Standing there in her lace nightgown, Suzanne blushed just thinking about it.
She was middle-aged now but more attractive than most women half her age. A true born-and-bred California girl, blond as the best of them, smart, self-assured. She had a good, solid job as a dental hygienist. Daughters as beautiful as she had been when she was their age. And Suzanne’s lover was attractive too. Wealthy, and with a full head of hair that had only just begun to go gray at the temples.
Suzanne thought it made him look dignified rather than old.
The two of them had met a few years previously, at a softball tournament in Tahoe. Both of Suzanne’s daughters played softball at the tournament level. She was forever ferrying them to tournaments. But in Tahoe she’d decided to take some time for herself. After another long day out in the bleachers, she’d wandered into a lakeside casino. There, at one of the tables, she’d met the man she would fall for—a man who would sweep her away.
They gambled together for a night, flirted, and, finally, parted. But the attraction was undeniable.
“It’s too bad you’re married…,” Suzanne said, and stared at him meaningfully.
A part of her had to have known that once she said it out loud, there’d be no going back.
That part of her had been right.
They met the next day, and the day after that. Suzanne was separated from her own husband. Now the man she’d suddenly fallen for told her that his own marriage had taken a turn for the worse.
It wasn’t long until the man, who was now her lover, was paying for tournament trips. He paid the college tuition for one of Suzanne’s daughters. He bought Suzanne a new house in Santa Cruz—the house she was pacing around in now as she waited for him to arrive. The house had cost close to a million dollars. But her lover had paid in cash, then bought another home—a luxury condominium that they could share in Tahoe.
Suzanne’s lover took her to exclusive restaurants, bought tickets to sold-out sporting events, flew her and the girls to the West Indies for a vacation.
He’d even started an IRA in Suzanne’s name, depositing $700,000 of his own money.
This was not why she had fallen in love with the man. But, to be brutally honest, none of it had hurt his chances.
And now here he was. Ringing her doorbell. Holding an expensive bouquet and beaming.
Chapter 5
Frank
The flight from Texas had hollowed Frank out. The man sitting next to him in the fifth row was wearing an LSU sweatshirt, snakeskin shoes, and just about the amount of cologne it would take to drown a mama cat and all of her kittens.
It was a blessing that the good old boy hadn’t talked all that much.
Frank no longer liked to fly commercial. The talk from other passengers made his head spin; the food made his bowels hurt; the stewardesses treated him (or so he felt) like a baby. When he was lucky enough to drift off, he dreamed of driving through the very same landscape—that long drive from Texas to California, with pit stops in Santa Fe, Tucson, Los Angeles. But there never was time enough for the drive, and Richard Raley’s private plane was a luxury, not a day-to-day thing he could use whenever Suzanne sank into one of her moods.
“Frank,” she would say. “You said you would leave her. But here we all are!”
The way Frank figured it, he’d spent millions of dollars on the woman. The least she could do was be grateful. But, of course, some part of Frank knew she was grateful. She missed him was all, and was lonely for him. And when she opened the door in that lace nightgown that Frank had bought her, Frank was grateful too.
Together, they moved through the house. It was as if they were dancing. From the entryway to the living room. From the living room to the staircase. Then up the stairs to the bedroom, with Suzanne whispering in his ear the whole way.
“Frank,” she said, in that low, sultry voice she used when she was feeling seductive. “Oh, Frank, the things that I’m going to do to you.”
* * *
It was dark and they were naked and spent, drinking champagne in the bedroom, when Frank reached over, stuck his hand deep in the pocket of his black Burberry coat, and pulled out a baby-blue jewel box.
The box was small and wrapped with a ribbon, just the right size for a ring.
Suzanne squealed when she saw it. She tore off the ribbon. And then her face dropped.
“Baby, they’re diamonds,” Frank said. “You don’t like ’em?”
“They’re perfect,” Suzanne said, and managed a smile.
“You were expecting a ring?”
“Years, Frank. It’s been years. How much longer am I supposed to wait?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? Here, on Christmas, in the house that I bought for you. Can’t you just wait a bit longer?”
He flashed the same smile that got to her back in Tahoe and she couldn’t help but smile back. It really was Christmas. He really was here, and not back in Texas with her.
“Yes,” Suzanne said.
“Promise?”
“I’m yours. And don’t ever forget it.”
The next day they drive to a casino. Suzanne forgets herself there, flirts with two men at the blackjack table, and ignores Frank until the moment her chips are all gone, at which point she asks him for another $10,000.
Frank nods to the floor manager. A moment later, new stacks of chips appear in front of Suzanne. But Frank’s smile is as tight as it was in Texas, when Nancy was nagging him about those Christmas lights that he should have paid someone else to hang—and as he walks away from the table, that smile turns into something twisted.
Outside the casino, Frank pulls out a disposable cell phone—a burner—and punches out a short text.
Need to see you, he writes. SOON. Next week. I’ll drive out to your town.
Chapter 6
Billie Earl Johnson
Frank’s text from Tahoe caught Billie Earl Johnson passed out on the couch.
Billie’s girlfriend, Stacey, was passed out beside him, snoring loudly, stirring slightly with each snore. Off in the corner, a hound dog whimpered away.
All in all it was just another Christmas in Ben Wheeler, an East Texas town that was as methed out as Carrollton was manicured.
In Ben Wheeler, Christmas might as well have been any old day of the week.
At rest, Billie’s face was sunken and skull-like. Every crease was a physical record of years of hard living, hard drinking, and hard drugging. His slumped-over body was tattooed and sinewy.
Stacey’s was tattooed and plump.
But as soon as he woke up, Billie’s face took on a much harder edge.
The couch they had passed out on was tatty and stained. The wood-paneled walls were all bare. But on the floor all around them, fifty- and hundred-dollar bills lay scattered like crisp, new confetti. The flat-screen TV propped against the far wall was enormous and new. Billie would get around to hanging it up eventually. The assault rifle leaning against the couch cost about as much as a new Mustang.
By now, the hound dog was barking. Billie’s burner kept ringing. After sending three unanswered texts, Frank had taken to calling and calling and calling again.
Fully awakened by the third call, Billie jumped up from the couch.
“Mr. John,” he said, using the name he knew Frank by.
Frank spoke briefly, and Billie replied.
“Okay, then,” he said as he rubbed a bit of crust out of his sunken eye sockets. “Look, I am down for whatever. But listen here: If we’re going to go ’head with this, you’re going to have to pay the next installment. Then there’s some other expenses that we’ll talk about.”
Billie Earl Johnson knew full well that in East Texas, $750,000 was not the going rate for any job—even when that job was the murder of a nice churchgoing lady like Nancy Howard.
But if that’s what this man, Mr. John, was willing to pay, who was Billie to keep him from getting strung along and along? Especially when Billie was the one doing the stringing?
It had worked out so well for so long now that Billie and Stacey and all the folks they knew—even a few folks that Billie and Stacey didn’t like, in particular—had been swimming, practically doing the backstroke, in Mr. John’s money.
“Hell,” he said as he snapped the cell phone shut. “At this rate, no one’s even got to get killed.”
Most likely, Billie thought, no one was going to get killed—and, like Stacey also thought, he had good reason to think so.
After all, Billie Earl Johnson and Mr. John had been having this same conversation, with only the slightest variations, for over a year.
PART TWO
NOVEMBER 2010
Chapter 7
Billie
One year earlier—thirteen months to be exact—Frank Howard was taking his own sweet time trying on cowboy hats at Sheplers Western wear store in Mesquite, Texas.
Mesquite was an hour west of Ben Wheeler, and Frank had spent the time it would have taken to drive half that distance admiring himself in the mirror, twisting this way and that, pulling the hats low over his eyes, tipping them high up above his forehead. He had just about decided to buy a black, broad-brimmed, Stetson Bozeman hat when he saw Billie Earl Johnson standing a few yards away from him, watching.
Although Billie had been standing there for some time now, he didn’t feel like he’d been looking at much.
Billie had spent a third of his forty-nine years behind bars. He knew a criminal when he met a criminal. But in Frank—or “Mr. John”—Billie felt as though he’d made something more useful than another casual, criminal acquaintance.
He felt as if he’d made out an easy mark.
For months now, Billie had been taking Mr. John’s money. Tens of thousands of dollars at a time—sometimes much more. The first time, it was $60,000 in cash. They’d been sitting in Mr. John’s Lexus at the time. The money sat between them in a paper bag that also contained a photo of the woman Mr. John wanted killed.
On that occasion, Mr. John had told him to make the death look like an accident.
Billie had said, “Sure,” adding only that “these things, done professionally, take some time.”
What had happened after that was, basically, nothing—except insofar as Billie had turned himself into the big man in town, handing $100 bills out to all the folks he’d grown up with in Ben Wheeler. He’d bought motorcycles, four-wheelers, and a big four-door pickup for himself. He’d bought a Firebird for his daughter. He’d also bought thousands of dollars’ worth of meth and shacked up with Stacey, partying and screwing for days on end. One day in town, the cops had picked him up for possession. But that was no big deal in the greater scheme of things. When he bonded out a few days later, he just called Mr. John and casually asked for more money.
The pattern had long since established itself, with Billie telling Mr. John he’d do the job, then coming up with some excuse or another that prevented him from doing the job. The one constant was that he’d always ask for more money.
The other constant was, he’d always get it.
Billie was surprised. He’d always been a good liar. A great liar, in fact. In some other life, he believed, he could have been one of the country’s great con men. And his excuses were always believable because they were always close to the truth. If Billie had to tell Mr. John that he’d have to delay the job on account of illness, it was because he really had been sick. If the cause was that Billie had found himself behind bars and needed to be bonded out, it was because he really had gotten himself into trouble again.
And Billie was always getting into trouble.
But even so, there had been so many excuses, stretched over so many months. Sometimes, Billie felt as though Mr. John was paying him not to kill Nancy Howard. Or if he was paying to not kill her just yet.
Sometimes, Billie wondered if Mr. John really did want this thing done. Sometimes he thought that the man was plain stupid. Stacey’s own theory was that, like all the men she’d run across, Mr. John didn’t know what he wanted. And what he’d been paying for was the luxury of not having to find out. In Stacey’s estimation, planning to have Nancy Howard knocked off made Mr. John feel free. But on some level, Mr. John had to know that doing the thing would make him feel terrible.
As far as Stacey was concerned, Mr. John paid Billie to talk—to make his fantasy about life without Nancy feel more real—and paying more and more stretched the fantasy out, while making it feel that much more real.
Stacey’s take on the situation sounded reasonable enough to Billie. As long as Mr. John kept paying, who was he to complain? And Mr. John did pay: twenty grand here, seventy there. Billie Earl burned through it all like a blowtorch through butter. As far as he even kept track, Billie figured he’d spent $750,000 or more just for coming up with a long line of excuses. Mr. John was not happy. He’d made that much clear. But for reasons that Billie could never quite fathom, that didn’t keep Mr. John from paying him. So, here they were at Sheplers, and Billie was sure that Mr. John would have a fat envelope full of cash on his person.
“Everything’s set,” Billie said, after the two men had exchanged a perfunctory greeting.
“Everything?” said Mr. John.
“Everything except the next installment,” said Billie. “I’m going to need that, if we’re to proceed.”
“Okay, then.”
In the store’s dressing room, Mr. John patted his pocket and took the envelope out.
“I want your assurance,” he said. “I want your word this is going to happen.”
Billie laughed as he grabbed the envelope out of Mr. John’s hand.
“You’ve got it, partner,” he said. “You’ve got it.”
Chapter 8
Frank
Frank didn’t like it one bit, this Billie Earl Johnson business he’d gotten involved with. His alter ego, “Mr. John,” didn’t sit comfortably with Frank, either.
The whole sordid scheme was a far cry from the good thing he had going with Suzanne.
But Frank knew that the plans he’d hatched with Billie Earl were the flip side of that good thing. Frank could have divorced Nancy, sure. He’d been divorced when he’d met her. But Frank’s first marriage had not produced any children. He and his wife had been very young—that had made for an easy divorce. He was much older now, a pillar of the community, and a father. The children would make things especially hard. Frank’s kids knew what a good man he was. He’d never want them to see him in the wrong kind of light. Compared to the harm that would do, life without Nancy would only be a small mercy.
Then there was the secondary consideration: Given a few things he’d been up to in secret over at his accounting practice—given the millions of dollars he’d stolen from his boss, Richard Raley—Frank simply could not afford to have some divorce court judge go through his financials with a fine-toothed comb. As far as Frank was concerned, filing for divorce was the same as walking into his local police station and turning himself in for embezzlement. And that was not something Frank Howard was willing to do.
So the question was, was Billie Earl Johnson the man for the job?
Sometimes it seemed to Frank that he’d been dealing with an imbecile. Already, on several occasions, he’d had to bond Billie Earl out of jail. But the thing he’d paid Billie for, time and again, never got done. Suzanne was on his back every day now about leaving Nancy, and he really had run out of excuses, while Billie Earl was full of them. Excuses poured out of the man like brown water pouring out of a broken Ben Wheeler faucet.
If Frank had known what all to do about it, he’d have done it. But it was too late now that he’d doubled down, again and again, with the money. He had to get something back for his investment.
And yet, Billie Earl got up the nerve to count his money—money he’d done nothing to earn yet—right in front of Frank’s face.
“It’s not the kind of job you rush, Johnny.”
“I’m not telling you to rush it. I’m just saying it needs to happen soon. So
oner than soon, in fact.”
“Why’s that, Johnny? You gonna go to the Better Business Bureau? The Chamber of Commerce? Your local police? Come to think of it, maybe the police would like to learn more about you.”
This was not a turn that Frank wanted his conversation with Billie Earl to take.
“Just do it,” he snapped on his way out of the Western wear store. Seething now and seeing red, Frank was breathing quickly, shaking his head, more upset than he’d allowed himself to be with Billie Earl up to this point. So upset that he didn’t see Billie Earl’s girlfriend, Stacey, standing in the parking lot a few yards away with her cell phone held in front of her.
“What’s that for?” Billie asked moments later, after John drove away, when she showed him the picture she’d snapped.
“Insurance,” said Stacey. “Honestly, that man doesn’t know what he’s doing. He might be playing us two ways, for all we know.”
“Nah,” Billie said. “He may have money, but I still say that he’s as dumb as a rock.”
Chapter 9
Billie
Sometimes Billie wished that Mr. John could have gotten a glimpse of where all his money had gone.
The way he’d single-handedly propped up the local economy of Ben Wheeler, Texas.
The bartender at Billie’s local biker bar had been one especially grateful recipient of Mr. John’s generosity. And so, on Thanksgiving weekend, Billie; Stacey; Stacey’s son, Dustin; and a whole host of East Texas knuckleheads gathered there, helping themselves to the bartender’s endless supply of booze and ducking in and out of the bathrooms, where pills and powders were being bought and sold. Way in the back of the bar, in the shadows, an ex-con named Michael Lorence lit one match after another and flicked them into an empty beer bottle.
Murder Is Forever, Volume 1 Page 2
