Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (26 page)

When she finished with the suitcase, she
looked around the room and spotted my stereo receiver on the
dresser. She yanked the plug from the wall, grabbed the receiver,
and came toward the bed holding it above her head. I slid out from
beneath the covers, stopped long enough to slip on my jeans, and
ran for the front door. As I opened it, I heard footsteps behind
me. Expecting to feel that stereo crunch down on my head, I turned
in one motion and swung with my fist, timing the move so I caught
her in the side of the face and sent her flying. When I saw she had
left the stereo in the bedroom, I felt guilty. I had never smacked
a woman until that night and never would again. Surely, I thought
as I ran into the yard to hide behind my car, I could have handled
this differently and not have her eternally on the guilty side of
my conscience.

Catherine had risen and come to the doorway
calling for me.

"Gary, come back inside. It's cold
out there."

She was right. Houston's November
chill had arrived, and I stood in the driveway, shivering behind my
car in nothing but my pants. Once again, if I had been watching
myself from across the street, I would have laughed. With my car
keys inside the house, I obviously could not leave. I vowed then
and there never to sleep in the nude again. With Catherine in my
life, I figured I never could know when I might have to flee in the
night. Just as I was considering that thought, the cops
arrived.

"You're really lucky," Catherine
told me after they had left, and we had agreed to a truce. "It is
rare when the cops come that someone does not go to jail. That's
what they do, you know. Take people to jail. It's a good thing I
didn't tell them about the beating."

"The beating?"

She rubbed the side of her face, and I saw she
would probably raise a bruise. So, I made another vow to myself.
Never again would I touch her physically unless backed into an
absolute corner. A neighbor had called the cops, and I had told
them I would leave the house if I could get dressed and find my car
keys—even though I was the one living there. I insisted they stay
until I was gone. Before I could dress, however, they had left, and
Catherine intercepted me with a new attitude of
restraint.

"Don't leave," she sighed. "I am
starting to agree with you that this will never work. I can't have
this kind of bullshit in my life. I have to get control. Why don't
we talk about this in the morning? At least, we'll spend
Thanksgiving together and have dinner with my mother. Then we'll
see what we want to do."

She seemed like a completely
different person from the Catherine of earlier in the day and into
the night. I wondered if the visit from the cops had made her more
reasonable. I was exhausted and had no place else to go. I believed
if she honestly wanted a peaceful end to our relationship, I'd be
better off in the long run. So I agreed to stay. But I didn't sleep
much that night until I heard Strong return from wherever his night
ride had taken him. I figured she would never do anything with a
witness in the house.

Despite his late night, Strong awakened early
on Thanksgiving morning—early enough to catch me carrying the
morning paper in from the driveway. He took me aside and stood
three inches from my face.

"Taylor, I want that bitch out of
here," he said through clenched teeth that made me wonder what his
night with her had been like before I arrived with Cindy. "If you
have to pay her rent somewhere else, I will loan you the money. But
get her out of here."

"She's going, Jim, she's going," I
said. "But it might not be as easy as wishing it done."

THIRTY-SIX

Thanksgiving Weekend,
1979

Our battlefield truce held through
Thanksgiving Day without any further outbursts. Catherine and I
didn't talk much, but we took her mother to dinner later in the
day. I knew I would have to take the initiative and act decisively
to accomplish our split without incident, so I rose early on Friday
and started checking the classified ads for an apartment for her. I
found about half a dozen places in good locations close to
downtown, where she maintained an office about three blocks from
the courthouse. When I showed her the ads I had circled, she just
stared.

"You know you need to live closer
to your office and your work," I said, hoping to win her
cooperation with logic focused on her ambitions. "You should get
that law practice up by living where it's convenient. Don't forget,
you have your first murder case to handle, and I want to make sure
you do a good job. I'll make some calls and take you around to look
at a couple of these places in the Montrose
neighborhood.

"I lived in Montrose before," she
said, sounding at least a little interested. The neighborhood was
Houston's version of a Bohemian community. The houses dated from
the 1930s and 1940s, with rental properties catering to an upscale
target market of young professionals. Rents were reasonable, and I
felt they certainly should have been within the range for someone
in Catherine's position. Individual investors predominated as
landlords, hoping to launch their real estate empires by
subdividing old brick houses into small apartment buildings and
duplexes.

Catherine remained
uncharacteristically silent during our tour of several potential
new homes for her. I hoped she simply wanted to reconcile her
paranoia about rejection with the obvious reality of our
incompatibility, but I couldn't be sure. I only knew we were making
progress. When she seemed impressed with a one-bedroom duplex for
four hundred dollars per month at 1723 Kipling Avenue, I talked her
into it on the spot. The landlord lived in the older house next
door. He wanted the first and last month's rent as a security
deposit. Catherine stunned me by taking eight one-hundred-dollars
bills from her purse and handing them to him. It was vacant,
freshly painted, and ready for a tenant.

"We can start moving stuff
tomorrow," I said, as we walked to her car across the
lawn.

"I think you should pay half of
that," Catherine replied without looking up.

"I'll see what I can do," I said,
eager to leave before she had a chance to throw a fit or back out
of the deal.

"I know I'm missing a period," she
said, but I ignored her.

I had hoped Strong might be around
to help move things, since he was so eager to have her out of his
house. But he had vanished without a trace, off on some unknown
quest, leaving me to cope with her on my own. Some of her
belongings still remained at Mike's house in far west Houston, and
the rest were at the house of Strong. She also said she had some
furniture in storage. We tried moving everything we could fit into
my car, but it seemed to take forever. I suspected Catherine was
trying to stall, but I remained industrious. At one point on
Saturday I even managed to sneak out and visit Cindy at her new
house. She showed me the bullet-riddled telephone base and asked me
if her rent house was "OK." She insisted she had chased Uncle Al
out of her life and was just taking it easy in her new place,
waiting for me. Between Cindy and Catherine, that weekend left me
dazed, uncertain, and more than a little depressed.

Although Catherine had paid quickly
to reserve the duplex at 1723 Kipling, she began dragging her feet
on the move. And her solitude made me suspicious. We didn't talk
about the future that weekend. I didn't want to set her off. Of
course, every now and then she would mumble a subtle
threat.

"You remember the court bailiff,
don't you?" she asked me. "All he owed was about $250. Now he's
lost everything."

I silently
reviewed her secret agenda of reasons for wanting a relationship
and decided to add another troublesome item: her fear of exposure
on a wide range of activities ranging from her abuse of Bar rules
on the bail bond certificate to her late night pseudo-confession on
the Tedesco murder. I knew that none of it provided the sort of
strong evidence that could cause her serious trouble. But I also
realized her twisted mind might turn that fear into a
rationalization for an irrational act, such as assault or even
murder. If she truly had been involved in the Tedesco killing, I
reasoned, she indeed would be a dangerous predator—one who likely
took pride in the accomplishment of a kill. She had joked about
Tedesco and other victims like the bailiff, incorporating them into
her resume of fear and wearing their mysterious destruction like a
badge of honor. I allowed my imagination to wander and
realized:
What a trophy I would make if she
could add a notch for me to her gunbelt after just a few weeks
together and get away with it
. I
wondered:
Am I just
paranoid?

Then I felt ashamed and ridiculous.
Here I was at six feet tall, athletic and a relatively strong
thirty-two years old living in fear of a five-foot-three-inch
female. Of course, she had bragged about unleashing the clients,
and, if that threat were true, they would level the field
immediately. I also had to sleep some time. I couldn't lie awake to
defend myself in case she decided to bash out my brains. I recalled
medical examiner testimony about a murder victim assaulted like
Tedesco:

His head resembled
what you would expect of an egg dropped from a ten-story building
and onto the concrete
.

Nope, I decided, unpredictability reigned as
her source of power, and it would be formidable. I had to stay
alert.

Then my paranoia hit a new plateau
on Monday night, November 26, when I fielded a call from Strong at
our house. I had not seen that guy all weekend. He obviously had
skipped out, waiting for her to move. He had returned to work at
the courthouse that day, and I had gone back to his house, where
Catherine told me she didn't think she could complete the move
until the next weekend. Before I could figure my next step, I
answered the phone.

"What's going on?" asked
Strong.

"What do you mean? I'm trying to
get her moved."

"No, there's something else I need
to tell you. She called me today and asked me to check on her
tonight. She said she is in fear of you."

"She's in fear of me?"

"She said you beat her once, and
you might beat her again. She said you've been acting weird, and
she may need my help."

"Ahhh, shit," I whispered, while
Catherine puttered in the kitchen out of earshot. "That's bullshit,
man. I am trying to get her out of here, but she is just not going
very easily."

"I believe you," he said. "But I
thought you should know, in case she's laying the groundwork for a
self-defense story of some kind."

"Can you believe we are having this
discussion? It sounds like something from a bad movie."

"What else can I say? You saw the
suitcase. You saw the umbrella. She tried to get Cindy over here
for God knows what. I think she is capable of incredible violence,
and you need to watch your back."

I didn't sleep that night. I lay
awake in the bed beside her, watching as she tossed and turned. At
one point she woke up sweating and screaming. She told me she had
dreamed of hell and wanted a priest. By morning I had decided on a
new plan for extracting her from my life. We got up, then drove in
separate cars to a little diner where we ate a quiet breakfast. I
told her I would see her later and drove off. Instead of going to
my office in the fourth floor press room of the criminal courts
building, however, I walked across the street to the building where
Harris County District Attorney John Holmes had his offices. I took
the elevator to the sixth floor where the lawyers of his Special
Crimes Bureau kept their desks and files. I asked the receptionist
for Don Stricklin, the chief of Special Crimes.

"I need to talk about Catherine
Mehaffey," I told Stricklin when he emerged from his office with a
curious look on his face. "Would you like to listen?"

Stricklin nodded, ushered me into
his office, and closed the door.

THIRTY-SEVEN

November 27, 1979

My decision to enlist Special
Crimes in this soap opera would mark a significant turning point in
both of our lives. To me, it was a stroke of genius that likely
kept me alive. Many others saw it as the desperate act of a fool
who had bitten off more than he could chew. Catherine later would
say melodramatically that, from the moment I walked through Don
Stricklin's doorway, I had entered "the arena of death." I became
the Judas in her personal passion play and just the sort of
betrayer every underdog heroine needs to justify her future
actions. Her own attorneys later would joke about the decision,
describing Stricklin as my "father confessor" and asking jurors
with a sneer: "Should everyone who has a fight with his girlfriend
now report it to Special Crimes?"

The answer, of course, was, "No."
But that was precisely the point. Had my girlfriend been anyone but
Catherine Mehaffey, I would have expected a horse laugh from Don
with a look of, "Who are you kidding? Do I look like a
psychotherapist?" Indeed, even though his assistant, Chuck
Rosenthal, had personally warned me about her, I remained unsure
how Stricklin would receive my visit that morning. I learned a
great deal when he hustled me into his office as fast as possible
and then asked if Jerry Carpenter could join us. Employed then as a
district attorney's investigator for Special Crimes, Carpenter
boasted an illustrious background as one of the Houston Police
Department's legendary homicide detectives. I had known him when I
covered the police beat in 1972. If Stricklin had assigned
Carpenter as the bureau's Mehaffey expert, I realized she indeed
represented a serious target for Houston's law enforcement
community.