Settegast would not budge. “I know what I saw in the home … and I know Lilla spent a lot of money to get her daughter straightened out.”
“You were aware of the income that Mary was bringing in from her prostitution activity, I take it?”
“I certainly wasn’t.”
“You were aware of the income from prostitution that Lilla Paulus was enjoying, weren’t you?”
Settegast drew herself up haughtily. “I certainly was not.” Then witness and prosecutor engaged in a cacophonous duet, their voices rising in anger against one another, she shouting, “That is the most outrageous claim I have ever heard in my life,” he throttling with “Just answer the question ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” DeGeurin shooting up to cry, “I object to Mr. Bennett cutting her off!”
Judge Price was not a gavel-slammer, but now he rapped to separate the combatants. “Answer the question, Miss Settegast.”
From clenched teeth, she said, “I have never heard of income coming into that house from prostitution, and I am certain that it never did.”
“So you never went to Galveston with her to collect the ‘rent’ down there?” asked Bennett.
“No, sir, I have never been to Galveston.”
Bennett let the temperature cool a moment. He glanced at the jury and caught several of them openmouthed, obviously astonished at the sudden tempo furioso. His chief worry now was that too much, too soon was being thrown at them. Could they possibly comprehend the complexities of this human drama? Could they understand that he was trying to prove that Lilla Paulus, Brownie leader from a good neighborhood, was also a woman capable of plotting murder?
He turned back to Settegast. “Are you or are you not aware of the efforts this defendant made to find her daughter, Mary Wood?”
“I am aware that Mrs. Paulus wanted to find her daughter … because of her daughter’s activities she wanted to give Mary some help … as before, when they tried to put her in a hospital and tried to get her some psychiatric help.” With that, another plum fell from the tree and tumbled into the prosecutor’s lap. Now he could bid the jurors to read how Lilla Paulus went to a hospital and visited her daughter with a gun in her purse. Now they could read the passage in the medical documents that stood out as if scrawled across the blue Texas sky: “Mother seems to be the major problem.”
“Are you aware,” went on Bennett, “that there were thousands of dollars given to individuals for the purpose of killing Larry Wood and Mary Wood?”
“I certainly was not,” said Settegast.
“Were you aware of the shooting into the apartment where Larry and Mary Wood lived here in Houston?”
“No!”
With that unelaborated act of violence hanging in the tense air, Bennett sat contentedly down.
With a forced look of “no harm has been done,” DeGeurin rose in attempt to rehabilitate his witness. All he could try to do was get Settegast to denounce once more what the district attorney had alleged, and save his remaining strength for summation.
“The breakup of Mary Wood and her mother, Lilla Paulus, did that come about because of Larry Wood?” asked DeGeurin, trying to smudge his client’s daughter’s husband a little.
“Yes.”
“How many times before had Larry Wood been married?”
Bennett, of course, made objection to that, but Settegast beat him to the punch. “Three or four,” she said triumphantly, as if that answer alone were enough to acquit her friend. In her desire to help the defense and lay waste to the prosecution, Settegast was so prejudiced a witness that the jury knew it. But for the moment she was all the defense had to rebut Mary Wood’s catalogue of horrors.
“Mr. Bennett has inferred that Lilla Paulus ran a house of prostitution. Your answer in that regard is what?”
“Ridiculous!” And at least one lawyer in the spectator section wondered why DeGeurin was re-emphasizing a point best left alone.
“Mr. Bennett has inferred that Lilla Paulus hired people, and put out money to have her only daughter killed? Your testimony in that regard?”
“Ridiculous!”
“When was the first time you heard this claim that Mr. Bennett has made that Lilla Paulus had men fondle her daughter? …”
Settegast laughed sneeringly. “That’s the first time I ever heard of it. It is sickening … and it is not true … and it is a lie by whoever said it.”
Bob Bennett rose and could not resist one modestly perverse maneuver before he would let Settegast off the stand. He withdrew a police mug shot from a folder, carefully cupped it in his hand to shield it from the jury’s eyes, and handed it to the witness. The photograph was of Lilla Paulus, taken when she was arrested in 1956 along with her husband on suspicion of bookmaking. This was a vastly different Lilla Paulus, a full-bodied, hearty woman with one thick blonde pigtail down her back. Settegast stared at it dumbly; of course she recognized her friend, but she was loath to say so. DeGeurin came to her rescue with an angry objection and asked for a mistrial. It seemed like the eight hundredth such request.
“Your honor,” he cried, “… this puts me in the position where the jury may think I’m trying to hide something from them. Mr. Bennett knows … or should know … that this is so prejudicial and so inflammatory … a deliberate attempt by him to prejudice the jury.”
Before the judge could even rule on the motion, DeGeurin—weary and anguished to the point that his words were glued together—threw out a non-stop barrage of other requests. He asked that the bench rebuke the district attorney, that the jury disregard the photograph, that the jury make note of Mr. Bennett’s unprofessional conduct, and—petulantly—that the judge step down and be replaced by another. The last motion, rarely used, was an enormous insult. DeGeurin backed up his demand by suggesting that Judge Price was “smirking” during parts of the Settegast testimony.
His face as icy as Lilla’s, the judge coldly snapped, “Overruled,” to each of the motions. There was now deep rupture between the two men.
It was necessary, DeGeurin decided, to throw Lilla back on the stand. Her testimony this time was but a hurried denial of every allegation made against her by Joan Jaworski Worrell and by Mary Wood. Lilla denied having been in New Orleans since 1961. She denied ever having been in the home of Dr. and Mrs. John Hill. Her denials came wrapped in a new meek and tiny voice, as if she had been stepped on by bullies and there was hardly a breath left.
Judge Price grew so fascinated by Lilla’s dramatic change of voice that he leaned sideways in his chair to observe. At this, DeGeurin made truculent complaint that the judge was making “faces,” influencing the jury, and necessitating a mistrial. The expression Judge Price bestowed on the defense counsel as he snapped, “Denied,” was one of patience wearing not only thin but out.
The judge decided it was necessary to declare a brief recess. He went to his chambers to cool off. “I’ve never been asked to excuse myself before in the middle of a trial,” he told his court reporter, stalking into his office and tearing off his black robes. “But I’m not going to let myself be goaded into giving Dickie a mistrial. He’s made some mistakes and he’s getting desperate. He should have rested his case the moment Bennett did.”
Bennett’s business during the break was to find a phone and call the hotel where Mary Wood and her husband were packing to leave. His worry was that the couple might have already checked out. He dialed frantically. He had to use a coded password before the deputy sheriff with a 12-gauge shotgun who answered the hotel room phone would put Mary on the line.
“I need you over here again,” said Bennett. “I’m sorry. I know what a strain this is on you.”
“I’ve already been through hell once,” she said. “I suppose the second time around can’t be so bad.”
Mary threw open her suitcase and found another pair of riding pants and a blouse. She dressed quickly. She knew that now Bob Bennett was going to push her cruelly back to a past that she had spent most of her adult life running from. As she bent over th
e mirror to put on makeup, waiting for the unmarked car to arrive and take her to the courthouse, one of the young investigators from the DA’s office asked how she felt about what was going to happen. He had grown to like Mary, and he had seen the pressures on her. “Frankly I’m paralyzed,” she answered. Then why go through with it?
“Three reasons,” said Mary, staring in the mirror at her long, tumbling auburn hair. “Number one, she did it. Number two, I’m not vindictive, but I’m tired of hiding from her. She’s dangerous; if she gets out of this, she’ll be invincible. And number three, I didn’t like living through some of the things I’m fixing to testify about. I couldn’t let them get away with putting Lilla on display as a Brownie leader who raised me with a lollipop in each hand.”
This time when Mary Wood entered the courtroom, Lilla Paulus put her head on the counsel table and did not raise it until well into the testimony. Thus she did not see her daughter pause, breaking her stately rolling gait, stopping to find her mother and let her know by the expression on her face that it was the hour of revelation. But Lilla felt the awful gaze of her child, and she trembled. Her hand shook as she found a handkerchief and put it to her face.
Immediately, Bennett asked Mary Wood when she had married. In August 1967, came the answer, three weeks after she was trapped into going to a psychiatric clinic. She had run away from the doctors. She married Larry. And they stayed married.…
“Did you go to St. Joseph’s Hospital of your own free will?” asked Bennett.
“No … wait, in a way. My parents thought I was on heroin, and if I could prove that I wasn’t—then I could get married. When I got there, they had me locked up.”
“Did your mother come to visit you in the hospital?”
“Yes. For a period of time.… Then she came up there with a gun and was waving it around … and a nurse saw it.” Mary stopped her answer. And Bennett paused. When there was a drum roll, he wanted the echo to last as long as he dared.
“Had you ever seen your mother carry one before?”
“To my personal knowledge, I never saw her without one.” At this, Lilla’s head snapped erect and her eyes bore malevolently at her daughter.
All right, thought Bennett to himself, on to the grand finale. “During your lifetime,” he began gently, “have you ever engaged in sexual activity for money or other things of value?”
Mary Wood did not hesitate. She nodded and said quietly, “Yes, I have.”
“When did you first enter into sexual activities in return for favors or money?”
“The first I can remember … was when I was about four years old.” The gasps that Bennett anticipated swept the court. One of the women jurors threw her hand involuntarily to her mouth. One of the men looked at his lap, as if embarrassed to hear the rest of this story.
“Where was that?”
“At my home.”
“Who else was present at that time?”
“My mother was in the house.”
DeGeurin, hoarse from his day of harangues, objected. Once. Twice. Ten times. He finally settled for a running objection to every word that came out of Mary Wood’s mouth.
“Was this a male person?” asked Bennett. “How old?”
“Yes.… He was in his sixties.”
“What prompted you to engage in some sort of sexual activity with that sixty-year-old person?”
“The first time I didn’t understand really what was happening and I told him to leave me alone. When he left, I told my mother I didn’t like him and didn’t want to be around him. She said for me to be nice to him. He gave her money.”
“Did you ever see him give her money?”
“Yes, I did.”
Lilla Paulus seized a pencil and wrote on her lawyer’s yellow pad. “LIES!” She pressed so hard that the lead broke and her fingers fell against the paper in despair.
“Did this engaging in sexual activities for money continue after that?”
“Yes.”
“Was it intermittent, or was it continuous?”
“One person came two or three times a week until I was about eleven.” Mary Jo Wood continued for some time, speaking in a flat, dry voice, as if she was reading from the pages of someone else’s diary. The day before, Bennett had feared that she would disintegrate emotionally. But now, in an excruciatingly poignant hour, she was calm. She told of her mother becoming a sort of manageress by the time she was sixteen, of how Lilla would make appointments for her, sometimes even answer the telephone and fake the daughter’s voice. Lilla also set fees, the young woman testified. “I had hundred-dollar tricks.”
“Objection!” DeGeurin continued to plead. But he could have been making his cries in sign language for all the power they carried against Mary Wood’s stark and painful recitative.
“When you were growing up, did you ever have occasion to visit Galveston?” asked Bennett.
“Yes, to collect the rent. And rob the juke boxes. That means taking the money out of the juke boxes and counting it and splitting it with the owners of the place.… Mother owned four buildings.”
“What kind of houses or establishments were these?”
“Houses of prostitution.”
“How did you know?”
“I was there quite often,” said Mary. “It was obvious … and I spent one summer there.”
DeGeurin tried one more time. He was on a teeter-totter between outrage and supplication: “How long will these lies go on? This is incredible. To allow this kind of testimony. It has nothing to do—nothing—with the facts of this case!”
But Bennett would not cease. He had too many grievances against all of these people. “Were you going to the St. John’s School at the time?”
“Yes.”
“Was your mother a Brownie leader?”
“Yes, she was.”
“Were the other Brownies made aware of what your mother’s activities were?” Bennett asked not uncruelly.
“No.”
“Did you leave Houston after you married Larry Wood?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Threats made on my life.”
“That’s all, your honor.” Bennett returned to his chair and sat down quietly. He knew that DeGeurin would not meddle with the girl any more. It was over. Tomorrow the two lawyers would pound their chests and sermonize in summation. But in the end it would boil down to this: would the jury believe this girl? Or had he gone too far? Would they perhaps be so sickened by tales of blood and money that they would run confused toward the clean air of their own lives, and set Lilla Paulus free?
That night DeGeurin walked Lilla arm in arm across the city’s streets to his office, as was their custom. Normally she talked animatedly of each day’s session, adding and subtracting from her cause. But on this night she put her head down on DeGeurin’s desk and she wept. The lawyer had never seen the tough old woman cry before and he knew of no way to comfort her.
In the courthouse, in Bob Bennett’s office, waiting for the car that would take her still guarded to the airport, and a hurried flight to her secret home, Mary Wood sat with a face of ivory. Then she broke, sobbing uncontrollably for a quarter of an hour, until the deputy came.
“I’m sorry,” she said, fishing in her purse for cosmetic relief. “Is there a word for when you’ve just exorcised your own mother?”
FORTY-THREE
No time was left to wait for the manager of the Fairmont Hotel in New Orelans to make an appearance. Therefore Judge Price allowed the opposing lawyers to share a conference long-distance telephone call with the man, as the court reporter transcribed the conversation for the trial record. The import was that his records showed no mention of Mrs. Joan Jaworski Worrell during the period of 1970 when she testified to having been registered at that hotel. But this did not absolutely exclude her presence there at that time, for the manager admitted that his records were not perfect, and that occasionally, when a guest paid cash, the documents were filed incorrectly or not at
all.
DeGeurin felt it was a helpful lift to the defense, and he planned to make use of the discrepancy in his summation.
Now, fourteen days after the trial had begun, they all assembled for the last time, like characters in a mystery play, waiting in suspense for the chief inspector to reveal the denouement. The rule that keeps witnesses out of the courtroom except during the period of their own testimony was now suspended. All could come and hear the final arguments and await the verdict.
Connie Hill took a seat directly in the front row, next to Myra Hill. The widow and the mother of the murdered plastic surgeon had insisted on coming, even though Bennett had cautioned them that the experience would be painful. He intended to re-create the death of John Hill with all the ugliness he could summon. “I know that,” said Myra, “but I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” She was disappointed that the prosecutor had not used her as an eyewitness to murder. Moreover, she had never seen the living flesh of Lilla Paulus, only newspaper photographs and those bleakly lit television sequences of the defendant scurrying in and out of chambers.
Now, as Lilla entered the court on the arm of DeGeurin, Myra Hill scrutinized her like a germ on a slide. All of her life she had tried to be an example of the Bible that she read for at least two hours of every day, but at this juncture she possessed no Christian charity.
Jerry Carpenter squeezed in a back row, amid an excited gaggle of lawyer wives and courthouse secretaries. He had encountered Lilla in the hallway outside, had even nodded politely at her, but she had cut him dead and turned quickly away. The homicide detective, having followed every twist of testimony, was enthusiastic over the state’s chance for conviction. But Bob Bennett had dampened his optimism. Overnight he had grown despondent. “This may not be the sloppiest murder case I’ve ever tried,” he told his wife, “but it is certainly close.” Well after midnight, he rose from his bed and went outside and sat beside a tree he had recently planted, cursing it for its lack of growth.
By tradition, the state opens and closes final arguments, with the defense sandwiched between. The theory is that the defense possesses many advantages during the trial itself while the state has the burden of proof; thus the jury retires with the last words in their ears coming from the prosecution.
Blood and Money Page 59