“And Paula was doing a lot of babysitting with her little brother when she was living at home?” I asked.
“Babysitting?” she snorted in my direction. “She was the one taking care of that boy; it sure wasn't Jo Herring,” she said.
I continued, “And Jo is watching her daughter become prettier than her mother, and now the eighteen-year-old is off to college, having a great time. She's becoming a leader, she helps start the first snow skiing club at the University of Tennessee, and she's about to join a prestigious sorority.2 Life was probably better than it had ever been, at least for Paula,” I said.
“And Jo was jealous,” she replied.
“Well, and something else,” I added. “It cost a lot of money to pay for college and all of those skiing activities and having fun in Knoxville.”
I didn't want to give away my next topic too easily, but I had decided this was the best way to potentially introduce the money aspect. It was a baited segue that Evelyn eyeballed like a wary brown trout in a Smoky Mountain stream. She looked hard in my direction with a steely gaze as she offered a response.
“Jo was cold. She'd do anything for money,” she said.
My eyes narrowed, and I looked long and hard back at Evelyn, thinking she might be opening the door to a motive that I had never mentioned before, primarily because it was a motive too terrible to comprehend.
“Let me come back to that topic in a minute and ask you about your work at Vanderbilt Hospital. Actually, let me ask you about Jo Herring's work at Vanderbilt. What shift did she work back then?”
She thought for a moment, then said, “She used to work first, but she'd been on second shift for a good while when we worked together.”
“What hours would that be?” I asked.
“She worked as a floor nurse, from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., second shift. Did you know she took care of some of the bigwigs that came to the hospital?”3
“I'm not sure what that means,” I replied.
“When some of these guys had to dry out, they had to do that discreetly, if you know what I mean. I'm talking about some prominent folks.” she said.
“Jo Herring was the person who was their nurse and kept her mouth shut, is that what you mean?” I asked.
“Yes, and she liked that kind of work, too. It let her get to know some powerful people. And Jo was willing to help them out with whatever they needed, don't you know? Of course, no one else at the hospital knew what she was up to,” she said.
“Like maybe providing them with something other than medication?” I asked.
Miss Evelyn nodded her head in agreement and took another sip of coffee. “And some entertainment later on,” she added.
“You say powerful people?” I asked.
“I'm mostly talking about Bev. He made trips to Michigan to rehab, but in town they'd just drop him off at the hospital to clean up and dry out from time to time.”
“You mean Beverly Briley, the mayor?” I asked.
“Right. One of the Vanderbilt doctors was trying to help him with his addiction problems, but I don't think even the doctors could compete with Jo Herring and her ways.”
“So in the group of people you told me about previously, the ones meeting up at these secret hideaways, like the cabin on Marrowbone Lake, the boat on Old Hickory, or the apartment near Wedgewood Diner, the mayor was part of that group?”
“Of course,” she said.
“I think I'm beginning to see the big picture.” As I shook my head, I asked a follow up question. “Jo Herring much of a drinker?”
“Are you kidding? She could get loopy-legged every day. I thought she was far too smart to be drinking so much, but she could drink anyone under the table.”
As she said this, she rolled her eyes. She pushed her rocker back a little and then cocked her head and asked, “Why are you still interested in all of this anyway, like it was yesterday morning's newspaper?”
“Because I think Paula was going to accomplish some things. She had big plans,” I said.
“Her daddy sure talked to her that way. He wanted the best for her.”
“I just think with all of the lies that were told, in court and everywhere else, that the truth should be told for Paula's sake. And even if I tell Paula's story, there's going to be plenty of people who will say that John Randolph Clarke or Sam Carlton the truck stop manager or some unknown Nashville prowler did the killing. But you and I both know that's a bunch of hogwash.” I continued, “If no one else, I think Paula Herring at least deserves the truth, no matter how bad it may be for some people to hear it.”
“I do, too,” came her soft reply.
“I need your help, Miss Evelyn. I don't know how much time any of us have on this earth, and nearly fifty years have already passed since this whole sordid mess took place.”
“What kind of help?” As she asked, she leaned forward out of her rocker and placed the empty coffee cup on the small kitchen table, but this time I could see she was ready to dispense with the friendly banter and move on to the darker aspects of her friendship with Jo Herring.
“Jo Herring was working as a nurse, and apparently spent money faster than she could make it; does that sound about right?” I asked.
“Jo would do anything for money, she could never get enough of it,” she said.
“At the trial in Jackson, I know Jo Herring was asked about being addicted to drugs. Would you know about any drugs in the house on the night that Paula was killed? Jo could have made some extra money that way, right?”
She nodded. “I thought the reason Jo called me the night Paula was killed was to help her get the drugs out of the house before the police arrived.”
“So how did the drugs get in the house in the first place?” I asked.
“She brought them home from the hospital.” She said this with an air of some exasperation, as if I were too dense to see the obvious.
“So she stole them from the hospital?” I asked.
“Well, technically she was stealing them from patients.”
“What kind of drugs?” I asked.
“Jo was stealing anything that could be sold. Amphetamines, narcotics, pills, inhalers, and plenty more,” she said.
“I thought all of those drugs were locked up in the pharmacy,” I said.
“Not back then. The medicine carts would be in the hallways on each floor. All you had to do was not give a patient their pill, or give aspirin or something like that instead of what had been ordered. You would just sign on their card that you gave the pill to the patient and then keep it instead. It was no problem, I assure you. And a lot of nurses got fired over addiction problems.”
“Just like Jo Herring got fired from Vanderbilt Hospital?” I waited a moment before asking my next question.
“So what was Paula's frame of mind on the night she was murdered? Care to offer an opinion?” I asked.
“She was still angry about her daddy, and she wanted revenge. That's what I think.” She offered this with an edge to her voice.
“You think Jo had something to do with Paula's murder?”
“She was the first person they hauled downtown to the police station that night!” Miss Evelyn almost spit the words out as she leaned toward me.
I nearly fell off of the couch before I eventually responded: “I'm glad you said that, because I don't think it took the cops anytime at all to figure out that the best suspect in the Paula Herring murder was the woman who found Paula in the den, do you?”
“They took Jo to the police station around midnight, and I followed them in my car. I wasn't sure what was going to happen to her but they turned her loose around daybreak, and I drove her back to Crieve Hall and dropped her off. Some of the cops thought from beginning to end that Jo did it, even after that Clarke fellow was convicted,” she said.
“So yet another babysitter enters the picture,” I muttered to myself, remembering that Miss Hattie had said she walked to the Herrings’ to babysit Alan when Jo returned at sunrise.
>
“Babysitter?”
“Yes, it appears there was a never-ending supply of them on the night of the murder. The Herring's next-door neighbor was the first babysitter, while you were downtown with Jo, then apparently a neighbor named Hattie early on Sunday morning when they turned Jo loose, and then, well it doesn't matter now,” I said. “Do you know anything about the book that went missing?” I asked.
“I thought that was Jo's book.”
“I'm talking about the paperback that everyone was searching for after the murder, you know, All the King's Men. It was supposed to be the killing clue.”
“I know what you're talking about, and I'm pretty sure that was Jo's book,” she said.
“By the way, I've got a picture of Jo Herring in the old Municipal Safety Building from the night of the murder.” As I said this, a look of horror came over Evelyn's face.
“Am I in that picture?” she asked.
“No, ma'am, it's just Jo and a couple of investigators,” I replied.
“Good. None of that was supposed to be in the newspaper. I don't know who took care of that; Bev calling in a few favors, I'm sure. I just didn't want to see my face on the front page of the paper back then, and I still don't.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“We need to meet tomorrow morning. I have a story you're going to want to hear.” This was my opening salvo to Gina, shortly after my final session with Nurse Evelyn had ended.
“I don't think I can make it.”
“I think you should try. It's important, really important.”
I wasn't certain that my directness would be well received, but after a bit of negotiating around the meeting time, Gina did arrive the next day, promptly at 11:00 a.m., at the same eatery as our prior session, and once again I had pre-purchased two drinks. This time, the wig had a reddish hue, and I noticed that her hands were shaking even more than when we had first met.1
“You said you had a story to tell me?”
“I do. It's a short story, and you may have actually heard it before.” As we sat at a table for two near a window, I took another look around the coffee house to see if anyone was a bit too perfectly positioned to hear what I was about to say.
“I discovered that years ago, decades actually, two women who were nurses and working at the same hospital just happened to have daughters of the same age, and both nurses were, shall we say, unhappily married.”
I paused a beat to ensure that she was paying attention. Satisfied that she was, I continued. “These two nurses discover that they have the same interests and hobbies. They like to drink. They like to dance. They like Printers Alley. Maybe they both like using narcotics? They certainly like using men for fun and pleasure, and lo and behold, they discover that they like each other. A lot. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“So one of the nurses decides to do away with her husband in the summer of 1960. Let's call that person ‘Nurse Jo.’ And let's call the other nurse, ‘Elizabeth.’ I don't actually know if Elizabeth was involved in any foul play in her husband's death, but this much is certain, Elizabeth's husband dies about three or so years after Jo's husband.” I glanced across the table at my guest, and she was staring out the window, unblinking, lost in a memory.
“Which brings us to the two daughters. One of the nurses begins to recruit her daughter into a lifestyle that I can only describe as unreal. A lifestyle where the mother eventually begins pimping out her daughter to powerful men, men with money, men who can pay the rent, men who can take care of their needs. And through what I might describe as systematic use and abuse, this daughter goes along with the plan. Are you getting the picture?” I asked.
Gina didn't speak but nodded her head affirmatively, still staring out the window.
“Maybe this daughter buries her pain in the arms of these powerful men, and she finds this exciting. Maybe she's treated well, for a while, but of course that doesn't last. It can't. And maybe on the outside it appears to everyone that this daughter is doing just fine. But on the inside? I wonder if that daughter might have vanished years ago, and it's possible that no one has seen her since then?”
I paused to sip from the iced-tea I had purchased, and I could see that Gina's eyes were now moist, but she was still staring out the window, not moving a muscle. I wasn't sure she was even breathing.
“The other daughter, let's call her Paula. She wants nothing to do with her mother's lifestyle. She rejects it and goes in a completely different direction. She leaves home, goes to college, becomes a leader, helps start the first snow skiing club at the University of Tennessee, gets an invitation to join a prestigious sorority, and eventually plans to go to law school. Oh, and something else, she wants justice for her father. But before she can get started down that path, guess what happens? Paula ends up murdered, her life taken from her in a tragic way, and she ends up graveyard dead, outside of town, without so much as a headstone to mark her lonely resting place.”
Across the table, I could see a trembling lip, and I asked Gina a question I had been holding back: “Does that seem fair to you? One daughter is murdered. The other one survives.”
After a second, I saw a tear rolling down her cheek. I leaned in and lowered my voice. “Gina?”
The whispered response took a while to formulate and was almost inaudible, as she covered her eyes with one hand.
“I wanted to be a nurse,” she said.
Now I had a lump in my own throat, and I turned my face toward the window so she couldn't see the tear forming in my own eye. We sat silently for a few minutes, both of us staring out the window, before I whispered softly to her: “There's help if you want it, Gina.”
When I turned back to face her, my glance was met with a look of deep sorrow. And then she whispered words I had not expected to hear: “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Can you please tell that little boy for me?”
I don't know how much time passed after this poignant exchange. There was another period of silence for what must have been several minutes, before the aroma of freshly roasted coffee began to find its way to our table, along with the sounds of a customer ordering drinks.
“What can I do for you, now?” Gina finally asked, her voice having regained some strength.
“I need your help. Paula Herring knew your mother. I think I'm right about that.”
“Yes, but they hated each other. I think at one point Paula threatened her if she ever came to their house again.”
“I think I know how that turned out,” I said. “So on the night all of this went down, you weren't there?”
“No. My mom got hurt somehow, and she tried to get me to bring a doctor's bag to her. At the time, I didn't know if my mom had been shot or stabbed, but I wouldn't do it. I knew something bad had happened, I just didn't know what it was, and I didn't want any part of it.”
“You found out later?”
“Jesse finally told me bits and pieces. When my mom got home that night, she had a pillowcase wrapped around her leg, with a piece of wire holding it in place. I'd never seen her like that, and she wouldn't talk. She packed a bag and left, and I didn't see her for almost a year.”
I shifted modes, ready to assert what I wasn't confident in, pretending that I knew what I actually did not. “How about a different topic: why don't you tell me about Beverly?”
She turned to the window again.
“Mom and Jo spent a lot of time with him on the boat.”
“And the apartment? The one near Wedgewood Diner, or I guess now you'd call it behind Zanies?” I asked.
“So you know about that?” she asked.
“I do. Anything you want to tell me about it?”
“No,” she replied.
“Do you know whatever happened to John Clarke's pistol?”
“It wouldn't surprise me if it ended up at the bottom of Old Hickory Lake.”
“That's what I would have done with it,” I replied. Pausing a moment to think about what had just been confirmed, I returned
to a more personal question. “Gina, do you need help? There are people in this town who can help you, you know that?”2
“I'm not ready. I'm just not.”
Attempting to savor my food during a lengthy discussion of murder and suicide was a challenge for me, but not so much for my two esteemed forensic guests, who seemed inured to such topics when we met for dinner during the American Academy of Forensic Sciences Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.1
A few minutes before our meeting time, it had been a relatively easy quest to ferret out the living Sherlock Holmes amidst hundreds of CSI enthusiasts filling up the massive lobby of the Marriott Hotel in midtown Atlanta. I simply looked for a man in a blue suit who could double for a tall, thin Basil Rathbone, wearing steel-framed eyeglasses, sporting a bit less hair, and indulging in one of two possible pleasures, tobacco or fine wine.
Basil Rathbone was the actor most associated with the Sherlock Holmes role for film and radio in the World War II era and again in the 1970s, when the films were rereleased. But whereas the fictional Sherlock Holmes might normally be found contemplating a problem while enjoying a pipe full of tobacco, Richard Walter preferred cigarettes, the Kool brand, as well as a fine glass of Chardonnay.
After introductions, I had the pleasure of sharing a meal not only with Richard Walter but also with one of his international colleagues, Dr. Klaus Neudecker, a physician and forensic psychiatrist from Bavaria, in southeast Germany. Walter explained that he had prepped Klaus with some minimal details about the babysitter murder and asked if the good doctor might join us for dinner.2 I welcomed the additional expertise. We found a quiet table in the back of one of the hotel restaurants, away from the main flow of guests, so as not to impact the dining experience of anyone seated near us.
“You're enjoying the conference?” I asked, after we had all been seated.
“It's rather good, yes. Especially today's presentation on suicide by water, where the victim drank so much water a chemical imbalance occurred and the person died, a rather clever way to off oneself,” noted Richard Walter.3
“That's interesting. How did the two of you come to meet?”
A Murder in Music City Page 25