Teach Me to Kill

by Stephen Sawicki

  She brought the pictures to work the next day, telling Billy that neither she nor Tracy thought they were very good and if the fifteen-year old wanted some of the pictures he could take them. Otherwise Pam would just throw them out. Billy said why not. He took about fifteen.

  He also took some heat from his mother after Karen Knight showed her a sampling of the kinds of pictures her oldest son had brought in to be developed. Indignant, Billy responded that the pictures were Pam’s and that he was only doing her a favor in getting them developed. He assured her that he was not the cameraman in this particular venture.

  It was not long after that when Pam called Cecelia to the room next to the media center office. By now, Pam and her intern were close and it was not unusual for either to come in with some tidbit about their personal lives for the other.

  “Cecelia, sit down,” Pam said. “I have to tell you something.”

  The teenager did as she was told and waited.

  “I think I’m in love with Bill,” Pam said.

  A smile stretched across the teenager’s oval face. She laughed at the notion. She was never part of Billy’s crowd, but Cecelia had always liked him and she regarded Pam as her best friend. The idea of the two together, however, was ridiculous. Pam, after all, was an adult. Billy was fifteen years old.

  “Cecelia, I’m serious. I think I’m in love with Bill.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I’m serious.”

  As it would turn out, Cecelia was to tell Bill to come by the media center so that Pam could tell him herself of her newfound passion. When Billy came over after school to see what she wanted, Pam fluttered around the subject, never quite getting to what she wanted to say. Bewildered, Billy hurried out to catch the school bus home to Seabrook.

  The next day, February 5, Billy skipped a study period and went to visit Pam again. Once more, she was evasive and seemed too nervous and embarrassed to talk about what was on her mind. She put her head down. She avoided eye contact. But Billy pressed the matter and Pam finally came out with it.

  “Do you ever think about me when I’m not around?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I think about you all the time.”

  Billy Flynn could not quite believe what he was hearing. Two minutes earlier, life was normal. He was putting in his time in high school, goofing around with his roughneck friends, and mooning over the pretty media center director. Now his fantasy was coming to life. Here was a woman--a woman—whom he had been attracted to from the moment he first saw her, whom he had been flirting with but with no real hope of getting anywhere, revealing how attracted she was to him. Pam said she did not know what to do about her feelings because she was married, but that Billy was constantly on her mind.

  The boy was quiet. He was happy, but stunned. He walked back across the parking lot to class, giddy but not quite believing what had just occurred.

  That was nothing, however, to the whirl of change his relationship with Pam would undergo in the next several weeks. At first, there was an awkwardness between the two, a period of readjustment between them. That would soon dissipate.

  Pam, meanwhile, was openly discussing her unhappiness in her marriage. She spoke of verbal and physical abuse, about the night she had gone over to the Smarts’ condo in the snow, saying that Greg had thrown her down and kicked her out in the cold wearing nothing by a long T-shirt and panties, Billy would testify. She told him that they got married in the first place because so many in their circle of friends were doing it.

  In time, as Billy learned more about the Smarts’ marriage—whether it was the truth or fiction that Pam was telling him—and as he came to love Pam, the boy admittedly developed a hatred toward her husband. For not only had Greg become Billy’s rival, but Pam made it clear that he was a bastard as well.

  Then one day, shortly after telling of her feelings for him, Pam reminded Billy of a conversation they had while working on the orange juice video. They had been driving in the van, Billy would later say, and Pam had asked if anyone knew where she could hire someone to kill her secretary. She wanted her eighteen-year-old friend Tracy to have the job.

  Unknown to Flynn, that had been a trial balloon, a test for a reaction that carried no risk. Billy remembered the question as a joke, an obvious one, the kind people make everyday. Still, he commented that there was a guy in Seabrook, a serious badass, who would probably do something like that.

  Now, however, Pam was behaving as if her earlier remarks had never been in jest. It was not her secretary she was looking to have killed, she told the boy. It was Greg.

  Although convinced of Pam’s hostility toward her husband, Billy doubted that she wanted to go as far as to hire a hit man. It was like someone saying they were looking for a rocket launcher to eliminate their neighbor with the loud stereo. Angry yes, serious no.

  Pam pressed on. She was in a quandary, she said. She wanted to be with Billy rather than her husband, and divorce seemed not to be a choice at all. Greg, she told Billy, would never easily give her up. Her husband would hound her, preventing her from establishing another relationship.

  What’s more, Greg would get everything they owned, from the cars and furniture on down to the dog, and she would be left with practically nothing. Besides that, her salary was scarcely enough to get a decent apartment. She would have to go home to her parents—a situation Pam no doubt wanted to avoid at all costs—and wouldn’t be able to move to the seacoast to be near him.

  Billy regarded Pam as a decent person. And he himself was just a fifteen-year-old kid. It was like an equation in which none of the figures added up. Billy said he knew of no one who would kill for money. He figured Pam would soon let it go.

  In the meantime, his relationship with Pam intensified.

  One day, they would find themselves at Billy’s place together, supposedly to work on the video. Pam and Elaine Flynn had met. The group had been to his mother’s apartment on the beach a few times before, to tape a scene or two. Billy would put on some music and they would sit around his room talking about the orange juice project.

  On this day, Billy would say, his mother and brothers were home when he locked his bedroom door behind him and Pam. Soon, they found themselves next to each other, stretched out on Billy’s waterbed, while Motley Crue’s “Starry Eyes” played on the compact disc player. The equipment, though, was malfunctioning and kept repeating the song.

  They lay across the bed, picking up the conversation that started back in her office.

  “Well, are you going to kiss me?” Pam finally asked.

  “Yeah, I will,” said Billy.

  “Well? When? Do I have to come over there and rape you?”

  “Yeah,” he joked.

  Then they kissed. “Starry Eyes” was finishing once again, only now the CD went on to the next song.

  Billy Flynn’s life was changing. He seemed happier around school these days. His buddies at first refused to believe him when Billy said he was involved with Pam. Until they saw her dropping him off at the top of JR’s driveway and kissing him good-bye. Then, they decided, she was probably using him. She couldn’t be serious.

  In Billy’s eyes, however, his relationship with Pam was getting better every day.

  Among other things, he and Pam started making plans to spend a night together. At one point she talked about the movie 9 ½ Weeks, which Billy, who usually liked his films with a little more action, had not seen. There is a scene, she said, in which actress Kim Basinger seductively dances for Mickey Rourke. She longed to do that for someone, Pam said, but until now she had no one she cared for enough. She planned to buy some sexy lingerie just for the occasion. “She told me she was gonna dance for me like that,” Billy later recounted.

  It wasn’t long after, when they were together with Cecelia and Tracy Collins at a clothing store, that Pam took Billy aside.

  “Do you see that?” she said, referring to what Billy would later describe as “a lingerie-lace-type thi
ng” on a wall in the store.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s pretty much what I bought for us, only mine’s turquoise and white.”

  Billy would remember it as a weekend in the middle of February, around Valentine’s Day, when Pam invited him to spend the night at her condo. He testified that he believed Greg was skiing with his friends at the time. (Greg, in fact, had been on a ski trip in mid February.)

  Cecelia was to come along as well. She was unaware, but the girl was mainly there to make it seem less suspicious that Pam was having a teenage boy sleep over at her place.

  Like Billy, Crit has heard Pam complain bitterly about Greg. In fact, when Pam told Cecelia that she had finally made her feelings known to Billy, she added that she now had a choice: divorce Greg or kill him. The teenager said that divorce was probably a better idea. But Pam said she wasn’t so sure. As she did with Billy, Pam told Cecelia that her husband would come away with everything in a divorce – even the dog, Haylen.

  That night, Billy called his mother from JR’s and said he was spending the night at his friend’s. Billy had done it so often that his mother did not give it a second thought. Then Pam and Cecelia picked up Billy and they headed to Derry, where they rented some videos, including 9 ½ Weeks, and went to 4E, Misty Morning Drive.

  Pam and Billy sat on one couch watching the steamy film on the VCR. Cecelia was on the other. And when it was over, Pam and the boy went upstairs to her room. They brought the stereo from the guest bedroom into the master bedroom, so they could have some music. The fifteen-year-old lay on the bed naked while Pam went into the bathroom and slipped into the turquoise and white negligee.

  After Billy’s assurances that he wouldn’t think she was overweight, Pam stepped out and danced to the Van Halen song “Black & Blue.” Then she and the boy had sex. Billy had told Pam that he was experienced, but in reality he was a virgin.

  That night, they had sex on the bed, then on the floor. At one point, Billy padded downstairs to get a glass of ice so he could rub it along Pam’s body a la Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger in the movie.

  Pam took Billy and Cecelia home to Seabrook the next day. She dropped off the girl and then headed east, toward Seabrook Beach and Billy’s home.

  It is peaceful down by the sea in the winter. Traffic is mild. The crowds are gone. The year-round residents who live off the beach, most of whom are not natives of Seabrook, can tramp on the sand with their spouses, kids, or dogs in quiet solitude, with only the background sound of the waves rolling onto the shore.

  Pam drove along. She told the boy sadly that this was probably the final time they could be together. She wanted to be with Billy, but Greg did not go away all that often. The opportunities were too few. She said she just didn’t know the answer.

  Pam pulled in past Billy’s building, down near one the sandy entranceways that connect the beach with the road. By this time, both of them were sobbing. The teenager told her that he felt as she did. He wanted their relationship to continue. He wanted to be with her.

  Then here was no choice, Pam said. The only way they could be together was if Billy killed Greg.

  The boy figured that it was Pam’s anger at her husband that was speaking, that she wasn’t truly planning to carry out a murder plot.

  After all, it had been an emotional discussion. All that had seemed so wonderful between them seemed on the verge of being over. Billy was in no mood to start debating moral or legal issues.

  “Well, I agreed,” the boy would later testify. “I wasn’t about to start disagreeing with her.”

  ◆◆◆

  As winter edged toward spring, Billy Flynn’s world had a new order. He had had a girlfriend or two in the past, but they were always around his age and matters never became very serious. Now, he was chest deep in the throes of an affair, with a woman who worked for the school board no less.

  There was, of course, the sex. Over the ensuing weeks, Billy and Pam would have encounters in a variety of places – his bedroom, a Seabrook ballpark, in the back of her Honda hatchback out behind a factory, and at Salisbury Beach.

  Cecelia said Pam once told her about an instance in which she and Billy were making love on the ground near a secluded parking lot at Salisbury Beach when a car unexpectedly pulled in. Both of them supposedly scurried around naked, Cecelia said, and in the process Pam cut open her knee.

  And Billy would tell friends about the time he was having sex with Pam in the back of her car and a guy who was mowing a nearby field caught them in the act and began yelling at them.

  It had all the markings of a teenage romance, which made sense as far as Billy went, given his age. Pam, however, displayed a rampant immaturity—though some say it was an act—that belied her organized, achievement-oriented persona.

  Besides the sex in out-of-the-way places, they took to trading love notes, a number of them sexually explicit. And at one point, amid the video games and other amusements down at the Salisbury Beach arcades, the two punched out cheap medallions for one another: “Pame and Bill Forever,” read hers. “Bill and Pame Forever,” read her teenage lover’s.

  The mystique was heightened by the secrecy that any extramarital affair involved. Added to the mix was the certainty that Pam would lose her job if the relationship ever came to the school board’s attention.

  Cecelia, of course, knew. But Pam’s friends, such as Tracy Collins, who regularly took part in the orange juice commercial, remained unaware that anything was going on between the two. Pam had given the boy explicit orders not to let on in front of Collins or any of her friends. After all, most of them were Greg’s friends as well. Even more than that, most of Pam’s friends had come about because of her marriage to Greg.

  No teenager, though, could be expected to say nothing about such an incredible turn of events. It was inevitable that Billy would tell JR and Pete. Ever since eighth grade, when they started pestering him to stop moping around the house, Billy kept very little from them.

  Pete Randall had only met Pam a few times and even then they had hardly talked. Unlike Billy, he saw nothing particularly fascinating about her. Something about Pam just irked him. In time, Pete and JR would come to consider Billy’s affair something of a joke. They would even come to rename the Van Halen song “Hot for Teacher” in honor of the lovers; they called it “Humping the Teacher.”

  Flynn, in fact, was far from secretive about the relationship. In the locker room one day he talked to Ralph Welch, who by now was seeing less of his old friends because he was spending more time with his girlfriend, about having had sex with Pam and their plans for more. He also kept Sal Parks, a friend from school, informed on occurrences.

  Billy even mentioned it to JR’s uncle once when the boy was over at the Lattimes’ place. “He was wearing the biggest smile you ever saw,” Donald Soule recalled for the Boston Herald. “He said he was smiling ‘because I’m dating an older woman.’ I said how old? And he answered, twenty-two. I said that’s not old Billy. And he said: ‘It’s old to me—old when you're fifteen.’”

  Often, he would carry Pam’s letters with him. He allowed friends like JR and Jenny Charles, who befriended Billy back in seventh grade, to read them. Jenny had borrowed Billy’s denim jacket one day and found a note from Pam to Billy. Pam had written about her jealousy of a high school girl the boy apparently kissed while returning from a Motley Crue concert. A bit later, Billy showed Jenny a couple of other letters from Pam, these quite risqué. Finally, Jenny asked Billy if he was in love with the media center director. “He said that he didn’t know,” the girl would testify, “but the sex was great.”

  Pam tried to be careful as well. For Billy’s sixteenth birthday on March 12, for example, she told him that she had considered buying him a gold-nugget bracelet. Because she was afraid that Greg would wonder where the five-hundred or so dollars went, she decided instead on a more practical, more humble, gift—a subscription to Guitar
magazine. Even then she paid for the subscription indirectly, giving Cecelia the money and having the girl pay for the subscription with her own check.

  Five days later, on Salisbury Beach, Pam, Billy, Cecelia, and Tracy Collins were in Pam’s car when another driver backed into her left front fender and sped away. While filling out the accident report, Pam omitted Billy’s name when asked to list the occupants of the car at the time of the accident. Neither Greg nor the police, should they ever take an interest, would then learn about his presence.

  Despite such attempts at keeping the affair under wraps, Pam was often foolishly incautious out on the seacoast. Billy came over to the office every day. She left his letters in her desk. They went out to lunch together. When she dropped off Billy at JR’s after school, a common occurrence, she would openly kiss him good-bye.

  And one time, outside of a Seabrook convenience store, she let Billy, who was drunk, hang on her and nibble on her neck while she chatted with his friends. Pam had bought the boy a bottle of Southern Comfort that night, while she and Cecelia had wine coolers.

  That same evening, Pam, Billy, and Cecelia had what was the affair’s equivalent of a near miss. They passed Billy’s mother on the road, but Elaine Flynn, heading the opposite direction, was preoccupied at that instant, yelling at one of Billy’s little brothers. Everybody in the CRX breathed a little easier. Their “secret” was safe.

  ◆◆◆

  Organization had always been Pamela Smart’s strong suit. Indeed, that was the key to her ability to balance four years of college packed into three, an internship and jobs, a steady boyfriend, and still come away with near-perfect grades.

  It was also the first thing she tried to teach her young charges when they started to make the orange juice video. She sat them down and made them brainstorm, bouncing around concepts, and whittling away until they had a unified, workable vision.