Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  Jerry Carpenter ran the name “Dusty” through his mental file of prostitutes. He knew hundreds of working girls by name, alias, and special effects. But he could not place one named Dusty.

  Was that her real name or her trick name? the detective wanted to know.

  The doctor shrugged. Dusty was the only name he ever called her by. But if it was worth anything, he had reason to believe her real name was Marcia McKittrick. Something like that.

  Carpenter had one more question. Did the doctor know a plastic surgeon named Dr. John Hill in Houston?

  “No,” said Staves openly and believably. “Never heard the name.”

  Jerry Carpenter now felt both elation and no small amount of worry. He knew the whore business as well as any cop in Texas. In vice, he had quickly learned the hierarchy. At the bottom in Houston were the waterfront whores, tough, aging woman who worked the ship channel bars and specialized in first entertaining, then rolling foreign sailors. “They’re so mean we just leave ’em alone,” Carpenter told Gamino. “It would take about six very strong men to arrest one of these babes, and it wouldn’t be worth the time.” A rung up the ladder were the street girls, in congregation daily a block away from the criminal courthouse in downtown Houston. These were prostitutes, mainly black and Mexican-American, who infested hot-bed hotels at the north end of Main Street, an area succumbing to pornographic movie theaters, penny arcades, and cheap emporiums that sold shoddy junk from Taiwan and Korea.

  Moving up, the next caste was the traveling whore who worked a circuit in the major towns of Texas and adjoining Southwestern states. And at the pinnacle of the profession were the call girls, many of whom were suburban housewives, belles de jour who accepted occasional appointments for fees beginning at a hundred dollars for a brief afternoon encounter. They were busy during large conventions at the city’s best hotels.

  From what Dr. Staves had said of Marcia McKittrick, it appeared to Jerry Carpenter that she was a member of the traveling category, the “spot” girls, and the most elusive in the trade. A records check in ID confirmed the suspicion. Marcia had been arrested in Houston the year before while working a “spot,” the character term for a hotel or motel that offers a hot bed or two in an otherwise legitimate hostelry. The custom is for a girl to spend a maximum of two weeks in a certain hotel whose night manager or chief porter is the entrepreneur of such things, never leaving the room during the period, entertaining customers twenty-four hours a day, and then moving on to another town before complaints result in a bust. The traditional split is sixty per cent for the girl, forty per cent for the hotel employee who handles the situation. Prostitutes in this category carry “spot books” in their purses, that being a valuable list of hotels in various cities that are accommodating. But due to the enormous size of Texas, and the fact that a girl could be working on any given day anywhere from Port Arthur in the southeast corner of the state to Amarillo seven hundred miles north, or El Paso, another eight hundred miles west—or Oklahoma or New Mexico, or even as far away as Las Vegas—made it a frustrating game of cat and mouse.

  “Now we look for Marcia,” said Joe Gamino. She was their only lead. Both officers well knew that they could spend months chasing the whore all over Texas, only to have it turn out that she pawned the gun the day after she took it from Dr. Staves, or sold it to a sister hooker, or left it under the mattress of a motel in Beaumont. Or she might have given it to her old man, the pimp, a traveling “character” who regularly swung about the circuit, stopping at various “spots” and collecting from the stable of prostitutes he employed. But the cops had to find out.

  Word quietly went out on the street that Jerry Carpenter wanted information on Marcia McKittrick, and a teletype was dispatched to police departments all over the Southwest. For a month Jerry drove around his old vice squad haunts, visiting madams, both current and retired, rousting pimps from pool halls, menacing bellhops and night porters for information. From police records, the detectives located both a photograph of their quarry and an address for her parents, a small community east of Dallas. The mug shot of Marcia McKittrick revealed a short young woman with heavy breasts and imperfect teeth, with dark hair woven and teased into a coiffure of towering stature, suitable for presentation at the court of the Sun King. The record showed that she was twenty-two years old at the time of the Houston arrest, that she had had a few other minor experiences with the law in and around Dallas, and that she was a suspected drug addict. “You know, I think I know this girl,” mused Jerry Carpenter. “I may have busted her once myself.” In the photograph were both hauteur and fear, like a girl masquerading at a party to which she had no invitation. Carpenter had seen this bluff a thousand times before. In fact, he wore it himself now and then.

  The detectives drove to a rural suburb twenty miles east of Dallas, a place of old and peeling white frame houses set in thick groves of trees. Grandmothers sat on sagging front porches and rocked, noting every strange car that drove past on dusty, pocked roads. Scraggly orange calla lilies tried to bloom outside Marcia’s family home, and within, a cheap throw rug of a deer grazing in a meadow was the principal piece of art on the wall. The house was modestly furnished but clean. Marcia’s mother was a plump, fast-wrinkling woman past sixty who worked in a hospital as a nursing aide. She sighed over the burden that her daughter had become. Yes, she knew that Marcia was a prostitute. No, she had not the slightest idea where she was. “I haven’t seen her in several months,” said the mother. A little boy about six with a thin face and a frightened air hung outside on the front porch, trying to eavesdrop through the torn screen door. Often the old woman rose and ordered the child to go down to the creek and find crawdads. “That’s Marcia’s little boy,” she whispered. “She loves him so much. She always turns up for his birthday.” Marcia’s father, a construction man with a sunburned turkey gobbler neck from outdoor labor, had no news of his daughter either.

  “She’s basically a sweet, loving girl,” said the mother. “Somewhere along the line she just got mixed up with the wrong people. She told me once she met somebody on a hillbilly TV show who got her hooked on drugs. She’s never been the same since.”

  Reluctantly, the parents mentioned two or three names of men whom Marcia spoke of from time to time, and Carpenter dutifully wrote them down. He held little hope that these would be fruitful; he doubted that a prostitute dope addict would tell her parents the truth about much of anything, certainly not the real identities of her friends. In fact, the officer suspected that the parents knew more of their daughter’s comings and goings than they cared to mention.

  “Hell, I don’t really blame them,” he told Gamino later. “They’re good, hard-working, religious people. They’ve got the right to protect their kid all they can.” This was not a traditional hard-line police attitude, but it was Jerry’s attitude. The one thing he could do was identify with poor people in despairing circumstance.

  Within a few days—it was now late October, almost a month after the killing of John Hill—the detectives learned that Marcia McKittrick was under the umbrella of a pimp named Clete, out of Dallas. He booked her into various “spots.” Hurriedly, the detectives ran a make on the man, but the disappointing news came back that Clete was residing in a federal penitentiary serving a long sentence for theft of interstate commerce, i.e., the hijacking of a truck loaded with automobile parts. Clete had been imprisoned long before the shooting on Kirby Drive. Obviously Marcia had a new manager by now. “Maybe she’s free-lancing,” suggested Gamino. Carpenter shook his head. “These damned old girls always have a pimp they give their money to,” he said. “I never understood it, but it’s always true.”

  Quick enough, an informer passed along the tip that Marcia indeed had a new alliance. He was also a fellow out of Dallas. The name, the snitch thought, was Bobby Vandergriff. Or Vanderslice. Van-something. A funny, long last name starting with V.

  Within half an hour a wanted bulletin flashed into every major police station in the United State
s and Canada, and to Mexican border guards. The presence of Bobby Vandergriff and Marcia McKittrick was desired in Houston by the homicide department. Had Jerry Carpenter made a bet, he would have given short odds that both would be arrested within a month. Fugitives with political connotations might find it possible to survive, through loyal connections, hidden in America. Jerry knew that well. But whores and pimps necessarily crawled on a more treacherous underbelly, every step a potential cave-in. Somewhere soon one or the other would get arrested, and the nationwide network of police communications would bring them to Houston promptly.

  But the weeks became months, and by early 1973 the homicide detectives were like men haunting a mailbox for a letter that never came. They drove thousands of miles over Texas searching for Marcia and Bobby What’s-his-name, and once, in March 1973, felt they were close. A report arrived from the West Texas town of Lubbock. Local police had Marcia located at a “spot” motel. “Sit on her,” ordered Carpenter. “I’ll be right there.” The detectives broke across the night, over the yawning desolate highways of the empty part of the state, where a car radio is lucky to pick up the music of a Mexican station. In Lubbock they burst into the motel room where, sure enough, they discovered an irritated prostitute and her compromised customer. But she was not the girl they wanted. It would turn out that Marcia had fled town hours before the Houston officers arrived. Already a sister prostitute had taken her place on the sheets. And already Marcia McKittrick was swallowed up in the vastness of West Texas.

  Six months after the murder of John Hill, the investigation was nowhere. They could not find Marcia. They weren’t even sure of Bobby’s last name. The two detectives were weary, cranky, and physically ill. Carpenter at one point suffered what he thought was a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. But he was only troubled by a tormented stomach and digestive system, enduring as he had been on grabbed hamburgers, fried pies, and too much coffee. Their normal good humor was gone. They had become sour angry cops, under pressure from their captain, from the press, from the public. They kept the case, such as it was, in the trunk of their car, both to shield their investigative reports from press leaks in the office and to avoid having their brother officers know how pitifully scant were their results.

  One afternoon, reading the latest in a continuing series of newspaper accounts that taunted, in effect, “No Progress in Hunt for Hill Killer,” Jerry Carpenter seized the paper and crumpled it and threw it angrily against the wall. “I want that whore,” he said, his eyes sparking fury behind his tinted glasses. “If I have to turn the state of Texas upside down and pour it into the Gulf of Mexico, I’m going to find that god damned whore.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Marcia had always been running—from the law, mainly—but also in flight from the constriction of what society dictated was a normal life. “Two things I simply cannot stand,” she would say, “… to be bored, and to wait.” Those who slip outside the fence usually cannot look back and pinpoint the precise moment of detour. Marcia could. Often she did just that, studying her life, closing her eyes and allowing herself a small measure of introspection, even sitting in her working clothes at the bar of a Las Vegas hotel. This was the only kind of waiting she would tolerate, waiting for the trick over there who was winning at the blackjack table, waiting to see how much money she could pry out of him.

  For the first thirteen years of her life, there was little to tell and less to set her apart from the others. The sixth of nine children, she was quiet, obedient, helpful with housework, dutiful in attendance at the Baptist church, shy, not even cute in the tradition of most little girls. Truthfully, Marcia was plain, her demeanor and her hair color both mouse, a child given to gaps and silence. Her father was a disciplinarian, in partnership with the Lord in threatened wrath, and so strict, Marcia would remember, that, had he his way, his daughters would not go out of his house unless they were clothed in nuns’ habits or the Baptist equivalent thereof. In counterbalance, the mother was overly lenient, shooing Marcia from housework. It was the duty of adults, she said, and soon enough Marcia would be a grown woman with a floor to scrub and babies to nurse. “Go out and play in the yard while you’re still young,” she often said, like the old women of Tahiti who bid the young girls dance on the sand until the passing years give them their turn to sit, sadly, and watch. In the small Dallas suburb of Mesquite, Marcia was a promising student, so fiercely committed to commendation on her schoolwork that she often sat up until dawn with a homework project. Her mother lost track of the times that she went to wake the child for breakfast, only to discover her still sitting at her desk, building a snowstorm of crumpled papers. “She was a perfectionist,” the mother would recall, “and if she got less than an A, she would bawl and squawl.”

  She became a member of the school choir, the student council, the girls’ pep squad. Her figure filled out rapidly and suddenly, and though she could never manage much over five feet no matter how hard she stretched, her breasts were admired and her hips widely coveted. The only source of foul weather on her adolescent landscape was a continuing feud with her older sister, Linda, of whom Marcia was sorely jealous. Linda was more beautiful, Marcia felt, and more popular. In every quarrel, Marcia always lost, for she lacked the temper of her sister. “Leave Linda alone,” warned the mother, trying to sustain calm in her household. “Linda would argue with the Devil or a lamppost.”

  When Marcia was fourteen her father moved his family from the comforting embrace of a small town to the city of Dallas itself. Marcia was thrown into a new and much larger school. “I’m lost, Mama,” she complained. “Everything I had in Mesquite has been taken away from me.” That move was the turning point in her life, Marcia decided for herself. That wrenching uprooting from familiar surroundings was the moment she boarded the bumper car that her life was to be. She became a friend of another fourteen-year-old girl whose specialty was truancy from school. The first time Marcia stayed away from school for an entire day, her mother sallied forth in search and found her daughter smoking cigarettes in the garage of her new friend’s home. Figuratively seizing her by the ear and leading her back to class, the mother grew uncharacteristically stern. What happened to the little girl who would settle for nothing but straight As?

  “I don’t know,” Marcia replied. “I’m just not happy with who I am and what I’m doing with my life.”

  “You’re only fourteen,” snapped her mother. “You’re too young to worry about the way your life is going.”

  Marcia agreed, absolutely. Over the next few months, every time she vanished for a day, or sometimes three or four, every time her mother would search for her and find her and lead her back to school, Marcia would agree. Her mother was right. She was repentant, ashamed, full of promises that it would never happen again. But it always did. “That child!” sighed the mother. “I lead her to the schoolhouse door, and she goes inside, and she runs out the back door.”

  There came a violent confrontation between Marcia and her sister Linda over the older girl’s boy friend. Linda accused Marcia of trying to steal him, of parading around the house and yard in vamping larceny. The two sisters screamed and threatened one another for several days.

  Finally, in 1964, a few months before her fifteenth birthday, Marcia left home for good. She wrote her mother a poignant letter. “There’s something in me I can’t stop,” she said. “I don’t want to go to school any more. I’ve gotta try things on my own.” It was the year after a President was killed in the city where she lived, and it was a time when the young of a nation were beginning to stir. Marcia felt no discernible political flutterings, only an uncheckable passion to run.

  Within a few weeks the stumpy little girl who had sung so sweetly in the Baptist choir and twirled the baton so ardently for the Mesquite junior high pep squad was—incredibly!—appearing at Dallas’ premier burlesque house, peeling off a borrowed gown to the wailing melody of “Walk on the Wild Side.” She had a new name. Sindy Shane. The stunning caterpillar-into-butterfl
y came about because the first man Marcia met at a party when she left home was a middle-aged Dallas police character named Cousin Morris, a man wise enough to know that seduction of fifteen-year-old girls in Texas was a guaranteed penitentiary offense. But he felt it safe enough to keep a decorative youngster like Marcia around. She made him young and she made him laugh. One night Cousin Morris took his new protégée to the Theater Lounge where he was well known. The owner welcomed the valued patron and made approving note of his companion, a blossoming young girl in hip huggers. “With a figure like that,” he suggested, “you oughta strip.” How curious, said Marcia, she had been considering just that.

  She rummaged through a backstage wardrobe trunk at the night club and found a tight emerald-hued sheath with thousands of hand-sewn sequins that would sparkle and throb in the follow spots. “It was as if I had been rehearsing for that moment all my life,” she would remember years later. “I wasn’t afraid for one minute. I just got up there and took my clothes off. And people were clapping and whistling. For me!”

  Marcia’s name went up in scarlet paint on posters outside the club, at the bottom of a drawing card that included established stars like Vikki Joye and Bubbles Cash. She joined the union at fifteen—pretending to be twenty-one—and began earning $250 a week, plus “tips” from the customers she met after performances and conned into buying “champagne” in shot glasses. Marcia was the baby of the club, and the older women mothered her. They all sat backstage sewing on glitter and speaking of worthless but handsome men, and children abandoned to grandmothers. Pregnancy was an ominous prospect, for it could leave stretch marks across the area most needed for public display. Nightly, Marcia heard the warnings from the older sisters of her art: “Tease ’em, take ’em, but, honey, don’t let ’em poke you with that thing or you’ll end up at Sears Roebuck selling cuptowels.”