed and made love. On their last night in the lovely city, in a bar atop a giant building, Connie sipped a cocktail and watched an enormous sun drop into the sea, and drapes of violet and black cover San Francisco and carry it into darkness. She felt completely divorced from reality. This was impossibly beautiful, a stage setting. Soon someone would come and shut off the lights and smother the enchantment and close the theater. Somewhere a murder charge was still pending against the man whose hand she held and whose eyes she held in emotional lock. But now, all the furies were banished. For the moment there was no one else, no place else.

  In Las Vegas the thin man with the droopy mustache and the dark, shaggy hair sat down on the motel bed and called every major hotel on the Strip. He could not find a Dr. John Hill registered anywhere. He swore. The girl beside him shrugged. Hill was supposed to be here. The thin man called Houston and double-checked. Yes, came the response from their contact. Hill was in Las Vegas. He was attending the plastic surgeons’ meeting. “But he’s not at the Stardust, god damn it,” swore the man impatiently. Then find him, came the order back. At the Stardust, which was headquarters for the assemblage, a woman at the registration desk smiled and helpfully went through the list of attending doctors. Dr. John Hill had not yet checked in. Perhaps he had simply failed to register. Some of the doctors were negligent that way. Maybe he had decided to stay in a quieter motel, or with friends. Would the inquirer want to leave a name in case Dr. Hill turns up? No. The thin man with the mustache shook his head. He grabbed the girl’s arm and they spent the rest of the day playing blackjack. When all their money was gone they left town. There would be another opportunity to meet John Hill.

  On the flight from Las Vegas to Houston, the plane was filled with members of Houston’s plastic surgery community. “If we crash,” mused John, “the business is wiped out in Houston.” It was a hot Sunday midafternoon when they took off from Vegas. It would be even hotter in Houston, where September is the broiling month. Not far away on the plane sat Nathan Roth, the heavy and moody surgeon who had hired John fresh out of medical training. He had gone before one of the grand juries and given harmful testimony about his onetime protégé’s character and professional responsibility. The two men were bitter enemies, but Connie every now and then flashed him a mischievous dazzling smile. John knew what she was doing and was amused. Give Connie five minutes with his worst enemy, and she could charm him into a friend. Some of the other surgeons dropped b
y and chatted with the Hills, grumbling over gambling losses, or speculating on the likelihood of certain Vegas show girls having had breast augmentation.

  “Slowly they’re forgiving him,” thought Connie. “Slowly they’re inviting him back into their group. And it’s about time!” Before the end of the year, she believed, her husband would be completely accepted by his peers and bear but few scars of his scandal and exile. During the rest of the late afternoon flight John dozed. Now and then Connie nudged him to try out a bit of a speech she was preparing for delivery to a women’s group entitled, “Vienna: City of Dreams.”

  In the taxi home from the Houston airport, Connie snuggled close to John and whispered her thanks for the trip. “Without you, I couldn’t have gone to my cousin’s wedding, or I couldn’t have done San Francisco the way it should be done,” she said. Putting her head on John’s shoulder, Connie was content. It occurred to her that she and her husband had known each other for almost three years and not one single cross word had been spoken by either. Aside from John’s habit of being chronically late, she could find no fault with her quiet husband.

  For a few months after the mistrial, she had worried that someone might try to harm him: the hate phone calls kept coming in, and Ash continued his ominous drives past their home. Once, when she went to bed early and fell asleep while waiting for John to return from the hospital, she awoke suddenly at 1A.M. and found John still absent. Frantically she called the hospital and implored a nurse to search. In the next quarter of an hour Connie paced the great house, imagining that something terrible had happened. Then the phone rang. The nurse had found the plastic surgeon, asleep on a couch in the doctors’ lounge. That had been the only disquieting incident in a year and a half. Their lives had settled into a routine. No one save Ash Robinson seemed interested in them any more.

  At their pillared mansion, Connie sprang out of the taxi almost before it had parked on the curving driveway. She was eager to see her stepson, Robert, and tell him of the trip. The boy was twelve, sprouting tall, and had somehow managed to survive the tragedy of his mother’s death and his father’s murder trial with psyche unharmed. He had warmed instantly to Connie, and she knew that he would not settle down for bed until he had visited with his parents. While John paid the cabbie and attended to the luggage, Connie rang the doorbell. Impatiently, she pressed her face to a glass panel beside the door, squashing her features clownishly, hoping to make Robert laugh. But no one came. She rang the bell again, thinking she heard the distant chatter of the television set. Even if Robert was absorbed in some cowboy program, surely John’s mother, Myra, who had been “baby sitting,” would hurry to the door in greeting.

  Then, to her right, through the glass panel, Connie saw a figure approaching, walking through the sunken living room and toward the small step that led to the entrance hall. Connie was not sure, but it seemed that the figure wore a green costume. She prepared to laugh, for Robert was apparently in masquerade. He had concocted a joke for their homecoming. What was he wearing? An odd green something covered his face.

  But as the figure drew closer Connie sensed in a fragmented flash that it was not her stepson. Then it must be John’s mother. No one else was in the house. But what would Myra Hill be doing with a green hood wrapped around her head? The door opened and Connie laughed. “What’s this?” she giggled merrily, going along with the joke. “What now?” Then it registered with her that the figure was too tall for the boy, too short for the erect grandmother. She waited for the figure to cry, “Surprise!” But this was not to be. The person standing before Connie instead reached out with one hand and grabbed a chunk of the cream-colored tailored blouse that she wore inside her suit jacket. Fingers seized a section of the gold chain necklace that was her wedding gift from John. Like a balking horse being led by an angry trainer, she was pulled across the threshold. As she formed a scream, her eyes saw that the figure held a glistening blue-black gun in his right hand and it was rising toward her, like a serpent preparing to strike. The scream died in her throat.

  “This is a robbery,” the intruder said, and for the first time Connie recognized him to be a man. All of this had passed in the span of five seconds, and she realized that the taxi had sped away and that John Hill was standing behind her. As she by reflex tried to break the man’s grasp on her blouse and necklace, John Hill moved in, pushing her away and confronting the robber. “Now wait a minute here …” began John as he pushed Connie out of the way, defending her, freeing her to escape. Hysterically she ran sideways, toward a neighbor’s house, afraid to run directly for the street and the help of a passing car for fear that she would be in the path of bullets. Just as she reached the white brick walls that borders the property Connie heard the first shot. Then a second. Screaming, falling, she stumbled crazily to a house two down from hers. “My husband’s being murdered!” she cried as the neighbor opened the door. Connie was composed enough to telephone the police, then hung up and dialed her lawyer, Don Fullenweider, partner of Racehorse Haynes. He lived just across Kirby Drive and was dozing after a day of fishing. Seconds after he heard Connie’s distraught screams on the telephone, he burst out his front door and hurried across the drive to the Hill home. Already sirens were filling the new night. It was just growing dark.

  The white colonial house was eerily quiet. The front door was open a crack. Fullenweider pushed it open and gained entrance. The first thing his eyes found was a vase of yellow mums, fallen onto the parquet floor, smashed, blossoms strewn madly about. And then he beheld a sight that he would never be able to shut from his mind. The child, Robert Hill, was standing over the inert form of his father. Hopping up and down because his feet and arms were bound, the little boy was sobbing, a piece of adhesive tape dangling from his lips as if he were a package newly opened.

  “They’ve killed my daddy,” he cried. Scooping him up, muttering shushing reassurances, the young lawyer carried Robert outside to the lawn, where neighbors were gathering. An emergency vehicle from the Houston fire department roared up, and an attendant ran into the house. The attorney led him to John Hill. The plastic surgeon lay face down, the lower half of his body on the foyer floor, his head and shoulders sprawled across the step leading down into the sunken living room. Quickly, expertly, the attendant checked for vital signs. He turned over John Hill. Don Fullenweider gasped. The eyes were sealed shut with adhesive tape. So was the mouth and nose. Blood soaked through the tapes and appeared in blobs about the body. The attendant stood up and shook his head. “I’m sorry, mister,” he said. “We’re too late.…”

  Fallen between two symbols of his life—one a brooding metallic bust of Beethoven sitting on an end table, the other a framed drawing of horses galloping through a mist—pale, indefinite horses, hurrying toward a gray and distant horizon—John Hill was dead.

  TWENTY-SIX

  They all had something to say.

  Racehorse Haynes swore. “God damn it all,” he said. “I should have known this would happen. Several months ago I picked up a street rumor that John’s life was in danger, but I didn’t pay much attention. In this business, you get threats all the time and you learn to live with them. I did tell John that perhaps he should hire a bodyguard, but he just didn’t have the money.”

  John Hill died broke. The strain of more than three years of defending himself against a scandal that devastated his practice drained his resources. When a tally was made, he owed more than $100,000. The Internal Revenue Service was demanding $60,000 in back taxes. Ann Kurth was suing over non-payment of moneys due in the divorce property settlement. A nurse-secretary sought overtime. A music store appeared with a $600 bill for records and instrument repair. There was not even enough money in his bank account to buy a coffin to bury him. The Settegast-Kopf Funeral Home, which staged Joan Hill’s elaborate last rites, refused to sell Connie Hill a box for her husband unless she put cash on the table, in advance. In despair, she told Don Fullenweider. An insurance policy was discovered among John’s papers that sat
isfied the mortuary enough to provide a funeral.

  Fullenweider felt both rage and helplessness. “Here I had worked for years, for literally thousands and thousands of hours, to help this man extricate himself from an impossible situation,” he told his wife, “and then I find him—my client, my friend, my across-the-street neighbor—shot dead and lying in a pool of his own blood.”

  New Judge I. D. McMaster deplored the violence, in the manner of public figures who are regularly called upon to make such statements in America. But to a friend he later allowed that he was not very surprised. Rather cryptically he said: “When that old boy signed that letter Ash Robinson wrote way back in December 1968, and then reneged on it, he signed his own death warrant.”

  The child, Robert Hill, watching the attendants carry the body out of the house, seeing the canvas sack that contained the man whose seed had given him life, ran to the arms of his second stepmother, fell into them, and buried his head. “Our daddy is dead,” he said. “Whatever are we going to do without him?” At the funeral, private, secret, limited only to the immediate family in attempt to keep the curious away, the child marched at the head of the funeral procession, his spine stiff, his face a mask of whatever emotions a twelve-year-old conceals. He stood quietly and watched his second parent returned to earth. Three years earlier he had buried his mother.

  Myra Hill mourned her second and last son. Both had been doctors, both men of music, both wasted. She put herself deep into the consolation of her faith, drawing strength from God, not even questioning the purpose of His ways. If she wept, she wept alone, for no one saw her steely pioneer face dampened by tears. Her major complaint was that she was unable to walk in procession to her son’s tomb, for she was confined to a hospital room after the murder.