AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Or do you mean more like…” She leans toward the coffee table and takes a tissue. “Like his appendectomy scar?”
“Yes!” Fletch pounces on the second detail given. “That one. Talk to us about the scar.”
“It’s jagged and messy.” Sniffling, she brings her tissue up and wipes beneath her nose. “He always hated it, said it was ugly.”
“Was Benedict a vain man?” Archer asks. “Did he care about his looks?”
“Not so much.” She glances around to me, then to Aubree, who waits by the door. While she takes stock of her audience, she fusses with her tissue. “He minded being noticed,” she hedges. “Like, he wanted to be able to walk through a busy room and not be seen at all.”
“Why?” Fletch has that gentler touch that Archer doesn’t have—for anyone besides me. He leans closer to Roberta, but not so close that he could be called a creep. And when he taps her knee, it comes across as supportive, and not a sexual advance. “Why did he want to go unnoticed?”
“Because he considered himself quite…” She hesitates. “Important.”
“How so?” Archer comes to perch on the edge of my desk, his back to me, and folds his arms. “Can you explain that a little more?”
“Ben came from a wealthy family, struck by tragedy.” She sniffles until her lips twitch. “He was also a gifted athlete, and got a full-ride scholarship.”
“But you said his family was wealthy.” I can’t help myself. I swear I try to, but I sit forward and enter the cops’ world. “Why would a boy from wealth attend college on a scholarship?”
“Because he could,” she answers. “Because he felt entitled. Ben was a smart man, Detectives. He was quite brilliant, actually. But when he was seventeen, his family was involved in a car accident that killed his parents, and put him and a couple of his friends in the hospital for a significant length of time. He was an athlete who, at that important juncture in his life, was laid up in a bed and feeling sorry for himself.
“My personal opinion,” she lowers her voice and leans closer to Fletch, like the dead man himself can hear her, “is that he wanted that school so much, he applied during his hospital stay, and got in on gray-area technicalities. He inherited his parents’ wealth, but as the sole survivor of that tragic accident, I always thought he felt he shouldn’t have to spend it. Rather, that the world owed him something.”
“Hence,” Aubree murmurs. “Scholarship. He still got the school and the degree, but he didn’t have to pay the price of admission.”
“Right.” Roberta sits back on the couch and crosses her ankles. “Same with the scar. He needed surgery, this was a couple of years after that car accident, and of course, he refused to pay. That was his money, and he wasn’t about to waste it on something that had come free in the past. Even though he had millions in the bank. We,” she adds a little sadly, “had several million. But we weren’t allowed to spend it on things that he knew from experience he could get for free. So he presented to ERs from here to Florida, but refused to provide his ID and insurance paperwork. He was often rejected, until eventually, he was turning septic and in significant pain.”
“So he would have died?” I ask incredulously. “For the sake of keeping his money?”
“Well… no,” she says softly. “That was too far, even for him. Instead, he… compromised, to a degree.”
“He found someone shoddy?” Fletch guesses. “Thus the ugly scar?”
“Pretty much,” she agrees with a shrug. “The doctor he settled on had their own, newly begun practice. I swear, the surgeon was younger than we were, but Benedict got what he wanted in the end.”
“Why would a doctor perform surgery and not charge for it?” Curious, Fletch turns to study me. Then Aubs. “I don’t get it.”
“To build his portfolio,” Roberta answers, drawing his attention back around to her. “The surgeon was new. He was keen to become the best and most prolific in the city, and he was more than happy to have a real live body to work on instead of a cadaver. So they created a mutually beneficial agreement amongst themselves, and the surgery went ahead.”
“But it wasn’t mutually beneficial, was it?” Archer points out. “Benedict wanted perfection, for free. Instead, he got a jagged scar.”
“That’s right.” She nods, ever so subtly. “That scar became a hex on his life. He hated it. Complained it was too conspicuous.”
“But… it was beneath his clothes,” Aubree counters. “It would be conspicuous only to those who saw him naked.”
Roberta scoffs in the back of her throat. “An argument I’ve been making for the last twenty years. Kind of makes a woman wonder, doesn’t it?”
“Do you think your husband was sleeping with other women?” I ask. I’m not a cop. I never said I was. But I’m curious as hell and working hard not to blow the detectives’ case. “You seem… well, desensitized to the idea.”
“Doctor, I’m quitecertainmy husband was sleeping with other women. He and I worked for the same company, in the same position, but in different wings of the facility. I can count on one hand the number of times I traveled in my entire career, and yet, he was out of the office at least three out of five days each week of our twenty-two-year marriage.”
“So if you had suspicions, why let him keep doing it?” Fletch asks. “Why stay for so long and pretend he wasn’t lying every week?”
“My son.” She pauses for a long beat. Her eyes burn redder, and her jaw quivers with emotion. But the tenderness in her gaze deepens.
“My husband was not a very nice, nor generous man, Detectives. We had more money than we’d ever need, but we lived on scraps. Our home was nothing fancy, but it had a roof to sleep beneath—and for that, I’ve always been grateful. It’s more than others have, I know. Still, beyond the very basics of bread and water and a bed, Benedict held tight to every cent he possessed. But…” She shakes her head and exhales. “Iknew, if I left this man, he would use everything he had to fight me, no matter the cost. He would keep my son, just to punish me. Because that’s who he was, you understand? Entitled. And my mistake in all this was conceiving a son who would carry on the McArthur name.”
Danger, Will Robinson! You’re giving the cops motive.
