It’s well into the summer of 2002, and I’m living in Montrose, a slightly bohemian but rapidly gentrifying area close to downtown Houston. I have sole custody of Carter. We are having a good time, getting closer to each other every day, even though he has to stay with his nanny a lot, while I travel all over the US and the world, working on a Microsoft project. Lucille is living in Pearland in Brazoria County, and Clyde is in the Robertson County Jail awaiting trial.
Sometime in late June, I get a phone call from my parents telling me they have an urgent message for me from Colette, Clyde’s ex-wife. She was trying to contact me, but didn’t know how. While I normally avoid contact with anyone even remotely tied to Clyde, it was Colette who first warned me about Clyde and Lucille’s activities, so I figure I had best call her and see what she has to tell me that is so important.
I get her number from my folks and call her, and she tells me that Clyde had written her a letter from his cell in the Brazoria County jail in Angleton, where, it seems, he has been transferred. That’s news to me. Then again, trying to keep up with Clyde’s arrest history has been a full-time job in and of itself. The letter told Colette to get in contact with me and warn me that Lucille is trying to have me arrested.
She doesn’t provide any more details, but says that Clyde indicated it was urgent, and that if I want to avoid even more grief, there’s something I need to do. He wants me to come visit him at the jail in Angleton.
I contact my lawyer and tell her the whole story, and ask her what to do. She tells me not to go down there under any circumstances, but to find somebody I can trust to go in my place. I know she is right. There is no way in hell I’m going to that county myself. I’m not sure exactly what is going on yet, but it just smells too much like a setup to me. My private investigator is the most logical person to send, so I call him and ask him to go down there and find out what’s going on.
My PI goes for the visit the following day, but the meeting almost doesn’t happen. Clyde doesn’t know who the PI is, and keeps refusing to come out. And of course, the PI is really being hassled by the cops there (cops either love or hate PIs, and bad cops all hate PIs). Eventually my investigator convinces Clyde – using the guards as messengers – that he is there to get information for me at his (Clyde’s) own request. After they go back and forth, Clyde meets with my PI for about 45 minutes, and spills out the devious plot.
It seems that while Clyde was in the Robertson County jail, he was told he was being extradited to Brazoria County, as Lucille had gone to the Brazoria County District Attorney and filed burglary and sexual assault charges against him. The DA – a woman who didn’t know anything about Lucille – believed her story and ordered the extradition. After Clyde was taken 150 miles and processed into the Brazoria County jail, a detective in plain clothes met with him in an interrogation room to talk about Clyde’s options. He told Clyde that he was facing multiple felony charges, but that if Clyde would cooperate, he would help him out.
He informed Clyde that he had proof that I had hired Clyde to kill Lucille. He also told Clyde that if he would sign a sworn affidavit confirming the plot and stating that he had refused to take the “contract,” the Brazoria County charges would be dropped. The other stipulation was that Clyde would have to testify against me in court regarding the murder-for-hire plot.
For reasons I still don’t understand, but for which I’m incredibly thankful, Clyde refused, and chose instead to contact me. Clyde needed $35,000.00 in cash to bail out of Brazoria, but – surprisingly – he didn’t ask me for any money. I wouldn’t have offered to help, anyway, and even if I had given him the bail money, it would have been pointless. After all, even if he were released from the Brazoria County facility, he would just be returned to Robertson County to await his trial there. Looking back, I realize that it’s a good thing that Clyde had been in jail for several weeks and was not high. Had he been tweaking, I’m sure he would have taken the opportunity to stick it to me.
Ultimately, all of the Brazoria County charges are dropped anyway, and Clyde is returned to Robertson County.
My lawyer talks to one of the Brazoria County Assistant DAs and is told that the charges have been dropped, and that they are going to file charges against Lucille for filing a false report. As it turns out, the detective who questioned Clyde and offered him the deal was the same detective who was doing Lucille and following me around Houston. For some reason – which I can pretty easily guess – no charges are ever filed against Lucille.
It is a major understatement to say that I am livid about this, and even more so that my lawyer advises that I just drop it altogether. I want to subpoena everybody involved in this scam, up to and including the District Attorney, get them into my divorce hearing in Harris County, and prove to the judge how absolutely crazy and out of control Lucille has become. I decide to fire my lawyer and hire one who has the cojones to go after this like a rabid dog. But my lawyer is absolutely adamant about wanting to stay on, and even breaks down crying in a desperate attempt to talk me out of firing her. I guess my sympathetic nature isn’t entirely supplanted by my rage, because I relent, and tell her she can continue to represent me. I do, however, let her know that she needs to get meaner if she wants to continue handling this mess for me.
Although it sounds like a long and drawn-out process, it actually takes me less than a week to deal with these matters. I have no idea how long it had been going on beforehand. Nor do I know exactly how long Clyde has been in Brazoria County, but he has obviously been there long enough to be processed and questioned, to write a letter to his ex-wife, and, of course, for his ex-wife to subsequently contact me. So it must have been at least several days, or perhaps a week or longer.
After going through my frustrating dance with what is loosely referred to around here as a justice system, I have almost decided that my next book is going to be a scathing criticism of law enforcement and the criminal, family, and judicial courts in and around Harris County. Of course Lucille knows all the little secrets to working the system, as criminals always do, which is why she jumps around from county to county all the time. She knows that getting any cross-county or interagency cooperation is next to impossible, and that one jurisdiction will likely never know about or even look at what she does in another. The common attitude is a lot like television’s Marshall Dillon in Dodge City, or Sheriff Andy Taylor in Mayberry – get the crooks out of town, the county, or the territory and you’ve done your job. Once they step out of your little sandbox, they simply don’t exist any more. And the people who run the show in those other jurisdictions can keep their problems at home, and not bother anyone else with them.
It should be easy to understand why I continue to be so angry about the way all these events in my life have been handled. I have felt for a long time as if no one cared, and in reality, no one but me did care. The law seems geared more toward protecting the rights and well-being of a person like Lucille than even the rights and welfare of a child like Carter, or his unfortunate half-brother Damien. It seems to make no difference to law enforcement and the courts that the person they’re coddling is a drug-addicted sociopath, who has no feeling for anyone else, nor any sense of remorse for anything she does. Even though Lucille has tried any and everything she could to destroy my life, I have never sought retaliation in any but legal means. I have to admit that many times, I did fantasize about killing her and taking my chances in court with the evidence. But those were just dreams; something I did to help me cope with the anger and frustration that have so filled my life these last years.
To give a better idea of Lucille’s behavior – even before she ran so far afoul of the law – she would be in another room with our dog while I was watching a football game or something. Out of nowhere, she would just up and viciously kick the dog. The dog, being a sweet, good natured animal, would just yelp and cower down. But after about the tenth kick, the dog would finally have all it could take, and would bite her. At that point, she would come running into the room, screaming that the vicious dog had bitten her, demanding that I do something about it. Of course, she would fail to mention that she had to kick the dog ten times before it bit her.
I feel as if I have been that dog during this whole process, and on more than one occasion I have been tempted to follow the dog’s lead and bite back. Fortunately, I’ve been able to refrain from baring anything beyond the legal “teeth” at my disposal. I think that being aware of Carter’s observation of me as father and role model has played a significant part in helping me to take the high road – and the legal path – in my dealings with Lucille. He needs to see the difference between handling things the right way and the wrong way. Lucille has chosen to show him one way, and I know that it is up to me to show him the other.
I suppose that somewhere beneath the rage and fear and chaos Lucille has wrought in my life, there lurks a profound sadness, a grieving for “what might have been.” But when I look back on our history and consider who I am and who she is, it seems the story could not have unfolded any other way. In any event I cannot waste too much time speculating on alternative scenarios. It is a full-time job managing one reality, such as it is. I have spent the past several years struggling to rebuild my life and provide Carter with a decent one, and have had to take extraordinary measures to protect the two of us from Lucille’s craziness, which still manages to surface in various ways. All those times Lucille walked out on Carter and me, as if saying her final, this-time-I-really-mean-it goodbye, she was only signaling once again that this was not quite the end after all. She could leave, but never really be gone, because, after all, she and I have not only a son, but a history. And even now, as I focus on the present and look with some trepidation to the future, I am deeply aware that some histories cannot be unwritten.
I recall with exquisite clarity a dream I had one night when Carter was still new to the world, a child with a mother lost to the shadows and a father who was clearly overwhelmed by what a frightening and astonishing thing it is to be a parent. Falling asleep exhausted in the haunted blue gloom of the TV set, my infant child in my arms, I was perhaps more than normally susceptible to this sort of dream, and even now can relive it, moment by moment, without closing my eyes.
In the dream I am in a pool, and Lucille is suspended before me in the pool’s warm water, lighted from within, everything aquamarine. Her breath floats over the surface in light bursts, smelling of salt-water taffy. The boardwalks of Galveston, she says, are all arcades and sweet things to eat. Her shoulders appear burnished in the strange light, almost black from a day at the beach. Life is short, she says. Can’t be caught treading water, not for a second. Stop moving and you’ll be torn to shreds by sharks. Try and catch me, Sterling. And she dives like a dolphin into the green water, headed directly for the lamp under the diving board, blinding me as I follow. I surface with a gasp, and see her submerged silhouette against the surrounding incandescence. So thin, like an exotic moth or some creature from outer space that is drawn to the furnace of stars. What a strange and pretty picture, I tell myself. So unreal and dream-like.
A great moon hovers overhead, a perfect circle of cold, reflected light. I point it out to Lucille but she doesn’t see it. It hangs directly behind her, and she has set a course for the sun.