Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  For five months the forays worked, just as Preacher said they would. He never printed checks for more than ninety-nine dollars, figuring that any larger sum might catch a clerk’s attention. Bobby and Maudeen, curlers in her hair, posed as husband and wife, she feigning impatience to get on with the buying of groceries for a hungry brood out in the station wagon. Bobby’s father was the first to note a change in his son’s behavior. The boy was still living at his family home in Dallas, and whereas he was previously the possessor of a good work record on the loading dock, now he suddenly started missing work, particularly on Mondays when he dragged in from weekend “fishing trips.” Moreover, his wardrobe perked up, and a new gold wrist watch appeared on his arm. When the foreman at the loading dock called to complain that Bobby was jeopardizing his position as “lead man” and was grouchy and full of sloppy moves, the elder Vandiver summoned his son for a conference. Bobby refused to speak of his behavior. Silently shaking his head, he walked out.

  In the winter of 1961, Bobby and Maudeen successfully passed three of Preacher’s worthless checks at Birmingham, Alabama, groceries, but on their fourth stop a clerk grew suspicious. At number five, a few blocks away, police stepped out from behind the courtesy booth and arrested the Dallas man and his girl friend, both twenty-one, she instantly hurling total blame on Bobby and sobbing that it was not only his idea, but that he would have harmed her had she not gone along. Preacher got out of town fast. Bobby’s father received the news of his son’s arrest and immediately flew to Birmingham, spending most of his life savings on bail and attorney fees. The pair was convicted, but because it was a first offense both received probated three-year sentences.

  Hardly back in Dallas, Maudeen broke probation by shoplifting a cheap plastic bracelet at a drugstore and was returned to Alabama to serve her penitentiary time. From her cell, she wrote Bobby long and tearful letters of regret, vowing that only in the shadow of bars could she see her true love for him. Touched by the revelations, Bobby rode a Greyhound bus through the night, across the pine forests of East Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, arriving at an Alabama prison bone weary but anticipating an emotional reunion with the woman of his fantasies.

  Maudeen walked hesitantly to the bench and sat down opposite the dividing rail. She weighed eighty-four pounds. Her eyes were opaque—empty. She looked mostly at her lap. In six months she had gotten religion. She spoke to Bobby in Bible verses. Then she abused him for his worldly ways. “But in your letters you said you loved me,” pleaded Bobby. Maudeen shook her head and looked into the middle distance. “That was before I found God,” she said. “When I get out of here, I don’t ever want to see your kind again.” She quoted a Bible verse: “There are new heavens and a new earth that we are awaiting according to His promsie, and in this righteousness is to dwell.”

  Sadly, Bobby rode the bus back to Dallas and tried to forget Maudeen. When she was released from prison she moved to Nebraska, married a banker, and became a prominent figure in church and community affairs. Bobby became a burglar.

  The major cities of Texas traditionally rank in the upper echelons of the national crime statistics, partly due to the large populations of blacks and Mexican-Americans among whom such deeds are unhappily a way of life. Dallas has the reputation of being the meanest Texas city, possessing not only large minority ghettos but a historically conservative body politic that reveres the right to own guns. It is also the loose headquarters for a substantial group of thieves and killers which somebody, probably an inventive newspaper reporter, once branded the “Dixie Mafia.” The name stuck, even though those to whom it pertained howled at the label. Certainly there was no formal crime syndicate, and no blood oath, such as binds the national Mafia of Sicilian parentage, nor were there territories to divide with organized rackets. The only glue that bonded several hundred outlaws in the Dallas area was the camaraderie of pursuing the same kind of work. The fraternity favored a handful of bars with their custom, and there they bragged of scores made, of women added to their wake, and of helpful contacts should a brother be traveling to a distant city. Principally their callings were burglary, safecracking, narcotics peddling, and pimping. But many of the free-lance criminals had guns for hire, and often they used them on one another. In a seven-year period from 1965 to 1972, thirty were shot to death either by their peers or in battles with police.

  One night, in the back booth of an East Dallas lounge, Bobby, twenty-one, was asked to join a group of four older men, in their mid-thirties and early forties. Their plan was to break into a doctor’s office and haul away his safe, reportedly full of cash and morphine. They needed a strong pair of shoulders; Bobby, though he still had the body of a runner, had plenty of experience lifting heavy crates. All he would be required to do was stand lookout in the yard, then help carry the safe to a truck. His anticipated share: at least $3,000. On the night of the job Bobby trembled with both cold and excitement. The plan proceeded as schemed, until it reached the crucial point of lifting the 2,000-pound safe and carrying it to the truck. His hands hurting from the bitterly cold January night, Bobby lost his grip and the safe crashed to the sidewalk, mashing his hand and his foot in its descent. Bobby screamed in pain and awoke a neighbor. A porch light switched on. Dogs began to bark. The frustrated thieves drove hurriedly away, cursing their new and bungling accomplice.

  The next morning Bobby telephoned his sister and asked her to bring over bandages and medication. He had been moving an icebox, he lied, and it toppled and fell on his foot. When Red arrived, her brother blurted out the truth. “Well,” sighed Red, “your foot is broken. I’ll have to call a doctor.” No! As Bobby quarreled with his sister over the danger of that, an urgent knock on the door interrupted. Two detectives were at the threshold. They arrested Bobby Vandiver on a charge of burglary. Their case was not only airtight, it became a famous and almost laughable one in the history of Dallas crime.

  When Bobby dropped the safe, it mashed his hand on the way to breaking his foot. And when police arrived to examine the safe, found unopened outside the doctor’s office, they found an indisputable clue. Wedged in a hinge of the safe was a neat and precise right index fingerprint—not only an impression but the actual flap of skin. The falling safe had sliced off the tip of Bobby Vandiver’s finger. No bungling burglar ever made police work so easy.

  “Why?” asked Red quietly, when just before the sentencing they shared a secluded moment together. “I’m not criticizing, Bobby, I told you a long time ago I would never do that. But maybe I could understand you better if you’d tell me why.” As she spoke, she brushed away a wet place on her cheek, and the charms on her bracelet jangled, all the mementos of her brother’s athletic career. Bobby had no real answer. He was bored, maybe, he said. The plan had seemed exciting, and it was. “Until the god damned thing fell on my foot, it was the most terrific sensation I ever had,” he said. “And it was something I was doing all by myself. My own decision. Don’t blame yourself.”

  Red nodded. She tried to understand. “Maybe he had to go out and be his own man,” she later told her father. “Maybe we all protected him too much. Maybe we didn’t let him grow up. Well, he’s certainly a man now.” She tried to make light of the impending sentence. “It’ll only be a few months,” she predicted. “And at least we won’t have to worry about him wrapping his Thunderbird around a telephone pole.”

  As he stood before the judge, Bobby kept his silence, obeying even as a novice the “character code.” He refused to name accomplices. He would have the court believe that the burglary was his and his alone. “You’re some man,” commented the judge sarcastically. “I haven’t met many fellows who could pick up a one-ton safe and carry it off alone. Two to five.”

  The only person who moaned audibly in the almost empty courtroom was Bobby’s father. His face went white. His grief, Red noted, was worse than death. He cried as his son was chained to others who were sentenced, then led out of the courtroom. For the next two years the senior Vandiver drove 250 miles
every other Sunday, as often as the rules permitted, to visit his son in the state penitentiary, trying to repair the years when they could not speak. He even ordered a photograph taken with his arm around his son, Bobby wearing white prison work clothes and a sheepish expression, and pasted it prominently in the family album, as if to say he had no shame, only love.

  Bobby emerged from the penitentiary fit and tanned and full of juices. Red had never seen him so appealing. Not yet twenty-five, he was exceptionally handsome and virile. She accompanied him to the East Dallas lounge which was his traditional hangout, and the ladies of the bar flocked about him. He seemed like a lean centurion returning from triumphant battle, ready now for the grapes and kisses due a victor.

  Red seized a moment of his time and put a question to him on this homecoming night. “Are you going to go straight?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “And maybe not. But I’ll tell you one thing, Red. Next time, I just won’t get caught.”

  For a time he dallied with legitimate endeavor. When he remarked at a family dinner that he was interested in chinchilla breeding, having read of it in the prison library, the elder Vandiver rushed to fill his garage with a dozen of the expensive and contrary animals. Enamored, Bobby tried to breed them, cursed them, even appeared on Sunday morning television as an “expert” on the business. But within a few months his interest was gone. “I got tired of smelling chinchilla shit,” he told Red, “and the little bastards wouldn’t screw when I told them to.” Then, incredibly, somehow eluding a background check, he even obtained work as an installer of burglar alarm systems, and delightedly seized the opportunity of casing offices as he wired them, returning at nights to relieve them of valuables. When Dallas police arrested him again on a charge of possessing burglary tools, their response was both laughter and embarrassment. “Bobby’s the flakiest burglar we’ve got,” said one of the detectives. “And the damnedest thing about him is he always owns up to what he’s done. He’s almost cheerful in his confessions.”

  His second penitentiary sentence lasted eighteen months, and once again he was released in fine fettle. “You always look your best when you get out of jail,” remarked Red. The only drastic change in her brother was a sudden and ferocious turn against the religion of his youth. Whereas he had once been awarded a ceramic attendance pin with a dozen bars for twelve years of perfect attendance, Bobby now demanded that his sister never mention God or religion again in his presence. When he turned on the car radio and a burst of gospel came forth, angrily he twirled the dial for another station. Driving past churches, he made obscene gestures. And at the funeral of a distant relative, when an old woman beside him murmured, “It’s God’s will,” Bobby disagreed audibly: “God has nothing to do with this. The man is dead. Dead!”

  This new attitude worried Red, for she was still shaped by the Sundays of her childhood. But she did not intrude on Bobby’s feelings. Their relationship could not withstand criticism, only toleration. By the time Bobby was thirty, Red no longer even questioned the fact that her brother was a burglar. Oh, of course he held jobs from time to time, selling campers, used cars, whatever. But these were only covers to fool parole officers. He stole. He took money and valuables that did not belong to him. He even had a philosophy of crime. “I don’t do anything violent,” he told Red once as they drank beer together. “I won’t even carry a gun. Why risk violence when the stuff is just lying there and so easy to take? It’s justified. It’s covered by insurance, anyway. Nobody gets hurt.”

  Now and then Bobby would talk to his sister about his work, but not so much of the danger, or even the potential rewards. He wanted her to know about the day-to-day details of burglary, of how cold it could be while sitting motionless in a clump of bushes waiting for a light to go out inside a target house, or the frustration of trying to quiet a barking dog. Once, he told his sister, he was even taken for a dog and almost killed. He and three colleagues were burglarizing the office of a drive-in movie after the Saturday night proceeds were put in a safe. It had become Bobby’s custom, his trademark, to wear both brown cotton work gloves (after the humiliation of leaving his fingerprint flap on the safe’s hinge in his first disastrous burglary) and a ski mask, both to hide his face and to warm it, for he always complained of the cold night air. In the movie’s office, while the others labored to open the safe, Bobby heard a noise and dropped to all fours, crawling toward a window to see if someone was coming. En route he bumped against a box and it fell. One of the other thieves whirled and saw only what appeared to be the brown paws and muzzle of a watchdog and fired reflexively, fearing the attack of a guard dog. Bobby hissed, “It’s me, you damn fool!”

  Red married again, this time an aircraft worker whom Bobby liked, and the subsequent children of the marriage became his special favorites. Bobby’s pattern was to disappear from his sister’s life for several weeks, only to burst in again unannounced. If he bore expensive gifts for his sister’s family—a tiny teardrop diamond necklace for the little girl, a cowboy suit for the boy—then Red knew well their source. “What can I buy you, Sis?” he once asked. “I never know what to get you.”

  “All I want is for you to go straight,” she answered. “Not square. Just straight.”

  “Then you want too much,” he said. “I can’t buy that.”

  Often Red prepared dinner for her family, called in vain for her children, and then went in search of the neighborhood for them, only to find that her burglar brother had the youngsters under his spell. Once she stood on the edge of a playground and watched as Bobby threw Frisbees, caught footballs, organized relay races, led a pack of ecstatic, squealing little ones up a giant old pecan tree and across its branches—“Watch out for the panthers!” he yelled—mesmerizing his flock. They would have followed his flute, laughing, into the sea. “You should have been a coach,” she told him when she finally assembled her family for a cold and overcooked meal.

  “I should have been a lot of things, Red,” he said. “But I am what I am. Pass the potatoes.”

  Bobby had the ability to talk on most any level. With the kids he was eight years old, to a pollster calling on the telephone to question political preferences he was an informed voter with knowledge of all the issues (although his prison record denied him his franchise), to the brother characters he spoke the argot more skillfully than any. He was the only one in the family who would bother with a senile grandmother, partially paralyzed after a stroke, condemned to a wheel chair and to continual wandering through the decades of her life. She annoyed her descendants, but Bobby found time to sit by her chair for hours, talking as her friend, her grandson, even becoming her long-dead lover, gently moving in and out of the roles that she assumed in her aging agonies.

  For several weeks in 1965, Bobby stayed with his sister in suburban Dallas and rarely went out. He seemed in need of home life, enjoying Red’s children and cooking, mowing the lawn, falling asleep on the couch during the late show. Often Sis heard him speak quietly on the telephone, declining offers to go somewhere or do something. A spark of hope caught within her. Her brother was wrestling with some unfulfilled need. Perhaps, she thought, the other life was over, or at least stalled on dead center. She even discovered him reading the newspaper’s classified ads in search of work. But then one evening an old friend called and asked Bobby to fetch him at a party; his car would not start. In the gray just before dawn Bobby telephoned Red from the Dallas jail. He was under arrest for possession of narcotics. His story was that he had barely walked through the front door of the apartment where the party was being held when police broke in and took him into custody. “It’s a bum rap,” he said. “I wasn’t holding anything. Maybe it was a setup. I thought it was funny that just as I arrived everybody started leaving.” Red immediately thought of some of the “jobs” he had been turning down on the telephone. Maybe this was someone’s perverted notion of revenge.

  With two previous penitentiary sentences, Bobby now faced—under Texas law—the possibility of a life sent
ence as a habitual criminal. He bargained for six years’ hard time in Huntsville. And bitterly he went away to give at least half a decade to the state of Texas. “The other convictions were deserved,” he told his sister. “But the only crime here is a god damned crime against me.” The only mercy in it, he said, was that his father was now dead. “I couldn’t stand six years of his crying every other Sunday.”

  But the Vandiver family album did add new photographs, one of Bobby at a drafting table, practicing his new-found craft of design-while in Huntsville he helped draw plans for a new wing of the prison—and one of him wearing striped jailbird pajamas as a gutty participant in the bull-riding event at the annual prison rodeo. This spectacle, held on the four hot Sunday afternoons of each October, is a popular event in Texas, drawing free world crowds eager to see condemned men risk their bones in contests against beasts. In one particularly favored contest, a sack containing twenty-five dollars is tied around the horns of a vicious Brahman bull. Then the creature is turned loose for those prisoners foolish enough to try to snatch the sack, eluding, if possible, the potentially deadly horns. One year Bobby was the winner, and the family album photograph shows him exultantly hoisting his bag of money. But the next year he failed and was badly gored in the stomach.

  Due to good behavior and popularity among prison officials—throughout his relationships with police and guards he usually kept in their favor—he served less than three years and was released in 1970. He was thirty-one years old. Almost one fourth of his life had been passed behind bars. In his third homecoming from prison, there was none of the festive air that had marked the others. Now he was sullen, silent, reluctant to speak even to his sister.

  He became a pimp, starting with a skinny, tormented nineteen-year-old whore named Reena who quoted poetry and spent most of her hours stoned on mescaline. She adored Bobby and clung to him like a tic to a collie. Whenever Bobby needed money, she drifted away for a day or two, turned a few tricks, and returned with cash in hand for drugs and wine. Soon there were other girls, Bobby learning the “spot” business from his friend Clete and dispatching his employees to the whorehouses of the Southwest. For a time Reena stayed in favor as his principal courtier, and then, when her infatuation turned to LSD and she became unreliable, Bobby cast her out. Later he heard that she had been sent to an insane asylum where, hallucinating, she enacted Mary Magdalene in search of the Savior.