Lobster Boy

by Fred Rosen

  By 7 o’clock, Grady had consumed twelve whiskey doubles. It was a wonder he could still crawl without tipping over, let alone talk. Because of his years of alcohol abuse, his alcohol tolerance was so high that to the average bystander, he appeared barely inebriated.

  Grady left the bar in his wheelchair and headed home. He got there just as Jack, Donna, Barbara, and Grady III were leaving to buy food for the wedding reception.

  They were planning on buying a lot of potato chips to feed the guests. While the others left, Donna stayed behind at Grady’s behest.

  “Look, I really don’t think you should marry him.”

  “Daddy, we’ve been over this—”

  “You know, I love you so much I paid an investigator one hundred dollars up front to find you?”

  “Daddy—”

  “And then I owed him another two hundred dollars, so I went over to Dover [Ohio] and worked in the sideshow to pay the guy off.”

  “Look, Daddy, I’m going to marry Jack!”

  “He’s not good enough for you!”

  Grady reached for his jug of whiskey. Grady usually had a gallon jug of whiskey around. He would drink almost a whole one of those by the time he went to bed.

  By 7:30, the group was back with the chips. Donna has a vivid recollection of what happened next.

  “We went out, Jack, Barbara, me, and Little Grady, and I think Susie was with us. Cathy was behind the house in the alley, playing with one of her friends.

  “We went to the mall. My father gave me some money. I was supposed to pick out a dress to get married in. We selected a dress at Zaire’s Department Store and put it on layaway to be picked up tomorrow morning. We had an appointment with the judge to be married on the morning of the 28th.

  “A few hours later, we came back. Susie ran out back to play.”

  The first thing they noticed when they got back was that Grady’s wheelchair was missing. Usually, Grady’s wheelchair was kept right outside the house for easy access. Donna, Barbara, Jack, and Little Grady went inside.

  “What happened to the wheelchair?” Barbara asked.

  “It was sitting here,” Grady replied. He sat calmly in his briefs. “Pittsburgh, in the streets, people steal things.”

  “Okay, we’ll go out and look for it,” said Donna, and she, Barbara, and Jack trooped to the door.

  “No, you, why don’t you stay, Jack? Close the door and sit down.”

  Jack stayed.

  “So, Barbara and I went around into the metered parking lot out back, looking for the wheelchair,” Donna continued. “Still not finding it, we searched in the bushes.

  “We were just about halfway around, and I heard a bang. And I looked at Barbara and said, ‘What do you think that was?’”

  “Don’t worry about it, it’s not your father,” Barbara replied.

  “Then I heard a bang again immediately after and I said, ‘Yes, it is something,’ and I ran back toward the house. When I got there, Jack comes stumbling out of the house. He was holding his chest in the middle.”

  “He shot me.” Jack coughed out the words, and fell straight down to the ground in front of Donna.

  “It didn’t seem real. It seemed like a joke. And I shook Jack. He didn’t move. And he was coughing. There was blood coming out of his mouth. And I looked up, and Dad was standing on his knees looking out the window, smiling at me. It really surprised me that he was doing that. I said, ‘Why did you do this?’”

  “Because I told you I would,” Grady smirked.

  “You’ll die for this, you son of a bitch!”

  “Don’t give me that shit!” Grady shouted back.

  “I’ll see you in your grave!”

  From off in the distance, Donna could hear sirens. And then she heard the crying and screaming from inside the house. Little Grady.

  Panicking, her heart beating wildly in her chest, she ran to her grandmother’s house twelve blocks away.

  It was a cool night for late September. Officers Jake Carlson and Jay Fazio were cruising in Unit 95 when they received the call from headquarters.

  “Shooting at 511 Foreland Street. See the woman.”

  “Roger.”

  When Car 95 arrived on the scene, Carlson and Fazio found Jack Layne lying on his stomach. Bending over him was Barbara Stiles.

  “What’s the victim’s name?” Carlson questioned.

  “Jack Layne,” Barbara replied.

  “Was Mr. Layne shot?”

  “Yes,” and she pointed up at the house.

  They went inside and found Grady seated in a stuffed chair at the far end of the living room. Near him on the nightstand was a .32 caliber H&R, six-shot revolver. It was the same one he’d purchased at the pawnshop exactly sixteen days before.

  “Take me. I’m ready. Take me,” Grady said calmly.

  After getting Grady’s name, Carlson informed him of his rights, then confiscated and emptied the gun of the remaining shells. With Grady in tow, they walked outside.

  On the porch, Carlson and Fazio happened to look down. Carlson picked up a spent bullet and put it with the gun.

  Once Grady was inside their squad car, they called homicide.

  At 8:45 P.M., detectives Joe Stottlemyre and Ray Condemi of the Homicide Squad received a call from central dispatch. “Proceed to 511 Foreland Street. There’s been a shooting and the victim is in critical condition. He’s presently being attended to at the scene by Medic Four.”

  They raced downstairs into their unmarked car. On went the siren, around went the bubble top as they sped to the scene.

  Donna didn’t know what to do. She was so confused. She doubled back, in time to see the cops and ambulance attendants crowded around Jack on the sidewalk. They were talking to him.

  “I waited until I seen them cut Jack’s shirt off to see if the bullet went through. I seen them turn Jack over, and then I ran. I was really scared, so I ran out again.”

  By the time detectives Stottlemyre and Condemi got to the scene at 8:52 P.M., the medics already had Jack on a stretcher.

  “This guy’s in very, very serious condition,” said Sam Switzer, the attending medic.

  “How bad?” asked Stottlemyre, pulling out his notebook and taking notes.

  “Gunshot wound to the left chest just above the nipple, exiting the right upper shoulder.”

  Still breathing, Jack was rushed to Allegheny General Hospital for emergency treatment. It wasn’t a homicide yet, they realized, and with luck, it wouldn’t be. Unlike most major eastern cities, Pittsburgh had very few homicides per capita. It was a safe, clean place to live.

  The detectives met with Carlson and Fazio, who told them what they had already learned. They handed over the revolver and spent bullet. “There were two empty casings in the revolver,” Carlson said, implying that the gun had been fired twice.

  After interviewing the officers further, the detectives examined the scene of the crime.

  They noted that the sidewalk was divided into four sections, that Jack’s head was in the northeast section of the sidewalk and his feet in the southwest section. He had been lying on his stomach. There was debris from the medics left in the area where Jack collapsed, and a little spot of blood in the southeast section of the sidewalk near the steps leading up into the tenement.

  511 Foreland was a two-story building of brick composition. To get inside, you climbed three steps to the front entrance. The front entrance then opened into the living room which measured fourteen by twelve feet. On the south wall, west of the opening of the dining room, was a gold, stuffed chair.

  “Grady was sitting in that chair when he shot Jack,” Barbara told the detectives.

  “Was the front door open or closed?” Condemi questioned.

  Barbara couldn’t recall.

  The detectives looked around and their keen eyes spotted a bullet hole in the wood of the front door. It appeared that the bullet had gone through the door on an upward angle and struck the roof of the porch. It then fell to the
porch floor where Carlson had recovered it. Based on the condition of the bullet which Carlson had handed them, they figured it wasn’t the one that had traveled through the victim.

  Putting a pencil through the bullet hole in the door and aligning the trajectory with the mark in the porch roof indicated to the investigators that the front door was open approximately ten inches when this shot entered the door. The detectives then surmised that Jack Layne was shot trying to leave the residence.

  In other words, as soon as Jack Layne opened the door, Grady started blasting away. That made it a cold and premeditated murder.

  Still, there were unanswered questions. Carlson had said there were two empty shells left in the revolver. However, only one bullet was recovered. The detectives, while not certain if the bullet recovered was the one that traveled through Jack’s body, were nevertheless inclined to believe that it wasn’t. That left them one bullet shy.

  They conducted a preliminary search in front of the tenement but it was too dark to do a thorough job. That would have to wait for morning.

  Meanwhile, the lab-tech boys arrived. The gun was taken by the crime-unit officers to be fingerprinted and then sent to the lab for further analysis.

  In addition to the gun and the spent bullet, a small piece of wood had been knocked from the door as the bullet passed through it. This piece of wood was recovered on the porch floor and was also submitted to the crime lab to determine if any lead wiping was present. Lead wiping would be any residue of lead left by the bullet.

  “Mrs. Stiles, I know this is a difficult time, but I’d like to ask you some more questions,” said Detective Condemi.

  Barbara nodded. After a few preliminary questions, she related her version of the events.

  “Jack was to marry my stepdaughter Donna tomorrow. Donna’s fifteen and she’s known Jack for about a month. And she ran away with him and stayed with him for about five days.

  “When she returned home, we told her that we would let her get married. In fact, they got their blood-test papers today. Anyway, today, myself, Donna, my two-year-old baby, and Jack went to the mall so Donna could get a dress and shoes for the wedding.”

  “How’d you get there?” asked Stottlemyre.

  “We used my car. It’s a 1973 Chevy, green wagon. Parked out front.”

  “Go on.”

  “We got home from the shopping spree at about 8:30 P.M. When we got into the house, I didn’t see Grady’s wheelchair and I asked him where it was.”

  “Where was your husband seated?” asked Condemi.

  “In the stuffed chair in the corner opposite the front door. Anyway, he says he didn’t know where his chair was. While Jack goes out the front door, Donna follows him. Then I was the last one to go out. I was going to look for his wheelchair because I thought my two younger daughters had it and they had been playing with it. Donna was with me when we got outside. As we were leaving, Grady called to Jack and said he wanted to talk with him. And Jack went inside the house.

  “I then heard two shots and I turned around and seen Jack on the sidewalk and Donna ran to him and grabbed him and he fell to the pavement. Donna got hysterical and was running around and she came back and called her dad a son of a bitch.

  “I went to Jack and he was groaning. When I went into the house, I asked Grady ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Better him than her and that’s the only thing I could do. I couldn’t let her do it,’ and then he told me to call the police. And I called the police and told them that a man was shot on the sidewalk at 511 Foreland Street.”

  The detectives got Barbara to sign a document giving them the right to search the premises. It wasn’t necessary, though. Barbara readily turned over the box that the revolver had come in, as well as a box of .32-caliber shells. The crime lab was subsequently given this evidence to analyze.

  After leaving the scene, Condemi and Stottlemyre drove to Allegheny General. They got there too late; Jack was dead on arrival. It was now, officially, a homicide.

  At 11 P.M. Stottlemyre and Condemi interviewed Donna in the hospital’s emergency room. While the pandemonium of a big-city hospital room reigned around them, it took Donna no longer than fifteen minutes to give her statement. By then, the detectives were anxious to question Grady. They were close to clearing the case. With a little luck, they could actually do it before midnight.

  The public safety building in downtown Pittsburgh was the home of the Pittsburgh Department of Public Safety. At 11:23 P.M., Condemi and Stottlemyre removed Grady from the bull pen holding cells on the second floor and took him to the homicide office, and sat him down on a chair in the interrogation room. Condemi read from a prepared form.

  “At this time, it is my duty to inform you of the rights that you possess while in custody. Under law, you cannot be compelled to answer and you have the right to refuse to answer any questions. While you are in custody, if you do answer such questions, the answers given by you will be used against you in a trial in a court of law at some later date. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Grady replied soberly.

  “The answers are to be recorded in the suspect’s own words. You are also entitled to talk to a lawyer and have him present before you decide whether or not to answer questions or while you are answering questions. If you do not have the money to hire a lawyer, you are entitled to have a lawyer present before you decide whether or not you will answer questions and while you are answering questions. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “You can decide at any time before or during to exercise these rights by not answering any further questions or making any further statements. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Knowing these rights, are you willing to answer questions without the presence of a lawyer?”

  “Some of them,” Grady replied.

  The detectives signed the form as witnesses and Grady gave his statement.

  “I suffer from emphysema, cirrhosis, and various other ailments,” he complained. “Two of my five children have the ‘lobster [claw] syndrome’ and my income at the present time is derived from social security.”

  “I use the wheelchair when I’m out of the house, otherwise I have to crawl around. I have the equivalent of an eighth grade education. I’m so concerned about my kids. What’s going to happen to them?”

  The detectives noted in their subsequent report Grady’s “… sincere concern for the welfare of his children. He appears to be sober at this time.”

  “Mr. Stiles, why don’t you tell us how all this happened?”

  “Well, about three weeks ago, Donna, she’s fifteen, she ran away from home with Jack Layne. I went to the city police and the state police to do something about Layne running away with my underage daughter, but I received no help. No help.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “Well, I-I contacted a private investigator to help me find her.”

  “You know the PI’s name?”

  “No, I don’t recall. I do remember that his fee was like eighty to a hundred dollars a day plus expenses. I gave him one hundred dollars to start with. Then a little while later, I got a call from Donna. Donna told me that she did not want to come home.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “Yes, she said she was in love with Jack and wanted to marry him.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “Oh, I was so upset. This is hard to talk about.”

  “Take your time, Mr. Stiles.”

  “Well, Donna, she, uh, she was a virgin and a good girl until Jack Layne came along.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I finally gave in and told her I’d sign the necessary papers for her to marry him. She came home the next day. By that time, she’d been gone six days, and I owed the investigator two hundred dollars.”

  Neither detective bothered to tell him that his math didn’t add up. They just let him keep talking.

  “So, last week,”
Grady continued evenly, “I went to Dover, Ohio, and worked in the sideshow for the Dine Amusement Company. I worked from Wednesday to Friday, earning a little over three hundred dollars. And then I paid off the investigator.

  “When I got back, I heard some street talk that Jack Layne was bragging about Donna living with him. This really upset me but I didn’t say anything to Layne or Donna, but I did try to talk Donna out of the marriage. With no success, I might add.”

  And then he related what happened that day.

  “I woke up about ten-thirty and went down the street to Harry’s Bar. I was there until 7 P.M., when I came back home to watch the news.”

  “How much booze did you drink?”

  “About twelve doubleheaders of whiskey.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “I’m good at holding my booze.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, Donna and Barbara, she’s my wife, and my son, Grady, and Layne, they went to Allegheny Center to buy a wedding dress. They came back about nine and that’s when I called Layne into the living room.”

  “The others went outside?”

  “Right. To look for my wheelchair.”

  “What’d you say to Jack?”

  “He was sitting on the sofa. I told him, ‘You have her. Don’t laugh and make a mockery of this.’”

  “What did Jack do?”

  “He smirked, and said, ‘I told you I’d get her.’”

  “And that’s when you shot him?”

  “I pulled my gun from the side of the cushion of the chair I was sitting in and shot two times at Layne. Layne got up from the sofa and walked outside. I had taken all I could at the time. The guy gave me no choice.”

  “How about the gun?”

  “What about it?”

  “When and where did you buy it?”

  “I bought it about three weeks ago from a loan company down on East Ohio Street.”

  “Know how to use a gun?” Condemi asked, looking dubiously at Grady’s claws.

  “I’ve owned several in my time.”

  “Well, why’d you buy this one?”

  “In the evening, when I’m alone downstairs, I watch TV. I like to keep the gun with me to ward off any intruders, who may be thinking about breaking into my home.”