Dirk Heinze grew up in Anchorage and wrote a best-selling book about the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, which he had experienced as a young boy, before turning to the true crime genre and penning An Encyclopedia of American Criminality, with entries on everyone from Leopold and Loeb to Russell Edeale, an aeronautical engineer who spent his free time putting guns to people’s heads and making them beg for their lives. Shared interest in the criminal mind was the reason that Kirk and Dirk came to their present partnership. Kirk, who was from Vineland, New Jersey, was inspired by Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood, to write a book very much in the same vein: Double Take, about Charlie Towers and Bob Fletcher, brothers who murdered each other’s wives. The consultant on Kirk’s book was Towers’ and Fletcher’s triplet brother Henry Kierbaum, who had just recently retired from GHH (Grady-Hawthorne-Hay) Enterprises, where he headed up the Genitalia Accessories division.
Gail and Ericka sat sipping tea. On the television across the room (its volume turned down and its closed captioning on), Inside Edition was running a story about a dental hygienist in Florida who two years earlier had stabbed one of her clients to death with an air-filled syringe.
“We’ll have to suspend our teatime shortly, Ericka,” said Gail, setting her teacup down. “They’re going to wheel all of us centenarians into the cafeteria and take our picture for the paper tomorrow.”
“Are you looking forward to the celebration?” asked Ericka.
“What’s that, dear?” Gail was momentarily distracted by a passing fellow resident waving at her from the hallway. Lois Gregory, another centenarian, was smiling smugly in the company of three doting men of various ages: her son Les, her grandson, Ari, and Ari’s life-partner, Wayne. Ari, formerly a bookstore owner in Wilmington, Delaware, and Wayne, a building contractor for Holman-Crampo Homes in Dallas, Texas, both of whom had had boyhood crushes on Roy Rogers, had met at a Royandalabilia estate sale six years earlier in Mitchell, South Dakota.
“I was just asking about the celebration tomorrow. Will all of your fellow centenarians be able to attend?”
“Well, dear, we lost Dr. Kleerekoper — the eminent mathematician. He’s been moved to hospice care. But the others are doing quite well for their advanced years. Take Penny Rutland, our resident Mainer; she writes for an outrageously funny newsletter about people who can’t abide flowers. Can you imagine such a thing? I love her spunk and spice, though. She’s the bees’ knees.”
Ericka smiled at the aged flapper. “What about Adelaide — the woman on your floor from Tarrytown?”
“Adelaide’s had a bad cold, but she’s much better now. We’re always holding our breaths around here, since the Grim Reaper often comes with a hacking pneumonic cough. Adelaide’s teacher friend, Carla — I think they met when they did some volunteer work together for the NEA — she’s flying all the way from Pocatello, Idaho, just to be in attendance tomorrow.”
There was a knock on the room’s open door. A pretty woman in her thirties stood in the doorway. “We’re going to take you and Mrs. Connelly down to the cafeteria now for the shoot.”
Gail winked at Ericka and whispered, “She’s new here or she wouldn’t have put it that way. When you get to be Catherine’s and my age, we generally don’t like to hear that we’re about to be shot. It sounds a little like ‘thinning the herd,’ don’t you think?”
Ericka grinned and wagged her finger at her playful friend.
“I don’t need this wheelchair,” said Gail, pointing to her “ride,” “but it seems to make them happy to roll us all around in them. Doesn’t it, Catherine? Oh, she can’t hear me.”
Catherine wouldn’t have heard Gail even if she could hear. At present she was squinting at and quite engrossed in a television program on the History Channel about Typhoid Mary. Catherine winced to see the house where Mary Mallon was quarantined on Brother’s Island, so close to where they had laid out the bodies of Catherine’s mother; her nine-year-old brother, Walter; and her baby sister, Agnes.
As Gail and Ericka were waiting for the assembling of all of the centenarians (in company with their respective retinues), Gail turned to her companion and whispered, “Lucinda — that girl there who wants to have us all ‘shot’—she was telling me the other day about being nearly kidnapped by a pervert in a mall in Waukegan, when she was no more than five. I have come to the conclusion, Ericka, that life is a perilous journey no matter who you are. There are some, like myself, who walk the tightrope and do aerial loop-the-loops to impress the crowds — those who add a layer of additional risk to their lives—we constitute a special category and sometimes we get lucky. My good Lord, I’m one hundred years old. I’ve looked death in the face more times than I can remember, yet here I am!
“But for everyone else, luck plays its part as well. Catherine was lucky to survive what she went through; so many who boarded that boat with her did not. Dorothy, who lives down the hall, survived the sinking of the Lusitania when she was just a little girl. And Angeline — poor Angeline’s face was slashed by her demented father at nearly the same age, but her marriage to her beloved Jake has lasted sixty years. Although, there are so many others I know who have been dealt equally unfortunate hands who did not survive, did not prevail.
“Do you see Alma there? Doesn’t she look exotic in that blueberry-colored gypsy peasant dress her granddaughter Connie got her from the vintage clothing store? Connie’s a dear. She’s taking over the kitchen and making us linguine tonight — she uses lots of oregano. Alma’s brother was shot by his lieutenant for not going ‘over the top’ in the first World War. Shot pointblank right there in the trenches. Lily Lanham — see her there in the pretty red hat? — Lily’s nephew Todd was accidentally pushed off a balcony in a Chicago movie theatre when an usher tried to get him to go home; the young man seemed determined to watch every single screening of The Harvey Girls. You know, the one with the song about the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe? And Amelia Bream’s sister Vanessa — Amelia’s the handsome woman sitting next to Joanna in the big wool sweater — Vanessa broke her neck in a jitterbug competition back in ’39, when she slipped from her partner’s arms in an over-the-head throw and had to spend the rest of her life paralyzed from the neck down.”
“I was almost devoured by hyenas on my trip to Africa last year,” contributed Ericka, almost proudly.
“Yes, I remember you telling me that they invaded your camp one night and tried to get into your tent.”
Ericka cleared her throat. “That’s right.”
Ericka was asked by the photographer to step back. His name was Dack and he wore a deerstalker cap he’d inherited from a favorite great uncle — a Michigan man. Dack was from Wisconsin but had spent most of the last thirty years living in Greenwich in a house he’d bought from an ad man, a Bataan survivor, who’d had the Neocolonial custom-built a few years after the war. The Gold Coast remained very popular with New York “Mad Men.” One of Dack’s neighbors was a Young and Rubicam account executive named Stewart Selman, who made headlines for himself and his agency in 1970 by putting together a midi-skirt ad campaign for New York clothier Bonwit Teller that depicted iconic Americans of the twentieth century (all men!) wearing midi-skirts: Louis Armstrong, the Wright Brothers, Harold Lloyd (hanging from that detaching skyscraper clock wearing a paisley print mid-length), and even Louis B. Mayer, bedecked in a chartreuse calf-length and flanked by a conveniently delighted Mickey and Judy. Several years later, Selman won a Clio for a parody ad in which the gunslinger Shane is persuaded to return to the homesteading Starrett family (in the midst of his ride into the proverbial western sunset) for a bowl of “crispy, crunchy” Golden Grahams breakfast cereal.