Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir Page 4

  "Strong?" she asked, obviously a little confused.

  "Jim Strong," he continued, adding with a laugh, "It's my name." Introduction complete, Jim turned to a new conversational assault on me, asking her: "Is Taylor making you bored? I came to tell him he's late for the Herpes Help meeting. But don't let that scare you away."

  "Let me guess," she said, ignoring his inference that I might have Herpes, and she should find a new date. "You're another one, aren't you?"

  "Another reporter?" Jim asked providing clarification. "You have a nose for shit, don't you? Smell us a mile away? But you're right. I do radio reports."

  Suddenly Catherine stepped back and looked at both of us. Then she said, "Say, wouldn't you guys like to see James's house? Can I give you a tour?"

  "Can't wait," said Strong.

  She turned then and led us around the living area, into a side room, and up a flight of stairs. She opened the door at the top, and the three of us entered James's bedroom. We started walking in different directions looking at his stuff. Catherine rifled through one of his dresser drawers and grabbed a pair of underpants. Clenching her fist, she shoved it inside and jammed it against the crotch.

  "The host with the most," she giggled, stretching the shorts like they had a massive erection and mimicking a ring master at the circus. "Yes, folks, our James is all man."

  "Uninhibited little gal, aren't you?" I said, while I watched Strong pawing through James's closet, pulling out a pair of trousers.

  "Must be his cheap scotch," she mumbled, tossing the shorts on his king-sized bed while rooting through more stuff in the dresser. "Now he can tell all his friends I've been in his drawers."

  I spied a large Bible on an antique lectern he had placed at the foot of his bed. In the living room it would have been an intriguing conversation piece. Up here, however, it seemed out of place. I imagined him reading the scriptures before hopping into the sack with some prostitute. I turned the pages and found the section where God turns Lott's wife into a block of salt. When I started to read out loud, Catherine and Strong hopped on his bed and lay next to each other listening pensively. Then I could hear her mumbling only half to herself.

  "What's the matter with me?" she was asking. "I don't know what I am doing. Where is the payoff on this? These guys have nothing."

  I stopped reading and asked, "You were saying?"

  Before she could answer, a small, secret side door burst open and James stormed into the room.

  "What the fuck is going on in here?" he yelled, as Strong and Catherine just continued to lay on the bed. Catherine started laughing and slowly stood up.

  "Ah, James, what's the problem? I'm just doing my job. I thought you wanted all your friends to see your fine new place."

  I watched his mutilated shorts slide off the bed and onto the floor as she stood up to look at him. Strong just laid there laughing. James looked at me and I said, "Nice Bible, James. Family heirloom or did you buy this specially for your new townhome?"

  James just scowled, looked us over, and then stomped out through the main door to the bedroom. I looked at Catherine and said, "What's the big deal?"

  Catherine picked up his underwear and tossed it in a wicker basket by the dresser. Still laughing, she made her way to the door while Strong got to his feet. In the doorway she turned and started to laugh.

  "He's just pissed, I guess, because I'm supposed to be his date for this thing. I'd better go back downstairs and pretend to be the hostess. He's also very sentimental about the bed. It's a five-hundred-year-old antique."

  I looked at Strong and said, "A five-hundred-year-old bed? Think of the stories that piece of furniture could tell. We probably should leave, huh? Seen enough of his place? Let's find a bar."

  Strong nodded and made for the door. Catherine said, "Good idea, I'll show you guys out."

  Downstairs Catherine asked for my phone number. I asked for two of her cards. I used one to jot down my office extension and handed it back. The other I dropped in my pocket.

  "I'll call you some time," I said, walking across the porch.

  Just then we heard a tremendous crash to the side of the building as James slammed a bag of empty liquor bottles into the trash can, breaking all the glass and mumbling something that sounded like, "Motherfuckers."

  "Again I ask, What's the big deal?" I said to Catherine. She looked to the side of the building, started laughing, and said, "This is going to be a long weekend. Call me some time."

  Then she turned to the trash cans and yelled, "Hey James, quit making so Goddamn much noise over there. We were just having some fun."

  I heard her cackling as she walked toward the trash cans all set to make up with James. Then I drove away wondering what the future might hold.

  Part Two:

  I Led Three Lives

  SIX

  September, 1979

  Catherine was destined to become several important things to me. But most prominently, she would become my problem solver. Before I met her, I had a bunch of problems. Then, all of sudden, with her in my life I had only one.

  I didn't see her again for about two weeks after the party while the Tedesco estate jury trial raged in Harris County Probate Court. I wasn't covering it, and I was busy with cases on my own beat. So I stayed away. I spent the time self-absorbed in my personal dilemma, something I had been doing a lot. And I thought about Herbert A. Philbrick.

  For those who don't recall, Philbrick shared his life story in the early Cold War 1950s with a tension-filled book and then a television series entitled I Led Three Lives. The stories followed his adventures living three secret, separate lives simultaneously. To most of the world, Philbrick was a private citizen working in a Boston advertising agency. To the Soviets, however, he was a communist sympathizer and spy in his own country. And, for the US government, he was a double agent, placing himself in danger to help his nation fight the Red menace. On one level the program thrilled viewers by dramatizing the dangers of a regular guy acting as international spy. On another level, however, Philbrick offered a message for everyone, even those in more mundane walks of life. To a certain extent, each of us lives several lives that often intersect. Some follow more contradictory simultaneous paths than others. But each of us must learn to balance those lives, adjusting the tempo to make the combination a tool for growth rather than destruction. If those paths cross and conflict, sooner or later you have to choose one and leave the others behind.

  So it was that I came to analyze my three lives and now, years later, recognize how they worked to first lead me into the turmoil ahead, and then, in the end, deliver me from disaster. It's been hard for me to appreciate the story of Catherine and me without first understanding my three lives and how she helped to forge them into a single path. They weren't as glamorous as Philbrick's, but each had its moments. First came my life as a dedicated, professional journalist. Second was my life as a responsible husband and father. And, third came my life as a reckless, but charming, rogue. I had no regrets about any one of them while realizing there were times when one interfered with another. Somehow I had managed to maintain them on separate but parallel lines for more than a decade—my entire adult life to that date—until they led me to Catherine, and I had to choose. I enjoyed each life in its own way and would be hard-pressed to pick one over another. Actually, now that I think about it, the charming rogue beats hell out of the other two. But seriously, how long can you effectively juggle that one against anything else—unless you are a congressman or member of the Royal Family?

  Of the three lives that comprised my existence, however, "professional journalist" dominated as the strongest thread among three layers of twine twisted into a single rope. That life overlapped the others and drove them along. And my focus on the integrity of that professional life would turn out to be my strongest weapon in the battle of wills about to ensue with Catherine Mehaffey.

  SEVEN

  The 1950s

  The professional emerged first and at a surp
risingly early age, spawned by ego and its inspirational sidekick, ambition. Who can explain the roots of a work ethic? Nature versus nurture traditionally frames the debate. Is anyone born with a work ethic? Although I tend to doubt that, I recall things I did as a child that would indicate I had one before I even became aware of the concept of work or watched my old man bury himself alive with it. In trying to understand it over the years, I have transferred the concept to ambition, which might be a more natural explanation of how a disposition toward success could trigger the conclusion you must work hard to get ahead. Whatever the explanation of the work ethic, I had it. And I harnessed it to push forward in a career of journalism that perfectly fit my talents.

  Almost as soon as I could write at all, I started turning that skill into story telling. I remember writing Christmas plays in the fourth grade about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and then following with a historical epic centered on a Colonial era Yankee peddler hero named Will. We actually performed these scripts in my fourth grade class, and I got a big kick from the attention. So it was an interest in writing that drew me toward journalism in the beginning, but it was the work ethic that helped me achieve it.

  Looking at the genes, I now know that my ancestry included hard workers. Poor white trash doesn't leave much of a paper trail, but I still have found records of some. They all trod similar paths toward the future, traveling west into central Missouri in the 1830s from Virginia and Kentucky. My mother's primary line, the Wrights, are traceable back to Scotland. Meanwhile, my Taylors begin as far as I know with a man named Joseph Taylor born in 1811 to unknowns in Madison County, Kentucky. Before Joseph there is simply a void. But I do know he farmed land in Missouri and worked his grandson mercilessly, according to a diary kept by the boy, Cicero Hampton Taylor, who grew up to become my great grandfather. Cicero lived to the age of ninety-six and did not die until I was in my teens. I regret that I never took the trouble to talk with him about his life when I had the opportunity. No one ever starts caring about genealogy until all the good sources are dead. But at least another relative shared Cicero's diary with me as well as some observations on the son that became a grandpa I would never know, Elsus Bower Taylor. He died of natural causes in 1944, three years before my birth.

  Folks called Elsus "Nub" because of a dreadful accident he suffered as a child when he burned off a hand after falling into a fireplace. But the handicap didn't stop him from becoming well known in central Missouri for his skills at breaking mules. He also earned a reputation as a hard-drinking scoundrel. My dad used to joke about their practice of moving every year to a new farm space and talked about times when they were so poor he couldn't have shoes. The Great Depression hit them hard, and my father, Dale Kempster Taylor, escaped by lying about his age to join Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. He returned to the farm in the late 1930s determined to make something more of himself. He met my mom, who came from more stable farming stock, and they moved to the nearest big city of St. Louis about the time World War II began.

  A CCC-related hernia kept my dad out of the service until near the end of the war when he volunteered and accepted an assignment guarding prisoners in Washington State. For some reason only Dale could fathom, he decided to leave the exciting Pacific Northwest after the war and return to grungy old St. Louis to seek his fortune and provide me a place of birth in 1947. Armed only with a grade school education and ambition, he found a job pumping gas and eventually turned that into a prosperous life, first owning a gas station and then launching what would become the city's largest lawnmower sales and service business.

  So it would seem that Dale's offspring might be expected to have "worker" stamped on their genes. That predilection received reinforcement when I learned to accept twelve-hour workdays as the norm just from watching him never come home. I was destined to become intricately acquainted with those twelve-hour days in just a few years ahead, but back then, like any other kid, I saw my old man as a hero and concluded that twelve-hour days must be the hero's schedule. Since I, of course, wanted to be a hero, too, I jumped into that lawnmower work alongside him as soon as I could, joining the business as a little gofer the summer after sixth grade at the age of twelve.

  Outgoing and witty, my dad was more of a salesman than a mechanic and had earned his living just after the war selling Fuller Brush products door-to-door. My mom used to joke about his first day on that job, when he left to sell brushes and came back with a 1948 set of the World Book Encyclopedia sold to him by a prospect. Another family legend claimed he once won a bet by successfully selling a bag of dog poop within his first dozen doors after bragging to a rival that he could sell anything. He told me later the buyer wanted the poop to fertilize a garden. As a lawnmower magnate he took great pride in sometimes loading a new lawnmower into his truck and toting it door-to-door until he could find some homeowner cutting the grass. Then he would carry on like a vacuum cleaner salesman, unloading the mower and cutting a section to demonstrate the wonders of the new machine.

  As proof you can't ever take the country out of the boy, Dale one time scored a big burlap sack filled with live chickens from an uncle who still lived on a farm in central Missouri. He carried the chickens home in the trunk of his 1952 DeSoto and proceeded to wring their necks in our driveway while I sat on the steps with my younger sister watching in absolute humiliation. Thanks to Dale, our neighbors would qualify as experts the next time they accused someone of running around like a chicken with its head cut off. They clamored to their doors and windows to watch his chicken show, mesmerized by the scene of headless birds dancing their death jigs while blood gushed from their open necks. But no one complained.

  For me, this silence-of-the-chickens-episode stirred my first emotions of empathy and compassion. I sat horrified watching him clutch each bird around the neck and then spread his legs for support while spinning his right arm clockwise in a windmill motion before snapping his wrist at the bottom of the circle with a jerk that kept the bird's head in his fist and sent the headless body sailing through the air to finally bounce across the concrete and then leap up in one final frenzy of fluttering confusion. I was glad I wasn't a chicken. I also was glad I'd have the freedom to become my own man and leave that part of my heritage behind.

  A rural traditionalist on corporal punishment as well, Dale lashed me occasionally with a belt and one time employed a willow switch in the backyard after I had vanished for an entire afternoon walking the three miles home from his shop at the age of seven with my five-year-old sister in tow. At least he acknowledged the ingenuity of my feat before laying on the wood, mumbling: "I can't believe you found the way." When I was a toddler, I'd been told, he once bought a dog harness with a leash to restrain me from running around in a store and then had to remove it after some Good Samaritan intervened with a threat to stomp him stupid.

  Despite embarrassments like those, however, I thoroughly enjoyed his eccentricities and fully respected his discipline, which also served as the foundation for our comfortable middle class life in suburban St. Louis with a stay-at-home mom. I never even thought about abuse and actually reveled in that switching as a badge of honor for what had been my greatest personal adventure to that point in my young life. I wallowed in the pride that the switching failed to make me cry. And he seasoned the rod with plenty of love. I just considered those episodes as the dark side of growing up rural in suburban America. On the bright side, he founded our neighborhood's unit of the YMCA's fathers-and-sons Indian Guides program, forming the Osage Tribe for us and several of my friends. As the inaugural chief he took the name Straight Arrow while I became Broken Bow. Through the Indian Guides he taught me to fish and camp. But he never was a hunter.

  While my dad emerged as a role model for discipline and responsibility, my mother was a different story. I loved my mom, of course. She gave me life and did other considerate things like reading daily at noon while I sucked my thumb before nap time. But I just didn't like her, and she never had my respect. S
he seemed helpless, terrified of life, and unable to function outside the home, where she often operated like a bully. She could swing that belt, too, and usually administered her whippings with an order for me or my sister to "Bend over and hold your ankles." She didn't have to wait for our dad to come home. I learned later that she suffered from a clinical depression so severe that a psychiatrist would treat her with shock therapy in the 1970s. In my formative years, she emerged as a reactive role model, providing traits for me to observe as an adult in rejecting women who might otherwise seem attractive.