If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  “What kind of business?” one of the girls asked as they prepared to leave.

  “An escort service,” Vonlee said.

  CHAPTER 34

  “IT’S DANNY, WHAT’S UP?”

  Vonlee had called Danny and he was returning her call. He didn’t want to make Vonlee any more suspicious than she already was, so he’d decided to touch base and see where she was at. It was near the end of September. They had not spoken for seven days.

  “Hey . . . hello,” Vonlee said. She sounded strange—her voice, her tone.

  “You got a cold or something?” Danny asked.

  She said no, but she’d had some dental work done and wasn’t feeling all that great. The entire right side of her face was still numb.

  Danny was asking why he hadn’t heard from her in so long. It had been a week, he told her, and she disagreed with how long it had been.

  “Listen,” Danny said. He sounded different. Hyper and anxious. It was like he wanted something, but didn’t know how to ask. “You okay? You sound so different?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” she said. “You do not sound like yourself, either!” Danny wasn’t prone to talking fast. She could tell he was nervous and—strangely enough—she had picked up on something wrong with him.

  Danny was recording the call for the TPD, of course.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You sound funny,” Vonlee said guardedly.

  “Maybe the phone—”

  “No . . . ,” she said. It was more than that, but Vonlee couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “What do you mean?” Danny asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s weird.”

  Vonlee talked about the dental work she had and Danny interrupted, asking if she had a new boyfriend yet.

  “Hell no,” Vonlee answered, her sassy Southern accent clear and pronounced.

  Danny asked about Billie Jean. How was she doing? Had Vonlee and her aunt gone to the casino lately?

  “She’s down there right now,” Vonlee said.

  They talked about menial things: Vonlee’s car, the casinos Vonlee and her aunt had been going to, how she was doing. Danny wanted to know if Vonlee was planning on going down to the casino anytime soon. He gave the impression that he wanted to meet her there.

  Vonlee wasn’t sure, she said, because she was taking painkillers for her teeth and she was tired and loopy all the time.

  As they continued, Danny became more comfortable, and Vonlee opened up a bit about what was going on in her life. She was conflicted about her aunt, she explained. Billie Jean was spending like crazy. She was her same old self, going to the casino and gambling her nights away. Vonlee said she was thinking about getting an apartment and moving out, but worried Billie Jean might need her help around the house. She was torn over whether to leave or not.

  “I think you helped her enough already,” Danny said with a modicum of sarcasm. It was as if he were saying: “What more does the woman want? You helped her kill her husband.”

  Vonlee was mumbling, probably because of the drugs. Then Danny asked what happened when “those people” (the cops) came to the house. What did they want?

  “Oh, they wanted to ask about Don’s best friend.”

  “They questioned his best friend?” Danny asked, sounding confused.

  “Yeah. . . .”

  “Why would they question his best friend?”

  Vonlee explained that the cops wanted to know about Billie Jean’s marriage to Don, the business, and why the kids (Don’s) would say the things they were. Apparently, Don’s kids had been putting pressure on the TPD to investigate.

  “He [Don’s best friend] told them,” Vonlee explained, “that Don was slowly going downhill. He never had a problem with his marriage and the will was written when he was of sound mind, and that the kids were evil.... And [the cops] said that as far as they were concerned, it’s over with. . . .”

  The problem arose when Billie Jean had told Don’s daughter that she and Vonlee had gotten home around eleven o’clock on the night they found Don, but the widow had told the police it was three in the morning. The discrepancy in times was enough to arouse some suspicion, according to what Vonlee had heard from Billie Jean recently. But Vonlee’s aunt explained to the police that she only told Don’s daughter that because she didn’t want to admit to being out all night gambling.

  “It don’t matter,” Vonlee said, when Danny mentioned how they would have to account for that missing time. “They have us on film down there [at the casino], and the detective said that Billie probably thought it was none of the daughter’s business what she was doing.”

  “I just hope everything is okay,” Danny said after the two of them chitchatted some more about Vonlee’s car and how she and Billie Jean had wanted to return it to the dealer, but the dealer was fighting them and would not take it back. Billie Jean wanted “her money” back for Vonlee’s car, Vonlee had told Danny earlier in the conversation. There were mechanical problems, along with warranty issues, and they were extremely unhappy. Vonlee was especially pissed off after the salesman, laughing, had said to her, “You think this is Kmart and you can get a refund?”

  “You should have showed him how much money you gave and shown him that checkbook of yours,” Danny said, laughing.

  Vonlee laughed back.

  They chatted about life in general and Vonlee’s teeth and what time Danny was closing his jewelry shop. Then, after hanging up and calling each other back a few times, they made plans to meet for dinner. Danny claimed he needed to go home and shower after closing his shop. Vonlee questioned why.

  After a bit of discussion about that, Danny agreed to close the shop early and not go home. Instead, he’d meet her at the casino.

  CHAPTER 35

  VONLEE TOOK TO DENVER as though the city had been built for her. Before the move, Vonlee had rented an apartment with some friends, a married couple that soon divorced after Vonlee had spent about three months there. She had purchased a salon with another friend, but that was failing horribly, she said. One day when she took a look at her savings account, she realized now was maybe her chance to start over and—along with the idea of Denver being new and fresh and accepting of her lifestyle—she took off.

  The friends she moved in with in Denver were “never transsexuals,” Vonlee explained, “but they [were homosexuals that] dressed up as females.” They wanted nothing to do with “the change,” as Vonlee put it, but liked being females when they went out.

  “You are going to love Denver,” her friend Mickey (pseudonym) told Vonlee as they traveled northwest from Nashville. “It is so much more accepting.”

  Not long after hitting the scene and taking in Denver, “I really started to come into who I was,” Vonlee recalled.

  Although the idea to start an escort service had been germinating for some time, it wasn’t something Vonlee did as soon as she arrived in the Mile High City. What’s more, she wanted to do it right: operate as a legitimate business—paid girls that went on dates with wealthy men. She never intended it to be a prostitution service.

  While digging through the daily newspaper one day, Vonlee came upon an ad for a local club looking for dancing girls. The dirty kind.

  A stripper, she thought. Could I pull it off?

  By now, Vonlee had gotten silicone implants and had large breasts. She was taking massive amounts of female hormones and, with her long, curly blond hair and a burgeoning swimsuit figure, she was an attractive female. There was nothing about her that said “man.” Her hands were feminine; her body hair was gone; her curves were real; her voice girly, but not overly so.

  Vonlee walked in and applied for a job—a cocktail waitress, she’d decided. Turned out, Vonlee wasn’t so confident that she could pull off being a female stripper in a strip club predominantly geared for heterosexual males.

  She was offered a job, as was her girlfriend.

  The strip club she worked at sold alcohol, so a requirement by the management w
as that all the girls wore two G-strings. This helped promote the rule that they were only to expose their breasts to patrons. If you were caught showing what you had downstairs, you were fired. The club could lose its liquor license if one of the girls exposed her vagina.

  “You and Mandy want to make more money?” the manager asked Vonlee one night. Mandy (pseudonym) was a full-on transsexual herself, and she and Vonlee could have passed for sisters.

  “How?”

  “The stage.”

  Vonlee had never told anyone at the bar she was a male. No one had ever asked. Vonlee knew about the G-string rule and figured it would be easy enough to hide her manhood, tucking it underneath.

  “Why not?” she said.

  Vonlee spent two weeks stripping. No one ever questioned her. She made lots of money, according to her. But, in the end, it was “far too stressful for me to continue,” so she went back to waiting tables.

  “Hey, Vonlee,” the owner of the bar said one night while Vonlee was cashing out, “I got a friend who wants to meet you.”

  Vonlee wasn’t seeing anyone. She was saving for her operation. She’d known a few transsexuals who’d gone up to Montreal and she was planning on doing it herself, once she had the money.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

  She never told the guy she was a man. He had some money. He was looking for a place to live. All three of them—Mandy, Vonlee and Vonlee’s new friend—decided to get a place together.

  Vonlee and Mandy had moved out of the apartment they had been sharing with Mickey, the transsexual they had traveled to Denver with from Nashville.

  “All she wanted to do was party all the time,” Vonlee said about the other girl. “And she was way into the gay scene, bringing home all sorts of men . . . and we decided we wanted to move on.”

  So they left, and it pissed the girl off. As a result, Mickey called the guy they were moving in with and explained, “Hey, do you realize that they are men—Vonlee and Mandy?”

  The guy had no idea.

  “As it was, we were all going to move in as friends,” Vonlee said.

  It was a three-bedroom apartment. At this time of her life, Vonlee viewed the world through a prism of always being on the defense. She got up and went about her days and was always on guard, waiting, anticipating, projecting that next insult would push her further into completing who she was. Thus, she saw people, whoever they were, as the enemy, no matter what they said or didn’t say. She wanted acceptance; yet she wasn’t prepared to accept herself completely. There always seemed to be a reason not to complete the transformation. By being a stripper, and not telling the owner and fooling the patrons, Vonlee was lying about who she truly was, or wanted to be. Essentially, she was living and working as a female, and yet lying about it still felt wrong.

  CHAPTER 36

  ON DECEMBER 4, 2000, Tony DeLeonardis, a detective sergeant for the Area Three Detective Division of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), sat in front of an apartment building at 1501 West Fullerton. It was cold outside his vehicle; the skies dark and gloomy; that infamous Chicago wind was whirling up newspapers and other garbage along the curb line of the street. DeLeonardis was sitting surveillance on a three-story building—the bottom and top floors occupied by businesses, apartments sandwiched in between—watching for a woman whose photograph DeLeonardis had in his hand.

  It was 12:50 P.M.

  Up the street, near Greenview, DeLeonardis had already spotted Vonlee’s two-door white Buick Riviera. It was parked out in the open. He had confirmed it was Vonlee’s by the license tag.

  Vonlee had relocated back to Chicago, where she’d spent a considerable amount of time before leaving to move back home and sober up, to start a new life. She hadn’t run to Chicago from Troy. Or taken off in the middle of the night because she felt the heat of the law, as some had later suggested. Vonlee had decided it was time to get away from her aunt and begin her life, once again, in a place she was familiar with.

  As DeLeonardis sat and watched, he witnessed the “subject” walk out of the West Fullerton door of the building. Vonlee had her hair pulled back and tied up like a rooster’s tail. She wore a knee-length blue coat and white shoes. She was toting a laundry basket full of clothes.

  Vonlee got into her car and pulled out into the heavy traffic on Fullerton. DeLeonardis followed, but he lost Vonlee somewhere near Demon Dogs, a restaurant several blocks from her apartment.

  DeLeonardis drove back around and parked in front of Vonlee’s building again. Almost three hours after losing her—Vonlee had still not returned—DeLeonardis, as he noted in his report, “terminated” the surveillance.

  What this proved to the TPD, however, was that Vonlee Titlow was living in Chicago, but not hiding out in any way. She was out and about, doing laundry, grabbing some food. She wasn’t on the lam.

  The next obvious task for TPD detectives Don Zimmerman and Don Tullock, who had taken over lead in the case, was to put everything they had into a search warrant and see what they could dredge up at the Rogers house. They had most of Don’s financial records already and knew that a lot of money had been spent by Billie Jean and paid to Vonlee. It proved nothing by itself. But, in the context of a search warrant and what else they now knew about Vonlee and her aunt, they could think about dragging the two of them in for a little chat.

  CHAPTER 37

  TWO TRANSSEXUALS LIVING WITH a guy in Denver during the early 1990s—this was not the ideal domestic situation Vonlee had seen for herself in the crystal ball of her life. By this time (heading toward her later twenties), Vonlee was hoping to be settled down (with a guy), her operation done, hold a nice job, and maybe have a small slice—however different it was—of the American pie. Quitting the stripper job was probably a good move, she thought. But where would she go? What was she going to do for a living?

  Just a few days after the three of them had moved in together, when the guy came home from work, he called Vonlee and Mandy into the living room.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Both of you.”

  “What’s going on?” Vonlee asked. She could tell he was upset about something.

  “I got a phone call at work today.”

  “Yeah . . . and . . .”

  Vonlee knew this guy had ties to organized crime, or did at one time. He was not someone to mess with in any way. Or, in this case, they should not lie to him.

  “It’s time for a little show-and-tell, girls,” he said. He wanted them to drop their pants.

  Vonlee and Mandy looked at each other.

  Shit.

  Caught.

  Mandy tried to say it was nothing but lies. Whatever the other girl had said was out of anger because Mandy and Vonlee had screwed her over and left without warning. She was just being a bitch and trying to make up stories about them. Both she and Vonlee were females. There was nothing to worry about. After all, didn’t he meet them at a strip club?

  Vonlee got up, walked into the kitchen, made a drink. She took a few pulls from the strong cocktail and worked her way back into the living room.

  “Mandy . . . let me. Look,” Vonlee said, addressing their new roommate, “the truth is, neither of us ever had any intention of having sex with you. It wasn’t anything like that. I feel like we misled you. Sure. But if you want to back out of the apartment and leave, we understand. I’m really sorry.”

  They had a conversation. Mandy actually had a crush on the guy, but that was quickly suppressed once she and Vonlee told him that they were, in fact, men. He couldn’t believe it, of course. Nonetheless, he decided to stay. They had been honest. They fessed up.

  No more secrets.

  Both promised.

  As time went on, Vonlee said, “There was some sexual energy there between us.” She and the guy had gone out one night and started drinking heavily together. When they got back to the apartment, Vonlee said she was out of cigarettes.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  On the way back from the store, he pulled
the vehicle over and “just started kissing” her. No warning or lead-up. He just took her.

  “One thing led to another, and me and him started fooling around,” Vonlee recalled.

  They never committed to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend, but as Vonlee told it, “It was like we were friends with benefits. We were living in the same apartment.... I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him.”

  Vonlee began working at a local chain restaurant after leaving the strip club. She wanted out of the stripper scene entirely. There was too much cocaine and drinking and dishonest business going on, and she saw herself, if she stayed, not coming out of it without a few serious bumps. She and the guy living at the apartment still had relations as the weeks turned into months, but it was all within that friends-with-benefits thing they’d started and never went beyond that. Vonlee and Mandy, meanwhile, became closer. Best friends, Vonlee said later. They always had told each other they would one day go into business together and were beginning to take that pipe dream seriously.

  Working one night at the chain restaurant, a nicely dressed guy left Vonlee his business card and implored her to call him if she wanted to go out. As Vonlee sat home alone a few weekends later, she took out the card and dialed the number.

  “And we just hit it off,” she remembered.

  They were inseparable after that first night out. Vonlee never shared her gender with him; she didn’t feel she needed to. Their relationship just kind of took flight and she made the decision not to tell him.

  Six months went by. They were in love. They’d had sex on a number of occasions, both oral and anal. He never questioned Vonlee about her gender. She’d always make an excuse: “I’m on my period. . . .” Or, “I have a yeast infection.”

  The time came to renew the lease where Vonlee, Mandy and their male roommate were living and Vonlee told her roommates she was moving out and getting a place of her own, but she would being staying with Jay (pseudonym), her boyfriend, until she found one.