by Robyn Carr
“I hope this isn’t too forward. You aroused my interest with the way you reacted to my question about Elaine Broussard.”
“That name tends to do more than arouse me, Jackie. Elaine and I parted on unfriendly terms and I haven’t talked about it much. If I could find her, I’d have her arrested.”
“Is it personal? Can you talk about it?”
“I can. I seldom do. I’m still angry and it gets me going. Why would you be interested?”
“Oh... besides morbid curiosity, you mean? I had a few dates with Tom Wahl last fall and he mentioned her. Apparently they were steadies and I got the impression, well, that he’d been hurt by her in some way. I’m not dating him now.”
“Poor Tom — I imagine he was hurt by her. She turned out to be a thief and a liar. She fled in the dark of night and took the shop’s bank account with her.”
Beth Winters had been living in Coleman less than a year and had some decorating experience when Elaine Broussard came to town and began establishing a decorator service out of her home, which was a rented house on the east end. They met through that connection because Beth was trying to order some supplies to refurbish her house.
“She was generous with her time and her commission on the things I ordered — everything from paint to wallpaper to custom-tailored spreads and valances. Bob and I aren’t all that social, and I hadn’t yet made many friends, although I’d met a few people. Besides volunteering at the schools for the kids, and shopping, I was occupied with decorating my house. I had worked for a decorator in Richmond when we were there and I did have secret, unspoken ambitions of opening a store.
“Elaine and I became close too fast. We were inseparable in weeks — both of us starved for friends, I thought. We began talking about opening a business. We both had to commit money to the venture, of course, and we both agreed that our own homes should reflect the kind of tasteful and reasonable decorating we were trying to sell. So we began to work out of her house, keeping all the samples, books, and receipts there until we could move into a shop.
“We advertised, circulated brochures, took photos, published coupons, did the legwork, and finally had a few clients. In order to do that, we had to borrow, and Bob not only approved our business loan, he cosigned. We put all our money into our own decorating and the store stock. Things like upholstery fabric that we bought on the shop’s books, we could put into our own homes because we used all that stock to get clients. It kept our income looking like zero while we were building a clientele and we were spending our earnings on ourselves. Because it was shop money, not divided fifty-fifty between us, all the furnishings of Elaine’s house were dually owned, as all my intake was half hers. Neither of us drew a salary that first year.”
A year after they opened their shop, Elaine started dating Tom Wahl and Beth was pleased for her. The shop used Tom as a repair man, carpenter, Mr. Fix-it. He could install doors, hang blinds, and do other things for clients. Because of Beth’s family responsibilities, Elaine was often alone. Until Tom.
“I didn’t realize until she had gone how little I knew about her. I thought her family was in Milwaukee, but I was never able to find any there. I thought she was getting serious about Tom Wahl and I learned later that they’d stopped seeing each other weeks before she left town. Elaine and I started to argue about things like charges for clients, wholesalers we were ordering from — that sort of thing. The reason Elaine gave me was that she needed a larger income. I was able to live on my husband’s salary; she was not. I think we each cleared about twelve thousand dollars that first year we had a shop. While my money went into extras, hers was supposed to keep body and soul together. Elaine became more and more irritable and impatient.
“She said she wasn’t making it financially and had sunk her entire savings into our store and our stock. She mentioned that she might have to go back to Milwaukee to work. I remember saying that I thought she was so happy in Coleman, with Tom, and she corrected me instantly. She said she liked Tom fine, but there was no future with him. She asked me not to say anything to anyone about her situation with Tom and that she’d fill me in sometime. He was not marriage material; they were only friends.
“She told me she would have to go north to work and she’d give up her half of the business. She said she wouldn’t need to be reimbursed for her share of the partnership immediately, but if she could just have a small portion of the bank account to get started, she could be patient. We made up a long list of the money we had used in our own houses and planned to count her possessions against the final tally.”
So Elaine, I was told, was going to take a couple of weeks off and go back to Milwaukee, which she did. She returned, packed up her stuff, and told her clients she was moving to Milwaukee, where she would work.
She had rented a truck that she was going to drive herself, towing her small car behind, which was how she’d arrived in Coleman. On this end she had friends to help her load; on the other end she had friends who would help unload. The only problem was, on her way out of town she stopped to withdraw all the money from the Finishing Touches account and had not terminated the lease on her house. More than half of that money had been deposits made by customers — money needed to make final payments on the materials ordered. The rented truck turned up empty, not in Milwaukee but in Des Moines, having never been leased to Elaine Broussard. Some man named Kyle something or other had signed the lease.
“You were robbed,” I said.
“And left with a big payment on a business loan that we both signed. I’m not sure if it was a scam from the start or if it was something she thought of after her cash-flow problem emerged. I’ll never know for sure.
“I asked Tom about her and he was angry, too. What happened to him was similar to what happened to me. Elaine got all hot and heavy and involved with him, never told him she was having money trouble of any kind, and later told him that there was a man in Milwaukee she had lived with, broken up with, and was going back to. Good old Tom, he even helped her pack up and get out of her house so he could stay on good terms to the end.”
“That was an awfully generous thing to do,” I said.
“He felt terrible about everything. He even offered to loan me a few thousand dollars because he had no idea Elaine was cleaning out the bank account and sticking me with debts. He said he felt partially responsible; we never talked to each other at all. I mean, if he’d come to me and explained some of the things Elaine had said to him versus what she’d said to me, I might have been warned.
“What she did, whether she’d planned it from the start or thought of it later, was so well organized. My husband’s home office is in Denver and he drives over about once a week. About two years after Elaine was gone, Bob brought home a lamp with the Finishing Touches sticker on the bottom and inside the shade. He’s a garage-sale junkie; he got it at a garage sale. The rose color was in tune with the shop decor and the decor of Elaine’s house so out of curiosity he lifted the lamp up and found our sticker. When he asked the lady where she’d gotten the lamp, she said a couple had sold a whole truckload of furniture and accessories at a flea market in Denver. Elaine dumped everything on her way out of town.”
“So there was a guy somewhere, in the deal with her?”
“Near as I can tell. I told Sheriff Scully about all this, but to tell you the truth, she got away clean and quick. I didn’t even know where to look. Kyle Somebody rented the truck with a Colorado driver’s license and when we researched that through DMV we found it was expired and there was no current address on him.
“As we compared notes, Tom began to wonder if she’d planned it all along. I doubt it. She was with me just about all the time and got away with about forty thousand dollars, total, for two years’ time invested. I would think a real con artist would need more than that to get by. No, I think there was a man in her past and he came up with the idea.”
“Did she do any damage to Tom?” I asked.
“Emotional damage,” Beth
said. “He told you about it?”
“Only that he had been dating her, didn’t know she had anything else going, and then they broke up.”
“There’s more to it, never mind what he says. He was in love with her. He was going to ask her to marry him,” Beth said. “They were inseparable; spent all their time together. He’s such a sweet, sensitive guy. He helps me out without charging me half the time because he feels bad about what happened with Elaine. She used him, too. To what end, I don’t know.”
“Why would you say that?”
“She needed an ally here to help her get out of town. It didn’t seem sudden at the time, but in retrospect, it was pretty abrupt. It was all happening at the same time — her gradual edging away from me, the business, everything. She became silent, tense, worried. I thought she was upset about finances; Tom thought she was upset about another man. I guess that’s when she was plotting her getaway. That would explain her behavior.”
“What do her other friends say?”
“What other friends? She didn’t get close to anyone else that I know of. Me and Tom... the injured she left behind. Oh, there were acquaintances — and there was Nicole, whose theory was that Elaine was not the genuine article. Nicole called her a hoity-toity floozy. I asked around for a while, but the only thing that was really clear was that she suddenly got a hot notion to leave and then left quickly. From her first mention of going, it was less than a month.”
I leaned forward. “Beth, surely you could have this investigated if you really wanted to. You could get the answers.”
“Bob and I considered that. We even discussed the details with Sheriff Scully. I’ve already lost about forty thousand dollars in this deal and I would have to get a detective and then file a civil suit after finding her. People who are dodging debts tend to slip away after they’re served by the court and finding them can get complicated and expensive. I decided to take the forty-thousand dollar lesson. You know how it is — even hungry for justice, I thought it was better to satisfy the clients who were left hanging, do a good business, and get on with my life. But, Jackie, I’m going to take my anger over this to my grave. I can’t get over it.”
Beth and I were not destined to be good friends, there was no chemistry. It was no loss for either of us. She was a good decorator, a nice lady, and I was sorry that she had suffered through losing a friend and a sizable chunk of money because of her involvement with Elaine Broussard. I could have offered to help her track Elaine down — I’m good at tracking people. I could have offered her a break on legal fees. I didn’t do any of that.
There was something in her telling of the story that got me thinking about Tom again and began an interesting quest for me. Despite my early-warning signs, I set out to investigate him in earnest. Before getting very far, I was seized with a new goal. I thought I could prove, with enough evidence at my disposal, that he had not killed his wife and child. This odyssey required help from Mike, and time.
When I considered doing more checking, it never occurred to me that I would resume any kind of relationship with him. I didn’t contemplate even a casual friendship. It wasn’t that his absence softened his image in my mind. I remembered clearly that contact with him and events in which he seemed centered, were fraught with indecision, disquiet.
I didn’t pursue this because I desired Tom. To the contrary, I wanted him out of my life. Over the winter, with all the gatherings and happenings, I’d met men I liked better, men who didn’t give me any signals that there was danger or complication ahead. There appeared to be no pressure of any kind. There was cross-country skiing with a group of people that included the painter, and I met the world-class cyclist at a political meeting. The possibilities for companionship were wider than I originally thought.
I wasn’t sure whether I would tell Tom what I found. What I wanted to do was have a sense of closure on that portion of my life. That month with the phantom, the finger, and the eerie feelings I had struggled with still held a nightmarish quality in my mind and I wanted to be past it. I wanted final, resolved peace of mind.
Roberta, only a month into her grief, talked about closing the office for a couple of weeks, perhaps a month, before the intrusion of summer campers and vacationers hit town. There were plenty of things at home she had to finalize after Harry’s death. She wasn’t about to go on keeping chickens and cows. She wasn’t going to continue to pay someone to look after animals that Harry had bred and cared for.
I was glad to have the time. I locked up the house and went to Los Angeles for a long visit. This time I bravely stayed with Mike and Chelsea: Mike and Chelsea and their pictures of Sheffie around their house. Sheffie and me. Sheffie, Tiffany, and Jessica. Sheffie and his dad; Sheffie, Chelsea, and Mike. It was time to see these.
“How many women come home for a visit and stay with their ex-husband and his wife?” Janice Whitcomb asked me.
“Not many, I’m sure. Think of how effective it is. I can’t possibly fall in love with him again when I get a first-hand view of how sloppy and lazy he is.”
“Think of his poor wife! What must she feel like, having you there under her roof?”
“Chelsea?” I laughed. “Listen, Chelsea is the only thing in the world that makes this possible. If Mike and I had been smart, we both would have married her. It would have saved us a divorce and we each would have gotten the best wife there is.”
I told Mike that I was still interested in the Lawler murders, that I wanted to take a closer look at that period, that case, and see what I could find. It isn’t hard for a lawyer to get access to files, research data, and DMV and phone records, even when working on an inactive case. What is hard is getting good stuff that’s twelve years old.
The first thing I did was go to the library and cross-reference this guy. I found his articles, some of them on microfilm. I found a brief biography in an old scientific journal, and in the Columbia yearbook I found his degrees and awards. Some of this information was repeated in newspaper accounts of the crime. I found his name in a scientific Who’s Who. I had already seen the newspaper photos; there was a picture in the University of Illinois yearbook, twenty years old. He was a fresh-faced youth, though unsmiling.
Thomas Patrick Lawler, Ph.D., was born in Chicago in 1947, the third son of Joseph and Rosie Lawler. He graduated from college in 1970, attained his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1975, and had published several papers before 1978. I read them. They were scientific and verbose but, I thought, comprehensive and insightful. He wrote about psychological testing, which, as he’d told me, had been his specialty. The case studies interested me, for they mirrored some of the stories that Tom had told me. There was a long paper on obsessive-compulsive disorder that seemed to be the story he had told me about the man who fantasized he had killed his handicapped brother.
The man who wrote about this and other clients he had seen in therapy had to be patient, disciplined, intelligent, and compassionate. But the articles I could relate to more easily were those few that had been published in women’s magazines. Here again, I was impressed by his handle, his sensitivity to these issues. I absorbed the warmth I knew him capable of and reminded myself of his other, more callous side.
One long piece was intended to help people detect mental illness in someone they loved — a friend or family member. The energy in his writing was devoted to removing the stigma of mental illnesses, comparing them to other physical conditions and limitations; he explained the brain chemistry of chronic depression, schizophrenia, manic-depression, senility, and Alzheimer’s. Then he set about giving a list of interventions the readers could employ to get the necessary help for their loved one. And finally, he wrapped the article up with a supportive finale and established a goal for our society: to treat these diseases with the same aggressiveness we use on more socially acceptable illnesses like heart disease and cancer. Included, as a sidebar, was a list of support organizations for people who had to deal with a close relative or friend who had a mental illness o
r disorder.
It was comforting to read. This man did seem to know his stuff. His articles were authoritative without being intrusive or bullying. The magazine article about identifying and helping the mentally ill had been published in December of 1986 and the bio called Thomas P. Lawler “a research psychologist who studies and writes in his Oregon home.” Well, I figured that was fair enough — he claimed to have come to Coleman in that year; it didn’t seem strange to me that he’d keep an Oregon location for the public. Had the article said he was practicing in Maine, I would have been very suspicious.
So I wondered, was he still doing some research? I don’t mean complicated all consuming scientific research, but was he perhaps still studying, still collecting some data, even if he wasn’t doing much field work? He was still doing some writing, he had told me. His collection of books was impressive. The ones I had picked up were heavily underlined and highlighted; notations were made in margins. He did have a personal computer, on which he did his price and materials lists for building work. He must also be doing some writing on it.
Finally, I got to the feature stories from newspapers and news journals about the crime. Here I was confronted with pictures — terrible pictures. Pictures of him crying while a policeman wrote down details. Pictures of him at the funeral, his head in his hands, and an elderly woman, I suppose his mother, touching his back in comfort. A profile photo of him at the graveside. A picture of him emerging from the police station with a briefcase-toting man walking beside him: his lawyer. I wrote down the lawyer’s name; he might still have a practice in Los Angeles.
I read the article about the Lawler murders and an account of Thomas Lawler being briefly questioned as a suspect. This article said there was another possible suspect, but the police wouldn’t elaborate. That was when I had to go back into court reports and police files, and pay a visit to the nearest maximum-security psychiatric hospital.