Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir Page 3

  "George was strange, but I never saw him in headdresses," she fired back. Then she added: "I took one other thing that is probably not on this list that I returned to him because I was fascinated with it, and I knew it meant a great deal to him. It was a human fetus that he kept in a jar. That was his only child, and I gave it back."

  Adding that the lawyer's list looked like "padding for the insurance company," she admitted getting $950 for some of the art, but refused to identify the buyer.

  She admitted knowing that Tedesco was taping their telephone conversations in the months prior to his death as they continued to squabble about her divorce case.

  "You have obviously gone over all the tapes and prepared questions from them," she told the lawyers during her deposition. "We both know. Let's not insult each other's intelligence."

  Jumping to her challenge, one of the lawyers asked: "Did you ever tell Dr. Tedesco in a telephone conversation back in January 1978, 'I came there tonight to kill you. Can I kill George Tedesco?'"

  She replied: "I don't recall but I could have. I think anybody who ever knew George probably at one time or another—including Robert—wanted to kill George, but George just was not worth it."

  The lawyer continued: "Did you ever tell him in January of 1978 that 'You are going to be very, very sorry as far as threatening me. I am a lawyer, and I know the tricks of the trade.' Do you know the tricks of the trade?"

  That question brought an answer that twenty years later would hover as a Dallas Morning News headline above a lengthy article the paper called "Tricks of the Trade."

  "Me?" she asked rhetorically. "Tricks?"

  Asked if she ever bragged about getting into his house through the mail slot, she replied: "Yes. I had a little bottle and on it, it would say, 'Drink me.' And I would drink it, and then I would shrink to an incredibly small size, and I would literally walk through whatever it was that Alice walked through."

  But her sarcasm turned dark at one point when the lawyer elaborated, and accused her of sticking her "skinny" little arm through the mail slot to open the door. She shot back: "Wait a minute. I don't have a skinny arm. I look just fine. You ought to re-examine yourself a little bit physiologically."

  Tedesco's family had charged that her removal of items occurred in 1978 and again after the doctor's death in January 1979. Dancing like a prize fighter along the ropes, however, Catherine bobbed and weaved around questions that tried to trace the trail of Tedesco's property. Investigators apparently had tied some of the loot to Catherine's acquaintance, Tommy Bell—a character destined to play a significant role in the violence of my confrontation with her.

  While evading questions that would link the missing art to anyone, however, she admitted her role with a comment that sounded like a boast: "And I sold it. How about that?"

  Not even Tedesco's murder in January 1979 stopped Catherine's removal of their "community property." If anything, it added more urgency as she told lawyers she suddenly feared that Robert would race inside the townhouse and grab some for himself.

  She told the lawyers she had not learned of Tedesco's death until mid-afternoon on that day when she went to the Family Law Center for the divorce hearing. The police had contacted her divorce attorney, and he told her they wanted to talk.

  "I couldn't tell them much," she recounted in her July deposition. "I was stunned. I didn't really believe he was dead until I saw this little purse he carried sitting on the desk."

  She said she went to the townhouse that night "because I wanted to know what had happened. I wanted to know how he had been killed, where he had been killed. I found it incredible."

  Catherine said she saw the report on the detective's desk while he was out of the room. She said she only talked to the detective for twenty minutes. But, before going to the townhouse, she said, all that she knew had come from him. She said the detective approved her trip that night to the townhouse.

  "It looked like there had been a ferocious battle in the garage," she testified in her deposition. "I saw a lot of blood. It was all over the right side of the garage. There were pieces of more than blood out there, and I never saw anything like that in my life."

  She admitted she took documents that night but nothing else.

  "When we got there somebody had poured glue in the lock, and they had pasted a sign on the front door written in paper that said, 'Sealed by order of the court.' We did not know what court—the kangaroo court?" she testified. "We didn't know, so we went around to the back."

  She said they entered through the garage because she suspected Robert would be "in there plundering heavily, so I decided to take that which was mine out of the house."

  Catherine began to ramble in her testimony. She told the lawyers: "I think the next day somebody told me the homicide detectives figured that it was either a homosexual who killed him or a drug-related deal because they had found some boxes there, crates, packing crates, and I started to receive a large input of information at this time from many people who began telling me things that they had heard, and I could not tell you what one told me and what the other didn't."

  She said: "I also heard that they thought that if I had done it, I would have used a gun."

  Catherine said she couldn't recall the names of the locksmiths or a friend who loaned her a van to transport property from the home. She said: "It passed like a dream."

  No one expected Catherine to present the image of a grieving widow when she took center stage at the deposition in July, barely six months after the brutal murder of the man she claimed had been her husband. But none of the lawyers either could have predicted the dark mix of sarcasm that spouted from her mouth. They knew she had flaunted her role in interviews with police investigators. And the way she handled questions in the civil deposition just enhanced her image as someone who felt untouchable in Tedesco's death.

  I never had a chance to read her deposition until ten years later. By then, I was able to smile about her cocky comments, shake my head with a laugh, and whisper softly to myself: Yes, that's my gal.

  FIVE

  September 28, 1979

  "That's her. She's here. That's the bitch everybody is talking about."

  It would not have mattered if I'd been at that deposition two months earlier, or if I had known in September about the other things I learned later on. It would not have changed what happened between Catherine and me. This was a special, peculiar time for me—a period that left me vulnerable for a dance down the dark side of the street with Catherine Mehaffey as my escort. Freshly separated from my second wife, I was looking for adventure. Although Tedesco had complained about the way she cooked food, I thought she might make the perfect chef for serving plates of action.

  Responding to my friend's whispered alert—"That's her"—I turned to look out in the yard where he was pointing his finger not so discreetly at Catherine as she strolled toward the house looking for the bar. We had come after work on a Friday afternoon to some lawyer's cocktail party organized to celebrate nothing more than the end of the week and his purchase of this upscale townhouse near Houston's bustling downtown. The lawyer's name was James, and he had offered his verbal invitation a few days earlier during a personal visit to our office in the criminal courthouse press room.

  "There'll be lots of nasty crack," James had said, announcing his party.

  "Nasty crack, huh?" I had said. "How can I refuse?"

  So it was that I came to be standing in James's living room, staring through his French doors, and watching the nastiest crack in the courthouse as she headed my way. This widow, of course, wore red. But at least it wasn't a flaming firehouse red that might have offended old-schoolers who prefer their widows shrouded in black. Her dress had splotches of yellow to complement the golden curls parked just above the shoulders. At five-feet-three-inches and about a hundred pounds, she really didn't look the menace that most would have us believe. She was considered attractive but not necessarily a knockout. In later years I would recall her as re
sembling the adult actress Reese Witherspoon, who was only three years old at that time. But she also had the hard look of a bad girl, and that played to my weakness. A menace? She just looked like fun to me.

  "So this is the notorious Catherine Mehaffey," I teased, approaching from behind as she ordered a scotch from the bartender. I figured this might be the only time in my life I'd be able to use that opening line.

  She turned and squinted from the corner of one eye. I could tell she was not immediately impressed with my attire. I stood out from the legal crowd in their pinstripe suits. My khakis and herringbone jacket betrayed my station. But after all, I did represent the working press, and I had a reputation to maintain. I also offered a display of red and yellow with my tie: a field of red decorated with yellow images of the three monkeys warning observers to see, hear, or speak no evil. It was a tradition at the courthouse for me to wear the thing when juries deliberated big cases, and now it seemed fitting as I began to flirt with Catherine Mehaffey. I asked for a scotch and saw her watching.

  "And you would be…?" she asked, waiting for me to fill the blank.

  I offered my right hand in a professional greeting, took the drink with my left, and said, "Gary Taylor. I cover courts for The Houston Post."

  Immediately she jerked back with a sneer, as if someone had thrown a dead skunk on the floor. She sipped her drink and peeked over the edge of the glass. I stared her down until she spoke.

  "I used to like that paper. It used to be the start of every day for me. Now it just makes me sad. I still read it, but not my mother. She can't stand it anymore just because of Fred King."

  "So Fred wrote a story you didn't like? Those police stories can be gruesome," I said, realizing that, as our police beat reporter, Fred had written the story about Tedesco getting his head caved in. I recalled how Fred had managed to work Mehaffey into that story, noting police had questioned her about the common-law marriage lawsuit and suggesting to even a casual reader: "gold digger" or, worse, "femme fatale."

  "If this ends with Faye Dunaway playing you in the movie, you'll feel better about Fred," I said.

  That made her giggle because, as I would learn later, she was a sucker for old crime movies, particularly those with bushwhacking babes, dangerous darlings or murderous muffs."I can't apologize for Fred, he's one of our best reporters," I continued in a professional vein. "I only control my own stories, and I don't think you've made any of those yet. But I do remember that Tedesco story was buried on the inside with no pictures. Maybe nobody read it but you and your mother."

  "It was read by everyone I know," she said, swishing a mouthful of scotch as she spoke. "Now I have the estate trial starting Monday. We'll see who gets the last laugh on this. Are you covering that?"

  "Nope. I'm strictly criminal courts. I don't even know if we're going to cover it. We're in one of those periods where editors see stories like that as detracting from more serious stuff like the mayor's race."

  "That would suit me just fine if no one is there to hear me tell about the merciless beatings and abuse I took from that man."

  We were starting to click. Two or three times in everyone's life they find another person playing their tune. This was happening then to us. As we talked, I knew both of us were thinking in the back of our minds: I'm going to fuck you, sooner or later. That's where this conversation is headed.

  If you say you've never had such a Norman Rockwell moment yourself with a potential sex partner, I'm sorry. But our roadmap to the bedroom was marked in scarlet letters from the moment we met. I can't explain how. But it happens. It's happened to me maybe four times in life. And this was one of them.

  "So, where is Mrs. Taylor tonight?" Catherine finally asked, not so subtly digging for a crucial piece of information.

  I sipped my scotch and took the bait: "Which one? You might say I'm estranged at the moment from wife number two. So I hope she's home with the girls."

  "Ah, Mr. Taylor, that's too bad. Just when we were getting along so well. But I have such bad luck with the estranged. You know, they always take what they want then run back to wife number two or one or whatever. Then I get the broken heart."

  "I don't think that's an option on this one. You can trust me on that."

  "Trust you, huh? You'd like that, wouldn't you? You'd be panting like a dog and begging for more if you could get some of this. Then you'd go off and run back to that wife number two the minute she says: 'Oh, Gary, I think we've made a terrible mistake. The girls need their father.' And you'd have this big, shit-eating grin on your face like you just scratched the seven-year itch with a steel sheep's comb and got away with it."

  She finished off her scotch, then continued: "I've been there. But it is fun to flirt with you a little. Once that divorce is final, you give me a call, and I'll buy you a decent scotch and maybe, uh, a new suit if you think you'd wear it."

  "You ever been married?" I asked.

  She tilted her head, batted her eyes, and laughed as she replied, "You mean to anyone other than George?"

  "Oh, yeah," I said almost apologetically. I was surprised she'd even snapped on the omission. It didn't seem he would count. "Forgot about him."

  "I sure can't call you as an expert witness, can I? You might qualify as an expert on marriage, but I can't have that attitude."

  "Well, besides George Tedesco. Anybody else?"

  She chatted a bit about her first husband and their time in Japan while he served in the Navy. Of course, she omitted the part about taking a shot at him. I guess it might have been confusing to discuss more than one wounded husband at a time. She quickly turned the conversation to my situation.

  "What makes you think this is so permanent?"

  "She's got a new man in her life. That's why we're estranged."

  "So sad. You're the stooge on this one?"

  "I came home from a trip and asked my four-year-old daughter about her weekend. When she said, 'It was terrible. Uncle Al was here all weekend,' I figured a separation was in order."

  By this time Catherine had ordered another scotch and was drinking it just as I provided the details. My misery caused her to spit a mouthful on the floor as she laughed in my face. I realized the image of the victimized cuckold really wasn't earning the proper respect from her. She obviously had her own code of acceptable conduct. So I shifted to my charming rogue personae.

  "I got even. We had a chat, and I went ahead and told her about my eight affairs."

  "How long were you married?"

  "Four years."

  "You had eight affairs in four years of marriage and confessed it? Your lawyer must love that. Why in hell would you confess to eight affairs in four years of marriage?"

  I shook my head, sipped some scotch, and mumbled, "That was all I could remember."

  Another mouthful of scotch hit the floor.

  "You know," I said, "it's kind of a joke to say it, considering I've been married twice, but I'm really not the marrying kind."

  Just then, one of my reporter pals walked up and inserted himself into our conversation. Jim Strong was destined to play a crucial role in the saga about to unfold. At the time, we shared adjoining desks in the criminal courthouse press room. While I wrote for a newspaper, Jim reported his stories for a string of local radio stations. We often covered the same trials and events, played bridge together on slow days, and had started trading life stories over beers now and then. He lived alone in a house in north Houston, and I was already thinking about possibly renting a bedroom from him so I could have a cheap place to live during the divorce. For the last couple of weeks, since Uncle Al had arrived, I'd been sleeping for free on the living room couch of a sympathetic editor who had warned his sympathy would vanish by the end of the month.

  "I see you've met the belle of the ball," said Strong, hooking a thumb in Catherine's direction. To her, he introduced himself by saying, "Mehaffey, right? I'm Strong."