The name on the screen was Dr. Everett Stroud. Mike set his finger beside it like a man marking a grave. “Frank, that doctor lost his license in Nevada seven years ago,” he said. “He wrote prescriptions for patients he had never met. The pods in your shake contain a heart medicine that slows the pulse and unsteadies the legs. Taken for a month, it makes a man dizzy. Taken for eight, it makes him fall.” He turned a page. “And Stroud is not just a name. He is the father of Brooke. The man she told you passed away when she was a girl.” My mouth went dry as the Arizona desert.
Mike did not stop there. He had made a call to an old friend in the insurance business, and the friend had found something. Seven months earlier, a life insurance policy for one million two hundred thousand dollars had been taken out on me. The signature on the application looked very much like mine, except that I have never made the loop on a capital F like that. The beneficiary was Brooke Stroud Pruitt. “Frank,” Mike said quietly, “the inheritance she told you about, the mining company, went bankrupt three years ago. That house is rented. The red convertible is leased. She owes people a great deal of money.”
I sat in that chair for a long time with the printout in my hands. I thought of the sunrise hikes, the diet, the way she kissed my head at the sink. I wondered how much of it was a script, and how much was a woman who had fooled even herself. Mike put a hand on my shoulder, the same hand that had pulled me out of a ditch in Grafenwöhr in nineteen eighty nine. “Sergeant,” he said, “you have got two choices. You can go home and cry. Or you can do what we were trained to do.” I wiped my eyes, and I stood up. “Tell me the plan,” I said.
A clear gel pod dropped into a morning shake gave one son the weekend to bring his father back to the house in Tucson.
The plan was simple, and it was patient. Mike called a detective he knew at the Pima County Sheriff, a gray haired woman named Lopez, and by dusk I was sitting in her office with a tiny recorder taped under my shirt. I went home. I smiled at Brooke. I drank plain water from the tap and told her my stomach was upset. I let her make the shake, and I carried the glass into the garage and poured it into a thermos. My son Dale, who had been calling for weeks, flew in from Denver that same night and sat in a motel across the road, waiting for my signal.
On the third morning, Brooke stood at the blender with her coffee and said into her phone, “Two this morning, Daddy. He drank it all. Christmas is three weeks out.” Detective Lopez heard every word through the wall of the garage. When the deputies came through the front door, Brooke turned, and the glass fell and shattered on the tile. She did not run. She looked at me across the kitchen with a face I had never seen, hard and tired and almost relieved. “Frank,” she said, “you were supposed to be easy.” I told her that I was a sergeant, and that sergeants are never easy.
I set my terms to the prosecutor, because I had no one else to set them to. I would testify at trial in my dress uniform. I would hand over every record, every shake and every thermos. I asked that Brooke be offered treatment for whatever sickness had made her do it, and that the money recovered from her father be paid to the other families he had cheated. I asked for no revenge. The prosecutor, a young man named Whitlock with a firm handshake, wrote it all down. “Sergeant Pruitt,” he said, “I hope I am half the man you are when I am seventy.”
The surprise came the following Saturday, when I drove up to the VFW hall and found the parking lot full. Forty one veterans stood in two lines on the sidewalk in their caps and their medals, and as I got out of the Buick, they snapped to attention. Mike had told them. A Vietnam sergeant named Lou, who was ninety, saluted me with a shaking hand. “Frank,” he said, “we do not leave our own behind.” They marched me through the door, and the bartender poured a round of root beer, and we all stood, glasses raised, and toasted the soldier who noticed.
The consequences were swift. Dr. Stroud was arrested at his apartment in Henderson, Nevada, and charged in two states. Brooke accepted a plea that sent her into treatment and a long term of supervision. The insurance company voided the policy, and the court seized the leased convertible and what little remained of her firm. The mining company file, along with the fake inheritance of Brooke, was turned over to a federal agency that had been waiting for exactly that paper. Seven other people, in four other states, received letters telling them that their money would be returned. None of them knew how close the thing had come.
My daughter Marcy came out from Phoenix the week before Christmas. She stood in my driveway with her hands twisted in her coat, and she said, “Dad, I should have come to the wedding. I should have told you what I felt.” I took her face in my hands. “Marcy,” I said, “you were scared for me. You were right, and I was wrong. Neither of us is the first.” We stayed up late, the three of us, Dale and Marcy and me, drinking coffee and eating cold pizza. It was the best Christmas Eve I had spent in years, and nobody was selling anything.
With part of the settlement, I started a program in the name of Mike. The Delgado Buddy Fund pays for independent lab testing, rides to the VA and a standing telephone check every Friday for veterans in Pima County who live alone. Forty three men and women signed up in the first month. A Korean War veteran named Eli, who was ninety three and had no family, held the receiver against his ear when the first call came in. “Somebody remembered me,” he whispered. I gave the telephone volunteers each a cap, and the caps said, Check On Your Buddy.