The Red Scream
Page 4
“I didn’t see no one around, but it was clear rich people lived there. I knew there’d be stuff to steal. I went to the door and it was unlocked, just like it was waiting for me, so I walked in and took me a little Sony TV from the kitchen and a silver bowl and the prettiest carving knife with this white handle that looks like it’s made of bone. I was carrying these out to the car when I saw a lady standing in the garage and the door was open. Yup. Mrs. McFarland—she was one of mine, sure was. See, I can have any woman I want. Any woman. She was all dressed in white, not a spot on her anywhere, had a bunch of flowers—these pretty red flowers. Yup. Just as easy to do the rich ones as them you pick up by the side of the road. Ain’t no difference when you get down to the basics.
“Lucky I had this little .22 Saturday Night Special I got me down in San Marcos for twenty-five bucks. I’d it stuck into my pants under my shirt. I dropped the stuff I was carrying and I ran at her. She was real small, I can see why they called her ‘Tiny,’ but she was strong, fought like a wildcat. Pushed me away, and turned to run, so I had to shoot her. I would of preferred to use my knife, or something else, but she didn’t give me no choice, fighting and running like that. She fell and I saw right away she was dead. That easy, it was.”
Then he pulled his old straight razor out of his pocket, the same razor he’d used on Rosa Morales, Lizette Pachullo, and Greta Huff—the razor he’d bought when he got his first job as a barber in Oklahoma after he was released from the state prison, where he was trained as a barber.
“I opened my razor and started on her hair. This Texas Scalper thing—well, I didn’t always do that, just sometimes. When I was done I thought about … well, you know, having sex with her. I took her dress off and looked at her. But this time I know it’s not going to work. I don’t know if it’s all the beer I drunk or it’s so damned hot or a strange place or maybe that she was a blonde and they’ve never appealed to me. They don’t seem … finished somehow. So I took her watch and earrings off of her, ’cause they looked like they’d bring in some cash, and I got in the car and drove off. And that was it, like it was just a detour from the road I was taking. I don’t think the whole thing took more than three, four minutes.”
In one of his confessions Bronk told Sheriff Dwayne Gaskill in Hays County that he sold the pistol and all the stolen items at different flea markets and pawnshops that same day between Austin and Fort Worth. He has also told other versions of what he did with the items. In court, he said he got scared and threw them in a river outside Austin, but he couldn’t remember where. None of the items have ever been recovered.
He said in his confession that he took the dress the victim had been wearing and threw it into the back seat of the Mustang. When he pushed the car off a cliff into Eagle Mountain Lake near Fort Worth, it was still inside. Although the lake has been dragged twice, the Mustang was never recovered.
As for the hair he shaved from Tiny McFarland’s head and from his other victims, Louie Bronk has never been willing to talk about what he did with it.
After he got back onto the Interstate that day, he drove on to Fort Worth where he’d planned to go all along, before he got in the wrong lane that made him take the exit, that led him to FM 2222, that enticed him to the hills, that took him to City Park Road, that lured him to the gravel driveway, that ended at the McFarlands’ garage on that hot July morning.
Molly looked up from the page, remembering that interview with Louie when he’d taken her through the steps of the McFarland murder. As usual, she’d kept her face neutral, her manner encouraging. Of course she already knew the story. She’d read his confession and then heard it all again at the trial where he had unsuccessfully claimed insanity. But hearing it from his own mouth, as they sat inches apart in the visitors’ room in Huntsville, separated only by a few layers of wire mesh, was something else—his cool recital of it, his occasional smiles and head shakes at the ironies of fate. At the time she’d just listened and recorded. But now, reading the words, she wondered how she was able to endure listening to it.
She looked back down at the page:
David Serrano was lying on his bed in his apartment above the garage studying an accounting textbook. He wore only a pair of boxer shorts because his quarters were not air-conditioned like the main house was, and the heat was intense, already ninety-one degrees at quarter past eleven in the morning.
He heard a noise that he recognized immediately as a gunshot, but that didn’t concern him. All four members of the McFarland family often practiced shooting in the field out behind the house where they kept some targets and cans to shoot at. During the summer the kids would often wander out there and do some shooting. Tiny also liked to shoot, was the best shot in the family, better even than Charlie and the kids who had all won trophies over the years In shooting competitions at the Travis County Rifle Club. It could be any of them out practicing.
David went back to his book.
But a few minutes later he put down his book. It occurred to him that there had been just one shot, and he began to worry. He couldn’t remember anyone ever going out to shoot and shooting only once. And as he thought about it, that shot had sounded closer than usual. He decided to check, and anyway, he knew Mrs. McFarland was planning to leave at about eleven-thirty when he would take over supervising Alison.
He pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt and stepped into his tennis shoes with no socks and without bothering to tie them. As he was walking down the staircase that led into the garage, he heard a car engine start up, and when he came to the bottom of the stairs he saw through the open garage door a white car, old and beat-up, driving out the driveway. He didn’t recognize the make of the car because he says he’s never been interested in cars, can’t tell a Ford from a Buick. Though he saw only the back of the driver’s head, he thought it was a man with dark hair, though he wasn’t absolutely sure. He was sure about one thing, though: the car was white with one brown door, the one on the driver’s side.
He watched the car drive off, wondering who the McFarlands knew who would drive an old clunker like that. Most of their friends drove late-model cars, new and shiny.
By then he was inside the garage and saw that a woman, naked except for a pair of white panties, lay in the empty space, the space where Charlie’s Cadillac was parked when he was home. David says he knew two things immediately—that it was Mrs. McFarland and that she was past help. Even though she was lying facedown and her hair was gone, he recognized her because her head was turned to the side and he could see her profile. “Also,” he said, “it was the size of her. No one else I knew, no grown woman, I mean, was so small. It had to be her.”
He walked slowly toward her and when he squatted down and saw her glazed, open eyes, he knew instantly that she was dead, even before he saw the blood oozing from under the body, beading up on the grease spot from where the Cadillac had leaked oil.
David Serrano was familiar with the look of death, he says, because his family, including his father, grandfather, and three uncles, was in the funeral business in Brownsville, Texas, where he grew up. For five summers he worked assisting in the embalming and preparing of bodies for burial. He didn’t need to feel for a pulse. He knew death when he saw it.
Only then, he says, did he think to look around the garage. It was a three-car garage, but the McFarlands parked only two of their three vehicles in it because the third space at the north end was taken up with storage of bicycles and lawn mowers and boxes. The big electric door was open and the small side door was shut, he says, though it was never locked. Mrs. McFarland’s white Mercedes occupied the center space and Charlie’s Cadillac, the space on the south end where his wife now lay. Scattered around her body lay a bunch of scarlet gladioli and a pair of garden snippers.
David backed out of the garage and ran to the house to telephone for the police, suddenly afraid that whoever had killed her might come back. He was shocked to find Alison standing in the doorway looking up the driveway where the car had just
been. He took her in the house with him, locked the door, and called the Austin Police.
APD records their response time that day as thirteen minutes. David Serrano says it felt like forever, as he sat with Alison in front of the television worrying about Mrs. McFarland, feeling she shouldn’t be left alone outside. But he felt his first loyalty was to his young charge, so he remained with her. He didn’t call Charlie McFarland at that time. He says he didn’t know what to say and thought he’d let the police handle it.
During that time, Stuart McFarland, who had decided to come home early from his cousin’s house, arrived on his bicycle, went to put it away in the garage, and saw his mother lying there. He knelt down and tried to revive her, thought about doing CPR which he’d just learned, until he saw the blood pooling under her and understood that his mother had been shot.
Molly stopped reading there, though the account went on to detail the arrival of the police and the early stages of the investigation before Louie Bronk confessed eight days later.
Molly stood up, then suddenly dropped the pages to the table. Oh, God. Fingerprints. Here she was a former police reporter, a former wife of a cop, and a present crime writer, and she hadn’t given a thought to fingerprints on the pages. If there had been any, she had certainly messed them up.
Not that it mattered; this was just some kook. There was no reason to worry about prints.
But that poem was damned unsettling.
She walked to the back hall closet and rummaged on the shelf for a pair of old cloth gardening gloves she rarely wore. This time touching only the edges with her gloved hands, she reread the poem. The line, “I may give his craft a try” bothered her. Was there a threat of violence there?
And, of all the 421 pages of her book that could have been torn out, why these? And why right now, just after her meeting with Charlie McFarland?
Glancing up, she saw that the kitchen window had darkened. She rose and pulled the blinds, then walked into the living room and closed the shutters on the big windows so she wouldn’t be tempted to look into those black voids. She poured herself a Scotch and water, a rare indulgence for her, and sipped at it while she changed into her exercise clothes. Maybe some strenuous sweating would help her get rid of this clutch of dread in the pit of her stomach.
It was a feeling she’d almost forgotten. She hadn’t experienced it for two years—not since the last time she went to visit Louie Bronk.
chapter 3
Always their hair
Their long black hair
Combing and brushing,
Washing and fussing.
Black hair everywhere
You could drown in hair,
Hair in the sink,
Hair in the drains
Long black hair instead of brains.
LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas
“But what if it isn’t just some nut case?” Molly Cates grunted as she did the seventh push-up in the set of twenty-five; she was damned if she’d let herself collapse at this point the way she usually did, even though the muscles in her back were screaming. “I mean, what if it isn’t a harmless nut case?”
She glanced up at her daughter who, as she rose and sank on thin, shaking arms, wore her usual serene expression in spite of the big drops of sweat dripping off her face. Jo Beth Traynor, who now wanted to be called Elizabeth, had the kind of determination that just didn’t recognize pain, Molly thought.
“Mother, calm down. You’ve had this sort of thing before.” Jo Beth just managed to make herself heard over the thrumming beat of the hard-rock booming from the overhead speakers. “Remember that guy who kept threatening to load his dump truck with explosives and crash it into the Lone Star Monthly offices if you didn’t stop writing about developers ruining the Barton Creek watershed. I hope you aren’t getting paranoid in midlife.”
“No,” Molly gasped. There was no way she was going to last through fifteen more push-ups. “I’ve always been paranoid.” She closed her eyes against the stinging sweat that was dripping into them. “God, this is torture.” She stopped for a minute to grab her towel and wipe her face. Then she hoisted herself up immediately and joined back in, determined to make this the first time she did all the push-ups. “Wait until you read this poem before calling me paranoid,” she panted. “It has a crazy feel to it. Of course I suppose it goes with the territory of—” She couldn’t finish; she’d done thirteen—thirteen!—more than she’d ever managed before, and her back and shoulders were burning. She collapsed on her stomach and watched Jo Beth persevere through all twenty-five.
Push-ups finished, the class of twenty sweating bodies looked to the front of the room for instructions. On a platform in front of the mirrored wall, the instructor, a forty-five-year-old freak of nature with tight beige skin, a twenty-two-inch waist, and a concave abdomen, flipped onto her back. “Now let’s work those abs,” Michelle bellowed out over the deafening music. “Backs flat, glutes squeezed tight, suck in, let’s go.” Hands behind her head she began to demonstrate sit-ups. Molly and Jo Beth turned onto their backs and followed her lead.
“But this poem—” Molly said, “it could be read as a threat.”
“Maybe you should show it to Dad then. You know, get his opinion.”
Molly shook her head as she raised and lowered her torso. “No. Austin homicide won’t want to bother with this. Too subtle. I’ll take it to the DA’s office—tomorrow. Stan Heffernan can take it to APD if he wants. God, these sit-ups always make me feel like I’m going to throw up.”
Now Michelle was pulling her knees into her elbows on each sit-up. It was difficult to do that and talk, but Molly managed to say, “This thing with Charlie McFarland bothers me, too.”
“You sure he tried to bribe you?” Jo Beth said, pulling her knees in to touch her elbows.
Molly grunted. “Yes. I can’t figure any other way to take it.”
“Tell me the truth. Weren’t you tempted? Just for a minute?”
Before Molly could answer, Michelle bellowed out from the platform, “Okay, as a special treat, let’s end on some more push-ups—another set of twenty-five.”
“No-o-o,” Molly wailed. “Just when I thought we were safe.” She wiped her brow and turned over again to her stomach, hoisting herself up on shaky arms. “Yeah, I was tempted. Maybe that’s why I feel so angry about it.” Molly stopped in mid push-up. “You know something?”
“What?” Jo Beth asked, not even short of breath.
“I’ll really be relieved when this Bronk thing is over.”
Jo Beth stopped, her arms extended, and looked up, wide-eyed. “Mother! What’s this? Do I detect some blood lust here?”
Michelle was counting to help them get through the push-ups: “Fourteen … fifteen …” Molly was groaning now from the strain and her arms were trembling, but in the five months she’d been doing this class she’d never gotten so far before. “Sixteen.” Only nine more; she didn’t want to give up. “Seventeen …” Her back felt like it was ripping. With a moan, she collapsed onto her stomach. So close, so close.
“Well, Mother,” Jo Beth finished off the last eight and added one extra for good measure, “what about it? Don’t tell me that an old liberal like you is looking forward to poor Louie getting the needle?”
Molly was silent for a moment, resting her chin on the floor. Then she said, her lips barely moving, “If I weren’t in a weakened state right now, I probably wouldn’t say this—and if you repeat it I’ll deny I ever said it—but,” she closed her eyes and said it very low so Jo Beth might not hear it over the music, “the world will be a better place with Louie Bronk out of it. I can’t wait to see that sneering, smug, murdering, evil son of a bitch dead.”
Jo Beth looked at Molly with her eyes open wide and said nothing.
They both did the cool-down stretching in silence. It was Molly’s favorite part of the class because it didn’t hurt and it meant they were almost finished.
“If you’re paying, sure,” Jo Beth said. As she followed her mother down the stairs to the women’s locker room, she said, “For a woman your age who can barely do a push-up, you’ve got a pretty firm butt.”
Molly looked back at her. “I’m bowled over by the praise.”
The menu at Katz’s Bar and Deli included several items that Molly had never identified—things like latkes and knishes, which she wouldn’t know how to pronounce even if she did order them. An unadventurous eater who stuck to the tried and true, Molly ordered her usual turkey on white bread and a Coors Light. Jo Beth ordered pastrami on Jewish rye and a Coors Light. Beer was one of the few things mother and daughter agreed on.
As the waiter left, Jo Beth said, “It may be your lucky night. Don’t look now, but there’s a man standing in the doorway of the bar who’s been staring at you.”
Molly glanced over that way. A dark-haired man in a well-tailored blue suit was indeed staring at her. He nodded his head when he saw her look over.
“You know him?” Jo Beth asked.
“No,” Molly said, turning back to the table.
“Gorgeous,” Jo Beth said.
“He is good-looking,” Molly agreed.
“I knew you’d think so. He’s just slightly sleazy and since that’s the way your taste in men runs—”
“Sleazy? You think your daddy’s sleazy?”
Jo Beth smiled the gentle, loving, maddening smile she always got on her face when she talked about Grady Traynor. “No. Not Dad. The other two. And some of the boyfriends. My God! Sleaze personified.”
Molly decided not to rise to the old bait. Instead, she shifted the topic slightly: “Speaking of your father, that marriage can’t still be holding together?”