Bitter Blood (42 page)

That summer, John and Jim began to tell their daddy about “Uncle Fritz.” They had mentioned Fritz a few times on earlier visits, but Tom hadn’t paid much attention. He knew that Fritz was Susie’s cousin, but he’d seen him only a couple of times. He’d noticed Fritz at the custody hearing the summer before. That had struck him as odd, but other things were on his mind and he didn’t think about it.

Now the boys told him that Uncle Fritz sometimes stayed with them, that he took them camping and to gun shows. They seemed to like him.

Tom couldn’t understand why Susie would be spending so much time with her cousin. She’d never been close to him before, had hardly ever mentioned him. Indeed, Tom had the impression she’d thought her cousin peculiar, as he did. “A nerd for life” was how he’d always pictured Fritz.

“I thought he was a little strange, but I thought he was basically harmless,” Tom said.

He had troubles enough with Susie, though, without questioning why she was spending time with her peculiar cousin.

While the boys were with their father that summer, Fritz was telling Amanda Jones about Susie and her boys. Amanda, who was in love with Fritz, knew that he spent a lot of time with his cousin, and asked about her. Susie and her boys were, after all, among the select few who would be joining them in Fritz’s little survival group when worldwide calamity struck, and Amanda was curious about her. Fritz said that he had to look after Susie and her boys because her parents had thrown them out of their house and wouldn’t do anything for them. He didn’t like it that the boys were in New Mexico with their father. Tom used the boys as a front to haul drugs into the country from Mexico, he said.

“He knew a border guard who’d told him all about it,” Amanda remembered.

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As spring of 1984 approached, Susie called Tom to tell him that snow days had cut short the boys’ spring break, so they couldn’t come for their scheduled visit. Instead, she was taking them on a brief trip to Washington to visit Senator Jesse Helms, whom she greatly admired.

Delores was so angry when she heard about this that she wrote a letter to Judge McHugh in Reidsville telling him that this was an unfair violation of his order. She asked him to intervene and proposed an alternative: a weekend trip to Louisville for the boys at the end of March, when Tom would be there for an American Dental Association convention.

“It could be a nice visit even tho short,” she wrote. “It would be the third time I have seen them in their lives…My husband will not be here to enjoy them. He died of a heart attack on Nov. 5th.”

Delores enclosed some snapshots of the boys with Tom, along with a couple of her house, but she showed the letter to her friend Susan Reid before she mailed it.

“Okay, Delores, you’ve written it,” said Susan, who thought Delores had no business meddling in her children’s lives and had told her so. “Now tear it up.”

Delores mailed it anyway, enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope with a request that the pictures be returned.

The letter was not enough to win Tom a visit with his sons in Louisville. Nor were any pleas to Susie. Tom’s lawyer had to file a motion before the judge allowed the visit. That Tom had to go to court and spend more money just for a weekend visit only added to the growing tension.

That spring, Dr. Klenner found himself unable to go to his clinic to treat the hundreds of desperate patients who were dependent on him and his vitamins. The heart problems that had plagued him for several years made him too weak to climb the steep stairs. His wife, Annie Hill, who referred to him as Doctor, was nursing him at home. On a Saturday in late May, she went upstairs to check on him.

“Doctor was sitting up there in our bedroom on the side of the bed talking,” she later recalled. “He just dived on back and just plain went out. Fritz resuscitated him, gave him oxygen, got him stabilized, got an ambulance and got him to a hospital. So Fritz knew what to do, and he knew how to do it, and he did it in quick order.”

Although Annie Penn Hospital was less than a mile from the Klenner house, Dr. Klenner was taken to Morehead Hospital in Eden, fourteen miles away. Several years earlier he’d given up his privileges at Annie Penn in a dispute over his controversial methods, and after the dispute he would have nothing else to do with that hospital.

Dr. Klenner died the following day, Sunday, May 20, with his son at his side. He was seventy-six. The family received visitors at the big Sharp house on Lindsey Street because the clutter at the Klenner house allowed no room for callers. Hundreds of patients came to see Dr. Klenner lying in state at Citty Funeral Home, and Fritz moved among them, calm and reassured, comforting one and all.

“That was a very interesting phenomenon,” observed Dr. Klenner’s friend Phil Link. “It was as if Dr. Klenner had gotten inside Fritz’s body. He had all of his mannerisms and expressions. ‘Well, we have to forge ahead,’ he’d say, just as if Dr. Klenner was saying, ‘Don’t worry about me.’ That was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, him just assuming Dr. Klenner’s identity.”

The funeral was May 22 at St. Joseph of the Hills Catholic Church in Eden. Years earlier, Dr. Klenner had left Holy Infant Church in Reidsville in a huff after a dispute with the priest, and had refused to go back, even after the priest had long been gone. Normally, Reidsville doctors sit in a group at the funerals of other local physicians. Only one attended Dr. Klenner’s funeral—ironically, a black woman.

After the service, Fritz again went through the large crowd, consoling patients. He was so much like his daddy, many said. They asked when he would be reopening the clinic. He was supposed to take his “national boards” that very week, Fritz told them, but the tests had been postponed because of his father’s death. Soon, he promised.

Dr. Klenner was buried at Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville, next to a big magnolia, one of his favorite trees. No graveside service was held. Fritz allowed no one but himself at the gravesite for his father’s burial.

“Fritz has been very emotional over his father’s death,” his mother observed later.

About a week after the funeral, Fritz appeared at Park Chevrolet in Kernersville, halfway between Greensboro and Winston-Salem, where he regularly had his Blazer serviced. He’d come to know several of the mechanics there. They thought of him as a tough guy. He’d told them stories of fighting with the Green Berets in Vietnam, of being trapped behind enemy lines, of saving his buddies and barely escaping with his life. His Vietnam stories were so detailed and convincing that even Vietnam veterans to whom he told them believed him.

When the mechanics offered condolences about his father’s death, Fritz began telling how he’d tried to revive his father at the hospital. In the past, he’d told many stories about saving his father from death in many circumstances, but this had been reality, not fantasy, and neither Fritz nor vitamins could pull him back. Once again, his father had gone to the Mountain without him. Fritz had failed him ultimately.

He burst into tears trying to tell the story and began sobbing uncontrollably in the crowded waiting room.

Fritz’s onetime friends Sam Phillips and John Forrest heard about Dr. Klenner’s death and wondered how it would affect Fritz.

“I knew in the back of my head that something was going to happen one day after his father died,” Sam Phillips said, “because his daddy was the only thing really keeping him in this world.”

“I always said if old man Klenner ever dies, look out world,” said John Forrest, “because that son of a bitch Fritz, won’t anybody have any control over him anymore.”

Not long after Dr. Klenner’s death, Fritz began seeing selected patients at his father’s clinic. He had his name included on a soon-to-be-printed 1985 calendar listing area doctors and their telephone numbers. He wrote prescriptions that were filled by local pharmacists, who assumed he was a physician. But his aunt Susie Sharp had become suspicious and she asked her friend Terry Sanford, the president of Duke University, to check on her nephew. When Sanford reported back that Fritz never had been at Duke, the retired chief justice had a talk about the law with her sister Annie Hill, and to make sure that it was understood, she had a chat with the Klenner family lawyer, Allen Gwyn, son of the judge who had claimed the judgeship her father had coveted and become her high school debating coach. Soon afterward, Dr. Klenner’s clinic quietly closed for good. Many patients, offered no explanation, were left desperate for their regular vitamin treatments and wondering what had happened to “young Dr. Klenner.”

Susie Sharp also called her sister Florence to tell her about her discovery. Should they inform Susie Q?

“I don’t know,” Florence said. “Let me talk with Bob.” Florence called back, saying, “Bob said don’t say anything to Susie about this.”

“Why? Are you afraid something might happen?”

No, Florence replied, she and Bob thought that if they told Susie, Susie would think it was just another trick to try to separate her from Fritz, and that it would drive her further from family and deeper into isolation.

“She wanted to keep somebody in the family to whom Susie would talk,” Judge Sharp recalled later.

Several weeks after Dr. Klenner’s death, Nancy Dunn got a call in Raleigh from Susie. Nancy hadn’t seen her cousin since Susie moved out of her parents’ house a year and a half earlier. She’d talked to her only a few times by phone, and those times Susie had seemed distant, not like herself. Nancy still didn’t know the reason Susie had left. She had no idea that Fritz was living with Susie much of the time. She didn’t even know that Dr. Klenner had died until Susie called.

“Where are you?” Nancy asked, happy to hear from her cousin.

“I’m in Durham,” Susie said. “I took the boys camping and I had to stop over at Fritz’s apartment.”

“Well, look, if you’re going to be there, I want to come and see you,” Nancy said.

But Susie made excuses. “I’m so busy,” she said. “You know Fred died and left the biggest mess you’ve ever seen. He had absolutely no money. He left that poor woman destitute. I’m helping Fritz get his old coins appraised.”

After that conversation, Nancy wondered about several things. The way in which Susie talked about Dr. Klenner’s death and all she had to do because of it made her sound almost as if she were a Klenner, not a Newsom, as if her own father had died. Just what was her relationship with Fritz anyway? And what was this business about camping? Susie camping?

“The Queen of England does not camp,” Nancy said.

While Susie was helping Fritz straighten out his father’s affairs, the boys were in Albuquerque for their summer visit. They arrived, as usual, looking pale and sunken-eyed, and this time they had fresh scars on their faces. Uncle Fritz had cut off moles, the boys said. That concerned Tom. From the little medicine he had studied, he knew that moles generally weren’t removed until after puberty.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Jim said. “Uncle Fritz is a doctor.”

Tom had never heard that Fritz was a doctor. He thought he was just a physician’s assistant who worked with his father.

“No, he’s just a doctor’s helper,” Tom said.

But the boys insisted that Uncle Fritz was a doctor and said he also gave them shots.

That wasn’t the only thing that Tom heard about Uncle Fritz that disturbed him that summer. The boys told of spending the previous Thanksgiving camping in the mountains with Uncle Fritz and their mother eating cold turkey sandwiches for Thanksgiving dinner and getting so cold that night that they thought they would freeze.

Tom could never have imagined Susie camping. When he had suggested they go camping after moving to Albuquerque, her response had been “Only if there’s a Holiday Inn.”

Fritz kept coming up in the boys’ conversations that summer. At one point they mentioned that he had an Uzi.

Tom enjoyed guns himself, and he had a cabinetful at home. When the boys had come on their first visit, he’d showed them the guns, all hunting rifles, told them they were not toys, and instructed them to keep away. He couldn’t imagine why somebody would have an Uzi.

“I was beginning to get a little concerned,” he said later.

But that was something to worry about in the future. Now he had a full schedule planned for the boys. He taught them to ride the used bikes he had bought and fixed up for them. He and Kathy took them back to the ranch at Wagon Mound, where they rode horses, and to the Grand Canyon, where they rode donkeys down the precarious trails cut into the cliffs to the murky Colorado River. They returned to Albuquerque to find a gift mailed to the boys by their mother—T-shirts picturing Clint Eastwood peering over the barrel of a .44 magnum, saying, GO AHEAD, MAKE MY DAY. Tom was disgusted that Susie would send such shirts and threw them away.

In mid-July, Tom and Kathy rented a cabin at Lake Vallecito in the mountains of southern Colorado and took the boys there for a weekend with their friends Duke and Betty Halle and their two children, Kelly and Kyle. Jim had a crush on Kelly.

The weekend seemed almost jinxed. Things went wrong from the beginning. Duke’s car broke down in a small town in northern New Mexico, and they had to leave it and take a rental. On Saturday they rented a houseboat and had a nice outing with a cookout that evening. But that night, two water-skiers collided on the lake, leaving one young man drowned and missing, and the next day the water was covered with rescue workers dragging for his body, making further pleasure outings too gloomy to contemplate. Instead, they went to a ski resort named Purgatory, rode the chair lift, and whooshed down the Alpine Slide. On the way home that night, heavy rains engulfed them, and in the town of Bloomfield, a child on a bicycle darted out of the darkness into the path of Duke’s car. Everybody ended up waiting at the hospital while the child, who wasn’t seriously injured, was patched up.