Who Killed Chrissy?: The True Crime Memoir of a Pittsburgh girl's Unsolved Murder in Las Vegas (4 page)

I knew I didn’t want to meet this
guy, and I’m sitting there mulling it over when she changes the subject
suddenly, and says, “Should I put chicken livers in this soup or what—what do
you think?” She’s going through the recipe her Italian aunts, Angeline and
Josephine, gave her.  I am not sure at this point what family she has and who
she is referring to—I don’t know much about Christine, or as her friends call
her, “Chrissy.”

I can’t bring myself to call her
that, it seems so childish, I just call her Chris.

“It’s up to you if you want chicken
livers, but personally I like a lot of greens, you know, chard, whatever…I want
to talk more about this guy Marty and why you’re seeing someone who plays with
knives and sounds very scary to me.  What’s up with that, Chris? Doesn’t he scare
you or give you the creeps?” I am pretending to be interested now; I am bored
and want to get the hell out of her kitchen and back to my apartment where I
can do my toenails.

Chris is now settling into a more
relaxed mode of soup making, and I can feel it. She’s not impressed me with
this goofy story, and I think she knows that, too. I am, however, more confused
than ever about who she really is as a person.  I’d like to help her if I can,
but what can I do for her?  She obviously has not had the Ozzie and Harriet
life that I’ve had, where the family is normal, and dinners are served daily at
five o’clock and mom and dad are there for you all the time.  I didn’t know any
other life; most of my friends had the same kind of life—strong family
structure and support for their children.

She dumps the chicken livers in the
pot, then copious amounts of chard and spinach, spins around from the steaming
pot and quite casually and calmly declares, “I’m not afraid of Marty, I feel
protected when I’m with him.  He’s actually teaching me various methods of
self–defense, like Karate and boxing; he spars with me all the time and he’s in
great shape, always has been. I think I met him when I was fourteen or so.”

“Okay fine”…I’m mumbling; I don’t
like the subject anymore.  I’ve never met Marty, and I don’t like him, don’t
want to meet him. I want to steer clear of him—don’t like what she’s telling me
about him.  I am frightened of Marty, not even knowing him; he is what my son’s
father, Rick, has warned me of for the last four years—white racist cops that
simply do not like interracial relationships. 

As an interracial couple, we had
experienced these types in restaurants and the nightclubs where Rick performed
with his singing group. There were times when I was so frightened I wanted to
run away and hide. The only thing that kept me from losing it was the fact that
Rick was a black belt in street fighting Karate, and after watching him
annihilate quite a few people who had picked fights with him in public places,
I gradually developed a sense of relief from the fear when we were out in
public. I never understood why people who knew nothing about you would want to
walk up to you and pick a fight with a total stranger….

We stood out like a sore thumb, in
that Rick was a dark-skinned, handsome black man, and I a blonde bombshell who
fell in love and never looked back—a love at first sight encounter that I
refused to explain to anyone, including my family and friends. 

“He’s giving you a false sense of
security Chris, that’s what he’s doing!” I yelled at her. The crooked grin
slowly emerged as she sauntered to the other side of the kitchen like it meant
nothing, so I shut up.

I don’t know why she chose to tell
me this story except that now I believe it was just meant to be. It was the
splinter that lodged in my brain and stayed there.

I had such a sick feeling in my
stomach during the entire telling of this story, like it was going to end up
meaning something later on—you know that feeling you get in books when you read
something like this and your little inner voice tells you that later on it will
mean something?

The wedding soup was finally being
dished out into huge soup bowls.  We both sat and looked at each other across
the wooden table while dipping our chunks of Mancini’s bread into the hot
soup—Mancini’s is the best Italian bread in Pittsburgh, and all Pittsburgh
people know that Mancini’s bread must be present at any soup, stew or spaghetti
meal, especially on a very cold, windy, winter night at the dinner table. It
does something for the soul, because we all know that the Mancini family made
it themselves just for us.  I felt connected to Chris at this tiny moment in
time….

It isn’t like Chris to cook
anything. From what I know of her by now, she isn’t domestically inclined, her
apartment doesn’t have much furniture or accessories and she likes it that way,
easier to clean. As far as I’m concerned, this Italian wedding soup day was
inspired by a conversation we had a week earlier about her aunts, Angeline and
Josephine, who raised her. That’s about all she ever told me, they raised her,
and the way she described them they sounded like two devout Catholic women who
had never married, but I don’t know that to be truth. We never discussed it any
further.

Having been raised Catholic and
schooled Catholic the first fourteen years of my life, I always felt confined
and smothered by nuns who hated men. I now looked upon Catholics as strange
people who had a belief system that I didn’t agree with. In fact, I strongly
disagreed with it.

My memories of the classroom are of
screeching nuns who questioned you every Monday morning about your dating
activities over the weekend with strange things like, “So you know you can get
pregnant through your clothing don’t you?”….hell, I believed that one for years
and years.

I lasted one year at St. Benedicts
Academy—the ninth grade. I got thrown out because I cut school to sleep in an
empty Greyhound bus overnight and be the first person in line for the Beatles
concert in Pittsburgh in 1964. My photo appeared on the front cover of the
Pittsburgh Press after I had informed my mom that she’d better call me in sick
because I was going, no matter what she had to say. So that did it for the
Catholic schools.

The most poignant memory I have of
Catholic school was that we had to wear the official Catholic uniform of
suffering, which was the heavy wool pleated skirt that came down to your
mid-calf, with wool knee socks that covered the remaining portion of the leg.
The skirts were always three sizes too large because they had to look blousy,
along with the blousy white shirt, so we rolled them at the waistline until
they were short enough above the knee that they looked more fashionable and
gave the leg some much-needed air. This wool uniform was required, regardless
of the summer heat. It was a form of good Catholic suffering.  Suffering was
essential in Catholic life, and for all, not just for a few.

Catholics were obsessed with
suffering, in one form or another. You had to suffer. If you didn’t suffer, you
weren’t worthy of your life. Since I had no interest in earning sainthood, I
didn’t want to suffer, and I fought it to the bitter end.  The other suffering
part was that if you weren’t good then you were very bad—very bad.  Bad things
would happen. Thus, the Catholic nun theory that sex was evil, and the aborted
babies they were possibly hiding in the convent walls had nothing to do with
that theory at all. I only knew that Catholics were confused people. I didn’t
much care to figure them out either; I just wanted out of their kooky
religion.  I believe I was looking for the word “cult” back then but never
found it.  

I didn’t see much of Chris on a
daily basis. She was usually on her way out the front doors of the building to
jog in the park.  She would say “Hi” and whisk by me in the stairwell in her
jogging get up. Then I would run into her later on in the day when I returned
home from a long day traveling the roads of Ohio and West Virginia as a sales
rep.

I have a two-year-old son to worry
about, and I’m currently consumed with the possibility that my job as a
manufacturer’s rep will cease sooner than I anticipated.

I’ve been working for a Styrofoam
cup and container company as a regional sales rep, setting up distributorships
for their products. I have a company car and a decent salary, but it’s still
difficult paying the bills and having any leftovers for babysitters and food.

I spend many evenings visiting my
parents, who are not far from where I live. My mother is happy to have me for
dinner as often as I like so she can see her grandson.

A.I.W.F.—Alan I. W. Frank Company,
my employer, is faltering; it sounds like a bankruptcy brewing—time to start
looking for another job.

I am well aware that Chris is
health conscious and sports minded, two interests that I personally never have
time to think about. I am a single mom who worries daily about how to pay the
bills, and I have no excess time on my hands for self-interests such as dating,
partying, or going to the gym. Personal time is not on my daily schedule.

Chris is without a doubt a
professionally trained masseuse, and I don’t know where she learned it or who
she learned it from. I once had a severe muscle spasm in my left arm and she
worked on it for half an hour until it was completely worked out of the muscle;
I felt fabulous. 

Chris gets a deal on a used massage
table from a woman she knows at one of the massage parlors in Pittsburgh. 
These are not health clubs; they are called parlors because no one believes
there’s anything legitimate going on there.  Unfortunately, after she has
someone help her haul the table up three flights of stairs to her apartment,
she gets a phone call from the owner who quickly lets her know that he doesn’t
want it sold. This massage parlor king of Pittsburgh, known as Dante Tex Gill,
has just been indicted for tax evasion by the Feds and has fears of someone
else taking over his turf in Pittsburgh.  Someone who worked in one of his
parlors has sold the equipment without Tex’s permission and he is livid.  He threatens
Chris with having bouncers come over to her apartment and remove the table.

Chris ignores the threats and keeps
the table. I don’t hear anything more about the incident, but I am wondering
why she is willing to take all that risk for a crummy massage parlor table.
That table is her gem.

I’m standing outside our building
one evening at dusk and a car pulls up to the curb. Chris comes jogging out the
front doors and lands squarely on her feet in front of me. 

“This is Chucky Werner,” she
introduces me to the guy who has just pulled up to the sidewalk in front of our
building. I say hello to Chucky and note that he looks nothing like what I had
previously assumed Chris’s taste in men was. I had only caught a glimpse of
Marty once in the hallway and he looked like a gym guy, a physically fit
fighter type. I didn’t remember his face but thought at the time that I saw him
that he was attractive and somewhat sexy, carried himself with a confident, cop
arrogance and the look of someone who had secrets, possibly an ex-military guy.

Chucky, on the other hand, was
somewhat out of shape and more on the nerdy side. I thought he was cute in his
own way, with a quirky smile, glasses and always dressed in business attire. 
Marty and Chucky are at opposite ends of the spectrum for personality, looks
and careers. 

Chris later confided in me that
Chucky Werner was her soul mate and advisor.  I felt it when she spoke of him
that she admired and respected him. After all, Chucky owned his own insurance
company, so I assumed at the time that he was older than Chris and more my
age. 

I saw more of Chucky than of Marty
around the apartment building, and that was just fine with me. However, I could
see that Chris sometimes drove Chucky insane with her belligerence over mundane
issues, and many times I felt that he was getting weary of trying to mentor her
on how to become less naïve and make smart decisions concerning her dating
practices, her unstable attitude towards life and her flightiness.