Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (36 page)

"Fired? No way. He
said he wanted me in here for my safety. You know, we have a lot of
important elections to cover this year, and
The Post
will need its best people
available on the desk for those stories. I'm really kind of excited
about this promotion."

"Promotion?" I thought I heard her
choke a bit as she repeated my mischaracterization of what
essentially represented a lateral move.

"And, I will have plenty of time
for a little sideline project in this new job," I said. "I want to
do a little research on the lawyer ethics requirements of the State
Bar of Texas and see if maybe you've slipped up on something I
might know about."

"Uh, OK, OK," she said calmly, as
if distracted. "I have to go."

That night at home I picked up a ringing phone
to hear her voice and hung up before she could finish a sentence.
For the next two hours the phone rang repeatedly, but I did not
answer. When Strong arrived back at the house, I told him not to
answer either. I had decided to end all communication with her. She
would be easy to ignore now that I no longer needed to visit the
courthouse daily. I believed I might never see her
again.

Later, after studying the psychology of the
narcissist personality, however, I would learn that my new strategy
that night had merely set the stage for an escalation of tensions
in our relationship because I had denied her the one thing she
actually needed the most: an opportunity for confrontation. And, I
would learn on our anniversary the next day, that confrontation was
the one thing she really could not live without.

FIFTY

January 15, 1980

I started the first full day of my
new assignment in the office with an attitude adjustment. Reviewing
my conversation with Logan, I became convinced he had been right to
move me out of the courthouse. Catherine definitely would have a
harder time stalking me, particularly since I had decided I
wouldn't even take her calls. My hours as a general assignment
reporter would be less attractive, with occasional night and
weekend shifts replacing the Monday-through-Friday, daytime rhythm
of the courthouse beat. But I could live with that. In exchange,
I'd have more opportunity to work on the so-called big picture
stories designed to change the course of Western Civilization. I
planned to immediately develop a list of hot-shot ideas for Johnny
B to consider. As the political season intensified, too, I expected
to assist on any number of intriguing local election coverage
issues. I even wondered if my long tenure at the courthouse had
been partially to blame for my attraction to Catherine.

Maybe I've been hanging around
lawyers and judges for so long I've gone native, I mused. I was
drawn to her like some rogue undercover operative who has fallen
too deeply into a culture he only wanted to observe.

Despite Catherine's threat
regarding big plans for our anniversary on the 15th, I had a smile
on my face as the evening approached because a special gal had
signed my dance card for that night. I had arranged to attend the
political barbecue fund raiser for Harris County District Attorney
John B. Holmes, Jr., as he kicked off his first campaign for the
office he'd held since his appointment a couple of years before.
And I was taking my four-year-old daughter, Little E, as a date. I
hoped that maybe with a new year and decade I had turned a corner
on all that domestic turmoil of 1979. I had allowed Catherine to
short-circuit what should have been the most important relationship
in my life. As an agent once told me while pitching a life
insurance policy, "You may divorce your wife, but you don't divorce
your kid." I bought the policy as well as the philosophy and always
thought it a shame that so many angry divorced men fail to focus on
their kids. Determined to put Catherine and her volatile behavior
behind me, I had arranged for Little E to spend the night at the
house of Strong after the Holmes event. Both of us were excited
about the prospect of the sleepover and, more importantly, the
prospect for retying what had been an unusually close but fragile
bond.

At four-and-a-half, Little E had reached a
wonderful age where her body and mind seemed at peace with
themselves. She hungered for new experiences and insights to feed a
developing intellect and rubbing shoulders with the power brokers
at the Holmes barbecue overwhelmed her desire to expand the
potential boundaries of her world. As we toured the room and I
introduced her to an endless parade of attorneys and judges, I felt
an awesome sense of pride. Not only had Little E blossomed into a
bright, precocious little girl, but she was a cutie, too—lithe and
athletic with her reddish-blonde straight hair cut short in a wedge
and freckles dotting her cheeks. I had a feeling the future truly
belonged to her, and the realization filled me with shame about the
way I had lived the last few months. Cindy had said she landed a
contract to sell our house and that bolstered my spirits, too. I
planned to use my share first to buy a car and then settle into an
apartment where I could spend more time with Little E and her
sister, who was too young that night to attend the Holmes barbecue.
Thoughts of the future finally had me grinning as I drove home from
the event with Little E in the passenger seat.

But that mood changed abruptly when I pulled
up to the house of Strong and saw Jim patrolling the sidewalk
outside with a shotgun in his arms.

"Get down on the floor," I told
Little E, as I swung into the driveway and Strong came to my
window.

"We've been hit," he said.
"Burglars have been here. I just got home, and they may still be
inside. I grabbed the shotgun in the garage and waited for you when
I saw you turning up the street."

I got out of my car, and we walked
cautiously toward his front door, which was standing open. I looked
around over my shoulder and motioned for Little E to stay down on
the floor when I saw her peeking over the dashboard. We entered the
house and looked around. Once we concluded the invaders had left, I
went back to the car for Little E and brought her inside. Then we
took a mental inventory of the damage.

I saw immediately
they had snatched the cheap stereo in my room, along with the
Eagles'
Desperado
album which had been on the turntable. In addition, I noticed
they had been through my dresser drawers. I tried to remember what
might be missing. The list included some inconsequential items such
as my copy of Catherine's
Exorcist
Tape
and a couple of photos of her. If it
had just been the stolen property, I could have laughed this off.
As I thought about this invasion, however, I realized it meant much
more than the loot. I doubted that the primary mission had been
theft and concluded Catherine had sent over some boys to teach me
one of her lessons. My anger started to rise when I imagined what
might have happened had I stumbled across them with Little E in
tow.

Strong, of course, suffered greater
material losses than me. Atop his list was one of the original Sony
BetaMax video recording units, a prized electronic possession at
that time. In addition, the burglars had known to crawl under his
mattress for the .357 Magnum revolver he kept hidden there. They
also had snatched a police officer's heavy duty black flashlight
that Strong once had sarcastically offered to Catherine as a weapon
for defense in ridiculing her complaints about beatings from
me.

We didn't need a Mensa card to
focus quickly on a chief suspect. And although Don Stricklin did
not normally take burglary calls as head of Special Crimes, he took
ours at his home and dispatched a police unit to get fingerprints.
After the cops left, we decided to assist the investigation
ourselves. We hooked a recorder up to a phone and each made a call
to Catherine at her apartment. She reacted to both of us in a
similar fashion, assuming a recorder was running and firmly denying
our allegations. But she laced her denials with giggles and
laughter I took as a subliminal acknowledgement she had triggered
an intended reaction.

In his conversation, Strong
appealed to any sense of fair play she might have had, telling her
he wanted a return of his stolen belongings and separating himself
from me by emphasizing he had done nothing to hurt her.

I took a different tack, insisting I did not
care about my stolen property and laughing about this latest
attempt to get my attention. With this plan I hoped to trick her
into an angry rebuttal on tape that would allow me to provide
Stricklin with more evidence that could at least prompt questioning
about this burglary. We knew it was a long shot, but Strong and I
had decided to do everything possible to use this burglary as the
mistake that would take her down.

"Celebrating tonight?" I asked,
when she picked up the phone.

"Gary, I don't know what you are
talking about. Jim just called me, too. I'm sorry to hear about
your problem over there."

"Yeah, yeah," I said. "I just
wanted to let you know that stereo isn't worth a shit, and I can't
even find anything else of mine that's missing. Your goons may want
you to pay them to make up the difference for loot that's fit only
for a homeless shelter."

"I don't know what you
mean."

"Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to let
you know this kind of work is really beneath you. It's about like
the Mafia rolling a wino for pocket change, really a joke, you
know—"

"I have to stop you, Gary. I have a
young man here with me tonight, and I have to say, he's giving me a
look like he thinks you must be crazy. I certainly don't want him
thinking I consort with lunatics."

"Yeah, your alibi is solid, huh?
That's good because—"

Then she hung up. I looked around
my bedroom where Little E had fallen asleep on my bed. Strong was
wandering around the house making a list for his insurance carrier
and shaking his head.

"This is Tedesco all over again,"
he said. "Interesting to note your initials are GT, too. I wonder
if this is the end of it."

Reality then
smacked me square in the face. I recalled Catherine's response when
I had asked her how our relationship would end. She had
said,
One of us has to die!
Then, I flashed on Logan's comment from his
meeting with her:
I just want him to
disappear!
I dredged the old news stories
about Tedesco's mangled body into my consciousness. Then I looked
again at Little E sleeping there. I couldn't join her. I sat up all
night in the dark, almost hoping that Catherine's team would return
to finish the job they had failed to do. Maybe then, I thought, I
could die fighting, and at least it would be over for innocent
bystanders like Strong and my daughters. I decided the time had
really come to force a final confrontation—hopefully in a place
where I would be the only possible target.

We can't surrender
to people like her
, I told myself.
We don't have to leave town and live in fear of
obsessive psychos. We turn that fear around and make them
run
.

I knew that is what I would have to
do.

FIFTY-ONE

January 16, 1980

As soon as I sat down at my desk
the morning after the burglary, my telephone extension started to
ring. When I answered, I recognized the voice of another reporter
in the newsroom. It was Mark—the guy I had introduced to Catherine
at the Ramsey Christmas party in hopes he would sweep her off her
feet and deliver me from her vengeance. I could also see that he,
too, was in the newsroom, sitting at his desk about fifty feet
away. I wondered why he had called instead of just walking over to
chat. I also wondered why he was whispering his message that he
wanted to huddle with me in one of our private conference
rooms.

"I need to tell you something," he
said sheepishly when he sat down in the room, which was about the
size of a large closet with no windows. Each of these rooms held a
small table and a couple of chairs. The staff used them for
interviewing sources and private conversations when managers
discussed a reporter's work. In deference to our current city
editor, Johnny B, this room had been named the "Boo-Boo room."
About five years younger than me, Mark was a handsome specimen—a
tall, bearded, athletic guy who had been a star football player in
high school. But now his face looked racked with a combination of
guilt, fear, and suspicion. He looked broken. I knew he was going
through a divorce and figured he probably wanted advice.

"It was me last night," he said,
and at first I wasn't sure what he meant.

"You?" I asked and he nodded. "You
what?"

"Me with Mehaffey."

I didn't know whether to laugh or
yell as the pieces of my conversation with her melded
together.

"You're the young man who thinks
I'm crazy?" I said, as I started to laugh.

"No, I don't think you're crazy,
but I was there. Taylor, what did you get me into?"

"You know what this makes you in
this case, don't you? You are Mr. Alibi," and I laughed again as he
nodded, then buried his face in his hands. "How did you get mixed
up with her?"