Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “That poor man comes out here and sits for hours just looking at the golf course,” she remembered the manager telling her. He figured that Chuck was either lonely or disturbed and didn’t bother him. Joyce decided that Chuck was deeply depressed. She felt sorry for him and ashamed for spying on him.

  Delores’s friends didn’t understand why she didn’t just divorce Chuck and let him have somebody else if she thought that was what he wanted, but she made it known that she wasn’t about to meekly walk away and let somebody else waltz in and take half of what she had earned with “years of misery.” Her friends were only reconfirmed in their suspicions that Delores’s misery was her greatest pleasure.

  Chuck’s drinking worsened. “He wasn’t a mean drunk,” said a friend. “He would get sad and lonely and sentimental when he was drinking.” Delores complained constantly about the empty bottles downstairs, bottles left for Helen Stewart to cart out. With Chuck’s increase in drinking came deterioration in his health, but when he grew sick and too weak to get to the doctor, neither Delores nor Janie would take him. He was forced to call Helen to come for him. He bought her lunch and gave her twenty-five dollars for her trouble.

  In June 1983, Delores and Janie were getting ready to fly to Albuquerque for Tom’s second wedding, to his former dental assistant. Chuck was going, too (Delores dared not displease Tom by opposing his presence), but a few days before their departure, Helen got a disgusted call from Delores telling her she had better come and attend to Chuck.

  Helen found him in the throes of delirium tremens. He was hallucinating that he was hosting a big gathering of GE people and was distraught that he couldn’t find their cars outside. Helen talked him gently to his car and drove him to the doctor, who admitted him to the hospital. Delores and Janie flew to Albuquerque without him.

  Chuck was still hospitalized when Delores and Janie returned, but neither visited him. When Delores’s closest friend, Susan Reid, asked what was wrong with Chuck, Delores said, “I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t bother to find out.”

  Helen took Chuck home from the hospital. Drinking was killing him, the doctors had told him. He heeded their advice to stop, but he returned to a hostile home and a future made even bleaker without alcohol.

  Less than five months after Chuck’s release from the hospital, on Saturday, November 5, Delores called Susan Reid about 4:30 in the afternoon. Susan had listened for years to Delores’s diatribes about Chuck (Delores called him the Poobah to Susan), had heard over and over her wishes for his death. Susan knew that whatever love Delores might once have had for him long ago had been overwhelmed by hatred and contempt, but she never really understood the reason for it. Like all of Delores’s friends, she was a little weary of hearing about it and dreaded that inevitable part of Delores’s conversations. But on this afternoon, to Susan’s relief, Delores chatted about other things.

  “Well, I’ve got to go,” Delores said after a while. “I’ve got to cook the Poobah’s dinner.”

  “What are you fixing?” Susan asked.

  “Green beans and scrambled eggs.”

  “Oh, Delores, that’s a terrible combination.”

  “He doesn’t even deserve that.”

  Two hours later, Susan got another call from an excited Delores.

  “I think Chuck’s dead,” Delores said.

  “What?”

  “He’s lying on the floor in front of the TV and I can’t find a pulse.”

  “Have you called the rescue squad?”

  “No.”

  “For God’s sake, Delores, call the rescue squad! Don’t call me!”

  Susan drove the eight miles to Delores’s house, arriving before the rescue squad. The emergency technicians tried without success to resuscitate Chuck. The county police came, as did the county coroner, Harold “Skippy” Corum, an insurance agent. The coroner viewed the body, talked with emergency technicians and police, conferred with Chuck’s doctor by telephone, and ruled the death of natural causes, an apparent heart attack. Delores displayed no emotion, and neither did Janie when she arrived later. Other things seemed to be on Delores’s mind.

  “I don’t know whether I’m going to be a princess or a pauper,” she remarked to Susan.

  A pauper she was not.

  “I had no idea that man had that much money,” she later told Eddie Logsdon, a friend from the playhouse.

  Chuck had been wise with his investments, and unbeknownst to Delores he had set up trusts for every member of his family. Not only was Delores the recipient of a handsome annual return from her trust, but by scrimping on her household allowance, she had secretly accumulated a tidy nest egg of her own. She could afford to live out her life in ease and comfort, free of the strictures of the monthly allowance Chuck had imposed upon her, the parsimonious nature of which she had complained about frequently while stashing a good part of it away. But lavish living and unnecessary spending were not her style. She had, after all, lived through the Depression. Her habits were too deeply ingrained to change.

  She spent hours each week clipping and redeeming newspaper and magazine savings coupons and rarely let a rebate offer pass. She drove miles out of her way to pick up sale items. She packed her lunch on trips to keep from spending money in restaurants. She rarely threw away anything deemed usable. She wore the same pair of shoes to both of Tom’s weddings, thirteen years apart, dyeing them from their original lime green to match her outfit the second time. She even kept scraps of soap and molded them into new bars.

  Helen Stewart knew those frugal habits as well as anybody. That was the reason she delayed telling Delores that she’d had to raise rates for her customers by five dollars a day. For fourteen years, Helen had been cleaning Delores’s big house every Tuesday. She put in a long day, and Delores’s passion for cleanliness made it a hard day. Helen polished floors on her hands and knees, washed windows, painted, burned trash. For this, her fee was twenty-five dollars. From her five customers, she eked out a bare subsistence. She, better than Delores, knew the value of a dollar.

  But three months after Chuck’s death, when Helen told Delores about the increase, Delores balked, saying she couldn’t afford it. Despite Delores’s constant cries of poverty, Helen knew better. If Delores didn’t pay, she wouldn’t be able to come anymore, she said. Fine, said Delores.

  Helen had traveled with Delores, shopped with her, gone out to eat with her. On many Tuesday afternoons, they had sat together after work, drinking beer, talking, and laughing. She thought of Delores as friend, confidante, and adviser. Delores had helped her with her children’s problems, stood up for her boyfriend when he killed her uncle in a drunken argument. But Helen wasn’t going to let Delores bully her into accepting a lower rate than she got from her other customers. She left and didn’t return.

  On Friday, July 20, five months after Helen quit, Delores called just to chat. “TJ’s coming to visit next week,” she said with delight, adding that he was bringing the kids. She thought Helen would want to know. Helen had taken care of the boys several times and traveled with Delores to visit them.

  “Who’s cleaning your house now?” Helen found herself asking.

  Delores said that she was doing it herself, that she hadn’t been able to find anybody who suited her, and she had a lot to do before Tom arrived.

  “You want me to come back?” Helen asked.

  Delores was exultant. She called several friends that day to report that Helen was coming back—and at the same rate.

  3

  The phone at Delores’s house rang all afternoon and into the evening of Sunday, July 22, 1984. Strange. Her callers knew that Delores always left the phone off the hook when she was away, one of her many ways of foiling robbers, who, she was convinced, always called to see if anybody was home before breaking in. Besides, the phone’s ringing upset her dogs, and she would never allow that.

  Fern Morgan started calling about 1 P.M. and kept at it until after 4. Fern had met Delores at the monthly meetings of the P
rospect Homemakers Club, where Delores had learned to cook new dishes and make dolls from old copies of Reader’s Digest. Fern owned a moving company that had been started by her husband, and three days earlier she’d sent a truck and one of her crews to move Janie’s belongings from her university apartment. She hadn’t heard from Delores and wondered if everything had gone to suit her. Delores had talked about going swimming with Fern sometime when Fern was visiting in nearby Prospect with her daughter, who had a pool, and Fern wanted to invite Delores to bring her swimsuit and come over this afternoon.

  “That’s funny, Denise,” Fern said to her daughter after several attempts to reach her friend. “Delores never leaves her phone on the hook if she goes out.”

  Susan Reid started calling shortly after Fern quit trying. She hadn’t talked to Delores since Friday, when Delores called to tell her about Helen coming back and to ask if she was going to church Sunday. Susan sometimes went to church with Delores and Marjorie Chinnock. She had done so the Sunday before, and Delores had invited her home for breakfast afterward, but Susan declined. She had to have a cigarette with her coffee, and she didn’t want to go into the backyard to do it.

  Delores sometimes nagged her about going to church, and Susan told her that if she decided to go, she’d meet her there. But she hadn’t felt well that morning and had decided to stay home.

  That Delores would become such a close friend had at first seemed highly unlikely to Susan. They had met in 1970, when Susan was working at the real estate agency that Chuck and Delores contracted to sell their house in Hunting Creek. Delores either called or dropped in at the agency almost every day complaining because the house hadn’t been sold. “She’d just raise hell,” Susan remembered. All the agents dreaded hearing from her and maneuvered to avoid her, Susan included.

  Susan got to know Delores better when Delores joined St. James Church, where Susan was a member. They sided together in the dispute that split the congregation. But it wasn’t until after the death of Susan’s husband, Carroll, in 1975, that they became close. Delores was wonderfully supportive. After going through the church fight and the loss of Susan’s husband together, they began to see each other or talk by telephone several times a week.

  When the phone rang without an answer Sunday afternoon, Susan knew something was wrong. She figured Delores’s phone was out of order again, as it had been a month or so earlier, when a caller would hear a ring, although the phone was dead at Delores’s house.

  Susan tried calling a few more times Sunday night with the same result. Surely the phone would be fixed tomorrow, she thought. She waited for Delores to call Monday with her can-you-believe-it? complaints about the phone company. When she didn’t, Susan tried calling again. The phone rang and rang. Boy, Delores would be hot, Susan thought. She pitied the phone company employees who would have to make the repairs.

  Susan tried calling again Tuesday morning without result and decided that she would just drop by to see Delores later in the day. She had to work until 1 P.M. at Clore and Duncan Real Estate Company. The office was at Interstate 71 on State Road 329, the road on which Delores lived just four miles away. But when Susan got off work, she decided to first drive to her sylvan red cottage in Pewee Valley, four miles away, to change clothes and pick up Abbi, her Shih Tzu. She knew that Delores would want to see Abbi. Their dogs had helped bind their friendship.

  Susan was well aware that, with the exception of her children, Delores’s dogs were the most important things in her life. They were pampered Yorkshire terriers. Pooky was twelve, Poppy eleven. Delores not only lavished them with attention, but, more significantly, had no qualms about spending opulently on them. She had special covers made for their beds and pillows. She bathed them with expensive soaps and perfumed and powdered them with Estée Lauder. She gave them birthday parties with decorated cakes and took them to the vet to have their teeth cleaned. While picking up store-brand canned goods for her husband’s meals, she sometimes bought steak for her dogs.

  Delores was convinced that Pooky wanted to talk, and she spent hours on end training him to say “mama,” sometimes preserving his howling efforts on cassette tapes. Unsurprisingly to those who knew Delores and her dogs, Pooky was diagnosed as neurotic and required daily tranquilizers. Because he couldn’t control his bladder, he spent most of his time in a wire pen in the kitchen, where the floor was covered with big sheets of plain newsprint that Delores bought especially for their absorbent qualities.

  Abbi looked expectantly out the car window as Susan turned into Delores’s driveway and headed for the house. As she neared the parking area, Susan saw the three familiar cars side by side—Delores’s Olds, Chuck’s VW, Janie’s Nova—but she didn’t see the rivulet of blood that had trickled more than thirty feet down the driveway and dried in the hot July sun. Not until she topped the hill did she see the body lying at the garage door.

  Horrified, Susan jerked her car into reverse and backed quickly to the front of the house. Later, she wouldn’t remember the drive back to her office, but her fellow employees never would forget the look on her face when she burst through the door. She was shaking so hard that her teeth chattered. She had to sit before she could say anything.

  “Call the police,” she finally stammered. “Delores is dead at the garage door. Janie’s probably in the house. There’s two dogs in there, too.”

  Steve Nobles was heading home in his police cruiser on State Road 329 near Crestwood, only a short distance from the real estate office where Susan Reid was trying to get control of herself, when he heard a call on his car radio for one of his officers to check a report of a woman down at 10420 Covered Bridge Road, the road on which he was traveling. The call was meant for Detective Tom Swinney, who was home at the time, away from his radio. Nobles picked up his mike and told the dispatcher that he was not far from the address and would check it.

  At thirty-two, Nobles had been chief of the Oldham County Police for four years. A lean man with military bearing, he wore his formfitting khaki uniform starched and creased, gold eagles flashing at the collars.

  Nobles arrived at Delores’s house only minutes after the call came at 2:55. He pulled into the driveway, stopped, looked around, saw nothing amiss, then drove slowly to the loop in front of the house and blew his horn. No reaction. He got out for a look around. He started up the drive to the side of the house when an unusual odor hit him and he spotted the body beside the garage. Suddenly, he realized he was in an exposed position. He drew his revolver, and, crouching, retreated quickly to the cover of his car.

  Tom Swinney had received a telephone call from the dispatcher and was on his way to the scene, only a few miles away on Covered Bridge Road.

  “Three-o-five, step it up,” Nobles called to him from his portable radio. “We’ve got trouble here. Run code three.”

  Nobles also notified the dispatcher to get car 315, Officer Steve Sparrow, to the scene.

  Nobles’s first thought was that the daughter the dispatcher had mentioned might have gone crazy, killed her mother, and was still holed up in the house. He kept a close watch on windows and doors until Swinney arrived.

  “We’ve got a body up here beside the garage and according to the lady who called in, there’s supposed to be a daughter somewhere,” Nobles told Swinney when his cruiser pulled up behind the chief’s. “We’ve got to go inside.”

  “I know the house,” Swinney said.

  He also knew Delores and Janie. He was the officer who had investigated Chuck’s death eight months earlier.

  With revolvers and portable radios in hand, the two officers advanced cautiously upon the house.

  4

  Tiny, sweet Janie. That was how family and friends thought of Janie Lynch, framed in their minds by her stature and disposition. In many ways, she was like her mother. She had inherited her mother’s size, for one thing, a petite five-foot-two, and, as she approached forty, still wore a size three dress. Her mother’s outgoing nature was hers as well. Perky, bubbly, and vi
vacious were words frequently used to describe Janie, although she also harbored a certain reserve that sometimes made her seem cool and distant, hard to get to know. Once that reserve was breached, she was witty and charming, fun to be around, just as her mother frequently was. In one crucial aspect, though, Janie was very much unlike her mother. She was without her mother’s abrasiveness and guile. Underlying Janie’s character was a sincere sweetness that endeared her to all.

  For the past year, however, Janie had not been her usual self. She was in the clutches of a malaise she couldn’t escape. She tired easily, became quickly irritated, was plagued with vague aches. She complained of having no energy and feeling bad all the time.

  Anemia, the doctors told her, and she had been to several. They seemed to think that her complaints were related to the stress of her final year in dental school. They gave her thyroid medicine and vitamin shots and sent her on her way. Stress from school no doubt was part of the problem, but those who knew Janie best suspected something deeper. Once again, she was approaching one of those points in her life that she dreaded and sought to avoid: a time for decision making, for setting a course.

  Janie never had been able to figure out what she wanted from life, and now, after four years of striving for her latest degree, her third, and only a few months from turning forty, she again was questioning. She had talked of moving to Albuquerque and joining her brother in his dental practice, of starting a practice near Louisville, of moving to some other state and making a whole new start, but she had seen drawbacks in all of these options and wasn’t really drawn to any one of them.

  Her mother told her not to worry. Just move in with her, rest, recover her health, then decide. That was the course Janie chose, the course of delayed decision, a non-decision that would be the most decisive of her life. Delores couldn’t have been happier about it. Her friends knew that she had Janie exactly where she wanted her.