WAKEUP CALL
Chapter Excerpt from the novel “Fatal Friendship”
by Stephen Paul Foster
Stephen Paul Foster's Fatal Friendship is a novel in which is solved the age-old Rousseau-Hobbes debate, merely requiring a grisly murder (or two).
The novel begins when Frank Bradley learns that his best friend, Rich Wahnfried, has brutally murdered his girlfriend in his Florida condo and fled to Europe.
Bearing all the markings of social and economic privilege, intellectually gifted, imaginative, outrageously funny, often boisterous and dramatic — the commission of such a primitively violent sort of crime by Rich was unthinkable. The ghastly news that his good friend was a closeted monster detonates Frank’s confidence that he knows anyone, starting with himself. After learning of the murder, more unsavory details of Rich’s life emerge and increase Frank’s perplexity and the horror. The story unfolds and leads Frank, a law professor and political philosopher, to its culmination in a dramatic murder trial.
This philosophical novel follows Frank’s self-torturous path to understanding the darkness in the human condition.
O piteous truth that so untimely dawns!
Euripides, “Bacchanals”
The long road to perspective for Francis Bradley began with a Saturday morning phone call. Its ring — at 10:21, precisely — disrupted a darkly colored parade of lingering regrets, marching slow-motion, dirge-like, through his memory, regrets related to the failure of his second marriage.
The caller was from Ft Lauderdale, Florida.
Francis hesitated. The phone rang five times before he slowly lifted it then softly emitted his tentative, puny “hello.” It was going to be bad. That, he intuitively grasped. Yes, bad — even worse than he imagined.
The unfamiliar male voice with a Spanish accent had a slightly hostile, insinuating inflection. It belonged to Lt. Jorge Santayana, Jr., who immediately introduced himself as a Ft Lauderdale city homicide detective. He then proceeded with a question, which is, of course, what homicide detectives are supposed to do: ask questions, beginning with easy-to-answer ones, then moving to those of a more uncomfortable nature. These latter would be questions such as: Do you own a Smith & Wesson 357, short-barreled revolver? Did you take out a life insurance policy for $500,000 on your recently deceased wife? Where were you on August 9th, between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00 a.m.?
You have to admit it: Having the job of popping up unexpectedly and putting those kinds of questions to slippery-acting suspects caught suddenly off-guard would get you up and going in the morning. Chop-chop!
Detective Santayana’s initial, easy question for Mr. Bradley: “Am I speaking with Francis Bradley?”
Obviously, the question was a rather manageable one, but it had been rapidly dispatched and brusquely officious — not the way regular folks on a Saturday morning lead off a casual phone conversation, not even a telemarketer’s unctuous pitch. Francis’ hyper-sensitive, paranoid-leaning antennas immediately flipped into full alert. Nothing good, they told him, was going to come from chit-chat with some Columbo wannabe who sounded like a graveled-voice Rickey Ricardo. His normally anodyne phone manners quickly turned aggressively surly. The tone of his response was defensive — rude, actually.
“Yes, you are. What…exactly…do you want?”
“Exactly?” Well, perhaps that was an ill-advised, hard-stressed adverb to insert into the prelude of a conversation that had been launched by the disembodied voice of a homicide detective. “Exactly” was coming, but not just yet.
A long, afflictive pause ensued, followed by another easy question. However, this one was going to make Francis uneasy.
“Do you know a Mr. Richard Wahnfried?”
Francis’ brow tightened in the center like a vice. His right cheek twitched suggestively. Could this be the lead premise of a practical joke launched by Richard, who was somewhat inclined toward stunts of a burlesque composition?
No. The man at the other end of the line certainly was a homicide detective who sounded dead serious.
Another long pause. Well, okay: “Si Señor,” Francis muttered sarcastically to himself. He did know a Mr. Richard Wahnfried. Mr. Wahnfried was a close friend, very close. Francis called him “Rich.” With the words “homicide detective” and “Richard Wahnfried” mentioned in close proximity, however, uneasiness suddenly gave way to an alarmed curiosity. Not only that, the detective obviously knew that he, Francis, knew Mr. Wahnfried — otherwise, he wouldn’t be calling. Francis’ phone manners suddenly improved — his voice shifted a gear up, from growly baritone to a thin, meek tenor.
“Yes,” Francis answered, after quietly clearing his throat and moderating his tone, “I do know Rich.”
He felt compelled, however, to add that Richard was a good friend, then immediately second-guessed himself for the gratuitous addendum.
The detective, with his predatory instincts, pounced.
“Rich, is it? Okaaay, when is the last time you saw or heard from your friend,uh, Rich?”
The intonation was now fully inquisitorial, and the question firmly in the uncomfortable register — uncomfortable because, well, it was embarrassing. You see, Francis, recently submerged in self-pity and “the sauce,” had suffered from an alcoholic blackout or two. A veridical recollection of that “last time” was likely, as your friendly, computer-support tech would put it, “a corrupted file, not readable.”
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This axiom popped into Francis’ mind — perhaps because there were certain parts of his past that he would not want to remember. Who, though, can lay claim to a “past perfect?” Or, perhaps, it was just something about this detective.
“Give me a couple of seconds, Detective, please,” Francis said, flustered and speaking his request with exquisite politeness. “It has been a while, and I’m trying to remember exactly when I talked to him last.”
Francis was stalling, trying to dissimulate the embarrassingly caused defects of his memory bank.
“Take your time,” was Lt. Santayana’s cool response. It was dispensed in a formal but distinctly paternal tone that established the policeman’s domination in this unfolding dialectic of disquiet for Mr. Bradley, who, at this moment, was uncomfortably sober.
“I believe it was about three weeks ago” was the best Francis could do. His Saturday morning was rapidly descending from its usual state of organized insignificance into a sorry state of mental disorganization. “Rich called me…” then followed a long pause. “It was sometime around midnight, or maybe even one in the morning…as I recall.”
“Why was he calling you that late?”
The detective was ramping up the uncomfortable index of his questions. Santayana’s years of experience grilling people-of-interest about homicide details had taught him to make his irritating queries insidiously agitate dormant emotions, thus bringing them to the surface. Fear, anger, and confusion were the emotional signals that flagged the lies he was typically slipped by people he intentionally made nervous. The detective was a graduate of the “gotcha” school of experimental psychology.
“He always called me late at night,” Bradley retorted with rising annoyance. “As I recall, he wanted to talk about a book he’d been reading. This was not unusual for him.”
Francis paused, feeling a sudden flash of resentment at this seemingly pointless question. He conjured in his imagination an uncharacteristically vicious stereotype of what a menacing looking fellow this flatfoot with Spanish surname must be: pencil-line mustache, gold-rimmed front teeth, his head crowned by an unkempt, oily pompadour.
Taking a deep breath, Francis looked out his living room window and studied for a few moments a large blue jay driving off a cardinal from the bird bath he’d mounted near the window. “Time for self-assertion,” he told himself with the ambivalence that always seized him in moments when he felt threatened — the fight or flight dilemma. Then:
“At some point, are you going to tell me why I am talking to a homicide detective about my friend?”
Heavy emphasis on “friend.” Francis asked this with a hectoring petulance, similar to that of an aggrieved wife accosting an unreformable, indifferent husband. He immediately regretted the carping edge in his voice.
“Lieutenant?” he asked, now correcting to a solicitous tone.
Detective Santayana made a sudden, rude noise. It was the exhalation of an impressive volume of smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall. The words of Emperor Constantine — In hoc signo vinces — composed the logo on the red package from which the cigarette had been extracted. “By this sign, shall you conquer” was inscribed beneath two regal lions and a knight’s helmet, a ludicrous non sequitur of cruel irony with a comedic twist.
Santayana’s lungs made a feeble protest. They emitted a rasping cough that sounded suspiciously like emphysema early in the construction phase. The detective paused, picked a moist shred of tobacco off his lower lip, then flicked it into a green and orange glass ashtray inscribed with the words “Florida Gators.”
Finally:
“Yes, of course,” he replied almost obligingly. “We are looking for Mr. Wahnfried.”
There followed an ominous silence. For Francis, it culminated in a painful suspense.
Santayana’s baritone voice then lowered a quarter tone. His cadence slowed with ominous pauses at the end of each sentence, like the coda in a Beethoven symphony. This, of course, was calculated to intensify the emotional impact of the serious police business that prompted the phone call. It would build to the conclusion: a bombshell that would explode in the middle of Francis’ disordered, regret-littered consciousness.
“Yesterday, we found the body of a woman in Richard Wahnfried’s condo here in Ft Lauderdale. She has been identified and confirmed as his girlfriend. She’d been bludgeoned and stabbed multiple times with a hunting knife.”
Francis’ eyes enlarged as they absorbed the shock.
“Wahnfried has disappeared. So, we’re considering him as the prime suspect for what appears to be a murder. We need to find him quickly for questioning, and I am hoping that you might be able to help us. Perhaps, you can tell us where we might look for him?”
Silence. A silence during which Francis was afforded a quiet set of moments to look past the door that had just opened on a chamber of horrors, forcing him to take a closer look. A silence that, for the detective, was the result of his cat-and-mouse patience after, Boris Karloff-like, throwing open the chamber door to provoke a reaction.
Richard Wahnfried was definitely not the sort of guy who would turn his girlfriend into a stab-riddled, abandoned corpse. At least, that was Francis’ stunned reaction. Impossible! Someone else must have done it.
Denial — that’s the first barrier of defense thrown up against a frontal assault of untoward facts. To step successfully from childhood into the adult world, one must have been forced to face disagreeable facts. “The piano is not your instrument.” “You don’t have friends because you are selfish and unpleasant to be around.” Some children, unfortunately, are insufficiently forced, and for some delicate personalities, denial is the only way to manage the unpleasantness that the intrusion of reality brings, like that of an uninvited, fractious guest. Francis, however, liked to think of himself as possessed of a cool, intrepid personality, equipped to go mano–a–mano with the reality-invader, no matter what dark, sinister forces were crashing through the gates.
Still…him?
[H]uman kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”
Suddenly, it occurred to Francis to ask:
“How did you get my name and telephone number?”
Francis heard another sound. It was the top of a Zippo lighter being snapped open with a thumb. A pause, then another blast of smoke, originating from Santayana’s fourth Pall Mall of the morning.
Another coughing spasm.
“We found his address book in the condo. Your name and contact information were on a short list in the front that appeared to be his frequently called numbers. His mother’s number was on that list: I called her first. She mentioned that you were one of his closest friends and might be able to help us locate him. She referred to you as ‘Frank.’ Is that the name you usually go by?”
“Yes,” Frank replied. “That’s what my family and friends call me.”
He felt justly annoyed by the intrusiveness of this unsolicited interlocutor and the insinuation that “Frank” might be some kind of alias.
But now, he was agitated. Or was it confusion that gripped him? Out of him timidly slipped the question:
“Who was the woman you found in his condo?”
“Her name was Claretta Petacci. Did you know her, Frank?”
More intimidating insinuation, with “Fraaank” drawn out and up.
Frank? “So, now,” Frank fumed to himself, “this cop I never met before, attached to this intrusive voice, is my long-lost friend?”
“Well, no, Jorge,” he said aloud. “May I call you ‘Jorge’?”
Two could play this game of vulgar, unbefitting familiarity.
No response. Frank suddenly worried that he had committed a verbal misdemeanor.
“I know the name, but Rich had a lot of girlfriends, Lieutenant. I couldn’t keep up with them,” he continued submissively and perhaps with a slight tinge of envy in his voice. “I haven’t talked to him in three weeks, and I don’t have any idea where he could be. I can’t believe he would do something like this.”
Francis thought he heard a soft, undecipherable, sarcastic expostulation coming from the other end of the telephone.
At this point in the interview, Francis Bradley, close friend of a suspected killer, was no longer of use to Lt. Jorge Raúl Santayana, Jr., who was hot on the trail.
“Okay, Frank,” he growled. “If you can think of where we might be able to find Richard — I’m sorry, Rich — or if he contacts you, call me immediately — any time, day or night. You have my number. Got it?”
“Yes, of course,” Frank replied obediently, feeling like a lowly waiter ordered by an imperious big spender to fetch the check after surveying the gnawed-upon scraps of his five-star repast. He was also, however, experiencing an ambiguous sense of relief at the approaching end of this agonizing tour-de-force of an interrogation.
Where did all this leave him, the close friend of…well…a guy believed to have stabbed his girlfriend to death and disappeared?
Then, Santayana finished with a gut punch to Frank, who was “on the ropes” and wobbling from shock:
“Whoever did this — and I’m strongly inclined to believe it was your friend — it was one of the most brutal killings I’ve seen as a twenty-year veteran in homicide work. You should look for some different friends, Mr. Bradley.”
That was the end, telephonically speaking.
Frank put down the phone. Feeling disoriented, he descended robotically into a nearby chair. He recovered. Ascending thoughtfully, he stood for an extended period of time frozen, motionless. Then, he slowly turned, ballet-like, and moved to the other side of the room, where he proceeded to examine himself in a large wall mirror. He suddenly — desperately — needed to reassure himself that he was who he thought he was.
He smiled into the glass at a handsome stranger with the mien of a television evangelist, who returned the smile with that smirky disingenuousness his mother used to scold him for. Mechanically, he shifted to an exaggerated frown. Mirror-man frowned back. He grimaced, and so it went for a bit longer — a haphazard series of self-imitative acts, a weird, impotent ritual of affected facial gesturing that failed miserably to move him to a secure state of self-recognition.
This ghastly news that his good friend — perhaps, yes, still “perhaps” — was a closeted monster had detonated his confidence in knowing anyone, starting with himself. No help from that philosophically reliable Frenchman, René Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.” Okay, maybe I am; but what am I? What certainty could come from the highly confused thinking and disordered state into which this phone call had plunged him? Between the man and his mirrored reflection was another “I am what?” — somewhere, a suspected killer on the lam, hiding out in disguise, evading capture.
“Is my ‘self’ real?”
Fueling this doubt was the philosophically unreliable F. H. Bradley — another Bradley, unrelated, as far as Frank knew:
“I cannot prove that the yesterday’s self, which I construct, did, as such, have an actual existence in the past.”
Where, then, to find the limits of the self’s mutability?
Frank was asking himself these sorts of questions. His duet of mimicry with Mirror-man was futile and inexplicably unsettling. It only served to exacerbate his growing sense of dislocation from reality.
This dislocation would last a long time, part of a struggle to distinguish appearance from reality. Ultimately, it would lead to what his life had been lacking: perspective.
Mr. Foster is a world traveler and a philosopher (Ph.D. St. Louis University) whose writings cover the world of politics, religion, and contemporary culture. His lifelong fascination is with totalitarian tendencies in modern life. He is a native Midwesterner who grew up in Michigan, married in Missouri, and currently resides in Ohio, with his wife of forty years.