Lethal Intent

by Sue Russell

  Cammie Greene was firmly ensconced in Ty’s life before Lee came along. There was little Lee could do about that, although waves of jealousy surged over her about Ty’s attachment to the pretty young woman. Lee was resentfully fearful of the fact they seemed to enjoy each other so much. Then again, Cammie was married. Safely preoccupied with Dinky and the boys. At the end of the day, Lee could warm herself with the knowledge that Ty chose to stay with her, not with Cammie. Crucially, when Lee told Ty that they were moving on, she went along with the plan.

  Sandy Russell presented Lee with a different kind of threat, as did the Casa Del Mar itself, with its extra-curricular team spirit.

  As always in her life, Lee was excluded from the team.

  Ty had made friends with some of the staff. Unhampered by her size, she joined the hotel volleyball team, adding an after-hours activity to her life in which Lee had no part.

  The separations while Lee went on her highway sorties seemed a necessary evil. They badly needed the money, but they made Lee nervous all the same and she kept them to a minimum. She was infinitely happier out there if she knew that Ty was lying around at home alone, just waiting for her to return.

  ‘I make a hundred and fifty dollars a day and you only make a hundred and fifty dollars a week. I’ll support you!’ Lee grandly proclaimed when they first met, persuading Ty to be a stay-at-home wife. Her greater earning power and the knowledge that she had the means to take care of her lover were crucial to Lee’s tenuous hold on any sense of security. The calculation was quite simple: while she was Ty’s mainstay of support, she felt less afraid of being abandoned.

  On the other hand, Ty’s pay was regular and Ty liked her job. The Casa Del Mar became an important part of Ty’s life, whether Lee liked it or not.

  So did Sandy. Ty made no secret of how much she loved her company at work and after hours. To Lee, Ty’s pretty, unattached friend represented a threatening combination. Sandy was supposedly straight, but who knew? She kept coming around to the Burleigh apartment for a few beers, or they’d go out and visit a bar or two. Lee liked her though, in spite of herself.

  Sandy wasn’t so fond of Lee, however nice and sweet and friendly she tried to be. For one thing, Sandy grew tired of Lee’s hunger to be the centre of attention the whole time. When they were trying to pay attention to a video, it was wearing the way Lee kept turning to Ty and demanding, ‘Hold me! Hold me!’ Downright annoying. Just like a big kid, Sandy thought. ‘Shut up!’ Ty admonished Lee, without taking her eyes off the screen. Duly reprimanded, Lee would briefly fall silent, but the attention-getting behaviour soon started up all over again. She seemed driven to make everyone focus on her and she’d do whatever it took.

  Sandy’s deepening friendship with Ty, however, amply compensated for her growing dislike of Lee and the discomfort she felt around her. Sandy was no stranger to difficult partners who had to be catered to, and didn’t sit in judgement.

  Despite her and Ty’s core difference in sexual orientation, they’d become like soul sisters, sharing secrets and exchanging confidences, spending long hours chewing over the minutiae of their personal lives.

  Of course, Ty’s chewing over had severe limitations. Ty had trouble admitting to herself what Lee had done to Richard Mallory; hell might have to freeze over before she’d voluntarily admit it to someone else. Talking about it would have made it seem more real. No, it was best buried.

  Sandy, who was blissfully unaware of her friend’s shocking, black secret, had already decided that for Ty’s sake she would endure Lee and her foibles. Since Ty and Lee were all but joined at the hip, it was the price Sandy had to pay.

  Ty, with her irresistible, simpatico sense of humour, provided a veritable ray of sunshine in Sandy’s otherwise rather grey and mundane life. They had even more fun during football season when Ty carted a small, portable television set into the laundry room and the two avid sports fans raucously cheered on their teams. Ty favoured the Georgia Bulldogs, Sandy the Cleveland Browns. Good-naturedly lobbing repartee—and hotel towels—back and forth, made the work go easier.

  Their colleagues, who weren’t privy to the intimate conversational shorthand that developed between them, affectionately decided they were both nuts. Both Sandy and Ty were popular. Witnessing the two women’s special rapport and affection for one another, some also questioned the exact nature of Ty and Sandy’s relationship. Inevitably, rumours flew. They were lovers. They were sleeping together. They were having a mad affair. Sandy and Ty had a good chuckle about it, then promptly ignored it. Nothing they couldn’t handle.

  In truth, Ty’s preference for women came as a relief to Sandy, who had few women friends. With Ty, there was none of that competitive stuff that had soured so many of her other relationships with women. Sandy was definitely of the shy rather than flirtatious or sexually aggressive type, yet somehow that only enhanced her considerable appeal to men. As a result, she found women often took a dislike to her without even knowing her. She’d grown used to them making superficial, unfavourable judgements about her based on her looks, then leaping to their erroneous assumptions that she was out to poach their husbands or boyfriends.

  Sandy certainly didn’t have to worry about Ty thinking she was coming on to Lee! And whatever Ty’s underlying feelings might have been for Sandy (particularly when the going got rough with Lee), she treated her with too much respect ever to complicate their friendship by making any moves toward her. It was all nice and simple.

  You didn’t need to be Einstein to see how head over heels in love with Ty Lee was, and Sandy put Lee’s possessiveness down to that love. It accounted for the way Lee tried to keep Ty on a taut rein. Ty and Lee’s relationship was fiery, though. Sometimes their fights turned physical and they’d slap one another or wrestle around on the floor. Lee prided herself on being tough, but Ty was no featherweight pushover, mentally or physically. Built like the mascot of her favourite Georgia Bulldogs, it was hard for anyone to put one over on her, and that included Lee. They were pretty evenly matched.

  Gary Kopietz had decided way back when Lee was a teenage prostitute that cigarettes were her downfall, but alcohol would have been a more appropriate culprit to earmark. No one knew better than Ty, who had learned it to her detriment, that Lee was transformed into a totally different person when she drank. Over the years, Ty had seen her go on some real cataclysmic binges. Ty liked to put away the beers, too, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Lee. The woman was a bottomless pit. With every drink that passed her lips, she grew louder and more boisterous. When she tipped over the line from obnoxious to aggressive, though, she’d never once hurt Ty. If anything, she was downright protective of her, just as she used to be with Lori.

  Lee repeatedly told Ty how much she loved her.

  She would do anything for her.

  She even said she would die for her.

  When Ty and Lee finally dropped the party line about Lee having a pressure-cleaning business and keeping her equipment in a white van down in Orlando, Sandy was hardly shocked. But on hearing that Lee was ‘a call girl’, she couldn’t help wondering about Lee’s ability to draw customers. With her beer belly and butch outfits (sleeveless white T-shirts sometimes worn without a bra, and cut-off jeans), she hardly struck Sandy as any kind of seductress. Prostitution was an odd career choice for someone who so loathed men. But Sandy often gave Lee a ride to the interstate and watched her walk off into the distance, carrying her little blue bag, looking for rides. And now she learned that Lee’s modus operandi as a hitchhiking prostitute was to work exit to exit, getting into anywhere from eight to fifteen strangers’ cars a day, and generally having sex with three, six, sometimes as many as eight of them. If one guy turned down her offer, she’d simply get out at the next exit and start all over again.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of being out there hitchhiking and getting in a car with anybody?’ Sandy asked, rather in awe of this bravery—or foolhardiness.

  ‘I carry my gun. I’m not afraid,’ Lee repli
ed with a shrug.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of getting AIDS?’ Sandy persisted.

  ‘I use condoms, even for head,’ Lee retorted, very matter-of-factly.

  Ty didn’t like Lee turning tricks, but Ty did like partying and was perfectly willing to help Lee spend her money. Her usual haul could be anywhere from $20 to a hundred, maybe more. Later, Lee complained of Ty’s extravagance. Ty was a spendthrift who frittered away her hard-earned cash, whereas she, Lee, was so frugal, so dedicated to saving up to buy a house, that she was reduced to wearing a bra held together with Band-Aids. Lee scathingly accused Ty of only being interested in going to the mall on spending sprees. Ty repeatedly put pressure on her to get out there and spread her legs, Lee alleged. ‘She was constantly telling me I wasn’t making enough money.’

  Whether Ty’s goal was in fact to send her girlfriend out onto the streets with renewed vigour, or to push her into getting a proper job, depended upon who was telling the story.

  Sandy was only grateful for Lee’s absences which she considered a blessing. Sometimes, she was only gone for a few hours, but occasionally she disappeared overnight. Ty didn’t seem to mind either. Ty and Sandy hung out together and watched TV without interruption.

  As the summer rolled around, Ty began focusing her attention on the impending visit of her 18-year-old half-sister, Tracey Moore. Tracey planned to come down to Florida from Ohio during her college summer break so she could spend some time with Ty and combine a vacation with some kind of job. Excited at the prospect, Ty began fantasising about all the things they could do together. Tracey needed to make money for school and Ty was confident that she could get her in at the Casa Del Mar. On the strength of those assurances, Ty’s parents, Jack and Mary Ann, sprang for Tracey’s air ticket.

  Tracey, who did not know Ty was gay, was woefully unprepared for the rude awakening awaiting her in Florida. She had not been warned that Ty and her friend Lee were lovers, let alone about Lee’s antisocial behaviour.

  Ty worked out the sleeping arrangements so that Tracey slept in the upstairs portion of the small, split level apartment, while she and Lee stayed together down below.

  Watching her sister and Lee interact, Tracey soon suspected that it wasn’t just a regular friendship. Only later, piecing together fragments of comments made by her parents, did she find out for sure.

  Her more immediate problem was dealing with Lee. She didn’t know what to make of her. No sooner had she unpacked her bags than Lee was asking if she ever did dope? No, Tracey said flatly. It was just that sometimes she got paid for her pressure-cleaning work with something other than money, or people gave her bonuses, Lee explained.

  Lee also pointedly told Tracey that things were very tight financially. Someone had stiffed her in her business, then some substance she’d been exposed to on her job had made her sick, so Ty had been struggling to pay all the rent and they’d fallen a few months behind.

  Tracey, who was ready to knuckle down to work, had no intention of lazing around and living off the fat of the land. She would pull her weight. And Ty was as good as her word. Tracey flew in on a Thursday in mid-May and the very next day, was hired by the Casa Del Mar. The sisters were thrilled. Working alongside one another in housekeeping, which carried a staff of close to thirty, they’d see lots of each other.

  Revelling in their reunion, they were oblivious to the effect they were having on Lee. She didn’t like the rival for Ty’s attention or affections one little bit. Lee’s perception of things was warped, misguided, and often blatantly wrong, but it was irrefutably how she saw the world. And at this moment Lee’s world was inhabited by looming forces who threatened her very being.

  Tracey couldn’t possibly have known that just her presence activated some of Lee’s deepest, most persistent fears of being abandoned by Ty. As the person in the relationship more afraid of being left, Lee was intensely vulnerable. And Tracey represented a dark threat to her shaky sense of well-being. She was not only a potent competitor for Ty’s attention but was also, Lee decided, a spoiled little brat. Miss Goody Two-Shoes. Didn’t drink. Didn’t smoke. What did she do? How could she possibly fit in with them if she didn’t drink?

  Tracey, viewing her sister’s relationship from the outside, heard Lee constantly talk about leaving to go to work, but it seemed there was far more talk than action. Lee’s promises were just so much hot air. Tracey had no clue how hard it was for Lee to leave. Lee’s worst fear was that Tracey might somehow talk Ty into leaving her, or might persuade her to go back to Ohio with her.

  Tracey was no fonder of Lee than Lee was of her, not that she knew much about her. She didn’t even know her last name, although she thought it was Polish and began with a ‘B’. Lee gradually unfurled a potted (and heavily edited) life history, saying she’d been married and divorced when she was very young, and that her ex-husband, whom she called ‘fuck face’, was very wealthy.

  To Tracey, Lee just seemed downright odd. When Tracey registered her surprise that people didn’t always lock their doors, the next thing she knew, Lee, quite unsolicited, wandered up to her bedroom and handed her a black nightstick with an engraved knob at one end and a leather grasp strap. The weapon was just to keep with her in case she ever needed it. Lee said she had a gun in her room, too, should Tracey ever need that.

  Tracey also found Lee completely unpredictable. Nice one minute, screaming her head off the next. Not someone she could imagine ever wanting to get close to. Heaven knows what her sister saw in her. Tracey never saw Lee being physically aggressive, but she certainly talked enough about violence. That, and hating cops. Something held Tracey back from asking just why she loathed them so much. Just as something held her back from asking about blood she saw on some clothes and shoes one day when she was doing laundry.

  It was when Lee was drunk—which was often—that Tracey truly dreaded being around her. ‘That is when she really got violent. Not violent but … kind of out of control … loud, boisterous, ’ she observed.

  When it came to beer, Lee drank anything, whatever was on the table, but heaven help them if someone offered her a shot of spirit and she got into whisky or vodka. That really sent her over the top.

  Lee showed no concern about fitting in with the rest of the world and blasted out her music so loudly that no one else could hear themselves think. Anyone telling her to turn it down sent her off the deep end.

  Just living in her presence, waiting for the next explosion, made Tracey horribly tense and uncomfortable. She was shocked, too, that when Ty and Lee got into one of their petty arguments, her sister backed down. That was totally uncharacteristic. Unheard of. She’d never known Ty back down to anyone. And Ty, in so many ways, had the stronger personality of the two.

  Summing up her feelings about Lee, Tracey admitted, ‘I was just plain scared to death of her.’

  19

  As ex-husbands go, 47-year-old David Spears rated somewhere around dream come true. He was predictable, honest, hardworking, responsible, a man you could count on. Their divorce notwithstanding, David still cared enough for Dee, his wife of twenty years and companion of twenty-six, regularly to hand her a good chunk of his pay cheque from Universal Concrete. A shy, soft-spoken giant of a man, 6 feet 4 inches, bearded, greying and weather-lined from his outdoor lifestyle, David was everyone’s idea of a nice guy. Quiet, and something of a loner. David and Dee, childhood sweethearts, met and fell in love in their native Kentucky when she was fifteen, he twenty-one. They married a year later. They’d divorced in ’84, if you followed those pieces of paper, yet as man and woman they were unwilling and unable to stay apart. They were living under the same roof the day their divorce was finalised. Not only did the divorce not take, their remarrying was on the cards once their daughter, Deanna, had graduated. David bought Dee an engagement ring in April.

  A creature of habit, David’s weekend ritual was to go to stay with Dee. The mother of his three children lived just short of a hundred miles away in Winter Garden, near Orlando.
On Saturdays, after signing out at his job as a loading supervisor, he hopped into his cream pick-up and headed on over. His usual route, certainly the most direct, was to go north from Sarasota on I-75, then flip east on I-4. He spent weeknights in a rented trailer, so he customarily arrived clutching an accumulation of dirty laundry.

  Just before lunchtime on Friday 18 May 1990 David called Dee and told her to expect him somewhere between 2 and 2.30 the next day. Definitely no later than 3, he promised. He’d be bringing her a special gift, a sleek, black, ceramic panther that stood about ten inches high. He loved indulging her and her passion for big cats and pretty clothes. He’d also have the cash so they could run out and shop for Deanna’s birthday on the 23rd, and her upcoming graduation. God, he was so proud of Deanna. Hard to believe his little baby girl was all grown up.

  When Saturday rolled round, David waved goodbye to his colleagues at Universal Concrete at 2.10 p.m. after sharing a quick beer with them outside in the parking lot. He had a busy afternoon ahead. His son Jeff, who worked alongside him, tried to get him to go to a bar. ‘No, I’m going home to your mama,’ David replied.

  But David simply did not materialise in Winter Garden. No phone call, no message, nothing.

  He made his fateful decision and opened the door of his pickup to her somewhere near route 27. 27 intersects with I-4 just 36 miles from his Winter Garden destination. He’d have been at Dee’s within thirty minutes. He might have stopped for gas. Most likely, she flagged him down on some pretext.

  When it was all over, she, the only living witness, who could say whatever she liked about these men unchallenged—and did—claimed that even though it took him clear out of his way, David Spears willingly agreed to drive her to Homosassa Springs. Even though it would inevitably make him late (and how late, he could never imagine), he simply took off in the opposite direction.