by Jim Lehrer
“Not necessarily—usually only very embarrassing. Have you come down with it?”
“No. But I think a colleague of mine may have.”
“Who?”
“That’s none of your ‘fucking’ business.”
Otis hung up and had a brief second thought or two about whether he should have said something specific to Bob about Pete. Not just about “fucking” but about his trumpet frustration, his troubled thoughts, his walking away from his office and job—his losing it right there in front of Otis.
But Pete said he had already talked to the people at Ashland. Forget it.
Otis saw from his watch that it was almost five o’clock. He picked up a file folder from an executive placement firm in Chicago—headhunters, they were called—that he had contacted secretly to begin looking for a new number two. He had concluded for sure a few months ago that Pete Wetmore definitely was not going to make it. The board had pushed Otis to have a natural and agreed-to succession in place before he was contemplating retirement. So, assuming he stuck with it until he was sixty-five, he still had some time to get things lined up. The file had the photos and bios and dossiers on two men— both white baby boomers in their mid-forties, both now working for giant insurance companies in second- or third-level positions. One was a New Yorker with an MBA from Wharton, the other a Californian who had started in the business as a company lawyer. Both were married with young children, both took good photographs.
Both, on paper, came across a lot better than Pete Wetmore did before Otis had hired him.
But maybe Pete might make it after all. Maybe he could work his way out of the mush.
Otis heard a loud scream outside. Before he could really react, Melissa burst through the door. She had her hands up to her face.
“It’s Mr. Wetmore! They just found him in his car! He’s dead!”
PETE AND JUNE Wetmore’s home was only six blocks west of the Halsteads in NorthPark, their upscale residential enclave. It consisted of some thirty houses of varying motifs—English Georgian, French chateau, Tuscan villa, Spanish castle, Cape Cod tony, Miami Beach deco, Jacobsen white, Southampton beachy, and so on—along a series of carefully drawn winding streets and cul-de-sacs. No matter the style, each house sat amid at least a half acre of trees on acre-plus lots, and most had swimming pools, three-car-plus garages, and sweeping circular driveways.
The Wetmores’ house was a light beige Spanish-castle design. Otis had been there only once or twice, but as he drove up to it now, he had no question which one it was.
There were two police cars and several other cars in the driveway and out front. Clearly, something was going on here. The front door was slightly ajar, and Otis walked on in. He heard soft voices coming from the living room on the left.
He stepped to the room’s threshold and saw maybe twenty-five people in the room. Everyone was standing and speaking quietly, mostly in small groups. Some were familiar faces. The first he acknowledged was Sally’s. He had called her from the office and suggested she go over to be with June Wetmore.
“June treated me coldly and very rudely, Otis,” Sally said after motioning him to one side. “She kept mumbling something about all of this being ‘your son-of-a-bitch husband’s fault.’ Meaning you, of course.”
Yes, meaning me, of course, Otis thought.
“Her kids are upstairs with some relatives, and she’s in another room now with Josh Garnett.” Josh was the pastor of the First Methodist Church of Eureka, where both the Halsteads and the Wetmores were members. “But when you do see June, don’t be surprised if she takes out after you. I don’t know how to say it, but she acted like she hated you.”
Otis said he would not be surprised. Then he moved over to another familiar face, that of Jerry Elkhart, the Cushman-loving detective who’d been at the Halstead house the afternoon Otis had returned from Nebraska with the scooter.
“I figured you’d be here,” said Elkhart. “How’s the scooter?”
Otis said the scooter was fine. He asked the detective exactly what had happened to Pete Wetmore. All Otis knew when he left the office was that Pete had killed himself.
“A jogger found him sitting in his car in the parking lot behind the civic auditorium. He had fired one shot from a nine-millimeter Beretta into his mouth. The medical examiner says he’s one hundred percent sure it was suicide.”
Elkhart held out a small white sealed envelope toward Otis. “There were two of these on the car seat next to him. One of them had his wife’s name on it. I gave it to her already. The other was for you.”
Otis took the white envelope and put it in a suit-coat pocket without looking at it.
“Aren’t you going to read it?” asked the detective.
“Not right now, if you don’t mind.”
The detective said he would eventually like to know what it said, although he doubted the coroner would need any further confirmation that Pete Wetmore had died by his own hand.
He said to Otis, “I understand you had a long private meeting with Mr. Wetmore right before he left your building to go kill himself. Is that right?”
Otis confirmed that.
“Did he act like he was a man about to take his own life?”
“Certainly not,” Otis said. “There was no question Pete was upset about some things that had gone badly in his life. But suicide? Certainly not.”
What else could I say? thought Otis. If I had thought there was a chance Pete was going to kill himself, I would have done something to stop it, I would have gone after him, I would have talked him out of it. Certainly not—that’s my answer, the only possible answer.
“One interesting thing about how he did it,” said the detective. “He didn’t open his mouth and stick the barrel in. He fired it right through his lips, which appeared to be closed tight. Tore them to shreds.”
At that moment Otis noticed a trumpet lying on an end table next to Elkhart. “Where did that come from?” Otis asked.
“It was on the car seat with the notes. Mrs. Wetmore said she’d never seen it. We’re still piecing it together, but it looks like Mr. Wetmore went from your office building to Wellington’s music store and bought this trumpet. A while later, he went to the parking lot of the coliseum. His wife said he always kept the Beretta in his car. That’s all I know.”
Two more familiar faces were next to Otis. They were those of Bob Gidney and Russ Tonganoxie, the good man and the asshole, respectively, of the world-famous Ashland Clinic. Otis turned toward them as the detective stepped away.
“Pete was a patient of yours, I take it?” Otis said to Tonganoxie, still dressed as if he were a slovenly graduate student. The only addition was a dark green warm-up jacket with the word JEEP over the breast pocket.
“I’m not permitted to discuss such things,” said Tonganoxie, “and you know that.”
“I guess you told Pete the same thing you told me: People in the insurance business were bloodsucking vultures who should feel guilty. Good work, Doctor.”
Bob Gidney said, “This is no time to talk about anything like that, Otis. Was Pete the colleague you called me about—the cussing one?”
“I’m not permitted to discuss such things, either,” said Otis.
“The immediate problem for all of us—me, you, Otis,” said Tonganoxie, “is June Wetmore.”
The room went suddenly silent. June Wetmore came in with the Reverend Joshua Garnett, a dull, grinning man about Otis’s age.
Otis turned toward June, and their eyes met and locked. She came right toward him, her face ablaze.
“Get out of my house!” she screamed at Otis. “You drove Pete to this! You took everything out of him, you treated him like dirt!”
Shit. I treated him like shit. Not dirt, Otis thought.
Otis said nothing to her or to anyone else as he backed out of the room and left the house. Sally joined him in the front seat of the Explorer.
“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, taking Otis’s right hand in both
of hers. “She’s just upset—understandably. Bob assures me she’ll be sorry when she realizes how awful and unfair she was to you.”
Otis said, “Pete left me a note. I’ve got it here in my pocket. I haven’t read it yet.”
Sally released his hand. He took out the envelope, opened it, and pulled out a folded piece of notepaper. It was a KCF&C memo sheet with Pete’s name printed on the top in small letters.
PETER L. WETMORE, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT.
There were only four hand-printed sentences on the sheet. Otis recognized Pete’s handwriting.
Otis—
I bought a trumpet and tried to play it. But the good lips were gone. It was too late.
Sing, Otis, sing.
Pete
RUSS TONGANOXIE DEFINITELY did not want to be alone with Bob Gidney right now. But they had raced from the clinic to the Wetmores’ in Tonganoxie’s Jeep Wrangler, and there was no way to avoid driving back together.
He decided on a preemptive strike. “No, I didn’t think Pete Wetmore was suicidal,” Tonganoxie said after several moments of silence. “If I had, I would have taken direct action.”
“Hey, Russ, nobody’s immune from this. A patient walks out of a routine therapy session after talking about his mother and shoots up a post office with a machine gun. That kind of thing happens to all of us.”
Well, fine, thought Tonganoxie. But it’s never happened quite like this to me before, and I don’t want to talk about it. But Bob Gidney was forcing him to. “I put him on Prozac, but my guess is that he didn’t take much of it. I was still getting to the bottom of his neuroses.”
“How depressed was he?”
“Enough to blow his brains out, obviously, for chrissake! I just didn’t know it!”
Bob did not respond to the outburst, either with words or with a look.
Tonganoxie gunned the Wrangler as fast as he dared. It was only two miles or so to the clinic, but he wanted this trip to end as quickly as possible.
There was Locust Street and the gate to Ashland. Only a few more seconds now.
“Do you need to talk to someone, Russ?” Bob said as they approached the staff parking lot.
“You mean as a patient overcome with feelings of guilt or as a staff member who screwed up?” Russ asked.
“Only as a patient. As in ‘Doctor, heal thyself.’”
Tonganoxie braked to a halt on the gravel of the parking lot. “I believe I can think through this on my own, but thanks, Bob,” he said as he began thinking.
“What about Otis?” Bob asked as they walked toward the clinic’s main building.
“What about him?”
“Is he liable to do something rash? Clinically abnormal?”
“No way.”
ILL YOU GO with me?” Otis asked.
“You mean on another ride?” Sharon asked.
“A longer one this time.”
“How long?”
“Oh, maybe to Hutchinson, Dodge City, Garden City, and beyond—the Rockies, the Red Ryder museum in Pagosa Springs, Colorado—or until we get tired.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
It was Sunday, just after eleven in the morning. Otis had told Sally he had a splitting headache and was unable to go to church this morning. She had said that was too bad because a little church might be particularly helpful in getting him over the terrible week of Pete’s suicide and the aftermath. He had agreed with that probability but said he was afraid he would be unable to keep his head up and he might even possibly throw up on the people in the pew in front of him.
“Sounds like spinal meningitis,” she had said.
“No, just a simple stress headache,” he had replied.
So Sally Halstead had gone to the garage, gotten in her BMW, and driven to the First Methodist Church by herself for one of the few Sundays ever, except when Otis was sick or out of town.
A few minutes later, Otis had gone to the same garage, put on his Kansas City Chiefs helmet, hung his Daisy air rifle by the lanyard to his Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter, and driven off toward Farnsworth Creek.
And there Sharon was in the same place, on the same quilt, but instead of reading a book, she was wearing earphones connected to a small yellow portable tape player beside her.
Otis stopped his scooter in the same place he had a week ago. He saw the case for the tapes. They were the companions to Beschloss’s book.
Sharon, as beautiful as before, saw him shortly after he pulled up. She took off her headphones and stood up.
He immediately made the suggestion that they go off together that drew her response.
“Yes, I probably am out of my mind,” he said now.
“I don’t know you—I don’t even know what you really look like. Are you ever going to take off that silly safety helmet?”
“It’s an official Kansas City Chiefs football helmet,” Otis said, unsnapping the chin strap.
She reached out toward him. Otis froze, and before he realized what she was doing, she had hold of the helmet.
“No,” he said, but he made no effort to resist. This had to happen.
“Yes,” she said and jerked the helmet off his head.
The look on her face was about what he’d expected. It was that of a person who had seen something truly unexpected, stunning, horrible, despicable.
Within moments Otis had his helmet back on his bald head, and he and his scooter were putt-putting alone back up the gravel path. At the blacktop, instead of turning left to go back to town, he went right, toward the West.
Sing, Otis, sing.
His initial interest in “Sunflower” and other pop songs had intensified in the ninth grade, when he was also memorizing the capitals of all the states. That had led Otis to create helpful silly ditties that were meant to be sung like the old radio jingles for cornflakes and other tasty products. He’d begun with the goal of writing a jingle for each of the then forty-eight states and their capitals, but he had done only eleven or twelve—all written in a small, blue-lined-paper spiral notebook—by the time he got tired of the enterprise.
He suddenly remembered one of them.
If I loved Ida of Boise,
And she had weeds in her garden there,
I would go and help Ida-hoe.
It was silly and stupid, but it made him laugh out loud, something he had not done in a very long time.
It had been so long, in fact, that he couldn’t even remember the last time.
IT WAS NOT a sudden, spontaneous decision to turn west. He essentially made it on Thursday afternoon, on the ride from the Cottonwood Valley Cemetery after Pete Wetmore was laid to rest. Otis was in the fourth car in the funeral motorcade to and from the cemetery, well behind and away from the mortuary limos with June and the rest of the Wetmore family and close friends.
June Wetmore’s anger had kept Otis far from her and everything having to do with the death of her husband. The eulogy at the funeral was given by a man who had grown up with Pete in Colorado. He spoke mostly of Pete as a kid, as a hardworking, smart, fun person who wanted to play in the Count Basie band. Two of the eight pallbearers were from KCF&C but they were Jack Thayer, the chairman of the board, and Leonard LaCrosse, the vice president of actuarial affairs.
Otis, anonymously through Thayer, had made the suggestion that they might want to have a trumpet solo played at the funeral service. Otis sat with Sally in the back row of the church during the service. There was no trumpet solo, only the choir of the First Methodist Church singing regular funeral hymns.
Sally did her best to comfort Otis about June Wetmore’s reaction toward him. So did Bob Gidney. They had obviously talked about it. Both said it was an understandable lashing-out. Bob said suicide of a loved one, particularly a spouse, can be inexplicable, but it can also overwhelm the survivor with debilitating waves of guilt. Why didn’t I see it coming? Why didn’t I do more to prevent it? It was my fault, it was my fault. If only I had been a better wife—or husband or son or daughter or
friend— he/she would be alive today. Having another villain to share the blame helps ease the guilt.
“You are that villain on two counts, probably,” said Bob. “First, for the way you treated Pete; second, for not reacting to Pete’s leaving that meeting and your building that day. It will pass with time—but it will take time.”
Otis doubted it would ever pass, that there would ever be enough time.
But he had also tried very hard to believe he was not the real villain, no matter what he did or didn’t do. Otis knew about the trumpet, about something that had happened to Pete Wetmore many years ago. Yes, yes—Otis wished like hell that he had not treated Pete Wetmore like shit and that he had figured it was important to keep Pete in the office that fateful day. But that didn’t make Otis Pete’s killer.
Those lips had killed him.
On the other hand, aren’t there one helluva lot of frustrated trumpet players and Johnny Mercers and opera singers and novelists and brain surgeons and pro quarterbacks and Bill Gateses who don’t kill themselves? Don’t they do other things to compensate, to make life work for them? Sally, for instance. She put aside her actress dreams to be a good wife and mother.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON, LATE, Otis walked from his office two blocks over to his bank and withdrew five thousand dollars in cash from his savings account. Otis was on the board of the bank, and the president, Nick Merriam, asked no questions. Otis Halstead wanted some cash, Otis Halstead got some cash—two inch-and-a-half stacks of fifties and hundreds, each held snugly and neatly by a large tan rubber band. Both knew, without having to confirm or comment, that nobody would have to be told about Otis’s money, which he walked out with in a small black canvas valise he’d brought from his office.
Saturday morning, while Sally went out to run some errands, Otis placed that valise in the bottom of the spacious rear storage compartment of the Cushman. On top of the money, he stuck Jockey shorts and skivvy shirts, a pair of khaki pants, two long-sleeved shirts, a Windbreaker, gloves, a pair of heavy walking shoes, and a Dopp kit with a safety razor, toothbrush, and other basic toiletries. On top, he placed his box of BBs, maps of Kansas and the western states, and the toy fire engine.