Read Online If You Only Knew by M. William Phelps - Free Book Online

Billie Jean found Vonlee sitting down by herself over in a corner. Vonlee was crying.
    â€œI can’t do this,” Vonlee said, looking up.
    Billie Jean stared at her. She looked around to make sure no one was listening to them.
    â€œI was so out of it at that point,” Vonlee later recalled, thinking back. “I could not even function. I was so sick.” The situation, as Vonlee saw it then, was strikingly opposite to what she had been used to ever since moving in with her aunt and uncle. When Vonlee first got to the house, she noticed her aunt was depressed and always angry, down and out, lying around a lot, sleeping late, not doing much of anything. Vonlee, meanwhile, was a ball of fire like her old party self, wanting to go out and own the night. Now, after Don’s death, it was as if they had changed places. “I became depressed and docile as Billie became lively and always up.”
    Billie Jean became agitated, according to Vonlee. “Stand up,” she said, grabbing Vonlee by the shoulders.
    â€œBillie, I . . . I . . . ,” Vonlee started to say before breaking down crying.
    â€œYou have to pull yourself together,” her aunt said. “Or you are going to have to leave right now.”

CHAPTER 12
    BILLIE JEAN AND VONLEE were at the Rogers household. It was midafternoon, August 17. “Vonlee, where are you?” Billie Jean said, looking for her niece inside the house. “Vonlee?” she yelled.
    Vonlee was upstairs. “What is it?”
    â€œCome with me, I want to go somewhere.”
    That afternoon, the two found themselves perusing the lot at Suburban Oldsmobile and Cadillac Buick on Maplelawn Drive in Troy. Don had not been dead a week and Billie Jean had her eye on a brand-new, flashy, fully loaded Cadillac. She’d always wanted one. Don would never part with the money. Now was her chance.
    Ultimately, she chose a Cadillac Seville Touring Sedan (STS).
    â€œCan we take it out for a ride?” the newly minted widow asked the salesperson.
    She and Vonlee were gone for about fifteen minutes. When they returned, Billie Jean was all smiles. She said she wanted a sunroof put in and also “OnStar, with a one-year subscription.”
    Done and done, said the salesperson.
    She also wanted the dealer rebate that was being offered.
    â€œYou got it!”
    With a deal in place, Billie Jean took out her checkbook, wrote a check for one hundred dollars and handed it to the salesman. “I’ll take it. When can you have it ready?”
    â€œI’ll call you,” he said.
    Four days later, on August 21, 2000, the dealer called to tell her that the car was all set; she could pick it up.
    She arrived sometime later, once again with Vonlee. She handed over a cashier’s check for the balance: $50,676. 80. This money was paper to Billie Jean, it appeared. The way she had been spending since Don’s death was in itself a sign of a woman either in desperate and severe grief and mourning, or someone who had no concept of money. In the days before his death, Don Rogers was very active with his Merrill Lynch accounts, buying stocks and bonds and growth funds, working with his money to insure it continued to grow. And yet, no sooner did he pass away, than his widow began selling off the stocks and bonds in big numbers. Just days before showing up to buy the Cadillac, for example, four days after Don had died, she sold ten thousand dollars’ worth of funds, of which she would be penalized for selling off early. What’s more, between August 17 and the week after, Billie Jean had one hundred seventy thousand in cash transferred by wire to her bank accounts. In addition, on the day she bought the Caddy, she made a thirteen-hundred-dollar purchase at U.S. Jewelers, a store that Vonlee’s boyfriend owned. In the days following that, she made another four-hundred-dollar purchase at U.S. Jewelers and spent upward of nearly two thousand dollars on