Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (17 page)

Back at Mizzou, reality had been waiting to
pounce. Ken would be Army-bound within months, and I was destined
to meet Boop in just a few weeks with that errant phone call to her
dorm. The rogue had enjoyed his time behind the wheel, but the
professional decided to lock him in the trunk for a while. Of
course, neither knew the domestic stood poised to emerge and lead
us in a totally new direction with Boop for the next few years. But
the rogue had not retired. He was just in hibernation, dreaming
blissfully about the great times he knew were yet to
come.

TWENTY-THREE

1970s

If your roommate-lover came home
late after a workout at the YMCA, you'd expect to find a gym bag
filled with sweat-soaked clothes. Sure. And that's what Cindy
figured one evening in early 1974, about six months before she got
pregnant. I knew that's what she had expected once I saw the
contorted look on her face, after she peeked inside to find my
T-shirt and shorts still neatly folded with a pair of white crew
socks rolled tightly in a ball. Fortunately, we had a guest from
the apartment next door chatting away, or I might have been
clobbered with that bag.

"Didn't make it to the gym, huh?"
she asked, with more than a touch of sarcasm after our visitor had
left. "So what kept you?"

I was busted. Cheating for the
first time in my life and caught, I realized lying would just
create more problems. So I told her about Maria, who worked as an
assistant for one of the elected county commissioners. While out
for drinks a few weeks earlier, Maria had confided about her
troubled marriage. One thing led to another, and we kissed. Then we
went back to the courthouse and had sex on the couch in the
commissioner's office. A couple of days late, she introduced me to
a little motel just a short drive from the government building so
we could enjoy tryst-breaks during the day. The place charged by
the hour, and each room had a speaker that allowed the desk clerk
to ask after forty-five minutes: "Do you need more time?" Maria had
a troubled past that included the defrocking of a Catholic priest a
few years before when she lived in the Rio Grande Valley on the
Texas border. She said the experience ruined her faith, and I
quietly wondered what it had done to the priest.

Cindy listened patiently and
responded without amusement when I suggested the fling had been an
attempt at "source development" for news stories.

"You want me to leave?" she finally
asked. Although she appeared hurt, she wasn't destroyed. Perhaps
she considered it cosmic justice for the cheating she'd done during
her marriage and wanted some punishment to soothe her guilt. She
also had no alternative living options, having become somewhat
dependent on me in those last months of her college plan. I
gathered, too, that this had been her first time to assume the
position of cheated lover. She didn't quite know how to react, so
the emotions were bottled inside.

In that moment, however, several
realizations emerged clear to me. First, I really liked Cindy and
wanted her to stay. Second, Maria was history. But third, I
couldn't be sure this would be my last time in the penalty box for
extracurricular activities. I couldn't declare Cindy as the last
woman I ever would fuck, particularly at the tender age of
twenty-seven. I could, however, work harder at insulating her from
the knowledge of any future transgressions. If it happens again, I
promised myself, she never will know.

So I made peace with my internal
conflicts, and it did not seem that big a deal. Cindy and I both,
at that time, fancied ourselves a '70s Boomer couple willing to
experiment and push the role of sex as a boundary for
relationships. Perhaps she was planning some extracurricular
activity of her own, and like as not, she probably had some. But I
was more interested in finding a way to disarm jealousy as a
destructive influence in my life while discarding the equally
destructive view that another person could be a possession. By
demystifying sex to the level of a mere physical act, I found the
more fundamental aspects of our relationship assumed greater
importance. By turning my fears into fantasies, I found I could
lick jealousy. I could even become aroused with the thought of some
other guy giving her pleasure. My only objection might have been
that she hadn't let me watch. She had my permission to mess around.
Why shouldn't I have permission from her?

Then again, maybe we actually should have
discussed these concepts in greater detail. And, of course, things
grew a lot more complicated quickly with her pregnancy and the
birth of our first daughter. I never set out to seek adultery, but
opportunities always seemed to come my way. It became the new
manifestation of the charming rogue as those opportunities
blossomed repeatedly after lying dormant while I had built my
career and surrendered to the domestic life with Boop.

By the time I had settled in with Cindy, it
seemed the domestic, the rogue, and the professional had forged an
uneasy truce. The rogue knew he needed the professional to survive
and grow, while the professional understood the needs of the rogue.
The domestic had his security blossoming with Cindy. So we agreed
to release the rogue to prowl on special occasions, as long as he
could be discreet. For several years, he succeeded beyond our
wildest expectations.

I recall the night
before my ten-year high school reunion in 1975. Cindy and Little E
stayed with my parents in St. Louis while I ventured out with some
old pals.
What have I been missing?
I asked myself as I sat in an apartment watching
them roll around on the floor having sex with women from their
jobs. Of course, the gals had brought an extra friend who wasted no
time getting her hand in my pants while rationalizing with
complaints about her husband's unfaithful ways. The eight of us
capped that night with an early morning skinny dip, scaling the
fence at a local public pool for an encore.

Then there was the time in New
Orleans for Mardi Gras when I rendezvoused at Pat O'Brien's saloon
with some friends. They had stopped on their drive south the night
before at a college, attended some kind of fraternity bash, and
left with a college girl asleep in the back seat of their car. She
woke up and quickly embraced the spirit of this religious holiday.
That night, the men stripped while she draped Mardi Gras necklaces
around our genitals. For some still-unexplainable reason I was the
only one who got laid. I guess in her heart she was really just the
monogamous kind.

During my 1977
sabbatical in St. Louis, I juggled care for my ailing dad and
Little E with visits to the apartment of a woman I met while
drinking with an old college pal. Ironically, her name also was
Cindy and she had attended high school with my Cindy when she lived
in St. Louis. As I rode my motorcycle back to my family's house in
the early hours of the morning before everyone there would be
awake, I couldn't help thinking to myself:
What a small world this is, indeed!

That year proved
fruitful for extracurricular activities. Back at work for
The Post
in the Fall, I
spent a month in Huntsville covering that sensational trial of the
two Houston cops accused of killing the Hispanic laborer by
throwing him into a bayou. While trying to concentrate on testimony
from the witness stand, I turned my head to survey the audience of
college students attending the trial from Sam Houston State
University's school of criminology. One female student caught my
eye when she opened her mouth to reveal her teeth and slowly rolled
her tongue across the enamel. About an hour later, we were back in
my room banging away. A few days later, I hooked up with another
coed from the school, and we spent several nights on the water bed
at her apartment.

Although Cindy was just a month
from delivery of Shannon, we traveled during Christmas of 1977 to
St. Louis with Little E for a visit with my parents. I got out one
night with the boys again, and that excursion ended at a massage
parlor, where one of my friends vanished into the back room with
the knockout blonde who ran the place. Instead of leaving, we hung
around the waiting room at her invitation for about thirty minutes
while she locked up. After breakfast at a Denny's, we adjourned to
her condominium and took turns hosing her down while her two
children slept in the next room. The next day, I went directly to
the St. Louis health department for a venereal disease test and
spent an anxious couple of days awaiting the negative results while
finding excuses to delay having sex with Cindy.

I could rationalize my behavior by
differentiating between the nature of these one-time, special
opportunity flings and the destructive potential of a full-blown
affair that could threaten our family. I also knew that
philandering occurs more as an ego builder than for the physical
release, the male culture's version of collecting scalps. No one
got hurt, and Cindy never knew. At least, she didn't know until
that night in August of 1979, when I learned about Uncle Al. I
wanted to lash back, and I also wanted to brag. So, out came a full
accounting of the rogue's secret life. I stressed the difference
between my flings and her affair, calling hers the extracurricular
activity that destroyed our home.

"And you never would have known
about mine if I hadn't told you now," I said.

"You say I didn't know," she
replied. "But there had to be something telling me we weren't
right."

My three lives had converged to
create a real mess. Our money was tied in the house, and I didn't
have the cash flow to get my own place. I was dumped and driving a
two-hundred-dollar car. I was sleeping on a couch at the home of a
friend. And I carried my dirty clothes in a brown paper, grocery
sack. I called it luggage by Kroger, and that bag came to symbolize
my existence during that time. I didn't know I hadn't quite hit
bottom or that a special problem solver named Catherine Mehaffey
lurked on the horizon. But pretty soon, despite all this mess, I
soon would have only one true problem. Beyond her, I would recall
the rest of this simply as bumps in the road.

Part Three:

A Fatal Attraction

TWENTY-FOUR

October 15, 1979

I had no sooner tossed my jacket on
the coat rack beside my desk in the courthouse press room to start
the day when the phone on my desk began to ring. From the desk
beside mine, radio reporter Jim Strong looked up from the morning
paper to see who might be calling me so early in the day. I nodded
and snapped my fingers when I heard Catherine's voice.

"I guess you've heard about my case
by now," she began. Strong drew closer to my desk with a grin on
his face. We hadn't seen her in two weeks since that introduction
September 28 at the party. He had left a couple of messages with
her receptionist, and I had called once. I also had visited the
courtroom briefly and seen her testifying in her case to win
control of the Tedesco estate as the doctor's widow.

"I just got in and hadn't heard," I
told her on the phone. "But I saw you crying on the witness
stand."

She laughed out loud and said,
"Some show, huh? That didn't even work. The things we do for
juries!"

I was more than a little stunned by
her cavalier manner. What if I'd been taking notes for a
story?

"So, you have a verdict?" I
asked.

"They agreed I was his wife, but
they didn't give me the estate. So, I lost. And it's worse than
that. I guess if you came to court you saw all my old boyfriends
sitting in a row. They were there to give me support."

My mind flashed back three days to
the scene I had watched through a window in the door from outside
the courtroom, standing beside a lower court judge who knew her. He
pointed out the gallery of old lovers that included a Houston cop
in full uniform and laughed. He also told me his bailiff had
testified against her for the family the day before, claiming she
had confessed the Tedesco murder to him. He said he didn't believe
that would be enough for an arrest. He also snickered at the idea
of her attorney possibly handling this probate matter on a
contingency-fee basis, as if it were some sort of civil damages
case, and the lawyer should take a cut. "Yep," he had said, peering
through the glass as she started to cry, "there goes the
hanky."

On the phone to me, she continued to joke
about the case.

"Weren't they cute? Even Officer
Joe in his uniform. He sat right up there and professed his love.
And now that I'm not getting any money, guess what? They won't have
anything to do with me any more."

Her attitude startled me, but I still had to
laugh. She had certainly aroused my curiosity. Then she cut me off
and came right to the point.

"I need to put this behind me now
and move on with my life. I'm so low right now I really need a
change. And it looks like you are my last hope. I think you're a
man who could show me the true meaning of love."

Catherine laughed as she said that,
of course, making it a tease. I winked at Jim and told her, "I'm
willing to try. When should we start?"

"Got plans for tonight?"

"But I'm still estranged," I
reminded her. "And you don't like the estranged."