If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  So withdrawn.

  So docile and depressed.

  Was she taking Don’s death that badly? And if so, why?

  She hardly knew the man.

  Inside the truck, as detectives listened, Danny tried to convince Vonlee that drinking again with him when they got to the restaurant would help her. She didn’t need to quit altogether. Just slow down a bit. Danny was hoping that drinking would relax Vonlee when they got there and she would once again open up.

  He said, “Drinking’s helping you because—”

  Vonlee interrupted. “It is not helping me. It is killing me. Drinking makes me even more nervous and more depressed.”

  “Yeah, you should, I mean, how—” Danny started to speak before she cut him off again.

  “Fucking drinking drove me to kill somebody,” Vonlee said.

  “Drinking drove you to kill somebody?”

  “Well, it helped,” she added.

  Later, Vonlee explained to me that what she meant was if she had not been drinking that night, she could have saved Don from what had happened. “I could have stopped it,” Vonlee said. She felt morally bankrupt because of the booze and it was one reason why her aunt had taken advantage of her on that night. She had beaten herself up since Don’s death: If I wasn’t drinking... I could have prevented what happened. “I’m not saying that I shouldn’t take responsibility . . . but was I wrong morally. Yeah, I was in a very fragile state.” And her aunt knew this, Vonlee claimed.

  Danny let it go. He realized that he did not need to ply Vonlee with alcohol in order to get her to talk about Don’s death. A few minutes into their conversation and she had given him a money quote already.

  “Drinking drove me to kill somebody.”

  Vonlee was feeling a fevered “hatred” for her aunt grow each day as she realized she had been used.

  Danny took a breath. They were stopped at a traffic light. Then he blurted out: “No, it’s not drinking that drove you to kill somebody—greed, I think, from your aunt.”

  “If I had not been drinking,” Vonlee told him, “I would have never have been there in a million years. No way . . . no way. And my mother called and asked me about it today.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I said, ‘Well, you know, those detectives came over. The kids are suspicious and everything.’ She said, ‘I think everybody’s a little suspicious.’”

  “Everybody, I’m sure.”

  They continued to talk about Georgia Pinkerton and Billie Jean Rogers. Vonlee’s mother was a bit apprehensive regarding her sister’s true motivations in life. Moreover, Georgia worried about Vonlee being influenced by her aunt as she continued to live with her.

  If her mother thought Vonlee had ever been involved with hurting Don in any way, Vonlee explained to Danny as he hit the gas and took off from the intersection, she’d have a “nervous breakdown.”

  “Oh, God,” Danny said, trying as best he could to stay out of the way and allow Vonlee the space to bury the knife deeper into her back.

  Vonlee continued about her family as Danny patiently listened.

  “Do I look better?” Vonlee asked at one point. She pointed to her hair.

  “You look much better,” Danny said.

  Vonlee mentioned how she had gotten the color of her hair changed. It felt good. And she was staying home now more and not going to the casino as often, not drinking, but still taking Xanax.

  “Now you’re rich woman,” Danny said, indicating that Vonlee could do what she wanted at this point.

  “Well, no. I’m going to quit killing myself,” Vonlee said, before adding how she was even thinking about working out again. “I used to work out three days, three times a week, and everything.”

  “You don’t need to work out. You got muscles like, uh, big muscles and, uh, you know,” Danny said before stopping himself, realizing he was digging a transgender hole for himself he would have a hard time talking his way out of.

  Vonlee kept returning to her family back in Tennessee and how her aunt didn’t want much to do with anybody and hadn’t, according to them, sent any money down there since she’d come into it. Vonlee couldn’t understand why.

  She didn’t mention—because she didn’t know—that her aunt had given her mother one hundred thousand dollars toward a house in those days after Don’s death.

  “I didn’t get no money from her, you know,” Vonlee said for some reason. “I’m not greedy.” Vonlee was looking at Danny strangely. Sizing him up. She was wondering why he was asking certain questions. And why he had suddenly become so quiet.

  “Maybe she’s short on cash. Maybe she doesn’t have cash,” Danny said.

  “Who? Billie?”

  “Yeah . . . how much cash she got?”

  “She has access to nine million dollars,” Vonlee said.

  “What do you mean—nine million dollars? She probably . . . It’s all in stocks and bonds and stuff like that. How could . . .”

  Vonlee leaned toward Danny and whispered: “She has over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in her bank account.”

  “Cash money?”

  “Cash! She wrote me a hundred-thousand-dollar check out of it.”

  “She gave you a hundred-thousand-dollar check? She gave you that check? It’s in your bank account?”

  “Yes, I have. I can . . . I have . . . It’s in my name. . . .”

  Danny said something along the lines of why couldn’t her aunt help her sister down in Tennessee if she had all kinds of money to throw around, but Vonlee squinted an eye and stared at him.

  She was thinking.

  There was a moment of silence between them.

  Then Vonlee asked: “You’re not recording this or anything?”

  CHAPTER 27

  DANNY CHAHINE ALMOST DROVE off the road.

  “No,” he said. “. . . Are you crazy?”

  Vonlee was looking at Danny with a curious eye. She paused.

  Danny stared back at her.

  “Are you going to blackmail both of us?” Vonlee asked. She was concerned that he knew what happened inside the house that night Don had died and was going to take the opportunity to crack his knuckles, flex his arms and maybe come up with a plan to want some money for keeping his mouth shut.

  “No fucking way,” Danny said.

  * * *

  As Danny thought about it later, the signs had always been there. He thought back to a few days after Don had died. He had gone over to the house to console Vonlee, who was “crying a lot . . . like she couldn’t” at first “talk” to anyone about anything that had happened, without breaking down.

  Vonlee had opened the door and let Danny in. Her aunt was home.

  “Come, follow me,” Vonlee said. Billie Jean was upstairs in her room. “See it?” Vonlee explained, walking in, pointing toward her aunt, who had one of Don’s suits spread out on the bed.

  “Hey,” she said when she saw Danny. She seemed lively and excited and, well, happy, according to Danny.

  “Hi, Billie . . . I’m so sorry about what happened to Don,” Danny said, sharing his condolences.

  Billie Jean didn’t seem at all hurt or upset. She was okay.

  Vonlee and Danny went downstairs. “She wants to do it right away,” Vonlee whispered.

  “Do what?”

  “Cremate him.”

  “Oh, shit . . . so the suit is for him to be cremated in?”

  “Yeah . . . and she’s pushing for it to happen as soon as possible. . . .”

  * * *

  As they continued talking inside Danny’s truck on the way to the restaurant, at one point Vonlee turned and looked at Danny: “Billie told me, ‘Yeah, Danny will be [an] alibi for us, then he’ll be fucking blackmailing us . . . !’”

  Danny said, “I don’t want to be no alibi to nobody, because I didn’t see nothing. I didn’t hear nothing.”

  “We were with you, though,” Vonlee said, letting Danny know that he was involved.

  “In the
casino?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’m safe. Do whatever . . . you want. . . .”

  They talked about money.

  About her aunt and the cars her aunt had bought.

  About Danny becoming someone who could, if needed, help them.

  “I don’t know why I trust you so much,” Vonlee said.

  “Don’t trust me. Forget about this. Don’t! I don’t want to hear anything.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “I just want to go . . . to dinner.”

  Vonlee said her aunt’s biggest problem with Don’s kids was the fact that she had told them she and Vonlee had arrived back at home at 11:00 P.M., when the police report said 3:00 A.M. Vonlee was certain that one mistake was going to come back and bite her aunt.

  “So why would she lie like that then?” Danny asked.

  “’Cause she didn’t think it was any of their business that she was at the casino.”

  Vonlee shouldered the burden of her life by drowning it in alcohol. She never once saw herself as “different” or less than; it was no mistake or error by God to have been born inside a male body. Rather, it was her life, complicated and important, as she understood it. Yet here she was in the middle of what appeared to be a murder, regardless of how it was packaged and sold to her boyfriend. If what Vonlee was saying during this ride to the restaurant was true, Billie Jean Rogers had murdered her husband—with Vonlee’s help.

  Danny explained that if they had told the police the right time that they had gotten home, they had “nothing to worry about.” Didn’t matter what they told Don’s kids.

  Vonlee said something about Don’s body being cremated and the investigation being over, because of that. But now that Danny knew what really happened, they might have something to worry about all over again.

  “But somebody like you comes along and tries to blackmail her,” Vonlee suggested again.

  “No, I’m not . . . gonna blackmail nobody. I don’t wanna blackmail nobody. I’m minding my own business. I want to go to dinner and have fun.”

  “You can’t prove it,” Vonlee said. She became passive and discreet. Then: “. . . I just want you to know I would never, ever, ever, hurt anybody. I don’t know what in the fuck happened. I don’t even really remember exactly what happened. I was so drunk.”

  Danny needed to pull Vonlee back around and steer her into talking about details.

  “You do?” he asked.

  “I know she got a pillow over his face,” Vonlee admitted. “I do remember that.... She’s the one that poured the vodka in his mouth. She did most everything and she even told me. . . . She said, ‘I did all the work.’”

  Danny said there was no way Vonlee could have helped her aunt because Vonlee was so wasted.

  “Well, no,” Vonlee corrected. “I kept letting go, I couldn’t do it.” It wasn’t the booze, she insisted. It wasn’t right, morally speaking, and she wasn’t going to be part of it—that’s why she stopped herself. Not because she was smashed.

  “I couldn’t do it . . . and I poured just a little bit of vodka down his throat, and she says, ‘Oh, hell!’ and just poured it up his nose. But it’s sad and it’s over.”

  “Please. Please,” Danny said. “I don’t wanna hear about this stuff. . . .”

  “You’re the only person I can talk to about it.”

  “I know, but it’s just, it makes me feel sad that what happened, all that, you know. . . .”

  Vonlee then explained how Don had fallen on the floor “by himself.” They hadn’t pushed him down or made him get on the ground. Earlier that night, after dinner, he was already really drunk and in the kitchen. “When we were there, we were sitting in the living room and he got up out of the kitchen and he just went. . . .”

  “He was passed out?” Danny asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Danny suggested that Vonlee bring her aunt with her to her therapist appointment scheduled for the following day. Vonlee’s aunt needed to talk to someone about what was going on in her life; Danny added, “She’s losing her mind and I think it’s all because of what she did. She’s losing it.”

  “Well, she kind of acts like it doesn’t bother her, but, you know, it’s got to bother anybody.”

  “I don’t care how strong she is.”

  “I mean, at least, I mean, I don’t have an excuse for what I did, but I was so fucking drunk that I don’t even remember. I started drinking that morning and, sure, I drank all day.... She was sober.”

  “And I think she used you. I think she used you big-time. I think the whole purpose of you coming over here . . . ,” Danny said, before he called Billie Jean “sick.” As he spoke, Danny tried to reconcile the woman that killed her husband with the woman he had known as nothing more than a gambler. At face value, the two personalities didn’t seem to mesh; yet as he looked deeper into his memory bank, he could sense, when around Billie Jean, a devilish, devious person inside her just waiting to come out.

  “But I’ve done it, too,” Vonlee reminded him. “You have to realize that. So I’m not normal, either.”

  “You’re not ‘normal, either’?” Danny said, sounding as though Vonlee had made the understatement of the century. Then he got serious, asking: “You’re not gonna kill me, are you?”

  CHAPTER 28

  THE TONE INSIDE THE vehicle during the drive to the restaurant took on an ominous air after Danny Chahine, however jokingly, asked his girlfriend if she and her aunt were planning to kill him now that he knew their secret.

  Vonlee shrugged it off and was more interested in talking about how bad she felt. How deeply sorry she was that she had been involved at all. The way she described her contribution to what was, effectively, a murder, there was no doubt she felt responsible in some way and it was slowly beginning to control her every waking hour.

  “I . . . I think about it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If I feel one little bit of happiness, I feel guilty for killing him. . . . If I got struck down by lightning right now, I deserve anything I get.”

  Was it guilt? Was it worry and dread? Was it concern? Was she afraid of going to prison?

  Danny didn’t know what to say. “I hear you,” he repeated four times before adding, “I’m an outsider.”

  “But I cannot go the rest of my life. I have asked God to forgive me and I’ve prayed every night and I know what I did is wrong. And I’m like, ‘Whatever you feel is right, God, do it. I mean, whatever you need.’”

  Danny kept saying he was an outsider looking in; he couldn’t imagine how she felt. He only knew that a man had died and the victim’s wife had been the driving force behind the death.

  Vonlee started to cry as she broke into a lengthy story of her life and how things had never really worked out for her the way in which she had ever planned. She spoke of God and her belief that, inherently, she had been a good person. All she wanted was for her “life to get together.” She talked about how she was constantly asking God for a way out of this latest mess. “Show me a way so I can have my surgery and have a normal life,” she told Danny. Seemingly justifying the crime, she then added: “I asked God and so maybe He was getting ready to take Don, anyway, and . . . He gave me an opportunity to get my life together? I don’t know. But that’s what . . . kind of comes to me—because everything is falling into place for me.”

  Carrying on, Vonlee next explained how, since Don was gone, her life was falling into order in ways she could have never dreamed. Vonlee said she had just met a woman who wanted “to do the beauty salon thing with me.” She wrestled with the idea that if she had done anything wrong, then “bad things should be happening to me. Not good things. But I have asked for forgiveness and, I mean, I think He knows that I’m . . . that I’m a good person.... He knows that what happened to me was that I was a victim. I really think I was a victim. I really do. Everything that was going on, I mean, she knew how bad I wanted my surgery. She knew how fucked up I was about telling you my situation.... You
know, I mean, I was just crazy. I mean, she could’ve stopped it. She could’ve just said ‘no.’”

  Danny needed a narrative of what happened. Vonlee was talking, and that was good. She was admitting her role in the crime and telling him—as she had suspected, he was recording everything—how the crime came to be, unknowingly drowning herself.

  She mentioned how when her aunt first brought up the idea of killing Don, Vonlee believed it was a joke. “Then she says, ‘I’ll give you money’ . . . and I, honest to God, just thought it was a big old joke at first. And then she got real serious, and then after she really got into it . . . [and said], ‘Well, we can’t stop now. He’ll know we were killing him.’” Vonlee paused, then changed her thought and was back to asking Danny to support her: “Okay. But you just have got to not, I mean, you’ve got to understand, if we’re going to be friends or whatever, that this is not something . . . I’m not that type of person. I mean, I’m not.”

  “I know you’re not,” Danny said.

  The drive from Troy to Detroit with traffic was a solid hour. Vonlee had opened up. She spoke of her motives for not wanting Don dead, but also what the future without him held for her: a beauty salon and her full transformation into a female, totally complete, with the final operation.

  Danny tried to convince Vonlee that she and her aunt had participated in a “mercy killing,” as he put it.

  Vonlee didn’t think so at first, but Danny persisted.

  Then she talked about how Don “was ready to go,” anyway. She had even considered that he did have a heart attack that night, which might have been the reason for him falling onto the floor. Vonlee had even told Billie Jean how close to death she once thought Don was; he bled all the time, Vonlee said, quite clearly justifying his death for her own spiritual benefit.

  They then got onto the subject of Billie Jean’s true motivation and Vonlee tried to come up with a reason why her aunt wanted Don dead. Danny made a point when he asked why they had not waited until Don died, suffice it to say if he was so close to death? Danny was curious. Don was sick and bleeding from his rectum and knocking on death’s door. Why push him over the edge and risk prison if Billie Jean only had to wait a little longer?