Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [118]
Then, there was the incident with the underage woman. Let’s call her Anita.
I got this story from a couple of different sources. On the interview tapes that Larry Schiller loaned me, during the last forty-eight hours of Gary’s life, one of his attorneys asked him, “Are you sure you don’t have any kids?” Gary responded: “I don’t think so. I had one kid, but he died … That was a long time ago, in Portland … He died when he was born.” I was jolted when I heard this—it was complete news to me—but the subject was finished as soon as it had come up. Gary had nothing more to say on the matter.
A few months later, I was poring over Gary’s arrest and trial records from Multnomah County, when I came across an indictment for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, as well as rape. From what I could tell, it looked like Gary and another young man probably got an underage woman or two drunk and then seduced them, but I couldn’t be sure it was that cut-and-dried. Later, I got in touch with the man who had been Gary’s codefendant in the matter—a man I’ll call Richard—and he consented to meet with me and tell me the circumstances of the event.
One morning, as heavy rain fell on Portland, Richard showed up at my door. He was a handsome, gray-bearded man, about fifty-two, and in contrast to many of Gary’s friends I would meet, there was nothing about him that seemed hardened or weary. Instead, he seemed like a friendly and decent family man. As it happened, his experience with Gary had proved a turning point in his life. Richard first met Gary, he told me, when they were both working at Bresse Appliances. “There was a kind of aloofness to your brother,” Richard said, as we sat and talked over coffee. “It was as if he were partly shy and partly scared—like everything was just too new for him. I felt a kind of kinship for that. I was sort of lonely in those days, and I’d always had a bit of a hearing problem. It had made it difficult for me to make new friends easily, because I was self-conscious about it. Anyway, I decided to befriend your brother. I’d try to help him along—show him where things were and how they worked—and we’d go out for a drink now and then.
“I had an apartment on 23rd and Weidler, in northeast Portland. I met a couple of girls who lived about three or four blocks from my apartment. They had a habit of coming over on weekends. Sometimes, one of them would stay late. We’d have a few drinks and I would proceed to do what young guys do.
“This one Tuesday morning,” Richard continued, “Gary and I had both been on swing shift at Bresse, and Gary had sacked out at my place. Early in the morning, the girls knocked on the front door and got us both up. They had their younger sister with them. She was about fourteen years old. She was on her way to grade school and the other two girls were on their way to high school, and they had to catch a bus over on Broadway someplace. The two older girls figured they could still get to school on time, but the young girl—Anita—didn’t want to leave. So the older girls left, and Anita and Gary and I sat around and talked and played cards. I kept telling her she better be going home because we had to go to work at about three-thirty. After a while, the day wore on and Gary says, ‘Well, maybe I won’t go to work today.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ but I remember thinking, ‘Hell, this isn’t right.’ But there’s no arguing with Gary, so I jumped in the car and went to work.
“When I came home, Anita was passed out drunk in the middle of the bed. All she had on was a thin slip, and Gary was nowhere around. I let her sleep because it was one o’clock in the morning and she was out of it—she couldn’t wake up. I just sat in my chair and dozed a little bit. I woke her the next morning and told her to get dressed and go home. Naturally, I knew there was going to be something bad coming down about this, so I just waited for it to happen. The following morning, bangity-bang-bang