Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  From her sister prisoners in the county jail, Marcia had learned that Goree Women’s Prison in Huntsville was not the worst place in the world. The food was supposedly good, the facilities for recreation tolerable, and the work hard but at least it occupied the mind. “If I don’t do something fast,” Marcia thought to herself, “I am going to start screaming and keep screaming until they put a straitjacket on me.”

  In Dallas, Caperton arranged a generous trade-out sentence for Marcia—two years in the state prison, with time credited for the months she had reposed in the Houston jail. With a warning that she must remain on guard and behave herself—she would still be standing trial for murder one day soon—Caperton sent his client off to the penitentiary where Marcia promptly landed a sweetheart job—receptionist in the factory where state uniforms are made. With her vivid tales of gowns made from mirrors and of standing next to Dean Martin while he flung dice across the green felt tables of Las Vegas, Marcia quickly became a popular member of the prison community. None of her fellow inmates were rude enough to ask why, if Marcia had climbed so high on the ladder, she was now at the bottom rung again.

  On April 10, 1974, the telephone rang in Bob Bennett’s cramped fifth-floor office at the Harris County courthouse. On the line was a familiar voice. “This is Bobby V.”

  “Hi, Bobby,” said Bennett. “We’re on for next Monday.”

  “I know. It’s really going down this time, is it?”

  “Looks like it. You’re gonna be here, aren’t you?”

  “You know it,” said Bobby.

  “Bring your toothbrush. You’re gonna go this time,” said the prosecutor. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. I ain’t too happy about next Monday, but I’m all right.” The two men, now friends, hung up amicably. Bennett fretted for a few minutes. He was not sure, but he thought he discerned a sense of malaise in his star witness. But, Bennett reassured himself, Bobby said he would be here. So far he’d been a man of his word.

  On the Monday of the scheduled trial Jerry Carpenter rose early, dressed, and sat beside his home telephone, waiting for a call from Bobby at the Houston airport. Bobby always called the moment he hit town, and the homicide detective did not mind playing chauffeur. No call came. At 9 A.M., with the morning docket about to be called, Bennett sat at the state’s table, swiveling his neck every time the door at the rear of the courtroom opened, expecting to see Bobby’s lean figure stride in. When half an hour had passed and still no Bobby, the prosecutor made a mumbled excuse of having left something in his office and rushed there, thinking that perhaps his witness was lost in the courthouse corridors. For an hour Bennett sat nervously drumming his fingers, watching his telephone, watching his door. Finally the court clerk warned that the judge was growing impatient, and Bennett returned in bewilderment. Lilla Paulus was now represented by the South’s most celebrated criminal attorney, Percy Foreman, and it would be humiliating to stand up against the famous old giant and reveal that the state’s star witness was absent. Fortunately, luck was working for Bennett that morning. Percy Foreman requested a continuance, claiming that his client was suffering from cancer of the cervix, was a doomed woman, and must have further time to rally strength for the ordeal of trial.

  Bennett was not exceptionally moved by Mrs. Paulus’ medical complaint; in a decade with the DA’s office he had grown accustomed to defense lawyers inventing heart attacks and tumors for postponements. It was a famous Percy Foreman tactic to delay, to stall until memories grew weak and witnesses disappeared and prosecutorial enthusiasm diminished. “No client of mine ever went to the penitentiary who did not stand trial,” Percy often said. A little perversely, Bennett made noises of disappointment at the delay, he being prepared for trial and all that. The judge ordered a postponement until autumn.

  Bennett fairly flew out of the courtroom and began a telephone marathon in search of Bobby Vandiver. He ordered the $15,000 bond revoked, as a lever to expedite his truant witness’ arrest should he be off and running again. From Vicki’s parents, Bennett learned that their daughter and Bobby had left the Dallas area the night before, presumably en route to Houston for his trial. “God help me,” thought Bennett to himself, “he’s lying in a ditch somewhere. Somebody got to him and shot him.”

  Then Bennett telephoned Red, Bobby’s sister. She had little to tell, other than that her brother had left Dallas the night before, with Vicki.

  “Was he coming here, for the trial?” pressed the DA.

  “I think so,” said Red. “He was a little mixed up. And upset.” At the end of the conversation, somehow Bennett knew that Bobby was safe, not dead, only missing. He had walked to the edge of the water but he could not plunge in. Bobby was running. And the state’s murder case to avenge the killing of Dr. John Hill was once more in a shambles.

  Red had seen it coming. She had watched her brother examining his face in the bathroom mirror, frowning at the crows’ feet and the new worry lines. She knew that he was counting the years that he would have to spend once again in the penitentiary. Twelve years might pass before he could hold Vicki through the night again, and he worried that she might not wait for him. Vicki swore she would. “There will never be another man in my life,” she promised. But even this fealty bothered him, for he was guilty over the penalty he was imposing on a child-woman barely twenty years old.

  Late one night, when the house was quiet, Red heard soft noises from the living room. She thought someone had left the television set on, and she tiptoed in to shut it off. There she found her brother, crying softly, annoyed that Red had discovered his pain. “You wanna talk?” she asked gently, sitting beside him and trying to take his face in her hands.

  “No,” he said, turning away. “I don’t wanna talk. All I want is a life. It seems I never had one.”

  Presently the gynecologist gave Vicki sorrowing news. She required a hysterectomy after her difficult pregnancy and miscarriage of Bobby’s child. When she told him, Bobby was devastated. He slammed his fist into the kitchen wall. “I’m so sorry, baby,” he said. Not only was he consumed with guilt over Vicki’s loss of their baby—while he was in flight with Marcia—now he had no money to pay for an operation that he considered mutilating, and his fault.

  All of this Red knew, but none of it could she tell the helpful district attorney in Houston. Nor could she speak of the cheap pairs of brown cotton work gloves that had suddenly started turning up in the room where Bobby slept, or of the postmidnights and early dawns when her brother came dragging into the house, cold, once again cold.

  On the Sunday night that was the eve of his murder trial in Houston, Bobby and Vicki packed to leave in an old yellow Ford that he had purchased for $300, using the false name of J. C. Sheridan on the registration papers. Bobby kissed his sister good-by. He seemed in a hurry to leave. “Are you going to Houston?” she asked, for she saw his torment.

  “I don’t know, Red,” he said. “I just may not be able to make that scene. Not right away.” With smoke belching from the tailpipe, the old Ford—Bobby Vandiver’s only possession in the thirty-fifth year of an unhappy life—screeched out of Dallas.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  If ten men were standing in a row, John Raymer would be the one to whom least attention was paid. With a tendency to flush red when angry or engaged in spirited work, John Raymer’s round face, with a disappearing fringe of hair at the crown, resembled a hard-boiled egg. A few more pounds and he would be roly-poly, like a rubber beach toy that bounces up every time it is knocked to the sand, but there was little about him to mark him as someone to remember. In the spring of 1974 he was almost half a century old, short, portly, prudish-looking, and well accommodated to the fact that he had made but slight scratches on the face of the earth. Even his continuing ambition, to obtain a college degree through endless years of night study, was carried on not in hopes of writing a great poem or to illumine his relationship in the family of man. He did not expect to light historic fires at the age of fort
y-nine when and if he ever received his Bachelor of Police Science degree from Tyler State College. All John Raymer wanted was a shot at a better-paying job, perhaps one with the Texas parole board or another government agency that required a diploma. He could use another hundred dollars a month, maybe to slip a few bucks to the kids and the grandkids and, if any was left, to sustain his only real indulgence, the bass rig that bore him into the still, deep lakes of East Texas. John Raymer was relentlessly small town in fashion and horizon, and he knew it and would have it no other way. He considered himself on balance to be a decent, God-fearing police sergeant who did what was expected of him, that being observation and eviction of the “characters” who stayed past their tenuous welcome in Longview.

  In the early 1930s, when Texas was convulsed with the excitement of tearing open the earth and searching for the oil beneath, people said Longview would become one of the world’s great cities. It was the capital of the East Texas oil boom, and it was a rough, brawling town where men waded through streets of mud to reach the only whiskey stores within a hundred miles. A richly painted whore from Marseilles named Marie Claude became celebrated for so inflaming an ignorant roughneck with a pocketful of oil leases that he flung a packet of them at her, whereupon she screwed him efficiently, sold the papers for $640,000, and returned to Paris where she opened a club called Le Lone Star. But Longview never grew the way they said, Houston and Dallas and Fort Worth money and muscle moving in to lure the bookkeepers and executive offices away, and by the time John Raymer joined the Longview police force in the mid 1960s, the town’s population stood resolutely at around 50,000. Vestiges of its violent youth remained, however, for Longview had become a principal rest stop on the I-20 superhighway that connected Dallas-Fort Worth and Shreveport, Louisiana. It was also known as a retreat for the big-city police characters who sought a quiet place to hang low for a while. In his nine years on the force Sergeant Raymer ran some of Dallas’ meanest men out of his town, and he kept a continuing eye on the comings and goings of Whiskey Bend, a collection of roadhouses and cheap cafés clustered like spores of mold around a curve of the Sabine River, just beyond the city line. If an out-of-town hooker or robber-lookin’ fellow turned up and stayed but a day or two before moving on, then John Raymer let them be. But should one hang around town long enough to arouse his suspicion, John Raymer would find reason to suggest a quick leave-taking. When Raymer screwed up his face in a scowl, people usually obeyed. He was not the kind of cop to argue with.

  Because of his quest for a college degree, Raymer worked the shift that nobody else wanted—from 11 P.M. until 7 A.M., the short hours of drunks and car crashes and sobbing women. On the midnight of April 18, 1974, he made note of a new car in town, a 1969 yellow Ford with license plates from the Dallas area. Nothing unusual about this, except that it was parked outside the Continental Café, née Charlotte’s Grill, an all-night joint that smelled of hamburger grease, spilled beer, and pool-table chalk. Directly beside the I-20, it captured hungry late night travelers and sent them on gulping antacids, and it often housed for a few hours the kind of folk Raymer wanted to escort out of town. When the yellow Ford stayed outside the Continental for a few more days, Raymer set out to discover the owner. He parked nearby and after a wait noticed a man come out of the café and get into the yellow car. He was a skinny man in his early thirties, ragged-looking, in jeans and a T-shirt, with a droopy mustache and a vaguely hippie-ish air. A regular of the café paid a due bill owed to Raymer by reporting that the new man called himself “J.C.” and was a fair pool player who hustled a few bucks, and between games seemed enamored of a tall, quiet, flat-chested new waitress named Vicki. Well, fine and good, mused Raymer. But he would have bet half his pay check that “J.C.” was in town for one of four reasons: (1) selling dope; (2) waiting for an underworld contact; (3) pimping; or (4) on the lam. The next night Raymer strolled casually into the café—he often dropped in for coffee—and sized up the thin, shaggy man. “J.C.” was shooting pool quietly with a black man, still a novel sight in Longview after dark. The town was deep South in racial attitude, and the more redneck of the old-timers would have preferred that niggers be off the sidewalks by sundown.

  The way the thin man moved, a little jerkily, and the color of his eyes—streaked with red—made Raymer decide that he was probably an addict, strung out, perhaps trying unsuccessfully to kick. While the cop drank his coffee, the new waitress, Vicki, went over and put her arm around “J.C.” She was half a head taller than he, and she struck Raymer as a sexless, vacant girl. “Well, she won’t last long with him,” Raymer thought to himself. “These old boys swap these girls back and forth like used cars.”

  Just before he punched out for the morning, as a cheerful orange sun poked its head over the pine forests to the east, Raymer ran a check on the yellow Ford, a 1028 as it is known. He asked Motor Vehicle Division in Austin for identification of the registered owner, and in three minutes the computer flashed back, J. C. Sheridan, Viva Street, Mesquite, Texas—a Dallas suburb. “Okay,” thought Raymer, “let’s go one step further.” He asked the Texas Criminal Information Center in Austin and the national center in Phoenix for any data on a man of that name. From both cities hurried back immediate response that several similar names were stored in their computers, but without a date of birth or additional identification; nothing concrete could be dispatched.

  Raymer let it ride for a few days, marking each night that the yellow Ford was parked outside the Continental Café. During the day hours, while the officer slept, another patrolman noted that the car usually moved around various cheap motels in the area. Then Raymer picked up a piece of interesting and troubling news from his informer. The thin man was not really named “J. C. Sheridan.” He answered to “Bobby” and the rumor inside the Continental was that he was in some sort of heavy trouble in Mesquite. Moreover, he had been seen carrying a gun.

  That was enough. Raymer would question Whatever-his-name-was that very night, and if he had a gun on him, then that was a felony, worth two to five years in the state penitentiary. The Texas legislature, alarmed at the awesome number of barroom killings in the state, had recently enacted a law making it a felony to carry a weapon into a place that sold beer, wine, or whiskey.

  On the evening of May 11, 1974, a raucous Saturday night, Raymer collected a brother officer for support and went to the Continental just after midnight. Raymer took a seat at the crowded counter and accepted a cup of coffee from the busy Vicki. A minor commotion at the entrance caught Raymer’s ear, and he turned to see what was happening. A querulous, falling-down drunk had detained the other policeman, who now had his hands full. In the next moment, Raymer’s eyes swept across the room to the pool table. “Bobby” or “J. C. Sheridan” looked directly at him, across the clouds of cigarette smoke. For a moment of suspense, their eyes met, locked, studied, as if they knew one another’s business. Then the thin man abruptly put down his pool cue and almost hastened to a dark rear booth where he joined a table of several people. Raymer sighed. Too much was going on. The joint was packed. If gunfire broke out, a lot of people might get hurt. Best to come back another night and collect this customer. He seemed to be settling down in Longview, anyway.

  The weekend passed, and late Monday afternoon, just as John Raymer was awakening after a day of fretful slumber—he had never really grown accustomed to sleeping off-schedule—the telephone beside his bed rang. An anonymous voice barked his name. The voice was youngish, rough, and a new informer. “Raymer,” said the caller, “that fellow you’ve been checking on … I believe his name is Vannerman. Bobby Vannerman.”

  “Wait,” said Raymer, trying to clear his head, reaching for a bedside pad and pencil. “How are you spelling that name? V-a-n-n-e-r-m-a-n?”

  “Yeah. That’s about it.” The anonymous caller hung up.

  On this night, Raymer had planned to attend his last class in a psychology course called Techniques of Interviewing. But he had already taken the final and gotten a B fo
r the semester, and since the concluding session was to be a party given by the teacher, he decided to cut class. Instead he would pursue “Bobby Vannerman.” Raymer sent the name and a physical description to the Mesquite Police Department, as the yellow Ford was registered in that city: “White male, approximately 35, five feet eight inches tall, 145 pounds, black over brown [hair over eyes].” He stayed near the teletype for an hour, waiting for an answer, but at 11 P.M., when it was time to commence nightly rounds, no response had come. “If something turns up from Mesquite,” Raymer told the dispatcher, “call me.”

  In ten minutes Raymer was paged on his car radio and instructed to go to a pay telephone, meaning for him to get off the police radio that is heard by so many citizens with their police band receivers. “Your boy Vannerman turns out to be one Bobby Wayne Vandiver,” said the dispatcher when Raymer called in. “The yellow Ford’s registered to his sister’s address. He’s also wanted in Houston on a warrant for jumping bond in a murder case.” The message from Mesquite did not mention which murder, so Raymer did not attach unusual significance to the report. What he had to deal with was a routine fugitive at loose in his town.

  At that moment he was speaking from a pay telephone directly across the street from the Continental Café. He looked through the smoke-stained front window and through it saw Bobby Vandiver shooting pool. “Guess I’ll go over and pick him up,” said Raymer. But before he hung up, still another message clacked onto the police teletype:

  MESQUITE PD TO LONGVIEW PD

  TX05 71600 5-15-74 11:42 CDT

  Ref: Bobby Wayne Vandiver

  Attn Officers involved in Vandiver case. On 2-13-74 this subject was in Mesquite jail on charges of DWI and no Drivers Lic. Subject advised he would kill the next officer who tried to arrest him. If this need be verified, contact Mesquite officers Duckworth or Westphal. Auth. Sgt. Warren.