To Hatred Turned (19 page)

A few minutes later, Lindquist was standing in front of the cabin, excitedly telling a sheriff’s deputy what had happened.

“And what,” the deputy asked, “does your truck look like?”

When Buster and Gary drove away from the campsite in the Texan’s truck, they headed up the mountain, evidently intending to drive over the crest and continue westward toward California. However, they were unfamiliar with the area and did not know that the road they were on deadended at the peak. When they got to a barricade, they had no choice but to turn around and come back down the mountain.

The deputy had no sooner asked Lindquist to describe his vehicle when the Texan glanced toward the road. He did a double take and broke into a huge grin. “As a matter of fact,” he drawled, pointing toward a pair of taillights, “there it goes right there.”

When the deputy pulled the vehicle over a few minutes later, Gary and Buster both ran into the woods. The corpulent and out-of-shape Buster soon collapsed. Panting in the thin mountain air, he gave in to the inevitable, surrendering meekly to the deputy. But the lithe Gary bolted into the trees and disappeared. He was arrested early the next afternoon, several miles away on the other side of the mountain, trying to thumb a ride. The two brothers were thrown into the tiny jail at nearby Carrizozo and charged with stealing Lindquist’s truck, armed robbery, and false imprisonment.

Once they were behind bars, the Matthews brothers worked quickly to make sure they secured a place at the top of the inmate pecking order, bragging to the meeker inhabitants that they were the meanest
hombres
in the lockup, and that their dominance of the situation would not be challenged without dire consequences for the challenger. One of the perks that went with being at the top of the prisoner heap was possession of the remote control device that determined what all the inmates would watch on the jailhouse TV. With the clicker firmly in hand, Buster made sure he and his brother got to watch their favorite program: reruns of “The Flintstones.”

19

After he sped up the road into the northern Idaho mountains, Andy dropped out of sight again and did not resurface until just before Christmas. In mid-December, he called Shelley and told her he was on his way back to Dallas. She reported the conversation to McGowan, who told her to go home and wait. Anxious not to let him slip through his grasp yet again, McGowan called the telephone company and arranged for a device called a trap to be installed on Shelley’s phone. It was different from a tap in that it would not pick up a conversation but was designed only to record the numbers from which incoming calls were made. That way, McGowan could backtrack and find the phone Andy was calling from and, hopefully, speed there in time to grab him.

On December 18, before the trap could be activated, Andy called Shelley again and said he was in the city. Fatefully, this information did not go first to McGowan, but to Ken McKenzie, Andy’s nemesis. According to Shelley, Andy was going to come to her house that night, a Sunday.

McKenzie, who had by then notified McGowan, left immediately for Garland, where Shelley lived with her mother, to stake out her house until McGowan and other reinforcements could arrive.

While McKenzie was waiting on the darkened street in an unmarked pickup truck, he glanced in the rearview mirror and watched nervously as a figure emerged from the bushes several houses behind him. As he watched with growing anxiety, the figure walked steadily down the sidewalk toward McKenzie’s vehicle. As the man got closer, McKenzie hunched further down in his seat, hoping he would not be seen. But when the man got abreast of the truck, he spotted the policeman out of the corner of his eye.

Figuring he had no alternative but to show himself, McKenzie sprang from the truck and drew his pistol. The man started running away, heading for the shadows alongside a nearby house.

“Halt!” McKenzie yelled. “Police!”

The man kept running.

“Andy!” McKenzie hollered. “Police! Freeze!”

As soon as he yelled “Andy,” the man screamed loudly, lifted his knees, and spurted away faster.

Testifying about this encounter later, McKenzie said that it was the first time in his fourteen years as a police officer that he felt his life was in danger.

The man disappeared, outmaneuvering the detective for the second time.

Later that same night, meter reader Merle Ward was watching “Designing Women” on TV and thinking about going to bed when there was a knock on the door of her home in northeast Dallas. Ward, who lived with her roommate, Rebecca Trammell, was an old dope-smoking friend of Andy’s. Still, she failed to recognize him as he stood at her door, dressed in scruffy, dirty clothes, his lower face covered in a scraggly, unkempt beard. But as soon as he identified himself, she let him inside without a second thought.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked him as soon as he was seated on her couch.

“Yeah,” he admitted, a sheepish look showing through his exhaustion. “I passed some money to have someone killed and they’re looking for me.”

With a pleading look, he asked Ward if he could stay at her house for a couple of days until he figured out what he was going to do.

Ward considered his request. “It’s okay with me,” she said, shrugging, “if it’s okay with Rebecca.”

Andy sighed in obvious relief. Stretching out and relaxing for the first time since he had crossed the threshold, Andy grinned and asked Ward if she had any marijuana.

Ward laughingly replied that she did. Switching the channel to ABC, Andy and Ward watched the Monday night football game and quietly got high.

After Trammell came home, the three of them sat around the kitchen table while Andy repeated his story for Trammell’s edification. He had made a mistake, he told her, by agreeing to pass along some money to a fellow he knew named Chip. The money was payment to kill a woman. He himself had not been the killer, he stressed, but he was still afraid that his role could result in a death sentence if he were caught. In the meantime, he needed to find Chip so he could clear his name.

Trammell was dubious. “I didn’t know you could get the death sentence unless you were the actual triggerman,” she said.

Andy waved off her statement, assuring her that he was in big trouble and he needed their help.

“How do you feel about being a fugitive?” Trammell asked, curious to see how he would respond.

“I enjoy it,” he admitted. “Being one step ahead of the law gives me a kind of high.”

“Don’t you think they’re going to find you eventually?” she asked.

“If they do,” he said, “it will be because I’m trying to see Shelley.”

“Aren’t you worried that they’re going to catch you in some simple way, like asking you for an ID?”

“I’ve got that taken care of,” Andy said, digging out a slip of paper which he handed over for Trammell and Ward’s examination.

It was a document purporting to be a birth certificate showing that the bearer was born in Georgia. On one corner was an official-looking seal. Trammell studied the seal and her mouth fell open.

“The birth certificate says Georgia,” she exclaimed, “but the seal says South Dakota. How are you ever going to explain that?”

Andy shrugged. “No one will ever notice,” he said confidently.

Seemingly excited in her own right by the idea of harboring a dangerous fugitive, Trammell fixed Andy a sandwich and, while he was eating, she dug out clean sheets and made a bed for him in a spare room. The next day she volunteered to drive to a park where Andy said he had hidden his belongings in some bushes and retrieve them for him. Then she went to work.

That afternoon, when Ward returned from her job, Andy was talking on the telephone. Covering the bottom half of the phone, he mouthed to Ward that he was talking to Shelley. When he got off the phone, Ward told him that she had discussed the situation with Trammell and they had decided that Andy was going to have to leave.

He nodded silently. “I understand,” he said quietly, promising to depart as soon as he could get his things together. He would vacate by the next day at the latest, he said. As it turned out, it was sooner than that; the telephone trap had caught up with him.

Thirty minutes after Andy hung up with Shelley, someone knocked on Ward’s front door. When she went to answer it, she was confronted by a uniformed policeman who asked her to step outside. Once away from the door, the officer told her to stay where she was and not to move. Looking around, she could see that police had the house surrounded.

Brushing past her, McGowan entered the house and found Andy alone in a back room. He offered no resistance.

Once the cuffs had been placed around Andy’s wrists, he was hustled into a squad car and taken straight to the Richardson Public Safety Department for processing. The whole thing took place so quickly that McGowan did not even stop to read Andy his Miranda rights until they got to the police station.

Without giving him a chance to settle into his cell, McGowan hustled Andy into a small interrogation room and pointed to a chair. Then, making himself as comfortable as possible, McGowan opened the conversation in his customary folksy style, an approach designed to impart to Andy that the two were simply brother Texans having a friendly chat over a Coca-Cola.

The investigator began by explaining that seven people had been arrested so far in connection with the attacks on Rozanne and Larry, but the moving force behind both incidents appeared to be an interior decorator named Joy Aylor, who had been indicted on five felonies, including murder. Intuiting that the name meant nothing to Andy, McGowan added, “She’s a lady that’s got a lot of money and that kind of thing.”

Attempting to ingratiate himself with the new prisoner from the very first, McGowan quickly apologized for his lack of foresight in sending investigators McKenzie and Bonner to interview him at the dealership the previous July instead of going himself. Also, he said, there was one other thing he regretted regarding Andy’s situation: “I wish you hadn’t of run,” he said wistfully.

For the next few minutes, McGowan detailed for Andy how he had been hot on his trail for the last five months and how investigators had almost caught him in Minot, North Dakota, missing him by just a few minutes at a truck stop where he had stopped to try to collect some money that had been wired to him from Texas. “But the time for running and all that crap is over with,” the detective added, not unkindly.

McGowan related how investigators had talked to others allegedly involved in the dual plots, including Brian Kreafle. “You already know Brian’s given us everything he’s done,” McGowan explained. “He’s been indicted and there will be some others.”

Andy, feeling a response was required, said simply, “Yeah.” Otherwise, he seemed to show little interest in the proceedings except to ask disingenuously if there was any chance he might be released on bond pending further developments.

McGowan shook his head. “I mean, it’s not hard to figure out why,” he said. “That’s why I say I wish you hadn’t have run. I mean, we don’t have any guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. You have to be honest with yourself: Would you run?”

“I don’t think so,” Andy replied. “I’m tired of running.”

“Well, I imagine you’re tired of the whole fucking deal,” McGowan clucked sympathetically, “just like a lot of people are. Well, where we go from here, that’s up to Andy. There’s nobody else now.”

Andy looked puzzled. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well,” McGowan replied, “you can get on our team and help us or not. That’s your business.”

“Shouldn’t I be talking to an attorney?” Andy asked suspiciously.

“That’s up to you,” McGowan said. “What I’m telling you is it’s over. We know the whole story but Andy’s.”

When Andy showed no inclination to respond, McGowan added: “Two things are going to happen. If you ask me a question I can answer, I will. And I ain’t never going to lie to you or bullshit you about nothing.
Nothing
!” he repeated emphatically. “Those are my rules and I go by them with everybody.”

Andy showed no signs of softening, so McGowan spread it on a little thicker. “All I can do,” he said to the unresponsive prisoner, “is tell you where I’m coming from and where I’ve been. I’ve been involved in this son of a bitch for five years, and it ain’t been easy. That’s where I got all this fucking gray hair. But at the same time, I got a good idea it hasn’t been easy on Andy, either.”

When Andy did not respond, the detective slowly shook his head again. “I just wish the fuck you’d never run,” he said.

Andy’s spirits improved a few minutes later, after McGowan told him he could make a telephone call. With the detective sitting silently at his elbow, Andy dialed Shelley’s number. He spoke for a few minutes, hung up, and turned slowly to McGowan. “Is she the one who turned me in?” he asked with bitterness.

McGowan shook his head. “Not really,” he said, explaining how he had been tracked through a device on her telephone. She was only one in a string of people, he explained, who had helped investigators.

“I want to tell you up front,” McGowan said, “that you got to understand something. People in their lives, everybody around you when you were here, wanted this deal over with. Nobody likes cops coming in asking them stuff: ‘What about this?’ ‘What about that?’ It was tearing a lot of people up. They wanted you caught so they could sleep at night.” But what had happened in the past was over with, he continued, and what was going to happen in the future depended on Andy.