A Case of Need: A Novel (26 page)

They were all in the living room. Betty Lee was crying; Judith was taking care of the children. There was broken glass all around. Two of the children had been cut deeply but not seriously. A policeman was questioning Mrs. Lee. He wasn’t getting anywhere. All she said was, “We asked for protection. We asked for it. We pleaded with you, but you never came …”

“Jesus, lady,” said the cop.

“We asked. Don’t we have any rights?”

“Jesus, lady,” he said again.

I helped Judith bandage the kids.

“What happened?”

Suddenly the cop turned on me. “Who’re you?”

“I’m a doctor.”

“Yeah, well, high time,” he said and turned back to Mrs. Lee.

Judith was subdued and pale. “It started twenty minutes ago,” she said. “We’ve been getting threats all day, and letters. Then it finally happened: four cars pulled up and a bunch of kids got out. They set up the cross and poured gasoline over it and lighted it. There must have been about twenty of them. They all stood there and sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ Then they started to throw rocks when they saw us looking at them through the window. It was like a nightmare.”

“What did the kids look like? Were they well-dressed? What were the cars like?”

She shook her head. “That was the worst part. They were young, nice-looking kids. If they had been old bigots, I could understand, but they were just teenagers. You should have seen their faces.”

We finished bandaging the children and got them out of the room.

“I’d like to see the letters you’ve received,” I said.

Just then the Lees’ year-old baby crawled into the living room. He was smiling and making little gurgling, drooling noises. The glinting glass on the carpet obviously intrigued him.

“Hey!” I said to the cop at the door. “Get him!”

The cop looked down. He had been watching the baby all along.

Now he bent over and stopped the baby by holding on to his pudgy ankle.

“Pick him up,” I said to the cop. “He can’t hurt you.

Reluctantly, the cop picked him up. He handled the baby as if he might be diseased. You could see the distaste on his face: abortionist’s baby.

Judith walked over, her shoes crunching on the glass. She took the baby from the cop. The baby didn’t know how the cop felt. He had been happily playing with the cop’s shiny buttons and drooling on his blue uniform. He didn’t like it when Judith took him away from those buttons.

I heard the other cop say to Mrs. Lee, “Well, look, we get threats all the time. We can’t respond to them all.”

“But we called when they burned that … that
thing
on the lawn.”

“That’s a cross.”

“I know what it is,” she said. She was no longer crying. She was mad.

“We came as fast as we could,” the cop said. “That’s the truth, lady. As fast as we could.”

Judith said to me, “It took them fifteen minutes. By that time, all the windows were broken and the teenagers were gone.”

I went over to the table and looked at the letters. They had been carefully opened and stacked in a neat pile. Most were handscrawled; a few were typewritten. They were all short, some just a sentence, and they all had the breathless hiss of a curse.

Dirty comminist Jewlover Nigger lover killer. You and youre kind will get what you deserve, baby killers. You are the scum of the earth. You may think you are in Germany but you are not.

Unsigned.

Our Lord and Saviour spake this ‘Suffer the little children to come to me.’ You have sinned against the Lord Jesus Our God and you will suffer the retrobution at his Almighty Hands. Praise God in his infinite wisdom and mercy.

Unsigned.

The decent Godfearing people of the Commonwealth will not sit idly by. We shall fight you wherever the fight is to be. We shall drive you from your homes, we shall drive you from this country. We shall drive all of you out, until our Commonwealth is a decent place for all to live.

Unsigned.

We caught you. We’ll catch all your friends. Doctors think they can do anything, a) Driving those big Cadillacs. b) charging high cost. c) making patients wait that’s why they call them patients because they wait patiently. d) But you are all evil. You will be stopped.

Unsigned.

You like to kill kids? See how it feels to have yours killed.

Unsigned.

Abortion is a crime against God and man and society and the newborn yet to be. You will pay on this earth. But the Lord in his infinite way will burn you in hell forever.

Unsigned.

Abortion is worse than murder. What did they ever do to you? Answer that and you will see I am right. May you rot in jail and your family die.

Unsigned.

There was a final letter, written in a neat feminine hand.

I am sorry to hear of your misfortune. I know this must be a trying time for all of you. I only wanted to say that I am very grateful for what you did for me last year, and that I believe in you and what you are doing. You are the most wonderful doctor I have ever known, and the most honest. You have made my life much better than it would be otherwise, and my husband and I are eternally grateful. I shall pray for you every night.

Mrs. Allison Banks

I slipped it into my pocket. It wouldn’t do to have that one lying around.

I heard voices behind me.

“Well, well, well. Fancy that.”

I turned. It was Peterson.

“My wife called me.”

“Fancy that.” He looked around the room. With all the broken windows, it was getting chilly as night fell. “Quite a mess, isn’t it?”

“You might say so.”

“Yes, indeed.” He walked around the room. “Quite a mess.”

Watching him, I had a sudden horrifying vision of a uniformed man in heavy boots struggling among ruins. It was a generalized vision, nonspecific, attached to no particular time or place or era.

Another man pushed into the room. He wore a raincoat and had a pad in his hand.

“Who’re you?” Peterson said.

“Curtis. From the
Globe,
sir.”

“Now who called you, fella?”

Peterson looked around the room. His eyes rested on me.

“Not nice,” Peterson said. “Not nice at all.”

“It’s a reputable newspaper. This boy will report the facts accurately. You surely can’t object to that.”

“Listen,” Peterson said. “This is a city of two and a half million and the police department is understaffed. We can’t investigate every crackpot complaint and lunatic threat that comes along. We can’t do that if we want to do the regular things, like direct traffic.”

“Family of an accused,” I said. I was aware that the reporter was watching me closely. “Family of an accused receives threats by telephone and letter. Wife and young family. She’s afraid. You ignore her.”

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

“Then something big happens. They start to burn a cross and tear the place apart. The wife calls for help. It takes your boys fifteen minutes to get here. How far away is the nearest station?”

“That’s not the point.”

The reporter was writing.

“You’ll look bad,” I said. “Lots of citizens in this town are opposed to abortion, but still more are against the wanton, lawless destruction of private property by a band of young hoodlums—”

“They weren’t hoodlums.”

I turned to the reporter. “Captain Peterson expresses the opinion that the kids who burned the cross and broke every window in the house were not young hoodlums.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Peterson said quickly.

“It’s what he said,” I told the reporter. “Furthermore, you may be interested to know that two children were seriously lacerated by flying glass. Children ages three and five, seriously lacerated.”

“That’s not what I was told,” Peterson said. “The cuts were only—”

“I believe,” I said, “that I am the only doctor present at this time. Or did the police bring a doctor when they finally answered the call for help?”

He was silent.

“Did the police bring a doctor?” the reporter asked.

“No.”

“Did they summon a doctor?”

“No.”

The reporter wrote swiftly.

“I’ll get you, Berry,” Peterson said. “I’ll get you for this.”

“Careful. You’re in front of a reporter.”

His eyes shot daggers. He turned on his heel.

“By the way,” I said, “what steps will the police now take to prevent a recurrence?”

He stopped. “That hasn’t been decided yet.”

“Be sure,” I said, “to explain to this reporter how unfortunate it all is and how you’ll post a twenty-four-hour guard. Be sure to make that clear.”

He curled his lips, but I knew he would do it. That’s all I wanted—protection for Betty, and a little pressure on the police.

J
UDITH TOOK THE KIDS HOME
; I stayed with Betty and helped her board up the windows. It took nearly an hour, and with each one I did, I got angrier.

Betty’s kids were subdued, but would not go to sleep. They kept coming downstairs to complain that their cuts hurt or that they wanted a glass of water. Young Henry in particular complained about his foot, so I removed the bandage to be certain I had not missed any glass. I found a small sliver still lodged in the wound.

Sitting there, with his small foot in my hand, and Betty telling him not to cry as I cleaned the wound again, I suddenly felt tired. The house smelled of burning wood, from the cross. It was chilly and drafty from the broken windows. Everything was a shambles; it would take days to clean it up.

All so unnecessary.

When I finished with Henry’s foot, I went back to the letters Betty had received. Reading them made me feel more tired. I kept wondering how people could do it, what they must have been thinking. The obvious answer was that they were thinking nothing. They were simply reacting, as I had been reacting, as everyone had been reacting.

I suddenly wanted it finished. I wanted the letters to stop, the windows to be fixed, the wounds to heal, and life to return to normal. I wanted it very badly.

So I called George Wilson.

“I thought you might call,” Wilson said.

“How’d you like to take a trip?”

“Where?”

“J. D. Randall’s.”

“Why?”

“To call off the dogs,” I said.

“Meet me in twenty minutes,” he said and hung up.

AS WE DROVE TOWARD THE SOUTH SHORE
and the Randall house, Wilson said, “What made you change your mind?”

“A lot of things.”

“The kids?”

“A lot of things,” I repeated.

We drove for a while in silence, then he said, “You know what this means, don’t you? It means we put the squeeze on Mrs. Randall and on Peter.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“I thought he was your buddy.”

“I’m tired.”

“I thought doctors never got tired.”

“Lay off, will you?”

It was late, approaching nine. The sky was black.

“When we get to the house,” Wilson said, “I’ll do the talking, right?”

“O.K.,” I said.

“It’s no good if we both talk. It has to be just one.”

“You can have your moment,” I said.

He smiled. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

“No. Not much.”

“But you need me.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Just so we understand each other,” he said.

“Just so you do the job,” I said.

I did not remember exactly where the house was, so I slowed the car as I approached. Finally I found it and was about to turn into the drive when I stopped. Up ahead, in the gravel turnabout in front of the house, were two cars. One was J. D. Randall’s silver Porsche. The other was a gray Mercedes sedan.

“What’s the matter?”

I doused my lights and backed away.

“What’s going on?” Wilson said.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Well are we going in, or not?”

“No,” I said. I backed across the road and parked on the opposite side, near the shrubs. I had a good view up the drive to the house and could see both cars clearly.

“Why not?”

“Because,” I said, “there’s a Mercedes parked there.”

“So?”

“Peter Randall owns a Mercedes.”

“All the better,” Wilson said. “We can confront them together.”

“No,” I said. “Because Peter Randall told me his car was stolen.”

“Oh?”

“That’s what he said.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

I thought back. Something was beginning to bother me, to pick at my mind. Then I remembered: the car I had seen in the Randall garage when I had visited Mrs. Randall.

I opened my door. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“I want to see that car,” I said.

We stepped out into the night, which was damp and unpleasant. Walking up the drive, I reached into my pocket and felt my little penlight. I always carried it; a throwback to my days as an intern. I was glad to have it now.

“You realize,” Wilson whispered, “that we’re trespassing on private property.”

“I realize.”

We moved from the crunching gravel to the soft grass and climbed the hill toward the house. There were lights burning on the ground floor, but the shades were drawn, and we could not see inside.

We came to the cars and stepped onto the gravel again. The sounds of our footsteps seemed loud. I reached the Mercedes and flicked on my penlight. The car was empty; there was nothing in the back seat.

I stopped.

The driver’s seat was soaked in blood.

“Well, well,” Wilson said.

I was about to speak when we heard voices and a door opening. We hurried back to the grass and slipped behind a bush near the drive.

J. D. Randall came out of the house. Peter was with him. They were arguing about something in low voices; I heard Peter say, “All ridiculous,” and J. D. said, “Too careful”; but otherwise their voices were inaudible. They came down the steps to the cars. Peter got into the Mercedes and started the engine. J. D. said, “Follow me,” and Peter nodded. Then J. D. got into the silver Porsche and started down the drive.

At the road, they turned right, heading south.