She could go anywhere, said Marcia, summoning her old bravado. A trick in Denver would send her money. A man in Atlanta would gladly dispatch his private plane. There was a long list of men who would rush to help her. She rattled on, throwing up the false gods, watching Bobby slip into blackness and anger. Finally he rose and said, “Then I guess you don’t need me any more.” He threw his scotch and milk directly into her face and walked out of the bar. She waited until he was well gone before she found a bar towel to dry her face. But it was hard, for she kept crying.
Bobby had been in Dallas for a few weeks, hiding out at his sister’s home. Red still did not know the desperateness of his situation. He had wrapped himself in the security of his family, growing emotional when Red produced long-wrapped Christmas presents from under a bed where they had been kept for months, awaiting his return. After her miscarriage, Vicki had taken a nearby apartment and Bobby spent occasional nights there, still in love but not totally at ease with the thin and quiet girl any more. Red could sense his shame and humiliation at having been away during her miscarriage. The afternoon that he ran into Marcia at the Painted Duck, Dallas police arrested Vicki at her apartment and took her to headquarters for questioning. She refused to tell them anything. The officers also went by Red’s house in search of Bobby.
In panic, he called a character friend who could normally be trusted. Bobby needed a hideout. The friend had one, a cabin on a lake near Dallas called Little Elm Reservoir. It was deserted this time of year. No one would find him there. In his flight he took along a girl named Sherry, an occasional prostitute whose arms were full of puncture marks. She had worked for him now and then as a whore, and was devoted to him, and would at least offer the company of another human being.
Captain Joe Murphy of the Dallas division of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state’s crack police force, had picked up a piece of news from a snitch paying a due bill. A dude named Bobby was supposedly holed up at a lake shack near Dallas. The character world grapevine had it that this Bobby No-last-name was wanted in Houston for murder. Not making any important connection, Captain Murphy routinely called Houston. Were they looking for some old boy named Bobby to clean up a murder? Jerry Carpenter grabbed the phone. “If it’s Bobby Vandiver, we sure as hell are!” he said. “Have you got him set down pretty good?”
Captain Murphy had no idea. He called the Dallas police and asked if any of their officers could recognize Bobby Wayne Vandiver on sight. Lieutenant A. M. Eberhardt, a Brooklyn-born man who had never shaken his New York accent, spoke up. He certainly could. He had arrested Bobby for his very first offense. “I busted him the time he fell on that safe job,” remembered Eberhardt.
The news was passed on to Carpenter in Houston. As much as he wanted to make the arrest himself, the homicide detective knew that he could not gamble on the time it would take to get to Dallas. “Go ahead and run on him,” he ordered. “But don’t tell him anything about a murder. Just say he’s wanted down here for questioning about an old burglary.”
It was true. Bobby had been arrested on a charge of possessing burglar’s tools in Houston in 1972, and he never turned up in court to answer the charge. A convenient warrant was thus out for his arrest.
The day was gray and cool and a wind made infant whitecaps on the lake north of Dallas. Bobby lay on an old leaky water bed; Sherry was stoned. She had begun to open a can of chili, but the only cooking pot had hardened food from the night before still in it, and the necessity to wash it had seemed overwhelming. She slumped beside the sink, sitting on the floor, trying to read a movie magazine, whimpering, wanting another fix. Bobby would not let her go out, for he had seen a suspicious-looking man walking around one of the deserted cabins the day before.
Then he looked through the window and saw them coming. Three cars. Eight men. All with drawn guns. One Ranger in boots and Stetson even had a machine gun in his hands, stalking the awakening spring earth as if it were the jungles of a South Pacific island. He recognized Lieutenant Eberhardt from a thousand years ago. He smiled ruefully. When the knock came, he took the gun from beneath the pillow and gripped it. “Let ’em in,” he softly told the girl.
The officers burst in with their weapons a forest of menace. Bobby, wearing only jeans, barefoot, rose and held up his hands in surrender. Captain Murphy instantly saw the .38 beside his bed and grabbed it, as the others threw manacles on the arms and legs of their prisoners.
“They need to talk to you in Houston, Bobby” said Lieutenant Eberhardt. “How you been?”
On the ride downtown Bobby mentioned that he had briefly considered making his arrest more difficult. “I thought about letting you guys hold court on me,” he said, using the character world euphemism for going down with guns blazing. “But I was afraid that skinny old girl would get hurt.”
Now it was a prize fight—Gamino and Carpenter in their corner, Bobby in his. Each side spent a day or two sizing the other up, making tentative jabs, withdrawals, no damage done. The cops made sure to obey every constitutional rule, informing the prisoner that he was being charged under an old possession-of-burglary-tools offense and, as this was his fourth felony complaint, it was the ultimate one. Bobby faced a conviction under the habitual criminal statute, which meant an automatic sentence of life imprisonment in the state penitentiary. Under this charge, no bail was allowed; there was, therefore, no question of Bobby slipping from their grasp under bond. He was offered the right to counsel, but he declined. “I can handle myself,” he said. The police knew they were dealing with a professional, not one apt to be seduced by salt and sugar routines, with one cop coming on as a Spanish inquisitor, the other as Father O’Malley. The contest was raw and elemental, between two strong forces, neither knowing exactly what strength the other side possessed. Not until the second day of questioning was the murder of Dr. John Hill even mentioned.
Jerry Carpenter, who had been bantering in whore talk almost pleasantly, suddenly asked, “Did you kill Dr. John Hill on September 24, 1972, here in Houston?” Behind his tinted glasses, his eyes were suddenly cold.
Bobby feigned wondrous innocence. Not only did he possess no knowledge of such a terrible deed, he was not even in Houston on that date. Yes, he remembered positively. He was in Dallas then. Relatives and friends could place him there.
“Then,” suggested Carpenter, “you won’t have any worry about making a showup.” Bobby nodded helpfully. He had no objection to standing in a line of men and displaying himself for some witness in a darkened theater.
In the morning showup, Connie Hill studied the faces of seven men but was unable to pick out Bobby as the one who grabbed her blouse and killed her husband. “I’m sorry,” she told Joe Gamino. “I only saw him for a split second and then I started running.” At that moment, seven months ago, Bobby was wearing a green pillowcase over his face because he had been unable to find a ski mask for sale in Houston in September. At Connie’s failure, Jerry Carpenter was momentarily disappointed. But in the afternoon the child, Robert Hill, fascinated at participating in a police drama, watched intently as the prisoners shuffled into line. After a few moments of somber study, the boy narrowed the list down to two. One of the prisoners he pointed to was Bobby Vandiver. And in the evening line-up, Myra Hill was instantly positive. Tight-lipped, she nodded in her definitive fashion. “That’s the man,” she whispered to the detectives. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
This damning information was laid on Bobby, but he would not budge. “She’s crazy,” said Bobby. “How can I defend myself against a crazy woman?”
Joe Gamino turned philosophical. Speaking gently and easily about his experience in such matters, he talked abstractedly about multiple defendants. The history of such cases is that the one who co-operates first gets the best deal. “It’s all a matter of who gets down with us first,” he said. “When and if we get Marcia, and she gets down, then it’ll be rough on you.”
“And by the way,” pressed Jerry Carpenter, “where is Marcia M
cKittrick?” Bobby denied knowing a night creature of that name. “Oh, come on, Bobby,” insisted Carpenter, “we know you’re her old man. And we know she got the gun from the black doctor. And you got the gun from Marcia and you killed John Hill with it.”
Well, it was certainly true that he knew a little of the whore business, allowed Bobby, but he did not know a lady of that appellation. His denial dropped heavily in the oppressive room of interrogation, a lifeless place of dirty blue walls, a barrel desk and chairs, a speaker box in the corner that, though functioning only for public address announcements, gave the appearance of a Big Brother ear, listening, recording.
Carpenter meditated a few moments, then had an idea. A long shot. He suddenly took out his pencil and drew two dots on the face of the desk, each six inches apart. He assumed the manner of a professor illustrating a lecture. “Here’s you,” he said to Bobby Vandiver, pointing to the first dot. “And here,” he said, moving the pencil across to the other mark, “is Dr. John Hill.” Slowly, stretching out the suspense, he put two more dots in between. He drew a line of connection between the first dot named Bobby and the unidentified second dot. “This is Marcia McKittrick,” he said. Then his pencil hovered over the fourth dot. He pushed down hard, snapping the point. From a corner of his mind he pulled out a fourth name. “And this is Lilla Paulus.” With a slashing motion, he linked all four dots, like a child completing a numbered puzzle.
Bobby stared at the desk top. He expelled his breath, sharply. “Oh, wow,” he said. “You know her name.”
Carpenter nodded, hoping that his face would not betray his gamble. Several times during the investigation, the name of Mrs. Lilla Paulus had arisen, the first time one week after the murder. Now and then it had come up again—he knew that Marcia occasionally slept there—but the name was only one among many. As a bluff, a dangerous bluff if it had not worked, he elected to throw in her name in his game of dots; he would later bless the fates that made him win.
“Why don’t you get down with us, Bobby?” he said. “Get your business straight.”
For a long while Bobby sat silent, staring at the dots. Finally he opened the door, but only a crack. “If I was to get down,” he tempted, “how much would you need to have?”
“We want it all,” said Joe Gamino.
“What if I didn’t know it all?” said Bobby, suggesting that names were involved which were unknown to him.
“Then I’d have to talk to the DA,” said the officer.
Again, silence. The detectives could watch the forces of torment working within their prisoner’s gut. Gamino intruded gently. Would it be worth it to a man to spend the rest of his life in a penitentiary, if that man was not the only one involved in a murder? Now would it, Bobby? Bobby was tired, he wanted sleep. A few hours later, after a shower in the police gymnasium and an uncomfortable meal in the police cafeteria where Bobby sat in a storm of blue uniforms, squirming, unable to eat anything but a package of crackers, he asked to see the district attorney.
Bob Bennett quickly dropped what he was doing and drove the few blocks across town from the Harris County courthouse to the Houston city jail. He was a young assistant DA in his middle thirties, a short, ambitious prosecutor who somehow resembled the formal oil paintings that hang in statehouse rotundas. There was the air of a nineteenth-century senator about him, even in his dark hair that fell in indented layers about his ears. Bennett was respected at the police station, both for the moonlighting weekends he put in advising officers on legal points in cases about to be filed or dropped, and for always making himself available to help them through the maze of courthouse red tape. He had a picture-book wife and children, a pleasing and funny manner of self-deprecation (with the ability to put on various accents and faces), and a very real awareness of the distasteful necessity of negotiating with suspected criminals. Bennett’s franchise at the DA’s office was organized crime, though Houston was the largest American city without a Mafia family structure. He knew little of the background of the John Hill murder case, but what he did recognize—as had so many others before him—was that here was a case with enormous potential. A man could run for district attorney someday on the power that successful prosecution would net. But he further sized it up as a case deadly with mine traps. Gamino and Carpenter told him on the telephone that they were reasonably sure they had the trigger man in the Hill murder, but if anyone else was to be implicated, it would take some skilled bobbing and weaving.
The two men, prosecutor and killer, had much in common, and from their first meeting a rapport was struck. They shared the same Christian name; both were country boys. Bennett had grown up in a small Louisiana town, son of an oil field worker, and like his adversary in the police interrogation room, he played sports with skill and passion, remarkably scrappy due to his slight stature of only five feet eight inches. A Tulane University football scout had come to see him play and burst out laughing at the notion of awarding a scholarship to a player that modest in dimension. Not only was Bennett the first member of his family to seek education beyond high school, he was the first to lift himself from the restrictions of his social caste. He and Bobby Vandiver could have talked for hours of how to bale hay and of football scores and of the lakes of East Texas where wide-mouthed bass slap against submerged cottonwood stumps, or—poignantly—why their common roots bore such dissimilar branches. But the business of the moment was barter.
It was in Bobby’s mind that, if he confessed, then a suspended or probated sentence might be arranged. Bennett shook that off immediately. “There’s no way you’re going to get out of this without going to the joint,” the prosecutor said. “You’re gonna have to do time. Of course, whatever we work out here will have to be cleared with my superiors … and when the case gets to a judge, he could well send you up for life. But you know the procedure as well as I do.…” Bennett let the sentence dangle, but Bobby nodded to finish it. Both men knew that judges usually follow the DA’s recommendation in sentencing.
How much time? Bobby wanted to know. Already he had spoken of Vicki and his love for her. He had told Jerry Carpenter that women had messed him up for the last time. He wanted nothing more than to get his ordeal over with and marry Vicki and disappear.
Bennett had anticipated this question. He had a ready answer. “Twelve years,” he said. The offer was generous; Bobby could serve that sentence and be out, with good behavior, in a minimum of two years. Most likely he would stay for five. Unless he was a pain in the ass to all concerned, he would not stay the full twelve. Carpenter and Gamino were both surprised at the district attorney’s proposal. At that moment in Texas, some judges were giving thirty years for marijuana possession. But Bennett recognized the basics of the situation. “I knew Bobby Vandiver was a pawn,” he would later say, “and I knew he was in over his element. Sure it was a foul thing he did, and sure it was an assault against the peace of our community. But I thought it was an equally foul thing to hire him, and to take advantage of him. I wanted the ones who put him up to it. And if we went for him alone, then the door to those others would be forever shut.”
Bobby absorbed the offer, chewed on it, countered with a suggestion that less time in the slammer might make his memory more valuable. Bennett refused. Not even a glimmer of promise was in his eyes. “I’m not fixin’ to horse-trade with you, Bobby. That’s an exercise in futility. I’d rather try a case any day than plead one. Ask these officers and you’ll know I mean what I say.”
Late in the afternoon of the third day Bobby made a telephone call to his sister in Dallas. He told her he was in trouble but that he was being well treated. She urged him to get a lawyer. He refused. He was so far content with his negotiations. “I’ll run it all down to you real soon,” he said mysteriously. Then he thought awhile, chain-lit a cigarettte, drank the rest of his now cold coffee, and leaned back in the stiff chair with his eyes closed. Joe Gamino watched him, and in his heart was concern. He knew that Bobby was wrestling with one last demon, the fear that if
he told on the others he would be breaking the character code of silence. It was not comforting to the homicide detective that he was offering the benevolence of the law to this skinny, wretched, wasted, but somehow appealing man, knowing that when the cops were done with their work—and Bobby was locked away—then a screwdriver might easily find its revengeful way into his heart one distant night in a dark corner of Huntsville Prison. “What can I tell this kid to calm this fear?” wondered Gamino to himself, and the answer was nothing.
“Well,” said Bobby after a time, “I suppose I’d better get down with you boys.”
“You did it?” asked Jerry Carpenter.
“Yeah. Now where do you want me to start?”
THIRTY-THREE
For the next six days, in a marathon that seemed to have no divisions of day or night—the outside world had in fact ceased to exist for the hunters and the hunted—the detectives listened and prodded while Bobby led them through it all. He told of his meeting with Marcia, their brief and tempestuous relationship as whore and pimp, the occasional nights spent in the hospitality of Lilla Paulus, the first mention of the contract to kill John Hill, the plans and the plottings, the trip to Las Vegas in search of the doctor, the night of death, the flight to California. Often Bob Bennett dropped by, quietly observing, occasionally asking a telling question, anxious that the prisoner’s constitutional rights were protected so as not to have the case break apart one future day on the altar of the Supreme Court. Now and then the prosecutor would remind Bobby that he was entitled to call a lawyer, but Bobby always refused. The only outside person he spoke with was his sister Red in Dallas. He did not reveal the enormity of his position, but he was refreshed by his conversations with her.
All three representatives of authority found themselves somehow liking the wiry man shifting restlessly on the center-ring tanbark. As he spoke, his tale seemed straight, wry, unremorseful. It was there—a fait accompli, now wash it and be done with it.
Blood and Money Page 43