Chapter 77 – Confrontations (A Gun in Her face)
Wednesday evening June 18, 2008 – 7:40 PM
“Newlan…Frank Newlan.”
The words rolled bitterly off of Tom Willis’s tongue as if he were regurgitating some sort of foul tasting medicine out of his system. After three days of false starts and endless delays, Willis finally had the information he’d been waiting for and now…well, now it was just a matter of time before he exacted his revenge.
It took a few days longer than expected for Willis’s private investigator friend, Brent Blain of the Boston Intelligence Group, to track down his contact at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, but as they say, patience is a virtue, and now Willis had in his possession, everything he could ever possibly want to know about one Mr. Frank Newlan.
Willis had a name. He had a phone number. He had a home address. He had a place of employment. He had an automobile make and model as well as a license plate number. He had a detailed account of the perpetrator’s whereabouts and activities…and of course he had pictures, plenty of pictures.
Being the professional that he was, Brent Blain had done a top notch job of tracking down his pal’s unsuspecting nemesis, and even now, he and his staff continued to monitor the home-wrecker’s every movement, practically day and night.
The only puzzling detail that Blain couldn’t quite figure out was why this Newlan guy had been observed driving in the general direction of the Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn every day this week when his records indicated that he worked at Tafts University.
“Maybe he’s on jury duty,” deduced Blain. However, as far as Tom Willis was concerned, none of these trivial details mattered in the least. As far as Willis was concerned, he was about to become Frank Newlan’s worst nightmare…and there wasn’t a damned thing anybody could do about it.
Willis rushed home as soon as Blain called him with the unmasking disclosure regarding Newlan’s identity, but much to his surprise, much to his chagrin, his wife Marianne and their two children were nowhere to be found. And while he frantically patrolled the house looking for hidden clues, he wondered whether his wife might actually be in Newlan’s bedroom at that very moment. He had preferred to confront her first, before moving on to Newlan, but the waiting was killing him and so he finally decided to pick up the phone and have a little man-to-man talk with his wife’s so called high school sweetheart.
When Blain first sprang the news on him, it took a while for Newlan’s strangely familiar surname to jog Willis’s memory banks, but then he vaguely recalled a number of occasions where his wife had casually mentioned something in passing about the boy she dated back in her high school days.
It had to have been at least ten years since Willis heard his wife utter Newlan’s name, and so like a fool, he never took him as a serious threat. Like a fool, Willis assumed that Newlan was just some pimply-faced kid from high school. Like a fool, Willis neglected to fully comprehend that pimply-faced kids sometimes grow up to become unscrupulous adults; immoral miscreants who would pounce on another man’s misfortunes at the drop of a hat.
But Willis would be a fool no longer. His heart was pounding with malice as he dialed Newlan’s phone number, while at the same time Newlan had just plopped himself onto his black leather sofa when a ringing tone disturbed his peace and tranquility.
“Damn it, I meant to turn that fuckin’ phone off,” lamented Newlan as he bent back up to see who the hell it could be this time, and when he observed the words “T & M Willis” illuminated on his caller ID, his reaction was decidedly mixed; his reaction was decidedly excruciating, like the exposed nerve of a throbbing toothache; his reaction was decidedly joyous, like a child on Christmas morning; his reaction was decidedly teetering in that broad-ranged spectrum, lost somewhere between exhilaration and dread, or quite possibly a fervid stew of both extremes all rolled up into one big heap of emotional turmoil.
For some reason, Newlan had an inkling that something dramatic was about to unfold, and as was often the case, his sixth sense was right on the money.
Newlan reluctantly answered the phone, and when he heard a man’s voice on the other end of the line he figured that he was in for quite the rude awakening. Somehow, from the moment that Newlan’s lips met Plante’s open mouth for the first time in ages, he sensed that he was placing himself smack dab in the middle of an irreversible predicament, and sure enough, his forebodings had come to pass.
“Is this Frank Newlan?” demanded the rough-sounding voice on the other end of the receiver.
Newlan was petrified; partly out of fear, and partly out of guilt, but he spoke as calmly as he could in hopes that his faltering voice wouldn’t betray his frittering emotions.
“Yeah, this is him,” replied Newlan, and his affirmative response was the only green light that Willis needed to hear for him to go ahead and release a torrent of fury upon his unsuspecting adversary.
“Yeah, well this is Tom Willis, you no good motherfucker…you think you can go fuckin’ around with somebody else’s wife and get away with?” roared Willis.
“Calm down for a second and let’s just talk this out,” suggested Newlan, but Willis was having none of it.
“Fuck you, calm down. You’re a dead man Newlan. You understand me? A dead man, you fuckin’ loser,” threatened Willis. But surprisingly his attempts at intimidation seemed to have had the reverse effect on Newlan, and despite his fears, he returned Willis’s serve with his own volley of contempt.
“Yeah, but I’m a lovable loser, so fuck you Willis. I’m not afraid of you. Hey, you go around treating your wife like dirt…it serves you right if you end up getting what you deserve. So why don’t you just go fuck yourself, you piece of shit,” boldly declared Newlan.
Predictably enough, Newlan’s tersely worded kiss-off sent Tom Willis spiraling into a state of livid frenzy, and as such he railed into his antagonist like there was no tomorrow.
“Don’t you dare talk to me about my fuckin’ wife,” ordered Willis.
“Yeah and what if I do? What the fuck are you gonna do about it?” demanded Newlan in attempt to egg Willis on.
“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna come down there and I’m gonna beat the living shit out of you. Then I’m gonna spit you out into the fuckin’ river where they’ll find your dead ass floating downstream in about a week or two. You understand me Newlan? I swear to God I’m gonna find you and I’m gonna kill you. Do I make myself clear, you motherfucker?” promised the menacing voice of Tom Willis.
“I don’t have to take this shit. Go to hell, you fuckin’ jerk,” bellowed Newlan, and with that final salutation he hung up the phone in Willis’s face and headed straight for his whiskey cabinet in a futile attempt to calm his nerves. Meanwhile, Willis headed straight for his gun cabinet where he retrieved a fully licensed, fully loaded, 357 magnum pistol; the same exact model currently being used by many a police department across the country.
In recent years, Willis had gotten into the habit of keeping a small cache of firearms, safely locked and carefully hidden, in strategic areas of his home. But at the moment he was so enraged that safety was the furthest thing from his mind, and unfortunately for Marianne Plante, she and her children just so happened to come wandering home at exactly the wrong time.
Almost immediately upon pushing open the ornately carved front door, Plante detected the look of a madman in her husband’s eyes. It only took one glimpse of his surly, bony, football-shaped face, contorted in a knot of rage, to warn her that trouble was brewing, and so naturally she proceeded cautiously.
Sensing danger lurking just around the bend, Plante ordered the girls to their rooms so that mommy and daddy could have a grownup’s talk. However, civilized conversation wasn’t exactly what Willis had in mind at the moment, and as soon as their children were out of earshot, he slapped his wife hard across the face which sent her sprawling backwards against the front do
or where he dug his foot into her midsection for good measures.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” wailed Plante as she cowered on floor.
“You fuckin’ bitch…you think I don’t what you’ve been up to? You think I don’t know how you’ve been screwing around behind my back? You no good fuckin’ cunt,” jeered Willis as he towered over his fallen wife.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about Tommy…please stop this right now, for the girls sake,” pleaded Plante.
“Oh yeah…play dumb…you don’t know what I’m talking, do you. Well I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. I’m talking about that fuckin’ scumbag you’ve been hanging out with…Newlan…does that name ring a bell? Frankie fuckin’ Newlan,” derided Willis, much to his wife’s dismay.
Plante was in a complete state of shock over her husband’s discovery, but she went into full denial mode in a last ditch effort to somehow avert a catastrophe.
“You’ve got it all wrong Tommy. He’s just a friend. I just needed someone to talk to. You’re never home anymore. Please Tommy, please listen to me,” begged Plante, but apparently it was too late for pleading; and furthermore, Willis was utterly insulted and disgusted by his wife’s rebuttal, and he told her as much.
“You’re so full of shit, it isn’t even funny. I’ve had someone watching you for weeks now. You think I don’t know how you’ve been flirting with every guy in town? You fuckin’ douche bag whore,” howled Willis. But as far as Plante was concerned, this bit of revealing news was the final straw; the straw that broke the camel’s back so to speak.
And so dear reader, as we know from our own experiences, inevitably, there comes a time in a person’s life, a rock-bottom nadir if you will, where they reach a breaking point; a boiling point; a point where nothing much matters anymore…and it was at just about this moment that Marianne Plante and Tom Willis had both reached that mythical point of no return.
Plante was outraged by the gall of her husband. How could he have someone following her when he was out on the town with a different floozy just about every night of the week? However, in Willis’s twisted mind -- courtesy of the immortal words of the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown -- it was a man’s world, and any indiscretions that he may have committed were off limits for discussion; all that mattered was that his wife had betrayed his trust, and for that she had to pay, and pay dearly at that.
But regardless of her husband’s misguided opinions, Plante rose from the floor like a phoenix rising from the dead and she got right up in his face like a lioness in heat.
“How dare you have someone follow me? I’ve had it with you Tommy. I just can’t take it anymore. I want a divorce right now. Frankie Newlan was the best thing that ever happened to me and I should have never let him go for a…for a…for a…,” stuttered Plante as she searched her mind for just the right words; and then with an emotional mixture of bravado and tears, she chose the phrase that would send her husband off the deep end; “…FOR A COWARD.”
Plante’s proclamation finally sent Willis literally over the edge. Apparently he had been teetering on the brink of insanity for quite some time now, and he wife’s biting insult was the last straw. And if truth be told, the cocksure Willis was actually quite insecure underneath that gruff exterior of his, and he was none too happy to have to listen to his wife verbally expose him for what he was, a coward.
“You want a divorce, do you? You think I’m a coward, do you? You wanna fuck around with other guys, do you? Well how about you try this on for fuckin’ size,” suggested Willis in a threatening tone…and then he did it. Tom Willis did the one thing that separates disagreements from quarrels; quarrels from arguments; arguments from violence. Tom Willis pulled out his 357 magnum pistol…and he pointed it…in his wife’s face.
From the Eyes of a Juror Page 90
