Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

  "I'm pretty sure that's the one, but I have to check it out," she whispered. If it hadn't been for Kenneth and his buck knife, I would have been enjoying this scene as part of a genuine caper. I had never seen Catherine so serious. Motioning with her hands and speaking in a whisper, she barked orders like the platoon leader on a commando raid.

  "Go around back, Kenneth, and set up at the bottom of the back staircase. I don't want him getting away when I come in the front."

  Then she looked at me and sighed.

  "Taylor, can you just stand right here to make sure he doesn't get past me down these stairs? You think you can handle that?"

  Kenneth offered the knife again, and I declined. He shrugged his shoulders and headed for his station, disappearing around a corner of the building. Catherine stared at me with that mischievous grin while waiting for him to set up. Then she tiptoed up the staircase, holding the wrought iron rail and watching for any movement from above. When she reached the landing, Catherine crouched down and peeked into the apartment window where I could see lights and shadows of people moving around inside. I could hear music, too, and suspected some sort of small party under way. Satisfied her quarry awaited inside, Catherine looked back to me, flashed a thumbs up, and stepped to the door. I watched her knock three times and then place her left eye directly on the fish lens peep hole to block anyone looking out. Her speed surprised me when the door opened a crack, and she drove her shoulder into the wood, forcing it all the way. As it swung backward, she raced into the apartment and people started screaming.

  What a fucking freak show! I said to myself and moved up a couple of steps, hoping to get a better view of the devastation in Catherine's wake. I could hear frantic footsteps and assumed the bond jumper had chosen flight over fight just as I heard Catherine scream for Kenneth to "Stop that son of a bitch." If I had chosen to make my living as an accountant or an engineer, I probably would have been the kind of guy to walk away. But just as my natural sense of curiosity dictated my profession, it also beckoned me the rest of the way up those stairs, where I wanted a view of that apartment living room. I could see the back door stood open, and I heard the sound of a body hitting the pavement from down the back staircase. In the living room, a small, mixed-gender group of kids in their early twenties sat lounging around on the floor or leaning up against the couch smoking marijuana.

  "Man," said one guy to nobody in particular as I stood in the doorway, "did you see that shit? Who was she?"

  "I don't know," said another guy, passing a joint to the girl on his right. "She was fast."

  Confident I faced no threat from the stoners inside, I retreated back down the front stairs and headed around the building to see how Kenneth had fared. I walked along a narrow alley that opened into a parking area behind that building and spotted Kenneth right away as he climbed out of a ligustrum bush, looking a bit dazed. Catherine's bond jumper obviously had breeched the perimeter, depositing Kenneth in the bushes, and likely was somewhere in the parking lot fleeing Catherine herself. I looked around, and then I saw them. She had him on his knees, over in a corner of the parking lot between a couple of parked cars. He was pleading, but she stood firm.

  "You know who I am," she said, pulling a pair of handcuffs from her jacket pocket. "Run from me, you cocksucker? You are going to the county jail."

  This guy looked every bit of six feet five inches tall. Still, he volunteered his wrists and sobbed while she snapped the cuffs around them. She nudged him to stand up and marched him back toward me and Kenneth.

  "My brave warriors," Catherine muttered as we fell in line. "What would I do without you?"

  "Motherfucker," Kenneth shouted as he shoved the bond jumper. Catherine stepped quickly between them and admonished Kenneth.

  "Tough guy, now, huh?" she scolded with a laugh. The bond jumper climbed in the back seat with me and rode sobbing in handcuffs all the way to the old Harris County Jail downtown, where Catherine took about forty-five minutes to surrender him. Then she treated us to a dinner at the Cadillac Bar & Grill.

  "Enjoy the show?" she asked as we sipped on beers.

  "You know how to have a good time on Saturday night," I replied with a wink. "You always do your own bounty hunting?"

  "I never needed to before," she said sternly. "My men usually behave."

  I understood painfully well the point of this night's adventure. In one escapade, she had proven that she indeed enjoyed access to goons with buck knives who owed her favors. She also proved she had the power to bring a grown man to his knees. Still bursting with adrenalin a couple of hours later, she took charge of our lovemaking with a cocky, primal aggression and forced an orgasm I imagined her bond jumper felt all the way back at the county jail. I wasn't sure I had even been involved.

  FORTY-TWO

  December, 1979

  I have always been ambivalent about Christmas. In many ways I loathe that time of year. Since the holiday has no religious hold on me, I must consider other reasons to understand it. On one hand, I am revolted by the selfish behavior in the name of the season. Children and many adults lose control when their wishes go unfulfilled. There's no doubt the holiday has evolved into an undisciplined waste of financial resources, as the retail sector feeds the frenzy of material consumption beyond any practical limitation. Even as a kid I dreaded the day itself and felt embarrassed about the presents. I wanted the visitors to leave my house so I could get on with my life of playing ball or reading books on December 26. As a father, I faked enthusiasm so my daughters could enjoy Christmas the way the retailers want all children to do. At the same time, however, I realize the season forms a foundation for sharing and giving, too. I've also enjoyed the parties, particularly those hosted by lawyers willing to spend more on a single night celebration than I earn in a year. By and large, however, for me those days on the calendar have always loomed largely as a black hole in the year, a place where I lose time and just have to accept it. So, surrendering the Christmas season of 1979 to Catherine Mehaffey meant nothing to me. I gave her something I wouldn't have had anyway.

  Those weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve of 1979 sit in my memory as a blur with a few crucial highlights leaping out. Catherine's plan for finally launching her law practice never fulfilled my limited expectations. Her good intentions only reminded me that was the material used to pave the road to hell. For every time she showed signs of accepting the past and just moving forward, she offered a contrary blow that destroyed whatever good will she might have engendered. I began to see more clearly her Machiavellian flaw. Viewing herself as an omnipotent manipulator forced her to plot about everything. She concocted strategies for getting things she wanted and even things she didn't want. The more complex the strategy, the more forcefully she embraced it. I had the feeling I had become the target of some such strategy, a rival she had to defeat. And still, I kept looking for a peaceful way out.

  We had a lot of sex that month, often several times each day. It had a calming effect on her, almost like an injection of valium that tended to control her outbursts. I considered her a nymphomaniac at that time and took every advantage I could. Our activity gave new meaning to my view of Christmas as a black hole. I came to see it as a wet one, too.

  "Jesus, did you fuck this much when you were married?" she asked me once.

  "Of course not," I replied. "Before meeting you?"

  I had to admit all that sex helped my condition as well. I had told Cindy I didn't think it safe for me to be around the girls much until I had figured some way to get Catherine out of my life. So constant sex with Catherine helped cover the melancholy mood derived from constantly thinking about the divorce. That depression probably made it possible for me to answer Catherine's bell as often as she wanted, using it as an avenue for escape from my own predicament.

  One afternoon she rang that bell with a phone call to the press room from her office.

  "Lloyd had one of his whores in here giving him a blow job yesterday," she claimed. "Today
it's my turn. You can be my whore."

  "What the hell," I said. "It's a slow news day anyhow."

  She left her office door propped open wide enough for Lloyd to get the message as we used her couch to show him he wasn't the only one there with a private life.

  Catherine held her Christmas party in her apartment. The place was small, but so was the crowd. She attracted a larger group than I had expected, however. After it ended she asked me to move one of her wooden kitchen chairs back to her bedroom. I set it against the wall by her closet and later would be glad that I did.

  We had dinner one night with a lawyer friend and his wife. In the course of routine chitchat, the lawyer asked me about Cindy. He wondered if I had a picture. So, I pulled one from my wallet.

  "She's attractive," he said. Before he could hand it back, Catherine snatched it out of his hand and ripped it to shreds.

  "You still carry a picture of that whore?" she screamed. "Not any more."

  While she was in the bathroom, he offered some succinct advice: "Leave town."

  When Catherine and I attended the large criminal lawyers party hosted every year at that time by the legendary Mike Ramsey, I accepted a wager from an old friend.

  "I bet you a hundred dollars you don't live to come back here next year," whispered Kent Schaffer, at that time a private investigator working his way through law school.

  "You're on," I said, shaking his hand.

  I also introduced her that night to a younger reporter from The Post named Mark. A twenty-five-year-old athletic hunk, he had joined the staff about a year before and also was in the midst of a divorce. I hoped Catherine might catch his eye, and I crossed my fingers when I saw them talking together in a corner of the room. I was sure they'd be seeing each other again soon.

  Catherine gave me a baby-blue sweater for Christmas. I don't remember what I gave her. But I do remember what she wanted. She asked me to find a small replica of the creature from the science fiction blockbuster Alien. She called it the "perfect predator." I couldn't find one. But I had to admit I really didn't look very hard.

  Besides killing her fun with my humbug attitude about Christmas, I also disappointed her with my New Year's Eve superstition of making sure I'm asleep before midnight. We dined that evening on cold-cut sandwiches from a convenience store, drank some scotch, and then went to bed. The decade of the 1970s ended before I arose the next day. For me, the holiday season of 1979 had ended, and a showdown loomed ahead.

  FORTY-THREE

  January 6, 1980

  "Why the hell is that there?" I asked, bolting upright where I had just awakened from a Sunday afternoon nap to see a pistol lying beside the lamp on the table beside the bed. I had only slept a short while after a quick tryst and had fallen asleep on my left side, eyes focused on that table where nothing sat but the lamp as I drifted away. Catherine obviously had taken that pistol from its hiding place while I slept and then laid it on the table where I could see it when I awoke. I wondered how close I had come to dying in my sleep.

  "I heard a noise," she said, leaning around the doorway that separated her bedroom from the hall toward the kitchen and the front of her apartment. "I was scared."

  I sat up on the bed and rubbed my eyes. I gave the pistol another look and shook my head. I imagined the scene that must have unfolded while I slept:

  Catherine paces the floor beside the bed, her pistol in hand. She wonders if she should take her chances now. She knows Christmas and New Year's have come and gone. It will be time to move on separately with our lives. "Did I tell him anything that will ruin me?" she asks herself, trying to remember all he's seen and heard in the weeks since September. And what about that tape recording on file at Special Crimes? What did he tell them that would be so dangerous? "Can I get away with this?" she ponders as she prepares for her statement to the police. "Shot dead while sleeping half-naked in your house?" the detective would ask. "He raped me," she could explain. "Then he had the nerve to fall asleep there in my bed. I got my gun and watched him, trying to control my anger. He woke up and said he was going to rape me again. I've been used mercilessly by that bastard. I decided to fight back this time. I had my pistol. He started to climb out of bed. I warned him to put on his clothes and leave. But the son of a bitch just laughed. He laughed in my face and said he was going to rape me again. So I shot him. Right between the eyes." "Could that work?" Catherine asks herself. And how would that play around town? "Two men in her life dead, murdered, in the space of a year. Don't fuck with Catherine," they'd all have to say. "She's like the Old West gunslinger with notches on her belt." "But what about that tape at Special Crimes?" Catherine wonders. She considers it further. "That damned tape. What did he tell them? This is too risky now," she decides. "I can pick a better time and make it look like self defense. I can get away with it, but not now. So I'll just put the pistol down beside the bed and watch him shit his pants."

  Paranoia? I wondered, as that scene flashed through my mind. Or have I become adept at reading her mind? Either way, I decided I had had enough. I had come to visit that day with plans for the final goodbye, anyway. I could see I had no peaceful, easy way out of this relationship. No new loverboy suckers had emerged to distract her and replace me. The time had come to break this off and take my chances.

  "Heard a noise, huh?" I said, realizing she had been standing there expecting a response. "Maybe a rat?"

  "Definitely a rat," she said, smiling. "A big fucker, too."

  I got the message. I pulled on my pants and walked toward the bedroom door, past the closet on the right and around the chair that I had moved there after her party. I looked over my shoulder to make sure the pistol remained on the bedside table. Then I looked down into her eyes. She looked up and smiled.

  "We need to talk," I said, nudging her backward toward the living room in the front of her house. She backed in that direction and sat on the couch.

  "How was your Christmas?" I asked.

  "OK," she said. "I had a good time this year."

  "Do you remember what we talked about the day I brought your television back here, and we went to the Holiday Inn?"

  "About our problem?"

  "Yes," I acknowledged and continued with a speech I had rehearsed several times in my head that week. "I told you there are times when two people just don't work as a couple. The sex might be spectacular, and there might be pluses. But for some reason, there is still a fundamental problem that should prevent them from staying together. You love someone because of some things and in spite of others. And you have to split because of some things, in spite of others."

  I paused, inviting a response and continued when she just sat there staring at me.

  "I've given us a good try, and I have helped you get through the Christmas holidays," I said. "But the more I think about it, I have to say we are in that category of couples that will always be in danger from each other. I just make you too angry. I don't know why. But the end result is that I am bad for you. I am preventing you from making something of your life. You are an attractive, intelligent woman. You are funny, like a standup comedian. Quick-witted. You need to go out there and use those skills to become a top criminal lawyer instead of getting mad at me all the time and letting our relationship get in the way."

  Catherine sat quietly during my presentation, one she obviously had been expecting. I had tried to fashion this discussion in a way that would stress the advantages for her—to give her a reason to accept not just a truce but a permanent armistice without surrender.

  "And what about you?" she asked.

  "That's another side to it. I have so much bullshit on my plate right now, so many things to straighten out. And I can't do that while we're fighting all the time. There are things I have to do alone. I have a court hearing Wednesday on my divorce, and I have to concentrate on that. I have to make sure my job is secure. We just can't go on. It's time to admit we are fighting a losing battle, and we need to give up the good things so we aren't hurt by the b
ad."

  I thought it made sense. And she just sat quietly, without a response. So I asked, "Will you tell me why it is so important to you that I stay in your life? Surely you can find another lover. What is so special about me?"