Mark Dunn - American Decameron

At least two of Gail’s fellow nursing-home residents were intimately familiar with the incident. Tillman’s plummeting body had barely missed landing on top of a friend of Pearl Patz’s. Pearl was Gail’s dining room companion. Leonora Touliatos was on her honeymoon in New York on that fateful day in late 1930 when the body struck the sidewalk only a few feet away from her. Not wishing to upset his blind wife, Leonora’s husband James waited several years before telling her the truth of what had occurred that day, perpetuating, instead, the fiction that the thud she heard next to her was a dead horse keeling over from heat exhaustion.

Also familiar with the incident was another member of the Centenarian Club, a woman from Hartford by the name of Frances Hellman. Frances and her husband Hank had come down from Connecticut for a weekend of sightseeing, dining, and dancing with their friends, the Petersons. When the body smacked the concrete, Frances reacted by slapping her cheeks in hard shock, and for hours thereafter looked as if she had over-applied her rouge that morning.

Though one of the occupants of the room next door to Catherine and Gail, Rory Hillard, had no special connection to the suicide, he nonetheless took an interest in Gail’s brother-in-law’s ill-fated invention. “It would have come in mighty handy for my buddy Torkleson and me when the Indianapolis went down and all the neighborhood sharks became ill-mannered.” A retired butcher (previously in the employ of Piggly Wiggly), Rory had moved to Fairfield County, Connecticut, from Houston after the death of his second wife to be closer to his daughter Regina and his five granddaughters.

The other thing casting a shadow over the life of Gail Hoyt (otherwise known as “The Rock-a-bye Girl” of 1900 Galveston hurricane association) was her rocky marriage to a philandering aviator by the name of Leslie Rabbitt (whom Gail decided had only married her because of their mutual love of flying and because he would be giving his wife the comical extended surname of Hopper Rabbitt).

Leslie, who was himself less rabbit and more pig (and once attended a masquerade party dressed as pig — snout and all — after reading about a World War I soldier who wore a pig nose in battle), descended from two fairly tainted bloodlines. In the late teens and early-to-mid-twenties (up until his arrest in 1926), Leslie’s father had performed hundreds of illegal abortions in the town of Winchester, Kentucky, which had resulted in no small number of client deaths. Leslie’s mother, Jettie Livergood Rabbitt, served a year in prison for filing a mischievous false police report in 1906 accusing the Livergood Family Association of Warwick, Rhode Island, of running a clandestine white slavery ring. The charge and the subsequent raid on the association’s 1906 reunion left the organization in a shambles from which it never recovered.

Leslie’s offenses, though comparatively more venial, were ruinous to the marriage: an ongoing affair with a wealthy middle-aged Fall River, Massachusetts lush by the name of Alice Rose Carteret, and an on-again-off-again long-distance relationship with a woman named Patsy Pullen, whom Leslie had met in the lobby of the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago during the city’s 1933-34 World’s Fair. Leslie continued to pilot airplanes after his messy divorce from Gail, and perished, arguably by his own hand, when in a drunken stunt in late 1944, he painted his personal plane in the colors of the Japanese Zero long-range fighter aircraft and ventured too close to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he was promptly shot out of the sky. The incident was covered up until 1987, when it was brought to light by a radio documentary producer in Madison, Wisconsin, named Byron Reeves, who was doing a piece on the 1947 Roswell UFO incident at the time, based on a book by two young authors with the Tweedledum-and-dee names of Kirk and Dirk.

Dirk Heinze grew up in Anchorage and wrote a best-selling book about the 1964 Alaskan earthquake, which he had experienced as a young boy, before turning to the true crime genre and penning An Encyclopedia of American Criminality , with entries on everyone from Leopold and Loeb to Russell Edeale, an aeronautical engineer who spent his free time putting guns to people’s heads and making them beg for their lives. Shared interest in the criminal mind was the reason that Kirk and Dirk came to their present partnership. Kirk, who was from Vineland, New Jersey, was inspired by Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood , to write a book very much in the same vein: Double Take , about Charlie Towers and Bob Fletcher, brothers who murdered each other’s wives. The consultant on Kirk’s book was Towers’ and Fletcher’s triplet brother Henry Kierbaum, who had just recently retired from GHH (Grady-Hawthorne-Hay) Enterprises, where he headed up the Genitalia Accessories division.

Gail and Ericka sat sipping tea. On the television across the room (its volume turned down and its closed captioning on), Inside Edition was running a story about a dental hygienist in Florida who two years earlier had stabbed one of her clients to death with an air-filled syringe.

“We’ll have to suspend our teatime shortly, Ericka,” said Gail, setting her teacup down. “They’re going to wheel all of us centenarians into the cafeteria and take our picture for the paper tomorrow.”

“Are you looking forward to the celebration?” asked Ericka.

“What’s that, dear?” Gail was momentarily distracted by a passing fellow resident waving at her from the hallway. Lois Gregory, another centenarian, was smiling smugly in the company of three doting men of various ages: her son Les, her grandson, Ari, and Ari’s life-partner, Wayne. Ari, formerly a bookstore owner in Wilmington, Delaware, and Wayne, a building contractor for Holman-Crampo Homes in Dallas, Texas, both of whom had had boyhood crushes on Roy Rogers, had met at a Royandalabilia estate sale six years earlier in Mitchell, South Dakota.

“I was just asking about the celebration tomorrow. Will all of your fellow centenarians be able to attend?”

“Well, dear, we lost Dr. Kleerekoper — the eminent mathematician. He’s been moved to hospice care. But the others are doing quite well for their advanced years. Take Penny Rutland, our resident Mainer; she writes for an outrageously funny newsletter about people who can’t abide flowers. Can you imagine such a thing? I love her spunk and spice, though. She’s the bees’ knees.”

Ericka smiled at the aged flapper. “What about Adelaide — the woman on your floor from Tarrytown?”

“Adelaide’s had a bad cold, but she’s much better now. We’re always holding our breaths around here, since the Grim Reaper often comes with a hacking pneumonic cough. Adelaide’s teacher friend, Carla — I think they met when they did some volunteer work together for the NEA — she’s flying all the way from Pocatello, Idaho, just to be in attendance tomorrow.”

There was a knock on the room’s open door. A pretty woman in her thirties stood in the doorway. “We’re going to take you and Mrs. Connelly down to the cafeteria now for the shoot.”

Gail winked at Ericka and whispered, “She’s new here or she wouldn’t have put it that way. When you get to be Catherine’s and my age, we generally don’t like to hear that we’re about to be shot. It sounds a little like ‘thinning the herd,’ don’t you think?”

Ericka grinned and wagged her finger at her playful friend.

“I don’t need this wheelchair,” said Gail, pointing to her “ride,” “but it seems to make them happy to roll us all around in them. Doesn’t it, Catherine? Oh, she can’t hear me.”

Catherine wouldn’t have heard Gail even if she could hear. At present she was squinting at and quite engrossed in a television program on the History Channel about Typhoid Mary. Catherine winced to see the house where Mary Mallon was quarantined on Brother’s Island, so close to where they had laid out the bodies of Catherine’s mother; her nine-year-old brother, Walter; and her baby sister, Agnes.