Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  Bobby had no trouble collecting girls who wanted to work for him, but he was not a very good pimp. If one of the whores held back money on him, and he knew it, he would not beat her, as pimps were supposed to do. “I can’t get used to hitting women,” he told Red. He let his hair grow long and shaggy, and he cultivated a drooping mustache. Red thought he looked disreputable, and told him so—as if he was hoping to reclaim lost prison years by trying to look young and hip. But other women disagreed. His life swarmed with them. Even Maudeen, the repented carhop forger, returned for a brief interlude from Nebraskan domesticity. She lay next to her long-ago lover for a month, then, sated, returned to propriety. Carlene, the childhood sweetheart who had been the catalyst in the wreck of Bobby’s titty-pink Thunderbird, reappeared for several months and bore him a child—his second. Then, sensing that it was better for all concerned, she took the baby and vanished.

  In the summer of 1971, at a night club in Dallas, Bobby presided over a table brimming with characters. Beside him was a short, full-bodied young woman with an immense hairdo and brown eyes smothered in mascara and false lashes. She dominated the evening, full of anecdotes about the men who had rained thousand-dollar bills and chinchilla furs about her, of the days when she held center stage in a gown of a thousand tiny mirrors. Red, present, took an instant dislike to Marcia McKittrick. “I don’t like her,” she told her brother. “She’s Swiss cheese. There are holes in everything she says.”

  Bobby shrugged noncommittally. “She’s nothing,” he said. “She’s just a whore who works for me.”

  For a brief time Marcia occupied the seat next to Bobby at the character gathering places, only to be replaced by a girl named Vicki. “This one’s just a little kid,” Bobby told his sister. “Doesn’t have a lick of sense.” It seemed reasonably true. Vicki had fire-pole legs and stood almost six feet in heels, well over Bobby, and there were few curves in a plankish body. She had reddish hair and never said much. When Bobby spoke character talk, Vicki nodded knowingly, although Red recognized that she had no frame of reference for what he was saying. Bobby could have been speaking in ancient Aramaic. Nonetheless, the shy Vicki adored the three-time ex-convict, and something in her naïve freshness touched him. Once, years before, when Bobby and Red had sat on the bathroom floor of their parents’ farm house in Venus, they had discussed “true love.” “It doesn’t exist,” Bobby had said. “People just make do the best they can.” Later, when Red met and became engaged to the man who would become her second husband, she wrote to her brother in prison. “I think I’ve finally found it,” she said. “Maybe it does exist.”

  Now it was Bobby’s turn. Shyly he made confession to his sister that he had fallen for Vicki. But, boyishly, all he could manage to say was, “Remember that time, Red, when we talked about it? Well, I was wrong.” With it came ambitious responsibility. Vicki had two children from a first marriage, and Bobby delightedly took them on as instant family, moving everybody into his sister’s small, overcrowded tract house. Red was so happy to see the new maturity in her brother—at thirty-two—that she cheerfully made sleeping pallets for the floor and got up a half hour earlier to prepare for work at a factory. “I might be able to get you some kind of job there,” she told her brother. “You’d have to run your story down to them up front,” she said, using the “character” terminology, “but once you got your foot in the door …” She let the sentence dangle, its possibilities unlimited.

  What kind of work was she talking about? Bobby wanted to know.

  On the loading dock, said Red bluntly. The hardest kind of muscle-knotting labor. She could not articulate her notion intellectually, but somehow she felt it was possible for Bobby to erase—if only symbolically—all the years since his first arrest, by moving back to square one, the same kind of exhausting but honest work that had begun his adult life.

  Bobby said he would think about it, and indeed he revved himself up to make application. But then the telephone rang and Bobby spoke in a muffled voice. Disappearing for a few days, he returned to Red’s home unshaven and dejected. In his hands was a ski mask. He threw it angrily into a corner. “Everything I try to set up falls apart,” he said. “I can’t even score enough bread to buy milk for Vicki’s kids.” All he wanted, he said, was one modest stake, enough money to put aside the old life and live quietly with his woman and his family. For several more weeks he continued going away without explanation and returning in deep depression. Once Red saw him staring at his automobile, a 1950 Ford with stuffing coming out of the seats, as if it were the monument to his life and his despair. He was disgraced that Vicki had to take a job as a cocktail waitress during one of his long absences, and each time she brought home money, he was mortified.

  Then Vicki became pregnant and encountered difficulty in carrying the baby. There was danger that she would miscarry unless she stayed in bed and could afford the services of a gynecologist other than the one who so brusquely treated the poor people at the county hospital. In a whirlwind of renewed activity, Bobby burst out of the house each night, bundling up in his sister’s blankets and sweaters, in pursuit of midnight money. Red noted him swallowing a handful of uppers; his body seemed stretched like a slingshot. But after several forays there was no money in his pockets. Even his whores moved out on him, for when he became committed solely to Vicki, they were denied the father-lover who was the foundation of their labor. “I’m not much of a man any more,” he told his sister.

  Then a call came from Houston. Bobby spoke quietly, turning his back so that Red could not hear. When he hung up, he seemed both animated and troubled. He headed for the front door. Then, with an air of fatalism, he turned back and issued a haunting directive. “If I ever die,” he said, “just throw my body in a ditch somewhere.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” said Red.

  “Dead is gone, Sister. It’s the end of the string. I don’t want any preacher man mumbling God words over my corpse. If you hire a preacher man, I swear I’ll come back to haunt you.”

  Red shook off the macabre thoughts. “Where are you going?”

  “To Houston. If I can get that god damn wreck out there started.”

  “Are you taking Vicki?”

  Bobby shook his head negatively. There was no time to explain. Red gathered that he was hurrying to an appointment in Houston that could give him money, perhaps his manhood.

  THIRTY-ONE

  As the events would be one day reconstructed by authorities, Marcia McKittrick was staying at the home of Lilla Paulus for a few weeks during the summer of 1972. One afternoon she was luxuriating in a bubble bath when Lilla entered the bathroom and sat down next to the tub. Lilla spoke of a “contract.” Would Marcia’s new friend, Bobby, be interested in filling it?

  “I don’t think he does that kind of work,” Marcia would remember saying. “But I’ll ask him.”

  Marcia well knew of what Lilla spoke. She had been overhearing murmured talk in the household of an opportunity that existed to kill a man for money. And she further knew that the contract had been “shopped” around her world for several months. When she next saw Bobby and mentioned it, he quickly turned the offer down. Assassination was not his line. Never, in fact, had he been a violent man. Just the other day he had been playing pool and, angry over losing ten bucks, he hit his pool cue against the bar railing. A piece of the tip broke off and flew against his opponent’s cheek, causing a trickle of blood. Bobby insisted on taking his barely wounded friend to a doctor who could be trusted for a dab of mercurochrome and a Band-Aid.

  Besides, Bobby told Marcia, he had heard from others that this “contract” was fraught with peril. At least two able killers he knew had considered the offer, checked it out, and turned it down. One professional hit man with the chilling reputation of having slain somewhere between ten and fifty men with his busy gun had analyzed the difficulties for Bobby. The target was supposedly a doctor. The fellow worked most of the time in the Hermann Professional Building in Houston, which, during of
fice hours, had hundreds of people milling around the parking garages, lobbies, pharmacies, corridors, and suites. Impossible to shoot someone discreetly there! And the doctor lived in a big house on a wide-open boulevard, on a busy and prominent corner no less, with a wife, a child, and servants. Moreover, the neighborhood was River Oaks, one of the nation’s most exclusive preserves, heavily patrolled by private security guards, with watchdogs behind every azalea bush. “You slow down around there at night, and in ten seconds there’ll be a radio car asking your business,” the hit man cautioned Bobby.

  The price being mentioned was $5,000—$1,000 down, the rest on completion of contract. “That’s pretty low rent for this kind of work,” complained Bobby. Maybe he should at least talk to Lilla, suggested Marcia. No. Bobby declined. He felt both apprehension and the uneasiness of a man asked to do a job for which he held no experience.

  That night he telephoned his sister in Dallas to inquire after Vicki. “She may lose that baby,” warned Red. “She’s spotting pretty bad.”

  The next day he told Marcia that he normally did not kill people. “But I’m ragged,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  Wildly, carelessly, he ran with all the speed of his youth away from the white colonial house, where inside the doctor lay dead. At least he prayed that the son of a bitch was dead. He had kept coming at Bobby, over and over again. The squirrels he had shot on the farm in Venus had always fallen, quickly, silently, from their branches. But the doctor fought him until there was no more lead in the gun. His mind spun in hysteria. Almost screaming in fear and exultation, he leaped the sculptured lawns as if they were rows of cotton, weaving across the massive Tudor and French provincial estates, the oaks with their mossy fingers reaching down twisted demon fingers to imprison him. He wanted more of the reds in Marcia’s purse to gentle his pounding blood, for he was almost straight after the deed, and his veins were bursting and his position terrified him. There was even blood on his face—he could feel the clammy wetness—and whether it was his own or that of the doctor, he did not know. He wiped it away and dried his hand inside his windbreaker pocket, but at that moment his hand brushed against the still burning gun. His other hand clutched the briefcase that Lilla had said would contain at least $15,000 in cash, maybe as much as $25,000, that the doctor was secretly bringing back to Houston from Seattle. Eight hundred bucks! That was all he found in the wallet, and nothing of value in the briefcase, nothing but papers and medical pamphlets. A police car, siren screaming to break the quiet twilight lull of the lavish neighborhood, screeched around a corner on two wheels, and Bobby quickly lowered his head so that no one could mark his face. Even with a head swimming in barbiturates, he knew that he was as noticeable as a red buoy on a blue sea. He ran to a house and pressed his trembling body against a wall. Ahead he saw a row of thick, dense bushes bordering a house. He ran to them and impulsively threw the briefcase under a clump, kicking it back deep into the growth. And, a few steps away, he threw the gun under some shrubbery, stopping to brush dirt over it. Later, a thousand times he would curse this stupid act, but at the moment he was governed only by fear. He had to dispose of the gun and the briefcase, for the night was clamoring with sirens.

  Now, freed of these connections to the dead man, he began searching the street signs for Kirby Drive. At least a dozen times he and Marcia had circled these blocks on casing expeditions. He thought he knew them as well as his sister’s face. But now, in his desperate flight, they seemed to loop and swirl and dead-end. The carefully rehearsed plan was for Bobby to walk calmly along Kirby Drive several blocks south to the House of Pies where Marcia was waiting with the car. She had promised to stay put, close to the public telephone, in case something went wrong and he had to call. But now he could not find Kirby! He saw a man tending to his front yard up ahead, and Bobby slowed, trying to make his face puzzledly calm, his feet slow, and he asked for instructions. Which way was Kirby Drive? Helpfully the man pointed, smiling, for in that neighborhood it was like asking a resident of mid-Manhattan which way was Fifth Avenue.

  Running again, he saw ahead a busy street, heavy with traffic in both directions. He searched for a sign. South Shepherd Drive! Cursing, he ran across the courtyard of an apartment project and paused only long enough to bury the doctor’s billfold in a garbage can. He had kept it this long in entertainment of a notion to search the hidden compartments at leisure and keep the credit cards. But there was no time for that. He trotted along Shepherd, imagining himself a jogger and hoping others would take him for one, and when he came to an intersection and another busy drive called West Gray, he whooped happily at the sight of a public pay telephone. He dialed the House of Pies and waited. After two rings, Marcia’s familiar drawl answered softly. “There’s been a rumble,” Bobby blurted. “I’m at a Stop ‘n Go market on West Way.” Marcia repeated the street, echoing Bobby’s mistaken pronunciation of “West Gray.” Then ten eternal minutes crawled past. Bobby stayed inside the phone booth, swearing that he would strangle Marcia the moment she arrived. If she arrived. She could not be more than two minutes from his spot, and yet she had not shown. Perhaps she had bolted, flaky whore that she was, running off to Tibet as she had always vowed. Suddenly Marcia pulled up and honked, almost merrily. Bobby threw himself into the car and sank down low in the seat. It was done, he said. He had killed the doctor. There was eight hundred dollars in his wallet. He had not intended to kill the bastard, but he had fought. “He kept coming at me!” gasped Bobby.

  Then he grabbed Marcia’s arm. “You stupid ding!” he shrieked. “What took you so long?” She giggled at the use of his nickname for her, fixed as she was on the twin points of adventure and hysteria.

  “Well, you got the name of the street wrong!” she said in defense. “You told me West Way. It was West Gray!”

  Marcia would remember driving crazily to Lilla Paulus’ house, becoming lost several times, backing up, making illegal turns, at one point veering into a ditch. Bobby lay on the floor at her feet, worried that he would be arrested for murder because he had put himself into the hands of a retarded prostitute who could not even drive a getaway car. Over and over he screamed at her to keep the car on the road, but she, too, was full of grass and pills, and the route blurred before her. The ten-minute trip took thrice that as the nerve ends of the car’s occupants raged at one another. Waiting for them—Marcia would later recall—was Lilla, her serene and composed spinster face suddenly taut and jerky. On the ride, Marcia had not really focused on the enormity of their deed. But seeing Lilla suddenly consumed with uncharacteristic fear, Marcia felt her stomach knot. She ran to the bathroom and tried to vomit.

  “Well, I did it, that’s for sure,” Bobby said harshly, and the deed became even more permanent with his announcement. He hurried immediately to the bathroom, ignoring Marcia’s wretching, slashing desperately at his droopy mustache, hacking away the identification. Later, months later, Marcia could not remember the whole night. But there were shards that pierced her awake. Then, sometimes she would even burst out laughing, for the aftermath was not without elements of black comedy.

  Marcia would later recall Lilla rushing around her house in a purge, burning any threads that might bind her to the work—newspaper clippings, even an old photograph of her, Marcia, and Bobby, posing drunkenly. She had a clear recollection of Lilla opening a small chest and counting out money to Bobby—$5,000. Then Bobby promptly gave her $1,500 of it back, $500 being expenses, $1,000 being a sort of “finder’s fee” for steering him to the job in the first place. She saw Bobby stuff $3,500 into his pockets and then jerk his hand as if the money was acid.

  She could remember hearing of John Hill’s murder on the 10 P.M. television news and everyone standing in front of the set transfixed. Her recollection was that Lilla began rushing her unwanted guests out of the house, nagging them to be gone. Marcia threw a suitcase into the car trunk and slammed the lid. When, moments later, Bobby was ready to leave, the keys were nowhere to be found. Marcia had locked them in
side the trunk! For an hour Bobby struggled with a crowbar, trying to pry open the trunk, Lilla dancing and chattering at the impossible predicament. At one point Lilla contended that it was possible to get into a trunk from the rear seat, and she climbed through, wedging her slim and aging body into the trunk, then finding herself unable to either open it or return through the narrow opening. Now, locked in an ovenlike prison, she began to pound in terror. Marcia collapsed on the driveway pavement near hysteria, at the same time certain that any moment a police car would appear and capture them. Finally Bobby pried the trunk open and extricated Lilla. And they were off.

  Marcia could not recall the drive to Dallas, other than a memory that the radio played hillbilly music throughout the long night, and that they arrived near dawn, both strung out from amphetamines that worked in contradiction to the afternoon’s downs.

  The first thing Bobby did was wake up a hairdresser friend and have his hair bleached. Marcia went to visit her son and listened to the six-year-old child read from his primer. Late in the afternoon she caught up with Bobby and burst out laughing. The attempt to lighten his dark brown hair had been disastrous. Four applications of bleach had turned his locks a pinkish orange, and his scalp was festered with blisters from the peroxide. As Marcia was now wearing her hair in an electric red shade—Bobby said it looked like the “Jesus Saves” neon sign atop a Baptist church he once knew—their coiffures were hardly those to aid them in finding anonymity. “Don’t laugh at me, you crazy ding,” Bobby ordered grouchily, but Marcia could not control herself. Suddenly both burst out and began rolling about the floor of the hairdresser’s apartment, the tension of the previous night in Houston momentarily broken.