If You Only Knew by M. William Phelps Page B

much.
    â€œHe’s on the floor,” Danny explained. “So [Vonlee] said they start pouring alcohol, vodka, in his mouth.”
    â€œWhy are you wasting this good vodka on him?” Vonlee supposedly asked her aunt when she realized what Billie Jean was doing.
    â€œThe way they [did] it was one of them would hold his nose [and] he cannot breathe, [so] he opens his mouth,” Danny said.
    â€œLet’s get some cheap vodka,” Vonlee allegedly told her aunt.
    â€œAnd he would not die,” Danny continued. “She said that he would not die. When they were doing that, she said . . . he was playing with [Vonlee’s] boobs.”
    â€œYou’ve got to help me, Vonlee,” Billie Jean said at that point. “You need to help.”
    At this point, with Don on the floor still alive and breathing, but totally out of it, Billie Jean allegedly told Vonlee that she would “up the money from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand.”
    Money?
    Danny gave the impression later that Vonlee said she and her aunt had made some sort of monetary agreement ahead of time: Billie Jean would pay Vonlee if she helped her kill Don.
    â€œIf he wakes up tomorrow, Vonlee, he’ll know what we’ve done and there will be big trouble,” Billie Jean said. “We’ve got to do it right now!”
    As Danny later told this story in court, he explained how Vonlee, every time she tried to help her aunt, couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. She’d hold his nose, but when he gasped for air, she’d let go and back away, scared and unwilling to follow through with a deed she apparently wanted no part of doing.
    â€œI cannot do this, Billie. I just can’t.”
    According to Danny, Billie Jean then got really pissed off at her niece.
    â€œYou’re no help.”
    Danny said Vonlee told him that her aunt then left the room in a huff and came back sometime later with something in her hands.
    A pillow.
    While they sat inside the car outside the restaurant in the casino parking lot, by using her upper body to dramatize what happened next, Vonlee supposedly explained and demonstrated to Danny that her aunt had placed the pillow over Don’s head and finished the job, suffocating her husband until he breathed no more.
    â€œWe threw the pillow and the empty bottles of vodka on the freeway,” Vonlee told Danny. Vonlee was crying. She was upset. Yet, at the same time, she was quite relieved she’d gotten it off her chest.
    â€œCome on, let’s go back inside,” Danny suggested.
    As they walked toward the casino, Danny still felt that Vonlee might be lying about being a man. He had no idea why she would do such a thing, but based on what he had seen and the sex he’d had with her, it was hard for Danny to fathom that she was a male.
    They found Billie Jean by a craps table.
    â€œGive me some money,” Vonlee told her aunt.
    Danny stood by and watched as Billie Jean took out a bankroll, peeled off several hundred-dollar bills, then opened up a small notebook and marked inside how much she had given Vonlee, as if keeping tabs for some reason.
    The next day, Vonlee met Danny at his house.
    â€œShow me,” Danny said. He was back on the male/ female thing. It was clear he was serious.
    Vonlee felt she had no choice at this point. She dropped her pants.
    And he sat in total amazement, staring at a very small penis.
    â€œYou believe me now?” Vonlee said, lifting her trousers back up.

CHAPTER 23
    DANNY CHAHINE WAS AT home a day after he learned not only that he had been dating (and had had sex with) a man he mistakenly thought was a woman, but also what he believed to be the truth about Don Rogers’s death: the guy had been murdered.
    Who was more culpable, Vonlee or Billie Jean? That was not for Danny to decide. What Danny needed to do was think about his next move. Danny had information about a murder. What he did with that information