A Mighty Fortress

      Kelly Marie Shipman and William Cody Brock were both born on the same day in June. Both of them lived in Washington. Both were newly graduated seniors at Hillside High School in Seattle, and both gratefully received welcome birthday presents from their friends and family. For her gift on the day she turned eighteen years old, Kelly received a new car from her proud and doting parents. To celebrate his eighteenth birthday, Cody got to kill a man.

     Kelly’s birthday began at seven o’clock on a fine summer morning, when she bounded down the stairs of her home in the affluent Seattle suburb of Mercer Island, a bundle of joyful youth and energy and anticipation at the beginning of her life. She was tall and leggy, an athletically perfect blonde teenager with ivory skin, crystalline blue eyes, and a killer smile of capped teeth that had set her father back almost ten grand. He had been able to deduct the dental work as a business expense, since Kelly had been modeling for advertisements and acting in commercials and on local television since she was three years old. The profits she made were scrupulously placed into a special trust for her by her father, who was administrator of the trust but who wasn’t above spending it on his daughter, especially if it gave him a good tax write-off. The Shipman family lived in one of the last remaining small islands of the American dream, in a split-level ranch dwelling located in a gated community which was flawlessly landscaped, well lit, and discreetly fortified against the outside world. The house had six large bedrooms, a swimming pool, a basement rec room containing more sports and games and entertainment gear than the downtown YMCA, and a capacious garage containing at any given time at least four late model motor vehicles, including her father’s prized Ferrari. The house carried a mortgage larger than the municipal debt of some American towns, but the Shipmans could afford it. They were among those lucky Americans who were not only still employed, but very gainfully so indeed. Kelly’s father, Dr. Edward Shipman, was a cardiologist who ran his own clinic and HMO in Seattle. His company provided three essential services: heart attack and stroke recovery, emphysema home care including home oxygen supplies, and out-patient AIDS and HIV care. Dr. Shipman used to remark wryly that “Our clinic cashes in on the three great health disasters of the past hundred years: smoking, AIDS, and the American diet.”

      He wasn’t joking. With Medicare and Medicaid long gone the way of Social Security, Shipman’s HMO catered only to the dwindling number of Americans who either still had health insurance, or who were sufficiently wealthy to pay for the services of himself and his doctor-partners to keep them alive. Doctor Shipman had also developed a reputation for discretion which brought him a number of special celebrity patients whom he treated for assorted embarrassing conditions in a consulting room tucked away in his home. Kelly’s mom, the elegantly attired and flawlessly presented Marty Shipman, was senior vice president of a major medical supply firm linked with the HMO, and Kelly herself had already brought in more money in her lifetime of modeling and minor acting gigs than some blue-collar workers ever earned in their lives. The American dream was very much alive in the Shipman household.