Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (28 page)

"I've done nothing wrong. Can't you
stop him, Jim? He's gone insane. I've got to get away. I haven't
done anything. I'm so trapped. He must take it all back. It has to
start now. I can't bear it. He's doing it now, he's hurting
me."

Strong winced as she raised the
volume and screamed: "He got everything he wanted. He fucked my
brains out. I'm not a dog. I'm so scared, Jim. I don't know what's
happening. I'm starting to hate him. My God, we cannot live here
another day. I've never killed anybody in my life. He's panicking.
He can't do this to me in Houston. I have to live here, Jim.
Couldn't he keep quiet? I'm scared. I've got to stop
him."

She took a breath, then continued:
"I do have hostility, tremendous hostility. He's got to call me.
He's got to come here. He needs to beg for my mercy before this is
over."

Beg for her
mercy?
I wondered if I had heard correctly,
and even Carpenter looked stunned.

She continued, "I've never killed
anyone but, Jim, he has done so much…"

"Catherine," Jim cut her off. "You
need to be careful. If anything happens to him, now—if he gets hit
by a bus—they will come looking for you. You need to make sure
nothing happens to him."

"A bus? How can I stop it if he's
hit by a bus?" she screamed in her demon voice. "He fucked my
brains out and then threw me away. He's got to take it all back.
He's got to beg for my mercy."

"Calm down, Catherine, calm down.
We have to pick up the pieces now."

Almost as suddenly as the hysterics
had come, however, she transitioned back to the sympathy-seeking
waif. Listening live, I thought I might be witnessing a true split
personality in action. But Strong wouldn't cave to her begging
about staying longer at his house. They made arrangements to meet
there one last time and finally ended the call. Listening to a
replay then, I thought I might break a sweat, her voice sounding so
surreal and indescribable. Stricklin made a couple of copies for us
to keep and placed the original in his file.

"I would advise you guys to
continue taping her calls," he said. "There will be more and you
need to keep a record. Do you have a tape recorder at the
house?"

We laughed. I did not own one,
preferring to take notes in a pad with a pen. But Strong worked for
a radio news service. He had recorders beside all his phones, ready
to tape on a moment's notice for feeds to radio station
broadcasts.

When Strong and I returned to the
press room, our media roommates were suspicious. They thought we'd
been out on a scoop. Instead, I locked the door that never had been
locked and said, "It might be best if we keep this locked for a
while."

Sandy furrowed her brows, and I
could see we needed to provide more details. So Jim took his copy
of the Exorcist Tape and popped it into his player. He only shared
a portion, the part where she screamed, "He has to beg for my
mercy." Then he shut it down.

"Oh…my…God," Sandy said, shaking
her head. "Taylor, Taylor, what are we going to do with
you?"

"Keep the door locked," I
said.

"And," said Strong, "if you think
that tape is bad, you ought to see the suitcase."

A couple of the other reporters
started laughing.

"Love on the rocks," sang one,
trying his best Sinatra to even more laughter.

"That's what happens as the world
turns," giggled another of my sympathetic colleagues.

Then they all went back to work.
They had given my story the five minutes of attention it deserved.
But now it was time to dig up something for the next newscast or
tomorrow's paper. I made arrangements to spend the night with Edd
Blackwood, the court coordinator from Judge Routt's court. His wife
was a Houston police officer, and I knew Catherine would not even
know where he lived. Then I called Cindy to warn her.

"Gary, I need to tell you
something," she said. "Al and I have made up. He's back in the
house here."

Clearly, I decided, I would have to
do something about the telephone-shooting Uncle Al living with my
kids again. But at that particular moment, he ranked lower on my
schedule. And just when I thought this day couldn't grow any more
complicated, Strong called from his house, where he had gone with
an investigator to oversee a peaceful transfer of property to
Catherine.

"You know that television she loves
so much?" Strong asked me.

"Yes."

"It was stolen property. They ran a
serial number or something before she got here and it came back as
hot. No wonder she wanted to get over here so quick."

"Where is it now?"

"They took it away and told her
they had to process it. Man, was she pissed. They didn't arrest her
yet, but I'm sure that's coming soon."

I hung up the phone and laid my head on my
desk, unsure whether I should laugh, cry, or get into my
two-hundred-dollar car with my grocery sack of laundry and drive
west on Interstate-10 as far as it would run.

THIRTY-NINE

November 29, 1979

"There they go," Strong was saying
as we sat on stools in a diner in the 500 block of Fannin Street
staring through the large plate glass window toward the 609 Fannin
Building directly across the street. It was about three in the
afternoon and the air was bitter cold outside for Houston, even in
November. The wind was blowing. And up the sidewalk on the other
side of Fannin walked four men in suits looking very uncomfortable
after a frosty, five-block stroll from the courthouse down the
street. A raiding party from the district attorney's office, they
were led by Don Stricklin, chief of Special Crimes. And they were
headed for the law offices of Lloyd Oliver where Catherine Mehaffey
also practiced her craft. Stricklin had tipped me about this
mission, and I wanted to see for myself. I couldn't believe it was
happening. They had enjoyed confiscating that stolen Sony TV so
much, they now wanted to see if Catherine had any additional stolen
property in her office.

Catherine and Oliver did not have a
formal partnership. I never really knew the particulars of their
arrangement. They shared a secretary named Rita but that seemed
about the extent of it. Lloyd was a fairly successful attorney fond
of the Yuppie nightlife and his Corvette. He treated Catherine much
like an eccentric younger sister, and I always had the impression
he handled her carefully. I doubted they had had any kind of sexual
relationship, or he likely would have been in line with me outside
Special Crimes seeking help from Stricklin. I even thought it
likely he would let it slide if she didn't pay her rent. He might
have been trying to stay out of her life and troubles, but now they
were both poised to rain straight down on his head, if only for a
couple of days. I would have loved to have seen the look on his
mustachioed face when Stricklin and his gang stormed into his
office looking for stolen goods. They found nothing.

But the raid
capped an active couple of emotion-packed days for me. Although
technically out of my life, Catherine had kept me so busy I hadn't
even had time to mope about Uncle Al, Cindy, and the reconciliation
that had derailed my reconciliation. No, Catherine had been calling
all hours of the day and night to harangue, harass, and sometimes
even make me feel guilty about her current state of affairs. Of
course, every time I even hinted to Strong that I might feel even a
twinge of sympathy, he would turn on his recorder and play back a
portion of the
Exorcist
Tape
. He had grown particularly fond of her
voice threatening that "someday he's going to look around, and
he'll see me standing there. And he's going to wish he'd never done
this to me." And always he finished up with the chorus: "He's got
to beg for my mercy."

The day before, Catherine had asked
me to refer her to a psychiatrist, noting that I had done that for
Cindy so I should do it for her. I asked Stricklin if he wanted to
suggest a name and Chuck Rosenthal came up with one. The next thing
I knew, Rosenthal's psychiatrist had checked Catherine into a
hospital. Strong and I wondered how outraged she would become after
learning that a Special Crimes psychiatrist had ordered the
treatment. But Lloyd had come to her rescue, checking her out of
the place after just a couple hours. Obviously aware of my visit to
Special Crimes, he apparently felt my battle with Catherine was
getting too close to his practice. Then, after Stricklin's
subsequent raid on his office, Lloyd decided to bring Catherine
along for peace talks that night during a surprise visit to our
house.

"I can't have Special Crimes
destroying my law office," he said forcefully, as Catherine sat
quietly beside him on Strong's couch. Strong excused himself, went
to a bedroom, and returned wearing a bicycle helmet.

"In case I'm hit in the head
tonight," he said, pointing to the helmet as he sat down in a
chair. Lloyd grunted, Catherine winced, and I stifled a
grin.

"How can we put an end to this?"
Lloyd asked.

"Just leave us alone," I said.
"It's done as far as I'm concerned. I can't help because she had a
stolen TV."

"It wasn't stolen," Catherine
snarled. "It's the finest electronic device known to man, and now
the stooges from Special Crimes have had their hands all over
it."

"Catherine," I said, "you know that
thing came from somebody wanting bail or something, and you just
took it without asking questions."

"I bought it," she insisted.
"There's been a mistake."

"Let's forget the TV for now," said
Lloyd. "I'll buy you a new one. I want to know how we resolve this
problem. We need a truce, or somebody might get hurt."

We all looked at Catherine. Finally
she pointed at me and said: "You have to take it all back. I want
the tape from Special Crimes. And I want you to go up there and
tell Don Stricklin you're crazy. I want you to say, 'Don, I'm so
sorry. I didn't know what I was saying the other day. I was just so
upset because my wife loves some other man, and he shot her
telephone. And, now I realize I've taken my anger out on Catherine,
who has done nothing. Don, I am the one who is crazy. I take it all
back.' Make a tape of that, and then get the other one back, and
give it to me. That's what you have to do."

"That's not going to happen," I
said stoically. But I was laughing on the inside, impressed with
her bluster. In spite of the troubles Catherine had injected into
my life, I still enjoyed her tirades, even while I had become the
prime target.

"Catherine," said Strong, offering
a compromise and looking like a clown in that helmet, "the tape has
no meaning until you give it some. It will sit over there turning
to mold if you just walk away and forget about it."

"I can't forget about that," she
said, looking to Lloyd for support. "I can't have something like
that laying around in my past for somebody to pull out and play
whenever they want. Lloyd wouldn't stand for that
either."

At this point, she
had no knowledge of the
Exorcist
Tape
made by Strong. She only wanted the
tape of my statement about our relationship. I could only imagine
her rage if she ever learned Strong had taped her meltdown with
Stricklin, Carpenter, and me as an audience. The threats echoed in
my head:
He has to beg for my
mercy
.

Lloyd shrugged his shoulders on her
demand, and I agreed that she had a point. Lloyd wouldn't want the
cops to hold a statement like that on him, and, if he thought he
could win, he probably would file a suit to order my tape seized
and destroyed. But, I figured, too, that he wasn't in the mood for
the kind of crusade required to fight Special Crimes.

"This is all so silly," Catherine
said. "If we lived in Los Angeles nobody would bat an eye over a
broken umbrella. They'd just call us normal."

"Don't forget the suitcase," said
Strong. "That's the one the gorilla couldn't destroy."

In return, he received the Medusa.
To his credit, Strong didn't even blink. And he didn't turn to
stone. Lloyd realized his mediation had disintegrated and stood up
apparently ready to leave.

"So that's it?" he said, looking
first at Catherine and then at me.

"I think we settled it," I said.
"There's nothing else to say as far as I'm concerned."

"We'll see about that," Catherine
said, and they walked out the door.

FORTY

December 5, 1979

"Gary, there's been a serious
mistake," Don Stricklin was saying in an afternoon phone call to my
desk in the press room. "That stolen TV? Turns out it wasn't
stolen. Our investigator miscopied the serial number while he was
over at Strong's. It has to go back. Can you come over to my
office?"

"Sure," I said. I pulled on my
jacket and headed for the district attorney's office building,
wondering why I had been summoned for this. I hadn't reported the
television stolen. But I thought maybe there was something else.
And I figured I needed to keep Stricklin in my corner. The last
week since the visit from Catherine and Lloyd Oliver had been
fairly quiet. We had received calls from Catherine at first and
tape recorded all of them, delivering the tapes to Stricklin first
thing each day. Sometimes she talked so long without stopping that
we would take turns sleeping with the receiver on the floor and her
just yakking away. I wanted to record any further threats, but she
hadn't made any. Instead, she talked about her emotional trauma and
apologized for frightening me.