Bitter Blood (3 page)

Delores began attending Little Colonel productions, then joined the group and tried out for a part. Her first appearance was in “My Three Angels” in December 1975, and she was widely congratulated for her skill. She had a knack for acting, the others told her, and she thrived on the attention. She became one of the company’s most enthusiastic members. In coming years, she would appear in eight more productions, always playing “little old lady parts,” as she laughingly called them. She liked the other members of the company, formed several friendships within the group, and particularly enjoyed the regular covered-dish social gatherings, where her Strawberry Delight dessert was always praised—and always the first to disappear.

Delores usually came to theater functions alone. Only a couple of times did Chuck ever come, and then he seemed uncomfortable. Louise Mahin, who, with her husband, Frank, was a founder of the theater, became friends with Delores and directed her in four plays. She thought Delores bright, curious, outgoing, funny, an excellent actress, “a sweet kid.” She did not like Chuck. On the few occasions she had been around him, she found him rude, belligerent, demanding, all words that could have come straight from Delores’s mouth. Delores filled her ears with complaints about Chuck, and Louise offered solace.

The entire theater company was aware that Delores was unhappy at home. She broadcast her discontent to anybody who would listen. One night at a party at the theater, Delores was complaining about her husband to a group in the kitchen.

“I wish he’d die,” she said.

Her friend Eddie Logsdon, who knew Chuck and liked him, stepped into the awkward silence that followed.

“Now, Delores, you don’t mean that,” he said.

“Oh, yes, I do too,” she replied.

Nobody knew the truth of that better than Delores’s maid, Helen Stewart, who started working for her shortly before she moved into her new house on Covered Bridge Road and had become a close friend. Hundreds of times she had heard Delores declare her wish for Chuck’s death. “He never walked out the door that she didn’t wish him dead,” Helen recalled.

The animosity between Delores and Chuck was of long standing. Neighbors at Hunting Creek knew that they lived separately—Chuck in the basement, Delores upstairs—an arrangement that continued in the house on Covered Bridge Road. The main living area of the house, the upper floor, was ruled by Delores, and Chuck was allowed to venture there only when Tom visited. The rest of the time he was remanded to the downstairs den, where he holed up with his business awards, his son’s athletic trophies, and the color TV on which he watched sporting events alone. Delores still cooked his meals, sometimes delivering them to the den, other times leaving them on the staircase in the foyer for him to retrieve. Two copies of the
Courier-Journal
came to the house because Delores refused to touch a newspaper that her husband had handled.

Chuck wasn’t secretive about his situation. “She lives upstairs in the farthest corner and I live downstairs in the farthest corner and we communicate by CB radio,” he joked to fellow jurors once when he found himself on jury duty.

Although he rarely talked about his private life at work, his colleagues were aware of the conflict at home. They knew that when Chuck came to GE social affairs he usually came alone and that the few times Delores had come with him she had done her best to embarrass him with outspoken opinions and put-downs. Delores’s friends knew in no uncertain terms how she felt about GE people: she detested them and wanted nothing to do with them.

At work, Chuck was an authoritative figure, widely respected and promptly obeyed. But at home he shrank before Delores’s unrelenting scorn and rarely stood up to her. He had learned that there was no winning against Delores, and he retreated to the comforts available in alcohol.

“A worthless drunk,” Delores called him.

Whatever drinking Chuck did, it never affected his performance at work, where he was greatly admired. But the pressures of his job were great, and combined with the conflict at home, they had taken a toll. In Chicago in 1965 Chuck had suffered a heart attack that kept him out of work for several months, and more recently he had been treated for ulcers. His boss of many years had retired, and a friend with whom he’d risen through the GE ranks was about to step down as well. Sales had slumped drastically, and automation was bringing great change. GE was about to lop 6,500 workers from its payroll at Appliance Park, some with as much as fourteen years seniority. Tired and feeling less than well, Chuck didn’t think he could muster the energy to deal with the coming new problems, and, in 1980 at sixty-three, he announced his retirement.

Delores was livid about his decision. She told friends that he was retiring only to keep her from doing what she wanted to do. “He just wants to cramp my style,” she insisted. She had been taking courses in music at Bellarmine College, a Catholic school in south Louisville, as well as studying piano. She often banged away on her piano, sometimes taping her efforts, but when Chuck retired, she stopped her lessons in protest, draped the piano in black muslin, and topped it with white lilies to symbolize her martyrdom and the murder of her musical dreams.

Chuck discovered that the pressures of retirement weren’t so easy for him to deal with, either. He tried doing things around the house, but nothing that he did pleased Delores. He couldn’t even mow the grass to suit her, he complained to friends. Delores didn’t want him at home expecting meals at certain hours, creating messes in his downstairs quarters, and fouling the air with smoke from the Pall Malls on which he puffed addictively.

Of all the things that irritated Delores about her husband, his smoking might have bothered her most. She once had smoked heavily herself, so much so, she joked, that she couldn’t even shower without a cigarette. But after she quit, she became a fanatical antismoker. She reprimanded people who smoked near her in restaurants, elevators, and supermarket lines. She posted a big NO SMOKING sign beside the door leading from the garage into the house and had smaller signs in the house and in her car. Helen Stewart, the maid, had to go into the backyard to smoke. But no amount of harping could stop Delores’s husband from smoking in the house. She even tried physically wresting cigarettes from him when he brought them home from the store, but he always smuggled in more. Delores refused to deal with the butts and ashes that he scattered throughout his quarters, leaving them for Helen to clean up.

GE had been too big a part of Chuck’s life for too long, and he was lost without the company. Retirement, he realized, was not for him, and he sought escape in volunteer work. He served on a mayor’s committee in Louisville, reorganized the transportation system of the Red Cross, advised small business operators at the Chamber of Commerce. He left home almost every morning and didn’t return until evening, just as he had done when working.

Delores became convinced that he was having an affair. Moist Pearl, she derisively called the woman, without the slightest proof that she even existed.

Janie had returned home from California to attend dental school by the time Chuck retired, and Delores enlisted her as an ally in her battles with Chuck. Delores did not use only Janie to try to catch Chuck in his affair, she even called on friends and one of Janie’s old boyfriends for assistance.

This former boyfriend, John Trent, a lawyer in Lexington, wasn’t surprised when Delores tried to get him to assist in her scheming, but he wanted nothing to do with it. He only hoped her suspicions were true. He liked Chuck and well knew the humiliations and turmoil he’d suffered because of Delores. Trent had once spent Christmas at the house on Covered Bridge Road, and on Christmas Eve, when Janie and her mother went to church, he had stayed home with Chuck.

Chuck began to talk about Delores, almost as if in apology, as though he needed to try to explain why she was the way she was. “She’s a good woman,” he kept saying. He accepted much of the responsibility for her actions. The demands of his job, his inattention, the many moves had affected her he said. What seemed clear to Trent was that he loved her and forgave her the abuses he endured. “He seemed like a moral guy,” Trent recalled. “I think he considered this was his payback for the suffering he had inflicted on Delores.”

Joyce Rose was one friend Delores asked to help trap Chuck in his supposed dalliances. Joyce and her husband, Paul, open and friendly country people, felt close to both Delores and Chuck. Paul first met the Lynches when he was running a garage and they began bringing in their cars and lawn mowers to be repaired. Paul particularly liked Chuck, who he considered to be a man of great character and breadth, and enjoyed talking with him about business and sports. Paul knew that Chuck was a man of integrity the day he brought a car to him that he was about to sell. A part was wearing but not yet defective. Paul told him that it would be a while before the part produced a problem, and since he was going to sell the car, he could get by without replacing it. Chuck told him to replace it. He didn’t think it right to sell the car knowing that a problem would soon surface.

Delores and Joyce became close friends. In the summertime, the Roses often drove to the house on Covered Bridge Road carrying dishpans filled with fresh vegetables from their big garden. Delores popped in frequently at the Roses’ old oak-shaded white house in Pewee Valley to sit at Joyce’s kitchen table, drinking coffee and talking. “You’ve got the warmest kitchen in the county,” Delores said.

Joyce shied from Delores’s efforts to recruit her into exposing Chuck’s supposed affair. But one day Delores called and said she’d discovered that Chuck was taking his paramour to the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club not far from the Lynch house, and Joyce drove to the club and questioned the manager to satisfy her curiosity.

“That poor man comes out here and sits for hours just looking at the golf course,” she remembered the manager telling her. He figured that Chuck was either lonely or disturbed and didn’t bother him. Joyce decided that Chuck was deeply depressed. She felt sorry for him and ashamed for spying on him.

Delores’s friends didn’t understand why she didn’t just divorce Chuck and let him have somebody else if she thought that was what he wanted, but she made it known that she wasn’t about to meekly walk away and let somebody else waltz in and take half of what she had earned with “years of misery.” Her friends were only reconfirmed in their suspicions that Delores’s misery was her greatest pleasure.

Chuck’s drinking worsened. “He wasn’t a mean drunk,” said a friend. “He would get sad and lonely and sentimental when he was drinking.” Delores complained constantly about the empty bottles downstairs, bottles left for Helen Stewart to cart out. With Chuck’s increase in drinking came deterioration in his health, but when he grew sick and too weak to get to the doctor, neither Delores nor Janie would take him. He was forced to call Helen to come for him. He bought her lunch and gave her twenty-five dollars for her trouble.

In June 1983, Delores and Janie were getting ready to fly to Albuquerque for Tom’s second wedding, to his former dental assistant. Chuck was going, too (Delores dared not displease Tom by opposing his presence), but a few days before their departure, Helen got a disgusted call from Delores telling her she had better come and attend to Chuck.

Helen found him in the throes of delirium tremens. He was hallucinating that he was hosting a big gathering of GE people and was distraught that he couldn’t find their cars outside. Helen talked him gently to his car and drove him to the doctor, who admitted him to the hospital. Delores and Janie flew to Albuquerque without him.

Chuck was still hospitalized when Delores and Janie returned, but neither visited him. When Delores’s closest friend, Susan Reid, asked what was wrong with Chuck, Delores said, “I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t bother to find out.”

Helen took Chuck home from the hospital. Drinking was killing him, the doctors had told him. He heeded their advice to stop, but he returned to a hostile home and a future made even bleaker without alcohol.

Less than five months after Chuck’s release from the hospital, on Saturday, November 5, Delores called Susan Reid about 4:30 in the afternoon. Susan had listened for years to Delores’s diatribes about Chuck (Delores called him the Poobah to Susan), had heard over and over her wishes for his death. Susan knew that whatever love Delores might once have had for him long ago had been overwhelmed by hatred and contempt, but she never really understood the reason for it. Like all of Delores’s friends, she was a little weary of hearing about it and dreaded that inevitable part of Delores’s conversations. But on this afternoon, to Susan’s relief, Delores chatted about other things.

“Well, I’ve got to go,” Delores said after a while. “I’ve got to cook the Poobah’s dinner.”

“What are you fixing?” Susan asked.

“Green beans and scrambled eggs.”

“Oh, Delores, that’s a terrible combination.”

“He doesn’t even deserve that.”

Two hours later, Susan got another call from an excited Delores.

“I think Chuck’s dead,” Delores said.

“What?”

“He’s lying on the floor in front of the TV and I can’t find a pulse.”

“Have you called the rescue squad?”

“No.”

“For God’s sake, Delores, call the rescue squad! Don’t call me!”

Susan drove the eight miles to Delores’s house, arriving before the rescue squad. The emergency technicians tried without success to resuscitate Chuck. The county police came, as did the county coroner, Harold “Skippy” Corum, an insurance agent. The coroner viewed the body, talked with emergency technicians and police, conferred with Chuck’s doctor by telephone, and ruled the death of natural causes, an apparent heart attack. Delores displayed no emotion, and neither did Janie when she arrived later. Other things seemed to be on Delores’s mind.