Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  They were eating supper at a cafeteria that Jerry favored, despite Joe Gamino’s demur that the food was kept alive for hours past its prime on steam tables, when a cashier called across the room. Headquarters was on the telephone. Jerry took the call. He bolted back to the table and fetched his partner. “Some masked intruder just broke into Dr. John Hill’s house and shot him to death,” he said.

  The detectives could have been anywhere in the city at the moment of the call, but coincidentally they were eating but five minutes away from the Hill mansion. As they drove with sirens shrieking to the house on Kirby Drive, both men raced their minds for memories of the celebrated case. The Houston homicide department had never gotten involved in the death of Joan Robinson Hill, for it had been a project of the district attorney’s office from the outset. A medical death that takes place in a hospital with a certificate signed by a doctor does not concern the police. A few routine background examinations had been run by the ID division, turning up no previous blots on the records of Dr. Hill or Ann Kurth, and only the overturned fraud conviction from the 1930s of Ash Robinson. But both cops knew what they had read in the papers and heard in the corridors of the courthouse. The shooting of John Hill came both as stunning surprise and, at the same time, as an almost predictable event.

  When they arrived at the great white house, both men were momentarily taken aback. Murders do not occur on boulevards like Kirby Drive in Houston. Stately colonial homes do not contain bullet-mutilated corpses. In police terminology, this was a Good Address. There were, in fact, none better in the city. With no small amount of awe, the two cops—one from the barrio, the other from its correspondent white ghetto—entered the house.

  Immediately Jerry Carpenter recognized the handiwork of a “character,” his term for professional gangster. It was not the random crime of a dope addict desperate to steal a stereo and caught in the act. The adhesive tape that bound John Hill’s mouth, nose, and eyes was a voguish way of extermination in the Texas underworld, the beauty being there was no threat of ballistics identification. Even without being shot three times, John Hill would have died from cruel, horrible suffocation. Assuming command of the scene, barking orders, the two detectives sealed off the house, shooed neighbors from the lawn, and split up the two major responsibilities. Gamino was known in the department as a superior “scene” man, his skill being meticulous examination of a murder setting, observing the position of the body, speculating what might have happened, probing every inch for possible hints and clues. While he worked quietly, Jerry Carpenter performed his specialty—talking to folks. He pulled a witness report out of the sobbing Connie Hill, spoke briefly with Myra before realizing that her throat pained her too much to speak, and questioned the boy Robert for a valuable half hour. The child was composed and able to give a good description of the killer, even down to the observation that he was “probably from Dallas.”

  “How so, son?” asked Carpenter gently.

  “Because he talked like Don Meredith,” said the child. Carpenter laughed. The former Dallas football star had a voice like ten thousand other Texas drawls.

  From shortly after 8 P.M. until 2:30 A.M. the detectives stayed in the house, roaming about every room, opening every drawer, gaping at the opulence of the music room. Jerry Carpenter was a musician too, playing in a dance band called the Centurions, composed chiefly of cops. He ran his fingers across the keyboard of the Bösendorfer, wondering what it was like to spend a year and a half’s salary on an instrument like that. As they worked, the man who had bought the piano was lying nude on a marble slab in the Harris County morgue, being dissected by Dr. Jachimczyk. The coroner had come personally to the murder scene, an unusual appearance for him to make, but he recognized the importance of this death, and he remembered the ruckus over the sloppy autopsy of the doctor’s first wife. How long ago that seemed. The coroner withdrew the file on Joan. She had died three and one half years earlier, and now her husband was stretched out on the same table. The coroner located three bullet wounds in John Hill—the first in the wrist, the second in the right shoulder. Neither of these would have killed him, but a third hit squarely in the stomach, tearing into the aorta. He bled to death internally. He probably lasted three to five minutes after the fatal hit. From scratches and bloodied places, the coroner deducted there had been a fierce struggle.

  The homicide detectives drove away from the great house of a mind that the murder had occurred as adjunct to botched robbery. John Hill’s briefcase and wallet were both missing. The killer had told Connie, “This is a robbery.” Connie’s best recollection was that her husband had between six and eight hundred dollars in cash on him. Nothing else seemed to have been taken from the mansion. As far as they could determine, the killer had not been in any of the rooms other than those downstairs: the foyer, the dining room, the living room, the kitchen.

  Joe Gamino had scant evidence to show for six and one half hours of investigation: a roll of adhesive tape which the child, Robert, identified as that used on him and his grandmother, a finger off a cheap brown cotton work glove stuck to one of the tapes that bound the victim’s face, and a .38-caliber bullet, spent, and lying on the floor of the entrance hall. Carpenter had compiled a verbal portrait of the killer: a white man between thirty and forty years old, slight, dark hair cut long and vaguely “hippie-ish,” droopy Pancho Villa mustache, wearing gray or tan slacks and a sport shirt. The “green something” which Myra Hill had noticed on the intruder’s head turned out to be a light green pillowcase, with crude holes cut out for eyes. A grotesque hood, it had been abandoned on the floor near John Hill. The label was still inside and it was new, but it would be difficult to trace.

  In the week after the plastic surgeon’s death, Gamino and Carpenter put in ninety-six hours of investigation, hardly going home except to change shirts. The initial shot of adrenalin from finding a prominent citizen mysteriously dead in a great mansion was quickly replaced by the grind of textbook cop work: going over the murder house again, and again. Interviewing the neighbors, north, south, east, and west. No one had heard the shots, for the Hill home, situated as it was in a diagonal position and set far back on its lot, hid the sounds of gunfire. Irritatingly, none of the neighbors even saw the killer escaping the house, nor could anybody remember an unfamiliar car on the block. “This is weird,” said Carpenter. Somehow a gunman managed to slip into one of the most prominent houses in the city in the full light of late afternoon, tie up two people, assault a third, and kill a fourth in what was surely a crashing struggle. And then slip out and away. Neighbors were about that hour watering roses, raking leaves, riding bicycles, visiting. It was a sedate neighborhood where people knew each other. A stranger would be noticed. Yet no one the cops interviewed could recall an unusual visitor in the area. “We’re dealing with a fucking phantom,” cracked Jerry Carpenter.

  “I guess we are,” said Gamino. The report was back from the police lab. Nothing. No fingerprints on the adhesive tape, the finger of the work glove, or the pillowcase.

  As did the collective attention of the city, their eyes moved briefly down the street, to the rust-hued home of Ash Robinson. The detectives did not knock on his door or even call him on the telephone. They merely drove by the house slowly, noted its close proximity to the late doctor’s house, and wondered. Certainly the old man was not the actual killer, for he was obviously well known to Myra, Robert, and Connie. Had he been an ordinary middle-class citizen, he might have received a visit from the cops, leaning on him for anything he might contribute. But Ash Robinson was Ash Robinson, a rich, powerful, and important member of the community. In Houston, police did not barge in on rich, powerful, and important members of the community with nothing more in mind than a fishing expedition.

  Ash delivered himself of only one public statement, granting an interview to a news reporter against the advice of his attorney. He had absolutely nothing to do with the death of his ex-son-in-law, the old man swore. John Hill’s murder was, in fact, a reeli
ng disappointment to him because he had been keenly anticipating the second murder trial. It had been scheduled for but a few weeks hence. “I’d have a thousand times rather see him alive than dead,” insisted Ash.

  In private talk, at the early morning Kaffeeklatsch with his cronies at the Houston Club, Ash was once again the center of attention. He reveled in it, a whole new mystery to play with! Certainly he had theories. Anybody who sat down at his table could hear him propound possible motives. He had heard “through confidential sources” that John Hill had been secreting large sums of money with Connie’s family to avoid paying his income taxes. “I heard tell he was coming back from Seattle with $25,000 in his briefcase to pay Racehorse,” said Ash. “That may be why he put up such a fight. The paper says there was a helluva fight between John and the man who killed him.” If that possibility did not wash, then Ash had others. “There were a lot of husbands out looking for John Hill,” he suggested. “Fellows whose wives had been seduced.” And, ruminated the old man, he had picked up gossip that the plastic surgeon had been driven by his failing medical practice and public disgrace to the dangerous business of transforming faces of wanted criminals. “Maybe one of those gangsters didn’t like his new face and shot John,” speculated Ash. “In fact, there were a lot of people who wanted that man dead. But I didn’t do it. I don’t know a damn thing about it. I was home watching television with my wife. I was as surprised as anybody else.”

  The one factor in Ash’s protestations of innocence that convinced many people was the fact that the tragedy was played out in front of the eyes of Robert Hill, his grandson. “Do you think I would hire someone to kill that man in front of that boy, and possibly do that child harm?” asked the old man. It made sense. That he loved his grandson even from an enforced distance was beyond dispute.

  Jerry Carpenter took the case to the streets, cashing due bills among the snitches. He nursed a considerable stable of informants, rarely paying them in money but in, as he put it, “Brownie points.” Word was passed among the whores, gamblers, and characters that Jerry wanted information.

  By the end of the first week of investigation, several names had been delivered to the detective. Among them was that of a woman, Lilla Paulus, familiar to vice officers as the widow of one of Houston’s most celebrated bookmakers. The informant did not suggest that Mrs. Paulus had anything to do with the death of Dr. John Hill, only that she had acquaintances in that line of work. Jerry Carpenter had a long list of people to talk to, and he added the woman’s name to a list he carried around in his coat pocket. But then a startling development got in the way, a break in the case that made him forget about the list for seven long months.

  An FBI artist was in Houston on another assignment, and Joe Gamino asked if he would interview Myra, Connie, and Robert Hill to make a composite sketch of the doctor’s killer from their recollections. While the artist was seated in the living room of the big white house, an urgent call from headquarters came for the detectives. An eight-year-old child who lived just a block away was looking in a clump of bushes for a lost toy, and he had just discovered what appeared to be Dr. John Hill’s missing briefcase.

  The two detectives raced puffing on foot down the block, blurring past half-million-dollar estates with ancient oaks hung heavily with Spanish moss and mistletoe. Ahead they heard children’s voices, and both men worried that the youngsters would paw the case and disturb any possible fingerprints. The child who had found the case was proud of his discovery and pointed to the place of encounter, a clump of bushes bordering a large brick home. Another half dozen kids danced around excitedly. All of them had touched the briefcase, smearing it with sticky after-school fingers. Inside was nothing but medical papers and documents. While Gamino disappointedly wrote his report, Jerry Carpenter ambled around the area looking for John Hill’s still missing wallet. Perhaps the assassin had thrown it here as well.

  His eye fell on what appeared to be the stem of a pipe sticking out of a patch of fresh mud underneath more bushes several feet away. Heavy rains had fallen the day before. Curious, Carpenter reached down and grasped the object. It was not a pipe. It was a .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver, rusted from the rain. “Hey, Joe, I think we just got lucky!” shouted Carpenter.

  If the lab could prove that the .38-caliber bullet found in the foyer of John Hill’s home had been fired from the rusted gun under the bush, then a major piece of evidence would be established. For three days Gamino and Carpenter waited in suspense for the ballistics report.

  The science of ballistics was first accepted by a U.S. federal court in 1924, and it is now so recognized that defense lawyers no longer bother challenging the test results. Sometimes a lawyer will try to disparage the reputation of the expert, but not the science.

  The Houston Police Department was fortunate in possessing a technician named Randy Sillivan, one of the ranking figures in the nation, and a man so hard-nosed and proud of his work that he would not testify in a trial unless he was a hundred per cent certain. “If it’s only ninety-nine per cent sure,” he often said, “then I won’t stake my reputation.”

  Randy Sillivan loaded three test bullets into the rusted .38 and fired them into a half bale of cotton waste. Retrieving each, he placed the bullets one by one next to the slug found in the Hill home. Then he studied them under a microscope. It was his hope that the random markings and identifying characteristics on the bullets would match, like a piece of paper torn in half.

  Indeed there were similarities, but not enough for Sillivan to rule that this was the gun that killed John Hill. He was disappointed. The news would be a reeling letdown to the detectives. Just when he was about to call the homicide office and tell Gamino he had the wrong gun, Sillivan decided to run one more test. He had an idea. Although the bullet found in the Hill foyer seemed to be a routine one, like hundreds of millions manufactured by the major weapons makers of America—Remington et al.—there was the slim possibility that it was not machine-made. “Back room” shops still exist in Texas where bullets are handmade. Sillivan found a package of these, loaded the .38, and repeated the process of firing into the cotton bale.

  This time, when he put a freshly fired handmade bullet under his microscope next to the bullet the homicide boys had found near the body of John Hill, the markings were identical. The killer had used handmade bullets. Sillivan had his one hundred per cent. “You’ve got your gun,” he told Gamino.

  One weak law exists on the federal level that concerns itself with the sale of handguns. In 1968, with the nation shocked by political assassinations, a firearms act was passed by Congress that compels every would-be purchaser of a concealable weapon (less than eighteen inches in length) to fill out a registration form at the gun store, swearing, among other things, that the buyer is not an ex-convict, a narcotics addict, or insane. These forms are sent to the U. S. Department of Justice and stored in a computer, valuable theoretically when police attempt to trace the heritage of a murder weapon. The weakness, of course, is that the law does not relate to the tens of millions of handguns sold prior to 1968, nor does it deal realistically with the private sale of a gun by one party to another. Knowing too well that guns are stolen, and lost, and sold a dozen times after their original purchase and registration, Joe Gamino nonetheless sat down at the teletype and tapped out a description of the rusted .38 and its serial number. Within one hour an answer rattled back from Washington, D.C. The gun had been purchased originally in 1969, at a discount store in Longview, Texas, by a Dr. Orrin Staves.

  “Jesus,” swore Jerry Carpenter. “A doctor!”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Dr. Orrin Staves was not happy to find a pair of Houston homicide detectives in his waiting room. Arrogantly he looked at the rusted snub-nosed .38 and said, yes, it was his, and thanks for finding it, now good-by. The doctor was a heavy-set black man, inclined to the vivid gambler-man suits that Jerry Carpenter liked to wear. A large diamond glinted from one stubby finger; his eyes were hidden by a celebrity’s dark
glasses. He ran a successful clinic in a small city in the heart of the East Texas black belt, an area first cousin in attitude to the deep South. And in his world, money earned was money displayed. Dr. Staves did not mind telling the cops that he made more than $100,000 a year, drove a number of Eldorado automobiles (he preferred to use the model name rather than the generic “Cadillac”), and openly enjoyed the rewards of the flesh.

  In other words, he liked to party, said the doctor. What was wrong with that?

  Not a thing, answered Carpenter. But what about this gun? How did it turn up under a bush in River Oaks?

  A whore stole it, answered the doctor. His explanation was so rambling, confusing, and unrepentant that Carpenter had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. The good doctor was a man caught in an embarrassing situation, and although the story would later check out, it was not one that he wanted police to share.

  In February or March of that year, 1972, Dr. Staves had entertained two white prostitutes from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. After a revel in his home, while the doctor snoozed, the girls increased their fee by stealing one of his Eldorado automobiles. A briefcase containing $2,100 in cash was concurrently missing. Upon awakening, the doctor was justifiably filled with anger at the greediness of his departed guests. He strapped on a .38 and telephoned an air charter service to reserve a flight to Fort Worth where he would go in search of his missing valuables. Just as he was preparing to leave, his story went on, still another “old friend” happened by chance to telephone. This caller was a young woman named Dusty, a traveling whore, and she was in town, wondering if the doctor was in a mood to welcome her.

  Indeed he was. The doctor could use the consolation of a friend. Dusty thus hurried to Dr. Staves’s home, soothed his brow, suggested that he take a bath to cool off, and while he was in the tub—Staves told the police—the deceitful woman stole the very gun that he was planning to wear on his flight to Fort Worth.