Luggage By Kroger

FORTY-NINE

January 14, 1980

“Your psycho girlfriend is over here in the newsroom right now.”

“Ahh, shit,” I mumbled after answering the phone and receiving that whispered message from Ed Jahn, a colleague on the city desk at The Houston Post. I told him: “But she just left this place.”

Ed had called me about two hours after deputies had evicted Catherine from the courthouse press room. I speculated she must have collected her thoughts and launched a Plan B in her attempt to trample me at work.

“Catherine certainly is having a very busy day,” I said. “She seems to be popping up everywhere. What’s she doing over there?”

I enlisted Ed to serve as my eyes at headquarters.

“She’s in Logan’s office pacing around and telling him all about something, probably you,” Ed said. “Oh, man, now she’s waving her arms around and pointing in his face.”

As our managing editor, Logan worked in an office with glass walls that allowed him to monitor the staff at all times. On this occasion, they also allowed my scout to monitor Logan and provide a play-by-play of Catherine’s surprise visit.

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“He’s just sitting there watching her without much of an expression at all. He looks like a virgin who wandered into a porn movie and is seeing a real pussy for the first time in his life. He knows what they are supposed to look like, but he wants to make sure this is real.”

I figured Logan had never experienced anything like Mehaffey, even in his long career with newspapers. I still had to laugh as I imagined him sitting there listening to a tirade similar to what had just occurred with me in the courthouse press room. I wondered if she had gotten to the part about the naked pictures of my wife. I still didn’t know what she had meant with that allegation, beyond just throwing out anything that might embarrass me even if it were imaginary. But I realized her visit to my boss had just dismantled any effort to separate my private life with her from my professional life at The Post. And I had a good idea what might be coming next. Two of my three separate lives were about to merge.

“She’s leaving now,” said Ed. “Logan’s still just watching her, and it doesn’t seem like he said much. She’s going through his door. Now she’s stopped and answering a question. Now she’s turned and left, and he looks pretty confused.”

“Thanks, Ed. I owe you.”

About fifteen minutes later, Logan called me at the courthouse and issued a succinct command: “Gary, I need you to just stop whatever you might be doing and come into the office. I don’t want you to even take time to put anything away. Just get up, get in your car, and come over here.”

It marked the only time that Logan had ever called me on the job. I worked under his city editor, Johnny B. It was unusual to receive a call directly from Logan, but, given my experiences of the past few weeks, I was not surprised. I reached his office in about twenty minutes. Then it was my turn to sit there with everybody watching through the glass.

“What’s up?” I asked politely, feigning ignorance as I took a seat across the desk from my boss.

“I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “I had an interesting visit a little while ago from a Miss Catherine Mehaffey, and she had some disturbing things to say about you.”

I just furrowed my brows to encourage him onward.

“She believes you are working secretly for the district attorney’s office as an investigator in a case against her.”

“That’s not true,” I said, eager to make a definitive denial as quickly and forcefully as possible—without laughing. “She has some gripes with me of a personal nature. None of it involves my job here. You are the only one paying me a salary.”

“She says you’ve made tape recordings of conversations with her and shared them with outsiders.”

“I recorded her telephone conversations threatening me, but I never played them for anyone else. A friend of mine did play part of a conversation he taped with her because he wanted the other reporters in the press room to let him lock the door.”

Logan grunted and stroked his chin while locking eyes with me.

“OK,” he said, “Here’s what I have to do. Mary Flood is on her way over to the courthouse to relieve you there—”

“Aw, c’mon,” I raised my voice interrupting him. “Don’t let Mehaffey get away with this. Can anybody just come in here with any sort of story and ruin me? I like that job.”

“Nope, it is already done,” he said. “I talked to Johnny, and he said you’ve been over on the courthouse beat a couple of years anyway. It’s time to rotate on some of these beats. He has a desk ready for you back in the office. Now, I don’t even want you going back there to get anything you might have left.”

“Don’t punish me for this,” I pleaded.

He looked stunned and said, “Punish you? I’m not punishing you. I’m concerned for your safety. I just want to put as much distance as possible between you and that woman.”

“OK,” I sighed and got up to leave.

“Gary,” he said, “I don’t meddle in reporters’ personal lives, and you certainly don’t have to tell me this if you feel uncomfortable. But, after talking with her, I’m really curious about something. What did you do to her?”

There it was: Always the man’s fault. In his mind it had to be me who did something to her. The question made me laugh as I imagined him sitting through her tirade wondering if aliens had invaded from Mars. Realizing any accurate explanation would be too complicated, I searched for a shorter version and finally just said, “Oh, I forgot to put her picture in my wallet.”

Logan stared a moment trying to figure that out until he saw me grinning and then laughed himself.

“OK, OK, I think I understand,” he said. “But you should know something she told me right before she left. I asked her what she wanted me to do about any of this, and she just got this strange, faraway look in her eyes and said, ‘I just want him to disappear.’”

We stood there a moment considering that until I shrugged my shoulders and moved to the door.

“So, welcome back to the newsroom,” Logan said as I left. Then he added, “And, Gary, under no circumstance do I ever want you to initiate contact with that woman again.”

I walked out, went to my new desk, picked up the phone, and dialed Catherine at her office.

“Hope you’re happy now,” I said when she answered.

“You went to my bosses at Special Crimes so I thought I should go to your boss to teach you a lesson. Where are you now?”

“I’m at my new desk in the newsroom. They took me off the courthouse beat.”

“Wait a minute. You mean you haven’t been fired?”

I realized I had an edge, as she revealed her primary mission had been to get me fired. She had failed. And, as I thought about it, I realized Logan had been right in my reassignment. Digesting a universal truth about stalkers, I concluded I was lucky to still have a job. Suddenly, I felt grateful and decided to twist the knife with her.

“Fired? No way. He said he wanted me in here for my safety. You know, we have a lot of important elections to cover this year, and The Post will need its best people available on the desk for those stories. I’m really kind of excited about this promotion.”

“Promotion?” I thought I heard her choke a bit as she repeated my mischaracterization of what essentially represented a lateral move.

That night at home I picked up a ringing phone to hear her voice and hung up before she could finish a sentence. I believed I might never see her again.

Later, after studying the psychology of the narcissist personality, however, I would learn that my new strategy that night had merely set the stage for an escalation of tensions in our relationship because I had denied her the one thing she could not live without: confrontation.