Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (20 page)

We finished dressing, locked Mike's
house, and drove toward downtown Houston in our separate cars
without making any definite plans for the future.

I arrived at work
a little late that morning. But the only one to notice would have
been the five or six "roommates" in my office at the press room on
the fourth floor of the Harris County Criminal Courts building. My
editors all worked in the main office at
The Post
, about four miles outside
downtown, and usually only saw me on alternate Fridays, when I
drove over to pick up my paycheck. But I had a professional family
in the press room, where reporters from several rival media outlets
maintained bureaus for their coverage of the beat. Tucked around
the corner from the elevators on a dead-end hallway, the pressroom
harbored barely enough space for the six metal desks stacked around
the walls. Besides for Jim Strong and myself, the room served as
base of operations at that time for Tom Moran from the rival
Houston Chronicle
newspaper, Sandy for one of the city's all-news radio
stations, and Rhia for another news radio station. The extra desk
remained available as a floater when needed by visiting members of
the working press. Stacks of old newspapers sat in piles around the
floor. A single clipping adorned the bulletin board—a ridiculous
feature written on an obviously slow news day a couple of months
earlier by a
Post
lifestyles editor describing the latest fashion trends at the
women's prison unit. In the margin, some sarcastic critic had added
a punch line in dark black marker: "All dressed up and nowhere to
go?"

My daily routine involved roaming
among three or four buildings that housed about thirty courtrooms
and finding news stories. I would visit with court personnel over
coffee, review docket sheets, chat with attorneys for both sides,
and usually uncover more than I could handle in a single day. I
would file my stories in the late afternoon, using one of the early
telephonic computer terminals. When editors needed me, they called
on the phone.

Although technically competitors,
the regular tenants of the press room enjoyed a tribal bond that
set us apart from the lawyers, judges, clerks, and criminals who
also frequented the building. We worked together on some stories,
when it was more efficient for a source to hold an impromptu press
conference there. So we had an open-door policy on the room at that
time.

On this day, I had barely sat down
behind my desk, when Chuck Rosenthal of the District Attorney's
Special Crimes Bureau popped his head in the door and asked me to
step into the hall. He ushered me into the men's restroom around
the corner and checked the stalls to ensure privacy before he
spoke.

"Are you hanging around with
Catherine Mehaffey?" he asked.

His question staggered me.
Rosenthal was one of the top dogs in Special Crimes, a hard-nosed
prosecutor destined eventually to win election as Harris County
District Attorney about twenty years into the future. Since I had
not yet sent out engraved announcements about the first date that
occurred less than twenty-four hours before, I wondered where he
had heard about Catherine and me. My mind flashed back to that
Galveston cop and a comment Catherine made as we headed back to
Houston. She had warned, "They'll be talking to you, now." I'd
laughed it off as paranoia, but this mysterious visit from Chuck
immediately raised my curiosity. He ignored my request for the
source of his information and came straight to the
point.

"I wish you'd think this over
before you get too far involved. She is trouble."

"Trouble? Don't you know that's my
middle name?"

Chuck ignored my lame attempt to
break the tension and offered to let me listen to some of the tape
recordings the bureau had confiscated of conversations between
Catherine and Tedesco. He said their investigation had uncovered a
long trail of battered and broken former lovers with Tedesco as
simply the worst example. He said: "You do a good job over here.
Everybody likes and respects you. We don't want to see you get
hurt."

"Maybe you haven't heard but I'm
not married any more," I began, speculating he might have seen
Catherine as an extramarital affair. "I'm not messing with Mehaffey
on the sly. She can't tell my wife and destroy the marriage. I'm
flat broke. My wife ran up a twelve thousand dollar MasterCard bill
and I can't even afford an apartment. I'm sleeping on somebody's
couch. Our house will sit on the market for months while I pay
child support and the mortgage. So I can't figure out what else
Mehaffey could do to me. Would she take my two-hundred-dollar car
and my paper bag of dirty shirts?"

"It might not involve money. She
usually takes whatever she can get."

"Even if there is
nothing?"

He stopped, stared at me, then
said, "There's always more than nothing."

"Maybe my soul?" I chuckled at the
thought.

He shrugged his shoulders and
repeated his offer: "Anytime you reach a point where you want to
hear those tapes just drop on by. They're off the record, of
course, but I think they would give you a new perspective on
Catherine Mehaffey."

I told him thanks, and he walked out the door,
leaving me with plenty more to ponder. On one hand, I began to
wonder if her claims of persecution might not have merit. How could
one night with me trigger a visit from Chuck? On another level, I
had to take his concerns seriously. But I had confidence in my
final conclusion. I had dealt all my life with all kinds of people
and proven my talent as a survivor. I had always been able to find
a way out of tight situations. I forecast she likely would play
with me for a while, and then go off after some guy with money,
finding a superior mark for her talents. Hell, I thought, we might
even become long-term drinking buddies.

And I grinned as I thought I knew
one thing for sure: No matter what she could do in the days ahead,
she'd never get back that pussy from last night.

TWENTY-SEVEN

October 17, 1979

I didn't see Catherine again until
the next morning when she used our open door policy to swing into
the press room and startle the reporters in there. It marked the
first time she had ever come into the press room, and her visit
caught all of us by surprise. Then things grew even more
bizarre.

She ignored me playfully and
stopped first at Sandy's desk, extending her left arm to show Sandy
a whopping large diamond ring on her ring finger.

"What do you think?" Catherine
asked.

"Is that a diamond?" Sandy said.
"Wow."

Until that day, they had never spoken to each
other, but Catherine acted like one of the team, part of the press
room family. She strolled across the room ignoring me and showed
her new ring to Rhia, the black female reporter working for the
other radio station.

"You're engaged?" Rhia
asked.

Acting as if I were not even in the
room, Catherine told her: "This is Gary's ticket out of
here."

Everybody looked at me behind my
desk in the far corner as if to ask, "What the fuck is this?"
Everybody, that is, except Jim Strong at the desk beside me. He
just started laughing. Then Catherine whirled around in the open
center of the room and acted as if she had just spotted me for the
first time.

"Oh, Gary, I didn't know you were
in here. Look at this."

Then I received the extended arm with the big
diamond on her finger.

"So, congratulations are in order?"
I asked. "Who is the lucky man?"

"You are the lucky man," she said.
I scanned the room and shrugged my shoulders, waiting for her to
elaborate. Finally she cocked her head with a loud laugh, pulled an
empty chair to the side of my desk, and sat down. My colleagues
turned back to their newspapers and telephones, leaving us to
chat—as if we could have had a private conversation in that
place.

"Don't you see?" she asked me. "By
the time I give this ring back, we'll have the diamond out and a
cubic zirconium in."

"Draw on your legal training a
moment and answer a question for me," I said, pausing to let her
twist her little nose. "Have I now heard enough to make me an
indictable co-conspirator?"

"Indicted for what? It's my ring
now. I can do whatever I want with it, and I think for safekeeping
I might want to have the stone replaced with something less
valuable in case the ring is stolen."

I laughed. Once again, I thought
she was kidding about this, trying to shock anyone listening with
this plan for what seemed to me a blatant scheme to commit a fraud.
I told her, "Catherine, I think I've heard about all I want to hear
on this plan. My only hope now is to become the proverbial
unindicted co-conspirator. You know—the snitch!"

"You don't know enough about this
yet to be the snitch."

Although she was giggling, I thought I
detected the beginning of a pout, as if I had disappointed her by
refusing to immediately pledge allegiance on her caper. She changed
the subject.

"We can talk about this longer over
lunch," she said. "We're going to Charlie's."

"I'm thinking more like the Hoagie
Shop," I replied, rejecting her bid for the most expensive steak
joint in downtown Houston. But she stood up and waved me
away.

"It's on me," she said. "I made
some money yesterday and I want to spend some of it on you. So I
insist. Be there at noon."

After she left, Sandy spun in her chair and
stared at me.

"Please, Gary, tell me you are not
hanging around with her now."

"I've never been
one to kiss and tell," I said, shrugging my shoulders as she shot
me the finger while turning to dial the phone on her desk with the
other hand. I considered Sandy a good friend. She recently had
begun dating my long-time friend George, the
Post
assistant city editor who was
letting me live temporarily in the living room of the two-story
house he was renting in Houston's Heights neighborhood. We had
worked together at the paper for eight years, arriving there in the
same month. He had accepted the assistant editor's job about a year
earlier, after covering a wide range of assignments that included
preceding me on the criminal courts beat. Recently divorced from
his first wife, George had extended the hospitality of his rent
house to me, but I figured my welcome was wearing thin. I already
had hatched plans to begin renting a room from Jim Strong at the
start of November.

In the last two years of working the
courthouse beat, Strong had become an even closer friend to me.
Although obviously a very bright guy, he also had a reputation as a
loner who had angered many with his acerbic wit. He lived in a
house in northwest Houston that was still owned by his ex-wife, who
had moved out of the city. She had been an advisor to a number of
high-powered, local politicians while he had bummed around on the
fringes of mainstream media jobs in the city before they split up a
few years before. A burly six-footer with boisterous mannerisms, he
said he had been a collegiate wrestler at the University of Texas
back in the 1960s. At the courthouse, he worked for a small company
called Houston Metro News Service, trying to carve a niche in the
Houston media market by providing news content to a number of local
music radio stations that had no budget for news staffs of their
own. So, he technically worked as the courthouse reporter for about
a dozen stations, feeding them all the same stories and taped
interviews as part of an independent staff with beat reporters
posted at the other key locations around town. More than that, he
was destined to play a central role in the tortured drama about to
unfold the next few months between me and Catherine
Mehaffey.

Our lunch that day should have been
a cheerful event. We were still in that early honeymoon phase of
our relationship. She had apparently landed a fee on a bail bond
and wanted to talk about the future. But I had to spoil things by
mentioning the visit from Chuck. I don't know why I told her he had
come and talked with me about her. Maybe I wanted to test her
reaction.

"That motherfucker," she snorted.
"That son of a bitch. They are doing this again. But this is the
end. I'm taking care of this now."

I thought she was about to leave
her chair and rush over the district attorney's office for a
confrontation. Immediately I saw my mistake. Not only had I
violated Chuck's confidence, but I had left him exposed to an
action where I would be the prime witness. I tried to envision what
sort of lawsuit might erupt and realized I had to keep her
corralled somehow. I struggled for an escape as she probed for more
information on what he had said.

"Oh, you know," I said. "He
suggested you might be trouble. So I told him trouble is my middle
name."

"That son of a bitch," she seethed,
waving off my attempt at humor. "What else did you say? What did
you tell him?"

Hoping that humor might actually
salvage this mess, I leaned across the table, looked to both sides,
then stared into her eyes and whispered, "I told him: 'Chuck, it
doesn't matter what you say. Every time I look at her, my dick gets
so hard I just can't stand it.'"