Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (13 page)

"The time has come," I told Wayne,
who took one look at her and started laughing. He escorted us into
his office and began to mumble some ceremonial nonsense before I
cut him off.

"We'll just take the five-dollar
job."

He looked a little surprised but then signed
the bottom of our license without any elaboration.

"OK, it's done," he said, handing
the certificate back to me. "It will cost you thousands now to get
out of this."

We emerged into
the hall to find the county government reporter from the
rival
Chronicle
waiting outside. She had followed me after I quietly left our
press room to make sure I wasn't working some secret scoop. When
she realized I had gone down on my lunch hour to get married, she
didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or scream at me. Somewhere in
Wayne's office she had found a package of rice and started tossing
it at us in the hall. More than thirty years later I would run into
an old editor from those days who greeted me in fond remembrance as
"the reporter who got married on his lunch
break."

Cindy laughed about this cavalier
and unromantic approach to matrimony, but I always suspected she
was hiding some pain. When breaking up five years later she
confided she never felt we had any kind of marriage, just a
partnership. And, she wanted to be courted. At the time, however,
she probably was more than a little frightened about the pregnancy,
and those first few weeks she seemed in a daze. She was probably
just satisfied that I was making an attempt to take care of us and
seemed willing to let me take the lead on just about everything.
But, let's face it. I had a good job, had put us in a house, and I
was even smiling about the future. I figured plenty of unmarried
pregnant women should wish they had her problems.

I had even helped her find a new
job. OK, so she was using her English degree to transcribe autopsy
reports in the Harris County Morgue! But, it would turn out to lead
into a couple of much more important positions for her, thanks to
her personal initiative. She was destined to parlay that job into a
caseworker's post with the welfare office investigating food stamp
applications. And from there she would go on to become an important
child welfare case investigator assigned to the main county
hospital, Ben Taub.

In the beginning, however, we both
just settled in to wait for the baby. About the only thing really
upsetting her was the suspicion that her supervisor at the morgue
intentionally assigned all the dead-baby cases to her for
transcription as a way to tease. But she could take it. Those days
became an interesting and relaxing period for both of us. Besides
feeling the baby move and picking out names, we attended the Lamaze
natural childbirth classes that were all the rage back then. I
learned how to be the coach and practiced those special breathing
techniques until I almost wished I were the one who was pregnant.
Besides helping her breathe, I planned to take photos in the
delivery room and capture the moment for posterity, and, I figured,
also for the kid's prom date to see eighteen years down the
road.

We made other plans for life after
the delivery, too. If she had any desires to be a stay-at-home mom,
Cindy never expressed them. No, she was too driven to take more
than the minimum time allowed and had just started the more
challenging job at the welfare department. She wanted to move her
career forward as fast as possible. So we found a day care center
about half-a-mile from our house with a suitable baby nursery and
made a reservation. The cost nearly cancelled any financial
advantage from her job, but that didn't matter. We believed each of
us had to continue growing and felt comfortable the baby would do
that, too, in the neighborhood nursery school.

So, on April 25, 1975, the moment
came, and we hustled to the hospital. As Cindy's labor pains
increased I deployed my most inspired Lamaze drills.

"Breathe," I demanded, huffing and
puffing for her to follow. She responded as we had practiced for a
while, and I continued to coax the best of natural childbirth from
her. "Breathe. Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo." Suddenly she stopped
responding. She raised up on her elbows and looked into my eyes. I
knew she wanted to tell me how wonderful I was. She pulled about
three inches from my face. And then she snarled: "Get me a fucking
shot."

So much for
natural childbirth. But that shot finished the job as our first
daughter, Little E, entered the world. And I got plenty of shots of
my own, capturing every angle with
Kodachrome
.

EIGHTEEN

Mid-1970s

Cindy's later characterization of
our marriage as more a partnership than a romance now seems right
on target. We had launched the partnership with a deal to have a
child and becoming good parents stood as our business mission. We
never shared a joint checking account and Cindy continued to use
her original last name, which had been restored after her divorce.
She bought a wedding band, she insisted, to help keep the wolves
away and make life easier in the workplace. I never wore one myself
because, I insisted, a ring would irritate my finger. Our wedding
featured no flowers or reception and, most importantly, no vows.
Our honeymoon occurred at the hospital when Little E was born, and
the photos of her birth were the closest we had to a wedding
album.

But I still argue that our partnership
included plenty of romance. It might not have been the traditional
hearts and flowers variety. But dictionaries define romance as the
pleasure experienced with someone you love. They also describe it
as the feeling of excitement or mystery from a particular
experience or event. I can look back on those years as a period
filled with excitement and mystery, a period good for all three of
us.

As inspirational as Boop had been
in launching my professional life, Cindy proved indispensable in
pushing it to the next level. By giving me Little E, she offered a
new motivation to excel. Besides providing the inspiration of the
baby, however, Cindy also pushed us positively in other directions.
We had hardly finished our work on that first house, for example,
when she decided we needed to cash out and move up. I grumbled.
But, after learning we had prospective buyers offering twice our
initial purchase price, I had to agree. I could take credit for
establishing our real estate beachhead in Houston's Heights
neighborhood, but Cindy deserved high marks for pushing it
forward.

By 1976 we had sold the first house
and used the profit to buy a larger old house that needed some
work. I spent weekends stripping six coats of paint off a built-in
buffet to discover the original wood had been a gorgeous Philippine
mahogany. I built a loose brick patio in the backyard. We started
dabbling in antiques. We also bought a rental beach house that year
on Galveston Island's west beach, about seventy miles south of
Houston along the Gulf of Mexico. The house had been the oldest on
that strip of beach, and, over the years, a community of more
modern rental dwellings had grown up around it. We had hoped to
make enough from summer rentals to allow us to use the house in the
winter, but we found no summer vacationers wanted that place. We
did manage to adjust and find regular tenants who could cover our
payments so we could maintain the place as an investment likely to
appreciate. At work for me, 1976 also had been the year of my
Pulitzer Prize nomination. And Cindy had taken the next step in her
career, landing a spot as a child welfare caseworker investigating
allegations of abuse and neglect for the county.

Despite our hectic
work and investment project schedules, Little E remained the center
of our lives, the glue that really held us together. We read books
on parenting theories and shared the joys of watching her rapid
development from infant to child. I'm still convinced her early
transfer to day care four weeks after birth sparked more rapid
development. Parents don't receive final grades on their decisions
until twenty or thirty years after they've been made. Based on the
success she's become as an adult, Little E now makes a persuasive
argument for early day care. But she also gave me a new dimension
and purpose of a more immediate nature at that time. Although I
lost a lot of sleep with her nighttime restlessness, I actually
came to enjoy the sound of Little E's cries because it meant I
could spend the next hour rocking her back to sleep in the wicker
rocking chair we'd bought for that purpose. For the first time in
my life I felt in balance because she gave me a link to the future.
I felt suspended in time by her in front and my parents in the
past. She kindled an interest in researching my family history, and
I started spending some of my few free moments reviewing old census
reports at Houston's extensive genealogical library. She walked and
talked at an early age, and, as she grew, I took great delight in
trips to the park on Sunday mornings, infant swimming lessons,
and
Dr. Seuss
at
bedtime.

So, Cindy and I
decided Little E needed a sibling. This time we planned it. About
the time she started to show, my dad in St. Louis suffered a
stroke—a big one destined to sideline him from life. He needed my
help so I took a leave of absence from
The
Post
in the summer of 1977 to spend a
couple of months restructuring his life. My youngest sister was
only fourteen, and my mom could not handle all the stress. In
addition, he still owned that lawnmower repair business, which, by
then, had grown into the largest in the city with about a dozen
employees. When I came home for this extended visit, I brought
Little E along so Cindy could concentrate on her new pregnancy
without the dangerous hassles of also minding a two-year-old. More
than that, however, I knew it would give my dad a chance to spend
some precious time with his granddaughter, and it turned out to be
an experience he revered.

"It's just like you came back
again," he said, noting the resemblance between Little E and photos
of me as a child.

Although she was barely two, Little
E was talking like a chatterbox and had begun to demonstrate the
spunk and gregariousness that would mark her personality. Her
outbursts ranged from compassion to high comedy. One day she
tumbled down a staircase and gave us a shock. An athletic little
kid, she simply rolled across the floor at the bottom and started
laughing. But five minutes later she spotted my poor old dad
hobbling around near the top of the stairs on his cane and showed
she obviously had taken note of his decrepit condition.

"No, granddaddy, no," she screamed
with the plea of a protective mama bear. "You stay away from those
stairs."

During that summer of 1977, we
forged a special kind of relationship.

By late August I had everything
stabilized in St. Louis. The business was up for sale. My dad was
getting around better and fortunately had not suffered much mental
damage at all. He was destined to live another seven years before
eventually succumbing to cancer. But his working days were done.
While living there that summer I had bought a small 360 Honda
motorcycle for transportation. So I put Little E on a plane and
took my own little trip back to Houston. I mapped out a relaxing
backwoods route through the Missouri Ozarks, Arkansas, and East
Texas that would take five days. As I rolled along those deserted
country roads, spending nights in isolated motels, I thought about
my life and found it sweet. Fatherhood had not become the burden I
had feared. And Cindy's January due date on our second child was
just ahead.

I had no way to foresee the
catastrophic turmoil that lay just beyond the horizon.

NINETEEN

Late 1970s

After that sabbatical to assist my
dad, my domestic "partnership" with Cindy in Houston shifted to a
higher gear of growth and prosperity. I returned to cover the
criminal courts in what would become my most productive period as a
newspaper reporter. Meanwhile, Cindy moved up the hierarchy at the
child welfare department. We were making a solid living from
satisfying and interesting jobs while building a good home for a
family that increased by one on January 18, 1978, with the birth of
our second daughter, Shannon.

Cindy had been so convinced that
the child in her womb was male, she had agreed I could pick the
name if it emerged a girl. We hadn't been able to agree on names to
that point, but I shrugged off the compromise in anticipation of a
boy. Her doctor had gauged Shannon's activity level in the womb and
also predicted a male. Even in the delivery room, the doctor kept
saying, "Here he comes." Cindy was smiling, after having this time
taken her shot a little earlier, and I was snapping pictures. The
doctor and nurses took the child to the side to count its fingers
and toes, and, then I heard the doctor say: "Oops. This is a girl.
Do you have a name?" It was my turn to smile as I told them,
"Shannon." Cindy just stuck out her tongue and laughed some
more.

Behind her façade as the joyful
mother, however, Cindy was starting to develop some personal
anxieties. Although I could notice them, there wasn't much I could
do. She was growing restless with personal ambition and started
grasping impulsively at projects designed to move both of us along
at a faster pace. Some of these projects worked to our advantage
while others just left her more frustrated.