Читать книгу Love Me To Death - Steve Jackson - Страница 9

Four

July 1996, Jefferson County, Colorado

“You’ve just got to meet this cowboy.”

Rebecca Holberton smiled at her friend’s insistence at setting her up with the smiling man in the tight black T-shirt and even tighter blue jeans. They were at an outdoor party, and she didn’t really know most of the people present. At forty-two years old, she had not expected to meet someone romantically, being a little on the shy side when it came to men since her divorce a couple of years earlier. She wasn’t seeing anyone in particular and lived on her own in a town house she’d recently purchased on West Chenango Drive in unincorporated Jefferson County, a large, mostly rural area that encompassed a half-dozen bedroom communities northwest of Denver.

The man in question was a little on the short side, but she had to admit that he had cheerful blue eyes beneath the black Stetson he wore, and a sexy voice—sort of a low, rumbling western twang. “Just call me Cody,” he said when they were introduced.

Forty years old, William Lee Neal was no longer the young outdoorsman he’d been when he met his second wife, Karen Wilson, in Washington, D.C., or even the free-spending patron of the strip club where he met his fourth wife, Jennifer Tate, and where all the girls and bartenders knew him as Wild Bill Cody.

He’d developed a paunch, and the muscles of his youth were soft with alcohol and disuse; he had a persistent cough from the cigarettes he chain-smoked. But he still carried himself like he owned the world, and his tongue was as glib as ever, maybe more so from the years of practice. He wore his hair long beneath the hat, which, he’d tearfully point out to any listening female, had been given to him by his dear departed mother. “The only thing I have left that’s from her,” he’d say.

Holberton thought he was cute and he certainly came on strong with his charm that afternoon; soon they were seeing each other every day. In many ways, he seemed like the perfect man. He was a great listener and offered what seemed to be good advice on everything from her finances to remodeling her town house.

He was sensitive, too, particularly when it came to his young daughter, who his former wife—an “evil,” unfaithful stripper, he said—kept from him. His descriptions of his battle to win custody of the child would bring him to tears, as would any mention of his mother.

Cody, as he wanted to be called, romanced her with roses and back rubs. Always the gentleman, he opened doors and lit her cigarettes as fast as she could get them out of the pack.

There was also an air of mystery and wealth about him. He sometimes painted houses for a living, but said that was just to get by while he waited for a trust fund to be released to him. The fund was currently tied up in the Las Vegas court system but, he said, when he eventually got his hands on the money, he’d be rich beyond her imagination. He sometimes hinted that the money had something to do with his mob connections, or “The Family,” as he referred to them, warning her that she had to keep that knowledge a secret. Or else.

It just added to his allure and she’d fallen for him. He moved in with her after a few weeks of dating.

Holberton wasn’t the only one convinced that Neal was something more than an underemployed house painter. When he divorced Jennifer Tate in March, he’d claimed to be $51,000 in debt, listed an old truck and $4 as his only assets, and described himself as an “unemployed alarm technician.” However, around the dive bars he frequented, he talked as if he were a bounty hunter, or some heard he’d once been a hit man for the mob. He cultivated the image by always dressing in black—from the crown of his Stetson to his shirts, with maybe a break in the motif for blue jeans. On cooler days, he also sported a long black duster that reached down to his black cowboy boots.

He told a lot of stories, such as having been one of the army’s elite Airborne Rangers. He seemed to know what he was talking about. At least that’s what the regulars at the bars thought who listened to him spin his tales as he sipped his favorite drink, rum and Coke, and bought rounds for his audiences. Not everyone heard the same story, which rather than identifying him as a liar, only enhanced his mystique.

The money helped. He seemed to have plenty of it around, too—$50 tips for a few drinks or a haircut, limousines, wild parties at local hotels. Depending upon which story one heard, the money came from a trust fund or his shady past. One story even combined the two: Years before, he was supposed to kill a wealthy man in Las Vegas for The Family, but he decided to spare the man. The intended victim was so grateful, he’d set up a trust fund for Neal.

Not everyone bought his act. Plenty knew he was a con artist almost as soon as they heard him speak; but being a “liar and a strange bird,” as one bartender would later describe him to the police, wasn’t against the law. He ignored or avoided those who saw him for what he was. . . . They were of no use to him.

In September 1997, Holberton and Neal went to Las Vegas to meet up with her best friend and former sister-in-law, Tammy. Tammy wasn’t impressed. He struck her as the kind of guy who lived by mooching off others. He did seem to have some connections in Las Vegas, because Holberton confided that they were getting their room for free.

Still, if Rebecca was happy, then Tammy was happy for her and didn’t worry much over Cody. That is, not until Holberton called a few months later and said she might be contacted by her insurance company. Apparently, she’d had some expensive jewelry stolen on the trip, though she hadn’t mentioned it at the time. Now she was warning Tammy that the insurer might call to verify if Holberton had once owned the jewelry. After they got off the telephone, Tammy wondered if Cody had anything to do with its “disappearance.”

Neal had plenty of drinking buddies among the men at the bars, but not many who thought of themselves as his friend. Instead, he surrounded himself with the women, who gravitated to his old-fashioned manners, shadowy past, and money. He certainly knew how to win them over. He frequently ordered flowers—always long-stemmed red roses—from Beverly Wise, a local florist, and had them sent to various dancers at strip clubs. The florist thought he was such a polite man, who always paid with cash. Even she was somewhat taken in by his air of mystery, such as the time he asked her to deliver two arrangements of roses to a hotel room.

“Who for?” she teased.

Neal smiled back. “Nobody in particular,” he said. “I’m just gonna go out, find a girl, and let her think I did it all for her.”

The only problem with Neal’s generosity was the money wasn’t his. It came from other people. Some from his former business partners, but mostly from women he could seduce out of their savings. Rebecca Holberton was one of those women.

When she met Neal, Holberton was leading a quiet, uneventful life. She’d once been married to an airline pilot, Rodney Holberton, but they divorced with no children. For twenty-three years, she’d worked for US West telephone company, where she was considered a well-liked, exemplary employee, though her friends at work worried about her occasional bouts with depression. Most of her career had been spent in Portland, Oregon, before transferring to the Denver office in 1995, in part to get a fresh start on life.

She hadn’t lived at the town house for long before Neal moved in, which might have had something to do with why her neighbors thought of her as distant. She rarely returned greetings and never wanted to stop and chat or introduce her new boyfriend, who also kept to himself. Not long after the man in the cowboy hat moved in, butcher paper went up on the inside windows of their town house, as if preparing to paint the interior.

Two years later, the paper was still up, but time was running out for Neal. The romance with Holberton had faded quickly enough from their relationship, until sex was no longer part of it. They were more like roommates. He came and went as he pleased, often spending days away from the town house. She had to have been aware that he was seeing other women, though it’s hard to tell if she was hurt more by that or by the realization that her “perfect man” had taken her for nearly every penny she owned.

Somehow over a two-year period, she’d let him borrow more than $60,000, much of it she’d had to borrow against her credit. Some of it was supposedly for his custody battle; another portion of it was for business ventures that he promised would make them both a lot of money when they matured. They just never seemed to reach that point, and the legal battle for his trust fund—with which he promised to pay her with interest—seemed to go on and on with no end in sight.

By June 1998, she’d had enough. She was starting a new position at the telephone company on July 6 and was excited at the prospect, circling the date on her desk calendar. She told a friend that she was going to get Cody Neal out of her home and out of her life. But she wanted her money back first.

Holberton confronted Neal and threatened to go to the police. On June 29, he surprised her by announcing that he was finally going to be able to pay her back. His trust fund had been released by the courts. As a measure of how certain he was, he urged her to write nearly $56,000 in checks to pay her creditors. The money to cover the checks would be in her account the next day, he said, when he would also give her “a surprise” to demonstrate his gratitude for her patience. That was in addition to taking her to Las Vegas for an all-expense-paid holiday before she started her new job.

The next morning, Neal rose early and drove to a building-supplies store. He’d been thinking of this plan for a couple of weeks and so he knew exactly what he needed. He already had a large footlocker back at the town house and a new circular saw. Now he moved quickly through the aisles picking up Lava soap—good for scrubbing almost anything off skin—four large eyebolts, nylon rope, duct tape, and . . . He went to the area of the store where the various axes, sledgehammers, and mauls waited. He tried the heft of several before settling on a seven-and-a-half-pound splitting maul—half ax and half sledgehammer—with a long wooden handle. Just right.

When Neal got back to the town house on West Chenango Drive, he pulled into the garage and closed the door. He left the maul in the truck to scout out the situation. Holberton was up, though still dressed in her nightgown.

“Ready for your surprise?” he asked with a smile. He noted her excitement; she was “filled with joy and happiness,” he would later say. He led her to a chair that he’d placed on the plywood floor of the living room—she’d planned to have it carpeted soon—facing the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. He then fetched a briefcase and placed it on her lap. It was heavy, as though it held tens of thousands of dollars. He’d wanted the weight of it to be a distraction, though in actuality it held only newspapers.

Neal went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of champagne. Popping the cork, he poured them both a glass and toasted their new fortunes, their new lives. Setting his glass down, he picked up a blanket, which he said he wanted to place over her head for her “surprise.” She protested that it would mess up her hair, but relented at his insistence.

Placing the blanket carefully over her blond hair, he announced, “I have to go get something in the garage. Be right back!” He walked quickly to the garage and picked up the maul. Returning to the living room, he noticed that his little white kitten was strolling about, rubbing against Rebecca’s legs. He raised the maul, his eyes fixed on the center top of Holberton’s head.

A pause. A heartbeat. A breath. Then the maul whistled down in an arc, the sledgehammer side crushing into the woman’s skull. Her hands flew up involuntarily to her head as Neal quickly swung the maul again like a man driving in a spike. As he struck again and again, and she pitched out of the chair, he noticed that her head was becoming sloppy and that a rip had appeared in the cloth through which blood and brain matter seeped.

At last Neal was finished. He turned and walked a few steps over to a hall closet, where he left the bloody maul. Going back to his victim, he removed the blanket and placed Holberton’s head in a plastic bag to catch some of the blood. He lashed her arms and legs with rope, and then encased his victim in black plastic lawn bags, which he bound with the duct tape until she looked like a mummy. He then dragged the body over to a wall to the right of the chair.

Turning, Neal noticed a two-inch piece of skull lying on the floor, bloody blond hair still attached. Using the paper from an ice-cream bar, he picked up the bone and carried it to the kitchen. The first part of his plan was complete. He’d given them fair warning, told them all: “Anybody who believes me deserves to get fucked.”

Well, now they’d believe him. But there wasn’t time to rest on his laurels, he had to go visit Candace Walters and put the second part of his plan in motion. As he left the room, he noticed his kitten. . . . Poor little thing, her belly hadn’t come off the floor since his attack on Rebecca. She knows who the biggest predator is, he thought.