Evidence of Love

by John Bloom

  As the questions continued, Candy grew more relaxed. She crossed her legs, confident that her dark nylons covered the bruises on her legs. Her high heels had open toes, but the black part of her stocking obscured the bandage on her middle toe. Inexplicably, the toe began to throb again.

  “All right. Now we want to know everything you did and everybody you saw on Friday morning.”

  Candy patiently repeated the events of June 13, beginning with Vacation Bible School at nine that morning and continuing through the harrowing phone conversations with Allan Gore late that night. The officers frequently interrupted to get precise times, places, descriptions of objects, and the like. But nothing in Candy Montgomery’s day seemed out of the ordinary. She had taken the kids to Bible School, then left the church about 9:45, arriving at Betty’s around ten. Betty was drinking coffee and sewing something out of yellow material when Candy arrived, but she put everything aside so they could chat and discuss what to do with the children. After a time the two women went outside and played with the Gores’ two dogs, and at one point Candy excused herself and went into the bathroom to “pick” her hair. (She had a new permanent which made her hair frizzy, in the then-stylish Anne Murray look.) Candy told Betty about her new business, a wallpapering and painting service she was starting with her girlfriend Sherry Cleckler, and she left one of her business cards on Betty’s coffee table. Then, near the end of the visit, she went into the utility room to get Alisa’s swimsuit while Betty got a towel. Betty also gave Candy some peppermint candy, with instructions to give it to Alisa if she put her head underwater at the swimming lesson. The entire visit, Candy said, took perhaps fifteen minutes. At one point Abbott stopped her to ask what Candy was wearing.

  “I was wearing a burgundy blouse and blue jeans.”

  “What about shoes? We’ve picked up some footprints in the hallway,” he said, “and we need to screen the prints of people we know were in the house. Can you give me a description of the shoes you were wearing that day?”

  “They were blue tennis shoes.”

  “Rubber soles?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have the shoes?”

  “Not with me, but I can get them for you. Just let me know when, and I’ll bring them to you.”

  “Yes, we may need those to check against our prints.”

  They dropped that line of questioning and moved on. Candy couldn’t believe the first question had come and gone so easily.

  The rest of her day seemed equally uneventful to the attentive policemen. After leaving Betty’s, she had driven to the Target discount store in Plano to purchase Father’s Day cards. But once there she looked at her watch and discovered it had stopped, since it still registered 10:15. So she asked someone for the time and was told it was 11:10, meaning she was already late for the Vacation Bible School program. She drove straight to the church, arriving at 11:30 for a luncheon. Later she took the kids to Wal-Mart in Allen to buy the cards, drove Alisa to her swimming lesson, attended The Empire Strikes Back with Pat and the kids, and didn’t suspect anything was wrong until Allan Gore started calling her at about 8:30 that night.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, not a single minute unaccounted for, and apparently no help to the police. The interview went on for about an hour and a half, but most of it was taken up with minor details and general background.

  As the interview drew to a close, Deffibaugh tentatively suggested another meeting. “Sometimes hypnosis helps a person to remember more in cases like this,” he said. “Would you be willing to submit to hypnosis in order to find out whether you remember anything you haven’t told us here today?”

  “Sure, fine,” said Candy. “I want to do anything I can to help you. You call me at any time and I’ll meet you anywhere you say.”

  “Good, thank you for coming down, you’ve been very helpful.”

  By the time Candy arrived home she was feeling much better.

  “I just called the police station to find out what was going on,” said Pat. “I couldn’t imagine why it was taking so long.”

  “They just had a lot of questions,” she said. “They don’t know anything at all.”

  “They don’t have any suspects?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What did they want to know?”

  “Whether I remembered anything, saw anything suspicious—things like that. But … Pat?”

  “Yes.”

  “I lied to them.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t mean to, but they asked me where I was at a certain time, and I forgot and told them the wrong thing.”

  “Where were you?”

  “It was when I went to Target on Friday. I’m not sure I told them the right time.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t matter.”

  But Candy Montgomery’s temporary anxiety about the time discrepancy in her story paled next to her great relief. The police had never asked her the second question. They had never asked her why the fingernail on the little finger of her left hand was cut to the quick.

  She felt so much better that she picked up the phone and called her parents in Augusta, Georgia. She wanted to wish her dad a happy Father’s Day.

  12 Prayers and Omens

  The Pomeroys had left for Dallas at dawn, the men of the family hovering nervously around Bertha to make sure she held up under the strain. But at the little Methodist church of Norwich, Kansas, where Betty Gore had spent most of her youth, the Reverend David Smith looked out on a sea of tear-stained faces as he led the prayers of mourning. There wasn’t a soul in Norwich who hadn’t known Betty; most of them remembered her as a fresh-faced homecoming sweetheart, or an energetic Y-Teen organizer, or simply as the girl who was always around and always welcome, liked by older people and her own generation alike. It was a vision tempered by the passage of time—most of them hadn’t seen Betty, except on brief visits, since she was eighteen—and idealized by the suddenness of the tragedy. But the genuineness of the mourning was never in doubt; since the news first became known on Saturday morning, half the town had visited the Pomeroy house, bearing food and offering sympathy. Betty was more than the “quiet, pleasant woman” she was being called in the Dallas newspapers. Here, where she grew up, she was the one so bright and talented that the town couldn’t hold her. She was the one who went to college, started a career, married well, and, by all appearances, was thriving in the city. No one could yet comprehend what had happened.

  Ronnie, the oldest child now, was making most of the decisions by the time the family departed for Dallas. He and his father conferred briefly about which car to take—they decided on Bertha’s Oldsmobile, since it was bigger—and then they set out for the interstate highway some thirty miles to the east. Ronnie’s wife Pat came along, too, as well as the youngest Pomeroy child, Richard, and now that the family was alone and together, they were able to speak, if only haltingly, about the crime.

  “I guess it was a crazy man,” said Ronnie.

  “Must’ve been,” said Bob, “but I still just can’t understand it.”

  Bertha remained silent, alone with her thoughts, staring at the white line or the furrows of ripe wheat alongside the roadside. It was harvest time, when she usually busied herself with cooking for the men, but she couldn’t focus on the present. Her silence was the most disturbing aspect of the long drive to Texas, for she was the talkative one in the family; the quiet was palpable and painful to everyone else in the car. Bertha thought back to Oklahoma, growing up in Claremore, among wheat fields that didn’t look much different from these, and she thought of the year before she met Bob Pomeroy, the year she was thirteen and went to the palm reader with her friends. “You’re going to marry a farmer,” the old woman had said. “He’s going to be from out of state. You’ll have three children, and one of them will die.”

  The memory gave Bertha a jolt; she withdrew even further into herself. Just as Bob was pulling the car onto Interstate 35, he lost power and coasted to a stop. Th
e engine was dead. It would be another hour before Bob was able to flag down a passing motorist, ride to a station, and get the car repaired. The sun was fairly high up in the sky by the time they passed into Oklahoma, but the car remained swallowed in gloom.

  They rode into Wylie in early afternoon, with the persistent heat nudging into the upper nineties, and found a dozen or so cars parked on Dogwood in front of the familiar little brick house. Those would be the after-church visitors. Almost as soon as they entered the house, they felt uncomfortable and left out. Unaccustomed to being among strangers, Bob and Bertha waited for people to introduce themselves. Several of the women from the churches in Lucas and Wylie had consoling words for Bertha, but the men seemed more withdrawn. The boys tried to talk to Allan, but he seemed oddly detached, almost as out of place as they were. Alisa was there, and seemed subdued but normal, as though the reality of her mother’s death hadn’t set in yet. But most disturbing of all, at least to Bob, was the behavior of little Bethany. She had always been an outgoing baby, gregarious even among strangers, but today she was scared and skittish; Allan had to hold her at all times or she would begin to cry. Bob knew the baby had been traumatized by being left alone all day, but he began to suspect there was more to the story he didn’t understand.

  There was an artificial feeling to the whole afternoon. Everyone felt like an intruder in a group that didn’t really exist but was created for the occasion. Certainly Betty had had friends unknown to her family—women from church, from the Marriage Encounter group she so strongly believed in, from school—but most of them didn’t seem to know one another. There were also police officers present, shuffling in and out, asking people their names and their relationship to Betty. Two of them identified themselves as Texas Rangers, members of the elite plain-clothes unit that for 150 years has been authorized to enter cases deemed beyond the resources of local police units. Their presence indicated that Betty’s murder was growing in importance by the hour; the Rangers invested their time in only a handful of murder cases each year. At one point that afternoon Bob stopped one of the Rangers and asked about the investigation. The officer said, “There’s nothing we can tell you at this time.” Bob was perplexed; there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to anything that was happening.

  All afternoon Bob stared at the closed door to the utility room, wondering if he would be able to go in. He knew he had to look in there; if anyone in the family had to, it was his job. It took him a couple of hours to summon the courage, but he finally edged over to the door and opened it. It had been cleaned up by the neighbors, of course, but he saw the black squares in the floor where the police had lifted part of the linoleum, the hacking marks on the white freezer door, the doors without doorknobs, and he began to realize the immensity of the suffering. Involuntarily, resisting the image even as it came to him, he could see his daughter, spread out, prone, on the floor of the room. He started to feel sick and closed the door, afraid to break down as he had the day before.

  Later that afternoon the phone calls began. Richard answered the first one.

  It was a male voice. “I killed her,” the man said.

  Richard was stunned. Before he could say or do anything, the man hung up. Richard sat in the kitchen, alone, wondering what to do next. He didn’t want to place any more burdens on his parents.

  A few moments passed, and the phone rang again. He picked it up, more hesitantly this time.

  “I killed her,” the voice said, “and if you don’t keep your daughter off the street I’ll kill her and rape her, too.”

  This time Richard was really shaken up, so he asked his father to come into the room with him. Bob told one of the policemen in the house, and after a brief conference, the family decided that for the rest of the day, older brother Ronnie would answer the phone, since he was a fairly smooth talker and might be able to hold the caller long enough for the police to trace the call.

  The man called twice more. His refrain was the same. “I killed her and now I’m going to kill the kid,” he kept saying. On the second call, Ronnie was able to engage him in conversation.

  “I really didn’t do it,” he said at one point. “But my girlfriend did and I know where she is.”

  The caller stayed on just long enough for the police to get a trace, and within minutes a patrol car had been dispatched to the address of the originating telephone. It was not until later that night that the Pomeroys learned the source: it had been a recently released mental patient, calling from a halfway house. They were continuing to question the man, but it seemed highly unlikely that he was the killer. Somehow the news that the man was sick didn’t do much to soothe Bob Pomeroy’s addled nerves.

  The next day brought more of the same chaos. Monday had been set as the day of the memorial service, and every newspaper and television station within a forty-mile radius had heard about it. Many of the reporters had set up a vigil on Dogwood Street, outside the Gore home, anxious to have their cameras poised when the grieving family members emerged to travel across town to the United Methodist Church of Wylie. The morning newspapers had reported the first arrest of a suspect—a bearded, long-haired drifter who had had too much to drink in a Dallas bar and started talking about how he had to get out of town because “they found that woman.” A panicky waitress notified the police, who arrested him for public intoxication. After a search of the fellow’s orange backpack, though, all they found that might link him to the crime was a pair of “thongs,” rubber-soled sandals of the type suspected to have caused the bloody footprints. But the man’s thongs were too large to have made the prints. He was dried out and released. Another Dallas newspaper had interviewed a couple in Wylie who went to sleep Saturday night with loaded guns at their bedside, still frightened by the possibility of a maniac on the loose. Tim Jarrell, a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald, put his finger on the reason for the continuing hysteria: “There was no apparent reason for the attack. Residents speculate and hope that instead of picking the Gore house at random, the killer had a grudge or some particular reason to choose Mrs. Gore as a victim.” It was the first murder in Wylie in twenty-five years. It was committed with a terrifying weapon, against an apparently nonviolent, innocent woman, while she was in her own home, in a nice neighborhood, in the middle of the day. And even though no medical details had yet been released to the public, it was obvious from the few eyewitnesses to the body that Betty Gore had been brutally hacked far beyond what would be necessary to kill her. It was the kind of macabre crime that holds an irresistible fascination for the press and public.

  Bob Pomeroy, growing more uneasy by the minute, understood none of this. He didn’t understand why the reporters would want photographs of him every time he left the house. He didn’t understand why Allan’s neighbors would talk to the newspapers, as though they were proud of their grisly knowledge. He didn’t understand why many of the people who came by the house didn’t seem to know Betty that well. Bob Pomeroy had a lifelong respect for the law and the police, but he didn’t understand why the officers wouldn’t sit down and talk to him, as though maybe even he were guilty of something. Bob began to suspect that he knew much less about his daughter’s life than he thought he had known, but for the time being he simply felt left out. In a fit of anger, he called the Wylie police and asked them to clear the reporters off Dogwood Street. When they complied, he felt better for a few minutes.

  Allan remained aloof and silent for the most part, though inwardly he felt comforted by the constant buzz of conversation, the steady procession of people through the house, the certainty that he wouldn’t have to spend another night alone. Saturday night had been difficult; he had finally called Dick Sewell, the dentist, to get a tranquilizer so he could sleep. Chief Abbott had come by the house sometime during the weekend and told him they were still processing the physical evidence. “We definitely do not think it was a prowler,” he had said. Allan had thought that an odd thing to say at the time, but then he didn’t think much more about it. He was wond
ering about other things. He was wondering whether he would forget what Betty’s face looked like. He was wondering how she felt at the moment she died. He was wondering whether Alisa would break down later; she was taking everything so well that it almost scared him. Sunday night had been easier; the house was full, with Ronnie and his wife Pat sleeping on the floor in the living room. When he woke up Monday morning, he wasn’t feeling quite so empty inside. When the phone rang later in the day he instinctively picked it up.

  “Alisa’s next,” said the caller, and hung up.

  The children’s names had been in the newspaper. But Allan was too drained to be angry or scared. He calmly reported the call to the police.

  According to the immemorial custom of the Southwest, formal sympathy was invariably expressed at mealtime. Within hours of the first reports of Betty’s death, all the organizations to which Allan and Betty had ever expressed allegiance had begun to organize cooking assignments. The Wylie neighbors had made sure that Allan had covered dishes waiting when he returned from St. Paul. Then, on Saturday evening, members of Wylie Methodist Church had come by the house bearing a many-course dinner. Now all the other groups, supervised by whatever person seems to materialize at times like that to engineer the fine details of feeding the grieving, were working in shifts. And for the noon meal on Monday, just prior to the afternoon memorial service, Allan knew that members of the church at Lucas would be coming by. The thought didn’t make him entirely comfortable, since Betty had quarrelled repeatedly with Ron Adams, the young minister at Lucas, and since Allan hadn’t seen many of his old church friends in several months. Betty had loved the Lucas church, but her dissatisfaction with the new pastor ran so deep that the only times she would attend services were when Ron was out of town for some reason. Now, in a final awkward irony, it was the same man who would officiate at her memorial service later that day. It was unavoidable: the Wylie minister had been called out of town.