Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (23 page)

As we finished the meal and
prepared to leave I realized I had a couple more items to add to
her secret agenda. And these appeared more threatening than the
rest. She wanted me to help her generate income through my job at
the courthouse. And, she obviously had decided I might be worth
more than she initially had thought.

Finally, I was starting to get nervous. I
realized Catherine was moving to take control of my
life.

THIRTY-ONE

November 1979

Although I moved into Jim Strong's
house on November 1, paying him a hundred dollars monthly for a
bedroom with a closet, I continued to spend most of my time with
Catherine at Mike's place in far west Houston. And, in the weeks
before Thanksgiving we spent a lot of time with Strong as well. I
recall that period now as similar to the lull later in my life
before Hurricane Alicia in 1983: Peaceful, but punctuated here and
there by a few ominous clouds.

One Saturday the three of us drove
to Galveston to walk around the older sections of the historic city
rather than visit the beach. We had a charming lunch and shopped at
the huge Army-Navy surplus store in Galveston's Strand district.
Strong had fun teasing Catherine about her reputation, offering to
purchase old World War I gas masks and showing her a box of
grenades.

"Use these on your next job," he
said. "There will be no witnesses."

She took it all in stride, enjoying
the attention from her colorful aura. On the way out of town we
noticed a sign for a fortune teller in the window of an old house
and stopped to have our palms read. I've never been a believer in
the occult. But that experience proved downright spooky. The Gypsy
woman read Strong's palm and jabbered about his need to fulfill his
potential. After searching Catherine's palm, however, the laughter
died as the old woman refused to share anything about it and
insisted on refunding the two dollars that Strong had given her.
Then, when the woman felt my hand, she looked into my eyes and
refused again. I demanded a reading.

"You are in very great danger," the
old woman said.

Strong repeatedly has sworn over the years
that he did not set that up or pay the woman extra for her dramatic
presentation. Catherine laughed it off, speculating that the old
woman probably played that game routinely as a way to generate
repeat customers and had just picked us at random for her
pitch.

On another Saturday night,
Catherine complained about an infected mosquito bite on her ass,
claiming I was to blame. She said the bite had occurred while
servicing my lust during our tryst on the beach and later got
infected. She insisted I take her to an emergency room and pay any
expenses above what her State Bar of Texas medical plan would
cover.

"You got what you wanted, and now
I'm the one who has to suffer," she muttered.

We walked into the emergency room
at Houston's Memorial Southwest Hospital to compete with the usual
Saturday night crowd of blood and gore waiting for service.
Unmoved, Catherine strolled forcefully to the nurse's station with
her complaint of a bug bite on her ass and demanded immediate
help.

"Listen," she lectured the nurse.
"I am a lawyer. Do you understand what that means? My time is too
valuable for this. I bill at the rate of two hundred dollars per
hour. I have clients who depend on me right now. I don't have time
for this. I have to be available if something happens. So get me a
doctor right away."

The nurse yawned in the middle of
Catherine's tirade, then shoved a clipboard in her direction and
told her to fill out the form and take a seat. Catherine repeated
her demand a few minutes later while returning the form, but the
nurse just pointed back to the chair. During the next three hours
Catherine pitched her case repeatedly to the same nurse who
continued to yawn and point her back at the chair. Catherine
watched in horror as the nurse ushered patients with broken limbs
and bloody faces into the rooms ahead of her bug bite on the ass.
Each time she demanded her turn and each time the nurse pointed at
the chair. I had a hard time holding my laughter.

Finally, her turn arrived. She
insisted I accompany her into the curtained examination cubicle,
telling the doctor, "I insist on a witness." Then she pulled a pen
and a notebook from her purse and asked for his name.

"We'll need this information in
case there has to be a malpractice suit," she said. I started
laughing but he was not amused. He grunted when she added, "I am a
lawyer, and I know what happens in these hospitals."

Then he prescribed an antibiotic and sent us
on our way.

Just as she'd
promised, Catherine refrained from debating my divorce case or
making comments about my marriage. We grew better acquainted and
went to old movies like
Casablanca
and
Red
Dust
. W saw some fresh
releases, too. Catherine embraced a line from the police murder
drama
The Onion Field
, chuckling as one of the characters chided another who had
expressed a conscience about his actions: "Guilty is just something
you say in the courtroom when your luck runs
out."

Whenever we encountered some old
pal of hers while crawling the bars, she'd introduce me and then
demand I repeat what I had said to Chuck when he warned me about
her. That, too, became one of her favorite lines.

We spent a lot of time together
alone at Mike's house while he was out making arrangements for his
wedding. She took pride in her cooking skills, preparing a variety
of dishes from Greek salads to shrimp scampi or something as simple
as hamburgers. She told me about her affair with the cop named
Joseph and how sexually charged it had been to watch him unbuckle
his Sam Browne gunbelt, then hang it over the bedpost before
climbing beneath the covers with her. Of course, she kept a
.32-revolver on the table beside her bed and said she had a .22
stashed somewhere, a memento from her father.

"I need to be prepared," she
warned. "You never know when the 'Tedescos' are going to kick down
the door here and come for me."

Tedesco remained a common theme in her
conversations. No day passed without a mention of his name or the
names of other lovers from her past who had suffered their own
particular punishments for alleged transgressions against her. I
felt like a confidante to someone truly living on the edge. She
ridiculed that court bailiff who had testified against her in the
estate trial and boasted about destroying his marriage.

"That's how low I had sunk, to have
sex with a slob like that," she said. "And then, he wouldn't even
pay for my abortion. All I needed was two hundred dollars, and it
was his bill to pay. Nothing is free. But he didn't pay and look
what happened. He's out on the street, his family is gone, and he
has nothing. Even at that, if I saw him and his kids in the desert
begging for water and I had a little in my canteen, you know what I
would do? I would pour it into the sand in front of his face and
watch them all die of thirst."

She asked one time to watch me
masturbate and I obliged. She said she'd never seen that
before.

"You should have asked me years
ago," I said. "Thanks to you, I now only have to beat off twice a
week."

She adopted that line as well and started
sharing it with other friends any time we met some.

"Gary says he only has to jack off
twice a week now that he's met me," she would say with a girlish
giggle. Then she would order: "Tell them how you handled
Chuck."

I kept my word on the defense appointment
opportunity and asked Edd Blackwood to check her out. I figured he
would toss her a burglary plea, but then he shocked me by assigning
her to defend a murder case against an Hispanic gang leader named
Blackie that would probably go all the way to jury
trial.

"Hey," I asked him, "you didn't do
that for me did you? That sounds like a complicated
case."

"Nah," he said. "She checked out
OK. She's got some experience. If she can't handle it, we'll pull
her off and reassign it."

Then, one Saturday after a bottle
of wine with shrimp scampi, she ran out of things to say. Candles
danced in the darkened dining room of Mike's house, and she sat
quietly as if considering the moment. She reached across the table
and took my hands.

"Gary, I want you to listen to me.
What if I were to tell you that I did kill George?"

"Huh?"

"What if I told you that we had a
meeting that night to talk about our divorce case? We were talking
in his garage, and I was making him angry. He was vicious when he
got angry. He was a dangerous, little man."

She paused, looked down at the table, and then
returned my stare.

"What if I told you he started to
make threats, and he doubled up his fists. And I couldn't take
another beating from that man. I was not going to take another
beating. So, I looked around for a weapon, and I saw the leg of a
bar stool against the wall. He came for me, but I was too quick. I
jumped out of his way, and I grabbed that chair leg, and I hit him
in the head. When he fell, I hit him again and again and again. I
couldn't stop. I kept beating him until I was exhausted, and then
he was dead. What would you say if I told you that?"

She left me speechless. I shook my head and
tried to guess her intention with this confession—if that was what
it had been. She stared, awaiting an answer.

"I don't know what to say. What do
you expect me to say?"

Catherine laughed then and said, "I
just wanted to see the look on your face."

"How did I look?"

"I think I scared you."

It could have been a performance. If it was, I
thought, she should get an award. I would have sworn from the tone
in her voice and glint in her eyes that she had been
there.

As shocking as that confession had
been, it couldn't top another comment from Catherine in those days
as our relationship approached the Thanksgiving holiday mark. She
drew my undivided attention one evening when she mumbled and tossed
off another riveting remark:

"I think my period is
late."

THIRTY-TWO

November 1979

Already troubled in my mind, our
relationship began its full transition into a war zone on the
Sunday night of November 11 when Catherine and I returned to her
house after a weekend trip to Austin in her car. We arrived about
eight to find her roommate Mike waiting to have a chat. He took her
aside to speak privately for only a few minutes while I relaxed in
Catherine's bedroom. Then he climbed in his car and left while she
joined me wearing a serious look on her face.

"We've been evicted," she said with
a giggle.

"We?"

"Well, I am evicted now because of
you. He said either you go, or we both go. You know what I told
him?"

"I'm afraid to guess."

"Ha! I told him, 'I'll never give
him up, even if I have to sleep in the gutter.' Ha! He said he
can't stand your car parked in front of his house all the
time."

"I can park it down the
street."

"He also doesn't like the noise all
night long."

For a moment, I saw this
development as perhaps an opportunity to accomplish the inevitable
and put some distance between us. She had grown too possessive, and
I had spotted a few danger signals. But she wouldn't have
it.

"Maybe we should cool things for a
while," I said. "I'm over at Strong's now, and you're back in
business. We can…"

"Wait a minute," she cut me off.
"You're not dumping me over this. You don't dump me."

"Well, you can
dump me. I'll tell everybody it was your idea," I said,
thinking,
as if anyone could
care
.

"I can't stay here after this. I've
told Mike to fuck off because we're leaving. We'll be out in a
week. And you better find me a place to stay. There has to be room
at Strong's. We don't take up much space, and that stooge is out
running around all night anyway, isn't he? No, you got the pussy,
and now you have to make this right. Nothing is free."

I should have been offended, I
guess, by that tirade, but instead I found it amusing, and I
realized I wasn't quite ready to break away. She had played the
guilt card, blaming me for her eviction. Although I did not agree
with her contention, I let it slide without an argument. I checked
with Strong, and he immediately agreed to let her bunk with me for
a while until she could find a more permanent solution, mumbling
something about being a little lonely over there and looking
forward to the excitement Catherine might introduce to his life. It
would take him only eleven more days to adopt a dramatically
different attitude. By then, however, we would have passed a point
of no return, with Strong poised to experience more excitement than
he ever could have imagined.

I tried to move Catherine in drips
and drabs, using the cars. Like me, she had no large pieces of
furniture. Besides the two pistols, her prized possession was a
Sony color television set I figured had come from a burglary client
as payment for a bond. But I didn't ask specifics. She mostly had
clothes she did not want wrinkled. Left alone, I would have tossed
her whole closet in my Vega and sorted it out later. But she
demanded more respect for her clothes and threatened to serve me
with a dry cleaning bill for any wrinkles. For a woman who
allegedly had the power to mobilize an army of felons for
burglaries on a moment's notice, Catherine really had trouble
finding anyone to help her move. So the burden fell on me. But, as
she reminded me several times during the week, "Nothing is
free."