Recessional: A Novel (66 page)

His partner tried to brush past her, and with a blow of his left arm knocked her against the wall, but while she was falling back she managed to fire two more shots at the fleeing body and was sure that one of them must have hit him in the rear.

Although knocked to the floor and stunned by what had happened in those few brief seconds, she began bellowing for help in a stentorian voice: “Don’t worry about me! Get that bastard who ran out the door!” And since the shooting had awakened almost everyone in Gateways, many people ran past her as she lay there, directing traffic with a waving revolver. When she heard the screech of wheels she shouted: “Damn it, he got away!” And when Dr. Zorn finally reached her with Mr. Krenek at his side, she told them: “He won’t get far. I’m sure I hit him in the back.”

“How can you be sure?” Andy asked and she said: “Because I don’t miss. Not from that distance,” and it was she who led them out to the oval and discovered, with the aid of Krenek’s flashlight, the thin trail of blood that led to where the Chevrolet had been parked. She still had its license number in her pocket, and by the time everyone piled back into the halls, the Tampa police were already broadcasting descriptions of the fugitive car to police stations in the area and even those up toward the Georgia border.

While the bloody body in the hall was being dragged away, people
began to ask: “What were they doing in this place?” and a roll call was made of the various halls. Three couples had slept through the whole affair, and when their apartments were checked, the only residents not accounted for were the Jiménez couple. Mr. Krenek was sent with keys to check them out, and soon even residents far removed from the fourth-floor apartment in which the couple from Colombia lived heard a man’s terrifying scream. When they rushed to the fourth floor and crowded into the rooms where Krenek waited, ashen-faced, they saw that Raúl Jiménez and his wife, Felicita, had been murdered. The Duchess, elbowing her way into the room, said: “It was a gun I heard. Soft echo from a silencer,” and for the first time, there in the crowded room beside the two dead bodies, she told of hearing the strange car moving into her parking place, of how she grabbed her revolver and went out to jot down the car’s license number and its color, and then of how she ran right into the two killers, shooting one of them before he could shoot her. She ended her report: “The second man got away, but he won’t go far, because I’m sure I hit him in the back. He may be dying right now.”

As soon as Krenek heard the story, he asked: “Did you say
swarthy
?”

“Yes.”

“But not black?”

“Definitely not.”

On this scant evidence he concluded, and as it turned out rightly, that the two strangers were a hit team sent up by Colombian cocaine runners to murder Jiménez, the former Bogotá editor who had hounded them so relentlessly, even from his sanctuary in Florida. And when the Tampa police arrived, with members of the FBI following soon thereafter, that was the hypothesis Krenek gave them.

The morning news reports in both papers and television were careful to state that local speculation was that it had been a revenge killing by the Colombian cartel, but there was no hesitation in publicizing the amazing bravery of Mrs. Francine Elmore, known throughout the Palms as the Duchess. “Alone, and armed only with a revolver her dead husband had given her for protection, she faced two hoodlums unafraid, killed one and wounded, perhaps mortally, the other.” Flash pictures showed her in her French peignoir, heavy hunting coat and bedroom slippers. Much was made of her confident quote: “He won’t get far. I’m sure I hit him in the back.”

Actually, the second killer got quite far, speeding through the night north to the Georgia border. At dawn he had heard news of the killing on the car radio, and although he was safely out of Florida, he began to wonder whether he could possibly escape any farther because of the pain radiating out of his left hip, into which a bullet had lodged. He was losing a considerable amount of blood.

Driving into a small town south of Macon, he asked in a drugstore that had just opened: “Where can I find a doctor? Bad pain in my left hip.” The druggist directed him to the emergency room of the little hospital nearby, then noticed a faint trail of blood along the floor where the customer had walked. Saying nothing to his clerk, an excitable young woman, he retreated quietly to his back office, dialed the police department and told the answering officer: “This is Forsby. Yes, Nathaniel. You’d better hurry over to the local hospital. Best if two, three men go well armed. It could be the killer they were broadcasting about. Yep. He looked Hispanic.”

At the hospital the doctor who’d had the night duty was preparing to go home for some sleep when the man came in with blood trickling from his left hip and in obvious pain, but since there was no clear sign that a bullet had caused the damage he saw no reason to inform the police, as he would have had to do if it had been an obvious bullet wound. But when the wounded man was stretched out on the bed, his street clothes still on, three police officers quietly moved into the next room and sent a nurse in to tell the night doctor that the patient down the hall was undergoing a cardiac arrest, whereupon the doctor said to his new patient: “I’ll be right back. There’s an emergency.”

Something about the way the nurse behaved or the ominous silence alerted the wounded man to danger, and he deftly withdrew his gun from his pants pocket. When the three policemen burst into his room, there was a crashing echo of gunfire which left the Colombian gunman dead and one of the policemen seriously wounded.

At that moment at the Palms the Reverend Quade was leading prayers for the two much-loved Colombian patriots. “They were,” she said, “heroes in the fight for liberty and decency in their country and exemplars of Christian charity in their American refuge. It was the insidious arm of criminal revenge that hunted them down, and their death is a loss to us all. They had come here, like all the rest of us, to find peaceful days in which to end their lives. They could not
have anticipated that they would die in this brutal manner. May their souls rest in that heaven which they tried their best to bring into being here on earth.”

When the short service ended with much weeping, three television cameras from the networks waited outside to photograph and interview the Duchess. She looked impressive, standing erect with camera lights framing her silver-haired head. But her confident pose was short-lived, for when what had happened since midnight sank in all of a sudden she was powerless to speak, so Andy and Nora led her quietly away. Krenek, who had witnessed much of what had happened and who had played a major role in identifying the probable background of the killers, substituted for her and gave a thrilling account of her bravery and foresight. “She even took down the license number of the car.”

At that moment, as the interview ended, word was received by the television people in contact with their home offices that the second cocaine runner had died in a shoot-out in a small Georgia hospital. When the Duchess heard the news, her voice returned and she cried triumphantly: “I told you I hit him in the ass! I don’t miss.”

When the turmoil over the murder of the Jiménez couple subsided, the federal agents having made their interrogations and departed, Reverend Quade, at the request of the residents, conducted a memorial service one evening after dinner. Her words were so apt that Mr. Krenek had them printed in a small brochure, which contained photographs of these two much-loved citizens:

Raúl and Felicita came to us as refugees from a dreadful tyranny which they had opposed with their courage, the loss of their property and the sacrifice of the high position they had held at home. In the very appropriate phrase I heard once in Missouri, “They voted with their feet,” and found a good life in our country. With a degree of love hard to match, they managed to keep their family together, bringing members to our home here each year and with enormous difficulty. We knew their children and grandchildren as if they were our own, and they taught us the meaning of the words
love
and
family solidarity
and
Christian values
.

They died in the midst of the battle they had bravely taken
upon themselves. They fought our struggles for us, and all who knew them well are indebted to them. We see him now, still among us, Raúl, tall, slim, urbane, a Spanish nobleman from another century, Felicita, the bubbling extrovert who could never allow herself to be dispirited. Listen, she is laughing with us once again!

How steadily in Gateways, our lovely, comforting home, are we forced to face up to the word
death
, but we do not want our days to be ended in hideous disease, tragic loss of mind or cruel murder. The actions of those gunmen, tracking down a man and his wife through two nations and across two oceans, were brutal and inhumane, but such death is also a part of life. Raúl and Felicita knew this when they chose to speak out for decency and freedom. I shall remember him playing bridge and glaring at me when, as his partner, I made what he considered a stupid error. I remember her as she knocked on my door with an offering of Toll-House cookies that she had baked for her neighbors.

God give us the strength to carry on the good life in the many ways that they did and may we join them later in a more peaceful afterlife.

The morning after the memorial service Dr. Zorn disappeared for three days without informing even his new wife of where he was going, whom he was meeting or what he was doing. Krenek and Nora supposed that he had gone to Chicago to report to Mr. Taggart on the aftermath of the murders, but when the head office called the Palms to ask about that very problem it became evident that Andy was not there, nor had he been. Krenek assured Nora and Betsy that Andy had been in reasonably good spirits despite his recent resignation and he guessed: “I’d say he was out looking for a new job, maybe even interviewing, and he didn’t want to raise your hopes only to have them dashed if he didn’t find employment.”

On the fourth day Andy flew into Tampa International on a redeye express from the west and immediately met in his office with Betsy, Nora and Krenek. After embracing his wife and apologizing, he took from his briefcase a substantial collection of pamphlets, posters and maps.

“I apologize to all of you, especially Betsy, but I have serious
problems to grapple with these days and I thought it best to fight this one alone.” Shuffling among his papers, he found a medical journal in whose pages he faithfully followed recent developments in his profession, even though he was no longer a practicing physician. Turning to a page marked with a paper clip, he placed the magazine facedown and said: “I suspect Clarence Hasslebrook may have done me a favor in forcing me to leave this comfortable job. Betsy and I could have remained here and built a good life for ourselves and, I believe, for the residents in our care.” He paused, then said slowly and with profound conviction: “But I want to be a doctor of medicine. I want to care for patients who need my assistance and knowledge. My work with Nora and Dr. Leitonen has shown me the path of duty. My visits to our Alzheimer’s patients remind me of the obligations of doctors. And when I stop by that horrible room holding Mrs. Carlson, I am torn apart by the question of what proper medical care is. I am a doctor. I’m not the manager of a posh hotel.”

His listeners understood the depth of his conviction and the steps by which he had decided to return to his permanent calling, but they had not a clue as to what secret steps he had taken to reenter his profession, but now he held the magazine with a finger marking the page he wanted and explained: “When I was forced to consider what I wished to do with the remainder of my life, I started reading the want ads in the medical journals—you know, the ones in which small towns in the hinterland advertise for a doctor to help them, and I stumbled upon just what I was looking for.” He opened the journal, pointed to a small ad outlined in red ink, and passed it around. It said, in part, “Silver Butte, a town of 1,800 on the glorious Madison River in south Montana near Yellowstone Park, seeks a doctor. Free office space for one year, loan of a car, gasoline at a discount, and other perquisites. Finest landscape in America, mild winters.”

“Is that where you’ve been?” Betsy asked without betraying her response to his revelation.

“Yep. Flew out to Billings, was met by a committee of the finest townsmen and -women ever, and rode with them over fascinating back roads to their town of Silver Butte. They made it clear before we got there that the settlement had been named in the last century in hopes there’d be silver. There wasn’t.”

“Did it look feasible?” Betsy asked.

“For my purposes, yes.”

“Exactly what are your purposes?” Krenek asked, and he replied:
“To be a doctor. To run the whole gamut. Building a small hospital. Bringing some young medical resident in to help me establish a countywide network. And to treat every sick person who can find the path to my door.” He stopped, then clarified his dream: “To be the kind of doctor I imagined I’d be when I started out years ago in Illinois.”

Nora asked: “Is there a hospital of any kind in the area?”

“There’s a small building they’ve been using as a first-aid center. Good hospitals in Bozeman, fifty-two miles away, and Butte, sixty-one, with helicopter services in the area. And absolutely first-class facilities in Billings, Montana.”

“Any other doctors in the vicinity?” Nora asked.

“Two older men in towns rather distant, but each of them is thinking of quitting.”

“Did the community look as if it could…I guess I mean”—Krenek fumbled—“did it sound as if it could support a doctor? What do your medical associations recommend as the minimum population to support one doctor?”

“Comes in, I think, at about twenty-four hundred.”

“And this Silver Butte has eighteen hundred? Does that mean the doctor starves?”

“It means, I think, that a good doctor can use that as a base and build a clientele.”