The two got in the unlocked silver CRX, with Billy on the driver’s side. Mylo drove off.
As Pam had promised, the key was in the ignition. He turned it to start the car. Suddenly, Van Halen’s “Black & Blue,” the tune Pam had played the first night they had sex, poured forth from the stereo. It was a special tape Billy had made for her. Now Pam had put it in the stereo to automatically play when the car started.
Billy pulled out of the lot and drove to his house, where they picked up a red and black duffel bag loaded with dark clothing—sweat clothes mostly—and the knife. Fowler had also provided some old sneakers, to be disposed of later, just in case the police could establish shoe prints.
Fowler took over behind the wheel, Flynn testified. They stopped at a pharmacy, Freedom Drug, in Seabrook to get some gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. Billy asked the price for the latex surgical gloves. They were ten cents a pair, so Billy said he would take six. He told the guy it was for a magic trick.
Now nothing was left to do but go to 4E, Misty Morning Drive.
They got on Route 101 toward Derry. Billy generally knew the way. He had been to the condo with Pam and what’s more, she had put the directions down on paper and told him to commit them to memory.
But now, as every mile passed beneath the wheels, Billy started to realize it was happening. Raymond seemed serious as hell. He might very well carry this thing out.
They were almost to Derry, straight ahead, when something in Billy’s brain cried Abort. He told Ramey to hang a right.
Fowler turned. They drove…and drove.
“I don’t see any signs that say Derry,” Fowler said after a while.
“Yeah, I don’t recognize anything,” said Billy. “I guess we’re lost.”
“All right. Let’s ask at this gas station.”
Ramey got directions. This was not the way, all right. They were in the town of Raymond. Fowler turned the car around and got back on track.
It was edging toward ten o’clock when they finally reached their destination. The plan called for them to park back at the plaza, but Billy suggested they drive through the condo complex first—in Pam’s car no less—to make sure all was clear. It was not. The silver Toyota pickup was there.
“Greg’s home,” said Billy, breathing easier. “We’re gonna have to leave. We can’t make it look like a burglary if the guy’s here.”
“Let’s make sure,” Fowler said.
They parked behind some trees in a lot across from the condo complex. Then they crossed the street and walked through the parking lot to Pam’s building. In the darkness, they stepped on the lawn and went around back.
Upstairs the bedroom light was on. Their target was definitely home.
So they drove over to Hood Commons, where Billy got some change and from a pay phone called Pam’s office in Hampton.
“We got here and we couldn’t do it,” Billy told her. “He was home.”
The school board meeting had long since been over. Not wanting anyone to know she had given Billy and Raymond her car, Pam had gone into her office and was sitting in the dark, waiting for them to get back. She had heard someone starting to come in, she said, so she had to lie on the floor behind a bookshelf. Whoever it was, they had opened her desk. She told Billy that she wondered if anyone had come across his love letters.
“Hurry up and get back here,” she finally said.
They did. Raymond wheeled into the Winnacunnet High School parking lot and Pam climbed in, sitting back toward the rear of the hatchback two seater. She was curious about what had happened.
“You got lost?” she said to Billy. “You’ve been there before. You know the way.”
“I don’t know,” answered Billy. “We just got lost.”
They drove for a bit.
“Let me see the gun,” said Pam. Billy had told her earlier that they were searching for the firearm that belonged to Ramey’s dad.
“Well, we couldn’t find one,” said Billy.
“Then how were you going to do it?”
Fowler displayed the sharp blade.
“You were going to use a knife?” she said incredulously. “Do you know how much of a mess that would make?”
“It would be quieter,” said Raymond.
“I just can’t believe it,” said Pam.
Raymond was dropped off. Pam took the wheel and headed towards Billy’s house. Billy had been relieved. She did not seem too upset that the plot had failed.
When they were alone, however, she started in on him.
“You knew the way!” she said. “You got lost on purpose. If you loved me, you would do this because you would want to be with me.”
“Pam, I do love you.” The last thing Billy wanted was to see her angry again. He was afraid that this time the romance would be over for good.
“If you’re never gonna do this, I want to know right now,” she said. “That way we can end this right now because I don’t want to go on like this.”
“No, I’ll do it.”
“Well, there’s another meeting on May first. You can do it then. But you have to do it then. It’s the last meeting of the year. If you don’t do it then, that’s it.”
Pam pulled down along the ocean onto the street that leads to Billy’s house and stopped. She did not want Billy’s mother seeing them together so late at night. Billy would have to walk the rest of the way.
In Pam’s office the next morning, Smart was angry as she talked with Cecelia, recounting the events of the night before. Cecelia had known that Billy and Fowler had planned to use the CRX, but now Pam was telling her about the knife and how Greg had gotten home before they even arrived.
Smart said she could hardly believe the boys’ stupidity.
By spring, Gregory and Pamela Smart’s marriage was in trouble and they both knew it.
On the surface it generally appeared to be fine. Greg and Pam spoke by phone in the early afternoon almost every day. They occasionally had dinner with friends. In May they were planning to go to Florida for a vacation-conference that Greg had earned for being one of Metropolitan Life’s top salesmen in the region. And Greg had even told a friend or two that he was planning a one-year anniversary party.
Increasingly, though, Greg was making comments to friends and even to some people to whom he was not very close that he and Pam were having problems. Toward the end of March, during a MetLife office party, Greg had been drinking and told some of the women staffers that the marriage had not been living up to expectations.
On an impromptu trip to Atlantic City in February, he told Yvon Pellerin, who Greg had known since they worked together as boys at an area supermarket, that he wanted to buy a house and start having children, but that Pam was not interested. Greg mentioned to his old friend that it was possible that the marriage was falling apart, but that he might still buy a house. He wondered if Pellerin would consider moving in with him.
Pellerin worked second shift for a company that built computer circuit boards. He and Greg both had midday free and that spring would meet for long lunches two or three times a week at the 99 restaurant in Manchester. They also usually got together at least once on the weekends.
Greg told Pellerin that his marriage was taking a nosedive. Pam seemed more distant, Greg said. When he called Pam at work, she often was not around. He spoke of Pam coming home late with no real explanation.
One time that March, Pam had left a message on the answering machine that she had to work late. Pellerin got off work early that day and had dropped by hoping to go out drinking with Greg.
Instead, Pellerin said, they drove to SAU 21 in Hampton. Greg wanted to see what exactly his wife was doing. Plus, he had a few things he wanted to say about her behavior. Lately Pam had failed on several occasions to be where she said she would be. Sometimes she wouldn’t even return his messages.
When they pulled in the parking lot, however, Pam’s car was not around. They waited about twenty minutes before she showed up, by herself
.
“Where the hell have you been?” said Greg. “I came over to see you and you weren’t here. I wanted to tell you what was going on for tonight and you’re not even here. This is real nice.”
“What are you even doing here?” Pam fired back. “Checking up on me? You don’t have to know what I do. You do what you want to do.”
Pellerin said that Pam launched an offensive immediately, deflating Greg before he could say all that he planned. “She turned everything around on him,” said Yvon.
By April, Greg found himself coming home to an empty house and eating dinner alone more often. And one night, possibly around the time of Fowler’s and Flynn’s attempt on his life, Pellerin said Greg told him he had felt a god-awful chill of danger as he walked into the empty condominium. Something inexplicable was just wrong. He turned around and left. He went to his parents’ place instead.
Out on the seacoast, meanwhile, complete strangers to the young man were observing his marriage’s demise. Cecelia Pierce one day came into the media center while Pam’s secretary was on break. Crit walked into the office to find Pam on the telephone arguing with someone.
“I said, ‘Greg?’ and she shook her head yes,” Cecelia would later testify. “She was saying something about getting a divorce and then they started fighting over who was gonna take the dog and the furniture and everything. And then she said, ‘Fine, take the dog’ and hung up.”
Cecelia saw this as a good sign. After all, talk of divorce sounded better than talk of murder. But moments later, Pam called Greg back to apologize. She told Cecelia that in her mind divorce still had its problems. She didn’t want Greg telling his parents that the marriage was in trouble.
Billy Flynn obviously knew a lot about the marriage’s problems as well. Pam, he claims, showed him a bruise she said Greg inflicted.
He too remembers hearing Pam and Greg arguing on the telephone one time. This conversation, he said, was also overheard by JR Lattime and Cecelia. (Pierce has no memory of it.) They were at the media center when Greg called and Pam put him on the speaker phone.
Greg started right in, Billy would say, demanding to know where Pam had been when he called fifteen minutes earlier. “What do you care?” Pam replied.
“They just got into a big argument, yelling at each other back and forth,” Billy testified. “And he said something like, ‘Well, what do you want? A divorce?’ And she said, ‘Maybe I do,’ or something like that and hung up.”
“But then he called back I believe and she didn’t put it on the intercom this time. And, I don’t know, I think they worked things out.”
After Pam hung up, however, she looked up at the kids and said, “Now you see why I have to have this done.”
There was no mistaking what “this’ meant.
Still, neither Greg’s parents nor many of his closest friends believed the marriage was falling apart, sometimes even when Greg said as much.
In mid-April, on Easter weekend, a group of Greg’s family and friends took in the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. Greg always loved the excitement of the casino, particularly playing baccarat, which seemed always to attract the highest rollers. He liked to watch the big shots lose tens of thousands of dollars in a single game, then plunk down tens of thousands more. Even when he was losing, Greg enjoyed himself.
But as he and Brian Washburn, a pudgy twenty-one year old with shoulder-length hair and a gentle, puppy-dog disposition, sat in the pits one morning, drinking icy beers, and playing baccarat, Washburn thought his friend was lacking his usual energy.
“What’s wrong with you, man?” Washburn finally asked.
“Nothing,” said Greg.
They sipped their beers, and played a little more.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Greg mumbled.
“Come on. What’s going on? What’s wrong?” asked Washburn.
“Everything’s all screwed up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Between me and Pam. I wasn’t gonna tell you this because I didn’t want anybody to know, but I screwed this other chick.”
“What? When?”
“It was a while ago, but all me and Pam do is fight about it. Every time we fucking argue that’s all she brings up.”
“You fucking told her? What are you? An idiot? What do you think she’s gonna bring up when you guys argue? If she had told you about something like that, you would bring it up, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Bullshit, I’d bring it up in a heartbeat.”
“Well, I don’t have to worry about it much longer, I don’t think, because she has, too.”
Washburn understood that to mean that Pam also had an affair. He said he did not press his friend about it. They knew many of each other’s secrets. He figured Greg would say more when he was ready.
A few minutes later, though, Pam and Tracy Collins came down, happy and laughing. They announced that they were off to go shopping. Washburn watched Pam and Greg interact and figured the affair was just a bad bump in their marriage. It sure didn’t seem to be tearing them apart.
Indeed, Greg was not shouting it to the skies, but few people who are confronting the failure of their marriage do. Instead, Smart was turning back to his old friends for support, a number of whom he had largely separated from because of Pam.
One person he sought to renew ties with was Giraffe, his friend Terri Schnell, who had introduced him to his wife. By April, he was calling her more often and dropping by to visit. “Hey,” Terri blurted out at one point, realizing that it was like old times. “You’re Greggles again.”
One Wednesday night, to Terri’s surprise, Greg and Steve Payment even showed up at Decadence, a Manchester nightclub, to have a drink or two and to dance with Terri and a girlfriend.
“Everything sucks,” he said at one point, an unmistakable reference to his marriage. “I’ll be divorced by the summer.”
Terri said she took it as a joke and told him to cut it out. Greg had made similar remarks previously and Terri figured it was just Greg’s way of complaining. “I think he was uncomfortable talking about it,” said Schnell. “He would mention it and then would get on to another, totally different, topic.”
Before that Wednesday night was out Greg would say that after he got divorced, he and Terri would go out on a date some time, a remark he had also made before.
“I love that, you know that?” he told her.
“I love you, too,” Schnell said, a bit miffed by the sudden sentimentality from a guy who usually was not sentimental.
The last week in April, Greg Smart went out of town to Warwick, Rhode Island, for a work-related training program, the Metropolitan Career Success School. He returned on Friday. That night he attended a party with about fifteen other people at Terri Schnell’s, where he played quarters, a drinking game, and smoked some pot with a group of other people. Pam did not attend.
The next day, Greg and a friend went to Schnell’s again to shoot some baskets and to chat with her.
Then on Sunday morning, he called Giraffe once more. He wanted to have breakfast at her house, something they both used to enjoy immensely but which Greg had stopped once he got married. Schnell, though, was on her way out and said it would have to be another time.
They talked a little and then said good-bye. It was the last time Terri ever spoke to her friend.
◆◆◆
No one, not even the participants themselves, may ever know for certain why JR Lattime and Pete Randall decided to assist Pamela Smart and Billy Flynn in the killing of Greg Smart. From the first time the boys heard of it, all indications are that they thought the whole idea was idiotic, that Billy was being manipulated, and they wanted no part of it.
Shortly after Fowler and Flynn failed, though, the boys agreed to help. Randall would say that he got involved because he was worried that his friend Flynn was going to get caught by the police if someone did not help him. In defiance of all logic, Randall said he then decide
d that he himself would take part, presumably, to make sure that Greg was murdered the right way.
More likely, it was a number of factors that converged. Indeed, Pete and JR had a loyalty to Billy Flynn; he was their friend, no small word among this group of boys. After all, they had few other people whom they trusted and who were always there for them. In addition, JR and Pete could not have known the high level of pressure and manipulation that Pam was employing on Billy.
Equally important, Raymond Fowler’s involvement may well have legitimized the entire matter, making it now seem like not such a bad idea after all.
What’s more, maybe Pete Randall, as he had said, truly was intrigued by what it would be like to kill someone.
And, if not, who is to say that a few rough-edged teenage boys would not find some titillation in playing out the stages of a murder plot—even if in their heart of hearts, as JR would say, they never actually expected someone to die.
Even Billy did not understand why his friends agreed, but Pete and JR finally told him, “All right.” They would help, but they wanted to be paid. That could be arranged, Billy said, and assured them that Pam would give them one thousand dollars each. Pam had talked about there being at least one insurance policy on her husband’s life, through Greg’s job, so the boy knew that Pam was about to come into some big money. (In the weeks that followed it would be learned that Greg had carried $140,000 in coverage.)
Now, Billy went to Pam and said his buddies would help.
“But my friends aren’t just gonna do this for something to do on a Tuesday night,” said Billy.
“I told you they could have everything in the house,” said Pam.
“Well, they’re probably gonna want some money.”
“How much?”
“A thousand each.”
Pam balked. All he needed was for the police to start scouring her banking records after the murder and to see an unexplained withdrawal of a couple grand. In what one newspaper reporter would later dub “murder on the installment plan,” Pam said she would give them five hundred dollars each, in payments of fifty dollars a week, so that the cash flow from her bank account would not attract attention.
Teach Me to Kill Page 15
