Sex. Murder. Mystery(200)

The girls laughed along with her.

“You don't ever want to get into trouble, you guys. This is not a place you want to be.”

Amber and Angie agreed. No one wanted to be in a place like jail.

“Did you see Audrey?” she asked.

The girls said they had.

“Isn't she getting big? A little too big for that outfit?” she asked somewhat conspiratorially.

“Audrey was wearing stretch pants—Mary Kay's worst nightmare,” Amber said later. She asked the sisters to go shopping to get her baby something decent to wear. Beth Adair, she said, could give them the money. Amber and Angie promised they would.

“Did you see her hair?” Mary Kay made a disgusted face.

They had.

“What's wrong with her hair?” Amber asked.

“They have that grease on it,” Mary Kay said in an exasperated tone. The girls gathered that it was some kind of Samoan style. Soona had used some kind of oil to slick up the hair before twisting it into shape.

Mary Kay was upset about it, but there was nothing she could do. Soona was dressing and grooming that baby the way she would any of her children. When Mary Kay got out of jail and could raise the baby, the grease, the stretch pants, the hideous red dress, would be history.

Mary Kay Letourneau wasn't an overnight sensation, as so many would later claim when her notoriety pushed her into Lorena Bobbit and Amy Fisher's turf, Tabloid Territory. Hers was a slow-building tawdry story of an inappropriate act by a schoolteacher before it became a media-made tale of a romance gone wrong. The spring that baby Audrey was born saw a steady flow of interest by the local media before the national vultures with moussed hair and journalistic pretense swooped down from Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. In the beginning, maybe before they knew what they had, before they could take credit for creating Mary Kay Letourneau, victim of love, the story was locals-only and media access was rationed.

One producer from a smaller television show knew that the carrot that had been so freely dangled by Dave Gehrke and Bob Huff had most likely been yanked completely out of reach after the Dateline appearance of Mary and Vili. Calls were no longer being returned. The secretary at the law office had a different excuse each time the producer inquired about catching up with Gehrke. “He's in court. He's out of town. He's with a client.”

Finally, at wit's end—and knowing full well the concept of being “blown off”—the TV producer made an appointment to make an appointment to set up further discussions to get Mary on his show. It was the secretary, not Gehrke, who telephoned later.

“She called me back an hour before and said, 'David can't make that time,'… and I had scheduled it a week in advance!”

This is crap, he thought. The show isn't a big enough player.

In time, the young producer felt a shift coming from Mary Letourneau's legal team. He felt the lawyers had been friendly, even intimate. David Gehrke faxed some material relating to soccer and his son, just like an FYI that a friend might send. Their attitude in the beginning seemed genuine: “She really needs help. I don't know if we can do the show, but we'll try. We'll really take a look at it.”

But after Karen O'Leary's interview with Vili Fualaau in the park, things changed. The shift was more apparent as Mary Kay Letourneau became a media sensation, a commodity to be brokered, and a ticket to the good life for the lawyers, her friends, and the Fualaaus. National TV. First-class airfare. Theater tickets. A new suit. Four-star hotel accommodations.

“I talked to people back east who said money had changed hands,” the producer of the small program said, quickly adding that his program was more honorable and didn't pay for guests. It became clear to members of the media that getting Mary's story out was not as important as “how much can you pay?”

The producer finally accepted that his show was out of the game.

With all the wheeling and dealing, blatant or disguised, the producer felt those around Mary Kay were taking advantage of a person who needed help more than she needed publicity. Mary was her own worst enemy, he thought, because she was so very ill and completely unable to be an effective advocate for herself.

“She was so deranged anyway that I don't know that she could make a conscious decision,” the producer said a year later.





Chapter 60

FOR MANY OF the Shorewood Elementary teachers, lessons taught in the classroom were different the fall after their colleague was arrested. What had once been so simple now became impossible. Gone were the hugs to comfort a child in need. Gone were any displays of friendly affection. Nothing like that was appropriate. This hurt many teachers, especially those with younger students. If a child skins her knee and starts to cry, are you supposed to shake her hand? But there was more to it than that. The scandal also changed what and how things were taught.