Final Vows

by Karen Kingsbury

  The woman drew in a deep breath and motioned for Brian to sit down. “I’d better start from the beginning.”

  According to Angelino, Mark Paulson was one of Carol’s coworkers. On September 7, 1989, Paulson met with a man named Denis Cremins who needed help putting together an advertisement for his plumbing business. In the course of their conversation, Denis asked Mark if he knew Carol Montecalvo.

  “Yeah, worked with her here at the office. Such a shame, what happened to her,” Paulson had said, looking up from the ad. “You know her?”

  “No, never met her,” Cremins had replied. “Knew her husband, Dan. Weird guy.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, one time when I was in a fight with my fiancée Dan told me how I could take care of the problem.”

  Mark had listened intently. “What’d he say?”

  “Well, Dan told me to insure her for a bunch of money, and he’d shoot her for me. After that, we’d split the insurance money.”

  Long after Denis Cremins had left that afternoon, Mark Paulson pondered their conversation. He’d heard that Carol had been killed by burglars, but even so he thought the information might be important. When he had come back from lunch that day, he pulled Laura Angelino aside and explained the story to her. She made a note of their conversation, placed it in an envelope, and put it on her desk to give the authorities. She completely forgot about it until that February day nearly five months later when Brian Arnspiger showed up in her office.

  Brian knew this was the piece of evidence he’d been waiting for. The next day he paid a visit to the district attorney’s office and this time Bernard was impressed.

  “Do we go to trial?” Brian asked when Bernard was finished looking over the new evidence.

  Bernard smiled slowly and reached across his desk to shake Brian’s hand.

  “As soon as possible.”

  Chapter 28

  Rita Nelson had managed the Oak Tree Apartments in a run-down neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles for nearly ten years. In her younger days she had been a beautiful petite brunette with blue eyes, a soft voice, and a kind smile. But now, seven years after her husband had passed away, Rita was known for neither her kindness nor her smile. She was a white-haired wiry pencil of a woman whose soft curves had long since been replaced with sharp angles and edges. At fifty-two years old, Rita was no more than five feet tall. But something in her assertive manner and the gruff tone with which she barked commands made her tenants respond in a way that deeply pleased the apartment building owners.

  In the past decade Rita had certainly seen her share of troubles at the complex. There had been drug busts, child abuse, drunken domestic fights, and occasional bursts of gunfire. Rita knew these incidents were typical of that part of town. Because of that she frequently congratulated herself on the fact that, to date, none of her tenants had died on the premises.

  It was the fourth day of February 1990 and Rita was sitting in her meticulously clean office looking at a list of tenants who had yet to pay their rent. Suzan Brown’s name was at the top of the list. Rita set the list back down on her desk and glanced out the office window toward a row of depressingly similar beige boxlike apartments.

  Suzan Brown, Rita thought to herself. Must have been two days since she’d seen the woman. Everyone in the complex knew there was something distinctly wrong with Suzan. Almost as if she had two personalities. One that stayed in a wheelchair talking incessantly about Vietnam, and another, more conniving, personality. It was that second one—capable of drug use and passing off bad checks—that concerned Rita.

  Rita glanced at her tenant records, flipping the pages to Suzan Brown’s account. The records showed that for the past two months Suzan had paid her rent on time. Rita thought over the situation. Until that week, a day had not gone by when she hadn’t been seen walking or wheeling herself about the property. Rita stood up and grabbed a ring of keys from inside her desk drawer. Ten minutes later she was standing outside Suzan Brown’s apartment. She knocked sharply several times and waited.

  “Suzan,” she barked. “Open up. It’s Rita.”

  Tenants at the Oak Tree knew that Rita sometimes paid them a personal visit if they were late with their rent. Most of them didn’t bother trying to evade her. Despite her hard attitude and rigid appearance, she was usually willing to work out a deal. Rita knew the rent deals she struck were better than losing a tenant or going through the lengthy three-month eviction process.

  Rita knocked again and waited. After thirty seconds, the diminutive woman let out a frustrated sigh and sorted through the keys on her ring until she found the one she was looking for. Working the key expertly into the hole, Rita opened the door.

  Managing apartments in an area wrought with crime and homelessness had hardened Rita so that nothing much surprised her. So she felt neither fear nor shock as she looked at the large, bloblike woman lying facedown on the living room floor. Instead she was aggravated. Suzan Brown appeared to be dead. And that would make her the first fatality at the Oak Tree Apartments since Rita had taken over as manager.

  Suddenly Rita saw the woman’s hand move. As the manager stepped closer she could hear Suzan snoring. Rita performed a quick check of the apartment and verified her suspicions. An empty bottle of sleeping pills lay near the bathroom sink next to a nearly empty glass of water. Suzan had tried to kill herself.

  After surviving her first suicide attempt, Suzan Brown had spent the past year making more plans to kill herself. But until that first week of February 1990 she hadn’t been able to carry them out. Finally she had decided to try sleeping pills once more, but as before she hadn’t taken enough to do the job. Suzan felt as if some awful force wanted to keep her alive, suffering in her constant belief that she and Ron Hardy had killed Carol.

  Rita knelt beside Suzan’s body and took her pulse. It was weak, but steady.

  “Suzan,” Rita snapped, her voice loud and bossy.

  The unconscious woman writhed slowly onto her side and began moaning. Rita sighed again, realizing that she would have to call an ambulance. There was no way to tell how many pills she’d ingested. Darn irresponsible tenants, she thought to herself.

  As Rita considered her next move, Suzan’s moaning began sounding more like slurred words.

  “Tell ’em wha’ happened,” Suzan said slowly, her words blending into each other. “Tell ’em. Gotta tell ’em.”

  Rita slapped the front and back of Suzan’s closest hand several times, trying to rouse her. Finally she gave up and moved toward the front door, intent on returning to the office and calling the paramedics.

  “Gotta tell ’em, gotta tell ’em,” Suzan repeated, her voice growing steadily louder. Rita, curious, moved back to Suzan’s side.

  “Tell them what?” Rita asked sternly.

  “Tell ’em ’bout Carol,” she said. Rita could barely understand her words. “Nobody knows about Carol.”

  Rita raised an eyebrow and frowned at the woman. It occurred to her that perhaps she would be better off calling a psychiatric facility. Rita had often held long discussions with Suzan Brown, simply trying to figure her out. But in all the months they’d known each other Suzan Brown had never mentioned anyone named Carol. Rita decided it was just as she had always thought. The woman was sick. She was a lesbian, a drug addict, and quite possibly a lunatic.

  Suzan’s body flopped back to its original position. The woman’s snoring grew louder. Shaking her head in disgust, Rita returned to her office to make the telephone call. Paramedics transported Suzan Brown to Los Angeles County Hospital, where doctors took less than an hour to determine she was in the wrong facility.

  The next morning Suzan Brown was checked into the psychiatric ward at the Jerry L. Pettis Memorial Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Bernardino County, southeast of Los Angeles. Upon regaining consciousness at the Los Angeles County Hospital, Suzan had told the doctors about her time in Vietnam. Although no one was ab
le to confirm the story, Rita Nelson must have found paperwork declaring she was indeed a veteran. That would have been enough to get her admitted to the V.A. hospital.

  The hospital was an old light-colored brick building set atop a rolling green knoll and fenced off from the wide residential streets that surrounded it. A visitors’ parking lot was sprawled out adjacent to the main wing. Most often, the lot was empty. Broken men and women, many of them forgotten, loitered about the grounds, causing most people to look away as they drove by. There was something unbearably sad and unfair about housing America’s ailing heroes in such a dreary facility.

  By mid-afternoon the effects of the sleeping pills had completely worn off and Suzan Brown suddenly found herself in her element. Late into the evening she and several other patients swapped stories about Vietnam, relating death-defying incidents and numerous accounts of hand-to-hand combat and raging ground battles.

  By then, whatever she had wanted to say about Carol was long since forgotten.

  Chapter 29

  His anxiety was growing. More and more, Dan was certain the police were following him. He could swear they were listening to his telephone conversations. With each passing day, they seemed to be closing in on him, surrounding him with an invisible net. The thought scared him to death, causing his heart to beat erratically, and his hands to feel cold and clammy.

  Finally, on March 13, 1990, two months after the charges were dropped, Dan Montecalvo knew that he had reached his limit. Two months of increasing tension had passed since he’d been released from jail on bail after his January arrest. Charges had subsequently been dropped, but Dan remained paranoid that police were trying to frame him. He was having difficulty breathing, difficulty concentrating. He seemed to have lost weight. No longer was he only concerned with being arrested. He told Maree he was worried the police might be trying to kill him.

  “Why would they do a thing like that, Dan?”

  “They’re trying to frame me, Maree!” Dan said urgently. “You think they want any witnesses to something like that?”

  Maree didn’t understand why police would frame Dan for Carol’s murder, but they did seem to be focusing their investigation on him. She didn’t think they would ever find enough evidence to arrest Dan for something he hadn’t done. Still, she remembered one incident in January when a telephone repair man had visited their shared duplex.

  “Just here to check the wires, ma’am,” he had told her with a nod and a broad smile.

  After an hour he had left without saying a word. Later, Dan had been furious.

  “Can’t they ever leave me alone?” He shouted the words and slammed his fist on Maree’s kitchen counter. “Where did they work?”

  Maree showed him, and after fifteen minutes of searching the telephone wires underneath the house, Dan appeared to have found what he was looking for.

  “It’s a bug, a bugging device. This isn’t the first time, Maree. They’ve been tapping my lines ever since Carol died.” He paused and ran a hand through his black hair. “What are they trying to find?”

  Maree had stood frozen in place, staring at the tiny device, not knowing that it would be illegal to set such a trap without approval from a judge. No such approval was ever granted in the case against Dan Montecalvo and police adamantly denied ever listening to Dan’s phone conversations or planting a bug in his home. In addition, no evidence was ever introduced that came from Dan’s phone conversations.

  But Maree had always taken Dan at his word. Now, looking at what appeared to be a bugging device, she could finally see for herself why Dan had become so paranoid.

  “Dan, we’re both in this now. I’ll be here for you, whatever happens,” she had assured him.

  Maree remembered the incident now, with Dan glancing from the front door to the back as if at any moment he expected police to burst into the house.

  “Calm down,” Maree said quietly, reaching across the table. “What will be, will be. Worrying about it won’t change anything.”

  For a moment, she thought she understood why Carol had fallen in love with Dan. He was intelligent and kind, gentle and soft-spoken. A perfect gentleman who obviously had nothing to hide or he wouldn’t still be living in Burbank. Years had passed since she had thought of herself as desirable. But even in the context of their purely platonic friendship, Dan made Maree feel special. He was her constant friend and companion, he got along very well with her teenage sons and tried his best to take care of them all. He worried about them, advising them to lock their doors at night.

  “If burglars could destroy my life, they could destroy yours, too, Maree,” he would tell her. “Please be careful.”

  Many times he would surprise them all with a pizza or a rented movie on videotape. Maree knew she had begun to depend on Dan’s financial contributions and his presence around her home. She wondered what would happen if police ever did arrest him.

  Now, with Dan nervously drumming his fingers on her kitchen table, she closed her eyes and began to pray. Immediately, she felt a wave of peace wash over her. Everything would be all right. After all, Dan was an innocent Christian man.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Dan’s words broke the peaceful reverie of Maree’s prayer. She opened her eyes and saw that Dan had begun moving toward the front door.

  “Where to?” Dan’s behavior was making Maree nervous.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said over his shoulder. Maree noticed he was looking impatiently out the front window. He turned suddenly and stared at her. “I just have to get out for a few hours.”

  Detective Brian Arnspiger and Officer Rick Medlin were waiting on the west side of Acresite Avenue. Only a sliver of moon shone in the sky and darkness filled the parked squad car, making it difficult for the policemen inside to see the Flores home. They had been waiting there since 8:30 P.M.

  Brian had decided their best plan was to wait until Dan left the house. If they could pull him over while he was driving, they would have the upper hand. If they approached the house, Dan might try to escape.

  Now, as he watched for Dan to leave, Brian could hardly contain his excitement. He had obtained a warrant for Dan’s arrest the day before, hours after visiting the district attorney’s office. March 13, 1990, would be Dan Montecalvo’s last day as a free man. Brian smiled in the dark and for the hundredth time since he’d taken on the investigation he seemed to sense Carol’s presence. Almost as if she had been encouraging him to put her killer behind bars.

  “You see that?” Medlin’s voice was suddenly alert. Quickly, Brian focused his attention on the Flores home. Two silhouettes emerged from the pitch-black shadows. The detectives watched as the figures climbed into the car parked in the Flores driveway. The car lurched into motion just as its lights came on.

  “That’s our cue,” Brian said.

  “Here goes.” Medlin started the engine and took off in the same direction. Instantly Brian flipped on the lights and siren. Medlin caught up with Maree’s yellow hatchback in less than ten seconds. Maree appeared to be driving.

  Another ten seconds passed and Maree still had not pulled over despite the glaring lights.

  “Probably can’t see us,” Brian said sarcastically.

  “Right.” Medlin focused his attention on the car in front of him, refusing to allow a gap between them.

  For nearly an entire city block the chase continued.

  Inside Maree’s car, Dan had been the first to see the officers behind them.

  “Pull over, Maree,” Dan ordered.

  Until Dan had spoken up, Maree had been completely unaware of the police car behind them. Now, afraid something awful was about to happen, Maree pulled the car over and turned off the engine. Silently she reached across the space between the two front seats, taking Dan’s hand in hers and squeezing it gently.

  “Trust God,” she whispered.

  Then they waited.

  Medlin’s job was to take care of Maree. He placed his hand
on his revolver and approached the driver’s door. At the same time Brian pulled his gun and scurried around to the passenger door.

  “Ma’am, you need to get out of the car.” Medlin’s voice was stern and Maree got out quickly. He could see the fear on her face and wondered why she had been harboring a cold-blooded killer these past months. Medlin ushered Maree to the curb and placed handcuffs on her wrists. The woman had been helping Dan for several months and the officers believed it was possible she would do something dangerous to protect him. They would take no chances.

  Just then, two additional police cars arrived at the scene. Their headlights lit up her car and Maree suddenly had a clear view of Dan’s face. Something had changed. He no longer looked frightened. He looked like he had given up.

  That was the instant Maree Flores’s heart broke for Dan Montecalvo and she knew without a doubt that she was in love with him.

  Two officers joined Brian; one pointed a rifle at Dan.

  “It’s all over, Danny boy,” Brian said, grabbing Dan’s arm and assisting him to his feet from the passenger seat. “You’re under arrest.”

  Brian wrenched Dan’s arms behind his back and clicked the handcuffs shut. It was the best sound he’d heard in a long time.

  For a moment, a flicker of indignation flashed in Dan’s eyes. “For what?” he snapped.

  Brian shook his head in disgust. He had never worked so hard to capture one man. And now that the investigation was finally over, Dan still refused to acknowledge the truth.

  “This might surprise you, Dan, so I’ll say it slowly,” Brian said. “You’re under arrest for the murder of your wife, Carol.”

  Dan hung his head and released a slow, pent-up sigh. He began to nod his head in understanding. When he looked up, Brian could see that the fight had gone. What Dan said next confirmed it.

  “I knew you guys would get me one day.”

  They were words that gave Brian a deep sense of satisfaction.