Ben’s Karma

Ben couldn’t help feeling disappointed. Rose only carved out a long weekend for him when it had been almost eight months since they were together. He accepted that art was her priority, but couldn’t she take off a little early this one day?

And the guesthouse? Is that all I am? A guest?

Her call had flattened his dream of a romantic reunion. It was fitting that Patsy Cline was singing I Fall to Pieces when he got to the highway to drive to Colorado Springs.

He reflected on the history of his love life as he drove. His marriage had been more about achieving the right status than love. His affairs were cliche whirlwinds—the stuff of soap operas. In all his life before he met Rose, he had only truly been in love once—with Diane. But even with Diane, he’d wondered if she would’ve loved him if she hadn’t been dying of cancer—if she hadn’t needed someone to care for her, and he just happened to come along.

He threw himself into love. But it was his addiction, he knew, and seldom reciprocated. And isn’t Rose just the latest example?

He parked in front of Rose’s house. Wanting to be wrong about her, he rang the bell to the main house, but there was no answer. He retrieved his bag from the car and headed to the guesthouse, where he found the key was under the mat as promised.

As he walked in, he noticed the baseball bat just before he almost stepped on it. What the heck? He picked it up before noticing a substance all over the fat end. He hit the light switch, then dropped the bat, the aluminum clanging against the tiles.

He stared down. It looked sticky, and he saw something on the floor as well. Blood?

But the door was locked. He backed onto the landing and felt a darkness emanating from the guesthouse as he stared at the door, trying to make sense of things.

He descended the stairs and walked slowly around the guesthouse, looking for any sign of a break-in—but saw nothing. I should call the police.

But what if it’s not blood? He relaxed a little. That has to be it. It’s something else. Why the bat would be laying on the floor, he didn’t know. But I’m being silly. He trudged back up the stairs.

He picked up the bat and held it with both hands—ready to strike—just in case, all the while feeling ridiculous. But the moment he stepped toward the kitchen, fear came roaring back. A man was splayed on the floor, his head laying in a dark pool. Ben dropped the bat again, the sound causing him to flinch. He froze and struggled to breathe.

He swallowed hard and walked slowly toward the body. He could make out nothing about the man. His face was just a bloody pile of flesh.

Ben gagged and ran to the bathroom, fell to his knees, and his insides came gushing out. He puked until there was nothing left to give, then just sat there in a cold sweat.

He was responsible for Max Nelson’s death, but he was spared seeing him freshly killed. The pictures at the trial had been horrifying. But he now understood better why Bonnie Bailey broke down on the stand when she was asked that simple question. How many times did you stab him?

Ben stood, turned on the faucet, and washed his face. By stepping the murder scene, he went to the bedroom, finding the bed unmade.

He fished his phone out of his pocket and called Rose’s temporary number. No answer. He then tried her old number, which went to voicemail. He texted her on both numbers—no response. He feared that whoever had killed the man in the dining room had harmed her as well.

What made no sense was the locked door. Don’t I call the police now?

No. My fingerprints are on the bat. The police always look for the easiest suspect. Right now, I’m it.

He returned to the kitchen and walked over to the table, still avoiding looking at the dead body. He had seen a laptop there before, but now, he saw something else. He stared down at the envelope. It wasn’t sealed, so, he was able to take the card out.

As he began reading, the blood drained from his face.

Dear Sergio,

Thank you for your love and kindness. Your presence has brightened my summer.

When I get back from New York, we’ll take a long weekend just for you. I will miss you while I’m away.

All My Love,

` Rose

Fucking Sergio? New York? He ambled back toward the bedroom, grabbing the walls and the door facing to avoid falling.

Sergio had been staying in the guesthouse a while, Ben thought, as he stepped over dirty clothes and walked toward the dresser, where he saw another envelope. Inside it was an announcement for Rose’s exhibit at the Franklin Burns Gallery in New York.

New Artist Rose Cantor’s Stunning Mural

The Convent

August 18, 2005

Tomorrow!

He sat down on the bed as his mind raced to put together the pieces. He closed his eyes and took long slow breaths, the way Diane had taught him. He became calm, his thoughts clear.

As hard as it was to accept, he was now certain Rose was responsible for the bloody dead Sergio. Nothing else made sense. No forced entry. No sign of a struggle.

He could almost imagine what happened. Sergio was sitting at the dining table, and Rose surprised him with the baseball bat—he never knew what hit him. How much anger did that take?

At first, Ben thought, I don’t know Rose at all. Then, he realized the same could have been said of himself and Bonnie Bailey. Are we all killers at heart?

Then, came the even harder conclusion. She set me up.

She placed the baseball bat where he would likely touch it. He used the key under the mat. His fingerprints are on both things and on the door.

Ben laid back on the bed where the dead man had, no doubt, been sleeping just a few hours before. His mind traveled back to his trial—to his acquittal. He’d always had this uneasy feeling there would be a reckoning.

He’d been a rather typical criminal defendant, who allowed his attorney to take advantage of everything that might prevent him from going to prison. He never told his mother, his wife, or his attorney the truth. He didn’t come clean until well after the trial ended.

After the acquittal, he threw himself into caring for Diane. He came to believe she was why he hadn’t gone to prison, why every witness and fact lined up just perfectly to create reasonable doubt. The Universe had sent him Diane, and taking care of her was his penance.

Nevertheless, there had been that nagging, lurking sense that had never gone away—that now stared him in the face. This is the reckoning.

For all her flaws, Ben loved Rose every bit as much as he had loved Diane. An unconditional love.

Did the Universe need Rose to be free? Is that why I’m here, now?

“Do I really love her?” he asked out loud. He had no doubt.

He understood why Rose set him up. She knew I’d be willing. She knew about his pent up guilt, and that he wouldn’t want her to lose her dream because of whatever Sergio was up to.

He also understood why she set him up the way she did. The key under the mat, the bat in the doorway, the love note to Sergio. We’ll have the same story.

Rose had killed her former student and lover, Ben assumed for good reasons, although the love note was strange. She needed Ben to cover for her—the Universe needed him to—because she was finally entering the art world.

The Franklin Burns Gallery . . . Rose Art . . . Michael Burns—the boy Rose had described as her first love, came into Ben’s mind, and he knew her trip to New York was about more than an art show. Perverse as they were, her cruel intentions and the role he was cast to play made sense. Diane taught me, the Universe works in mysterious ways.

He sighed, pulled out his phone, and dialed 911.

The rest of the day and night was as close to an out-of-body experience as Ben had ever had—even more than his murder trial had been. He didn’t talk or answer questions—he was placed in handcuffs and taken to jail. He refused to talk, not because he wasn’t willing to, but because he was exhausted, and he wasn’t exactly sure what to say, yet.

***

The police sat him in an interrogation room, gave him a cup of coffee, and told him to wait. Eventually, two detectives arrived.

“Mr. Holmes, can I call you Ben?”

“Sure.”

“I’m Detective Ralston. This is Detective Gooch.” Straight from central casting.

“We’re from homicide, as you might imagine,” Ralston continued. “You’re a lawyer, so I assume you know the drill. I gotta say, you don’t look much like a killer. Maybe that’s why you got off in Texas, hmm? You want to explain what happened here? The arresting officers said you refused to talk. Are you going to pull that, ‘I won’t talk without my lawyer present’ crap?”

“No. I was a bit dazed before. I’ll talk now.”

“Ok.” Ralston sat down across from him. “Take us through it. We’ve got plenty of time. Do you mind if we record?”

Gooch flipped a switch on the video camera set up at the end of the table.

Ben took a deep breath. “Detectives, I learned today that the dead man was back in a relationship with Rose Cantor, the owner of the house. I came to town to run the Pikes Peak Marathon. Rose was going to do that with me, but she has an art exhibit opening tomorrow in New York. I went to her guesthouse because that is where we were last together, when I came for Christmas.”

Ben closed his eyes for a moment and breathed. “I found Mr. Garrido there. We argued. I found the baseball bat—I remembered seeing it before, in the hall closet. And, I guess, the rest is obvious.”

“When did you arrive?”

“I drove in from Canyon, Texas—got in around three pm.”

“Did you go straight to Ms. Cantor’s home? You didn’t check into a hotel? Where were you planning to stay?”

“I was planning to find a hotel. The reason I went by is because . . . when we signed up for the marathon back in March, Rose said I could stay with her—in her guesthouse. I went by because I was angry she’d changed her mind.”

“When did she change her mind?”

Ben believed the new phone Rose had been using was a ruse, that she’d been planning this. She eliminated a text record, as he doubted the phone was registered in her name. Even so, he decided to make it easy for her.

“It was around the first of the month. We used to talk every day. But she called me then and ended our relationship. I haven’t talked to her since then, although I tried to call her today, after I killed Mr. Garrido.”

“Ok, Ben. You’ve made our job easier. I have to say, you’re awfully calm for a guy who just bludgeoned another man to death with a baseball bat.”

The detectives got up to leave, but Ralston turned back to him at the door. “You want your phone call?”

“Yes, Detective.”

When he got to the phone, Ben called his mother. He dreaded it, but he didn’t want her to hear about his arrest on the news, as she had back in 1995.

“You’re calling from jail?”

She sounds so afraid. She doesn’t deserve this.

“Yes, Mom.” He took a deep breath. “I’m under arrest for killing a man. Rose’s boyfriend.”

“What?” Her voice cracked. “Ben, what are you saying? I thought you were her boyfriend.”

“It turns out I’m not. I went to her house. He was there. We argued. There was a baseball bat. The rage just took over, Mom.”

She was crying. “Oh, no. I can’t believe that, Ben. That’s not you.”

“You’re right. I don’t think it was me. It didn’t feel like me. It doesn’t seem like it really happened.”

He hated doing this to his mother, but Ben knew that if he told her the truth, she wouldn’t let him take the fall for Rose. Telling her that he murdered another man was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Much harder than when he had confessed to her a half dozen years earlier, that he was, in fact, the middleman in the murder for hire he’d been acquitted of.

When he hung up, all the emotions he’d held back the past several hours crashed down on him. He laid his head on the desk and cried.

Finally, a uniformed officer arrived and took him to the holding cell, and he slept.

He was aroused early in the morning by Ralston. “You’re being charged with murder, Ben. You should get a lawyer.”

Later in the morning, after he had been moved, showered, and put in a jumpsuit, he placed a call to his old law partner in Amarillo, Judge Jim Barton. Barton was flabbergasted by Ben’s call, but he helped him. Later that afternoon, a lawyer named Robert Nance came to see him.

“You have some big friends back in Texas,” Nance said after introducing himself. “This is not a brag, but I’m the big gun—the one you call when you did it but want to get off.”

Nance’s swagger reminded Ben of himself back before the whole Max Nelson thing, when Ben was that lawyer.

“Judge Barton persuaded me you were worth helping,” Nance continued. “So, you want to tell me what the hell happened? They told me you confessed. I’m pretty good, but I don’t know if I can get around that—you don’t look like you were tortured.”

Nance made Ben smile for the first time since he saw the blood-covered baseball bat the afternoon before.

“No. I wasn’t tortured. Look Robert, I appreciate that you prefer extricating clients from situations like these. But I want to take responsibility, and I know I need a lawyer to do that right.”

“Hmm.” Nance had that look of someone trying to understand the inexplicable. He sighed. “Sounds like it was a crime of passion, as they say on TV.”

“Yes.” Ben nodded. “I guess I lost it. It’s all a blur. But I did it, and I’m not looking to get out of it.”

“I understand this isn’t your first rodeo, as you guys say in Texas.”

Ben smiled again. Man does his homework.

“Barton told me to Google you. I guess you went a different route in that case a few years ago.”

“Yeah.” Ben sighed, closing his eyes for a moment. “I’m not that person anymore. I think the time has come for me to pay.”

Nance looked ready to laugh. “Now, Ben, you know as well as I do, that’s not what this whole system is about . . . I could make a run at throwing out your confession.”

“Yes, but I don’t want you to.”

Nance leaned back in his chair. A man Ben doubted was seldom surprised, looked almost dumbfounded. Finally, he said, “I respect that, Ben.” He looks like he means it.

Nance stroked his chin. “The DA’s office has some serious questions about your story, Ben. The police are content with your confession, but the prosecutor must tell her boss they’ve gotten everyone involved.” Nance paused, looking at Ben, waiting for a response.

Ben looked back at Nance, not offering one.

“I’m going to be honest. There was no blood on you, no sign that you had any contact with Mr. Garrido, other than your fingerprints on the bat.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I think your girlfriend Rose did this, and you’re covering for her.”

Ben gave Nance no satisfaction. He had perfected his poker face from the days he used to play that sport. After he and Nance looked at each other in silence for a minute, Ben said, “I did it. I’ve confessed. That’s not going to change, Robert. I trust you can deal with the DA.”

“You’re not like any lawyer I ever met. Or any client.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you really love this woman so much you’d go to prison for her?”

“I’m not changing my mind.”

“I hear you, but I’m going to charge you my fee, so I’m going to do my job.”

***

Ben didn’t hear from anyone, except his mother, for the next two days. He was treated much better than he had been a decade before at the Potter County Jail in Amarillo. There was a small library, where he tried to keep his mind occupied, being resolute in the decision he’d made. He truly believed this is the reason I met Rose. He intuitively understood why she saw him as the perfect patsy, and he agreed with her. From what little she had told him about what the Garrido family did to her, he assumed Sergio had given her every reason to kill him.

What was Sergio doing there? Staying in the guesthouse? It didn’t make much sense. He guessed young Mr. Garrido was up to no good. How Rose got caught up in it, why she would have let him stay there, he knew he might never know. But he could almost feel the scales of the Universe tip back into balance.