Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,172
the cold gray flesh—“You know I like bodies warm.” He grinned, his silver incisor winking in the lights, and there was laughter.
The tuxedo couldn’t conceal Bender’s fit boxer’s body or sense of vigor. Sixty-eight years old, balding with a white goatee, he looked like a man at least a decade younger, the envy of younger men, capable of chasing muggers and drawing justice for years to come. His eyes gleamed with energy, like a bulb too bright for the fixture. He looked like a man women would always love.
He said he felt the great forensic pathologist was with him, watching him now. Fillinger had said, “Once you get bit by the forensic bug, you’re hooked forever. And he was right.” Looking back on his career, Bender loved being a part of the Vidocq Society because it gave him a feeling of camaraderie he had experienced only once before, in the Navy.
He wanted to do more with Vidocq; there weren’t enough cases that needed his art. He always wished he could do more.
He smiled again and thanked everybody, and the applause rang through the great hall. They were still cheering him when he sat down. He was Frank, a cad among moral men, a hero among mortals, the incarnation of the wild Vidocq, and they loved him. He could say anything to them.
Walter scowled. What had Bender—the same age as him—accomplished to deserve such crowning recognition? Others thought it was odd. It was strange hearing Frank look back fondly on his career when he was smack in the middle of it, fresh from one of his greatest cases, Colorado Jane Doe. Strange, too, when Fleisher introduced “my great friend Frank Bender” in an emotional speech that summed up their decades together, and then gave Frank a sloppy bear hug. No one burned with more passion for the work than Bender, the all-night iron horse. No one lived more in the moment and less in memory.
After the speech, Bender, Fleisher, and Walter walked together out onto the patio overlooking the river. The founders were joined by other men in tuxedos, with cigars and port, Cockburn’s Special Reserve, and women tippy in high heels and gowns with light throws. The autumn evening was unseasonably warm. They stood looking out at the river rolling by in darkness. Pushing the bank, it looked joined to the flat landscape, the rough stitching between two states.
Frank said, “I feel great right now. And it’s now that counts, right?” His smile, like his voice and his eyes, was electric, joyful.
His partners nodded. “Yeah, sure, Frank. It’s great.” They knew. Some others knew but Frank had not wanted to share it widely.
Frank Bender was dying.
Walter stared at Fleisher, who laughed nervously. “Yeah, it was a last-minute thing. We weren’t going to give Frank the award, but then we found out he’s dying. We gotta give it to him.”
Walter glared. Bender roared with laughter.
In recent days he’d learned that he had pleural mesothelioma, the cancer brought on by exposure to asbestos. The cancer was extremely rare, a thousand times rarer than lung cancer caused by heavy smoking. Only about one in a million people worldwide developed it. And it was deadly.
Mesothelioma took twenty to fifty years to develop after exposure. Bender was exposed to asbestos in the Navy, having fled the art establishment and an art college scholarship, knowing only that he didn’t want his art to hang only in museums. The Navy had offered to make him a photographer, but he refused. He wanted to work in the engine room, a mechanic like his dad, although he still couldn’t stop pencil-sketching the other mechanics. He spent three years in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the engine room of the destroyer escort U.S.S. Calcaterra, loving it. “I not only worked with asbestos,” he said, “I slept with it.”
The cancer filled his torso. “It’s bigger than a baby’s head,” the doctor said. The image made him feel bitterly miraculous, like he was giving birth to his own death. Radiation could ease the pain, but it wouldn’t save him. Chemotherapy could shut down his kidneys. “Surgery would be fatal,” Bender said, “because the cancer is already around my heart and lungs like a spiderweb. I have no options.”
Shaken, he had taken his partners into his confidence. He asked Fleisher to read the medical reports for him and give his impression. “It looks very grim, Frank,” Fleisher said sadly. Then Fleisher let out a small laugh.