Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (41 page)

"Dig you an early grave, did we?" I
asked. "Kick you while you were down?"

Fists started flying, and, before
we were able to back out of the bar, an entire wall collapsed—the
one displaying a framed collectible of Queen Victoria's pantaloons
and much beloved by the proprietor. Once we got outside, the mob
retreated back into the pub, but I was shaking as I got in Strong's
car to ride home.

"What is going on with me?" I asked
him. "I'm thirty-three years old and getting into barroom brawls,
now? In just six months I've seen my marriage collapse, dated a
psycho, and gotten shot. Now I'm fighting in bars? What the fuck is
next?"

He just shrugged his shoulders and laughed at
me.

We had decided to live under the
assumption that Catherine probably would have enjoyed nothing more
than to successfully finish the job she started January 18. Just to
feel safer, I bought a .357 Magnum. I recruited our police
reporter, Fred King, to take me to a pistol range and teach me how
to shoot it. I carried it everywhere in a canvas knapsack. On our
nightly forays, Strong would bring his shotgun, too. We must have
looked like cartoon characters, coming home drunk after a darts
tournament, stopping in the driveway, and then grabbing weapons
from the trunk. One time a tree limb made a noise brushing against
the garage door in the wind as we walked toward the house, and
Strong defended us by blowing a hole in the garage wall. Our
friends felt the need for arms as well. One night playing poker in
Strong's kitchen with a group of lawyers and reporters, we heard
tires squeal in the cul de sac outside his house.

"Whoaa," I shouted, as our guests
produced at least four large pistols from under the table, ready
for action.

"And the wind cried
MOOOOOHAFFFEEE," laughed Mark, mimicking Jimi Hendrix again as the
other players holstered their weapons. The he begged me to never
tell that he'd made fun of her that way.

"You know I told her you called her
a bum fuck, don't you?" I said.

"Can't trust you worth a shit. Now
I'm on her list."

"But we know who's still on top,
don't we?" laughed Kent Schaffer, the private investigator who had
bet me a hundred dollars I'd never live to attend Mike Ramsey's
1980 Christmas party, still more than nine months away.

"Want to cancel that bet?" I
asked.

"Nope," he said. "I still think
it's good."

"I think that as long as I can find
a chair, I could handle her again."

Of course, there
was work as well, and I found I enjoyed the change back into the
office for the variety of general assignment duties, covering
whatever story might arise on any given day. Both newspapers
appeared so confused about what to do with me as a story that they
relegated the shooting to the back pages. My management likely was
embarrassed about the news of their reporter getting shot in a
domestic squabble. But they didn't punish me or try to make me quit
by assigning an unpleasant work schedule. I saw the situation as
placing
The Post
in
a bind because the paper needed me to prove myself before a jury as
a truthful man. An acquittal for Catherine might have painted me as
a liar and diminished the paper's credibility. But I also thought
everyone at the paper believed my version of the events. Familiar
as they were with the vagaries of the criminal court system,
however, I also was sure they were holding their breath to make
sure I could prove it.

But it wasn't all fun and work
during the weeks between my shooting and Catherine's trial. I also
had preparations to attend with the district attorney's office for
that big event. And I was about to learn that the pleasant months
of early 1980 were just the eye of a hurricane, with the second
wall of rain and winds gathering just then to dump all over my
head.

FIFTY-EIGHT

March 1980

Frustrated for more than a year by
their failure to touch Catherine on the Tedesco murder, the brass
at the Harris County District Attorney's office saw me as the
vehicle for their second shot at her. And they liked their odds of
success. Not only was she the suspect in both cases, but the facts
of her relationship with both me and Tedesco boasted many
similarities, with one crucial exception. I would be able to
testify about mine.

So it had come as no surprise to
find a who's who of local law enforcement gathered in a large
conference room in the DA's building about eight hours after the
shooting to take my official victim's statement, a document that
normally would have been prepared by a homicide detective like
Donovan. Instead of just me and a cop in his cubicle, we had a
court stenographer taking my testimony under oath in a room filled
to capacity with DA assistants and special investigators. Donovan
was among them. Also in the crowd were Stricklin, Rosenthal,
Oncken, and Carpenter, plus some others that had not surfaced in
the early days of my case. Further emphasizing the importance the
law enforcement community placed on my case, the man interrogating
me for two hours in front of this audience was none other than
Harris County District Attorney John B. Holmes, Jr.,
himself.

Everybody wants a
piece of her ass, now
, I thought, taking a
mental roll call around that room.
And they
believe I can pimp her out.

That was fine with me. I hoped I
had done just that. Later I grinned when I learned that Catherine
had spent two nights in jail, unable to post bond while facing a
possible life sentence on a charge of attempted murder. I also
enjoyed seeing Don Stricklin himself visit Strong's house
unannounced two nights after the shooting to warn us personally
that she had finally made bail. Stricklin also said the office had
decided to assign a prosecution team from the regular assistant
ranks to avoid any hint of conflict that might arise if he or
another Special Crimes Bureau lawyer took the case. Stricklin had a
good chance of being called as a witness based on my statement to
him in November.

But I was pleased a few days later
to learn that a veteran prosecutor named Bert Graham would lead the
team with the help of another veteran, Ira Jones. Bert was about my
age, and I had watched him handle a number of trials during my time
covering courts. In fact, he had been the lead prosecutor in the
trial of the two Houston police officers accused in 1977 of killing
the Hispanic laborer, Joe Torres, by throwing him into Buffalo
Bayou. During that month-long trial moved to Huntsville, we had
become close acquaintances while living in the dormitory on the
campus of Sam Houston State University. Consulting frequently with
Bert on plans for the Mehaffey trial, I learned a lot more about
what actually had occurred the night she shot me and two days
before with the burglary at Strong's house.

"It's a good news,
bad news situation," Bert warned as he began outlining the case
strategy for me. I knew Bert to be an extremely fastidious
attorney. Although he had never lost a case as a prosecutor, he
always worried that he would. He was destined to remain a career
prosecutor in the office and rise in the next twenty years to the
position of chief assistant. But his tone discussing the Mehaffey
case in early 1980 left me wondering if it would actually be the
cakewalk to conviction I anticipated. After all, I thought,
hadn't I been shot in the back?

"You were inside her house," Bert
explained. "And there were two pistols involved. She told the
officers on the scene you had used one of them to threaten her, so
she has established a claim of self-defense."

Catherine had tried to tell the first officers
that all the action had occurred in the living room. But one of
them was skeptical, noting bullet holes along the walls and through
the picture window in the front of the apartment beside the door
where I had run. He walked into the bedroom where he discovered a
bullet hole in there and the chair with a bullet hole through the
seat.

The investigation convinced detectives she had
fired a total of seven times at me that night. One slug landed in
my back. I laughed when I heard they found another slug just laying
on her bed where it had fallen after sailing through the chair and
bouncing off my head. In addition, they marked holes in the hallway
wall and another in the picture window beside the front door. They
believed she fired two more times outside the house as I ran down
the street.

"Blasting away," I muttered, musing
on the image of those holes in the wall.

Bert said the officers believed
Catherine had kept a .32-calibre pistol stashed on the floor
beneath the couch in the living room, waiting for the best moment
and working up the courage to actually use it.

"She could have pulled it out and
shot you in the face any time she wanted while you were in the
living room with her earlier," said Bert. "For some reason, she
waited until she could entice you to the bedroom. Maybe she wanted
to make sure it looked like you had been in the bedroom so she
could call it attempted rape. Or, maybe she was waiting for someone
else who decided not to come. At any rate, when you got loose back
there, she had to change her plans. She shot up the walls trying to
kill you as you fled but couldn't hit the moving target. She even
threw one slug into that picture window at the front of the house,
probably just before she shot you in the doorway."

After using the last bullet in the .32 to put
me on the ground outside her apartment, Catherine apparently
withdrew to the bedroom where she retrieved a .22-caliber pistol
from the top drawer of her dresser, Bert theorized. The first cop
on the scene found that drawer still open when he checked the
bedroom. Bert said they believed she had used the .22 for any shots
outside the apartment, as I fled down the street.

"But the physical evidence verifies
your version of the incident," Bert continued, offering his view of
the good news for his trial strategy. "In fact, it's hard to
explain it any other way. That bullet hole in the seat of the
chair, for example, is crucial. She will have to explain that some
how. We all feel if she testifies she will lose control and show
jurors that temper."

"Or, at least the Medusa
stare."

"Yeah," he chuckled, "that, too.
Anyhow, we also have the other stuff leading up to that night,
testimony from Strong and the burglary. There are the tape
recordings with the threats against you she made to Jim Strong. And
we hope to find some way to at least mention the unsolved death of
George Tedesco. Could you testify that you knew about her
reputation and the suspicions in that murder?"

"Better than that," I said. "She
talked about it constantly. She told me what I had done was worse
than anything George had ever done."

"Did you take that as a
threat?"

"You bet your sweet
ass."

"We'll need you to say that in
court, without the sweet ass part, of course."

I nodded. Bert also said he needed to get that
slug from my back to prove she had been shooting the .32. So I
arranged day surgery and went to a hospital with John Donovan. He
stood beside the surgeon with a tin pan to preserve the chain of
evidence as the doctor deposited the .32-calibre bullet into his
custody. They just deadened my back with local anesthetic, and the
doctor dug around in there until he could grab the slug with a
forceps, much like a scene from an old western movie. I felt quite
a bit of pressure when he grabbed the slug, but nothing went wrong.
Of course, I needed another round of Demerol.

Just a few days after my shooting,
the family of George Tedesco filed a civil, wrongful-death lawsuit
seeking damages from Catherine and alleging she had conspired with
a man the family identified as Tommy Bell to murder Tedesco.
Although the criminal investigation into Tedesco had stalled, the
family's attorneys felt strongly enough about their private
investigation to make those allegations in a suit. I hadn't heard
much about Tommy Bell to that point. But I was destined to hear
much more in the weeks ahead.

My first Bell connection arrived in
the mail, when I received a receipt for a late January gasoline
purchase in New Jersey on a credit card of mine stolen in the
burglary at Strong's. I took it to Bert, and his investigator, John
Ray Harrison, tried to chase it down. The license plate number on
the receipt was partially blurred, but Bert and John Ray tried a
combination of digits until they found one that made sense. They
traced one of the combinations back to the mother of Tommy Bell. He
was known to have been a client of Catherine's. They thought they
might finally have hit the jackpot, gaining leverage against an
insider who could deliver Catherine on a number of crimes—maybe
even Tedesco.

So, just before the March 24 trial
date, they interrogated Bell for three hours. They persuaded him to
admit Catherine had dispatched him to Strong's house the night of
the burglary. He told them she wanted him to "rough Taylor up." But
Bell denied stealing anything. Since Bell had missed me at the
house, Bert decided against trying to squeeze him on a flimsy
charge like unlawful use of a credit card. He wanted more. But,
with the trial fast approaching, he had to keep Bell in the wings.
Bert knew he couldn't trust Bell enough to force him to testify.
And Bert thought he had a strong case without Bell. Bert just saw
Bell as a potential ace in the hole, should something go
wrong.