Marcia learned the “spot” business efficiently. The mechanics were simple. “Hello,” she would say cheerfully in a long-distance call to a motel night manager in, say, El Paso. “My name is Dusty, and I want an appointment for a couple of weeks.”
“What kind of an appointment?” always came the response.
“Well, I sell pussy. That kind of appointment.” Always, unless it was a prior connection, the employee would sputter ignorance, even indignation, and always Marcia would bide her time until the charade was done, then lay on a name or two of mutual interest. Clete, in particular. Only then would the “appointment” be granted, usually with a warning that the town was hot, the vice were active, and that the split would have to be fifty-fifty due to the pressures involved.
“Uh-uh,” Marcia would shoot back in negation. “Sixty-forty. You’ll make money. I guarantee it.”
Often the motel manager would ask, “Can you take a bust?” meaning, was Marcia’s police position such that she could accommodate a routine, revolving-door vagrancy arrest and fine, or was she wanted on some other charge that would bring grief if visited by the police? “Well, I don’t wanna get busted,” Marcia usually responded. “But it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
She knew that if a working girl could not tolerate a vagrancy rap, then the bellman would automatically get forty-five per cent of her fees, the additional five per cent needed as extra insulation from the police. Marcia was not sure what this entailed—a bribe, assumedly—but it was an old and unchallenged rule of the game.
Working “spots” was a comedown for the girl who had once made $10,000 in a single Las Vegas week, now reduced to setting up shop in motels flung across the American Southwest, and trying to wheedle fifty bucks for “short time”—thirty minutes at most—and wrestling with grunting, laconic old ranchers on thin sheets. But she prospered nonetheless, earning at least five hundred dollars a week for herself, even after commissions were deducted for the various agents involved. The best town was Houston, not for its “spot” certainly, for it was an old and peeling hotel on the fringe of the central downtown district, with urine-smelling corridors, but for the amount of money to be made. During one national convention held at the Astrodome in 1971, Marcia turned fifty-six tricks in five days and earned almost $6,000. At the end of the horizontal siege, she called Clete in Dallas and said she was exhausted—having averaged 11.2 acts of sexual intercourse per day—and was checking off the circuit for a while. “Don’t blame you,” said Clete. He was on his way to Houston anyway with a friend. They could all meet at Lilla’s house.
Marcia often passed a few days at the comfortable home of Mrs. Lilla Paulus in the sedate West University section of Houston, not far from Rice University. Through her friends in the character world, Marcia learned that Lilla was a hospitable woman in her early fifties who held a more or less continuing salon for those who journeyed on the subterranean paths. The one-story red brick house seemed unlike any other on the block, but once inside, Marcia would later tell a probation officer, “it was twenty-four-hours-a-day non-stop fun and games.” Lilla Paulus was a slender woman with high cheekbones that had once framed beauty, and above them were enormous eyes that gave her the look of a startled forest animal. Through her recently deceased husband, Claude, a prominent bookie and operator of a popular downtown “fraternal club” which had gambling in the back room, Lilla had become acquainted with certain men and women whose photographs and biographies reposed in police department files. She herself possessed a minor record, with arrests for vagrancy and investigation of bookmaking. But she could now enter any church in town and, on face value, be mistaken for the spinsterish schoolteacher who had pined a life away in memory of a tragic love affair. Marcia found it amusing that the gentle-looking Lilla could cuss better than any whore she had ever met, often carried a pistol with a pearl handle carved like a cameo, and Stocked a kitchen supplied with good whiskey, marijuana, and a pot of deer meat chili simmering on the stove. All of these were antidotes to Lilla’s loneliness and fear of advancing years. “When the characters gathered for a party,” Marcia would later say, “it was like an arsenal. And when the doorbell rang, nobody opened it unless they had a drawn gun.”
Sometime in mid-1971—the date is unclear, because Marcia was fuzzed with a renewed appetite for barbiturates—Clete arrived in Houston with the friend he had mentioned. No introduction was necessary as Marcia had met this old boy in Dallas years before. At the time, she took him for one of the most attractive and devilish men she had ever run across. Right off he called her “squirt,” which was not an appellation she enjoyed. Instantly the twin forces of appeal and hostility had sprung up between them. Over the years she had seen him shooting pool and conspiring in the back booths of lounges in Dallas. Once he had even knocked urgently at Cousin Morris’ door, seeking to borrow two sticks of dynamite. By repute, she knew him to be a moderately capable burglar whose trademarks were cheap brown cotton work gloves and a ski mask.
His name, she knew, was Bobby Vandiver. “If anything ever happens to me,” Clete had said, “Bobby here will take care of you until I get my business straight.” Hardly a month would pass before the need arose. Clete was jailed in a Southern state, charged with hijacking, and by the time he was sentenced to fifteen years in a federal penitentiary Marcia was in the arms of his best friend. True, she wept for Clete, but Bobby Vandiver comforted her. He had a terrific sense of humor. He was, in fact, the funniest man she had ever met. And in the dark, when he whispered foolishness in her ear, he sounded just like Don Meredith.
THIRTY
Bobby Vandiver was reared in the town of Venus, Texas, whose picturesque name belied a drab community of farmers within graying houses, on their knees in prayer that the sun would spare the summer vegetables from incineration, that the winter wind would not howl away the precious topsoil. Appearing at the end of the Depression decade, Bobby was the second child and only son of a part-time farmer and truck driver who ferried chickens and eggs to market in nearby Dallas. His mother could eke a week’s meals out of one fowl, until on the last day there was nothing but bones in the watery soup. But the family endured, due to slavish attention of the father to work, from before each dawn until deep into each night, relentlessly whipping himself with no time for rest save fanatic attendance at the Methodist Church. The elder Vandiver possessed a severe moral code, so devoted to the law that his children made jokes about it. “If Daddy ran a red light,” cracked Bobby, “he’d probably drive himself down to the police station and turn himself in.” The father worked so hard and laughed so little that his face began to resemble the earth of Venus—thin, gray, weather-beaten. Bobby both feared and respected his father, but only modest rapport existed between them. They rarely talked; theirs was largely a world of avoiding one another. Bobby spent most of his early years alone, his best friends the books he read—Jules Verne and Mark Twain were favored authors—and his dogs. He always had a dog, usually one that would have nothing to do with any other human being save the young master. They all died, these dogs, horribly squashed on the highway. And always Bobby would hold mournful and private burial services, alone, tearfully screaming at anyone who came near the graves, cursing the speeding cars blurring toward Dallas.
His most dependable line of communication was with his sister Virginia, whose vibrant auburn hair earned her the predictable nickname from her brother of “Red.” Bobby and Red took to holding “conferences,” usually seated on the floor of the locked bathroom, sorting out their young lives. She, being two years older, loomed wise and was tolerant of Bobby’s curious ways. “I like you best, Red,” he always told her. “You take me like I am. You don’t criticize.”
It was to Red, his sister, and not his father that Bobby looked for commendation and attention when he brought home a string of crappie from a nearby lake, or a brace of doves killed neatly with the .22 rifle he bought with a coupon from the back pages of an outdoor magazine. The youngster reveled in the outdoors
of Venus, sharpening his lean body by running across the cotton fields alone, leaping the neat rows of ripening plants as hurdles in his path. When the family moved to Dallas in the late 1940s, Bobby’s life seemed traditional and ordinary. He collected merit badges from the Boy Scouts with ease and filled Red’s charm bracelet with the miniature gold track shoes that marked his victories in athletic endeavor. In high school, Bobby’s life was heavy with promise. He was vice-president of his class, star athlete, a capable student, and devastatingly successful with girls. They waited by the telephone for his calls, the best girls, the first in an ever lengthening string that would be attracted by his sexual power. The principal of the school autographed Bobby’s Sundial yearbook with glowing testimony: “To Bobby V.—a good student, hard worker, and fine athlete. Your goal in life should be the very top.” But a best friend scribbled his memoir edged in gloom: “To Bobby, who if he lives to be 21, will be a miracle.”
The reference was to Bobby’s notoriety with the automobile, burning away unspoken demons by hurtling down highways. He often wrecked his chariots. The first such episode came the night that Red was married. His sister was eighteen, Bobby was sixteen, and he bitterly opposed the man she had chosen. Even as she dressed for the ceremony, Bobby burst into her bedroom and implored her not to marry. “It won’t take, Red,” he warned. She kissed her brother tenderly and promised that her special love for him would not be diminished by marriage to another man. After the reception, during which Bobby drank several glasses of champagne and glowered in a corner, refusing to congratulate the newlyweds, he took his father’s car without permission and roared away, the squeal of rubber heard above the laughter of the hall. Speeding out a quiet street in suburban Oak Cliff, Bobby attracted the attention of a police prowl car, which gave pursuit. He ignored its sirens and flashing lights, pressing the accelerator to the floor, careening wildly, bouncing from curb to curb, slicing across front lawns, sideswiping parked cars, finally crashing into a telephone pole and crumpling the left side of the car so seriously that the vehicle could not turn left. But that did not stop him. Bobby kept going, making a crazed series of right-hand turns, laughing at the dozen police cars lunging toward him, still laughing as he drove into a predicament from which there was no way out but a left turn. Rather than do that, he drove directly into a wall, bricks and mortar showering the car, drowning out his cries of exultation.
His explanation was a rueful memory of too much champagne, but Red recognized the rampage as an act of anger against her marriage. Bobby denied any such thing, but not until Red’s marriage broke and ended in divorce within a year—exactly as her kid brother had predicted—did a feeling of good will return to them.
Bobby’s father built a good trucking business, enough to buy a series of three new Oldsmobiles, all of which Bobby borrowed, all of which Bobby wrecked. When the elder Vandiver finally had the sense to ban his son from the family automobile, Bobby assembled his financial resources from odd jobs and found a finance company miraculously willing to assist him in the purchase of a Thunderbird. “It’s titty pink,” he whooped on the telephone to Red. “It’s the most gosh damned beautiful car in the whole world!” But the ink on the registration papers was scarcely dry before Bobby went to nearby Mountain Creek Lake for a wiener roast with his best girl, Carlene. There they quarreled over his need for a fuller emotional commitment from her. When she refused to tie herself down totally to the unpredictable boy with the streak of violence, he grew sullen. On the way home, with his Thunderbird crammed with friends, Bobby pushed his car to 80, then 90, picking up a highway patrol car. Noting the tail, Bobby floorboarded the Thunderbird, ignoring Carlene’s screams to stop. The pursuing officer clocked the Thunderbird at 120 miles per hour, just at the point when it careened out of control and struck a telephone pole, shearing it in half as easily as a man would snap a toothpick. The car was demolished, falling broken and smoking into a ditch, and Bobby crawled out, soaked in blood, screaming for help because he was convinced his car contained the dead and the dying. But only he was hurt, the others had been thrown free. At Dallas’ Methodist Hospital, attendants had to place the strong seventeen-year-old in a straitjacket so they could sew up the deep gash on his forehead. “Let me alone!” he screamed. “Nobody can touch me unless I say so!”
A few months later, when the cut healed, the scar gave his forehead a raffish look. Once his sister caught him examining his face in a mirror, scowling tough-guy expressions at the reflection.
Retrospective examination of a life must be speculative, even by the one who has lived it. But in the unusual course of Bobby Vandiver’s years the first turning point was as obvious as the day Marcia McKittrick fled her home to become a stripper. Bobby married, a few weeks after his graduation day, a girl named Betty Sue who told him that she carried his baby. Because she was known to be generous with her favors, Bobby was not entirely sure that he was specifically to blame. “But I might be,” Bobby told his father. “So I guess the right thing to do is marry her.” Alarmed at the prospect of his son marrying at seventeen, condemning himself to a life of barren work just as he himself had done two decades earlier, the father railed against the marriage. He spoke of lost dreams, blown away by realities harsher than the winds of Venus. Listening, fascinated, Red could not remember this kind of communication between the two except in the aftermath of the car wrecks. Now they spoke for hours, the man warning the boy that he would be plowing under his prospects for the better life that only a higher education could bring. Already there had been scholarship nibbles from small colleges whose athletic scouts had noted the boy’s promise in long-distance running.
“I’d like to go to college,” agreed Bobby. “And maybe I will. Things will just have to work out.”
Then if his son was not one hundred per cent certain he got this girl pregnant, countered the father, take her to a doctor and be certain. He would pay for it. “It’s a lot cheaper than marrying for the wrong reasons.”
Perhaps because his father was so opposed, perhaps because he felt a mature responsibility at the immature age of seventeen, perhaps because he was tantalized at the prospect of becoming a father, Bobby married Betty Sue. And within one month she sent him out for Kotex, a coy way of informing her husband that she had been mistaken. But by the end of the first year of a marriage conceived in fraud, a baby son was legitimately born to the couple, and the now eighteen-year-old proud father happily passed out cigars on the loading dock. His work was picking up crates in his thin, hard-muscled arms and putting them into trucks. Six months after that, Betty Sue ran away with a man named Carlos and divorced Bobby. She informed him by letter that he was a no-account common laborer with no prospects for betterment, and that she was going to guarantee that their child, Davey, never had to shove boxes around.
For a few months Bobby visited his son regularly, bearing the child footballs and baseball gloves, tossing him into the air and catching him with delight. Then, abruptly, he resigned his parental responsibility and never saw Davey again after he was two. Only Red knew the reason, or suspected one. Her brother’s sorrowful attitude was that the little boy would be better off without knowing that his father was the kind of man Bobby was so suddenly turning out to be.
After Betty Sue’s wrenching departure with the child, Bobby began hanging out at a drive-in restaurant in North Dallas, a magnet that drew the kids in their fresh-waxed convertibles, the budding punks with their vacant-eyed ladies, the hookers, the pushers. The carhops wore red and white drum majorette uniforms, with dancing fringe stopping high above white boots that displayed provocative flesh. The premier waitress was Maudeen—statuesque, black hair, huge purplish eyes, olive complexion, and a poutful mouth that dispensed easy repartee and profane indignation at cheapskate tips. Not only did Maudeen deliver cheeseburgers and beer to the attentive customers, she was open for business after hours, working under the aegis of a pimp named Preacher, so called because his father was a faith healer. Bobby fell desperately in love with Maud
een, although his desires went unfulfilled. For the first time in his young life a woman feigned absolute indifference to him. All Maudeen did was laugh at his juvenile importunings and wiggle off with the hard-earned dollar bills he threw down on her tray. “Wait till you grow up, hon,” she teased. “It takes a bigger bat than you got to play in the major leagues.” But gradually, even though she maintained a hands-off policy, Maudeen took to inviting the ardent dock worker on after-curfew rounds with her and Preacher.
When Red began hearing infatuated praise for the incredible creature named Maudeen, she drove to the restaurant and eyed her brother’s new treasure. Then she asked a few questions around. It took little effort to learn that Maudeen and Preacher were two-bit police characters, suspected of stealing a little and selling dope. “She’s trouble, Bobby,” warned Red. It was her turn to prophesy. But Bobby only shrugged. “She’s the kind of trouble I’d like to get into, Sis,” he answered.
Somehow Maudeen came up with a small printing press. Concurrently, she and Preacher hatched a scheme to print phony company payroll checks, then travel far out of Dallas to cash them with false credentials. They needed a third man, both to help with the driving and to saturate thoroughly the major check-cashing groceries of a distant city in one frenetic late Friday afternoon period. This, Preacher reasoned, was the time of the week when thousands of payroll checks were being cashed, and, moreover, there would be no opportunity to check their genuineness until Monday morning. By that time the travelers would be long back in Dallas, pockets full of easy cash.
Blood and Money Page 39