Strange Brew Part 19

The list had been compiled by someone with little or no sense of rock and roll history. T-shirts, 20, the list would say. Or Record alb.u.ms, 116, or Posters, 32. The inventory didn't say that one of the T-shirts was from Captain Beefheart's debut tour, or that the alb.u.ms were mostly mint and all cla.s.sics of the genre, including copies of everything ever recorded by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. There was even a Claudine Longet alb.u.m. A real collector's item.

At the bottom of a box of mildewed T-shirts, I found what I'd been looking for, papers. And I literally mean papers. There must have been ten cartons of Zigzag rolling papers. Underneath them were the papers that could tell me something about Wuvvy's life-and maybe her death.

I sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, dumped out the box, and started sorting things into piles. Most of the stuff related to YoYos. Wuvvy didn't seem to have much of a life or an ident.i.ty outside her shop.

There were copies of purchase orders, catalogs from toymakers, packing sheets, canceled checks, and a thick stack of bills that looked like they'd never been paid.

Rubber-banded together in one thick packet were what she must have considered her most pressing debts: the power bill, phone bill, insurance statement, gas bill, a form letter from the IRS inquiring about her nonpayment of income tax for the past year, some bills from suppliers notifying her that her accounts had been placed on "hold" until they received payment, and a notice from her landlord that her lease had been terminated.

I found three notices, in all, from her landlord, starting in July. Month by month, they notified her in formal detached language to pay up or get out.

Why? I wondered. Why, if she'd had that much notice, had Wuvvy refused to do anything to keep the roof over her head? She'd known since the summer that she was in trouble. And from what little I could tell from her sloppy records, she'd been going deeper into debt with each pa.s.sing day.

The landlord's name was Restoration Properties, Inc. The letters threatening eviction were all signed by someone named Rutledge Gross.

I called Restoration Properties, but got an answering machine telling me that business hours were Monday through Friday, nine A.M. to four-thirty P.M. And for emergencies I could call another number. Which I called. Which gave me a tape recording telling me to leave a message.

I did leave a message, asking to have Rutledge Gross call me in reference to the property at 362 Euclid Avenue.

Back to the bills. I took a calculator and added up all Wuvvy's unpaid debts. They came to more than twelve thousand dollars, a huge chunk for someone with a marginal business like YoYos. And at the same time she'd been struggling financially, Wuvvy's store seemed to have been under siege from shoplifters and burglars.

When I called Bucky and caught him at his desk-on a Sunday-I was surprised. Wasn't this football season? I asked.

"I've got a case working," he said, sounding exhausted. "Jane Doe found in the kudzu behind the Carter Center Library. Don't tell me you're still trying to free Virginia Lee Mincey?"

"I won't tell you that," I agreed. "But do you have time to answer a couple questions? If I ask nice?"

"You never ask nice, that's why I love you," Bucky said. "What do you need?"

"A couple things," I said. "Remember you told me that Wuvvy had reported all kinds of break-ins and burglaries and simple thefts in the last couple months before she died? What I'm wondering is, when did all this start to escalate? I'm looking through all these boxes of stuff from the store, and from her records, it looks like she started getting in financial trouble in June or July."

"You want uniform crime statistics for Zone Six," Bucky said. "I can get you that, if you wait till tomorrow."

"Will it have complaints broken down by each address within the zone?" I asked.

"If I have the computer a.n.a.lyst run it that way," he said. "But why?"

"Hap said something to me today," I said. "About what s.h.i.tty karma Wuvvy had. How all this stuff was happening to her. I want to know if Wuvvy was the only person in Little Five Points who was experiencing a crime wave."

"All the stats have been up in L5P, I can tell you that right now," Bucky said. "Marge Fitzgerald, that new chief I told you about, has been busting everybody's chops about it. a.s.saults alone are up thirty percent over there."

"Edna was a.s.saulted," I said. "But Wuvvy wasn't the victim of an a.s.sault. She was being nickel-and-dimed to death with petty thefts. That's what I'm interested in."

"Okay," he said. "What was the other thing?"

I took a deep breath. "Do you know a street guy named s.p.a.ceman who hangs out in the neighborhood?"

"Guy wears a s.p.a.ce helmet made out of a plastic milk jug, has a walkie-talkie made out of an old television remote control," Bucky said. "What about him?"

"Cheezer, one of my a.s.sociates? He was at the Yacht Club Friday night. He saw two guys grab s.p.a.ceman, kick him senseless, and throw him in the back of a truck. Cheezer said he thinks one of the guys is a cop who hangs around the Yacht Club, a body-builder type with blond hair. The description of the other guy fits Edna's attacker."

"Half the cops in this town pump iron in their spare time," Bucky said. "And if Edna will look at some mug shots, maybe file a complaint, we could do a little more about the guy who robbed her. Besides, Garrity, maybe it was just a couple righteous citizens who got tired of having the s.p.a.ceman crawling into their vehicles and s.h.i.tting all over the place. That's his specialty, you know. Car-s.h.i.tting."

"He wasn't in a car when Cheezer saw him, he was in an alley," I said angrily. "And the pickup truck had an FOP sticker on the windshield. Come on, Bucky. You must know this guy. What's going on? Is this part of the new chief's plan to cut crime in Little Five Points? By yanking helpless winos off the street, beating them up, and trucking them out of there?"

Bucky laughed, but not a hearty ha-ha. "You're complaining? Callahan Garrity? The same person who comes crying to me because you've got a Peeping Tom one night and then your own mother is mugged in your own front yard the next night-and you don't want the cops to clean up the sc.u.m living in the gutters over there? Are you going to give me a lecture now on the const.i.tutional rights of lowlife sc.u.mbag maggots?"

"I'm going to tell you that what I heard about this s.p.a.ceman guy makes me want to puke," I said. "Cheezer said he was unconscious when those guys threw him in the back of that truck. What if he's dead?"

"Then that's one less sc.u.mball committing crimes against tax-paying citizens like you and me," Bucky said. "I gotta go now, Callahan, before you p.i.s.s me off so bad I forget we're friends."

I hung up the phone and kicked the nearest box. The cardboard seam caved in and an alb.u.m slid out. It was Country Joe and the Fish. What were the words to their big song? Something about whoopee I don't give a d.a.m.n, next stop is Vietnam?

The alb.u.m underneath was another cla.s.sic. The Woodstock quadruple alb.u.m. My brother Kevin had that one. In fact, looking at it reminded me that it had been one of his favorite places to hide his dope stash-not from my mother, who had no idea a stash existed, but from my other brother, Keith, who would have ripped off Kevin's dope in a minute.

I opened the alb.u.m and Wuvvy's stash came drifting out, several small yellowed pieces of paper that fluttered to the floor like so many dying b.u.t.terflies.

They were newspaper clippings. Nothing long or sensational. No trial stories, to my disappointment. The first one was the smallest, just two paragraphs.

GOVERNOR APPOINTS PANEL TO INVESTIGATE BATTERED WOMEN'S SENTENCES, the headline said.

Gov. George Busbee today appointed a three-person panel to look into several controversial murder cases involving battered women who were convicted of killing the men who allegedly abused them.

Chairing the panel will be G. H. "Buddy" Hughes of Conyers, former head of the State Department of Corrections. Also serving on the panel will be Gail Samford, former mayor of Banbury Cross, and Joseph P. Mengino, professor of forensic psychology at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.

The other two clippings weren't much longer. One announced that the panel had spent a year a.n.a.lyzing sentencing patterns for women convicted of homicide when the victim had a history of abusing his murderer, and that three cases had been chosen by the panel for reconsideration of their sentences. Two of the women, Sh.e.l.ley Diane Moore and Virginia Lee Mincey Poole, were serving life sentences for the murders of their husbands; the third, Ruth Barrett, had been on death row since 1981 for the fatal poisoning of her stepfather and two uncles.

The final clipping was the biggest. It looked like it had taken up the top half of the front page of the Atlanta Const.i.tution, and it announced: GOVERNOR SETS ASIDE.

BATTERED WOMEN'S SENTENCES: MOORE, BARRETT & POOLE.

ORDERED RELEASED FROM PRISON.

The story had photos, too, old prison mug shots of the three women that made them look tough and incorrigible. Wuvvy was unrecognizable. Her hair was dark, pushed behind her ears, eyes heavy-lidded and wary. There was also a photo of a group of picketers standing outside the gates at Hardwick, the state prison for women. One picketer was a pigtailed little black girl who grinned for the camera and held aloft a sign that said GO TO h.e.l.l SHEL-YOU KILLED MY DADDY.

I lined the stories up on the floor and read them over again. Wuvvy had been delivered from prison. She and two other women. I wanted to know how. I wanted to know why. The only name in the news stories I recognized was Gail Samford. She'd been the first female mayor of a city in Metro Atlanta. I'd seen her on television news. A ballbuster back then, unafraid to speak her mind. Maybe, I hoped, she still liked to talk. I'd had it with people with secrets. It was time to let some light onto the tired old story of Broward and Virginia Lee Mincey Poole.

26.

Banbury Cross was a dot-sized town fifteen minutes from downtown. Physically, it was just another of Atlanta's countless bedroom suburbs, but technically, it was an incorporated town, with its own city council, police force, and school system. I'd pa.s.sed through there before, but had never crossed the six-foot-high hedge that separated the town from Covington Highway, which ran through it.

Even though she'd given me detailed directions to her house when I'd called, it was dark by the time I'd navigated the winding confusing maze of streets in Banbury Cross to find Gail Samford's sprawling Tudor-style house.

I didn't even have to ring the doorbell. She switched on the porch light and opened the door as I was walking down the front path.

She was short and round, with long blond hair and wire-rimmed gla.s.ses perched on an upturned nose, and she was dressed like a lumberjack, in worn blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and work boots.

"After you called, I realized it was probably a rotten idea-talking to you about the Hughes Three," she said, showing me through a darkened living room and into a cavern-sized den.

The room smelled like a forest. A twelve-foot live fir or spruce or something like that had been erected in front of a cathedral window, and cartons of decorations were scattered all over the room. It was only the first week of November. We still had a bag of Halloween candy in our living room.

She saw me staring and laughed. "I'm a Christmas nut," she said. "There's a place up in Hiawa.s.see where they grow my tree every year. I went up there to the mountains today and chopped it down. I'll keep this one up until the end of January. I collect Santa Clauses, too. There's about a hundred and fifty in those boxes. I have to start this early because it takes me the whole month to get them all unpacked and set up the way I like. Crazy, huh?"

She motioned me to sit in one of a pair of armchairs beside a fireplace and took the chair opposite mine.

"I appreciate your seeing me," I told her.

"When you said you'd known Virginia Lee after she got out of prison, I was curious," she admitted. "I've read the newspaper stories, but I'd like to hear from you how things really were with her. Maybe we made a mistake with Virginia Lee," Gail Samford said. "That's what I've been wondering."

"I don't think so," I said. "She started a business, made friends and a new life. And I'm not sure she was ever guilty of murder."

"So," she murmured. "I'm glad you came. I'll talk. You'll talk."

She poked the fire with a piece of kindling from a stack on the hearth. "My lawyer would kill me if he knew I was talking to you. He's always telling me people love to sue elected officials. But h.e.l.l, I'm retired now. What do you want to know?"

"Your committee recommended that the governor pardon three women, including Virginia Lee," I said. "Why those three?"

"We looked at about fifteen cases, as I recall," Gail said. "But a lot of those women were real hard cases, with long criminal histories and a previous history of violence, alcohol or drug addiction, shoplifting, bank robbery, you name it." She shuddered a little. "I'm a die-hard feminist, but some of those broads we looked at-they needed to be locked up for life."

"But not Virginia Lee Mincey," I suggested.

"No," Gail said. "I liked her. I liked the other two women, too. We interviewed them all, looked at the trial transcripts, talked to the district attorneys, the prison warden, gave them psychological tests up the wazzoo. You know something?" she asked. "Until she committed suicide, Virginia Lee was the last of the Hughes Three who was still alive."

"Really? What happened to everybody?"

She didn't have to hesitate to think about it. Gail Samford had kept up with the women whose lives she had helped to change.

"Virginia Lee Mincey Poole you already know about. Sh.e.l.ley Moore? She was the one who stabbed her common-law husband, after he beat her and a.s.saulted her with a beer bottle and burned her repeatedly with cigarettes. Great little gal. After she went to prison, she got her GED, took a correspondence school course in hairdressing. Hers was the first case we chose and the only one we all agreed on was worth a second look."

Gail shrugged. "How wrong could we be? Two years after she was released, she died of a crack overdose."

She held up a second finger. "Ruth Barrett was the most unlikely murderer you'll ever meet. Very shy and quiet. Extremely religious, devoted to her family. Nursed first her stepfather and then her uncles through two long, horrendous illnesses. And then it came out that she'd fed them rat poison in their coffee for two years. Her attorney was a serious drunk. He never mentioned during her trial that her stepfather and uncles had taken turns s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g Ruth since she was in diapers."

"And what happened to Ruth Barrett?" I wanted to know.

"All the paperwork had been done for her release, and as part of the regular procedure, they gave her a physical. Totally routine. Until the nurse found a ma.s.s. On her neck, the size of a walnut. She went right from Hardwick to the hospital, to have surgery. But the cancer had spread too far, to her brain, kidneys, lungs, everything. She died in that hospital a week after her surgery. We never did get her home."

As Gail Samford was discussing Ruth Barrett's cancer I found my own hand clenched tightly across my chest, like a shield that would protect me from a recurrence of my own breast cancer. If she noticed, she didn't mention it.

"Who came up with the idea to get the cases reconsidered?" I asked.

"A bunch of us," she said. "It was the eighties, and there were a bunch of us loudmouthed feminists who wouldn't shut up or take no for an answer. We kept reading about those kinds of cases, women who killed after suffering years of abuse. So we started agitating. Going down to the capitol, lobbying the General a.s.sembly, writing letters. Ruth Barrett was the final straw, I guess. After she got the death penalty from an all-white, all-male jury in Stephens County, we really put up a stink. The next thing I know, Governor Busbee had appointed me to the Hughes Committee."

A cat wandered into the room then. It was a calico, scrawny, with yellow eyes that gleamed in the firelight. It crept up to me, rubbed against my legs, and meowed beguilingly.

"Dookie likes you," Gail said, surprised. "Usually when I have company she goes into hiding."

I wished Dookie would go back into hiding, but I kept that to myself.

"You said you and your colleagues got organized after hearing about Ruth Barrett," I said. "What about the other two? Sh.e.l.ley Moore and Virginia Lee? How did they get on the committee's list?"

"It's been a long time," Gail admitted. "Probably through one or another group that had an interest in social justice issues. Legal Aid, the Southern Poverty Law Council, Georgia Women's Political Caucus. All those folks were working behind the scenes. Quietly, of course, because back then you didn't want to alienate the good ol' boys."

From my experience, you still didn't want to alienate the good ol' boys. Unless you had so much clout the good ol' boys couldn't mess with you...

"Did you know Catherine Rhyne back then?" I asked abruptly.

"Little Kitty?" Gail smiled widely. "Sure. I knew Big Kitty, too. Everybody did. Talk about a dynasty!"

She picked up Dookie and stroked the cat's head absentmindedly. "They had a real power base down in Hawkinsville. Wait," she stared at me. "I see what you're getting at. Hawkinsville. It's not that big a place. Virginia Lee was from there. And Itty-Bitty, well, Catherine, she was a member of the Women's Political Caucus. She was still in the General a.s.sembly back then, I guess."

I leaned forward. "Did Catherine Rhyne ask the Hughes Committee to take a look at Virginia Lee Mincey's case? Would she have lobbied to have Virginia's sentence commuted by the governor?"

Gail stood up and the cat jumped down. "Catherine Rhyne never liked to ask for favors. It was Little Kitty who called me and sent over the case file."

27.

I borrowed Gail's phone so that I could call home and check on my mother. Edna hated to be checked on. She hated to be coddled or patronized in any way. But it was either phone checks or taking her along with me every step of the day. Neither of us could have stood that.

Cheezer answered the phone at my house.

"Oh, good," I said. "In the middle of everything else, I realized we still need a bodyguard for Edna, since the burglar alarm didn't get installed. What are you doing there? Mooching groceries again?"

"You asked me to do some checking around the neighborhood, remember? I've been kind of making rounds, riding past your house every so often, just seeing if everything's cool."

"And is everything cool?"

"You're not gonna like this," Cheezer warned. "Edna just left."

"Did my sister pick her up?"

"No. When I got here, Edna was in the middle of some neighborhood commando meeting," Cheezer said. "Some cop buddy of Deavers's showed up, to give them tips about crime prevention."

"Was it Jeff Kaczynski? The same guy Deavers sent over before?"

"Yeah, I think that was his name," Cheezer said. "And he brought some more photos for Edna to look at. I think maybe she recognized the guy who beat her up and stole the medal your dad gave her. But she was real quiet. Then, after everybody else went home and I was getting ready to leave, too, she went in her bedroom. I thought she was getting ready to take a nap or something. I was writing a note to leave for you when she came out of the bedroom. She was dressed all in black. I asked her where she was going, and she got this funny look. She told me she and Neva Jean were going out for a nightcap. The next thing I know, Swannelle's truck is in the driveway and before I can stop her or make her let me come along, she's gone. Adios. Outta here."