Poisoned Dreams

by A. W. Gray

“You haven’t seen her since she left to go to college?”

  Her smile saddens in shadowy dimness. “Not once. That last night, she said we’d have lunch and things. I guess she lost my phone number.”

  The interviewer tries to quicken the pace; he’s learned from experience that Crystal’s time is limited. In another fifteen minutes she’ll have to dance again. The dancers make the circuit, beginning on center stage, then moving in sequence to the various platforms around the room as other girls take their places in the center. The circuit takes about an hour and a half. If the interviewer doesn’t finish with Crystal during her break, he’s stuck in the club until past midnight. “Let’s talk some about Dillard now,” he says.

  She hesitates. “I guess since it’s all over …”

  “It’s over. The case is on appeal, but …”

  “It’s over, then,” she says.

  “Right. You told me before, that was two nights ago, you told me he was different.”

  She nods, more direct now, having made the commitment to talk about it. “A lot of these guys, older, they’re in here because they like to play around and maybe don’t have the looks or whatever to get women other places. That’s what we’re here for.”

  “That wasn’t the story with him?”

  Her forehead puckers in thought. “This is just my observation. Barbara is the one that knew the guy. But, yeah, he seemed, like, driven or something. This was a good-looking guy, not the type we usually run across. You know, older guys. Him and his crowd, they spent money like, wow. Sure, a lot of men pay for table dances, but they’d have, like, two or three girls at a time. More, even.” She looks nervously around her, over at the bar, where the manager is watching. He knows what this conversation concerns, and doesn’t want the other dancers or customers to get interested in the couple at the table. There are certain customers to whom the presence of a writer would mean an early exit. “I told you, didn’t I, that until all that stuff was in the papers we didn’t know who he was,” she says.

  “You mean, he didn’t give the right name?” the interviewer says.

  “No, he gave his name, Bill. It’s just that, well, he told everyone around here he was part of the department store family. You know, Dillard’s? It wasn’t until, that trial, I guess, that any of us knew differently.”

  The interviewer already knows this from information he’s gotten in court records. It’s interesting, but not important, that some customers in topless clubs want their true identity kept secret. It’s the same thing in reverse, the identical reasoning, that causes this girl to be Crystal at this club and Dawn at another. “And it was Barbara,” the interviewer says, “that was his main girl.”

  “You have to understand,” she says, “that nobody in here was anybody’s real girl. Barbara had her own boyfriend. But in the club she was his favorite. He bought her drugs.”

  “Cocaine?”

  “Yeah, mainly. Takes a lot of money for some of these girls. He went to her place some.”

  “Her apartment.”

  “Yeah. A few times I think he paid the rent, but I’m not sure about that. I know about the drugs, though. A couple of times she gave me, you know, a couple of twenty-five-dollar papers. They came from him.”

  “He was keeping her,” the interviewer says.

  “Not like you’d think. I told you, she had this boyfriend. Still did, last time I saw her, she lives with this guy.”

  “What about,” the interviewer says, “when Dillard came over? The boyfriend …”

  “It would be during the day. Her boyfriend would be gone and they’d …”

  “Now, don’t say anything you’re not sure of,” the interviewer says.

  “Well, I never saw any of this in person.”

  The interviewer thinks it over. “She was trading him sex for drugs,” he finally says.

  “That was the really strange thing about that dude,” she says. “That’s what you’d think, and there’s sure a lot of that going on in this business. But him, she told me that guy didn’t seem all that interested in sex. He just wanted somebody to get really out of it with, is more like it.”

  “To get high with him?”

  “Man, if that’s the word for it. Blasted is more like it. He had a habit, that’s for sure. Came in these clubs, drank and took dope at the same time, and I’m here to tell you from experience that’s a dangerous combination. You see a lot of addicts doing what I do, you know, working these clubs, but with him there was more to it. Like an obsession.”

  “You think he was obsessed with her?” the interviewer says.

  “With Barbara?” She flashes an even smile that looks wholesome in spite of her dress and the surroundings, the nude dancers all around writhing to throbbing guitar music. “No, not with her. She told me that dude used to get zonked and then go on these real crying jags, talk about his wife a lot. Barbara could never really understand what he was up to. He was crazy about his family, but there was something driving this guy. When all that stuff first came out, about what that defense lawyer was saying, a few of us went, Hey, you think maybe it was Bill that did the murder and not the other guy?”

  The interviewer sits closer to her. He’s listening carefully, thinking he might be about to get something really big. “You mean,” he says, “that Dillard did or said something that made you think he might be guilty himself?”

  She shakes her head. “Nothing he said, or did, really. But I’ll tell you something, and this is from Barbara. This was one tortured dude. Probably he’s never killed anybody, but this guy has some kind of terrible guilt complex.” She seems to search for words, frowning. She licks her lips. “Something back in his past, you know?”

  On the morning of January 9, 1991, there are a lot of things that Sue Dillard doesn’t know about her surviving son, but she’s certain that whatever problems he’s had, the troubles aren’t entirely his fault. Addicts simply aren’t responsible a great deal of the time. But Bill Jr. now seems to have shaken his addiction—or at least to have put the addiction into remission—and his mother is ecstatic for him. He isn’t out of the woods as yet, not by any means, but one day at a time he’s making progress. Sue crosses her fingers and says a silent prayer for her boy, and then turns her thoughts to her younger girl.

  In the Tennessee Williams play, the cat on the hot tin roof was Brick’s beautiful, restless, and ambitious wife. Though the two are brother and sister rather than husband and wife, if Bill Dillard Jr. is the family’s Brick, Nancy is its Maggie the Cat. So the pretty and resourceful brunette has always been. When she graduated from high school, Nancy forsook the familiar Dallas confines for Hollins University in faraway Virginia. She got her BA at Hollins, then moved on to Washington, DC, to work in a museum for a couple of years, a time that she found unsatisfying. Nancy wanted a career in landscape architecture, so headed for the U of Pennsylvania’s School of Design as if drawn by a magnet. At Penn, Nancy’s grades were right in line with her irresistible obsession to excel. From Penn she went on to graduate school at Harvard, and her marriage to another Crimson graduate student named Richard Lyon didn’t slow her ambition a farthing. After earning her master’s at Harvard, Nancy returned to Dallas with her husband in tow. Her job with prestigious Tramell Crow Industries came about as a result of Big Daddy’s connections, but Nancy’s progress with the company was her own doing. She worked long, hard hours, and the brief interruptions in her career to bear two daughters were mere interludes, nothing more. At twenty-nine, Nancy became the youngest partner in the history of the Crow Companies and supervised construction of a multimillion-dollar subdivision. In her off time, she served on the board of the Dallas Historical Society, did high-profile charity work, and rubbed elbows with governors and the president’s wife. Her dark brown eyes set in steely determination, there seemed to be no limit to Nancy’s blossoming career.

  For her husband’s part, Rich
ard seemed content to stay in the background. He had his own Harvard credentials, of course, but whereas Nancy seemed driven to succeed, Richard was happy with a lesser niche. He was more of an artist, sensitive and caring. Whereas Nancy reveled in the limelight, Richard seemed embarrassed by any attention showered on him. As of January 1991, in the eight years since his marriage to Nancy and subsequent move to Dallas, Richard had held three different jobs.

  Given their widely different perspectives, it was hardly surprising that at some point Richard and Nancy would drift apart, but the nasty rumors that began in late 1989 were a shock to Sue Dillard. Sue’s quiet son-in-law had never seemed the type to take up with another woman, but he had. And the affair with a flashy blonde was anything but run-of-the-mill. Richard had flaunted his infidelity, showering his lover with expensive gifts, taking her to New Orleans, going skiing with her in Taos. Finally Richard had moved out of his and Nancy’s duplex and taken up residence in his own apartment. Not only had Richard forsaken his wife, he had publicly embarrassed her.

  Almost as shocking as Richard’s infidelity was the sudden change in Nancy as her marriage soured. Heretofore, she had seemed so strong. But with Richard’s alienated love and eventual departure, Nancy became despondent and childishly nervous. The problem affected her work to such an extent that she was eventually replaced on her job. She went nights on end without sleep. So frantic with fear of losing her husband did Nancy become that she went on starvation diets and even dyed her hair blond to match Richard’s new lover’s hair. She pursued Richard endlessly; even after he’d moved out of the duplex she would call him late at night with pleas that she was violently sick and needed him at her side. Even her own mother wondered if Nancy imagined—or possibly even fabricated—her constant illnesses in order to draw Richard to her. During the year-long separation, the Nancy that Sue Dillard observed shrank within herself, lost weight to the point that her limbs resembled twigs, and became a hollow-eyed and haunting shell.

  Then, when all hope for Nancy’s marriage seemed in vain, in the fall of 1990 Richard seemed to regain his senses. Word came to Big Daddy and Sue that their son-in-law had quit seeing the other woman, and that he and Nancy were on the verge of a reconciliation. Nancy’s parents listened to the news with tightly crossed fingers; in November, when Richard and Nancy withdrew their divorce petition from the courts, hope seemed about to become reality. To Sue’s and Big Daddy’s joy, Nancy brightened. Just before Christmas, Big Daddy made an early morning drive to DFW Airport to take Richard and Nancy to catch a plane to Connecticut, where they spent part of the holidays with Richard’s folks. In January, Richard was scheduled to vacate his separate quarters and return once again to the Park Cities duplex. On the day after New Year’s, he moved part of his things back into the duplex and planned to bring the rest of his gear, piece by piece, throughout the remainder of the month.

  So on the morning of January 9, Sue Dillard is full of happiness for her two middle children, one having apparently beaten his addiction, the other having sunk to the depths over her marriage and now seemingly on the brink of recovery. Though wide the differences between the two middle Dillard kids, both have cause for celebration.

  Sue thinks it fitting that these two seem to be bringing their lives into focus at the same time. As the two Dillard children closest in age, Bill Jr. and Nancy had the most to share while growing up. Only two years separated them, so they had friends in common. Bill Jr.’s friends dated Nancy’s friends in high school, and brother and sister attended school functions and parties together. Mary Helen, Bill Jr.’s wife, was a classmate of Nancy’s. Bill Jr. and Nancy had been well-adjusted teenagers for the most part, wealthy kids with the brightest of futures.

  Once there’d been a problem.

  Sue Dillard doesn’t like to think about it. All mothers for all time have had a tendency to forget the bad things that happen to their children and concentrate on the good. It’s human nature to dismiss one’s children’s shortcomings, even classify their problems as insignificant. Besides, the problem with Nancy and Bill Jr. was years and years ago. In 1991, the problem is ancient history. As adults, Bill Jr. had an addiction, but that, too, has passed, and Nancy was driven to succeed, survived a stunning blow to her self-confidence, and now seems about to put her life back together again. On the morning of January 9, 1991, Sue Dillard sees only the good side of things. The years-ago problem could have nothing whatsoever to do with the troubles that Nancy and Bill Jr. have had as adults.

  Or could it?

  As the phone rings, Sue puts the years-ago problem out of her mind and concentrates once more on the happy things. As she reaches for the receiver, the kitchen clock shows 7:00.

  The voice on the other end of the line belongs to Richard Lyon, and his words assault Sue’s inner peace like jackhammers. Richard has been up all night with Nancy at Presbyterian Hospital. Nancy is terribly sick with diarrhea and uncontrollable vomiting, and the hospital personnel can’t seem to figure out what is wrong with her; in fact, even as Richard uses the corridor pay phone, the Presbyterian staff transfers Nancy from the emergency room into the intensive care unit. It’s probably nothing really serious, Richard says—both he and Sue are painfully aware of Nancy’s many illnesses during the past year—but he thought that Sue and Big Daddy should know of their daughter’s whereabouts.

  As Sue hangs up, she is shrouded in gloom. Just as Nancy’s life seemed about to come together, this has to happen. She fights to control her emotions, and forces herself to think rationally. What should she do? She must notify the rest of the family, of course. Bill Jr.’s wife will be home, and that’s who Sue decides to call first. She’ll ask Mary Helen to contact Susan, the elder Dillard daughter, up in Wichita Falls. Once she’s talked to Mary Helen, Sue Dillard will then have to phone around and try to locate her husband; Bill Sr. will have already left the Masters Swim Club by now and will be going about his business. At this time of the morning, Big Daddy might be almost anywhere.

  3

  Later there would be wide disagreement as to exactly what went on during Nancy Cooke Dillard Lyon’s treatment at Presbyterian Hospital. In fact, the only thing consistent in the recollections of those present in the emergency room, and later in the IC unit, is that there was a great deal of confusion; not surprising in a big-city hospital, where Chinese fire drills are the norm rather than the exception.

  Richard Lyon entered Presbyterian’s emergency unit through the double-door parking lot entry within ten minutes, either way, of one in the morning on the ninth of January. The seats in the waiting room were nearly all occupied; though the temperature outside hadn’t dropped enough to freeze the drizzle on streets and sidewalks, weather conditions were still pretty nasty. Two of the patients in Emergency were there for car wreck injuries—one with fearful lacerations on the left side of his face and neck, another with a fractured pelvis and crushed ankle—while a third, a twelve-year-old, had suffered a concussion from landing on his head when his skateboard upended in his parents’ rain-slickened driveway. Additionally, in the patient area beyond the waiting room and reception desk, there was an elderly man who’d come in complaining of severe chest pains; before the night was over the man would spend several hours on a heart monitor before the staff discovered that he’d swallowed a chicken bone. A woman with cramps, nausea, and diarrhea wouldn’t be considered a high-priority case; Nancy Lyon would have to wait her turn.

  Richard was dressed in jeans, a tan Harvard sweatshirt underneath a waterproof windbreaker, and worn Nike running shoes. The female nurses in the hospital would remember him well. It is true that once the story became a public event, chronicled on television and related in the newspapers under screaming headlines, others would also suddenly remember Richard (some of the refreshed memories are suspect, since the recalling parties weren’t within miles of the hospital on that fateful night), but that the women at Presbyterian noticed Richard Lyon isn’t particularly surprising. With
his dark Middle Eastern good looks—his mother is Lebanese—easy smile, and athletic manner of moving about, he is an eye-catcher with an authoritative way about him. At the time he wore a thin, neatly clipped Omar Sharif mustache.

  Although the time of Richard’s arrival at the hospital is pretty well established, his demeanor was to become a matter of controversy. Depending on which description one accepts, Richard either strolled casually through the waiting room, winking and grinning at every woman in sight and casting hungry glances at each feminine chest and thigh (prosecution version); or (defense’s story) dashed hurriedly around the waiting room couches and chairs like a messenger from the Alamo in frantic search of reinforcements, took a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the reception counter, and announced breathlessly, “Someone help me. My wife is ill.” Whatever Richard’s posture, the duty nurse sent a male attendant with him into the parking lot, and the two men rolled Nancy through the entry in a wheelchair.

  While Richard’s outward attitude in the waiting room is pretty well up for grabs, Nancy’s appearance is not. Her pretty brown short-cut hair was disheveled, her complexion pale, her mouth slack in discomfort and pain. Her brown eyes appeared glazed over; her lids drooped at groggy half-mast. At close intervals her body shook as she retched and gagged, and in between gagging and retching she uttered a series of moans. At one point, Richard encircled her upper body with a cloth strap in order to keep her upright in the wheelchair. The hospital staff allowed Nancy to sit in the waiting room in this condition for better than three-quarters of an hour while waiting-room occupants glanced nervously at the young woman in the wheelchair and exchanged disturbed looks among themselves. The delay was in part due to staff availability, and in part due to Richard’s slowness in the filling out of the hospital’s medical history and insurance forms. Hospital emergency room records show that by the time Presbyterian was assured that it was going to get its money, thus clearing the way for the deathly ill Nancy Dillard Lyon to enter the patient care area behind the reception desk, it was 1:55 in the morning.