Bitter Blood (39 page)

He went on to explain that these were ancient religious writings that had been spurned because of their magical thrust, black magic cloaked as white.

“Whoever is dealing with this, you don’t want to know,” he said, “because they are dealing with evil. This is the work of the devil.”

Ruth left Fritz at the end of May, taking the BMW with her. She moved into the same apartment complex in Durham in which Sam Phillips lived, and she became friends with Sam and Cynthia, all bound by their bizarre experiences with Fritz. All were angry at Fritz, but they agreed that he was sick and needed help. Ruth and Sam talked of trying to have him committed to a mental institution, and later discussed it with a lawyer, only to learn that it was virtually impossible.

Cynthia and Ruth decided that the only way to end Fritz’s subterfuges and get him to seek help was to go to the source of the problem—his father. They called the Klenner home several times, only to have Fritz answer and thwart them. When Dr. Klenner finally answered one of their attempts, they poured out their story: Fritz never had been to medical school; he had affairs, lived a life of dangerous fantasy and lies; he was sick; he might hurt himself or somebody else; he desperately needed help.

The response wasn’t what they expected. “It isn’t your problem,” Dr. Klenner told them coldly. “You shouldn’t concern yourselves with it.”

As both women sought to persuade him to do something, they heard Fritz burst into the room shouting. They listened in disbelief while Fritz wrested the phone from his father, screaming at him, “I’ll blow your goddamned head off!”

Suddenly, Fritz came on the line, cursing, crying, threatening. He had a .45 in his hand, he said, and he was going to kill himself.

“Go ahead, Fritz,” Ruth taunted. “You don’t have the courage.”

From an extension phone, Cynthia pleaded for him to see a psychiatrist. He stopped her with one command, the last words he would ever speak to her.

“Get…the…fuck…out…of…my…life.”

But the voice wasn’t Fritz’s. It was guttural, cold and alien, a voice unlike any Cynthia had ever heard, and minutes after she’d hung up the phone she still shivered from its effect, convinced that she had heard the very voice of evil.

27

Only bits of information about the troubling incident at the Klenner house filtered down to the Sharp family that summer. Fritz had blown a fuse, word had it, suffered some kind of temporary breakdown. He had pushed his mother down the stairs, and, most unbelievable of all, threatened to kill his father. But as usual, the Klenner secretiveness prevailed, and few details were ever forthcoming. Sharp family members thought that stress brought on by the breakup of Fritz’s marriage, about which they also knew little, probably provoked the trouble.

Soon after the incident, Fritz stopped to see John Forrest in Hillsborough, and Forrest quickly made it clear that he did not condone deception and wife stealing. Fritz was apologetic, sorry, he said, that it all had happened.

Forrest asked what Fritz planned to do now that his parents knew that he was a fraud and had wasted more than four years of his life, not to mention vast amounts of money his father had supplied for tuition and expenses. Fritz said that he wasn’t sure.

“Our relationship is ended,” Forrest told him, “but I won’t ever do anything to hurt you.”

“Well, John,” Fritz replied, “you meant a lot to me and you never have to fear anything from me either.”

Forrest couldn’t help but notice that Fritz was wearing a Second Chance bullet-proof vest, and he passed the information on to Sam Phillips, who still was wearing his vest, too, in case Fritz was not quite so humbled as he appeared.

Ruth talked to Fritz several times that summer of 1981, and she later told friends that he sounded contrite. He said he was glad that everything was finally out in the open, happy that he no longer had to pretend. He still talked of medical school, but Duke’s wasn’t the only one in the world, he said. He might just go to one overseas.

Instead, he enrolled that fall at Durham Technical Institute in a two-year dental laboratory course, keeping it secret from everybody but immediate family. It was a demeaning step down for someone who had so long thought of himself as a doctor, and his heart wasn’t in it. Although he would attend the full two years, his presence would hardly be remembered by teachers and classmates, and he would complete only 60 percent of the required work and never receive a degree.

The front of contrition that Fritz presented to his wife and John Forrest turned out to be merely another pose. The elaborate structure of pretense that he had built to prop up his life proved formidable and enduring. Neither he nor his parents could face the humiliation of disassembling it, and with his parents’ knowledge and complicity, Fritz continued his masquerade. He still worked at his father’s clinic; still led patients, friends, and family—including his cousin Susie Lynch, who came regularly for treatment—to believe that he was continuing at Duke Medical School, now involved in postgraduate studies and research, and that he eventually would take over his father’s clinic. To strangers and casual acquaintances he presented himself as Dr. Klenner, still tramped about publicly in a physician’s coat with a stethoscope in the pocket, still carried a medical satchel loaded with vitamins and prescription drugs, which he dispensed as freely as ever. So long had he lived in fantasy that fantasy now seemed his only reality, and, feeding on itself, it grew.

Fritz continued seeing Betty James sporadically, but he spent more and more time with Wanda White and her sons, and all the time he was getting closer to his cousin Susie and her two sons, John and Jim. By the fall of 1982, however, just as Susie’s mother, Florence, began to grow concerned about her daughter’s relationship with her cousin, Fritz was about to enter another love affair.

Amanda Jones met Fritz soon after moving to Durham in 1979, and friendship soon developed. They became much closer after Fritz confided that he had incurable cancer, and her maternal sympathies reached out to him. He presented himself as a Duke medical student, but led her to believe that he was involved in clandestine work for the army’s antiterrorist Delta Force, work he’d been drawn into while serving as an intelligence officer for Special Forces in Vietnam. Although secretive about his work, he frequently spoke of political and military stirrings in exotic parts of the world, about which Amanda had little concern. She thought of Fritz as an “inside-track man.”

He always knew people who knew the real situation, no matter what it was,” she recalled.

In the summer of 1980, when she gave birth to a daughter, Ann, her only child, Fritz quit seeing her without explanation, and she feared for what might have happened to him. Not until the spring of 1981 did he suddenly reappear, relieving her anxieties but offering only vague excuses for his absence. Their friendship grew closer early in 1982, when Amanda’s marriage began to fall apart. By then Fritz had grown a full beard, giving him a dark, brooding, and more mature appearance, and he seemed always to be there to comfort and reassure her. After she separated from her husband, she began to feel other stirrings for Fritz, whose cancer, he now assured her, had been cured by his father. By 1983, she was in love with him. That summer, her parents, who distrusted Fritz and wanted to protect their daughter from another disastrous relationship, checked at Duke and discovered that Fritz had never been enrolled there. Presented with the evidence, Amanda chose not to accept it and not to confront Fritz about it, reasoning that even if he hadn’t been to Duke he needed the medical identity as cover for his clandestine work.

“It didn’t make any difference to me,” she later recalled. “I needed to have a relationship with somebody.”

Amanda kept a diary, and in it she recorded her love affair with Fritz.

November 10, 1982: I am constantly emotionally anticipating that perhaps Fritz and I will develop an affair. We’ve been thru so much together in these years—his divorce as well as mine, Ann’s birth and his cancer and at one time seeming sure death. I long for a deeper relationship, but I am not sure of its consequences. We may not have as much in common as we think.

February 2, 1983: And my relationship with Fritz continues to grow. I always look forward to touching but we’re both slow.

February 16: I had a chat with Fritz today and my head still reels. I know now that he is seven years younger than I am, a Catholic of some breeding and I am twice divorced. It seems a ridiculous match. I do seem to attract curious people. He is a survivalist, which I can understand and certainly have leanings toward, but where I’m for retreat he is for action. Too much Vietnam. And religion. He’s ready to defend his fellow man and has reason to believe that necessity will come about in the imminent future. If you believe that, then it’s hard to see any reason to work for today. I mean if all life is to be dismantled, does it really matter if I get a shelf put up in my closet?

February 23: I had a long visit with Fritz last night. Whether he’s clairvoyant or a crazy remains to be seen. But he definitely foresees nuclear war and he plans to be a survivor. Romance of romance, he has invited Ann and I to go along and despite all I agreed. So there is his cousin Susie and her two boys, his sister Mary Ann and her daughter Lynn, and Ann and I so far that I know of in the party. The tea leaves or whatever he reads say between now and the spring thaws in Europe are the times to worry the most. And naturally it is with great reasonableness and justification that he reads these messages. And I try to roll along in my normal pattern wondering once again if there will be a tomorrow. But, too, there still is romance, and I must admit Fritz has charmed me.

April 6: Last night I actually went out for supper with Fritz. Not very prepossessing but I did enjoy it. Fritz has bought property in Idaho and wanted to know if Ann and I would move out there. ‘In theory’
anyway. At least he’s beginning to dream of something other than disaster.

May 25: I had a funny dream about Fritz. I went to visit him at his place and he fell asleep—probably not too unrealistic. That’s what worries me about Fritz. He doesn’t see much joy in life.

June 28: Fritz came in last night. It’s been a month since I’d seen him. He brought me another towering pile of flowers with a lily kind of thing on top. It’s charming to have a fellow bring you flowers. He also brought me a pair of jade earrings. He says he’s going to remount the jade into gold pierced earrings, that these aren’t gold but had better jade. Anyway, it’s nice to have him back in the country.

July 8: He brought me more flowers and has some pearls for Ann and I that he’ll bring later. I’ve never encountered such a gift giver and am somewhat perplexed how to handle it. He seems to have a very thick shell that I find hard to pierce. His defense is innate. I almost look forward to making love to him just to remove the physical layer of clothes. There are so many more layers remaining I can’t imagine really seeing in. Meanwhile, he is gentle, kind and thoughtful.

July 18: So I did see Fritz again and then he’s off for a couple of days. But I did tell him I loved him. It was smooth and easy for us both. Not a shocking revelation, but perhaps a letting down of barriers.

August 5: I haven’t heard from Fritz in over a week. That situation always chafes me. I’m so much a waiter. It’s just like all my affairs with married men—I’ll hear from him. Except he’s not married. I keep hoping our communications will improve. Right now I don’t know if he’s in Chad or Reidsville. He’s got so many roles I wonder if he keeps them straight.

August 10: I’m sure Fritz is off in North Africa. I think there is a lot going on in Chad and Libya that we are concerned about. I m pretty sure I would have heard from Fritz if he’d been in the U.S. I do miss having him to talk to tho he’s never really been that available.

August 19: Fritz came by last night. Again momentarily and back off to Chad and the unknowns. But I am cheered.

September 17: And always I am waiting for Fritz. He called me Friday before I left work. His “I miss you and I love you” were enough to keep me warm again.

September 20: I haven’t often been as depressed, mad and disappointed. It’s Fritz. He called Fri. night that it would be the first of the week that he’d see me. It’s Tuesday night and no word. He could be in N. Africa or Reidsville for all I know. He has promised time and time again to do things for me, yet he’s never come thru. He never has time for me or him. I feel like I’ve reached the end.

October 25: Fritz has still not appeared. The world is currently rocking and close to war on all fronts. 200 or so Americans were killed in Lebanon on Sunday. Few of the relatives have been notified and so few names released. The only thing that gives me cheer is that Fritz said someone would come to Ann and I and give us some money were anything to happen to him. So no news is good news. I just pray he returns before the world explodes. It really seems imminent.

The image that dances into my head is what a complex, intelligent and sensitive soul the Lord has created in Fritz, and the reduction of that to a mass of blood and tissue would not be sensible. The Lord must have more in mind for him than that and I need to keep that faith.