Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

"Special Crimes would know that any kid of ours is bound to grow up into a smart alec, and the Lord knows we have enough of those already. So, no, it would not be allowed."

  She had cackled and said, "I like that. You're not afraid of those special guys at all, are you? Maybe I have found someone who can protect me for a change."

  No, I had no fear of the boys from Special Crimes. I knew them all on a first name basis, and they needed me to tout their cases as much as I needed them to tell me about them. But I was starting to wonder about her preoccupation with pregnancy, and I had begun to see hints of what might be a piece of that secret agenda for me. I concluded there was no harm in viewing me as a buffer that might insulate her from any unseemly persecution by Special Crimes. Reporters were supposed to do that anyway.

  I knew we had made a lot of noise overnight, and twice I heard her roommate-landlord rummaging around in the hallways beyond her closed door, obviously disturbed by the loud laughter she never tried to suppress. She identified him as Mike, an acquaintance from her days a few years before at the University of Houston Law School, where she had volunteered her time to student legal services and met him before he graduated. She called him her salvation during the last few months, providing this sanctuary when she had nowhere to stay while pursuing her claim on the Tedesco estate. But he would soon be getting married, she said, and that would leave her seeking a new place to live. He had departed the house for work before we arose, abandoning it to us for showers and breakfast. Sated in more ways than one, we had just applied the finishing touches to our appearances together in the bathroom when Catherine made the declaration about our appeal as a couple.

  So, I paused to check it out. At five-feet-three-inches, she stood about nine inches shorter than me with the top of her head coming about to my chest. She wore her shoulder length, naturally blonde hair with bangs in the front and spread out on the sides in curls. She had a petite body, too, weighing I guessed about a hundred pounds. I indeed looked the part of a complementary companion with my dark brown hair and beard—glasses unnecessary thanks to contact lenses I had worn since high school. I had to agree with her observation.

  Oh yeah, I said to myself, we'll turn heads, all right, the first time we show up at the courthouse together—but not because of our looks!

  Before she could put on a dress, the phone rang and I watched her answer it in bra and panties, then walk around the room having a forceful discussion with someone on the other end. In those primitive days before cell phones, or even cordless devices, she had to carry the rotary dial base in one hand while holding the receiver to her face with the other. I eavesdropped with interest as she paced the bedroom, ordering some unknown party around.

  "So you'll be in my office by eleven?" I heard her saying. "OK, you know where the office is? And you know, you better bring the money along and that's cash, five hundred dollars."

  Then she laughed aloud and said, "No, a check? Are you serious? No checks. Cash and that's five one-hundred-dollar bills. Do that and he'll be out of jail by two. OK, I'll be there. But don't forget. Bring cash."

  I had learned that Catherine actually made the bulk of her earnings as a bail bondsman by abusing a loophole in the rules governing business activities by attorneys. She had even bragged about it during our drive, claiming she had conned some old man into placing a large sum of money under her name as a surety. She gave him a percent of her bonding business as his cut for covering her image as a woman with the funds to back up her bonds. She told me the State Bar of Texas might frown on this arrangement but insisted she only needed to use it temporarily to generate cash. Usually she would refer bonding clients to more experienced lawyers for representation, and then, those lawyers would provide a referral fee, allowing her to profit twice from services rendered on one alleged crime. But she wanted desperately, she said, to leave this bail bonding business behind and create a future as a top lawyer. Once again, I wondered why she would be sharing such information with a reporter, but I realized I couldn't do much with it. My editors had expressed no interest in her unusual probate trial for the Tedesco estate with all its bizarre aspects and allegations. Why would they want coverage about her pushing the rules on bail bonds? Besides, I had to salute her spunky ingenuity and found it intriguing.

  We finished dressing, locked Mike's house, and drove toward downtown Houston in our separate cars without making any definite plans for the future.

  I arrived at work a little late that morning. But the only one to notice would have been the five or six "roommates" in my office at the press room on the fourth floor of the Harris County Criminal Courts building. My editors all worked in the main office at The Post, about four miles outside downtown, and usually only saw me on alternate Fridays, when I drove over to pick up my paycheck. But I had a professional family in the press room, where reporters from several rival media outlets maintained bureaus for their coverage of the beat. Tucked around the corner from the elevators on a dead-end hallway, the pressroom harbored barely enough space for the six metal desks stacked around the walls. Besides for Jim Strong and myself, the room served as base of operations at that time for Tom Moran from the rival Houston Chronicle newspaper, Sandy for one of the city's all-news radio stations, and Rhia for another news radio station. The extra desk remained available as a floater when needed by visiting members of the working press. Stacks of old newspapers sat in piles around the floor. A single clipping adorned the bulletin board—a ridiculous feature written on an obviously slow news day a couple of months earlier by a Post lifestyles editor describing the latest fashion trends at the women's prison unit. In the margin, some sarcastic critic had added a punch line in dark black marker: "All dressed up and nowhere to go?"

  My daily routine involved roaming among three or four buildings that housed about thirty courtrooms and finding news stories. I would visit with court personnel over coffee, review docket sheets, chat with attorneys for both sides, and usually uncover more than I could handle in a single day. I would file my stories in the late afternoon, using one of the early telephonic computer terminals. When editors needed me, they called on the phone.

  Although technically competitors, the regular tenants of the press room enjoyed a tribal bond that set us apart from the lawyers, judges, clerks, and criminals who also frequented the building. We worked together on some stories, when it was more efficient for a source to hold an impromptu press conference there. So we had an open-door policy on the room at that time.

  On this day, I had barely sat down behind my desk, when Chuck Rosenthal of the District Attorney's Special Crimes Bureau popped his head in the door and asked me to step into the hall. He ushered me into the men's restroom around the corner and checked the stalls to ensure privacy before he spoke.

  "Are you hanging around with Catherine Mehaffey?" he asked.

  His question staggered me. Rosenthal was one of the top dogs in Special Crimes, a hard-nosed prosecutor destined eventually to win election as Harris County District Attorney about twenty years into the future. Since I had not yet sent out engraved announcements about the first date that occurred less than twenty-four hours before, I wondered where he had heard about Catherine and me. My mind flashed back to that Galveston cop and a comment Catherine made as we headed back to Houston. She had warned, "They'll be talking to you, now." I'd laughed it off as paranoia, but this mysterious visit from Chuck immediately raised my curiosity. He ignored my request for the source of his information and came straight to the point.

  "I wish you'd think this over before you get too far involved. She is trouble."

  "Trouble? Don't you know that's my middle name?"

  Chuck ignored my lame attempt to break the tension and offered to let me listen to some of the tape recordings the bureau had confiscated of conversations between Catherine and Tedesco. He said their investigation had uncovered a long trail of battered and broken former lovers with Tedesco as simply the worst example. He said: "You do a good job over here. Everybody likes and r
espects you. We don't want to see you get hurt."

  "Maybe you haven't heard but I'm not married any more," I began, speculating he might have seen Catherine as an extramarital affair. "I'm not messing with Mehaffey on the sly. She can't tell my wife and destroy the marriage. I'm flat broke. My wife ran up a twelve thousand dollar MasterCard bill and I can't even afford an apartment. I'm sleeping on somebody's couch. Our house will sit on the market for months while I pay child support and the mortgage. So I can't figure out what else Mehaffey could do to me. Would she take my two-hundred-dollar car and my paper bag of dirty shirts?"

  "It might not involve money. She usually takes whatever she can get."

  "Even if there is nothing?"

  He stopped, stared at me, then said, "There's always more than nothing."

  "Maybe my soul?" I chuckled at the thought.

  He shrugged his shoulders and repeated his offer: "Anytime you reach a point where you want to hear those tapes just drop on by. They're off the record, of course, but I think they would give you a new perspective on Catherine Mehaffey."

  I told him thanks, and he walked out the door, leaving me with plenty more to ponder. On one hand, I began to wonder if her claims of persecution might not have merit. How could one night with me trigger a visit from Chuck? On another level, I had to take his concerns seriously. But I had confidence in my final conclusion. I had dealt all my life with all kinds of people and proven my talent as a survivor. I had always been able to find a way out of tight situations. I forecast she likely would play with me for a while, and then go off after some guy with money, finding a superior mark for her talents. Hell, I thought, we might even become long-term drinking buddies.

  And I grinned as I thought I knew one thing for sure: No matter what she could do in the days ahead, she'd never get back that pussy from last night.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  October 17, 1979

  I didn't see Catherine again until the next morning when she used our open door policy to swing into the press room and startle the reporters in there. It marked the first time she had ever come into the press room, and her visit caught all of us by surprise. Then things grew even more bizarre.

  She ignored me playfully and stopped first at Sandy's desk, extending her left arm to show Sandy a whopping large diamond ring on her ring finger.

  "What do you think?" Catherine asked.

  "Is that a diamond?" Sandy said. "Wow."

  Until that day, they had never spoken to each other, but Catherine acted like one of the team, part of the press room family. She strolled across the room ignoring me and showed her new ring to Rhia, the black female reporter working for the other radio station.

  "You're engaged?" Rhia asked.

  Acting as if I were not even in the room, Catherine told her: "This is Gary's ticket out of here."

  Everybody looked at me behind my desk in the far corner as if to ask, "What the fuck is this?" Everybody, that is, except Jim Strong at the desk beside me. He just started laughing. Then Catherine whirled around in the open center of the room and acted as if she had just spotted me for the first time.

  "Oh, Gary, I didn't know you were in here. Look at this."

  Then I received the extended arm with the big diamond on her finger.

  "So, congratulations are in order?" I asked. "Who is the lucky man?"

  "You are the lucky man," she said. I scanned the room and shrugged my shoulders, waiting for her to elaborate. Finally she cocked her head with a loud laugh, pulled an empty chair to the side of my desk, and sat down. My colleagues turned back to their newspapers and telephones, leaving us to chat—as if we could have had a private conversation in that place.

  "Don't you see?" she asked me. "By the time I give this ring back, we'll have the diamond out and a cubic zirconium in."

  "Draw on your legal training a moment and answer a question for me," I said, pausing to let her twist her little nose. "Have I now heard enough to make me an indictable co-conspirator?"

  "Indicted for what? It's my ring now. I can do whatever I want with it, and I think for safekeeping I might want to have the stone replaced with something less valuable in case the ring is stolen."

  I laughed. Once again, I thought she was kidding about this, trying to shock anyone listening with this plan for what seemed to me a blatant scheme to commit a fraud. I told her, "Catherine, I think I've heard about all I want to hear on this plan. My only hope now is to become the proverbial unindicted co-conspirator. You know—the snitch!"

  "You don't know enough about this yet to be the snitch."

  Although she was giggling, I thought I detected the beginning of a pout, as if I had disappointed her by refusing to immediately pledge allegiance on her caper. She changed the subject.

  "We can talk about this longer over lunch," she said. "We're going to Charlie's."

  "I'm thinking more like the Hoagie Shop," I replied, rejecting her bid for the most expensive steak joint in downtown Houston. But she stood up and waved me away.

  "It's on me," she said. "I made some money yesterday and I want to spend some of it on you. So I insist. Be there at noon."

  After she left, Sandy spun in her chair and stared at me.

  "Please, Gary, tell me you are not hanging around with her now."

  "I've never been one to kiss and tell," I said, shrugging my shoulders as she shot me the finger while turning to dial the phone on her desk with the other hand. I considered Sandy a good friend. She recently had begun dating my long-time friend George, the Post assistant city editor who was letting me live temporarily in the living room of the two-story house he was renting in Houston's Heights neighborhood. We had worked together at the paper for eight years, arriving there in the same month. He had accepted the assistant editor's job about a year earlier, after covering a wide range of assignments that included preceding me on the criminal courts beat. Recently divorced from his first wife, George had extended the hospitality of his rent house to me, but I figured my welcome was wearing thin. I already had hatched plans to begin renting a room from Jim Strong at the start of November.

  In the last two years of working the courthouse beat, Strong had become an even closer friend to me. Although obviously a very bright guy, he also had a reputation as a loner who had angered many with his acerbic wit. He lived in a house in northwest Houston that was still owned by his ex-wife, who had moved out of the city. She had been an advisor to a number of high-powered, local politicians while he had bummed around on the fringes of mainstream media jobs in the city before they split up a few years before. A burly six-footer with boisterous mannerisms, he said he had been a collegiate wrestler at the University of Texas back in the 1960s. At the courthouse, he worked for a small company called Houston Metro News Service, trying to carve a niche in the Houston media market by providing news content to a number of local music radio stations that had no budget for news staffs of their own. So, he technically worked as the courthouse reporter for about a dozen stations, feeding them all the same stories and taped interviews as part of an independent staff with beat reporters posted at the other key locations around town. More than that, he was destined to play a central role in the tortured drama about to unfold the next few months between me and Catherine Mehaffey.

  Our lunch that day should have been a cheerful event. We were still in that early honeymoon phase of our relationship. She had apparently landed a fee on a bail bond and wanted to talk about the future. But I had to spoil things by mentioning the visit from Chuck. I don't know why I told her he had come and talked with me about her. Maybe I wanted to test her reaction.

  "That motherfucker," she snorted. "That son of a bitch. They are doing this again. But this is the end. I'm taking care of this now."

  I thought she was about to leave her chair and rush over the district attorney's office for a confrontation. Immediately I saw my mistake. Not only had I violated Chuck's confidence, but I had left him exposed to an action where I would be the prime witness. I tried to envi
sion what sort of lawsuit might erupt and realized I had to keep her corralled somehow. I struggled for an escape as she probed for more information on what he had said.

  "Oh, you know," I said. "He suggested you might be trouble. So I told him trouble is my middle name."

  "That son of a bitch," she seethed, waving off my attempt at humor. "What else did you say? What did you tell him?"