Gang Mom (7 page)

“Heard you snitched on me, man,” Beau shouted at Jack.

“What?” Jack replied, not knowing what Beau was talking about.

“You told ‘the man’ I gave you that gun off the burglary.”

“I didn’t!” Jack retorted. His heart started to race.

“Yeah, man, and the cops busted me for it.”

“Look, Beau,” Jack continued, desperate now, “I never—”

Aaron came over and put his hand on Beau’s sleeve. “Hey, come on, Beau—” but Beau pushed Aaron away and pulled a knife. Quickly, he turned back to Blessing and slashed at his stomach, cutting through his jacket and scratching his skin with the blade.

The owner of the Grocery Cart had seen the assault in the making and had already called 911. Sirens screaming, cops arrived on the scene before Beau could do any further damage. Beau was arrested and when cops asked him if anyone else had participated in the assault against Blessing, he identified Aaron, who was also arrested. Aaron couldn’t believe it! He was there to protect the kid and he winds up getting charged!

“What am I supposed to do?” Aaron asked Janyce when he was finally released into her charge. “Beau needs help, Mom, but if I finger him, he’ll go back to jail. You know he has a record.”

“Frankly, Aaron, that’s not your problem. He got himself into this mess. You tried to stop it. Seems to me you did everything you could.”

After much soul-searching, Aaron got really practical.
There’s no way I’m going to jail for a scuzbucket like Beau
, he thought.

Aaron called Officer Richard Grimes of the Department of Public Safety and told him that Beau Flynn was responsible for assaulting Jack Blessing with a knife. Since Flynn was on parole from the MacLaren Juvenile Detention Center at the time of the assault, his parole was revoked and he was returned to MacLaren pending trial. In return, charges against Aaron were dropped. He was scheduled to testify against Beau in the assault case when he was murdered.

“I was very upset about this,” Mary continued, “because I believed that Beau didn’t do the scratching at the Grocery Cart. It took me a while to come to terms with that. See, emotionally, during the next two weeks before Beau went back to MacLaren, we got along better than ever. And, Beau thought that he was doing good. All I could think was, why is this happening? And then the kids would continue to come over. Then my dog got really sick and died.”

Again with the dog! Mary must have recalled how her dog back in Cleveland got her kicked out of town.

“In the course of this two weeks,” Mary continued, “I know I said that Aaron couldn’t testify against Beau. I know I said it in front of this group of kids.”

She didn’t like Aaron, and couldn’t believe his betrayal.
How can he hurt me this way
? Mary thought. “Cause I had asked Aaron to keep an eye out for Beau. I didn’t ask Aaron to baby-sit him twenty-four hours a day. I just asked that if he heard of anything, either to let me know or to tell Beau he was screwing up.”

“Try to keep him out of trouble?” Rainey nodded sympathetically.

“Try to keep him out of trouble,” she repeated. “And, part of my feelings about Aaron in the last couple weeks is that he stood right there,
right there
, and let all of this happen.” And she told Jim Elstad, Wayde Hudson and Joe Brown how angry she was at Aaron.

“And, one day last week I knew they had a thirty-eight handgun. I saw it. They had it at my house and I told them to get it out of my house.”

“They being who?” Raynor cut in.

“They being Joe Brown. All three of them were actually there. Brown, Wayde Hudson and Jim Elstad.”

“And, this is in the week just prior to the homicide?” asked Rainey, trying to get it straight in his mind.

“Yes. Yes,” Mary answered emphatically. “Joe and these kids would talk, you know …”

“Talking tough?” Rainey interrupted.

Mary nodded. “Talking tough. Talking bad. They didn’t like Aaron because of what he did to Beau, or what they felt he did, what we all felt he did to Beau. They didn’t like him because of what he did to me. The hurt there. And they didn’t like him because they thought he set his demons on them.”

Demons? What was this,
Rosemary’s Baby
?

“You mean like some kind of satanic thing or something?”

“Yes.”

“So, there was a lot of stuff they were unhappy with Aaron about?”

“Yeah. But I never thought that any of this was serious. They would, you know, say, you know, that they were gonna go beat him up. They were gonna go
cap
[shoot] him. And, they had a plan where they were gonna cap him on his way to pick up his girlfriend at the market. And I said, ‘I don’t want to hear this, you know, you guys.’ And, they shut up about it. And then on Monday morning, early, early Monday morning—”

“Which Monday was that, Mary?” Raynor interrupted.

“The Monday Aaron was killed.”

“Go on,” said Raynor.

“In the middle of the night there’s a knock on my door. Joe Brown and Jim Elstad are standing there. They said they had just done it.”

“Done what?” Rainey asked, knowing the answer like a good interrogator should.

“And Jim said that they’ve killed Aaron,” Mary confirmed, and Rainey nodded.

“I just didn’t believe these guys could do it, you know?” Mary asked incredulously. “These are kids I had
in my home
. I just didn’t believe they had the guts to do it.”

“What happened after that?”

“I got my clothes on real quick, hopped in our pickup and took Joe home. On the way there, Joe wanted me to drive him by the river so he could get rid of the gun. So I took him over on River Avenue under the underpass, under the Beltline, and stopped and he went down. He was carrying a cigarette and I saw him go as far as the water’s edge, and then, it was too dark to see him any further. He was gone for maybe a minute, maybe two minutes. Then he came back up and got in the truck and I took him on to his house over off of Maxwell and dropped him off. And he give me a hug and said, ‘See you tomorrow, Mom.’ And I went home.”

Mary paused, looked down, then looked up at Rainey and said earnestly, “I didn’t believe that they had actually done this even though my common sense should have told me better, ’cause, you know, we went to get rid of a gun.”
You dumb ass
, she thought. And when she got home, she told her husband John what had happened.

Rainey wanted to know what Joe had told her about the shooting.

“Joe said that it was him and Jim went in there and Joe was rifling through the bitch’s purse.”

“The bitch,” meaning Aaron’s girlfriend, Carrie. Mary continued: “And Aaron turned his head like he was waking up or something and Jim never hesitated. He just capped his ass right in the head.”

In order to catch someone in a lie, go over their story again. And that’s what Rainey did.

“Okay. So, you get back, you drop Joe off at the house. You tell your husband John that these guys say they just capped Aaron. Then what happens?”

“My husband says, ‘No they didn’t. They’re just telling you that.’ And I said, ‘Well, why did they tell me that?’ And he says, ‘Well, they think they’re big and bad. And they’re trying to impress Beau and they’re trying to impress you!’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ It sounded reasonable to me. And John and I went to bed. And the next thing I know, John’s coming in and telling me, ‘There’s three cops out here.’”

“This is when Detective Raynor came to question you?” Rainey asked.

“Yes,” Mary replied. “And then you guys told me that Aaron had been shot. I thought somebody else did it, and the kids were capitalizing on it, trying to take the, uh, you know …”

“Credit for it?” Rainey said, finishing the sentence.

“Credit for it,” Mary agreed.

“So when we showed up at the house, and we let you know this is happening and we’re asking for information—”

“I thought Beau did it. I really did.”

“And we told you, I think at that time, that we had already checked and Beau was in custody at the time of the murder.”

Mary nodded.

“So what’s your reason for not having told us the whole story right then and there, Mary?”

“Number one, I didn’t believe they were capable of that. Number two, I was afraid for my safety, and my son’s safety. I figured if these kids could murder, they could do me and they could do Beau.”

“Okay. So going back even before that when you gave Crazy Joe a ride to the river ’cause he asks you to do that so he can get rid of the gun. From a lot of people’s perspective that would suggest that there really is some truth here to what these guys are claiming. That they had just done Aaron. Why is it that you didn’t attach more weight to what they were saying?”

Or, put another way, why was Mary such a moron that she refused to believe she was handling the murder weapon in a capital murder case?

“I just didn’t believe them,” Mary answered. “I just couldn’t conceive of them doing that. I guess part of me was kinda in shock. Like, ‘Damn!’ You know? And then trying to weed out the wheat from the chaff.”

But what really took her aback was that neither Elstad nor Brown looked shaken. They had just killed a man and they looked like they were out for a midnight walk. Both cops knew that such behavior was consistent with psychopaths, a breed of human apart, who felt no guilt for their crimes.

“Did you see any blood on anybody?” Rainey wondered.

“There was no blood.”

“Did you make a point of looking for it?” Rainey pressed, leaning forward and touching Mary’s arm, trying to crowd her into the corner he had placed her in.

“Yeah. And riding in the truck, I couldn’t smell the gun,” Mary smoothly answered, leaning forward and meeting Rainey’s steely gaze. “And I’m thinking, ‘They’re bullshitting me.’”

Raynor had a question.

“When you were in the car, Mary, and going to the river …”

“Yes?”

“… where did Joe carry the gun?”

“I’m not sure, but I think it was in the front of his pants.”

Rainey, though, wanted to pin down the make of the murder weapon.

“Describe the gun for us as best you can.”

“Thirty-eight wheel gun,” said Mary in clipped tones. “Had wooden handles, wooden-like stock and stock grip.”

She talks like a gangster and knows guns like one
, Rainey thought.

“And the rest of it was blue steel,” Mary added. “Maybe a three-and-a-half, four-inch barrel. Top length.”

“Any idea what brand the gun was?” Rainey persisted.

“Maybe Smith and Wesson.”

“A Smith and Wesson or something else?”

“Maybe a Ruger. They told me it was a thirty-eight. The week before, I knew they had a thirty-eight and, I just believed it to be the same gun.”

“Did this look like the same gun they had the week before?” Raynor interjected.

Mary said that it did indeed, that Joe Brown had taken custody of the gun the week before and Joe Brown showed her the gun when the boys came to her house after the murder. As for getting rid of it, “That happened after we were in the car and we were going down River Road. Joe said, ‘I’m gonna throw this gun in the river.’”

“When you got down by the bridge, did Joe tell you where to stop?”

Rainey was trying to see if Mary had any complicity in dumping the murder weapon.

“Joe directed me where to go,” she answered smoothly.

“Or was there conversation between the two of you?”

“Joe directed me where to go down River Avenue ’cause I wasn’t familiar with that road. But, I knew it had to go down in there somewhere ’cause I drive over the Beltline and see people with their boats. And, I see the sheep on the other side going right down to the river. And he told me to pull in, as we went under the underpass he said, told me where to stop. I guess you call it the boat ramp side. And, I stopped right there on the road, on the corner. And I said, ‘Go do it.’ And he jumped out and ran down to the river. He was gone maybe a minute, maybe two, then he came back up and got in the truck and said, ‘It’s gone.’”

“So, whose idea was it to get rid of the gun?” Rainey persisted.

“Joe’s.”

“Did he say why he needed to do that?”

“Well, not in so many words, but it was implied, I think, because they told me that they had just shot Aaron.”

“So, your understanding was just that he’s getting rid of the gun because it’s evidence that could be used against him?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So when, when Crazy Joe comes back up from the river, does he have any water on him at all? Or, does it look like he’s waded or anything?”

“Nope.”

Rainey was trying to establish whether Brown threw the weapon out in the river, which could be pretty far out depending upon the strength of his arm. Otherwise, if he walked in, he could only go as far as he could stand. In any case, the cop knew that a search would be launched for the murder weapon and wanted to pin down where it was in the river.

“And, that’s another thing,” Mary continued. “I wasn’t even sure that he had gotten rid of it. I thought maybe he was lying.”

“Why would you think that he didn’t get rid of the gun?”

“’Cause I had my window open, and I didn’t hear a splash.”

“So you just weren’t convinced he’d done it, huh?”

Mary nodded.

“Please speak up for the tape.”

“No.”

“No, what?”

Mary sighed.

“I just wasn’t convinced that Joe had dumped the gun.”

Rainey made some notes on his yellow foolscap pad, then looked up.

“So when Jim and Crazy Joe come to your house, and tell you that they’ve just capped Aaron, who’s doing the talking?”

“Both. But, not out of fear or excitement. They were both talking real calm.”

Just like a psychopath
, Rainey thought.

“And they said, ‘We just capped his ass.’ I said, ‘Who did?’ And Jim said, ‘I did.’”

“And then, at that point Jim leaves?”

“Uh huh. And Joe runs out with him, then Joe comes back and I said, ‘I’ll take you home.’”

“Was there any conversation at that time regarding how exactly the murder occurred?”

“No. No.”

“So the information about Crazy Joe going through the purse, did that come out in a later conversation?”