Evidence of Love

by John Bloom

  Candy looked like she always did—smiling, full of energy, bustling around. She didn’t seem too upset by whatever it was that had happened. Pat looked the same, too. Don didn’t really notice him. The Montgomerys passed the huge but empty reception desk and went straight back into Don’s private office, the one with the autographed picture of President Carter on one wall and various athletic trophies suspended from the fake wood paneling.

  “Ya’ll have a seat,” he said. “What happened?”

  “It’s probably not as bad as we think,” said Candy, “but the police called me back in this morning and they accused me of killing Betty.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Wha’d they say?”

  “One of them yelled at me and said I was a cold-blooded little murderer, and then they took my shoes because they said they had some footprints.”

  “Why they think you did it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because I was at Betty’s that morning.”

  “Tell me everything you did that morning.”

  Candy briefly went over her itinerary, now well rehearsed.

  “Sounds like a bunch of hyperactive small-town cops who don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “Wait a minute, Candy,” Pat broke in, becoming concerned about the light-hearted tone of the conversation. “Tell Don about the affair.”

  “Hold on,” said Don. “Before we say anything else I think you need to retain me right now so that we’ll have an attorney-client privilege. Pat, write me out a check, doesn’t matter what it’s for. Hundred dollars. And put the date and time on it, and then we’ll be covered.”

  Pat took out his checkbook and made out a check for $100.

  “And Pat, could I talk to Candy alone for a little bit? It won’t be long. Just wait outside or drive around ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  As soon as Pat had gone, Don said, “What affair?”

  Don didn’t change expressions when Candy revealed how she had had an affair with Allan Gore, but inwardly he was amazed. Allan Gore? Don knew Candy was capable of it—he had always suspected she was a little wild on the inside—but he couldn’t imagine Allan doing anything like that. When he tried to visualize Candy and Allan locked in a passionate embrace, he almost wanted to laugh.

  “But the affair’s over, Don,” she said. “It’s been over for eight months.”

  “Candy,” he said when she had finished, “is there anything you need to tell me?”

  Candy hesitated for a second, then went on to repeat everything she had told the police that morning. She added a detailed account of how Murphy had raged at her and stormed out of the room and then Cochran had finished the interrogation.

  “They played Mutt and Jeff with you. Bad guy-nice guy. The bad guy makes you scared, and then the nice guy gets you to spill your guts. I didn’t know it was this bad, Candy. You’re in a mess of trouble, and you need to try to remember everything they asked you for. What about this polygraph thing?”

  “They asked me to take a polygraph and made an appointment for me tomorrow. I told them I would so I could show them I didn’t murder Betty.”

  “Well, you’re not taking the polygraph. Those things are too unreliable; some people just can’t take ’em. You could hurt yourself worse. What we’ll do is I’ll get my own polygraph man to test you, so we can find out how you test, and then after that maybe we’ll let ’em test you.”

  “Should I call them?”

  “No, we’ll take care of that. But I’ll tell you what I do want you to do. Call all the women at church, everyone who saw you at Bible School last Friday, and ask all of ’em if they remember what you were wearing.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been reading a book called A Death in Canaan where a young boy was accused of stabbing his mother to death. But the kid was seen in a white tee shirt before the crime and again after it, and it seems to me that that’s pretty strong evidence that the kid couldn’t have been involved in a bloody crime. Something that brutal, like the kind of corpse we’re talking about with Betty, whoever did it would’ve had blood all over him. So see if you can get Barbara Green and whoever else was there to remember your clothes.”

  “Don, I think that’s dumb.”

  “Just do it, Candy, and we might get this cleared up right away.”

  As a boy, Alton Don Crowder had two passions in life—sports and fighting. As a man, he had the same two passions, only he called them sports and lawyering. Of the two, it was the legal work that came second in his heart, a substitute for the professional football career he never had. But like most disappointments in his life, his failure at the Washington Redskins tryout camp of 1966 merely made him a better fighter. The courtroom was not the same kind of arena. In fact, he always felt a little out of place wearing a suit and kowtowing to judges. But it was still a place where you could earn respect. It was a place where there was always one winner and one loser, and the only thing that mattered was which side you were on at the end.

  Donnie Crowder was neither a smooth talker nor a particularly friendly person, and those encountering him for the first time were apt to write him off as antisocial. The truth was, he was shy. That’s not to say he was a shrinking violet. On the contrary, he was so prone to quick anger and ill-advised confrontations that, as a young man, he carried with him a perpetual air of menace and brutality. He had lost a dozen teeth in brawls and street fights by the time he was nineteen, and he had never overcome his capacity for sudden, uncontrollable rage.

  Donnie was always the little guy, both literally and figuratively. Growing up in Dallas in the forties and early fifties, he was the scrawniest, homeliest kid in the class, the one with jug ears, red hair, and buck teeth. “You wanna learn to fight?” he would say in later years. “Grow up with buck teeth.” He was the kid who always ended up on the bottom of the schoolyard dogpile, the kid older children made it their business to taunt. His homelife was less than idyllic. Donnie’s mother was Irish and feisty and strong willed, a woman who brooked no nonsense and once strapped Donnie into a bathtub and left him in a darkened garage for several hours to teach him a lesson about playing in the street. His father, Alton Dowe Crowder, had spent time in Guam during the war and suffered from clinical battle fatigue the rest of his life. Both parents taught the same lesson: life is hard, and don’t expect it to get better.

  Donnie fought with his father like he fought with everyone else. They both had hair-trigger tempers. All it took was one reference to his teeth, his intelligence, his family, and Donnie would fling his books to the ground and tear into the kid who popped off. He fought dirty. He kicked and bit and kneed people in the groin and tried to land punches to the throat. He went after kids twice his size. Beginning in elementary school there was rarely a day when he didn’t come home bloodied or bruised. Donnie got a reputation as a tough kid, even a bad kid.

  Athletics, it seemed, was the one respectable thing Donnie could do. By the age of five he was already playing baseball and basketball. In elementary school he would sleep in his football uniform on the night before Peewee League games. Yet he had no more natural talent for sports than he had for schoolwork. He was gangly and too light; there were always kids who could run faster. All he had going for him was blind competitiveness.

  Thomas Jefferson High School, “TJ High,” was the site of Donnie’s transformation from class bruiser to athletic star. The TJ Rebels were a less-than-stellar football team, losing more games than they won, even though Donnie received constant praise for his passing exhibitions as a roll-out quarterback and bone-crushing flying tackles as a defensive halfback. One of the fringe benefits of stardom, he quickly learned, was that for the first time in his life he could get girls to pay attention to him. He wasn’t so brave as to actually ask one for a date, because of his insecurity about his looks, but as soon as he heard a girl was interested in him—usually through the football grapevine—he would go after her with a frenzied passion. He was so sexually aggressive,
in fact, that after a time his reputation for that almost equalled his reputation as a brawler. At sixteen, he and his girlfriend were caught making love by her mother. “Yeah,” Don would say later, “her mother caught me fuckin’ her. It was back in the days when you had to pour me into my jeans, and I couldn’t get my prick back in.”

  In Donnie’s senior year, the Rebels won exactly two games, and that almost put an end to his college plans. He was an honorable mention on the Dallas All-City team, but all that was good for were scholarship offers from East Texas State College in Commerce and Hardin-Simmons College in Abilene, schools so small that he was afraid he could play there forever without getting any notice. Then, in the spring of 1961, Donnie was practicing track-and-field one day when he noticed Sleepy Morgan, a legendary recruiter for Southern Methodist University, sitting in the stands. Never shy about showing off, Donnie decided to run past Morgan to see if he could get noticed. As soon as he got close to him, Morgan said, “Hey, can you tell me where Don Crowder is?”

  Donnie couldn’t believe it. “That’s me,” he said.

  Morgan handed him an envelope, but Donnie was too nervous to open it right away. He stuffed it into his shorts, then sprinted two miles home, went into his room, and very slowly opened it. It was a letter-of-intent for something called a “one-year-make-good” scholarship to SMU. It would put him in the big time, the Southwest Conference. He signed immediately.

  The distance between TJ High and SMU was only about ten miles, but for Donnie it was like going to another planet. SMU was an expensive private school, full of the blue-blooded sons and daughters of some of the state’s wealthiest families. He started signing his name “A. Don Crowder” instead of “Donnie,” and he made one brief run at fraternity life (it ended the day he punched out his SAE pledge leader during a hazing incident), but he still never quite fit in anywhere at SMU except the Cotton Bowl. That’s where the Mustangs played their home games on Saturday afternoons, and where Don not only earned all four years of his scholarship but sometimes defied common sense and his own limitations by playing kamikaze cornerback. His flying tackles against men much larger than he were like those fights on the schoolyard: they made people notice him.

  Don arrived at SMU weighing only 140 pounds, distributed over a gangly six-foot frame, and he immediately had to contend with three other high school hotshots who had been recruited at the quarterback position. But he attacked the weight-training program with single-minded zeal and bulked himself up to 160 by the time his freshman season started. By his sophomore year, he weighed 185 and was moved to running back, where he earned a letter mostly because the other backs were injured. He also played defensive back, and would have had a chance to play on the starting team if he hadn’t been badly injured during practice. After a particularly nasty collision, he was carried off the field with blurred vision and within a few days had surgery for a detached retina. He remained in the hospital for weeks, his eye patched, lying flat on his back, and the wisest of the many medical opinions paid for by the SMU athletic department were for Don to give up football. That was impossible, Don said; there was nothing else he wanted to do.

  It took Don a year to fully recuperate. It was the year that weight training became an obsession with him; like the skinny kid who gets sand kicked in his face, Don wanted more and more bulk, to the point where he would sometimes spend six or seven hours a day working out on weight machines. By the time he reached his senior year, Don weighed an even 200, more than 60 pounds more than when he had arrived, and he was strong enough to win a starting position in the defensive backfield. The doctors still weren’t particularly optimistic about the eye, but they were sufficiently pleased with the surgery to leave the decision up to him. Don was the first man on the practice field that fall. After another terrible season, head coach Hayden Fry encouraged Don to stay on at SMU for one final year, making up the year of eligibility he had lost after the eye surgery. By that time he had already finished his bachelor’s degree. Strictly in order to play football, he enrolled in law school.

  SMU had yet another pitiful season, though, and much to Don’s chagrin, he went completely unnoticed by professional scouts. Undaunted, he spent most of the spring semester sending letters and films to pro teams; the result was a single offer. Otto Graham, head coach of the Washington Redskins, liked Don’s enthusiasm enough to invite him to summer training camp as a free agent. Unfortunately, Don never made it past the team medical examination. The Redskins doctor took one look at the injured eye and refused to approve him. “You had a good operation on your retina,” the doctor said, “but if you get hit wrong again you could be blind. You’ve got one year of law school. Give up the sport.”

  Crushed, Don tried to talk him out of it. “Ray Nitschke has a detached retina,” he pleaded. But invoking the great Green Bay linebacker’s name made no difference.

  “Ray Nitschke is All-Pro,” said the doctor. “If you were a first-round draft choice, I’d let you play. But you’re a free agent. Go home.”

  Twenty-three years old, Don felt frustrated, bitter, and completely disillusioned. It would have been different if he had gone to camp and been beaten out by other players. To be turned away by the team doctor seemed cruel and unfair. He returned to Dallas and spent the summer hanging out in pool halls with his football buddies, where he would drink himself into a stupor, start fist-fights, or pick up women for one-night stands. Coach Fry tried to help him out by offering an assistant coaching job that would pay for his second year of law school. Don was grateful but had no great enthusiasm for the law. He would do it strictly because he couldn’t think of anything better.

  His attitude began to change, though, as Don entered his second year. It wasn’t the classical beauty of the American legal system that first stirred his ambitious heart. Rather it was the realization that great trial lawyers—like Melvin Belli, the man then making Dallas headlines for his defense of Jack Ruby—were almost as famous as great quarterbacks. Don would never be more than an average student, but he didn’t intend to spend his legal career writing briefs. He wanted to earn his money in the courtroom.

  Despite his mediocre grades, Don managed to get a job the next summer working for a firm run by one of his father’s friends. From the lawyer who hired him, Don learned the basics of what he would later regard as his calling. Don called it personal injury law. Some of his wealthier, haughtier colleagues at SMU called it ambulance chasing. The truth was that Don had little choice in the matter. He had made the usual rounds of prestigious corporate law firms in Dallas. None of them wanted him. Either his grades weren’t high enough or his combative personality did him in with the interviewers. By the time he received his law degree, Don was more than willing to take the $700 a month his father’s friend was offering.

  Don’s baptism by fire came on a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1968 when one of the partners handed him his first case. It was set for trial the very next day and was an almost stereotypical personal-injury suit. Don’s client claimed he was suffering from whiplash as a result of a car accident that occurred just a stone’s throw from TJ High. The defendant had an experienced Dallas attorney on his side. Don studied the case most of the night, showed up at the courthouse Monday in an ill-fitting suit, and called the office later to report, “I kicked the shit out of him.”

  He had the bug. Personal injury law, he decided, was ideal for him. Each client was an underdog, whether it was the guy who had been hit by a truck or the factory worker whose hand was mangled by a piece of machinery. All the cases were handled on a contingent basis, meaning the lawyer didn’t collect anything unless he won the lawsuit. Don was so elated by his first victory that he went on to win nineteen straight cases, losing only when he got so cocky about his prowess that he took an obviously bad case to trial.

  Just as Don could never get along with his coaches, he quickly bridled at working for other people and, after only three months, bolted from the firm and hung out his own shingle. It was more difficult now,
though, because he was married. Shortly after he started his third year of law school, Don had given up his one-night stands and taken up seriously with Carol Parker, a recently divorced woman he had known vaguely all his life but had never dated. Carol had two children, five-year-old Rhonda and baby Jimmy, and Don fell in love with all three of them. The courtship was brief, and once they were married he redoubled his efforts to make it as a personal-injury lawyer. His success was modest, mostly a series of auto-accident cases that, by 1970, had netted him a comfortable $50,000 a year.

  To make things happen faster Don formed a partnership in the fall of 1970 with his father’s friend, John Curtis, and an old law school acquaintance named Jim Mattox. Mattox had spent a couple of years as a prosecutor on the Dallas district attorney’s staff, but he was ambitious enough to want his own criminal law practice. It was a marriage of convenience. Mattox would be the criminal specialist, Curtis the corporate and securities-law specialist, and Don would handle the personal-injury work. Mattox had also started dabbling in local Democratic politics, and his acquaintance with labor leaders and party officials would no doubt lead to a lot of workmen’s compensation cases, which are so similar to personal-injury cases that Don would naturally handle those as well.

  That same year Don and Carol had twin girls, Christy and Wendy, and started planning to move to the country. Even though Don had always lived in Dallas, he had a sort of sentimental romantic nostalgia for his father’s boyhood on a farm, and he had thought off and on of moving to a rural area where he could have a few acres of his own. He didn’t actually make the move, though, until a bizarre tragedy made the Dallas house seem painful to live in. A month before Wendy’s first birthday, the baby attempted to crawl up into a built-in shoe drawer, traumatized her trachea and suffocated to death. Carol was distraught for months afterward, and Don decided they had to move to the country. So in 1973 he finally found what he was looking for: a three-acre tract in a brand-new subdivision called Brookhaven Ranch Estates, carved out of an old farm in the little town of Lucas. The new home, which Don designed himself, was a brick-and-redwood fortress with a circular drive in front and a little country creek running through the thickets in the far reaches of the backyard. Don soon added a pool and a tennis court. “You can’t miss my house,” he would tell first-time visitors. “It’s the one with the tennis court out front. It’s a pretty good court. The only thing is, my neighbor’s horse likes to take a shit on it.”