Murdering Mr. Monti: A Merry Little Tale of Sex and Violence (11 page)

I stared at him. He was trying to scare me, right?

“And it won’t be, you know,” he went on, “just little Wally who’s going to get it. There’s Jeff—you heard what’s doing with him?” I nodded. “And then there’s your husband. Your husband the fancy pediatric surgeon. Your husband and those two malpractice suits.”

Mr. Monti was pushing hard, but I didn’t intend to let him see I was shaken. “Those stupid lawsuits!” I snapped, “I can’t
believe
those people are suing. They’re being just incredibly ungrateful.”

“Ungrateful?” said Mr. Monti. “These are heartsick, heartbroken people, their children’s lives shattered by a surgeon’s knife.” He puffed out his cheeks and slowly blew the air from his pursed-up lips before he continued. “But lucky for them, a friend of mine—I’ve got my friends at the hospital—looked up their records and helped me track them down.”

“Tracked them down to do what exactly?” I whispered, though I already knew the answer.

“To tell them it wasn’t too late to sue the pediatric surgeon who messed up their children. And”—his (once so melting, now so menacing) big brown eyes locked
onto mine—“to offer them my help with their legal expenses.”

•  •  •

While I never refrain from criticizing the medical profession for being (this is a partial list) insensitive, greedy, arrogant, conservative, and patronizing to women, I also (where it’s appropriate) am always willing to give the doctors their due. I have nothing but praise, for instance, for my artful cosmetic surgeon, who rescued me from upper-eyelid droop. I adore my nimble internist, who is the Jascha Heifetz of the sigmoidoscope. I am even willing to grant that the sadist who deep-cleans my gums four miserable times a year is, though made of stone, the finest periodontist in the Washington area. And I’m totally convinced that my husband, Jake, whatever his personal inadequacies, is a brilliant, gifted, dedicated surgeon. (You don’t have to take my word for it; there are major—major!—hospitals in New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles where they’re begging on bended knee for Jake to please be their chief of pediatric surgery.) So when, a few months back, I heard that the Tesslers and the Malones were suing Jake for malpractice in the treatment of Tara Tessler and Kenny Malone, I knew (and this was
before
I knew that Joseph Augustus Monti had put them up to it) that Jake was being persecuted unjustly.

At the time the suits were brought, it was almost impossible to get my husband to talk about them. He was evasive, dismissive, cryptic, and abrupt. He was also (although, of course, he would never admit this to me—but I knew) terribly hurt that the Tesslers and the Malones, whose daughter and son he had done so much
for, would take him to court on such baseless and nasty charges.

I extracted the details one night in July when Jake had come home from Children’s with a bad headache, and I offered to give him an almond cream massage. He flopped on his belly while I, on my knees, gently straddled his thighs, kneading his bunched-up muscles with the silky, slithery, almond-scented lotion.

“Ooooh, ahhh,” he sighed. “I love that a lot.”

“More?” I asked him.

“More.”

“Happy to do it,” I said. “But you’ve got to talk to me.

Which is how I finally got the straight scoop on the Case of the Shattered Spleen and the Case of Malrotation Volvulus.

Kenny Malone was the kid with the shattered spleen, which got badly smashed up (along with his leg) when he ran in front of a car at the age of six. Jake—in a race-against-the-clock emergency operation—saved Kenny’s life by taking out his spleen. Jake also, in the post-op care, gave Kenny his all-out, you’re-my-main man attention, the kind he rarely gives unless you are scared and sick and under the age of eighteen. The Malones had sent Jake a lavish “Thanks, Doc, we’ll never forget you” Christmas card every single year for the last five years. This summer—on the grounds that “due to the removal of his spleen Kenny Malone has suffered from, and-will continue to suffer from, a lifelong susceptibility to painful and potentially lethal infections”—the Malones filed a two-million-dollar suit against Jake.

The Tesslers’ suit was for few and a half million dollars.

Another family that should have been singing Jake’s praises instead of suing him, the Tesslers, had brought Tara in with a twisted intestine, which, as I understand it, is the English translation of malrotation volvulus. As Jake explained it to me, when a person’s intestine gets twisted, the twisting cuts off its blood supply, and without a supply of blood the intestine will die, and if a surgeon doesn’t untwist the intestine and remove the part that is dead, pretty soon the person will be dead too. The reason Tara Tessler, now three, is just in the fifth percentile for height and weight and has chronic diarrhea and will spend her life on a highly restricted diet is that Jake took out part of her intestine. And the reason Tara Tessler did not die at five weeks old is that Jake took out part of her intestine.

Okay, so what we’re dealing with here are very ungrateful parents, who got ungrateful after they met Mr. Monti. A man I thought, until yesterday, I’d know how to outmaneuver and control. A man I thought, until yesterday, was vengeful and mean but not
that
vengeful and mean. A man I thought I’d like to kill, which of course is totally different from
deciding
to kill, which—since yesterday afternoon, on Sunday, September 20, is what I decided to do to Mr. Monti.

•  •  •

As I often explain to my readers, our capacity to deny, repress, and split off isn’t always, by any means, a bad thing. Indeed, it is this capacity that permits us to go about our daily lives while waiting to get the results of an MRI that will tell us whether we’ve got a brain tumor, while wondering whether our husband
has decided he’s going to leave us for Sunny Voight, or while worrying our hearts out over the safety and well-being of our nearest and dearest. Thus I was able—despite (on August 18) that unpleasant scene on our front porch, and despite (on August 20) Jeff’s highly distressing real estate revelations, and even despite (on August 24) my ugly confrontation with Mr. Monti—to write my column, run my house, nurture my relationships, and (on August 27) serve my fabled red pepper, soup, followed by veal tonnato and tabbouleh, followed by a simple lime sherbet with blueberries, to Marvin and Susan Kipper, Dave and Joan Goldenberg, and the McCloskeys, plus Carolyn and one of her former husbands.

The meal was a smash with my dinner guests, none of whom knew how much I had on my mind. For only that morning Louis had phoned, to say he had come up with zip on Jeff’s real estate problems.

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” he said, after he broke the news, “developers are going bust left and right. Please don’t think I’m a wise-ass if I say to you that if your kid’s wiped out, he’s going to be in some very ritzy company.”

What about that new group—that new Consortium of Black Business Folks—that Louis had established and was working with? Hadn’t they been talking about some housing for the homeless in Anacostia?

Louis laughed. “Yeah, sure. I’ll tell you what, get some fat cat philanthropist to buy up Jeff’s houses and
give
them-to CBBF. Then Jeff can pay off his debts, the fat cat can get a place in heaven—and a tax deduction—and CBBF will turn them into first-rate, well-run
housing for the homeless, They’ll even. I’ll bet you, name it after the fat cat.”

“This isn’t,” I told him, “a totally impossible idea. Semi-impossible, maybe. But not totally.”

“And if that plan doesn’t work, I think I could get you a couple of guys to torch the properties. Then Jeff could walk away with the insurance.”

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “You know arsonists?
Reliable
arsonists?”

“Yeah, I do, Brenda, but that was a joke, okay?” Laid-back Louis sounded a little ruffled. “I know all kinds of guys who do all kinds of crazy things, but I’m trying to
discourage
them from doing diem.”

“Of course you are,” I said. “And I am with you a hundred percent. Anyway, I just might know a philanthropist who wants the family name on some homes for the homeless.”

Actually, I’m acquainted with four seriously rich people, three of whom (the exception is Joseph Monti) would easily qualify as philanthropists. One is my friend Carolyn, whose vast sums of money, however, are tied up in what is called a spendthrift trust, watched over by bankers who get to say yea or nay (and mostly say nay) whenever she wants to spend money on save-the-world ventures. Another is Vivian Feuerbach, a magnificent eighty-two-year-old grande dame, the widow of a man who had been in oil when it was good to be in oil. She likes me a lot—the two of us always share season tickets to the Washington Opera—but Vivian only gives money to the arts, and most particularly to music. The other philanthropist in my life, or formerly in my life, was retired ambassador Edmund Standish Voight, whose grandchild had died
of leukemia and whose central charity was children’s diseases. Jake and I first met Edmund eight years ago at a black tie do at Children’s Hospital, for which he had just grandly purchased a CAT scanner. He was there with his niece, the daughter of the youngest of his brothers, the blue-eyed, black-haired-, beguiling Sunny Voight.

Sunny had just moved from Boston to take a job at the Smithsonian. Her Uncle Edmund was showing her around. And because we all took to each other, Sunny and Edmund and Jake and I found ourselves spending a lot of time together. And some of the time it was just Jake and me and Sunny. And some of the time (though nobody told me about it) it was just Jake and Sunny.

Do you remember Leslie Caron in
Gigi? Lili? An American in Paris?
Absolutely irresistible, right? Those expressive eyes! That graceful dancer’s body! That accent! That style, so ingenue yet chic! Now combine her with the young Audrey Hepburn. Those expressive eyes! That graceful dancer’s body! That accent! That style, so ingenue yet chic! And give her warmth and modesty, along with a Ph.D. in paleontology, plus a blind, irrational reverence for surgeons. Would you want a woman like this (who, incidentally, had Leslie’s lush mouth and Audrey’s fine cheekbones) anywhere near your beloved surgical husband, especially if his taste ran to the Leslie-Audrey type rather than to bosomy Playboy bunnies? Of course you wouldn’t. No woman would. So why did I let her in? Was I that sure of Jake or of our marriage? I think that the answer is yes but I also think there’s another answer: Although I couldn’t compete with Sunny in body and eyes and
accent and cheekbones and chic, I was light-years ahead of her in ingenue.

I’m embarrassed to admit that—even after the day I saw them together, leaving the Holiday Inn across from Saks—I couldn’t believe I was seeing what I was seeing. I was willing for Jake to tell me that he had gone with Sunny to the Holiday Inn to help choose a room for Sunny’s mother’s next visit. I was willing to hear that they’d gone to Saks to secretly buy me a birthday present (my birthday was a mere ten months away) and Sunny had started to faint from the heat and Jake rushed her off to the Holiday Inn to lie down. I was willing to hear that there was this really spectacular view of upper Wisconsin Avenue which had to be seen from a room at the Holiday Inn. I was willing to hear almost anything except what I heard on that hot June day eight years ago, when Jake came home and I said to him, “Before we have our dinner, we need to take a walk in the Bishop’s Garden.”

“Taking a walk in the Bishop’s Garden” was how Jake and I used to tell each other, in code, that we needed an urgent, private talk—immediately. We saved these walks for red alerts—like the time ten years ago when the doctor thought I had a brain tumor and I sat in the garden sobbing and clutching Jake’s hand, and we wound up having a fight because he refused to swear that if I died of this tumor he’d marry my friend Marianne who, while admittedly not
that
sexy, would make a wonderful mother for our boys.

Words usually burst right out of me, but on this bad June evening all the words seemed pasted to my throat. We strolled through the Cleveland Park streets, past wide porches hung with trailing baskets of geraniums,
and onto the grounds of our neighborhood cathedral, then took the stone steps that led by a trickling pool down to the heart of the Bishop’s Garden, flamboyant this season with roses in red and yellow and pink and palest peach champagne.

“So,” I asked, bending down to breathe the shy perfume of a newly opened rosebud, “are you and Sunny having an affair?”

Jake looked at me as if deciding whether he wanted to operate and if so where was the best place to plunge in the knife. “She didn’t want it to happen,” Jake told me. “And I didn’t want it to happen.”

I straightened up. “Then I guess it didn’t happen.”

“It happened,” he said.

We sat—as far apart as we could—on a small wooden bench just beyond
The Prodigal Son,
stone figures draped in an all-is-forgiven embrace. I contemplated my wedding band. “Are you in love with Sunny?” I asked my husband. “And if you are, what are you going to do about it?”

“We love each other,” Jake answered. “And—oh, Jesus, Bren, I’m sorry—but I swear I don’t know
what
I’m going to do.”

I had planned to maintain my composure while Jake explained that he wasn’t in love, but merely infatuated, and hadn’t the slightest intention (What was I thinking of? What was I, nuts?) of leaving me. But all of a sudden I’m hearing that our marriage could really be over, I’m seeing my life about to careen off a cliff, and I started to sob even louder than I had on the day I’d sat sobbing about my brain tumor.

He pulled out a clean white handkerchief and handed it to me. I threw it back in his face and continued to cry.

“Look,” he said, neatly folding the. hankie and putting it back In his pocket, “I’ll really understand if you want me out of the house while I’m thinking through—”

“You’re leaving already?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“No discussion» no nothing? Eighteen years and it’s over, just like that?” I wiped my wet eyes with the back of my hands and sniffed up the drip from my nose. “Tell Sunny Voight to go and get her own husband! Tell her to get the hell out of our lives!”