by Louis Lopez
Nate was sitting in a chair looking at his wife lying in bed. She always went to bed early, usually by 9. A hard back copy of Jessica Logan's Dark Promise of Delight, which he had read and then given to her, lay by her legs. He could now hear the ambulance siren, about two blocks away.
He went and held the front door wide open as the emergency team members arrived. "Through there," he yelled, "to the left, then the second door on the right." They rushed in and he followed right behind.
"I already checked her pulse and there was nothing. She wasn't breathing, either," he told them. They checked for themselves, two men and a woman, and then started giving her CPR, working quietly except for necessary communication. After several minutes of intense effort, they stopped, put her on a stretcher, and carried her to the ambulance.
"We've got to get her to a hospital immediately," the chief technician told Nate. "It's our only chance. You can come with us if you want."
"Sure," he answered, then quickly climbed into the ambulance. He didn't even have time to grab his jacket although it was a cold night.
They kept up their efforts in the ambulance. In addition to more CPR, they tried administering oxygen. Nate watched calmly, admiring their dedication in the face of the odds. The chief then sat next to him with a clipboard in hand, filling out a form.
"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you some questions. I hope you won't mind," he said gently.
"No, not at all," Nate answered calmly.
"Does Mrs. Dumont suffer from any disease or permanent illness?"
"She has high blood pressure."
"Is she taking medication for it?"
"No, it's not supposed to be that serious. She's just supposed to keep her weight down and not eat much salt."
"Good advice. Does she suffer from any other illness?"
"No."
"How old is your wife, sir?"
"She's 60."
The technician asked additional questions about her medical history. Then he asked, "Mr. Dumont, do you know what happened tonight?"
"Yes. I think she took an overdose of sleeping pills. I didn't have time to show you, but there was a bottle of Vitamin C pills that was almost empty on the little dresser next to her side of the bed. You see, she had a bad cold, and she believed Vitamin C was very helpful for colds. So she meant to drink a handful of Vitamin C pills. The glass in which she took the water is on the dresser next to the bottle. She used to like to switch pills around and put them in old bottles, so she must have put sleeping pills in the bottle where she thought she had Vitamin C and then took a handful of those. I looked in the bottle, and they looked like sleeping pills to me. I think because of her cold she wasn't able to tell any difference in the taste."
"Were you at home when this happened, Mr. Dumont?"
"No, I'm real sorry I wasn't. Maybe, I would have caught it if I had," he said as he looked down at the floor with a painful grimace. "You see some nights I go over to Gurney's to have a few drinks with friends I have there. I've been going there for years. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't go there."
"Well, I wouldn't worry about that, Mr. Dumont. Thank you, that's all the questions I have for now. I'm real sorry about this happening."
When they got to the hospital, they quickly rushed her to the emergency ward. A woman and a teenage boy were in the waiting room talking nervously. After a few minutes, the woman struck up a conversation with Nate. She said she had brought in her other son with a broken arm and after a few minutes asked Nate why he was there.
"Oh, my God. That's terrible," she exclaimed after he told her. "Don't worry, though. She'll be all right. You wait and see."
"Yea, you're probably right," he answered quietly as he smiled back at her. She complained of how hard it was being a single mother with teenage boys. She had only been divorced a year. Another statistic, Nate thought, adding to the sadly high divorce rate.
He thought of the difficulties he might have in adjusting, the little chores and details that he would have to attend that he had been able to ignore for a long time, most of all the loneliness. He got up and paced after finding himself unable to concentrate on the magazines that were there.
He realized that making the adjustment from being married to being single was not going to be completely unfamiliar to him. He had managed well through the periods of singlehood that had been interspersed between his five marriages. Then again he had never stayed single for very long, and he would not hesitate to marry again. He couldn't see not being married. Marriage offered the best chance at bliss and happiness for a person's life, even for someone of 65, in spite of all the problems and unfortunate discord that always inevitably seemed to accompany marriage. He and the present Mrs. Dumont had been arguing frequently. She had even made an appointment for next week to see a divorce lawyer. That had depressed him for several days. He hated to think of a marriage ending in divorce.
Knowing that he had certain flaws that were hard to live with, he had tried hard to correct them and to be as good a husband as possible. He admitted he was not very responsible when it came to money and that he liked to spend a lot of time at the nearest neighborhood bar wherever he had lived. Much of his drinking money was spent on buying drinks for other people, which made his wives think he drank excessively. He was also a soft touch for someone in need of a loan, bad enough that his paycheck had been known to disappear entirely. He was also more jealous than he would have liked and had tried very hard to control it. Yes, sometimes he had gotten violent, including the time his second wife had to be taken to emergency, but he hadn't meant it. It had happened when he had had a few too many.
On the other hand, something that women had found very attractive in him was that he was so romantic. He was very attentive and old-fashionedly chivalrous with a habit of giving frequent presents for no reason at all. Expensive flowers were a favorite. His tenderness and easy affection had won the hearts of many women. He was also an untiring reader of romance novels, having read all of the novels of Danielle Steele, Janet Dailey, and other well known romance novelists.
"Sir, could you come with me, please?" a young man asked as he led him through a door to another room. It soon became apparent that he was an emergency room doctor from his air of authority. "Everything possible has been done to save your wife. We've all been working nonstop since she was picked up at your home."
"Yes, I'm sure," answered Nate. He knew what was coming.
"I'm afraid it was simply too late when we got to her. She passed away. I'm very sorry, sir," said the doctor and then explained a little more about what they had tried to do for Mrs. Dumont while Nate listened and grimaced. The doctor asked him to wait a little longer until the coroner came to make his report.
Nate was relieved that with his fifth wife's death he could still say that he had never been divorced. All of his previous wives had also died, and while he had been very sad time, death was still clearly preferable to divorce. There wasn't the sense of failure, and other people were more sympathetic and understanding. He personally knew of instances in which the friends of divorced couples felt they had to choose between the two. It was rare that friends would feel comfortable enough to continue seeing both members of a broken marriage. Then there was the repelling thought that a previous wife might remarry and belong to another man. He realized this was a primitive emotion, but it went deep nonetheless.
He had been in a hospital in a situation like this before and had talked to a coroner, so he told himself that he shouldn't be worried. Two of his previous wives had died in automobile accidents, one had been killed during the apparent commission of a burglary, and the fourth one had been killed by a gas explosion due to a defective furnace in their home. Their friends had felt very sorry for him because of the sudden, unexpected nature of the deaths. It had been different sets of friends each time because he had moved to another part of the country after each death.
The coroner first went to talk to all the emergency room personnel who had been involved in the case including those that had gone to Nate's home on the ambulance call. He looked at the body carefully and talked to the emergency room doctor. He finally came to talk to Nate. The coroner escorted Nate back into the waiting room because of the noise in the treatment area. He was very businesslike. Nate didn't particularly like him but tried to hide it. He knew he had to be careful what he said. Under the circumstances, they could make this into a criminal case. A woman was sitting nearby. The coroner asked Nate most of the same questions that had been asked by the chief technician on the ride in the ambulance. He wrote it all down and asked further questions.
"Sir, do you remember what time you left for the bar you went to?"
"Yes, it was around 8 o'clock."
"And what time did you return?"
"I must have got back a little after midnight."
"What happened when you got home?"
"She looked different somehow and so I touched her. She felt real cold. I got close to her and felt she wasn't breathing. I felt for a pulse in her wrist and there was nothing so I called for the ambulance right away."
"Do you remember who saw you at the bar?"
"Yes, most of my friends were there . . . Jack, Tom Ledbetter, Mike Cios. Nora, the bartender, was there, too."
"How long were you and Mrs. Dumont married, sir?"
"Six years."
"Had you and your wife been getting along lately?"
"Well, we'd been having some arguments but it was, you know, the usual problems you have in marriage."
"Yes, I know," the coroner answered. For the first time, he seemed to loosen up a little. Nate was glad to see that. Perhaps he was having marital problems of his own. The coroner stopped asking questions and kept writing for a minute.
"That's all then, Mr. Dumont. I'm going to report this as an overdose of sleeping pills. I'm very sorry about what happened." He shook Nate's hand, managed a slight smile and walked away. The woman nearby immediately came over and offered her condolences as she hugged him and tried to console him.
Then she said indignantly, "My God, though! What nerve they have to ask all those personal questions. Don't they realize a person is just not feeling up to answering all those silly questions. It was like you were on trial. That sure was rude."
Nate felt relieved as he went to call a taxi to go home. He was confident there wouldn't be any more questions about what had happened. He felt very sad but was nevertheless satisfied that he had now gotten away with killing his fifth wife, just like with all his previous wives whose deaths he had also arranged to look like accidents after they had moved for divorce from him. It hadn't been done in anger or with any desire to retaliate. It was simply that each time he had seen the smoldering signals that a marriage was going to die, he had been horrified of seeing it end by divorce. Besides, what great love story had ever ended in divorce, but how many had ended in death--Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Heathcliffe and Catherine.
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