Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  When the ambulance attendant entered the house and found John Hill dead, Myra Hill was writhing on the floor of an adjoining room, her hands taped behind her, her mouth stuffed with cloth, tape encircling her face. She had heard the shots, heard the final agonal cries, but could do nothing but scream silently into the gag. The killer had kicked her in the throat, and she could not fully tell her story until some days later.

  Hers was the best full eyewitness account that the police had to go on:

  The day before the killing, the telephone rang mid-Saturday afternoon in the Hill home and she answered it.

  “Is Dr. Hill there?” inquired a man’s voice.

  “No,” answered the mother. “He’s out of town.”

  “Oh. When do you expect him?”

  “Tomorrow night,” she said. “Are you a patient of Dr. Hill’s?”

  “No. But I need to talk to him very bad.”

  There was, she would remember in retrospect, a vaguely rough edge to his voice. Perhaps he had a piece of information that could be used in her son’s second trial for murder by omission. It was scheduled in a month, and it occurred to Mrs. Hill that this just might be somebody who had something to contribute to the defense. There had been other calls like this.

  She asked his name.

  “Gleason. James Gleason.”

  “Mr. Gleason, Dr. Hill should be home tomorrow night around seven-thirty.” She was polite, helpful, Christian.

  The next day, Sunday, Mrs. Hill took her grandson to church in the morning and church in the evening, and on the way home, around six-thirty, Robert hatched a prank. “Let’s go somewhere and fool around for a while and let Mama and Daddy get home first. They’ll wonder where we are, then we can burst in and surprise them!”

  The grandmother laughed and put down the idea. “No,” she said, “we must be there to welcome them. How would you like to come home to an empty house?”

  The telephone rang again. Once more it was “James Gleason” calling. “He should be here soon, by seven-thirty,” Mrs. Hill said helpfully. She scribbled the name down to remember it.

  The boy was restless, prowling about the house and watching from the front windows. He had homework to do, but it was unattended on a kitchen table, waiting for the homecoming. Suddenly he wanted to play chess. Myra sighed. She knew little of the game, but perhaps it would content her grandson and pass the hour. She had planned to start dinner but decided to wait and entertain the boy. Probably John and Connie had eaten on the plane and would not be hungry. She glanced at the clock. A quarter past seven. John had called from the Las Vegas airport saying the flight was going to be a few minutes late. She expected them at the front door by 8 P.M. latest.

  Suddenly the doorbell rang. With a whoop, Robert ran to the foyer. Myra followed him. Just as the child put his hands on the knob, his grandmother felt something was wrong. It was one of those vague fragments of apprehension. She was about to call out for the child to wait, but the boy had already flung open the door.

  A strange man pushed his way in and stood in dominance. Though in her seventies, Myra’s senses were sharp and her powers of observations clear. She would never forget how this intruder looked, even though her heart was rising to her throat. She first noticed his eyes, “… wild eyes, like great big marbles rolling about. And glistening like they had a coat of shellac on them.…” It seemed he was wearing a sorrel-colored wig, with a strip of greenish cloth dangling about his head. And in his hand, casually held as if it were nothing but a stone picked up at random from a plowed field, was a gun. At this first moment, Myra thought it was a ceramic gun, certainly a toy, but then he raised it and pointed it at the boy, and she recognized it was true steel. A shaft of last afternoon sun from the hot September day fell through an oak outside and glinted against the pistol. For a moment the gun gleamed golden.

  “Are you a patient?” asked Myra, trying to keep her voice calm. Perhaps this was a deranged sick person, escaped from a hospital. She had heard tales of distraught men coming to repair imaginary grievances against doctors.

  Politely, the man holding the gun shook his head negatively. He was young, thirty perhaps. He swayed in his place unsteadily, as if he were not in control of all of his senses. “No, ma’am,” he said. “This is a robbery.” With that, Robert sucked in his breath and backed toward the winding staircase. His face was contorted and trembling. The man, fearful that the child would cry out, rushed to him and seized the little boy’s face, cupping it in his rough hands. “Be very quiet,” he ordered. “Don’t say anything. You won’t get hurt.” At that instant Myra Hill noted that the front door was still open. She could flee into the yard and scream for help. Automobiles were passing outside; people were returning home from weekends in the country. But she would have to leave her grandson alone for such a dash. As she debated with herself, the man whirled and slammed the door, killing her option. He shoved the old woman on the floor and ordered her to stay quiet. As she fell, her shoe came off and she touched it quietly, wondering if it could be used as a weapon, wondering where the heel could inflict the most damage.

  There would not be the chance. The man lifted Myra and shoved her into the nearby dining room, the child preceding them. “Sit on the floor,” he directed. Myra decided that obedience was best at this point and she sat down quickly, throwing looks of reassurance at her grandson. Now she realized that the gunman’s wig, or mask, or whatever it was, had come off, and his face was naked. He had a lean, cruel countenance, with a well-tended drooping mustache, dark, like his shaggy hair. His eyes were aflame. Immediately she assumed that this was surely a drinker, and whiskey was aging him quickly. She revised her estimate. He was older than thirty. Disappearing for a moment into the adjacent kitchen, he returned with a steak knife. Immediately Myra began to pray, throwing her arm about her grandson and trying to shield his eyes, for she felt this was the moment of her sacrifice. But he was not holding the knife as a dagger, rather as an instrument of utility. From his pocket he produced a thick role of adhesive tape, and he began cutting strips, binding first the boy’s hands and feet, then his mouth. The child, having seen a similar incident on television, wet his lips just as the tape was pressed against his face. He knew it would not stick, but he kept this secret to himself.

  Then, in one of those small side incidents which at the moment seem graver than the actual event, the man pulled Myra Hill’s sweater from her shoulders and began slashing it with the kitchen knife. “My beautiful Hong Kong sweater that I bought on my trip around the world,” protested Myra, furious that the cherished possession should be so savaged. But her objection could not be vocal, for the man quickly stuffed the strips into her mouth and then turned and did the same to the boy. When he was finished, he became suddenly benevolent, kneeling and looking into the old woman’s eyes. “Can you breathe okay?” he asked. Myra nodded. “Are you sure?” he pressed. She nodded again, now certain that he did not plan to murder them. The gag slipped slightly and Myra took the opportunity to blurt out a warning. “Dr. Hill will be here in a minute,” she cautioned sternly.

  The man nodded knowingly. “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll be ready for him.” And then Myra knew that the man’s mission was not robbery, but harm to her son. Her stomach began to heave, but she tried to keep a brave front on behalf of the child. Once more she began to pray. Five eternal minutes more or less crept by, eerily silent suspensions of time and substance. The man had disappeared into the living room, and Myra could not see what he was doing. Then the sounds of a car on the driveway, its doors opening and shutting, murmurs of happy voices. The doorbell! Myra screamed from beneath her gag, “John, don’t come in!” With that, the man rushed back into the dining room and brutally kicked the old woman in the throat. “Be quiet!” he hissed. And he kicked the child in the ear.

  Now everything happened with speed and violence. She heard Connie scream. Scuffling. Feet scraping. Bodies crashing to the floor. John grunting. The first shot! The second! One last bul
let exploding from a chamber! Then the awful silence. The boy spat off his bandage and hobbled to the kitchen telephone. With remarkable presence of mind, he managed to dial the operator and cry for help. “My father’s been shot, send somebody quick. The address is 1561 Kirby Drive.”

  By the time someone came to raise Myra from the floor and peel away her tape bindings, an ambulance attendant had already arrived and was checking John Hill’s wounds. She discovered her son propped up against the wall, beneath the drawing of the pale horses, his sport jacket and shirt hitched up and his bare chest splattered with blood. Five pots of mums had been broken and their yellow blossoms scattered about, like offerings.

  The mother walked to the body and stood over her son, and the attendant said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. There are no vital signs.”

  Myra Hill went to a couch and sat down and buried her face in her hands. But she did not weep. Her grief was molested by an intruding thought. Ash Robinson. A few blocks away. She suspected he was somehow the source of her son’s death. She thought to herself, “If I went down there right now and shot Ash Robinson—shot him ten times—shot him until his flesh was stripped bare—and then burned the house down, it wouldn’t do any good. It would not breathe life into my son.”

  There was nothing for her to do but sit on the couch and feel the throbbing pain from the kick to her throat and try not to look at the bloodied corpse sprawled forever beyond her reach.

  Ann Kurth had moved away from Houston. She had taken a remote house on a lake near Austin, a place approachable only through guarded gates, or by boat across an inlet. She lived quietly with her three sons, relieved to be away from the city of the prior ugliness. Her flashing moments in the spotlight during the murder trial had not been satisfying—she knew her testimony was not well received—and she was apprehensive about Ash Robinson’s attitudes, despite the fact that she had borne witness on his behalf.

  Near midnight on this late September Sunday, her telephone rang. The number was unlisted. When she answered, a familiar voice was on the line. An old voice, cracking, drawling, unmistakable. “Did you hear about old John Hill?” asked Ash Robinson. “He went and got himself shot to death.”

  Yes, answered Ann. It had been on the late news. And her telephone had rung several times—relatives and close friends in Houston. It was a terrible thing.

  “Yes,” echoed Ash. “A terrible thing. Just wanted you to know about it.”

  As she put down the phone, Ann trembled. She could not be sure, but she thought she discerned in the old man’s voice a gloating. For the rest of the night she drew her sons about her and kept the remote house ablaze with lights.

  Book Three

  PURSUIT AND TRIAL

  “… Behold a pale horse: and his name that

  sat on him was Death,

  and Hell followed with him.…”

  —Revelation 6:8

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sunday is a lazy day in Houston, rarely molested by murder. The killings come in one terrible spurt, from Friday sundown when the pay checks go out and are helpfully converted into money and spirits by the liquor stores, until a few hours past Saturday midnight, when the bars close and the radio stations change the tempo from the miseries of lost love to the jubilant shouts of gospel. Traditionally Sunday is so peaceful that the homicide office of the police department has but two pair of detectives on duty—one to answer calls at the station (truant and hungover husbands are the complaint of the day), another out cruising the enormous sprawling city of more than four hundred square miles.

  Detectives Joe Gamino and Jerry Carpenter began their field shift at 4 P.M. on the steaming afternoon of September 24, 1972, and passed three hours doing nothing but idling around in the late afternoon traffic, keeping an ear cocked to the dispatcher radio, grateful for the refrigerated calm of their anonymous blue Plymouth. An odd pair who had been teamed for only a month, their relationship was not yet the close one of cops whose professional lives entwine them closer than blood brothers. In fact, they knew little of one another, for neither was the sort who rattled on with shreds of biography.

  Joe Gamino was one of the serious men, a look of melancholy often on his face. Stocky, in his late thirties, on his way to overweight like many of the old Mexican men in his family, he had life boiled down to a factum—no one was going to do him any favors. His guard was up; no one got close. He was known to be gentlemanly and polite with those he put under arrest. Never once had he drawn his gun in anger. The only time he ever came close to using it—and he would probably have fired into the air—was to stop one man from strangling another.

  A child of the Houston barrio, Joe quit school in the ninth grade and, after a few years of muscle-tearing work carrying plumber’s pipes, joined the Marines. The four years he spent in Hawaii and Japan as an aviation ordnance worker were the first really satisfying ones of his life. “The Marines taught me responsibility,” he would later say. “They threw me against men who had education. I even got a little respect for myself, and for two terms I never understood—ambition and direction.”

  Toward the end of his term, during which he passed a high school equivalency test, Joe was at Camp Pendleton when brochures appeared on the base from the Los Angeles Police Department, soliciting Marines to join the force. The idea held appeal. He was comfortable in a regimented life, with boundaries and discipline, and the wearing of a uniform and its attendant power was further lure. But he had no liking for California and returned home to Houston to apply to the police force. “I never would have dreamt this as a kid,” he said. “Cops were always guys who rousted kids and brought news of the men who had been stabbed.”

  In seven years as a radio patrol officer, Gamino grew maddeningly bored. Hungry for more education, he was spending his spare hours at the University of Houston’s night school, and the man who could barely read an English paragraph at sixteen was closing in on a college degree in police science. Yet his police work demanded little more of him than issuing traffic tickets and pursuing peeping Toms. All about him were men in their forties and fifties, still doing the same work, waiting for a pension and a long night’s rest. “If I stay in this job, I’ll be back to square one,” thought Gamino, so he applied to take the examination for detective, crash-studying for a month, trying to learn what other men spent years on—the rules of criminal investigation and evidence. Almost three hundred men took the test, and Gamino placed thirteenth, a remarkable accomplishment. Proud and happy, he shed his blue uniform and went forth as a plainclothes homicide detective.

  With a Mexican gold coin dangling from a chain about his neck, with a taste in clothes that favored flaming red ties against matching shirts, with tinted spectacles, with an aura of knowing quite well how to squeeze a hard eight out of a pair of dice, or sweet-talk a reluctant girl into a hurried accommodation, Jerry Carpenter was a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn from Joe Gamino. He spoke “character” talk as well as the gamblers and hookers he busted during several years on Houston’s vice squad and, on first encounter, it would be difficult to draw the line between hunter and hunted. For Jerry Carpenter resembled nothing less than a flashy high roller, the kind with no middle initial and ill disposed to rummage in his past. But a façade is the easiest part of a house to build, and within Jerry’s private life was uncommon torment and pain.

  He, too, had been reared in a house fanatically devoted to God, but his was the fundamentalist deity, the almost primitive kind of hardcore worship. His youth was squirming on the folding chairs in evangelists’ tents, shouting helpful Hallelujahs! to faith healers pretending to exorcise devilish tumors from the doomed.

  Desperate to leave home and find a measure of freedom, Jerry married quickly, at eighteen, and fathered two children. He found work at Sinclair’s enormous refinery, suffocating labor that drenched his senses with the chemical fumes, numbing his outlook. He realized quickly that he had moved from one prison to another. “I was as unhappy as a man can be,” he would remember years later. �
��I had no future, and the world had closed in on me before I was twenty-one years old.” His marriage broke, and he was laid off at the same time.

  Jerry joined the Houston police force with no sense of calling or notion of glamor. The only reason was that a rookie cop could make four hundred dollars a month in 1961, plus benefits, and it was better than a man with no education, with nothing but a strong back, a restless pair of hands, and two children to support, could do anywhere else. But cop work appealed to him from the beginning, its gift of authority filling him for the first time with dignity that he had never otherwise possessed. “I am somebody,” he could finally say. He married for a second time, and until 1968, Jerry Carpenter was reasonably content with the way his life was going. Then, in the space of less than a year, his mother, his grandmother, and one of his daughters died. The child suffered for six months from a vicious leukemia that put her in the hospital seven times, draining Jerry of every penny he had and putting him in debt almost $30,000. The tragedies tore him, and he covered his pain with a veneer of almost cocky toughness, but the chip on his shoulder balanced precariously. On vice, he arrested whores and gamblers with diligence but with little enthusiasm, for he felt cops had better ways to spend their time, and, furthermore, he realized that people do things like screwing for money because of personal circumstances that society’s laws cannot hope to understand. A life cannot be operated strictly within the boundaries, he reasoned, because parents and religions and diseases that destroy innocent children keep intruding.

  But none of this did he tell anyone, nor did his brother officers know that Jerry Carpenter was anything but a solid cop with the best pair of ears to the “character” world of anybody on the force. “I arrested an old whore lady the other day and your name came up,” a vice officer told Jerry after he had transferred to homicide. “She says, ‘Jerry Carpenter! Why, that son of a bitch is pure character hisself!’” Jerry grinned, accepting the backhanded compliment.