Miss Me When I'm Gone (17 page)

Chapter 32

“Too Far Gone”

The Mall at Green Hills

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville’s Mall at Green Hills is pretty swanky—there’s a Tiffany and a Louis Vuitton and an Apple store. It’s so damn classy it doesn’t even have a food court, so I’ve been forced to write in a Cheesecake Factory. Not that I’d ever be so ridiculous as to resent having to order a coffee and a slice of Turtle Cheesecake. It’s being the sniveling pale Yankee weirdo—dining alone while scribbling in a notebook—that I don’t like.

I deserve to look like a creep, I suppose. I’ve come to the Mall at Green Hills because I’m rather a sick woman—because ever since I started being interested in these women’s lives, I’ve been obsessed with a particularly dark part of Tammy’s history—her “kidnapping,” which happened right here at this mall.

It occurs to me, as I sit here licking caramel off my spoon, watching all of these beautiful people eat Cobb salads, that I’m a shameless student of people’s worst moments: lies, violence, melodrama, fraud. I have been since I was a kid. I like to hold them up like baubles and examine them every which way. When I was young, I thought that would make me understand them and become immune to such moments myself. Now I’m older and smarter, and study them purely out of gratuitous habit.

It happened on October 4, 1978:

Tammy’s story went like this:

She’d gone shopping at the mall for a birthday gift for her daughter Georgette. When she returned to her unlocked car, there was a man inside, wearing panty hose over his head and wielding a gun. He told her simply, “Drive.” That was the only word he said to her during their sixty-plus minutes together in her yellow Cadillac. They headed down Highway 65 for a while. After about twenty minutes, he had her pull over and tied panty hose tight around her neck. Then he took the wheel, gesturing her onto the floor of the backseat, and drove for about forty more minutes.

Then he pulled to the side of the road near Pulaski, Tennessee, beat her up, and fled in another car, driven by a mysterious accomplice.

A few minutes later, a young man in a pickup truck saw Tammy stumbling along the highway, bruised and with panty hose tied tight around her neck. He didn’t recognize the unfortunate woman, but picked her up and brought her home to his stunned mother, who happened to be a Tammy Wynette fan. The family politely held back their questions and their disbelief, helping her cut off the panty hose, letting her rest on their couch, calling the police.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was perplexed by the case. The assailant hadn’t stolen anything from Tammy. There was no sexual assault, no ransom demand, no motive. Tammy herself didn’t seem that interested in cooperating with the investigation, or finding the culprit. Some claim that the bruises on her face appeared to be enhanced by makeup in the days immediately following the incident.

There are a number of theories about what really happened. Some thought George Jones (her third husband) hired a couple of thugs to frighten Tammy into submission over a $36,000 child support dispute they’d been having. Some thought it was just a media stunt, cooked up by Tammy for a little attention since, for the first time in almost a decade, she hadn’t been nominated for any awards at the upcoming CMAs. Still others thought her new (fifth and final) husband, George Richey, had beaten her, and the whole thing was a ploy to explain why Tammy, who had several concerts scheduled, was so bruised up.

Indeed, after Tammy’s death, one of her daughters claimed that her mother confessed this to her twelve years after the incident—that it was fabricated to cover up Richey’s violence. A couple of Tammy’s friends say she told them the same thing. While my gut tells me this is the closest thing to the truth that Tammy fans will ever get, there are a couple of reasons to doubt it. For one, Richey passed a lie detector test about the kidnapping, while Tammy refused to take one. Also, Tammy’s daughters hated Richey and he hated them, particularly after Tammy died. Richey managed to keep most of Tammy’s money from her daughters. While there is ample evidence that he was a controlling and temperamental man, it seems Tammy’s daughters also had every reason to demonize him after her death.

Some other confounding factors are these:

In the year preceding the incident, there were break-ins at Tammy’s mansion, in which people left threatening notes and words like
slut
and
pig
scrawled on her mirrors. There was also a mysterious fire in the house. After the kidnapping, more threatening notes were found—one stuffed into the gates of her house, another backstage at a concert. The latter notes were analyzed by a handwriting expert who said that they were written by someone who was trying to distort his or her handwriting, and could not say conclusively that they were not penned by Tammy or George Richey.

Also, in the early 1980s, Tammy mentioned offhand in interviews that she discovered later that her phone was being tapped in the days before the kidnapping, and that someone was doing surveillance on her house from the nearby woods. She said she knew who it was, but preferred to let the matter drop. She did not elaborate much on this claim or mention it again in subsequent interviews. And it does not appear to have been corroborated by the police, who hadn’t ultimately pursued the case at great length.

Friends and family all confirm that, kidnapping aside, Tammy had an unusual tendency to exaggerate stories and invite drama into her life. She apparently had a deep need for sympathetic attention.

So here I am at the scene of the crime, asking myself,
How the hell did this happen?
Love Tammy as I do, I don’t believe her version of the events of that October day. But if her daughter’s version is essentially true, how did Tammy come to this? How is it that desperation and dysfunction could converge so perfectly with absurdity to create such a cinematically pathetic incident in Tammy’s life?

It’s no secret that Tammy had a lot of hardships and made a number of very bad choices. But the kidnapping incident has a special kind of insanity to it. And it feels like a turning point for Tammy. It was a step away from the merely melodramatic and toward the sadly, scarily delusional. After this point, Tammy never had the kind of success she’d had in earlier years. Skeptical fans mocked her story, and this is where Tammy’s “pathetic drama queen” reputation really started to take shape. (In 1980, a punk band called the Maggots released a song called “Let’s Get Tammy Wynette!” mocking the kidnapping incident, singing from the point of view of the supposed kidnappers.) Her reliance on drugs grew steadily more serious, her relationship with her enabling, controlling husband more entrenched.

A clear, factual explanation of that day can’t be had. Tammy’s the only person who could have clarified it, and she’s gone. So all one can do now is try to understand it on some broad emotional level. And in order to do this, you need to resist the impulse to laugh at Tammy, to scoff at her fakery and her flailing recklessness. Like her music, understanding it requires—fancy this—a totally sympathetic heart, a total, if momentary, absence of irony.

Strip off the details that make it worthy of a punk-rock song: a whiny diva who trades in her sequins for painted-on bruises, kidnapping herself in her own yellow Cadillac. Take away the stardom and the fancy car (and the distraction of the silly panty-hose head), and you see a battered woman who didn’t know where to turn and who, sadly, had vowed never to get another divorce. Get a little closer, and she’s just a terribly confused individual who never had a clue how to pursue her own happiness. In the last analysis, she’s someone who so desperately needed love that she did things that brought her the very opposite. What exactly made her this way isn’t the point. The point is that everyone knows people who operate this way. And that most of us know that at our worst moments, that is how
we
operate.

Tammy’s life—like her music—conveys a vulnerability that I think many of us are not comfortable with. You can hear the “teardrop” in her voice, and think,
That’s beautiful and honest.
Or you can hear it and opt for the safer response:
That’s pathetic and maudlin, to which I am too cool and self-assured to relate.
And for that reason, Tammy will never be hip like Johnny Cash or Loretta Lynn have become.

There is nothing ironic or sassy about Tammy Wynette. There is nothing cool about being as desperate for love as she was. In the metaphor of American celebrity as high school, Johnny Cash is the badass with the motorcycle (and therefore acceptable in a hipster’s musical library), but Tammy’s that cheesy girl who tries way too hard. She wears too much clumpy mascara and the wrong color lipstick and fucks a guy who doesn’t like her much on the off chance it’ll make her feel popular and loved. She cries easily and will do anything for attention. She downs five aspirin and tells everyone she attempted suicide. Really, nobody wants to be that girl.

In Tammy’s case, that girl has, in spite of all of her flaws, a disarmingly powerful, beautiful voice. To enjoy her voice, however, one must believe it. And to believe it, one must admit that it’s possible to be that vulnerable oneself. That, in fact, you could be that girl. That your worst moments could potentially be as sad and confused as hers. That you, too, have a tender, needy, crazy, and distinctly uncool heart.

—
Tammyland

Chapter 33

The next morning, after Sam had left, I settled at the kitchen table with a mug of tea and Gretchen’s recording. I felt ready now—ready to hear Gretchen’s voice without dissolving into a hormonal-existential mess. I started the recording at the beginning again.

“So where were we?” the male voice was saying.

“You were talking about Linda and Shelly’s dad,” Gretchen replied.

“Your grandfather, yes,” replied the man.

“I never knew him,” said Gretchen.

“Well, he was a good guy,” the man continued. His voice had a nasal quality. “I knew the whole family from church. But I got to know him pretty well from the Knights,” the man was saying.

“The Knights?” Gretchen repeated.

“The Knights of Columbus. I was the youngest one in there. I didn’t stay long. But I had fun selling Tootsie Rolls a couple of times with your grandfather, outside of the IGA. It was to raise money for various charities. Handicapped kids.”

“Uh-huh,” said Gretchen.

“So your grandfather, he was pretty welcoming to me. I was a bachelor then. Didn’t know anyone in town for a while, really. Your grandparents took pity on me, had me over for dinner a few times. That was before he got sick, though. That was so sad. He left us way too soon.”

“So you felt like you knew my family,” said Gretchen, sounding slightly impatient. “That’s why you were willing to give Shelly a job years later.”

“Well—yes. I knew her since she was, uh, eleven or twelve or so. I liked your grandparents, liked the whole family. So when she came in for that clerk job, it felt like the right thing to do, to give her a chance. She’d had a rough go of it, but clearly cleaned up her act. And I wanted to help her get out of the factory. It seemed like it was dragging her down.”

Gretchen cleared her throat. “Still . . . a pharmacy clerk. For someone who’d had a drug addiction, that was a quite a . . . favor. Quite a leap of faith.”

So this man was Shelly’s last boss—the pharmacist, with whom she was supposedly flirting or maybe more. I looked back at my notes to remind myself of his name. Phil Coleman. Of whom Frank was supposedly jealous.

“I guess so,” answered the pharmacist. “But I felt like I knew the real girl, from before all of that. She’d been off the stuff for a year or two at least. And my impression was she’d mostly abused alcohol, actually, and some cocaine. It wasn’t like now, where I’d be concerned about someone lifting oxycodone, or whatever.”

“But still, it was a risk,” Gretchen said.

“I had faith in her. I wanted to give her that chance.”

“So it all worked out.”

The pharmacist sighed. “She only worked here about nine months before she was killed.”

Gretchen didn’t respond immediately to this statement. There was a shifting sound on the recording for a moment. I wondered if this guy knew he was being recorded. I supposed it didn’t really matter. He probably wouldn’t have agreed to talk to Gretchen if he had anything too illicit or explosive to share.

“But it all worked out?” Gretchen repeated.

“For the most part.”

There was another pause.

“So . . . there were problems, or no?” Gretchen nudged.

“Just a few growing pains on the job. But nothing related to her addiction recovery, of course. Nothing like filching medications. I’d have had to let her go for something like that, absolutely.”

“So what . . .” Gretchen began.

“Well . . .” There was a pause, then what sounded like another sigh from the pharmacist. “We had sort of a strange incident once. I caught her rifling through some of the recently filled prescriptions, from about a month earlier.”

“Not part of her job?”

“What? No. Not at all. Not prescriptions that old. When I asked her what she was doing, she couldn’t really come up with an answer. She said something about being worried about some teenagers . . . When I pressed her on it, she said that she thought they were maybe forging prescriptions, or something. But the more I asked about it—like, what did she think, that one of them lifted a prescription pad from one of the pediatricians? And didn’t she realize I knew all the town doctors’ handwriting like the back of my hand?”

“So you weren’t convinced there was a problem,” Gretchen said, after a moment’s pause.

“No. Not at all. In fact, I pointed out to her that no young kids had come in with prescriptions for anything narcotic recently. Antibiotics and antifungals and the usual things. Really, I’m pretty sure it was something she said to cover up being . . . well, maybe being nosy, or maybe checking up on someone in particular. She didn’t seem entirely convinced of her theory herself. She didn’t really try to sell me on it.”

“But you didn’t fire her for that?”

“No. She’d done really well, up till then. She was a great worker. And I thought to myself—hey—maybe she
did
really think that happened. With her history, maybe she was a little overly concerned about the kids getting drugs on her watch. I don’t know where she could’ve gotten that idea, but I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.”

“It never came up again, after that one time?” Gretchen asked.

“No . . . not that I can remember. But that was maybe a month before she was killed.”

There was another pause.

“So that was the only problem you had with her on the job. Otherwise, I hear you got along pretty well.”

I held my breath for the pharmacist’s answer. I knew Gretchen was probably trying to hint at their supposed flirtation. She said it so casually, so sweetly, he apparently didn’t pick up on it.

“Yes. She was very patient with customers. Very careful.”

“Okay,” Gretchen said uncertainly.

There was another long silence, then the pharmacist asked, “Did you have any other questions?”

“Um . . .”

I bit my lip. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to ask him or not. Surely he knew it was something people had talked about?

“Did Frank ever come in when she was working?” Gretchen asked.

“Frank Grippo?”

“Yes.”

“Um . . . No, not really. Once or twice. And never for long.”

“What was your sense of him? Of their relationship?”

“Oh, I really couldn’t say. He brought her her lunch once. Maybe stopped in to buy a soda and say hello a time or two. Not enough for me to make a judgment at the time. I knew his face. I knew he was her boyfriend. He seemed a little old for her, and maybe a little gruff. But I didn’t ever speak more than about five words to him, so I couldn’t say I knew much about him. Until he was arrested, of course, and in the papers . . . then I learned all sorts of things about him. But I’m sure that’s not what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, no,” Gretchen replied. “I know all about what people said about him
afterward.
”

“It really was very tragic, and I’m sorry. How old were you then?”

“Uh. Seven.”

“
Seven
. Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

I wasn’t expecting this, and it seemed Gretchen wasn’t either.

“It’s, uh . . .” she stuttered. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“I wish I knew more. But I just never got much of a read on Frank Grippo.”

“That’s okay,” Gretchen said.

There was some more rustling on the recording.

“So, have you been in town long?” the pharmacist asked.

“Oh, since Friday this time. I’ve been up a few times, talking to family, Shelly’s old friends.”

“Do you like Emerson? Do you remember it well from when you were a kid?”

“Some spots that I went to a lot back then. Like the playground on Kipling and Randy’s Hot Dogs.”

“Ah. Randy’s. Gotta love Randy’s dogs.”

I rolled my eyes. All of these references to that blasted hot dog stand were making me want a hot dog in the worst way. I wasn’t supposed to eat them—
What to Expect
had told me so.

The rest of the conversation was similar small talk and ended with a discussion about the weather. Gretchen said good-bye to the pharmacist. That was followed by a series of rustling sounds, some clicks that sounded like heels on pavement, and a car door. Then the recording stopped.

I waited a few seconds to see if there was anything else. Then there was a slightly different kind of hiss, then a little clunk.

“You mind if I record this?” Gretchen asked.

“You’re something else, you know that?” said a soft, vaguely familiar male voice.

“Is that a yes?” Gretchen teased.

Gentle laughter. “
No,
Gretchen. Give me that.”

That recording stopped there. I had to replay it three times before I could place the voice: Kevin Conley, the grown-up paperboy. They certainly sounded comfortable with each other. And Gretchen sounded so lighthearted.

I let the recorder run to the next interview.

“It might take me a minute to get used to that thing,” said a gravelly female voice.

“I don’t need to use it. Really,” Gretchen said.

“No, no,” was the response. “It’ll just take a minute. Then you won’t be able to shut me up, hon.”

“Okay. Well, then. Should we start with that night? Or something easier?”

“We should just get right to it, hon.”

“Okay. So you and Shelly went to the movies.”

“Yup. Me and Shelly and her friends Judy and Diane.”

“Were all four of you friends?” Gretchen asked.

“Not really. I only knew them through Shelly. I knew Shelly from the factory, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“I got the feeling those girls didn’t usually associate with folks from the factory. It was just they knew Shelly since she was a kid.”

Hearing this, I thought about Judy and Diane and their disdain for Shelly’s friend Melanie. I guessed this was her speaking.

“Uh-huh,” Gretchen said softly.

“And actually, I never really spent much time with them. It was just the movie we’d picked for that night.
The Color Purple.
Shelly mentioned it to her other friends, and they decided they wanted to go along. Kind of invited themselves, I think.”

“Just the movie? Did you guys go out after?”

“Me and Shelly and Diane did. We all met at the movie. Judy went home after. We were going out for a drink, and Judy wasn’t into that. Judy was engaged, planning a wedding for that spring. Shelly would say all Judy ever wanted to do was sit at home and dog-ear her brides’ magazines.”

Melanie laughed a little.

“Was it a late night, with the three of you?” Gretchen asked.

“No. We were home by about midnight. I think it was awkward for Shelly, trying to keep the conversation going between her and Diane and me. We were very different, you know? She and Diane talked mostly about their old high school friends and stuff. Me and Shelly, more about the factory and the guys we went out with. And she knew I was self-conscious around those friends of hers. I probably shouldn’t have been—they were nice girls. But I think it made Shelly uncomfortable, too. She was uncomfortable that night. After one drink, she said she was tired, and we all went home.”

“Did she talk about Frank at all that night?”

“Not really. A little. Same old stuff.”

“Which was what?”

“She was worried about his drinking. She thought she’d probably have to ask him to move out soon if it didn’t improve. I mean, Shelly was no Goody Two-shoes about alcohol, let’s be honest about that. Even when she went to rehab and everything, it was to get off the drugs. And the drinking, after that, she cut down. Got it under control. But she never gave it up, did the AA thing or anything. Back when we both worked at the factory, she’d go to happy hour sometimes with the rest of us. She liked to have a good time.”

“Uh-huh,” Gretchen said.

“But Frank . . . I think she felt Frank was over-the-top. That that kind of drinking she shouldn’t be around. Especially now that she was trying to hold a job and see you more. And she hadn’t realized the extent of it before he moved in.”

Gretchen hesitated for a moment, drawing in a breath.

“Why
did
Shelly let him move in? What was the attraction in the first place?”

“Well. That’s a good question. You know, I knew Frank a little bit from the factory. And he could be funny. Laid-back. It was easy to be around him. No pressure, I guess. But I think what Shelly liked about him was that he was strong. Not just muscle strong, but sort of stoic about things.

“And honestly, I think the girl had a problem being by herself. After she and that Roland guy broke up, I think it was hard for her being in that house alone. She was one of these girls who always thinks she needs a man around. Like she thought she needed the protection. Kind of ironic, I guess. That that was what he was there for.”

“So do you think he was the one? Who killed her?” Gretchen asked.

Melanie sighed. “Wow, honey. I didn’t expect you to ask me that straight out.”

“Well. It’s kind of the point of the whole thing, really,” Gretchen said softly. “To ask that question.”