Thus prepared to walk across a perilous tightrope, Lilla Paulus raised her hand and vowed to tell the whole truth. She looked like an old bird, ready to peck at the questions thrown at her. Her voice was weak and tremulous. Her eyes were sad, magnified behind thick glasses, great pools of sorrow and burden. Before she could even offer her name, Lilla Paulus began to cough again, pressing her handkerchief to her lips, bending over it in such discomfort that the worry was she might spew out her throat’s blood as payment for the cruel ordeal. At first Bennett fretted that the jurors would greet her with sympathy, but then he glimpsed one of the young women on the panel looking a little skeptical at the beautifully timed seizure. That was promising.
DeGeurin rushed to the heart of the matter. “Do you know Ash Robinson?” he asked.
Lilla answered politely. “I know of him,” she began. “Personally he is not an acquaintance of mine.”
“Has Ash Robinson ever been in your home?”
“No.” The response was as positive as a beat on a bass drum. Her eyes swiveled briefly to Bob Bennett, who was not upset by the answer, only amazed that DeGeurin would permit his client to completely repudiate the not particularly damning fact that she at least knew the old man. Her total denial was so surprising that Bennett wondered if he could disprove this in the precious few hours left to him. The trial seemed likely to end by the next afternoon. Given a week’s recess—an impossibility!—the prosecutor felt confident he could find a score of people who could connect Ash Robinson and Lilla Paulus as old and even devoted friends. Not only had their lives entwined at the Alameda Stables, Bennett had heard a promising bit of gossip that Lilla had even served as the old man’s deputy at the aborted murder-by-omission trial of Dr. John Hill in 1971, attending each session, telephoning him each night with blow-by-blow accounts. And Bennett also knew that Ash Robinson had told at least one intimate friend that he had asked Lilla to help him dig up scandalous information on John Hill’s character, if such existed, so he could use it as defense ammunition in the surgeon’s $10-million slander suit against him. But at this moment all Bob Bennett could do was sit openmouthed, waiting for the next brazenness from the widow Paulus. He knew now he was up against a pro.
FORTY
It took Lilla Paulus only thirty-five minutes to present her life and times to the jury—or, more correctly, the version she chose to offer on this occasion. And it was so banal and colorless that the wonder was she had not expired from boredom years before. She bade the jurors accept her as a “country woman” who had labored hard all of her unfrilled life, only to encounter great pain and anguish in these, her dimming years. She managed to work in frequent references to the cancer that had allegedly invaded her frail body. “Let’s see, that was after my cancer operation …” she would say. And there were frequent allusions to her widowhood. Such-and-such occured “after my husband Claude passed away from a heart attack.” Once she even combined both cancer and heart trouble in the same answer, seasoning with a bit of economic hardship as a bonus. “We bought a smaller two-bedroom house after I had cancer surgery and Claude had his heart condition.” Death seemed to knock quite regularly at Lilla’s door. She even spoke wistfully of her “sweetheart,” a man named Corley whom she had taken up with after the death of Claude. Of all things, this beau dropped fatally of a heart attack while digging a vegetable garden at Lilla’s side. At this Bennett bit the inside of his cheek to keep from groaning—or laughing. It was too bad about the poor man dying at such a patriotic pastime, but it was too much, the way Lilla delivered the mournful set piece.
Then DeGeurin moved to a poignant area.
“Do you have a daughter?”
Lilla smiled, almost sweetly. It was the first ray of light to cross her face since the hour the trial began. “Yes,” she said. “Mary … she’s twenty-seven.… She went to St. John’s School.…” Here Lilla paused for effect, letting the name of the most distinguished and expensive private school in town soak in. “I was a Brownie leader and Girl Scout mother her first two years there.…”
Had Lilla here stood up in the witness box, produced an American flag and, while waving it, delivered both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and helpful hints for home canning, Bob Bennett would not have been surprised. Clearly this defendant was not going to own up to even the tiniest bit of adolescent mischief. If she kept this up, the jury would accuse him of setting a torch beneath St. Lilla of Underwood Street.
Now DeGeurin led his client through a series of demolitions, exploding every major allegation levied against her by the prosecution.
—She denied ownership, authorship, or knowledge of the four slips of paper the state had introduced as evidence. The scrap found in her purse with Ash Robinson’s private number? “I did not write it down, nor do I know whose it was.…” Perhaps some friend had given it to her for some unknown reason, and she had put it in her purse and forgotten about it. Nor had she ever seen the slips of paper with airline schedules and various telephone numbers relevant to the case and witnesses.
—She denied meeting Ash Robinson in the Ben Taub Hospital parking lot.
—She denied receiving money from Ash Robinson.
—She denied ever meeting or knowing Bobby Wayne Vandiver.
—She denied that her home was “an arsenal,” as Marcia McKittrick had implied. “My husband had a 20-gauge shotgun he had owned for years,” said Lilla, “and a pistol, and I still have them.” That was the extent of that.
—She even denied a minor bit of testimony from Marcia McKittrick that her daughter, Mary Jo, had ridden horses with Joan Robinson Hill at various equestrian shows. Lilla insisted that Joan Hill was a fixture on the “society circuit” while her own daughter was more modestly engaged in rodeos. Their bridle paths did not cross. She would not permit even the frailest thread to bind her to the Ash Robinson family.
But DeGeurin had to introduce information more substantial than that to discredit Marcia McKittrick. He knew that the jurors were probably wanting to know how a respectable widow like Lilla Paulus ever admitted a disreputable prostitute-dope addict like Marcia McKittrick to a household where Brownies and Girl Scouts had once gathered.
“Do you know Marcia McKittrick?” he asked.
Lilla put on a brief face of displeasure. “Yes.”
“When did you meet Marcia McKittrick?”
“In the spring of 1972.”
“Who introduced you?”
“… a friend of my husband’s.”
And then Lilla made a mistake. She was almost across the tightrope when she fell. It could have been avoided. But she did what every lawyer fears a well-rehearsed witness might do—deviate from the script.
Lilla was telling how Marcia inveigled her way into the household. The version was that Lilla, freshly widowed, her own daughter married and living in another city, suffered from loneliness. Along came this girl Marcia, seemingly friendless as well, in need of surrogate mothering, breathing a little vitality and the spring air of youth into the deep, solitary autumn of Lilla Paulus’ life.
“Marcia seemed to be a lonely girl,” said Lilla, her voice brushed by the sadness of bitter recollection. “… she needed a place to stay.… I liked her … even though you could gather from her conversation that her life was just a little bit different”—dramatic pause—“from mine.”
Bob Bennett practically sat up in his chair from electric shock. He repeated the phrase to himself: “… you could gather from her conversation that her life was just a little bit different from mine.” Had Lilla suddenly lost control? Did she realize that this seemingly innocent remark was perhaps a key to the locked doors of her life?
Incredibly, she went even further. Her tale continued: After Marcia McKittrick had ingratiated herself into the household, she began abusing Lilla’s hospitality by bringing around worrisome men of dubious repute. “I told Marcia once that I did not ever want any of her friends … those men … in my house,” sniffed Lilla. “I was a widder woman.…”
> DeGeurin concluded his questioning with a whiff of police muscle tactics. “Did Jerry Carpenter threaten you? Make any promises?”
Lilla nodded vigorously. “Yes. He told me I would be free of any involvement if I would implicate Ash Robinson.”
“What did you say to that?”
“I told Jerry Carpenter I thought the police were supposed to find out the truth. If I testified the way he wanted me to, that would be perjury.”
A hush, the kind when an audience waits in the moment of darkness and suspense for the curtain to rise, fell across the courtroom. Bob Bennett stood and looked rather courteously at the woman in the jury box. How would he impeach what she had said? The feeling in the spectator section was that Lilla had made a powerful argument on her behalf.
The prosecutor began quietly, wondering in his very first question how Lilla’s husband supported his family. There must have been a lot of money coming into the cookie jar to buy a house on prestigious Sunset Boulevard and send a daughter to St. John’s School and indulge her love of horses.
Well, answered Lilla, she wasn’t very good at finances, but as best she knew, her husband had “investments” and “stocks and bonds from which dividends came in” and “there was some rent property in Galveston.”
Bennett arched one eyebrow. “Rent property in Galveston?”
“Yes. Some houses on E Street.”
Suddenly his voice whiplashed. “Your husband also had an income from gambling, didn’t he?”
Lilla put on a face of bewilderment. “No,” she said.
“He was a bookmaker, wasn’t he?”
“Not that I know of,” said Lilla, shooting a look at the jury that said the question was impudent and ridiculous. DeGeurin objected, and he had good cause. The district attorney was on thin ice if he planned to impeach Lilla Paulus on the character of her dead husband. With a warning to Bennett that he proceed with extreme caution, the judge let the questioning continue. Judge Price was similarly troubled by the halo Lilla had worn during her testimony, but he could not permit the prosecution to tilt it by wandering off into areas irrelevant to the business of the day, that being whether Lilla Paulus was an accomplice to the murder of John Hill.
Very well, Bennett would drop the queries into Claude Paulus’ line of work. But he returned to the “rent property” in Galveston.
“These rent houses were on Post Office Street, weren’t they?” asked Bennett, emphasizing the address, for Post Office Street in Galveston was to prostitution what New York’s Bowery is to bums.
“Well,” said Lilla, giving in a fraction, “E Street is the same as Post Office Street.”
“They were whorehouses, weren’t they?” shot back Bennett.
As DeGeurin shouted his objection, Bennett nodded, knowing the question was out of bounds, but pleased to have made the point anyway. Now he tried to break Lilla down on her blundering aside that her life was “just a little bit different” than Marcia’s. Surely, said Bennett, Lilla knew that Marcia worked as a prostitute.
No, insisted Lilla, she had no knowledge of that.
A half dozen ways Bennett asked this question, and a half dozen times Lilla replied that she had no frame of reference for knowing that her house guest earned money in that sordid capacity.
Bennett grunted. What he wanted to do was tear open one of the folders on his table, seize Lilla’s rap sheet dating from three decades past, make a paper airplane out of it, and sail it squarely into her lap. Perhaps she could enlighten him as to the nature of her own experiences with police, beginning in 1942 and dotted with entries like “Investigation—(hold for clinic)” and “Vag. and common prostitute.”
Surely, under the “It takes one to know one” principle, Lilla must have had the tiniest glimmer of knowledge concerning Marcia’s work habits. But the law would not permit the district attorney to do this. Only felony convictions and misdemeanors involving moral turpitude were admissible, and Lilla’s rap sheet would thus remain as buried from the jury’s eyes as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Frustrated, Bennett passed the witness, but with the proviso that he would perhaps call her back. During recess he went to his office and slumped seething in his chair. He had not pried a molecule of concession out of Lilla’s tight lips. “This is a classic example of how the judicial system hides the truth,” he said. “I sure would like to ask Mrs. Paulus, ‘By the way, Lilla, did you teach all those other Brownies to be whores, like you did your own daughter?’”
A year or so before, in the small Texas town of Hallettsville, Mary Jo Paulus had testified in her unsuccessful attempt to claim the inheritance from her paternal grandmother’s estate. She had therein claimed, under penalty of perjury, that her mother, Lilla Paulus, had trained her to be a prostitute. It was all there, in stark and painful black and white, on the pages of a court record in another town. But Bob Bennett could not pass these documents around to his jury, either.
“Why don’t you get Mary Jo here and put her on the stand?” wondered one of the DA investigators who had not been involved in the case for the lifetime that Bennett had.
“She won’t come,” snapped Bennett. “She’s scared to death. And, buddy, I don’t really blame her.”
He returned to the courtroom and ordered Lilla back in the box. There was no more mock courtesy. Was it not true, demanded Bennett, that she had offered the contract on John Hill’s life to at least two other police characters, spitting out their names like an Old West marshal nailing “wanted” posters to the jailhouse door?
“No,” replied Lilla in a voice of exceeding calm. Her composure was astonishing.
“When did you give Marcia McKittrick a key to your home?”
“I don’t know exactly,” reminisced Lilla. “… spring or summer of 1972.”
“By that time you had become convinced, had you not, that her life style was ‘a little different’ from yours?”
Lilla nodded. “It was quite obvious. I’m fifty-six, and she’s in her twenties, I believe.”
“Wait a minute,” thought Bennett. That’s giving me the temperature when I asked the time of day. He asked, “You were talking, were you not, about the life style as opposed to the age?”
Lilla backed off quickly. For the first time she seemed a little flustered. “No … I … I …” She was stammering.
Bennett rammed back quickly. “You came to suspect that she was a prostitute, did you not?”
Lilla regained her control. “No, I did not know whether she was a prostitute or not. She had never met men in my house.”
“So the only thing you knew about Marcia McKittrick that would indicate her life was ‘a little different’ from yours was that she was twenty-three and you were fifty-six?”
“Well, yes. And she came and went in my house. She did not have a home. I did have a home.… I liked the girl … she was friendly.”
“That’s all you knew about her?” demanded Bennett. “That she was younger than you are and she was friendly?”
“That’s all I can testify to.”
“That’s all you will testify to,” disagreed Bennett.
“That’s all I can,” shot back Lilla a fraction hotly.
Bennett changed gears. “When did you meet Diane Settegast?” He introduced the name of the Dallas woman who had been a house guest in Joan Robinson Hill’s home the week before she died. She was also the woman who first revealed the tale of the mysterious French pastries and more then anyone else propelled Ash Robinson off his launching pad. Bennett had discovered a curious coincidence: Diane Settegast was also a close friend of Lilla Paulus, had even stayed in the Paulus home during trips to Houston to testify in various proceedings relating to the trial of John Hill. He felt strongly that she was a crucial weld between the old man and the sad-eyed widder woman.
Lilla said she had met Diane Settegast at least fifteen years ago. At the Alameda Stables.
“You were aware that she was a good friend of Ash Robinson’s? And of Joan Hill?”
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p; “Yes, sir,” Lilla answered cautiously.
“You were aware that she was upset by the death of Joan Hill?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You were aware that Ash Robinson, by virtue of your acquaintance with Diane Settegast, was also upset?”
“I did not see Mr. Robinson at the time of his daughter’s death, but I assume he was grieved.” Bennett hesitated at this answer. The phrase “at the time of his daughter’s death” tempted him. If Lilla pretended not to know Ash Robinson at all, then why would she use that curious bit of qualification? Would the jury be smart enough to pick up on this?
“Mr. Robinson, according to you, has never been in your home?” asked Bennett.
“No, sir.” Firm. Unyielding.
“So, if Mr. Robinson says he was in your home, he is ly—” Bennett pretended to catch himself. “He was … in error?”
Lilla paused, perhaps wondering if the district attorney was bluffing—he was—or did he have a trap laid for her? She elected to hew to her line. “Well, he was never in my home when I was in my home.”
Blood and Money Page 56