Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (33 page)

So I drove over to her place. I
went inside. She fixed a couple of hamburgers. We ate them and had
a drink. I wished her goodnight. And, I'm sure she was more
surprised than me when I declined her invitation for one last night
in her bed. I walked out the door hoping we had finally placed a
peaceful seal on our story as a couple.

Sure. And those monkeys were just then taking
wing from heaven to deliver bags of gold for everyone on
earth.

FORTY-SIX

January 10, 1980

How had I forgotten
Barbara?

I still ask myself
that question decades after my entanglement with Mehaffey. Things
likely would have been quite different had I only remembered
Barbara sooner. She was a smoldering blonde a couple years younger
than me. She worked in the advertising sales department of the
rival
Houston
Chronicle
and ranked as one of the
paper's top producers. That did not surprise me. I had a hard time
imagining any local businessman refusing her solicitations for a
sale. We had met by chance in late 1978, about a year before my
break-up with Cindy and my introduction to Catherine. At that time,
I had been mired in coverage of that marathon trial of the Fort
Worth billionaire, T. Cullen Davis. One night after a lengthy
session in court, I had wandered into a downtown bar where Barbara
was shooting pool. Unlike a lot of the newspaper sales staffers,
she enjoyed the company of the reporters and liked to hang out with
us. Someone introduced us, and I experienced another moment similar
to what I would experience later with Catherine. I felt that
natural magnetic connection that happens only so often in a
person's life. I knew that Barbara and I were destined somehow to
get together. Since then I had filed her away in my mind as someone
more important than a one-night stand. I had seen her as an option
for a serious relationship. Still married to Cindy and too busy at
work to want more than a detached romp, I let our night in 1978
over beers and a pool game slide with only a little flirting and a
promise to give her a call.

Somehow then, a year had passed. Distracted by
the turmoil of my break-up with Cindy and its link to Catherine, I
had forgotten about Barbara being at the top of my list of options.
Then I had just happened to bump into her at another downtown bar
during December on one of those rare nights when Catherine was
elsewhere for a couple of hours. I was walking in as she was headed
out. I was surprised when she recognized me and stopped to
chat.

"Barbara, right?"
I asked, playing coy as if I had forgotten the name of option
number one. I almost slapped myself in the head as my mind
screamed:
You dumb fuck! What are you doing
with that crazy Catherine when you had this chick in the card file
from a year ago? You should have called this Barbara the day after
Uncle Al ran you off!

"Gary? You never called," Barbara
said with a wink and a grin. She didn't strike me as the type to
sit by the phone, and I wouldn't have been interested if she were.
With a hint of sarcasm, she said, "Been busy, I guess,
huh?"

"You wouldn't believe it. I've been
wrestling with a divorce."

Eager to gauge her response to revelation of
my newfound availability, I was rewarded immediately with a quick
smile she could not hide, a wonderful green light that indicated
full speed ahead. Just then I realized we had blocked the doorway
to this bar. I recalled my holiday obligation to Catherine and the
importance of shedding her from my life before I invited anyone new
into it. I pulled Barbara out on the sidewalk and held her
hands.

"We should get together," I said.
"You interested?"

"I'd ask you to give me a call, but
we both know how that works with you," she said with a
giggle.

"I will call you
this time, you can count on it," I promised. "I'm really glad I ran
into you. First of the year. January. I'll call you at the
Chron
, we'll have some
drinks and get acquainted."

"I expect it to happen this time,"
she said and turned to walk away.

So, after I had
achieved what I considered a final split from Catherine on Sunday
and with my Wednesday divorce hearing on the front burner, I had
called Barb that Monday and made a date to meet her after work on
Thursday, January 10, at a bar called Corky's. I hoped this would
be the first step toward a new beginning. And I was thinking about
the possibilities that afternoon in the courthouse press room,
finishing up a story, when Catherine stormed in unannounced. Our
experiment with locking that door had been a dismal failure as soon
as we had tried it back around Thanksgiving when Strong played
the
Exorcist Tape
for our press room colleagues. It had just proved too much of
a hassle to go unlock it repeatedly for all the traffic coming
through that room. Of course, every lawyer or reporter had demanded
an explanation for the heightened level of security, and I had
realized quickly it was more embarrassing to explain than to just
take my chances with an unlocked door. Catherine hadn't even
visited the press room during our Christmas reconciliation. But
now, just a few hours before my date with Barbara, she suddenly
felt the urge. When she demanded we leave for a private talk, I
refused and then asked her to leave the room.

"It's important," she pleaded. I
realized her demeanor had changed from the night before, when we
had parted company at her place after her invasion of my divorce
hearing. Her tone had grown desperate. I had become so immersed in
her moods I believed we had reached a crossroads. I thought her
dangerous and considered it my responsibility to evict her from our
work area. So I picked up the telephone and started to
dial.

"I'm calling the sheriff's
department, Catherine, and I'm going to tell them to send deputies
up here to remove an unwanted guest from the press room," I said,
wondering if anything like this had ever happened before. She
glared and slammed her fist down on the phone, breaking the
connection. I ignored her and started dialing again, but she leaned
across my desk and killed the phone again. When I tried dialing a
third time, Catherine reached down and jerked the phone cord from
the wall.

"OK," I said, trying to stay calm.
I had decided after our physical confrontation at Thanksgiving that
I could never again touch her in anger, recalling her regret over
failing to tell those cops about "the beating." She would
exaggerate any touch as a "beating" and, as the male, I knew I
always would appear the aggressor. So I pulled on my jacket and
scooted around my desk, where she blocked my path. "Since I can't
use the phone, I'm leaving here and going to the sheriff's
department to tell them in person to come here and get you
out."

She responded by grabbing me around the waist
as I walked toward the door. She dug her toes into the floor,
forcing me to drag her across it. The other reporters did not know
whether to react with anger, laughter, or assistance so they all
just sat there watching the show. Realizing I had to loosen her
grip somehow, I stopped just short of the door as if I had given
up. Catherine took that as a sign of surrender and relaxed for a
second while coming to her feet. I seized that opportunity and
broke for the door, leaving her in my wake. I opened it and raced
through, heading down a hallway toward a staircase. Relentless as
always, Catherine came crashing behind, and I heard her on the
steps above as I reached the third floor on my way down. So I
stopped.

"Please, Gary, if you will just
listen to me I will stop chasing you. It is important."

"OK," I said, turning as she came
down the steps. "What is it?"

"I know what you are getting ready
to do, and I don't want you to do it."

"Huh?"

"I know who you are taking out
tonight. You can't do that. We have to be celibate for a while
until we get things straightened out."

Celibate?
I thought.
Did she just
say celibate? She's lost her mind.

I did not know any way Catherine could know
about my pending rendezvous with Barbara unless Catherine truly had
supernatural powers. In that case, I concluded, I would just
surrender and let her keep me in her apartment for the rest of my
life. So, I figured she had just made a wild guess that I would be
flexing my independence. She had let her paranoia bubble to the top
and was testing me out. I decided against saying anything that
might confirm my plans. Instead, I wanted to be as forceful as
possible at this moment because I saw it as the true breaking point
of no return. If the mere thought of a rival for my affections
makes her anxious enough to babble about celibacy, I thought, a
peaceful split would be out of the question.

"Catherine," I said firmly, "you
have to accept the fact that I am going to be seeing other women.
There will be no celibacy. I'm tired of letting you bully me
around. The holidays are over and so is our relationship. Didn't we
talk about this on Sunday?"

She looked stunned and bit her lip, so I
continued my lecture.

"I am going to live my life from
now on the way I want to live it."

"I am begging you," she said.
"Don't do this. There will be trouble if you cheat on
me."

"Cheat on you?" I asked,
dumbfounded. "I don't know what you are talking about. But I do
know whatever I'm doing is no longer your business. I have a right
to live my life without you in it, if that's what I want. I did not
cheat on you during Christmas. I kept my word. And now we are
separate individuals. I don't want this to be ugly, but if you make
it that way, then that's how it will be."

Then I turned and went down the
stairs. I left the courthouse early and headed to Corky's where
Barbara arrived right on time after I had loosened up with a couple
of drinks while waiting for her. She smiled when she spotted me,
then came over to my table and sat down. She ordered a drink, and
we made small talk for a few minutes. Then she placed her drink on
the table and looked into my eyes.

"Do you know someone named
Catherine Mehaffey?"

I couldn't believe my ears. I
leaned my head back and twisted the muscles in my neck to keep them
from getting stiff with stress. I wondered if she had heard about
my relationship with Catherine and just wanted to know more. I
nodded, took a sip of my drink, and asked, "Why?"

Barbara took a deep breath and
said, "She came to see me today."

"You're kidding me."

"She came to my
office at the
Chronicle
and introduced herself as your girlfriend."

I started shaking my head and
groaning. Trying to contain my anger, I just said, "She's not.
Don't listen to her."

Barbara looked a little sad. She
sipped her drink and said, "She scares me. I'm worried for you. I
just don't know how she knew we were going out tonight."

Wondering the same thing, I reached
instinctively into my inside jacket pocket for my appointments book
only to find that pocket empty.

"Oh, shit," I mumbled. "My
appointment book is gone."

"You wrote our date down in your
appointment book?"

"I only wrote
initials and the number for the
Chronicle
. She must have done some
serious detective work to find you. I'm really sorry about
this."

Barbara finished her drink before
she spoke again. Then she said, "Damn. I think you are really a
neat guy, and I would really like to get to know you better. But
you should know you really have a serious problem with her. She is
frightening. She said she wanted me to understand that you are
taken. And even if you say that isn't true, and I believe you, I
can't take the risk. I'm sorry, for both of us."

I nodded and ordered another drink for
me.

"I understand," I told her. "I
really do, and I think you are smart to back away from me right
now. I see I still have some work to do with her."

"Good luck," she said, rising to
leave. She walked out as my fresh drink arrived, and I sipped it
trying to devise a new strategy. Clearly, I realized, I had been
naïve about my ability to break away without trouble. I had never
heard of anything like this, much less suffered it myself. It was
an alien dilemma. In my experience with lovers, girlfriends, and
wives, we always had just walked away. If one partner wanted out,
the other one accepted it and went on with their life. I recalled
how spooked Barbara had looked as she revealed Catherine's visit
that day. Just as I rehashed her words and expression from moments
before, Barbara returned unexpectedly and approached me at the
table with an added reminder of how scary Catherine must have
been.

"Can I ask you one other thing?"
Barbara said. I just squinted my eyes, wondering what that possibly
could be.

"I have two dogs," she continued.
"You don't think Catherine will hurt them, do you, to get at
me?"

"Two dogs?" I mumbled. Despite the
fear in Barbara's eyes, I started to laugh a little at the kind of
impression Catherine obviously had made. I moved quickly to
reassure her.