Mourn the Living

by Henry Perez

  Chapter 71

  Walter Bendix had become a surgeon for only one reason—to make money. Sure, it felt good to save lives and help people, that’s why he’d always wanted to become a doctor. But the decision to go into surgery was strictly driven by money.

  “The difference can be significant, especially if you’re good, and I was good,” he explained as they flew over Route 30. “Don’t get me wrong, it gives one a sense of personal contribution. That’s a part of it, too.”

  The doctor’s big financial break came twenty years earlier when he removed a badly ailing appendix belonging to the son of a savvy land developer named Paul Montgomery.

  “He’s the one who got me started in all this. Changed my life in a way.”

  Bendix had spent the next decade securing chunks of land in six counties throughout northern and central Illinois, and a couple more in Indiana.

  “You own any land, Alex?”

  “Not really. The bank still owns my house.”

  “A man should own land if he is to truly be a man.”

  Chapa resisted the urge to start listing all of the great men who’ve never called an undeveloped plot in LaSalle County their personal source of pride. He was focused on the controls, and the ease with which Bendix was manipulating them.

  The plane felt a bit more secure than he’d expected. But any sense of safety vanished whenever Chapa thought about the drop that could await them if this fragile piece of human ingenuity suddenly gave out.

  “I’ve worked very hard for everything that I have, and all that I’ve been able to provide for my family.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Walter.”

  “I prefer that you call me Doctor.”

  “Will do, Doctor.”

  They were starting to climb. Chapa felt the surge through his body as he watched rectangular patches of farmland below shrink to the size of postage stamps.

  “I’ve done a lot of good in my life. I’ve saved others, given my time and money to a variety of charities and good causes.”

  Chapa now couldn’t stop wondering why the hell he was up here in a plane with a guy who apparently thought of himself as a combination of Ward Cleaver and Superman.

  They had been silently cruising above Route 47—at least that’s what Chapa assumed the thin gray thread below was—for nearly five minutes. Finally, tired of drifting along at a high altitude with no clear plan, Chapa asked him where they were going and why.

  “And I’m not sensing that you’re surveying any parcels of land, Doctor.”

  Bendix stared straight ahead into the horizon, motionless. If it hadn’t been for the single drop of sweat cruising down the side of his face, he could have passed for a wax figure.

  “But I’ve made some mistakes, too.” His voice was different now, deeper, older, tired. “Most of my mistakes weren’t too bad. But then one day you cross a line, and—”

  The plane took a sharp dip, and in that instant Chapa felt himself lunging forward, his hands clutching at nothing, as though they were trying to hang on to the sky. But as quickly as he’d lost himself and damn near lost control of the plane, Bendix seemed to get a grip, and managed to steady the aircraft.

  As Chapa did his best to coax at least two, maybe more of his vital organs back to where they belonged, Bendix reached over, and pressed a button on the control panel. The plane immediately leveled out, and Chapa assumed he’d switched on the autopilot.

  Chapa watched in silence as Bendix struggled to gather himself. Not exactly the sort of behavior he wanted see from the man who was piloting a plane, three thousand feet above the hard Midwestern soil.

  Then Bendix unbuckled his seat belt and turned to face Chapa.

  “Most of what I’ve done wrong has been victimless.”

  Chapa had no clue where this was heading, but just to be sure he reached inside his jacket pocket, clutched his tape recorder, and pushed RECORD.

  “It’s funny how one thing leads to another.”

  “What led to what, Doctor?” Chapa asked trying to get some control over the situation, though it was clear he had none.

  “It started about three years into my working as a volunteer at the prison hospital over at Pennington Correctional. The system didn’t have a lot of money to pay big shot doctors, so I volunteered to stop by once or twice a month and help patch up guys who’d been cut up or had their bones broken because they looked at the wrong guy the wrong way. I’ve done some good work there.”

  Bendix pressed a series of buttons, steered the plane west, leveled it out, and switched on the auto again.

  “Then I met a guy there, a prisoner who was back in. I knew him from his first stint, and he wasn’t a bad guy, not really. He just needed a chance, a new start. He’d tried to make it on the outside, but his record followed him around. He wished he could just have a different name, a new identity.”

  As the plane continued to split the sky on its way to nowhere in particular, Chapa started searching for the reason this conversation was taking place up here, instead of in a warm, well-grounded office, or the middle of an open field—there were certainly enough of those to choose from down below.

  “As soon as his parole time was up I helped him change his name and history. Made him promise to leave the state and never come back. Which he did.”

  But the bigger question remained—Why was this conversation happening at all?

  “You might be surprised how easy it is to create a new identity for someone when you’re a respected person in an important profession with access to personal records. So easy to change a detail or two, if you know which ones are the most vital to an individual’s identity.”

  Then Chapa figured it out—maybe. Could Bendix be concerned that Chapa was wearing a wire? That could explain the meeting in a lonely hangar in Kendall County, as well as their present altitude.

  “You did this for free?”

  “No. You do something for a person and don’t charge them, it has less value. That’s why handouts to the poor or minorities are a bad idea. I charged him, told him he could mail me the money in cash when he had it.”

  What the hell? Was one of Oakton’s leading citizens, a man with several lifetimes’ worth of civic awards, confessing to a major crime? Chapa was accustomed to working hard for his scoops. This was way too easy.

  “A few months later, I did it for someone else, then someone else the year after that. And you know, except for two of them, they all paid me eventually. They all did exactly what I told them to do. The payments would come from California or Texas or Alaska, or wherever.”

  Chapa shifted in his seat. The ride was becoming more uncomfortable by the minute.

  “It felt good, what I was doing. I told myself I was helping guys get their lives straightened out.”

  “You were making some bucks on the side, Doc, helping convicts elude the authorities.”

  “They weren’t convicts anymore, and they were all off parole.” Bendix said, raising his voice for the first time, and Chapa was surprised by how much hostility had been hiding behind that measured tone he’d been using up until now.

  “Do you really think I needed the money? I own this plane that you’re sitting in, which is more than you can say for your house.”

  Chapa watched as Bendix took a deep breath and struggled to regain his composure.

  “Please don’t rile me like that again. I don’t like it.”

  Okay Doc, I won’t, Chapa thought. Not right now, anyway.

  “In time word got around a little bit, and eventually made it to the wrong person. And I helped a guy change his identity, start over, and he showed up at my door a few years later and threatened me, threatened my family, and he forced me to help him change it again. But he didn’t leave after that.”

  Wait, this was much more than an admission of guilt. Chapa remembered what Clarkson had told him about the stickman killer changing his appearance and his name. Was that where this was headed?

  “This guy wasn’t your
standard simple criminal. In fact, as far as I could tell, he didn’t even have a record. At first I told myself it would be okay, that he’d disappear like the others. But then he started joining civic groups and getting invited to all sorts of things. He wasn’t going away—he was putting down roots.”

  Up until now Chapa had resisted his reporter’s urge to interrupt with questions, but that restraint wouldn’t hold much longer.

  “I still thought it was going to be okay, until the day he told me I needed to do him a favor. I looked into his eyes and knew he wasn’t asking, he was telling me. I thought he was going to tell me to change someone else’s future, but it had nothing to do with an identity.”

  Chapa was sorting through the recent murders. The guy in the alley? Wade Marshall, the college student? Clarkson? He remembered what Merv Olsen had told him about the fatal cuts, hardly the work of a surgeon.

  “I refused to cross that line, but he threatened to destroy me, and all that I’ve built for my family. He forced me to accept just how deep I’d be willing to go to protect everything I care about.”

  Bendix was waiting for something from Chapa, but it was not clear what that was.

  “You understand, Alex, he knew everything, all of it. And he made it very clear that he’d make it all public before vanishing again.”

  “I’m not the guy to ask for absolution, Doc.”

  “That’s how he got me to do it, understand?

  “Who got you to do what?”

  Bendix’s face underwent some sort of transformation, like he was seeing Chapa for the first time.

  “Good Lord, you don’t know.” He looked into Chapa’s eyes as though they held the answer to a puzzle he was desperate to solve. “Here I thought you were ahead of it all, like Chakowski was, but you’re not.”

  “What did Chakowski know?”

  “I thought you were the cat in all this, but you’re not. You’re just another mouse.”

  What was Chapa supposed to know? What didn’t he understand? Had Bendix killed all of them? He couldn’t have. Maybe there was some other crime. Then Chapa remembered there had been one other recent death. He had alluded to it in his story, but only in passing.

  The situation has become so grave that for those of us who have been paying attention even the heart-related death of an old woman can merit a closer look.

  “Gladys Washer.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you seem to know so little about so much. I thought you were toying with me when you mentioned her in your story. Now I realize that wasn’t the case.”

  Bendix rubbed the side of his face, then turned and looked out toward the horizon.

  “I thought you had something, Chapa. Maybe even enough to stop him before he does whatever he’s been working toward.”

  “Who? Who am I going to stop?”

  “I thought we would negotiate, work something out, an agreement that would have benefited both of us.”

  Chapa was about to ask him again, but then he realized Bendix wasn’t listening anymore.

  “But it’s over anyhow, Chapa.”

  Bendix reached under his seat and produced a handgun. It was big enough to do a great deal of damage, especially at close range. Chapa wasn’t sure about its make or caliber, but it was just the sort of weapon a lot of regular people own, believing it will protect them. He was pointing it at Chapa.

  “I’ve run through a number of scenarios. Most of them end with one or both of us dead.”

  “I’m a writer, I can probably help you come up with a bunch of better scenarios.”

  Bendix almost smiled, but the change in his expression seemed driven by pain, not humor.

  “I brought you up here because I thought you might be wearing a wire, working with the feds like that Clarkson guy.”

  “I figured that was it.”

  “But now I know you’re not. And that’s too bad in a way. Because he’s been building up to something, and it’s going to happen soon.”

  Chapa thought about the recorder in his jacket pocket, hoped it was still running and picking up most of this conversation.

  “Look, Dr. Bendix, I can help. I’ll expose what’s been happening in Oakton. We can work on this together, you and I.”

  Bendix nodded in a way that seemed neutral, almost involuntary, and Chapa read it more as a gesture of resignation than agreement.

  “You’re an important person in your own way, I guess, and killing you would ultimately just make the situation worse for my family,” Bendix said as he looked out toward the horizon. “He’d make sure of that.”

  “Who would make sure of that?”

  Bendix responded with another pained smile.

  “As long as I’m alive he’s got something to hold over them. He will hurt them to get to me.”

  Uncertain of what was happening to Bendix, and having no idea what would happen next, Chapa slipped his hand across the seat belt buckle.

  “Do you believe in God, Alex?”

  The gun was pointed at Chapa’s chest, again.

  “I’ve never thought about it much, maybe I should have,” Chapa responded. “But you won’t find too many committed atheists among two men squeezed into a small plane when one of them is holding a gun.”

  “I’ve done a lot of good, saved lives.” Tears were starting to fill Bendix’s eyes. “But none of that matters once you’ve taken a single life.”

  “All of this has been off the record, Doc, so there is another option. Let’s land the plane, and walk away like we never met.”

  Bendix seemed to be considering Chapa’s offer. It wasn’t genuine. Chapa’s first stop would be the Oakton police station. Or, considering how his last appearance there was received, he’d call first.

  “We’ve never met, not formally,” Bendix said, still processing.

  “That’s right.”

  “We’ve only seen each other in passing, and just once or twice at that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And I never noticed you before, had no idea who you were.”

  “Okay.”

  “So when I saw you sneaking around my plane, I naturally rushed back to my office in the hangar and got my gun.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “I called out to you, but you seemed to have a weapon of some sort, and I pulled the trigger, meaning to fire off a warning shot, but it struck you in the chest.”

  Chapa was certain now that Bendix had snapped, gone completely over. Not a bad man, necessarily, not too bad, anyway. But he’d killed once already, and no matter how much remorse he may have felt, the second kill would be much easier than the first.

  “Are you forgetting we’re at close range? They won’t buy that story.”

  Bendix withdrew a little, and Chapa quietly started unbuckling his belt.

  “You’re right. No, it wasn’t a warning shot. I saw you by the plane, didn’t know who you were, got my weapon, called to you, and you came after me, hostile, yelling something about that reporter who got killed a few days ago. You lunged for the gun, and it went off.”

  Chapa was looking for an in, any twitch or other movement that would give him the chance to make a grab for the gun. The plane was buzzing over a long stretch of trees. Route 47 and all that Chapa knew was a distant memory now.

  “A few of the other leaders around the area will tell police that you threatened them too. We watch each other’s backs, you know.”

  “I’ve heard that, but this is a pretty big favor you’d be asking of them.”

  “There have been bigger, believe me.”

  Bendix leaned back against the door and raised the gun so that it was pointed at Chapa’s face. His finger coiled tight against the trigger.

  If Chapa dove at him, low, a shot might ride high and miss. But that would make it difficult to go for the gun. And the cockpit was much too snug to allow for a horizontal dodge.

  No, getting out of the way of a bullet wasn
’t a good option at the moment. Chapa needed to create an opening.

  “Think for a moment, Doctor, this isn’t who you are.”

  “Maybe it’s who I’ve become,” Bendix said, then straightened his arm and prepared to fire.

  Chapter 72

  Chapa thought about Nikki and Erin and all the things they could be doing right now.

  What had he been doing the moment his father was murdered? Probably playing with his toys or being read a story, or asleep in his room. Maybe he was outside enjoying a clear blue sky and the dying sun’s warmth, unaware that someplace else, someone who was a stranger to him was about to squeeze a trigger and change his life, a vital part of it ripped away while he was off doing something ordinary.

  Still no flinch from Bendix. The end of the gun was no more than three or four feet from Chapa’s face.

  Any in, any at all, Chapa thought, his eyes fixed on the doctor’s trigger finger.

  He saw the muscles in Bendix’s neck tighten, pushing against the man’s sagging flesh. Chapa was readying himself to make a move, probably the only chance he’d have. He locked eyes with Bendix, trying to get a read, but came up empty.

  But something else was happening. The doctor’s arm was trembling just a little now, barely noticeable, but it had not been a moment ago. Was this good or bad?

  Chapa kept his eyes fixed on Bendix, trying to give him a hard look, worried all the while that his fear might show through. Would that be good or bad?

  The shaking was becoming more obvious now. So much that Bendix himself must have been aware of it, and known that Chapa was seeing it, too.

  There was a struggle going on inside the man. But there was one raging in Chapa as well. Part of him wanted to keep watch on the trigger finger, but looking into Bendix’s eyes, so deep that Chapa felt like he might see all the way through him to the door beyond, was having some sort of effect.

  The plane hummed across the empty Midwestern landscape as Chapa struggled to find the right words to say, uncertain whether he should say anything. But before Chapa could think of something, Bendix withdrew the gun, pulling the weapon back until he was holding it sideways against his chest.