nodded. “Good. I want something done for my boy. I want to protect my kid; don’t want him going to prison. You get it?”
Christensen nodded. “Yeah, we get it.”
“He may have to do some time. I get that. But if I can help him—I’m responsible for him. I’m the one that got him mixed up with that no-good Allen. All I know is I got my one boy, so I want something done for him.”
“We can’t make promises, but we’ll do what we can.”
“I been around. I understand no promises, but I’m counting on you boys to do right by me if I do right by you. You understand?”
Blade had put a little edge in his voice when he had asked about Lee Furrow and Carrasco’s eyes had flashed briefly. “Okay, so I had these accounts, you know? People owed me money. Now, you aren’t going to tell all this shit to the income tax people are you? Those are guys I never want to mess with.”
“Income tax isn’t our problem.” Lean laughed. “We all understand income tax.”
Carrasco was opening up more and more, telling the detectives that Furrow and Clarence’s son, Roger, had worked for her when she needed some money collected and she sent them out to collect it. She had been in jail on charges different than those that caused her to end up in Alderson and needed bail money. Upon her release, Furrow and Chuck Jones, another boy who worked with Clarence, came down to her house in Mexico. They carried American Express money orders they ripped off of one of their accounts at some joint. She couldn’t remember the name. But she could remember one thing that turned out to be crucial.
“Anyway,” she added, “when they came down, they had this little, blond-haired girl with them. Just a little thing.”
Blade held his hand up to stop Carrasco from going forward. “And can you describe the girl?”
“Well, she was young, maybe seventeen or eighteen. Clarence’s boy had been running around with her. Anyway, she had hair just past her shoulders. She was maybe five foot, four or so. Only weighed around a hundred. I notice things like that.” Carrasco looked down at her square body. “No time in my life was I built like her. She was built pretty good. But I had other things, you know?” Blade and Lean laughed and nodded, encouraging her to continue.
“See, Clarence wanted to pass these money orders and I told him, if you can get to the money exchanges in Mexico, maybe they can do it. Anyway, nobody would exchange them. They came to my house and my old man—I got one you know, at least before I got in here—he went over to San Diego with Allen, and I went with them in a different car. Furrow was driving me. So, they got some of the money orders passed in San Diego. Then Clarence took all of us to this restaurant, but I left before everybody was finished. I had some runs to make that night. Had to make a living, you know—business.”
Tommy broke in. “And what about the girl?”
Carrasco looked over at Tommy. “Don’t get ahead of me, honey. I’ll tell you everything but you got to let me get to it.”
Blade laughed. “Well, he’s young. Just go on.”
Barbara smiled at the older detective. “See, I was in jail around August. It was after I got out that Eugene Furrow told me about the girl and what happened to her.”
“Did you talk to Clarence about this?”
“I asked him about it after I talked to Eugene and he said, ‘Yeah, we had to waste her.’ I didn’t ask him more about it because you gotta know Clarence. He said that she opened her mouth about things, about the money orders, and they had to shut her up. But Clarence was always talkin’ shit like that. He would say things like, ‘I had to waste this guy’; I did this, I did that. I never paid attention to it because it always seemed like so much bullshit, you know? But this was after I knew about it from Eugene, so I knew it wasn’t no bullshit about the girl. Anyway, they bailed me out and Furrow came back to San Diego and started working for me again. But when my kid got sick, Furrow took me and my kid to the hospital. We was waitin’ at the hospital for the doctors to finish with my kid. Eugene was talking to me and then outta nowhere, he starts cryin’ and asks me to go outside. He’s gettin’ real upset, so I walked out with him and he starts talking about some robbery and then he says the girl’s name. I still can’t remember it. And he says, ‘We had to waste her, Barbara, the girl that was with us when we was here before.’ He says that Clarence made him do it.”
“So I said, ‘What do you mean, Clarence made you do it?’ And he says, ‘Well, they said they had to shut her mouth.’ Then he said that Clarence was supposed to give her some sleeping pills that were gonna put her to sleep but that it didn’t work so Clarence told him to do it and Furrow just started choking her. He said it was bothering him so bad that he couldn’t sleep. He said that he was choking her and she just kept looking at him.”
“Did you ask him where this happened?”
“Yeah, he said that Clarence and the others said it had to be done and he had to do it, so they did it at Shirley’s house.”
Lean interrupted. “At Shirley’s house? Who’s Shirley?”
“Shirley is Clarence’s girlfriend. I been to her apartment before. She had red hair, a dye job, ’cause she weren’t no natural redhead, you know. Anyway, she’s around 35, maybe five foot, six, got a good figure. Works as a secretary for him, but she does more than type, if you get my meaning.”
Blade held up his hand to slow Carrasco down. “We get it. So this is in August, in ’74?”
“Yeah.”
“And Eugene said he choked her? Strangled her with his hands?”
“Yeah, he said he had his hands on her throat and her eyes was lookin’ up at him.”
“Did he say he used anything else to maybe stab her or shoot her?”
“No, just that he choked her. That’s why I remember so well because he kept talking about her eyes. She just looked at him. Eugene said nobody was with him when he started to do it and when he couldn’t, they called him from outside and told him he had to do it or else. Clarence said if he didn’t he was going to kill him and her, too.”
“So he was in fear for his life?”
“Yeah, that’s what he said, that it was either her or both of them.”
“And it was all over these money orders? She was going to tell on these people?”
Barbara nodded. “She was talking too much and they was afraid that the cops would connect them to it.”
“So, when did Furrow tell you all this?”
“It was in November, but he said that all this stuff with the girl happened while I was in jail and that was between August 2nd and August 21st.”
Lean reached into his pocket and took out the photograph of Mary Sue Kitts. “Do you remember this girl? Is this her?”
“Yeah, that’s her, but she had blond hair, honey. Not like in your picture where it’s kind of brown. I mean it was bleached real blond when I saw her. I heard her mother came to ask Roger about her. Did she report her missing? She is missing isn’t she?”
Blade
