“Honey,” Frank said, “I’ll just have to go down to the station. Answer some questions. I’ll be back tonight.”
“But, Frank, they’ve got you in handcuffs!”
“I know, hon,” Frank said. But he was as white as a ghost, and when he said, “I’ll sort this out,” his voice broke.
Nancy looked over at Ashley, who was covering her mouth with her hand. Then she looked down at her own hands, which were trembling.
The shock of the shooting…the shock of finding out about Frank’s affair…and now this? Feeling terribly weak, Nancy put a hand on the sofa to steady herself.
She didn’t know how much more she could take.
“Officer?” she said, turning to the man who looked like the officer in charge. “This can’t be happening. There must be some sort of mistake.”
“Ma’am,” the man said. “I’m sorry to have to do this in front of you and your daughter. But I’d advise you to call your lawyer. And I’d think about calling your minister too.”
Nancy didn’t know what to do. She looked at her daughter again and saw her crying.
“Come here, babe,” Nancy said. But Ashley just stood there, shaking.
“We got through the past few weeks,” Frank told his daughter. “The Howards can get through anything.”
“Daddy?” she said.
The look he gave her broke Nancy’s heart. But a moment later Frank was gone, the police were gone, and the house on Bluebonnet Way was quiet again.
PART SEVEN
AUGUST 2014
Chapter 39
Frank
It had been nearly two years now that Frank had been out on bail.
“The wheels of justice grind slowly,” the judge at the bond hearing had told him. “But, Mr. Howard, you’ll find that once they get started, they grind very effectively.”
Now that his murder trial was starting, Frank was afraid that he’d find out the hard way. But it wasn’t as if the past two years had been some sort of picnic.
Days after his arrest for soliciting the murder of Nancy Howard, Frank was sued by his boss, Richard Raley. Frank’s lawyer, Arch McColl, had called the charges “preposterous.” But Frank had known better—and, in the end, a panel of arbitrators had ruled against him, in the amount of $8.5 million in actual and putative damages.
“Good luck getting that money,” is what Frank had thought at the time. “It’s long gone.”
He decided that he would file his own suit against Raley. And, of course, Frank had even bigger problems to solve.
First, he and Nancy had had to tell the children about his affair. There was no hiding it after the arrest, not once the news channels had gotten ahold of Detective Wall’s warrant.
Then Frank had had to contend with Nancy.
At first, she didn’t believe the charges. Nancy simply could not imagine a world in which Frank would want her dead, much less a world in which he would actually act on the notion. Lying in bed late at night, she’d look over at Frank and try to stop her thoughts from spinning. But once the thought had been planted, it grew and grew, until it had overwhelmed all the others: Could this whole business, insane as it sounded, be true? Once she had caught herself wondering, she couldn’t stop. And once that happened, Nancy found herself in a dark place. A place where, for the first time, her faith in the Lord and her love for her husband seemed like they would fail her. Filing for divorce was the only thing that she could do, she’d said with tears in her eyes. Try as she might, she couldn’t see another solution.
It had split the family apart, and not just in the obvious ways. The more convinced Nancy became in regards to Frank’s involvement in the shooting, the more convinced their daughters seemed to be in regards to Frank’s innocence. Learning about their father’s affair had been hard. But the leap from love affair to murder plot seemed, to them, absurd. Like Nancy, in those first few days after Frank’s arrest, the kids couldn’t imagine a world in which their father would do such a thing.
Unlike Nancy’s, their faith seemed to be shatterproof.
It was the one true comfort Frank had had during those long months leading up to the trial. No matter what, his kids stood by him. And when the time came for Brianna to marry her fiancé, Nancy had written the court and asked that the conditions of Frank’s bail be amended so that he could attend the ceremony and walk his daughter down the aisle.
Suzanne was gone, out of Frank’s life for good. He hadn’t seen her since she’d driven him to the airport on the night of Nancy’s shooting. She hadn’t called him—not even once—after reading about his arrest. Suzanne’s daughters had not even known that Frank was married. Now they knew everything, including the fact that Frank had become the prime suspect in the attempted murder of his own wife.
Meanwhile, Billie Earl Johnson was sitting in jail, preparing to testify against Frank. In exchange, he’d gotten what seemed to him like a good deal from the government: A twenty-four-year sentence for drug trafficking, but no charges in relation to the plot to kill Nancy Howard. He’d have to give up some friends, for sure. But then Billie wondered—did he really have any friends?
Caged in his cell, Billie had had plenty of time to think. He thought about Stacey, and Dustin, her idiot son. He thought about Michael Lorence, the stranger Dustin had glared at, back in that biker bar in East Texas. At some point, Lorence had been a cell mate of Michael Speck’s. A man close enough to trust, but far enough from Billie to keep suspicions at rest, in case he had been caught.
But Lorence had not been caught. And unlike Dustin, he’d actually had it in him to go through with the shooting. He had gone to Nancy Howard’s house, along with Speck. And there, in the Howards’ garage, he had pulled the trigger. The best part had been, he and Speck had agreed to the shooting for a measly $5,000 a piece.
The worst part, of course, was that they had failed to actually kill Nancy Howard.
* * *
As for Frank, he’d done all that he could to win in the court of public opinion. He still had friends in Carrollton. Men and women who knew him from church, knew his children, knew in their hearts that he’d never be capable of such a crime. They pinned the blame on burglars, vagrants, spree killers—anything made more sense than the idea that Frank had set out to kill his own wife. Those friends had packed the court at his bond hearing, ready to testify about his good character. They were why he was free now, Frank supposed. While out on bond, he’d gone on the news shows, licked his lips, and cried. His daughters had come onto the programs, too, speaking in their father’s defense. Even Nancy, who’d finally landed on the side of believing in Frank’s involvement, was careful not to come out and say it on camera.
“I believe he had relationships with the kind of people who would do something like this,” she’d say. “But I’m going to let the jury make the decision on whether he called the shot.”
Now, with the trial set to begin, Frank’s lawyers told him they were hopeful. He was an upstanding, churchgoing man. Most of the witnesses lined up against him were criminals, testifying in exchange for more lenient sentences during their own upcoming trials. You never knew, they told Frank. But his chances were solid.
Even at his most hopeful, Frank wasn’t so sure.
Chapter 40
Frank
In court, Frank’s lawyers argued that Frank himself had been the victim in a long series of terribly unfortunate events. Far from trying, and failing, to orchestrate his wife’s murder, he’d found himself caught in a blackmailing scheme. Way back in 2009, they argued, Billie Earl Johnson had found out about Frank’s affair with Suzanne Leontieff. Billie had tried to blackmail him over it. Heck, Billie had blackmailed Frank, to the tune of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars. He’d bled Frank dry in exchange for his silence. Then, when Frank finally stopped paying, Billie had taken his revenge and hired an accomplice to shoot Nancy Howard.
It was a good story, Frank thought. Nancy herself was disgusted.
And then their
children—Ashley, Jay, and Brianna—stood up to take their places in the witness stand.
Frank had his failings; it was true. All three of his children had learned that by now. Hearing about his affair had shocked, even shattered, them—if they hadn’t known their own father, what did they know?
What could they be sure of?
The answer turned out to be simple: The children were sure of Frank’s innocence—they had to be—because if Frank was guilty, their world no longer made sense. And so, one by one, they testified in his favor.
“My family foundation is built on God, faith, and grace,” Jay said, turning all the way in the witness chair to face the jury. “Since Jesus has given me grace, I ask that you do the same for my father.”
Brianna called him a “great man,” spoke about how much she loved him and how he’d been there for her for all twenty-three years of her life.
Ashley took a more pragmatic approach. Frank had always been there for the family, she said, even during these last two years since his arrest. His alimony checks for Nancy never came late. In fact, he was still Nancy’s main source of income. “What benefit is there to putting him away?” she asked.
* * *
Suzanne Leontieff took the stand, too, during the first week of the trial. It was the first time that Frank had seen her in almost two years. She told the jury she really had loved Frank, and really had expected him to leave Nancy for her. She’d planned out their whole life together—although, Suzanne had to admit, she’d gotten fed up toward the end with Frank’s endless excuses. But she also knew in her heart that Frank was a good husband. She described the way he’d collapsed, sobbing, after learning that Nancy had been shot.
There was no way Suzanne could have imagined that Frank was involved in the attempted murder.
Frank had mixed feelings about Suzanne’s testimony. It did nothing to cement the idea that he was a committed family man. He wished the woman wouldn’t giggle so much. It was unseemly, given the circumstances. But Frank wasn’t on trial for the affair—a fact that his lawyers had stressed repeatedly in their opening address to the jury—and, overall, he guessed that Suzanne had done more to help than to harm him.
That was something he could not have said about other witnesses called by the prosecution.
Sober now, after a long stint in prison, Billie Earl Johnson was more coherent than Frank had ever seen him be out in the world. Up on the witness stand, he put on a real performance. And, even Frank had to admit, his testimony did extreme damage to the argument Frank’s defense lawyers had set out to make.
Chapter 41
Billie
It wasn’t the first time that Billie had sworn on a Bible. But as far as he could remember, Frank Howard’s trial was the first time that he’d sworn on a Bible and gone on to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
“I knew him as ‘Mr. John,’” Billie said, while pointing at Frank and looking straight at him.
Frank Howard was dressed in a dark business suit, one that was well cut, with expensive stitching. Billie was wearing a prison jumpsuit that itched and chafed. They looked worlds apart. But Billie was determined to catch Frank’s eye. When he did, the look the two men exchanged was significant.
“Let the record show that the witness is pointing to John Franklin Howard,” the prosecutor told the clerk.
This was the first of several nails that Billie and the prosecutor tried to drive into Frank Howard’s coffin.
Methodically, step-by-step, they went through the chronology.
Up in their box, the jurors looked intent and impassive.
“John, Frank, whatever you want to call him. He called me up out of the blue in 2009. I was at home, lying there on the couch. My girlfriend, Stacey, was in the kitchen. And this man said that he’d heard of me, heard I’d be good for the job.”
“Did this man specify what that job was?” the prosecutor asked as Billie wriggled around the witness stand.
“Sure he did. He said he wanted to get rid of his wife. Well, do you think I didn’t jump up off of that couch?”
“What did you tell the man?”
“I told him I didn’t know what he’d heard, or why someone would say that. But if he wanted to meet, we could meet.”
“What year was this, to the best of your recollection?”
“This would have been in 2009.”
“And did you meet this man ‘John’?”
“We met several times,” said Billie.
“And what was discussed in the course of these meetings?”
“The ways in which John wanted me to get rid of his wife.”
One of the jurors—a middle-aged woman who’d worn sensible shoes and cardigans to every day of the trial—snuck a glance at Nancy. She was sitting on the prosecutor’s side of the room, staring straight ahead, betraying no emotion. But at his lawyer’s table, Frank shook his head gently from side to side.
“Specifically, if you don’t mind,” said the prosecutor.
Billie wriggled around in his chair. He glanced over at Nancy, who was still looking straight ahead. He avoided looking at Frank.
“Specifically,” Billie said. “With an ax. With a baseball bat. With a gun. He wanted me to kill her while she was at home, with her book club, or something like that. One time he said I could burn her house down. We also talked about carjackings, muggings, cutting the brakes on her car. If she was going out of town for a conference, she could be killed in her hotel. Or she could be killed out in public, like at a restaurant out with her friends. John didn’t care too much if other folks got in the way, long as none of us got caught afterward.”
The juror in sensible shoes was looking at Frank now. He was shaking his head more vigorously, whispering to his attorney.
“Wait,” the attorney whispered back. “Wait, and he’ll give us our opening.”
“And did you have any intention of following up on any of these plans that John Frank Howard had made?”
For the first time since he’d taken the stand, Billie looked directly at Frank, who met his gaze and glared at him.
“Hell no, I did not,” Billie said.
“So why did you keep talking to Howard?”
“Because every time that we talked, he would give me more money.”
“Money for what?”
“For killing his wife is what he said.”
“Which you never intended to do?”
“No. But I didn’t see that talking about it was some great crime. Not when I never expected to do it. And every time, John would give me more money.”
“How much money?”
“Tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes more. All in all, I’d say he paid out well over a million in cash and another million in bail bonds.”
“For something you never came close to doing? Why do you think he’d do that?”
“Objection!” Frank’s lawyer called out. “Calls for speculation on the part of the witness.”
But the judge let Billie answer the question.
“Well, sir,” he said. “Have you ever been of two minds about something important? It seems to me that John was that way about Nancy. If I were to guess, I’d say that he was paying me to listen to him talk about killing his wife. The man had money, that much I know. And listening’s not much of a crime.”
* * *
During cross-examination, Frank’s defense lawyer was incredulous. In fact, it was as if he’d looked the word incredulous up in the dictionary and was working his hardest to live up to the definition. He arched his eyebrows, flapped his arms around, and adopted a mocking tone every time he approached the witness stand where Billie was sitting.
“What you’re saying, Mr. Johnson, is that Frank Howard paid you—paid you upwards of two million dollars—to listen to him talk about killing his wife?” he asked.
“Based on the fact that he kept paying and I kept on listening, I would say yes.”
“But killing Nancy Howard was something
you never had any intention of doing?”
“No, sir.”
“You expect us to believe that?”
“I don’t care what you believe. It’s the truth.”
Billie’s really hitting his stride now. His whole life, he’d never understood how easy and simple just telling the truth could be. But now he stopped wriggling around in the witness box. Sitting straight up in his seat, looking right at Frank Howard, he felt righteous and spoke forcefully. It’s amazing what the truth can do. Billie wondered why no one had told him about it before.
From here on in, he answered each of the lawyer’s questions with as much conviction a simple “No, sir” can carry:
“Isn’t the real truth that you contacted Frank Howard and not the other way around?”
“No, sir.”
“And that you contacted him because you’d gotten wind of an affair he was having?”
“No, sir.”
“And that you intended to blackmail him, in exchange for keeping what you know about his affair to yourself?”
“No, sir.”
“And that you did, in fact, blackmail Frank Howard? That you blackmailed him for several years? And that when Frank Howard finally stopped paying, you took revenge on him by shooting his wife?”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Billie said, and leaned back in his seat, looking triumphant. But the judge instructed him to answer the lawyer’s question.
“No, sir,” Billie said. “There was never any talk about blackmail or anything like that.”
“Mr. Johnson. Isn’t it true that you’re in prison now on drug-related charges?”
“Yes, sir, that’s true.”
“And that by testifying here today, you’re hoping to lessen your sentence?”
“No, sir.”
“No?”
“I’m here to tell the truth. Whether or not the government sees fit to reduce my sentence, that’s up to the government. I’m not a killer. And I haven’t been charged with anything having to do with the crime we’re talking about today. But what I do know about the Howards is the truth of what happened. That’s what I came here to tell you today.”
Murder Is Forever, Volume 1 Page 9
