Fellow revelers knew nothing of Bender's gift for sculpting lifelike busts of murder victims using their skulls as a model. Nor did clubgoers know that the dancing fool suffers from pleural mesothelioma, asbestos cancer he traces to years spent in the engine room of a Navy destroyer.
Regular readers may remember my 2009 column about Bender receiving his death sentence while caring for his lung cancer-stricken wife, Jan. She, too, outlived prognosticators before finally dying in April.
After burying his bride, Bender figured he'd best get back to living. Disability rules prohibit him from earning money, so he can only paint or sculpt for pleasure.
Bender had a sublime summer until the release of The Murder Room, the long-awaited book about the Vidocq Society, the crime-fighting cabal he cofounded.
"The book is fast-paced and well-written," he allowed, "but not entirely factual."
A month of hiccups
Bender's cancer has destroyed his left rib cage and invaded his pectoral muscles. Doctors marvel that he has experienced no weight loss, no fevers, no chills, no shortness of breath, coughs, pelvic pain or palpitations.
"Remarkably, he is in incredible shape," one physician wrote on a June evaluation. "This weekend," the doctor added, "he was swimming in the Atlantic Ocean."
Bender skipped publicity events for The Murder Room, written by onetime Inquirer reporter Michael Capuzzo, because of one strange side effect of the condition:
"I had the hiccups for a month."
Because he could collect royalties from The Murder Room, Bender is pleased the cold case-cracking narrative is a bestseller. But he and fellow subject Bill Fleisher, a former FBI agent, say Capuzzo took artistic license in the work of nonfiction.
They even coined a term for it: faction. That, Fleisher told me, is "a book with facts made to read like a novel."
