Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (43 page)

"I know that bitch was responsible
for killing him," Bell's sister said, after lighting a cigarette
and taking a sip of her beer. She was about ten years my junior and
I found her exceptionally attractive in an earthy sort of way. She
had been in court that day to lend support to the other young woman
sharing drinks with us at Corky's—a woman who had identified
herself during testimony as the former girlfriend of the late Tommy
Bell.

Her appearance had followed my
testimony, much abbreviated from that first trial. As Bert and I
had decided after that March debacle, I told a simple story of love
gone wrong with Catherine. There had been no mention of Tedesco or
the tapes. Jurors heard only my abbreviated account of the
relationship that had ended with a burglary and my shooting. Then
Bell's girlfriend took the stand to rock the courtroom and drive
Catherine's legal team into the corner for a standing
ten-count.

Although Tommy Bell had never
agreed to testify against Catherine, the pressure had grown intense
in the weeks between the trials, with Bert seeking any sort of
wedge that might force him to turn. The climax occurred on May 5
when police responded to an ambulance call at Bell's apartment and
found he'd been shot to death while watching television. His
roommate reported Bell had been playing Russian roulette with a
pistol and had accidentally killed himself with a shot to the head.
While they could find no evidence indicating anything different,
the police did discover something that would prove crucial in the
second Mehaffey trial. Right there at the death scene, connected to
Bell's television, they found Jim Strong's Beta Max, which had been
stolen in the January 15 burglary. Finally Bert had secured
physical evidence linking Bell to the burglary. He just needed to
link Catherine with Bell.

And Bell's girlfriend was quick to
oblige. She testified only briefly to make two points. She told
jurors that her boyfriend had not acquired the Beta Max until after
the middle of January. And she also told them that Bell had been a
client of Catherine Mehaffey.

"What was Tommy Bell's profession?"
asked Bert.

"Lots of things," she replied. "But
he did rob and do a lot of burglaries."

In his turn with her, Skelton
drilled a little deeper into Bell's death and saw it backfire when
he raised a question about the cause. His questions allowed her to
challenge the assertion Bell had died in an accident, leaving
jurors to question the mystery themselves and demonstrating Bell's
girlfriend possessed a Medusa stare of her own, directing it at
Catherine.

"He had a shot to the head, but he
wasn't playing Russian roulette," she testified in a steady voice
that made clear these two women hated each other. "I have no way of
saying for definite. The case hasn't closed."

All that remained was for me to
return to the stand and positively identify the Beta Max as the one
stolen from Strong in the January 15 burglary. As quickly as that,
Bert had shown jurors that Catherine was not the type to walk
quietly away from a simple domestic dispute. He had linked
Catherine to a professional burglar who had died violently in
possession of something stolen from my home. Further investigation
of Bell's death had produced no evidence to bring charges against
anyone. The name of Tommy Bell would, however, fill another space
on the list of Mehaffey associates and lovers to meet an untimely
death. He no longer was eligible to receive one of our "Mehaffey
Survivor" T-shirts since he had failed to survive. And his sister
was convinced Catherine had orchestrated his death
somehow.

I had been sitting beside Bell's
sister on a bench in the hall outside the courtroom and would not
learn until later from reading a transcript exactly what Bell's
girlfriend had said in court. Bell's sister had been subpoenaed to
testify, too, but Bert had been reluctant to call her for fear she
might say something to trigger a mistrial. Neither of us was
allowed to sit in the courtroom and hear the testimony of other
witnesses. So we had a little chat ourselves that led to the
drinking session that night at Corky's.

"You're Gary Taylor," she said,
introducing herself. "We have a lot in common."

"We should get a drink," I offered
and made plans for Corky's.

The rest of the trial that day had
gone well. Bert called a parade of police officers, forensics
experts and other witnesses who assembled the jigsaw puzzle of my
shooting for the jury. One detective told of finding both pistols
outside near the street. A forensics expert testified that the
bullet hole in the seat of the chair had entered from the bottom in
a manner consistent with someone holding the chair out as a shield.
The two teenaged girls told about my race from the apartment and
Catherine's pursuit. And my surgeon testified about removing a
.32-caliber slug from my back where it had been lodged about
half-an-inch from my chest cavity. Still, Will Gray tried to get
the doctor to say I had not been in mortal danger from the wound
because the bullet had stopped before killing me. It seemed like a
strategy that jurors might find deceptive.

"I saw him after the injury and at
that time he was up, walking around," the doctor said when Gray
asked if the wound posed the possibility of permanent injury or
death.

"Wasn't any thanks of Catherine
Mehaffey that bullet didn't go into the heart?" asked Bert
sarcastically, with his question interrupted by the expected
shouting of objections by both of Catherine's attorneys. But he had
made his point.

Then, at Corky's that night, Bell's
sister was making her point about Catherine, vowing the vengeance
of a feud that would continue until one of them was dead. Admitting
her role as a fence for selling the property her brother had
stolen, she said she also had worked with Catherine from time to
time. She said she knew Catherine owed her brother a large sum of
money for a secretive job he had done for her, but Catherine had
never paid. Although Bell had never confided the nature of that job
to his sister, she just assumed it had been the murder of George
Tedesco.

"Taylor, you know, I don't want to
offend you, but your stuff was really shit," she said, changing the
subject with a giggle. "I knew right away I couldn't sell that
stereo, so I just threw it into a dumper behind a convenience
store."

"I'm not offended. My luggage by
Kroger days are over now, and I bought a nicer stereo already. That
stuff was junk, wasn't it?"

"But Jim Strong," she said, nodding
at him, "that man had some quality equipment. Tommy wanted the Beta
Max for himself. But the pistol and the other things I turned into
cash."

Jeez, I thought, looking right into her eyes,
I would really like to fuck you tonight.

Then I wondered if
I hadn't slipped and mumbled that out loud because she grinned and
winked at me. I looked at Strong and realized he must have been
eavesdropping on our subliminal conversation because he started
shaking his head in the negative, reminding me how dangerous a
fling with Bell's sister would be. Bert Graham had become something
of a probation officer for me, ordering me to avoid controversial
situations that could disrupt the trial. I knew he would have had a
palsy attack to learn I had taken Tommy Bell's sister out for
drinks in the middle of the trial. And his eyes would have popped
right out of his head if he were to learn from some defense witness
later in the week I had started a sexual affair with that girl.
Jurors would likely find some way to convict me of something if
they heard about that. So I sighed and made a mental note to
myself:
Some day figure out why I find bad
girls so irresistible
.

"Say," I said, changing the
subject, "what do you think would have happened if I had been in
the house the night your brother came by? Think I could have taken
him?"

She tilted her head and ran her
eyes down the front of my body, humming as she did. Then she said,
"You are bigger than he was. But he was quick and wiry with street
smarts. It might have been a pretty good match."

I doubted that I would have given
Tommy Bell much trouble at all. But I would have tried, and I was
glad there hadn't been a chance to find an answer.

"You know," Bell's sister said,
"after today we're all on Catherine's list now. When she gets
around to settling all of her debts, she'll want payment from
us."

"I don't know what we can do about
that," I said.

"I do," she said. "I want us to
make a pact. If any one of us turns up dead, the other three will
go after her."

I looked at Strong, who blinked
long and hard. We'd been invited to join a death pact.

Well
, I thought,
why not? We've had just about every other silly thing in this
adventure, why not this, too?

I could predict with some certainty
I'd never see these girls again, anyway, so I didn't see the harm
in a drunken promise of this sort.

"All for one?" I said, with more
than a twinge of sarcasm, and raised my beer bottle to the center
of the table.

"One for all," said Strong,
snickering and clanging his bottle against mine. Then the molls of
the depleted Bell gang joined our salute. We all drank up and went
our separate ways, our paths never to cross again.

SIXTY-TWO

June 11, 1980

"I went to the movies last night,
Gary, and you'll never guess what I saw."

Catherine had returned from the
lunch recess really full of herself and startled everyone in the
hall outside the courtroom by walking straight to me with her
chatter about the movies. It marked the first time we had spoken
since the start of her first trial—when she had explained my
survival as evidence that only the good die young. Now she wanted
to talk movies. Sitting beside me on the bench outside the
courtroom, Strong's head snapped around to look, and his mouth flew
open.

"I could never guess in a thousand
years," I told Catherine, chuckling a bit and inviting what I
anticipated as a well-rehearsed explanation.

"I saw
The Long Riders
—you know,
that movie about Jesse James."

"Like it?"

"It was great. You know what
happened to Jesse James in the end, don't you?"

With that she whirled and entered the
courtroom with attorneys Skelton and Gray in tow.

"What the fuck was that?" asked
Strong breaking into laughter.

"Jesse James was shot in the back,
just like me," I said, "She's getting ready to testify. She was
pumping herself up so she could take the stand."

We both leaped to our feet from the
benches where we had sat in boredom all morning after our night out
with the molls of the Bell gang. As witnesses, we could not enter
the courtroom. But the rules could not stop us from peeping through
the small rectangular windows on the double doors, and we smacked
our shoulders together vying for a look at Catherine taking the
oath before climbing into the witness box. I saw Bert sitting at
his table—perched like a tomcat outside a rat hole. All he would
have to do is wait for the Last Cowboy to guide Catherine gingerly
through that minefield of physical evidence, where she would try to
explain everything from the bullet hole in the seat of the chair to
the placement of the two pistols, without anything blowing up in
her face. Then Bert would have a chance for what might be the
prosecutor's dream cross-examination of a lifetime. Catherine was
considered a defendant who might even erupt in a violent outburst
if forced to trip over her own lies. Word spread quickly around the
building, and within minutes Judge Jon Hughes had standing room
only left in his court. I expected Skelton would soon need to
adjust his nickname and be looking more like the Lost Cowboy once
she started to speak.

Catherine really had no choice but
to take the stand in her own defense, despite the dangers of
offending the jury with obvious lies. Bert had executed his
simplified strategy without a hitch, leaving jurors to decide
between my testimony verified by the physical evidence and her
explanation, if she chose to provide one. Besides Bert's successful
streamlining of the case, the quality of the evidence against her
had improved thanks to my courtroom performance. Courthouse
insiders are constantly critiquing the appearances of each other
whenever called to the stand, and I had won high marks from several
observers for a polite but firm presentation to the jury. Although
standing my ground during cross-examination, I had not argued with
Skelton and projected honesty, according to more than one
reviewer.

But I also knew as Catherine strode
to the witness stand, the jury would have my final words from the
day before still ringing in their ears. Those words had followed an
exchange with Skelton when he challenged my veracity about going
back to Catherine's apartment despite concerns about my
safety.

"You sat there for two hours in
fear of your life, I suppose?" Skelton had asked with disdain. When
I volunteered to explain, he hastily ended his turn. But he left an
opening for Bert, who jumped to his feet and asked, "Why did you go
over to that house even though you were afraid she would
explode?"