A Tear-Stained Letter - Three Days Late and a Million Dollars Short (chapter 3) by Vern Beachy

I thought the Memphis Police Department lacked compassion, but I soon got a lesson in true cruelty.

His name was Don and he “owned the condo” where Melinda hung herself. I put “owned the condo” in quotes because based on what Melinda had told me, the bank was close to kicking him out for not making the mortgage payments. They eventually did foreclose and gave him the boot.

Too bad, so sad.

I am not reveling in his problems, but I am not disappointed either.

He was unemployed, and had been for nearly a year. Melinda and Don had been co-workers and, according to her, had very little going for him and she took pity on his plight and agreed to update his resume and help him in his search for a job. He was a middle-aged neurotic hypochondriac and Melinda, being a Psyche major in college, was kinda intrigued by him, for clinical reasons. I just thought he was a whiny sponge and all he wanted was for people to do his work for him. According to Melinda, I wasn’t very far off in my perception.

The phone at the house kept ringing, but the call from Don didn’t come for three days.

Three days!

48 hours.

I didn’t get a visit from MPD until 18 hours after Melinda’s death, even though the detectives passed my house several times that morning while conducting their investigation.

The phone rang.

Hello?

This is Don.

I had been wondering what I was going to say when he eventually did call (but I had serious doubts whether he would) and now he was on the other end of the line. In my mind I didn’t practice anything for this phone call because I thought it would be largely up to him how I would react and what questions I would pose. If he was adversarial, I would adopt the same stance. If he was accommodating…well, I would be too. But three days told me volumes about his stance and personality so being nice expired about 47 hours and 59 minutes ago.

I have been waiting for you to call.

He used a lot of personal pronouns in that first conversation and I could tell this middle-aged neurotic hypochondriac was trying to seek my sympathy.

My sympathy!

What happened, Don?
Well, I have not had an easy time since Friday (and I have?) and my girlfriend and I have been upset (wow…let me consol you, I’ll be sure and run right over to offer a sympathetic shoulder). Did you know the cops questioned us for an hour in the back seat of their squad car? An hour! They treated us like suspects! We felt so ashamed.

I was struck by how many personal pronouns he managed to sprinkle in his sentences: I, we, and us.

18 hours.

Less than a half-dozen blocks away.

18 hours.

Don…why didn’t you call me right away? I didn’t find out until late Friday night.

Well, I think that was my fault.
I was trying to figure out in my mind why he would think he is responsible for the Police Department’s long delay and, in my thoughts, I didn’t even come close to envisioning the reason he gave;

Well, I told the cops not to tell you because you have multiple sclerosis.

That’s what he said.

Verbatim.

First of all, the cops actually listened to him? And second of all, oh geez…how is that even relevant to this conversation?

What!?

I can’t even fathom why that bit of information would enter into his thought process early Friday morning. I cannot even contemplate why anyone –even a middle-aged neurotic hypochondriac—would think shielding me from bad news would help keep my body out of the doldrums of a raging disease. I replied in the only articulate and correct way I knew;

Um…What?

Well, I didn’t want to burden you any further (again with the personal pronouns). I was thinking this whole affair was NOT about HIM or HIS girlfriend or how THEY felt or how THEY were going to tell me and what THEY were going to do now and…

I LOST MY WIFE! Don’t you understand? I LOST MY WIFE! Don, I just want to know what happened. That’s it.

Him, he, us, my…it was all about him. His plight, his problems and his…

I JUST LOST MY WIFE!

Click.
I guess he didn’t want to deal with me anymore because the phone suddenly became silent. Dead.

There is that word again: Dead. It’s such a final word.

I hit Star 69 on the phone and it rang and rang and rang and rang until I hit the ‘off’ button. I tried it again…nothing. He didn’t want to deal with me. That’s too bad because I needed some more answers and I was feeling increasingly frustrated and alone.

Abandoned.

I think I started to cry again, but it may have just been a continuation of my state of shock since Friday night when the small detective told me--sort of--what happened to Melinda.

What did I ever do to Don to deserve being treated like this? The short and long answer to that question was: NOTHING. Not a damn thing.
I tried calling again.

And again.

Nothing. I hit *67 before I punched in his home number and I got his answering machine. He was screening me. Fine…if you’re going to play that game I will too.

My brother had a cell phone and I asked him if I could use it, maybe then he will answer if he doesn’t know it’s me calling.

Ring.

Hello?

Don, I just want to know the truth. That’s it. I just want to know the details of Melinda’s last moments. His girlfriend grabbed the phone and started yelling something at me. I couldn’t really understand her and I couldn’t put a face to the voice because I had never met her…to this day I don’t even know her name. Nor do I care to.

Melinda told me a few things about her: how she had two English Bulldogs and Melinda liked to ‘smish’ their faces because they felt so soft. She and I have always had a soft-spot for dogs and we’ve always had Pugs. We even worked closely with Memphis Pug Rescue and took in two older dogs because the rescue group couldn’t place them. Floyd and Whitey were father and son, both black pugs. Whitey got his name because his front paws were white, almost like he was wearing socks. Melinda told me Don’s girlfriend knocked the passenger side mirror off of our car when she refused to back up and let Melinda into the condo parking lot one afternoon. She was upset when she told me the story and now I was talking to the woman (well, she was yelling something and I was trying to figure out what she was saying).

I would later learn that the two English Bulldogs were the first to find Melinda early Friday morning.

I understood little of what she was yelling, but I did recognize the words:

Leave

and Us

and Alone!

She slammed the phone down and the line went dead again.

The picture that came to mind when I was fielding her rant was partly based on what Melinda told me about her and partly based on an old Saturday Night Live sketch. The old sketch involved Mike Myers’ character Linda Richman. Coffee Talk. This woman appeared to be the evil incarnate of Linda.

Vicious. Unrelenting. Loud. Boisterous and whiny. Emphasis on the loud, boisterous and whiny part.

Loud. Very loud blah, blah, blah and then click.

I called again and it rang almost 10 times before the evil incarnate Linda Richman answered. She was, apparently, not done yelling because her tone was still in the whiny stratosphere: blah, blah, blah, DON’T, blah, blah, blah, CALL, blah, blah, blah HERE, blah, blah, blah, AGAIN!

Click.

The long steady dial tone signaled one more dead line. Another attempt by me was met with the same disdain and shouting that greeted my earlier conversations. I was the recipient of her loud, boisterous and incomprehensible rants. I thought about ending my pain from the brief conversations right there, but I needed some answers. Answers that the evil incarnate Linda Richman didn’t think I deserved, I guess, but I am not sure why. What happened? Why did she, whatever her name was, go off on me?

I JUST LOST MY WIFE!
Furthermore, why was Don letting her treat me like this? He knew me…he stopped by our house one night when he wanted to pump me for some computer help. His computer was beyond my help. Well, beyond little software tweaks he thought (was hoping) would make it run better. It wouldn’t. I told him his hard drive was fried and he would need to buy a new one.

Don didn’t want to spend the money because he had been unemployed for a year or so and the bank was ready to foreclose on his condo. He didn’t tell me that of course, but Melinda filled me in.

You know, I thought: screw him. I JUST LOST MY WIFE!

Don provided precious little information about what Melinda did. I was finding myself feeling a little jealous because he was the last one to see her alive. But I was also glad I didn’t have to find her that morning. Jealous, but glad she spared me from that scene. The scene haunts me every second of every day and I can imagine how much more sharp and biting the memory would be if I had found Melinda slumped over in the patio. My dear, sweet Melinda. What happened? Tell me what happened!

Please.

People talk about needing closure but I am convinced closure never comes. I don’t know if I would be satisfied with any closure. It’s the end of things. It can’t be changed and the pit in my stomach is getting blacker and growing. Closure won’t stop its hideous expansion. It’s a cancer. A black void and it robs your body of oxygen. It also robs your body of the ingrained feeling to stay alive. I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to pick up my Jacks and go home…the fat lady was belting out her final note. That final note was probably a D-Flat…’D’ for death and flat for how I felt.

No guns. But I can get one, right? I have free will and I can be with Melinda again…just one bullet is all I need. That’s all. I can feel the cold steel in my mouth and in seconds I would be with Melinda again. That would be closure. That would answer my prayers. But my bones ached and I cannot make my family and friends’ bones ache. Even though I would get relief from the massive, all encompassing pain…I didn’t want to—and couldn’t—go out that way. I wanted to so bad…oh God I wanted to do that with all my heart and soul and every fiber of my being.

Don started to sprinkle out more information…precious little, but he was talking. The evil incarnate Linda Richman woman was yelling something in the background. I couldn’t make it out and it really didn’t matter to me either. Let her yell and rant…I had no idea why she was so upset at me.

It didn’t take long, however, to find out. She said something to me that burned like a knife; she threw a ton of salt on my fresh wounds making sure the scabs would never come. I would have an open wound to carry around forever. It was bleeding. It was hot.

Don said Melinda came to his condo around 2 AM. She was drunk and upset about losing her job. He told her to go home and he would talk in the morning. She asked if she could make a drink before she left. She did: vodka and Gatorade in one of those 7-Eleven Big Gulp cups. That was about the time she called me.
The phone rang…I was in bed and had been there most of the evening. It had been a ‘bad MS day.’

Hon…why don’t you just come home?

Later I would ask myself why I didn’t lie and tell her I was hurting for some reason and I needed her help and she should come home right away. Melinda was always there for me, especially when I was having a “bad MS day” and this certainly qualified.

Her cell phone battery was almost out of a charge, I could hear it beep.

I’m coming home.

Promise?

I promise. I’ll be home in 15 minutes.

Those were the last words Melinda said to me. Did she make a point to say she would be home?

Maybe.

I would later think she was talking about going home to God. Maybe that’s what she meant.

Melinda didn’t ever sound upset when I was talking to her that night. She called me several times and I would later learn she talked to several friends, including her best friend from her growing-up years who lived in Iowa.

Don said he went to sleep after Melinda left. She didn’t come home. He said he woke up around 5 AM to let the dogs out but they went to the patio and quickly came back inside.

He went on the patio to find out what spooked the dogs and Melinda was there. He said it looked like she was praying.
Maybe she was, or maybe she did: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

I know, in my heart, that the Lord was watching over her in the hour of her death. Don said he woke his girlfriend and they performed CPR on her until the paramedics arrived about 10 minutes later.

His girlfriend, whatever her name was, stopped screaming long enough to tell me what she was wearing to go out to the patio in the early morning. A robe or something like that. I guess she thought that bit of information would be of importance to me. Apparently it was very important to her, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned it.

The evil incarnate Linda Richman then flung a knife at my heart that penetrated my soul and caused my fresh wounds to spurt forth more blood;

How could you let your bitch wife kill herself at our place!?

Click.