Love, Lies, and Murder

by Gary C. King

  What would he tell the officials at the border, when he was ready to cross, what his business in Mexico would be?

  “Tell ’em you wanna get pussy!” Perry said, laughing.

  Perry cautioned Farris about the risks of trying to take drugs across the border, and suggested that he should do a test run at some point. Their conversation turned again toward which location, the apartment or the house, would be best to carry out the killings. Perry said that the apartment would be best, but he did not know the name of the complex or where it was located. Farris indicated that he could find out its location by following the Levines from their house.

  “How would I go about getting rid of their bodies?” Farris asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean . . . should I just set ’em on fire after they’re dead or somethin’? It’s gonna be pretty scary for me to leave ’em there . . . say I’ve gotta put ’em in my car or somethin’ and that’s really gonna spook me. . . . You’re not gonna get a fair trial,” Farris said.

  “I know. . . . When somethin’ goes down (inaudible). . . . Within, within an hour the police (inaudible). . . .”

  “Oh, I know they’re, they’re gonna come quick, but look, but, Perry, look . . .”

  “Somebody without question, somebody is going to put us together,” Perry said. “You’ve gotta be prepared for it.”

  “Look, let me tell you a story,” Farris said. “One time me and this guy, we went and did a, a job. . . . We didn’t kill nobody, but, you know, the person got their finger cut off and everything. Look here . . . when that happened, another person come to the house, they got in the house before we even knew anything. We started shootin’ at each other. We take off runnin’, we steal a car. . . . We’re runnin’ from these people shootin’. We know they just called the police. Look here, the car breaks down on Dickerson Road. . . . Look here, listen, listen, you know we had dope, money, we had, like, three guns. Okay, but the car broke down on Dickerson Road, about a half a block from the Circle K, which we call the cop shops. It’s full of cops. I walked straight up in the store, police everywhere, I buy beer, I buy some cigarettes, a lighter, you know, like nothin’ happened, you know.”

  “Face the fear,” Perry said.

  “You’ve got to, we’ve got to.”

  They spoke briefly about taking precautions with the evidence, particularly the kind left behind from firing a gun—gunpowder residue.

  “Gun powder on your hands,” Perry said.

  “I know, look, you know, when you shoot a . . . handgun . . . but like, you know, there’s ways around that type of stuff.” “Gloves,” Perry said.

  “Exactly, gloves, long sleeves, and look . . . I’m gonna get a silencer, too. They’re expensive as hell to get, but I know I can get one. I can get all of that, and look the way that I go about gettin’ me the gun and all this type stuff, I’m gonna get more than one gun, but, I mean, you know, as far as I know that you won’t tell on me, Perry, and, look, let me assure you of something, Perry, if I got caught—”

  “I don’t wanna hear it. . . .”

  “Well, but I mean we’ve got to look at everything.”

  “I don’t wanna hear it. . . . We have everything under control. . . .”

  “Well, look, I guarantee you I’m not gonna get caught,” Farris assured Perry. “Okay. Look, when I do this, look it’s gonna be so quick. . . . Here’s what’s in my head, here’s what I want to do. I want to find out where they’re stayin’at this apartment. . . . I’ll wait till they go back in the house, if I can’t find where this apartment is. Both of them there, knock on the door, boom boom. I don’t touch nothin’, nothin’ . . . they’re gone; you know what I’m sayin’? The only, you know, the only thing that my presence, the only thing if anybody else’s presence being there is, is four bullets.”

  “What?”

  “Four bullets.”

  “I don’t know if they have video cameras in this apartment,” Perry said.

  “Look, don’t worry about that, Perry. I wear wigs . . . gold plates that go over your teeth, you know. Look, I put on a ski mask, but before I put ’em on, look here, Perry; look here at me. From here to here, I paint it brown, put on a ski mask; you know I look like some black guy with gold teeth. Another thing, now look, take wigs, put ’em in a ponytail, put hats on like—”

  “Maybe you can . . . when they’re gettin’ in a car or something,” Perry suggested.

  “Exactly. If I could catch ’em both gettin’ into the car, it’s over. . . . Perry, I don’t plan on, I don’t plan on gettin’ caught, and look, Perry, I don’t plan on going back to prison for these other charges I’ve got, either. What I plan on doing is, is—”

  “Going to Mexico,” Perry reminded him.

  “Going to Mex, yeah exactly, going to Mexico with you and . . . Sammy . . . and . . . Zul?”

  “Tzipi,” Perry corrected him.

  “Tzipi. I want us, you know, and . . . the dog, Snowball?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Snowball and Diamond,” Farris added, referring to Perry’s dogs. “I want us on the, on the beach somewhere.”

  “We will be.”

  “I know we will be—”

  “We will be. I just tell you on trusting, don’t even have one shade of doubt about my dad. . . .”

  “Look here, the reason why I’m not doubtin’ your dad—for one, he’s your dad; for two, he’s your dad.”

  “I want you to know that we’re like, like this,” Perry said, indicating the closeness between him and his father.

  Perry and Farris agreed that Arthur March would be the contact person in Mexico, and not Carmen. Perry also cautioned Farris against doing anything that would cause the police to look for him in Mexico.

  “I know . . . I’m gonna tell you . . . where the police are gonna look. They’re gonna look in East Nashville.”

  “Of course,” Perry agreed.

  “Well, you know, I don’t even think that they will come and question me. But if they do, well, look, look, what they’re gonna be thinkin’ is that this was, you know, they’re gonna make up some story, ‘Well, he, you know, his hit man from Singapore . . .’”

  “They’ll charge me with it,” Perry said.

  “But you’ll beat it.”

  “I know.”

  “But look, you know, I don’t think that they’re gonna think about me, you know, they might come and question me and try to, well, you know, ‘If you know anything about him,’ and I’m gonna say, ‘Hey, man, look, dude, I don’t know much . . .’ I’m gonna say, ‘He was some fuckin’ petty-ass lawyer or somethin’. I used to talk to him and he’d give me food.’”

  “That’s it,” Perry agreed.

  “You know what I’m sayin’? ‘I’d talk to him because I wanted candy bars and envelopes and—’”

  “And he wanted to know what prison looked like,” Perry added. “You just call my dad up on Monday.”

  After some more small talk, Perry laid out the plan, or what he had envisioned as the plan, that Farris would follow in communicating with his dad. He said that his dad would be communicating via e-mail.

  “He sends an e-mail to my sister, right?” Perry said.

  “Okay.”

  “Then she prints and then sends it to me in regular mail,” Perry said. “So, I get it, like, in three or four or five days right? In normal mail from Chicago, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Here’s the way we’re gonna do it,” Perry said. “I’ve got this old BMW down in Mexico. Just call it the BMW, okay? We’re gonna have two stings, okay? We’re gonna talk about them; sellin’ the BMW . . . the BMW is gonna equate to our thing we’re talking about here. It’s gonna be the same thing . . . so, here’s what you’re gonna do. Once you establish a rapport with my dad, you’re gonna have my dad send a message through an e-mail, which is, ‘Bobby Givings is gonna buy the BMW.’ Tell my dad, e-mail Perry and say Bobby Givings is gonna buy the BMW. Okay, now . . . that should be
at least a few days before you do anything.”

  “Okay.”

  “So that way . . . you can say don’t sell it. . . . And don’t sell it, means don’t do it.

  “Okay.”

  “Or Bobby Givings can’t find a way to buy the BMW now. He’s gonna buy it next month . . . got it? When I get my dad’s e-mail, I’ll just call my sister and tell her that, and I can send my dad an e-mail that says tell, uh, you know, tell Mr. Givings that I’m not ready to sell it. . . . You get that part of it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, that’s real important,” Perry said. “What makes my stomach hurt is when Bobby Givings buys the BMW . . . it’s gonna be all over the news, it’s gonna be all over the national news.”

  “You think, you think it’ll be on national news?”

  “Hundred percent.”

  Chapter 24

  Pridemore and Postiglione found it amazing as they listened to the recorded conversations between Perry March and Nathaniel Farris that Perry could plan the cold-blooded murders of his children’s grandparents and speak his children’s names in the same breath. In their minds he could be nothing less than a scumbag.

  “When we heard him talk about, ‘Make sure you do it when the kids are not there,’ we just found it incredible,” Postiglione recalled.

  “With his hatred of the Levines,” Pridemore said, “he starts calculating how much better his case will be if they were gone.”

  “They were in discussions about killing the Levines five minutes into the first conversation,” Postiglione said. “He thought he had Nate wrapped around his finger. The truth is, Nate had him wrapped around his finger.”

  “Look, Perry, the main thing is that you’re here, okay. And, look, you know, I’m not, you know I’m not gonna run when I do it now,” Farris said as he and Perry continued their jailhouse conversations.

  “You can’t,” Perry responded. “You can’t do anything that compromises (inaudible). . . .”

  “I promise you that,” Farris said. “But, look, you just promise me that once I do leave, that I’m gonna be okay in Mexico.”

  “You establish that yourself, with my dad—”

  “Okay, yeah, yeah, exactly. I just, you know, I’m just . . . All I’m doin’, Perry, is just reassuring myself; you know what I’m sayin’? Because . . .”

  “No question in my mind. When I get out of jail and I (inaudible) set up in my restaurant, you’re set up forever in business (inaudible). . . .”

  Perry went over the plan again with Farris, reiterating the codes that they had set up, using the name Bobby Givings, the e-mail and telephone communications with Arthur March, and the “sale” of the old BMW Perry left behind in Mexico.

  “My dad’s the key,” Perry said.

  “Whenever you showed me the picture of him, I can see just, you know that, he kinda looks like the chief Indian or somethin’, you know what I mean?”

  “He’s totally cool,” Perry said.

  At another point, after telling Farris to not draw attention to himself after completing the job, and to just let the police think that “Mexican hit men” or “guys from Singapore” had done the job, Perry raised a point of concern regarding his father.

  “They’ll investigate my dad,” Perry said. “Where was my dad? Where was my brother? I’m glad I thought about it; when you talk with my dad, or my dad talks with you, and somethin’ happens, they’re gonna investigate my dad. The FBI’s gonna be in Mexico and they’re gonna check my dad’s phone records, his bank accounts, and everything. . . . They’ll lead ’em right back to you. . . .”

  “Well, look, no, I thought about this. When I call your dad, I’m gonna call from a secure line. And what I mean by that is, like, it’ll probably be . . . a cell phone out of New Jersey—”

  “Okay, perfect. . . . Anytime, you make sure that he never calls on a phone that can be traced because they’ll have phone records.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want him callin’ me,” Farris said.

  “I know, I know.”

  “The first time I call him, it’s gonna be very brief. And, like, when I talk to him, I’m gonna let him know through some of these codes that, you just know, that I’m for real.”

  “And tell him he’s gonna get a confirmation from Perry. . . . through Kathy . . . an e-mail . . . that Bobby Givings . . . is lookin’ to buy the BMW.”

  “I’m gonna have ta write that down.”

  “Just think of the BMW.”

  “Kathy, okay, yeah, but see, like, I’ll forget Kathy and all that shit. See that’s one of the things I fear about, too, Perry, is me forgettin’ little bitty things, ’cause when I call and, you know, I say the wrong thing and it spooks him, and he never talks to me again.”

  “The key for you is to be thinkin’ about the trails of evidence,” Perry said. “Think about everything you touch, everywhere you go. Video or recorded, there’s links. We have to make sure there’s zero links tying us and the reason we have to make sure there’s zero links tying us is so that they’re not thinking that you’re in Mexico. Hold on.”

  There was a lengthy pause before Perry continued.

  “We got to be careful (inaudible). I don’t want to be (inaudible), fifty-fifty shot against second degree (inaudible) and then give that up and get nailed on the first degree,” Perry said.

  “That’s not gonna happen, Perry,” Farris said. “Perry, look here, before I would let that happen, I’d take my own life.”

  “No, I don’t want you to do that. . . . You know, what I really want, I just want two years from now . . . living alone and havin’ money and just relaxing and goof in’ around and we can do jobs whenever we want. . . . That’s what I really want. . . . I’m just gonna tell you, it’s going to turn huge when something happens to them.”

  “But, look, ain’t you gonna love it, though?”

  “Uh-huh,” Perry acknowledged.

  “Think about it,” Farris said, laughing. “I mean, really think about it.”

  “Oh, oh yeah, you know, there’s no question,” Perry responded, “as long as my kids are safe. . . . There’s no question, but what I’m saying to you is that the day the DA is gonna come in for me like a fuckin’, like a kissing dog did to a cat.”

  “Fuck him,” Farris said. “Look here, Perry. He can, but he won’t. You know what he’s gonna do?”

  “Nothin’ .”

  “Exactly, nothin’,” Farris agreed.

  Perry expressed his relief again that Duffer was gone, that he had been moved to a different section of the jail or had been released, because it suddenly gave them a chance to talk without being overheard, to begin making plans to murder the Levines. Perry told Farris that Duffer’s departure had been a “sign of God,” and that he had been praying for a solution to his problem every night for the past three weeks, asking for God’s help.

  At another point in the conversation, Perry reminded Farris again about keeping his children safe when he killed the Levines. Farris brought up the issue of whether or not the Levines kept a safe in their house, and Perry told him that he didn’t know whether they did or not. He did say, however, that he knew that they had an alarm system in the house—Sammy had told him about it.

  “The kids will be at school and they’ll both be home, and they’ll both be working on my case,” Perry said, relating a possible scenario to Farris about where the children would be when it came time for him to do his job. “Or they’ll both be, you know, he’ll come to the office for an hour or he’ll come back at night again—”

  “Hey, hey, wouldn’t it be crazy if I caught ’em and they was workin’ on the case?”

  “Yeah,” Perry responded.

  “I’d take every bit of information they had,” Farris said, referring to information that they had undoubtedly put together about Perry.

  “Yeah.”

  “You hear me,” Farris said. “Why, no, I wouldn’t, either; I wouldn’t touch that, but I will tear up the walls and everythin
g, like I’m there looking for somethin’ specific. I would take their rings and you know—”

  “But I think there’s plenty of opportunities when my kids aren’t there,” Perry said. “Carolyn stays at home all the time.”

  “Aw, well, look that’s good,” Farris said. “I’m not messed up with stayin’ in the house with Carolyn for, you know, four or five hours waitin’ on old Lawrence to come home.”

  “Yeah, but the problem is that her brother could come over. . . . My sister-in-law could be bringin’ Tzipi . . . back.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Well, I’m not just gonna watch ’em for two or three days,” Farris said. “You feel me? I’m gonna watch ’em a lot longer, you know, people have patterns, you know what I mean? And, like you know, too, we might get lucky, you know, like they might have a paper delivered and they come and get the paper. You know they walk out to get the paper, or, you know, they might have like when they come out to get the mail out of the mailbox, just anything. I’ll find their patterns, and, you know, I’m just gonna have to time it right and it’s not that hard.”

  “No, it’s not,” Perry agreed. “It’s just havin’ the balls and goin’ and havin’ good instinct.”

  “Look here, balls and that’s it; balls and instinct,” Farris said. “You know, listen to your gut.”

  “The thing you have to remember,” Perry said, “is that you gotta clear the house of kids, make sure there’s no kids there. . . . And then you have to wait for the opportunity of when they’re together . . . and then you leave no trace of evidence!”

  They talked briefly of making the murders look like they were the product of a burglary or a robbery, and spoke of somehow getting the fingerprints of another person onto the murder weapon, most likely a gun.

  “Well, the idea of makin’ it look like a burglary/robbery, that’s good,” Farris said.

  “Exactly; you get a weapon or a club or crowbar held on to by somebody else,” Perry said.