The Most Dangerous Animal of All (11 page)

“Our pictures are everywhere. You have to do this,” he insisted. “Do you want to go to jail? Someone will recognize you.”

Tearfully, Judy watched in the mirror as her beautiful blond hair turned black. The person looking back at her was a stranger—a pregnant, black-haired stranger. She noticed Van’s crooked smile of approval through her tears. For the first time, she realized they were in big trouble. She swallowed back a lump of fear in her throat.

Van decided to double back, confident that no one would recognize Judy now. He worried about his own appearance but thought that his glasses would suffice as a disguise. Most of the newspaper photos had been taken when he was not wearing them. He was right: no one recognized them as they hitchhiked to Los Angeles, where he hoped they could go unnoticed in the big city.

Van soon rented an apartment in an industrialized area near Torrance and insisted that Judy get a job, because he couldn’t risk being recognized. Covering up the bulge in her belly as best she could, she got a job at a nice restaurant on the north side of Los Angeles near Hollywood. When the manager realized she could not even mix a Bloody Mary, she was fired within a week.

In late September, Van and Judy headed south to San Diego. There was no hiding Judy’s growing belly now, and her chances of getting a job were becoming slimmer. The money Van had brought was running out, but he convinced a gullible woman to cash a bad check for three hundred dollars. He knew they had to get out of California. At a bar, he persuaded a drunken patron to give them a ride to Tucson, Arizona. He still held on to the thought that if they could get to Mexico they would be safe. He had crossed the border many times—at Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali, and El Paso. He thought El Paso would be the safest route. They could travel to Ciudad Juárez and be home free.

Sympathetic drinking buddies provided transportation along the way. The Rescue Mission of El Paso provided lodging.

Judy was miserable. Each morning, in order to be able to eat breakfast for free, she and Van were required to attend church service and prayer sessions. Their daily breakfast, consisting of eggs with blood visible in the yolks, made the already nauseated girl sicker. After forcing herself to eat one morning, Judy experienced pains in her back and began having trouble urinating. When she doubled over on the floor, Van called for an ambulance.

Judy was diagnosed with a kidney infection, and Van, with no way to pay her hospital bill, befriended a woman named Belle and asked her to cash a check for one hundred dollars. Belle gave him her money, and he gave her a worthless check, signed by one of his growing list of aliases, John Register. Before Judy could be discharged, Van whisked her away from the hospital without paying the bill.

Worried about his love, Van spent the evening cooking a meal that Judy would always remember: ground beef with a baked potato. It wasn’t that the meal was that special; it was the sweet way he’d tried to take care of her, the fact that he had cooked for her. Since their escape, Van had not been as nice as he’d been in the days they’d spent walking home from the sherbet shop or playing tourist in Mexico City. He had become short-tempered. Snappish.

Mean.

That night restored her faith in the man who had swept her off her feet.

In her befuddled state, and experiencing pain from the infection, it was only later that Judy realized what Van had already known.

The date was October 8, her fifteenth birthday.

14

My father’s plan to cross the border near El Paso was nixed when someone at the hospital put the pieces together after the couple left without paying, and identified them as the Ice Cream Bride and her fugitive husband. Evening news reports announced that the runaway couple were planning to cross the border at El Paso. Troops at the border were ramped up as U.S. Border Patrol and local law enforcement agencies vied to catch the runaway couple.

Van’s father was determined not to let that happen. He had been in San Francisco when Van took off with Judy again, and he had returned home to Indiana with a heavy heart.

When two gentlemen in suits showed up at his home and produced their badges, he wasn’t surprised.

“We’d like to monitor your telephone,” one of the men informed Earl, who had no choice but to agree.

The minister listened politely while they explained how the bug worked. When they were finally gone, Van’s father, tears rolling down his face, got into his car and drove to his pastor’s home. Suddenly, the minister needed some ministering of his own.

After his confession, the pastor allowed Earl to use his phone. Earl called his family in South Carolina. He informed them that Van was in a lot of trouble and on the run. “Spread the word,” he said. “If Van and the girl show up, I will pay for any help they are given.”

Out of options in Texas, my father offered to write a check to anyone who would give him and his pregnant wife (as he called her) a ride to Mississippi. It wasn’t difficult. Judy’s condition elicited sympathy.

Earl’s brother Rufus, having gotten the message, was not surprised when Van and Judy showed up at his door in Meridian, Mississippi, hungry and disheveled. He agreed to help the couple on a temporary basis.

Rufus’s dilapidated farmhouse was located on a few acres in the woods outside of town. In mid-November, the temperatures were dipping into the mid-forties, but there was no central heat in the house, only a cast-iron wood-burning stove and a few space heaters scattered about. An outhouse served as the bathroom, and Judy, who was six months pregnant, had to make the trek to the smelly, rickety old building often.

“I want to go home,” Judy told Van on the first night of their stay, trying to get comfortable on the lumpy sofa bed Rufus had folded out for them.

“Stop whining and be still,” Van said. “We’re lucky to be here. At least we’re safe.”

Judy didn’t see it that way.

Although Rufus allowed them to hide out there, he was not comfortable with the idea. He worried that others would find out that he was harboring fugitives and constantly made the couple aware of the trouble he was courting on their behalf. He had promised Earl he would take care of them. He had not promised to make their stay a pleasant one.

“If you want to eat, you hunt your food,” he told Van. “I can’t be feeding the whole damn family.”

“You can come with me,” Van told Judy. “I’ll teach you how to hunt.”

“No,” Judy cried. “I don’t want you to kill anything.”

“You want to eat? Let’s go.” Van grabbed a rifle from beside the door, checked to make sure it was loaded, and headed out the door with Judy in tow.

“Just aim and shoot,” he said, positioning the rifle along her shoulder.

“I don’t want to,” Judy begged, tears glistening in her eyes.

“Shoot the damn thing. Just aim and pull the trigger,” Van said.

She got off one shot and handed him the gun, trying to hide her trembling hands by rubbing her shoulder where the gun had kicked.

She watched in horror as a squirrel appeared from the brush and Van took aim and fired.

“Look,” he said, holding the bloody rodent triumphantly for Judy to see. “One shot. And he was running.”

Judy didn’t want to look, but Van held the squirrel close to her face and then laughed when she retched.

At dinner, Judy begged him not to make her eat it, but Van insisted, the tone in his voice inviting no argument. Judy put the meat into her mouth and tried not to vomit.

Every day, her body burdened with the weight of her child, Judy hesitantly followed Van into the woods, praying he wouldn’t shoot another animal. Van’s bullet always met its mark.

Three weeks later, Van decided it was time to move on. Judy couldn’t have been happier. The Van she saw in the woods was not the charming man she knew. She didn’t like this Van.

Rufus gave them some money and an old family footlocker in which to pack their things. Van recognized it from his childhood. “Where did you get that?” he asked.

“Your father gave it to me years ago,” Rufus told him.

Van opened it reverently, but the christening gowns and family documents it had once housed were gone. He inhaled its familiar cedar scent before filling it with the few items he and Judy had brought with them.

Rufus silently wished them good riddance as my parents headed off to Jackson, Mississippi, where Van rented a cheap room in a motel frequented by prostitutes. It was a far cry from the hotel in Acapulco, where the balcony overlooked the Pacific Ocean, and room service brought baskets of fresh fruit each day.

When their money ran out, Van got desperate.

“You know, we could earn some easy money at this motel,” he told Judy. “All the girls do it. It’s quick cash, and I don’t think it will matter that you’re pregnant. Some men really like that sort of thing.”

Judy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You want me to sleep with men for money?”

“It’s just until we get enough cash to get out of here,” Van persuaded her.

“No,” Judy yelled. “I won’t do it. How could you even ask me that? I’m pregnant!”

“I know,” Van retorted. “That’s what got us into this mess.” He stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Judy threw herself on the bed, crying. She hadn’t bargained for any of this. Van had promised her excitement. He had said he would take care of her. She thought about calling her mother, but she didn’t want to go back to juvenile hall, and she was afraid of what Van would do.

Van was in a better mood when he returned. He had gotten a man he met to cash a bad check for forty-five dollars.

“Get packed,” he told Judy. “We’re going to New Orleans.”

15

America’s most wanted couple arrived in New Orleans a few days after Christmas 1962, the gloomiest time of the year for outsiders in the City that Care Forgot. Van, using the alias Harry Lee, wrote a bad check to a man he encountered named Morris Stark, swindling enough money from the kindhearted gentleman to rent a run-down apartment at 1215 Josephine Street, two and a half blocks from St. Charles Avenue, in the city’s Garden District. This area, once home to New Orleans aristocracy, had experienced a decline during the Great Depression when wealthy landowners were forced to sell their side yards for enough money to maintain their positions in society. Cheap apartments, poorly built because money was scarce, sprouted up along all of the streets bordering St. Charles Avenue, their design a startling contrast to the architectural masterpieces next door. Poor working-class people and vagrants flocked to the area, attracted by the inexpensive rent and cheap transportation afforded by the St. Charles streetcars.

Staying in their cramped apartment as much as possible during the day and going out for short stretches only at night, Van and Judy managed to attract little attention in this busy section of New Orleans. Once in a while, strangers would comment on Judy’s growing belly or ask when the baby was due, but Van brushed them aside, not interested in chatting with anyone unless he was trying to scam them.

Judy tried to be happy about her pregnancy, but Van was having none of it. He could not have cared less about the impending birth of his child. Still, Judy tried to please him, cooking and cleaning and not asking too many questions when he went out alone at night, his face hidden beneath a hat. Nothing she did worked. Although he repeatedly vowed his love for her, Van belittled her swollen belly, offended somehow by its very presence.

Less than two months after arriving in New Orleans, on February 12, 1963, I was born Earl Van Dorne Best. (I’m not sure why my father added the
e
to Dorn—or whether that was a mistake made by the hospital.)

Van called William.

“I need the money I gave you,” he said. “Judy had this damn baby, and I need to pay the hospital bill before they’ll let her go. Can you wire it?”

“Of course,” William said, “but Van, I need you to get back here as soon as possible.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I got arrested. They charged me as an accessory for bringing you and Judy to the airport when you eloped. I have to stand trial, and I need you to testify that I didn’t know how old she was.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Van said. “They’ll arrest me the minute I get to San Francisco.”

“Van, please. This could ruin my career if I’m found guilty.”

“Sorry, man. I can’t do it.”

William hung up the phone. He wired Van the money, but he was angry that his friend would not help him.

Van paid the hospital bill.

The nurses at Southern Baptist Hospital, on Napoleon Avenue, did not know how young my mother was or they might have provided her with some instruction about child care before sending her home. After elementary guidance to a girl they thought was nineteen, they had smiled and waved good-bye, saying, “You take care of little Earl now.” That had been it.

Two weeks later, my father, out of money and finding no one he could persuade to take his checks, talked my still-healing mother into taking a job as a cocktail waitress in a bar in the French Quarter. Van befriended the owner of the Ship Ahoy Saloon, on the corner of Decatur and Toulouse Streets, across from Jackson Brewery, and lied about Judy’s age to get her the job. The bar was a favorite of thirsty sailors who arrived at the Port of New Orleans on the Mississippi River, a block away.

In addition to the bar on the ground floor, with seven French doors that were always kept open, the establishment featured a hotel on the three floors above, where sailors could conveniently retire with the girl of their choice after a rowdy night of drinking. Loud music streaming from the open doors attracted passersby, and the bar never wanted for patrons. It was notorious for its violent clientele, with bloody noses the predictable ending to each raucous night.

One evening after work, Judy stepped out of the St. Charles streetcar a few blocks from her home, shivering as the breeze off the Mississippi swept through her. It was early March and still cold—forty-three degrees and rainy. The skimpy outfit she wore beneath her coat, a requirement at the Ship Ahoy, did little to protect her from the cold. Judy hid her fear of the sailors well, smiling and flirting and lightly slapping overzealous hands to earn enough money to buy me formula and to keep Van supplied with the gin he needed for the Tom Collinses he now loved to drink.