by Gary Taylor
"You saw him," she screamed at the other reporters. "You saw him beating on me."
Tom looked at her without rising from his chair and asked, "Catherine, can we call you an ambulance?"
I started laughing at that remark as she sat up on the floor and then climbed into the chair while Tom continued to offer aid, asking, "Can I get you a doctor? Do you need a doctor?"
"No, I'll just sit here," she said. The rest of the press corps decided then would be a good time to check the courts for news, and they scattered faster than normal while she sat there looking at me and Tom. Without a pause, I picked up the phone, dialed the sheriff's office, and said, "We have someone in the press room who is not welcome, and she won't leave. Can you arrest her for trespassing?"
Before I heard an answer, she jerked the phone off my desk and slammed it onto the floor. Then she yanked the connection from the wall.
"OK," I said. "I guess I will have to file my complaint in person."
As I got up to walk across the floor, Catherine sprang, grabbing my necktie and trying to slide the knot against my throat. Recognizing the danger of this confrontation, Tom rose to action and tried to step between us.
"Catherine, Catherine, calm down," he said. "Don't be this way."
When she turned to face him, Catherine relaxed her grip, and I spun away heading out the door. A couple of minutes later, I returned with two deputies to find Tom and Catherine sitting there chatting.
"I want to tell you he beat me," she screamed, pointing at me.
"Is this a family disturbance?" one of the deputies asked me. I shook my head and said, "No way. We are not related, and she is disturbing our work."
The deputies looked at Tom for support, and he nodded.
"Tell them what happened to me," she barked at Tom.
"Catherine fell over the chair trying to attack Taylor," he said.
The deputies had heard enough. One of them looked at her and said simply, "Miss, you will have to leave."
"I think I'm going to vomit," said Catherine. She grabbed her purse, stood up, and left the room with the deputies in her wake.
"Thanks for sticking around," I said to Tom, after Catherine had left the room.
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," he said with a grin. "I'm sure I'll be writing a story about you pretty soon anyway and may need these observations for background. I was having coffee with a couple of lawyers last week, and one of them said he expects the next time he sees you, you will be wearing a toe tag."
"Schaffer bet me a hundred dollars I won't live to attend Ramsey's Christmas party this year. I took the bet because I don't see any way he can collect on it if he wins."
Tom chuckled and offered another observation: "I just don't see any heroes in this story."
I hadn't thought about that aspect until then, but it sounded right. I just looked at him, grinned, and said, "What about you? You're my hero. Why don't you follow me around for a while and be my witness?"
"No, thanks."
Turning back to my desk, I hoped that maybe I had finished my business with Catherine for this day.
Sure. And those monkeys from heaven finally had reached the mountaintops, carrying bags of gold for everyone on earth.
FORTY-NINE
January 14, 1980
"Your psycho girlfriend is over here in the newsroom right now."
"Ahh, shit," I mumbled after answering the phone and receiving that whispered message from Ed Jahn, a colleague on the city desk at The Post building, about fifteen minutes from downtown. I told him: "But she just left this place."
Ed had called me about two hours after deputies had evicted Catherine from the courthouse press room. I speculated she must have collected her thoughts and launched a Plan B in an attempt to trample me at work.
"Catherine certainly is having a very busy day," I said. "She seems to be popping up everywhere. What's she doing over there?"
I enlisted Ed to serve as my eyes at headquarters.
"She's in Logan's office pacing around and telling him all about something, probably you," Ed said. "Oh, man, now she's waving her arms around and pointing in his face."
Logan was our managing editor, and he worked in one of those offices with glass walls that allowed him to monitor the staff at all times. Of course, on this occasion, they also allowed my scout to monitor Logan and provide a play-by-play of Catherine's surprise visit.
"What's he doing?" I asked.
"He's just sitting there watching her without much of an expression at all. He looks like a virgin who wandered into a porn movie and is seeing a real pussy for the first time in his life. He knows what they are supposed to look like, but he wants to make sure this is real."
I figured Logan had never experienced anything like Mehaffey, even in his long career with newspapers. I still had to laugh as I imagined him sitting there listening to a tirade similar to what had just occurred in the press room. I wondered if she had gotten to the part about the naked pictures of my wife. I still didn't know what she had meant with that allegation, beyond just throwing out anything that might embarrass me even if it were imaginary. So, I had just let that slide. But I realized her visit to my boss had just dismantled any effort to separate my private life with her from my professional life at The Post. And I had a good idea what might be coming next. Two of my three separate lives were about to merge.
"It looks like she's leaving now," said Ed. "Logan's still just watching her, and it doesn't seem like he said much. She's going through his door. Now she's stopped and answering a question. Now she's turned and left, and he looks pretty confused."
"Thanks for the warning, Ed. I owe you."
About fifteen minutes later, Logan called me at the courthouse and issued a succinct command: "Gary, I need you to just stop whatever you might be doing and come into the office. I don't want you to even take time to put anything away. Just get up, get in your car, and come over here."
It marked the only time in my career that Logan had ever called me on the job. I routinely worked under the direction of his city editor, Johnny B. It was highly unusual to receive a call directly from the managing editor, but, given my experiences of the past few weeks, I was not surprised. I reached his office from downtown in about twenty minutes. Then it was my turn to sit there with everybody watching through the glass.
"What's up?" I asked politely, feigning ignorance as I took a seat in a chair across the desk from my boss.
"I'll get right to the point," he said. "I had an interesting visit a little while ago from a Miss Catherine Mehaffey, and she had some disturbing things to say about you."
I just furrowed my brows in a way to encourage him onward.
"She believes you are working secretly for the district attorney's office as an investigator in a case against her."
"That's not true," I said, eager to make a definitive denial as quickly and forcefully as possible—without laughing. "She has some gripes with me of a personal nature. None of it involves my job here. You are the only one paying me a salary."
"She says you've made tape recordings of conversations with her and shared them with outsiders."
"I recorded her telephone conversations threatening me, but I never played them for anyone else. A friend of mine did play part of a conversation he taped with her because he wanted the other reporters in the press room to let him lock the door."
Logan grunted and stroked his chin while locking eyes with me.
"OK," he said, "Here's what I have to do. Mary Flood is on her way over to the courthouse to relieve you there—"
"Aw, c'mon," I raised my voice interrupting him. "Don't let Mehaffey get away with this. Can anybody just come in here with any sort of story and ruin me? I like that job."
Mary Flood was a younger reporter destined to attend law school and build a national reputation for legal reporting in the next twenty years—a period in which I often would boast that she owed her start on that career path to me and Catherine Mehaffey. While I argued
my case, Logan just sat patiently and allowed me to vent. Then he laid down the law.
"Nope, it is already done," he said. "I talked to Johnny, and he said you've been over on the courthouse beat a couple of years anyway. It's time to rotate on some of these beats. He has a desk ready for you back in the office. Now, I don't even want you going back there to get anything you might have left. Make a list of anything you need, and Mary will bring it in."
"Don't punish me for this," I pleaded.
He looked stunned and said, "Punish you? I'm not punishing you. I'm concerned for your safety. I just want to put as much distance as possible between you and that woman. It's obvious she's interfering with your work at that location, and it's my responsibility to make sure everyone at this paper has a chance to succeed in their job. You'll have plenty of good stories to work on general assignment. Now, go see Johnny, and he'll show you to your desk."
"OK," I sighed and got up to leave.
"Gary," he said, "I don't meddle in reporters' personal lives, and you certainly don't have to tell me this if you feel uncomfortable. But, after talking with her, I'm really curious about something. What did you do to her?"
There it was: Always the man's fault. In his mind it had to be me who did something to her. Or, I thought, maybe he was kidding. The question made me laugh as I imagined him sitting through her tirade wondering if aliens had invaded from Mars. Realizing any accurate explanation would be much too complicated, I searched my mind for a shorter version and finally just said, "Oh, I forgot to put her picture in my wallet."
Logan stared a moment trying to figure that out until he saw me grinning and then laughed himself.
"OK, OK, I think I understand," he said. "But you should know something she told me right before she left. I asked her what she wanted me to do about any of this, and she just got this strange, faraway look in her eyes and said, 'I just want him to disappear.'"
We stood there a moment considering that until I shrugged my shoulders and moved to the door.
"So, go on, get your new desk, and welcome back to the newsroom," Logan said as I left. Then he added, "And, Gary, under no circumstance do I ever want you to initiate contact with that woman again."
So I walked out, went to my new desk, picked up the phone, and immediately dialed Catherine at her office.
"Hope you're happy now," I said when she answered.
"You went to my bosses at Special Crimes so I thought I should go to your boss to teach you a lesson. Where are you now?"
"I'm at my new desk in the newsroom. They took me off the courthouse beat."
"Wait a minute. You mean you haven't been fired?"
Instantly I realized I had an edge, as she revealed her primary mission had been to get me fired. She had failed. And, as I thought about it, I realized Logan had been right in my reassignment. Digesting a universal truth about stalkers, I concluded I was lucky to still have a job. Wouldn't it be easiest for any employer to just eliminate the whole problem by cutting the worker? I thought. In this case, however, Logan and my paper had backed me. Suddenly, I felt grateful and decided to twist the knife with her.
"Fired? No way. He said he wanted me in here for my safety. You know, we have a lot of important elections to cover this year, and The Post will need its best people available on the desk for those stories. I'm really kind of excited about this promotion."
"Promotion?" I thought I heard her choke a bit as she repeated my mischaracterization of what essentially represented a lateral move.
"And, I will have plenty of time for a little sideline project in this new job," I said. "I want to do a little research on the lawyer ethics requirements of the State Bar of Texas and see if maybe you've slipped up on something I might know about."
"Uh, OK, OK," she said calmly, as if distracted. "I have to go."
That night at home I picked up a ringing phone to hear her voice and hung up before she could finish a sentence. For the next two hours the phone rang repeatedly, but I did not answer. When Strong arrived back at the house, I told him not to answer either. I had decided to end all communication with her. She would be easy to ignore now that I no longer needed to visit the courthouse daily. I believed I might never see her again.
Later, after studying the psychology of the narcissist personality, however, I would learn that my new strategy that night had merely set the stage for an escalation of tensions in our relationship because I had denied her the one thing she actually needed the most: an opportunity for confrontation. And, I would learn on our anniversary the next day, that confrontation was the one thing she really could not live without.
FIFTY
January 15, 1980
I started the first full day of my new assignment in the office with an attitude adjustment. Reviewing my conversation with Logan, I became convinced he had been right to move me out of the courthouse. Catherine definitely would have a harder time stalking me, particularly since I had decided I wouldn't even take her calls. My hours as a general assignment reporter would be less attractive, with occasional night and weekend shifts replacing the Monday-through-Friday, daytime rhythm of the courthouse beat. But I could live with that. In exchange, I'd have more opportunity to work on the so-called big picture stories designed to change the course of Western Civilization. I planned to immediately develop a list of hot-shot ideas for Johnny B to consider. As the political season intensified, too, I expected to assist on any number of intriguing local election coverage issues. I even wondered if my long tenure at the courthouse had been partially to blame for my attraction to Catherine.
Maybe I've been hanging around lawyers and judges for so long I've gone native, I mused. I was drawn to her like some rogue undercover operative who has fallen too deeply into a culture he only wanted to observe.
Despite Catherine's threat regarding big plans for our anniversary on the 15th, I had a smile on my face as the evening approached because a special gal had signed my dance card for that night. I had arranged to attend the political barbecue fund raiser for Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes, Jr., as he kicked off his first campaign for the office he'd held since his appointment a couple of years before. And I was taking my four-year-old daughter, Little E, as a date. I hoped that maybe with a new year and decade I had turned a corner on all that domestic turmoil of 1979. I had allowed Catherine to short-circuit what should have been the most important relationship in my life. As an agent once told me while pitching a life insurance policy, "You may divorce your wife, but you don't divorce your kid." I bought the policy as well as the philosophy and always thought it a shame that so many angry divorced men fail to focus on their kids. Determined to put Catherine and her volatile behavior behind me, I had arranged for Little E to spend the night at the house of Strong after the Holmes event. Both of us were excited about the prospect of the sleepover and, more importantly, the prospect for retying what had been an unusually close but fragile bond.
At four-and-a-half, Little E had reached a wonderful age where her body and mind seemed at peace with themselves. She hungered for new experiences and insights to feed a developing intellect and rubbing shoulders with the power brokers at the Holmes barbecue overwhelmed her desire to expand the potential boundaries of her world. As we toured the room and I introduced her to an endless parade of attorneys and judges, I felt an awesome sense of pride. Not only had Little E blossomed into a bright, precocious little girl, but she was a cutie, too—lithe and athletic with her reddish-blonde straight hair cut short in a wedge and freckles dotting her cheeks. I had a feeling the future truly belonged to her, and the realization filled me with shame about the way I had lived the last few months. Cindy had said she landed a contract to sell our house and that bolstered my spirits, too. I planned to use my share first to buy a car and then settle into an apartment where I could spend more time with Little E and her sister, who was too young that night to attend the Holmes barbecue. Thoughts of the future finally had me grinning as I drove home from the event with Little
E in the passenger seat.