Final Vows

by Karen Kingsbury

  Suzan wheeled herself into her living room and slumped forward, falling from the chair onto the floor. The silence no longer mattered.

  Chapter 17

  On the surface Annette Wilder’s relationship with Dan changed very little after her meeting with the Burbank Police Department. Throughout the summer of 1989 she and Dan continued speaking and seeing each other regularly for lunch at Hamburger Hamlet. If Dan had any concerns about Annette’s July 22 visit with the police, they dissipated quickly when he saw that her opinion of him was unchanged.

  But had Dan known the truth—that Annette had been terrified of him ever since meeting with the police—he would have felt angry and betrayed. The police had needed relatively little time to convince Annette that Dan was indeed guilty of killing his wife. Several officers had gathered in an interview room at the station that afternoon armed with information that Annette had never known about Dan. They had told her about Dan’s excessive gambling debts and Carol’s numerous life insurance policies. And they told her about Dan’s past, the time he had spent in a high security prison for robbing banks. Annette knew that Dan had been in prison, but she had never known the extent of his past crimes.

  To anchor their statements, the police had pulled out diagrams and flow charts and photographs of guns that Dan had been seen carrying prior to Carol’s murder. Annette was left speechless. She was also frightened. Even Carol couldn’t have changed a man with Dan’s background. If she herself had been fooled about him, wasn’t it possible he had been able to do the same to Carol? Annette was still absorbing the shock when Sergeant Kight put away his charts and diagrams.

  “Annette, you’re in the position to make a big difference in this case,” he said.

  Annette looked startled. She had come to hear bad news about her friend, Dan, but she had never imagined that the police might be interested in her help. “What do you mean? I don’t know anything.”

  “No, but you could if you wanted to,” Kight said softly. “Remember, right now you’re the best friend he has.”

  “That’s right, but how could I help the investigation?”

  Kight spent the next thirty minutes telling her.

  In the days after that meeting, whenever the conversation between Dan and Annette turned to Carol’s murder, Annette asked a number of questions she had never asked before.

  “How long have you owned your guns, Dan?” she asked one afternoon over lunch. The clamor inside the restaurant seemed to fade noticeably as she watched him, waiting for his answer.

  Dan’s face took on a puzzled look and a light film of perspiration broke out on his forehead. “Not long. Picked ’em up a few months after she died. For protection.”

  Annette nodded, then laughed nervously. “I know that, silly. What about before? Ever have any guns before Carol was killed?”

  “What’s the difference?” Dan sounded abrupt and annoyed. All traces of his gentlemanly behavior were suddenly gone. The man before her was now angry, irritable, and defensive. “Sure,” he snapped. “I had guns. But there were no guns in the house that night. Believe me, if I’d had any guns in the house those cops woulda found ’em.”

  “But, Dan,” she asked softly. “Isn’t it against the law to carry hidden guns?”

  Dan brushed away a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead. “Of course it is.” He was getting angrier. “But the law is after me and I need to protect myself. Don’t you see, Annette? They’re trying to frame me!”

  Similar conversations continued over many a lunch during the next few weeks. After each one, Annette would telephone the police with a report. She did not enjoy the task, but she felt it was the least she could do for Carol. It occurred to Annette that her own life might be in jeopardy now that she was acting as a police informant.

  One afternoon late that summer Dan was driving Annette home from lunch when he stopped, illegally parking his car in front of a gun shop. Lately he had been acting more and more like a paranoid gangster. Annette almost never saw the gentleman Dan had first shown himself to be.

  “Wait here,” he said curtly, opening his car door and getting out. “I’ll be right back.”

  Annette waited nervously in the car, her mind imagining an assortment of deadly reasons why Dan would need to visit a gun shop while she was in the car. The minutes slipped by; Annette too fearful to leave the car. He’s buying another gun. He’ll take me to some remote place and kill me because I finked on him, she thought.

  By the time Dan came out of the store Annette was convinced her life was in danger. But Dan only smiled at her and tossed her a paper bag.

  “Hold this, will you?” Inside were more than a dozen boxes of ammunition.

  That night after she had reported the incident to Burbank police, Annette called Shirley Brannon, one of Carol’s longtime church friends. Although Annette did not attend Overcomers’ Faith Center Church, Carol had introduced her to Shirley years earlier and they had become friends.

  “Shirley, you’re not going to believe this,” she said, desperate to confide in someone.

  “What is it, what happened?” Shirley was a middle-aged woman who led a quiet, conservative life in which, prior to Carol’s murder, the only bad things that happened did so to people whose stories appeared in her daily newspaper.

  “Well, I’ve been seeing a lot of Dan lately,” she said, forcing herself to sound calm. “Today I was with him and he stopped and bought bullets.”

  Like others at church, Shirley knew Dan was being fingered as Carol’s killer and she could not for the life of her understand why. Dan had been a wonderful husband to Carol. Whenever he hadn’t been working, he had accompanied Carol to church. Shirley had seen for herself how the man doted on his wife, held her hand, and treated her like a queen. He was a soft-spoken gentleman who had been rescued from a wayward life by the love of a sweet, compassionate woman. It seemed clear to Shirley that Dan could never do enough to repay Carol for believing in him. He cherished his wife in a way few men ever do.

  After Carol’s murder, Shirley had kept in touch with Dan and he had confided in her that he had begun carrying guns to protect himself from the police. She didn’t like the idea because she worried that he might accidentally shoot himself while he was cleaning or reloading the guns. But she wasn’t surprised that he felt he needed protection; indeed, the police did seem to be harassing him. One officer had even tried to convince her that Dan was guilty.

  “Listen, mister,” Shirley had told him in her no-nonsense fashion. “I watched Dan and Carol together with my own eyes. That man loved his wife. Now, I don’t want to hear another word about this, ‘Dan’s guilty’ and ‘Dan’s a bad guy’ and ‘Dan has a bad past.’ Doesn’t matter. Dan loved Carol.”

  If Carol had been unhappy with Dan, or feared him in any way, Shirley thought that certainly she would have confided in her church friends. But Carol had never said a bad word about him. Now Annette was worried about Dan buying bullets. Shirley released a deep sigh. When would this finger-pointing end?

  “He has guns, Annette,” Shirley said calmly. “Guns need bullets.”

  Annette paused impatiently. Shirley didn’t understand because she had not seen the police charts and diagrams.

  “Don’t you see, Shirley?” Annette’s voice took on a hushed tone of conspiracy. “There’s something odd about him having guns and all.”

  “Nothing odd about it,” Shirley said. “The man fears for his life. You’d carry a gun, too, if burglars had killed your spouse and they were still roaming the streets.”

  “Dan’s not afraid of them, he’s afraid of police,” Annette said firmly.

  “Either way. He’s afraid and he’s protecting himself. So?”

  “So? So, maybe he’s had guns all along, maybe he had guns when Carol was killed.”

  Shirley could feel a wave of anger rising in her. “Annette, don’t go turning against the poor man now.”

  “You’d turn against him, too, i
f you knew the truth.” The words were out before Annette could stop herself. There was a moment of awkward silence before Shirley spoke again.

  “What truth?”

  Annette sighed, sorry she had broken the vow of secrecy she’d promised the police. “I met with the police, Shirley. They showed me charts and diagrams and pictures and told me things about Dan I never knew before.”

  “It’s a bunch of lies,” Shirley said, quick to come to Dan’s rescue. “They have no leads so they’re blaming Dan.”

  “That’s not true. Dan used to be a bank robber; he has gambling debts. He had lots of life insurance on her—”

  “Stop!” Shirley shouted. “If you feel this way about Dan, then why were you still with him this afternoon?”

  “For Carol,” she said softly. “I’m working with the police, Shirley. When Dan tells me something, I tell them.”

  “That’s terrible!” Annette had completely betrayed Dan. “He trusts you! Do you know what this’ll do to him?”

  “Look, he killed Carol. So don’t go telling me about betrayal,” Annette said. “Anyway, he won’t find out until after they arrest him and by then it won’t matter.”

  “He’s going to find out before that.” Shirley spat out the words. “Because I’m going to tell him.”

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  It was a muggy night and Annette could hear the crickets chirping loudly outside her window. Suddenly she darted across her living room and bolted the window shut. Dan was about to find out that she’d been informing for the police. I’m a dead woman, Annette thought to herself.

  Later that night, Shirley Brannon called Dan and told him about Annette and her arrangement with the Burbank police.

  “She isn’t your friend, Dan,” Shirley said gendy. “I wanted you to know.”

  Dan sounded emotional. “Why, Shirley?” He pounded his fist on his bedside table. They were trying to turn his friends into enemies. “Why would she do that to me?”

  Shirley had no answers.

  In the following days, Annette lived in terror that Dan would retaliate. She constantly looked over her shoulder and except for work she rarely left her condominium. Dan, meanwhile, did not contact Annette. He never threatened her, visited her, or spoke to her.

  Instead, he slid into what Shirley Brannon decided was a deep and sad depression. Whereas he had been distressed and grief stricken after Carol’s murder, now he was despondent. Finally, Dan contacted Pastor Wil Strong.

  “What do I do now?” he asked.

  “You need to turn to God, Dan.” The pastor was calm and quietly assuring. “The Bible tells us to expect persecution. God knows the truth. That’s what matters.”

  From inside the kitchen of his apartment, Dan nodded silently. “You’re right. Thanks, Pastor.”

  “You aren’t alone in this thing, Dan,” Strong said.

  For the next three months—when he wasn’t dumping money in Las Vegas—Dan spent much of his time with his church friends. By mid-November, he had befriended a woman named Maree Flores, a plump but pretty Hispanic woman with chestnut hair, bubbly brown eyes, and a contagious smile. Originally Maree had met Carol at the Women’s Aglow meetings and for years had heard her speak lovingly about Dan.

  The resemblance between Carol and Maree was uncanny. The two women shared the same hair and eye color, and they dressed and spoke alike. But most of all people noticed a similarity in their personalities. Maree’s life had never been easy and, like Carol, she felt challenged at the prospect of helping people caught up in trouble—people like Dan.

  Maree was born on August 13, 1948, in Bakersfield, California, a farming town located on Interstate-5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Although Bakersfield is still considered a small town, it is a metropolis compared to the way it was in the late 1940s. Maree grew up the second oldest of five daughters in a Hispanic Catholic family where—as far back as she can remember—she was something of a surrogate mother for her younger siblings. This was especially true when Maree became a teenager and her parents suffered a hostile, heartbreaking divorce. Not long afterward Maree’s older sister, Mona, was diagnosed with bone cancer. After three months of suffering, Mona had one final request—to visit Disneyland. With money from his own savings account, a local Catholic priest took Mona, Maree, and their sisters to Disneyland. Mona died weeks later, her dream fulfilled.

  Overwhelmed with sorrow over the loss of her husband and oldest daughter, Maree’s mother began drinking and was often incapable of running the house and raising her daughters. So Maree took charge. She handled their father’s alimony money, making sure her sisters were properly fed and clothed and that the cleaning got done. The experience ignited Maree’s desire to help those in need—a trait that Maree knew could sometimes become compulsive.

  The day after she graduated from high school in 1966, Maree signed up with the United Farm Workers of America and began volunteering fifteen hours a day for Cesar Chavez’s radical organization. Maree would commute from Bakersfield to Chavez’s headquarters in nearby Delano. Like Chavez, Maree firmly believed the field workers of the San Joaquin Valley deserved more than forty cents an hour for their backbreaking labor. Most of the workers were Hispanic, and Maree felt an especially strong desire to help the cause. Chavez provided his volunteers with five dollars a week, community meals, and, in some cases, shared housing. But with Maree living at home unable to provide for her mother and sisters, Chavez would quietly slip her an additional ninety dollars each month. Maree remembers it as the most exciting time of her life. She could think of nothing better than devoting herself to fighting the causes of downtrodden people.

  During her five-year stint with the association, she met and married a boy who was so committed to the movement that he became Chavez’s favorite volunteer. His name was Juan Flores. They shared a happy, busy life and on Valentine’s Day in 1970 she gave birth to their first son, Juan Marcos. They continued their volunteer work for two years, but when Maree became pregnant again her husband decided they needed to get paying jobs. By January 1972 Juan was doing community service work for a Los Angeles County organization and Maree had begun working as a receptionist. The organizational and business skills they had attained working for Cesar Chavez paid off in the private sector and that year they bought a car and rented a large apartment in a nice section of East Los Angeles.

  But their blissful lives were marred with marital trouble soon after the birth of their second son, Lino Rene. Juan began experiencing trouble and soon afterward the marriage followed suit. In 1979 the couple divorced.

  By then Maree had a job as a bilingual patient advocate with Kaiser Permanente Medical Facility in Los Angeles. In many ways she was doing the same work she had done for Cesar Chavez and the farm workers. Only now she was fighting on behalf of frustrated, sick patients who were in danger of being lost in the medical system.

  For years Maree remained a single mother, working at Kaiser and raising her boys alone. Then in November 1987 at a ceremony attended by Dan and Carol Montecalvo and other friends, she married Jim, her longtime friend and coworker at Kaiser. By then, Maree had been a Bible-believing nondenominational Christian for seven years. Only by following Jesus Christ did she feel she found the inner strength to continue fighting for the people who needed her.

  As a child Jim had suffered from polio and the illness left him without the use of his legs. However, he used crutches and was completely self-supporting. Maree found him both intelligent and attractive. What she didn’t know when she married him was that Jim was a closet drinker. Early in their marriage he would disappear for one or two days and come back with soiled clothing and alcohol on his breath. In a relatively short time Jim began to berate her sons. Maree knew that if she ever had to choose between fighting on behalf of a man she loved and fighting on behalf of her sons, her sons would win every time. She was all they had and she loved them dearly. Months after their first anniversary, the couple b
roke up.

  After the divorce Maree welcomed her ailing mother and youngest sister to share the duplex she now owned in Los Angeles just outside Burbank’s city limits. Maree’s mother paid rent and Maree devoted herself to caring for the woman.

  But in March 1989 her mother died, and soon afterward her sister moved out. For the first time ever, the tables were turned and Maree was in need of help. She had a $970 monthly mortgage payment and no one to share it with.

  On August 24, 1989, Maree received a call from Dan Montecalvo. Dan had heard through mutual friends that Maree and her husband had split up, and during his conversation with her, he spoke exclusively about Maree and her recent trials. From the beginning, Maree trusted Dan unquestioningly. She knew from Carol that Dan had been a devoted husband, and she believed Carol was telling the truth. After all, Maree knew what it was to be in an unhappy marriage, and Carol, with her outgoing, confident manner, did not seem to be a woman suffering from an unhappy marriage.

  While rumors had been taking root about Dan’s involvement in Carol’s murder, Maree, who attended a different church, had been too caught up in her own troubled life to hear any of them. For that reason, she had none of the doubts that Annette was by then harboring.

  She and Dan agreed to meet for lunch and, in the same way he had charmed Carol and Annette and other women before them, Dan spoke in a soft, unassuming manner that quickly endeared him to her. When Maree learned that police were pursuing him as their lead suspect, she was shocked. She could not for a moment even consider that their accusations might be true. By November Maree and Dan had worked out an arrangement whereby Dan would rent the upstairs of her duplex for six hundred dollars a month. He also volunteered to make repairs on the house that Maree had been unable to afford.

  In Maree, Dan found a friend who filled the void left by Annette Wilder. But there was a difference. From the beginning she could not bring herself to question him—even for the sake of discussion—as Annette had done.