04.Die.My.Love.2007 (16 page)

for me.” When it came to Piper, Mac would say he grew to see her as his “little sister.”

From that point on, Piper had entered Tina’s world. With patients and friends, Tina had a reputation for offering guidance on how to live their lives. She would do nothing less for her little sister.

Even before Piper drove the U-Haul into the Houston city limits, Tina approached Martin “Marty” McVey, a fi ftyish attorney who lived on the top floor and officed on the fi rst fl oor of a duplex just doors from the clinic. A former Houston prosecutor, McVey, white-haired, bearded, and with a generous girth, played Santa at a Houston children’s hospital every Christmas. A former high school and college football player with a fondness for cowboy boots, he says, “I’m not a pin- striper. I’m a country boy, and in a courtroom I down-home people to death.”

Years earlier McVey had rented offices from Tina above her clinic. Still, he maintained that they weren’t close friends. Instead, McVey was a friend of Tina’s second ex-husband, Dr. Praver, and contended that he had mixed feelings about her, saying she’d taken advantage of Praver. “Tina is a user,” he’d say. “She uses everyone around her for her own personal reasons.”

Tina wanted McVey to assist Piper, by taking her under his lawyerly wing, renting her an offi ce, and helping her restart her Texas legal career. McVey, who works alone in a front office, had an empty back office he didn’t use and agreed to rent to Piper for $500 a month.

At first the arrangement went well. Piper moved in and set up a desk with a computer, bringing in the children’s artwork to decorate the walls. Tina dropped in often, and McVey had time to see the sisters together. As others had over the years, he came to the conclusion that Tina dominated Piper. “When Tina was around, Piper was submis-DIE, MY LOVE / 119

sive,” says McVey. “Tina was always telling Piper what to do, and Piper was doing it.”

When Tina wasn’t around, Piper was bubbly and fun. Yet, often all she wanted to talk about was her divorce and how she’d been abused by the system. She had rec ords from her case in binders and spent hours combing through them, searching for a way to restart the fight to get the children. At times she asked McVey, who did criminal and divorce work, for advice. He deferred, saying the laws in Virginia were different than Texas. But he found it hard to understand how she’d failed to get the children, even if she’d committed adultery. “The courts nearly always give the kids to the woman,” says McVey, “unless something’s really wrong.”

The children came to visit, and McVey watched Piper with them. The living room/reception area, homey with a fireplace, hardwood floors, and burgundy leather furniture, became their art area, where Piper pulled out construction paper, paints, and scissors. More than once McVey returned to the office from court and found the offi ce windows and walls plastered with the children’s art, and Piper and the three children all on the fl oor painting.

“She was so into those children,” he says. “More than any mother I’ve seen.”

It would later seem incongruous that in the fall of 2002, after her own bitter divorce ended in her losing custody, Piper took a seminar that, with her Texas law license, qualifi ed her to work as a guardian
ad litem
, an attorney charged with overseeing the best interests of other people’s minor children in divorce cases. Before long she was being appointed to work cases by judges. McVey, too, handed her work, small cases he didn’t have time for or ones that didn’t interest him. In return, she agreed to pay him a percentage of her fees when the cases were settled. Piper seemed happy for the work and grateful for the chance of an income. But after the first few months, 120 / Kathryn Casey

each time McVey asked Piper about the rent, she replied, “I don’t have it.” He thought about telling her to move out, but a woman he was dating convinced him to let Piper stay.

“She’s had a rough time,” the woman said. “Give her some time to get her life together.”

Away from the office, however, McVey had the sense that Piper was living life on a grand scale. She dressed well, from expensive business suits to cowboy boots and jeans.

Piper and Tina frequented the restaurants and bars in the area and rubbed elbows—using the membership Tina had gotten in her split from Grant Heatzig—with the upscale crowd that frequented the Houstonian Hotel health club.

“Tina’s always lived well . . . and Piper moved right into that world,” says McVey.

In November, Terry, Tina, and Piper went to a pop ular Houston bar, Sam’s Boat, a busy, noisy place where the crowd is young and there to meet others. “Whenever you went anywhere with Piper, the men went crazy,” says Terry.

“She was flitting from lap to lap, flirting. Two or three men asked Piper for her phone number that night. She just had that effect on men.”

One of the men was Jerry Walters, a six-foot-one, fi fty-year-old oilman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with a well-lined face, prominent chin, a deep whiskey voice, soulful brown eyes, and a penchant for big silver belt buckles, snake-skin cowboy boots, and flirting. “You gotta help me fi nd a honey. You know I’m a lonely man,” he’d say with a crooked smile. In truth, Walters needed no one to help him fi nd women. Divorced for years, with one grown daughter, he worked out daily at a gym and had the massive chest and legs of a body builder.

Walters and Piper began as friends, but by April 2003 they were lovers. Piper seemed fascinated with the big, bulky oilman with the hearty laugh. If her first lover after the divorce, Gable, looked enough like Fred to have been his brother, DIE, MY LOVE / 121

Walters was both their polar opposites. Monday through Thursday, Walters worked in Houston, while on weekends he drove home to Baton Rouge and his beloved bloodhound, Bertha, and his “main woman,” his mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. His connection with Piper, he’d say, was strong. She was different than any woman he’d known. It was the way she could spend an hour simply watching a squirrel forage in a tree. “She enjoyed life more than anyone I’ve ever known. Just sipping coffee in bed in the morning and talking was an event when I was with Piper,” he says. “She lived totally in the moment.”

At times, Piper talked about her divorce, and “poor Fred, whose wife was unfaithful.”

Still, it was another world that seemed to call to Piper.

The business cards she had printed would perhaps attest to what was going through her mind that fall. On the front, she superimposed her own photo, serious and arms crossed, in front of a black and gold painting of a classic Greek fi gure, a woman warrior wearing a headdress and brandishing a sword. Printed over the photo was: “The Law Firm: Piper A.

Rountree.” Inside, the card touted her talents as a former district attorney and a school attorney. She claimed to have twenty years of experience, and wrote: “If you feel you don’t have the Right . . . or are convinced that you are not deserv-ing . . . then we need to talk . . . If a person puts up with whatever bad situation or injustice is imposed upon them, they are really just teaching their children to learn how to suffer as well.”

Perhaps that’s what she thought she would do if she accepted the loss of custody—teach her children to suffer. On the back of the card was one of Piper’s paintings, a dark angel on a fiery background, holding scales and a sword.

Not all was calm at Tina’s house that year. The relationship between Tina and Mac had always been volatile. Later, she’d say that over the three years they were together, he 122 / Kathryn Casey

walked out on her three times. In 2002, not long after Piper arrived, Mac was getting ready to leave and apparently worried about how Tina might react. One day he walked up to Piper and handed her a .38 caliber revolver Tina kept in the house. For some reason, perhaps his history with her, Mac worried about having it in the house when he told Tina he was leaving.

“He asked me to get rid of it,” says Piper. She did as requested, entrusting the gun to McVey for safe keeping. Days later Mac moved out, but as he had in the past, he later returned to Tina’s house and her life.

Meanwhile, in Richmond, the

Rountree-Jablin divorce

continued, but the battlefield had moved from custody to money.

In September, Commissioner Bischoff held a hearing that had been scheduled the preceding summer. Piper had been in the courtroom when the date for the hearing was set, but she didn’t show up, instead sending an attorney to ask for a continuance. Saying Piper had been given ample notice, Bischoff refused. Since his client wasn’t there, Piper’s attorney left. The hearing went on as scheduled, without Piper or an attorney present to represent her.

That day, Susanne Shilling and Fred laid out for the commissioner, who’d be deciding the fi nancial settlement, the horrors of his years with Piper, including her adultery, flagrant spending, impulsivity, and her false charges of domestic abuse and neglect of the children. Shilling asked Fred, “Did you love her up until the time you actually separated?”

“Yes,” Fred answered. But he added that after the split, “I always thought there was the potential for Piper to do very destructive things to me.”

Shilling then turned her attention to the matter at hand, the financial settlement. Fred and Piper had property: the DIE, MY LOVE / 123

houses in Austin and on Hearthglow, the beach house, and retirement accounts. Piper had little in her retirement account, but Fred had more than $300,000 in 401(k)s at UT

and UR. But he’d also taken over $70,000 of the family debt, much of it from credit card bills attributable to Piper, and his salary had been cut now that he was no longer acting dean. The house in Austin had been his before the marriage, and the beach house was purchased using separate property—

his inheritance from his parents. By the time Fred paid the bills, including a nanny for the children, and despite grossing nearly $10,000 a month, he claimed a negative monthly cash flow of more than $3,000.

At the hearing, Fred read from a letter Piper had written to Callie: “I’m pretty sure I have a job with a large law fi rm,”

she said. “I’ll know this week for sure.”

“She has the potential to make more than I do,” Fred testifi ed.

Afterward, it would seem odd that Piper, an attorney, had misjudged the situation so badly, by not showing up at a hearing where her financial future was at risk. When the decision came down, it was devastating. Judge Hammond, on Bischoff’s recommendation, not only discontinued the support money Fred had been paying Piper, but ordered that she begin paying Fred $890.24 monthly for child support.

That support order would later appear to have gotten Piper’s attention.

In December she wrote a letter to her most recent attorney in which she listed twenty points she said should be used to vacate the order, including her contention that the ruling wasn’t within the judge’s power.

While Piper stewed over her increasing misfortune, nearly fourteen hundred miles away, life continued for Fred and the children. They spent that Christmas at the beach house. Later, he e-mailed Piper that they’d had a traditional celebration, with a big dinner, a tree, stockings, Santa, and gifts. “We had 124 / Kathryn Casey

fun, and the spirit of Christmas was in the air,” Fred wrote. In her reply, Piper said acerbically, “Thank you for having some X-mas for the kids in spite of your undertaking of otherwise following Jewish principles.”

Her own Christmas was less successful: dinner with Tina and friends and a trip to the hospital when Tina’s youngest son cut his hand on a broken window.

“I miss my babies so much it hurts,” Piper cried when she called Loni Elwell.

Throughout that year and into the next, 2003, Piper and Fred corresponded via e-mail. He wrote her of the daily joys of life with the children, celebrating the day Jocelyn’s braces were removed and when she made the honor roll, talking of Paxton’s and Callie’s activities and their good grades. For the most part, Piper was civil with him, even thanking him

“for letting me know what is going on with the children.”

But just below the surface the power struggle continued.

The court hadn’t divided Fred’s pension funds yet, and Piper wanted him to pay to fly the children to Texas for her visitation. He refused.

“I have my own problems,” he wrote. “With my responsibilities and the debt I am saddled with.”

To save the three airfares, at times Piper went to Virginia, checked into the TownePlace Suites hotel, and had the children stay with her there, just as Fred had when she had a restraining order against him and he was barred from the house.

In January, Piper moved out of Tina’s and into an aging wood- sided house a block from McVey’s office, with an $850 monthly rent. On a quiet street, set back from the road, backing up to a greenbelt, it had space heaters and window air conditioners, a long way from the comfortable homes she’d lived in with Fred. The night Vincent Friedewald moved into the old duplex next door, he saw Piper gardening DIE, MY LOVE / 125

well after dark, planting a patch of flowers near the front steps. Wearing a tank top and short shorts, she looked attractive, and she invited him in. Offering him a beer, she had her cell phone tucked into her bra, and it vibrated and chirped like a cricket when it rang, causing her to erupt in laughter. When he got ready to leave, she invited him to

“come by and have a drink anytime. The door is always unlocked.” He never took her up on it, and he had no doubt she was offering more than a cold beer.

That spring, Piper complained constantly about her lack of funds.

As always, she blamed her situation on everyone else.

“You know, I have always had at least a receptionist, one or two secretaries, a runner/filing clerk and law clerks, data entry person, accountant, and a house computer systems person and librarian, practice manager,” she e-mailed Fred. “I mention the above because it is very hard for me to function as an attorney when I am barely surviving. I am cleaning my own offi ce.”

In Virginia, the children were beginning soccer, and Fred reported on their teams to Piper in e-mails. In response, Piper asked Fred to send her the children’s schoolwork, art, and papers. The separation was difficult, and these artifacts had become precious to her. Despite all he’d been through with her, Fred did as she requested, and when Jerry Walters gave her an airline ticket to Richmond to visit the children in March, Fred agreed to let them stay with her at the hotel, even though she didn’t give the court- ordered two- week notice. In the e-mail where he agreed, Fred pointed out that the children did, however, have activities that weekend, and he quoted from the court order that stipulated visitation shouldn’t interfere.