The Art of Making Money (14 page)

“I never knew what he was up to, but I had my suspicions,” says Magers. “He always had money, and I’d ask him how he got it. He’d say it was payday, then I’d ask him for a stub and he’d have another excuse. I was always the investigator trying to crack the case! But then I’d just get tired of arguing with him.”

Williams found the double life exciting, Karen’s inquisitions a turn-on. “I’d tease her,” he says, “I’d tell her she was a wannabe cop.” Their fights, which were frequent and fierce, often led to explosive sex, and as long as it didn’t interfere with his new lifestyle, Art was content to let the loop play out and reset indefinitely. He attributed Karen’s outbursts to jealousy over the fact that he was happy with his life, even if it was a lie.

“I
was
jealous,” she admits. “Here I am taking care of the baby, and he’s doing whatever the hell he wanted, lying to me about it. Things always came easy to him. I didn’t know he was counterfeiting, but when I found out years later I wasn’t surprised. He was good at anything he set his mind to. If he put half the energy into just a job, he’d probably make good money anyway.”

But pretending to be a cop was more than a game to Karen. The baby had merely put a hold on her dream. When Art III was four years old, she placed him in day care and took a job waiting tables. And just as Art’s own mother had fallen in love with a criminal by serving him coffee, she met a cop.

His name was Ned Fagan. He was a Chicago PD lieutenant, in his late forties and on the verge of retirement, and ran a security company on the side. He didn’t laugh when Karen told him about her dreams, but instead offered her an office job at his firm. She took it, and suddenly Karen was not only talking about becoming a cop again, but she and Art were hanging out with them at weekend barbecues. At first Art was supportive; he thought becoming a cop would be good not just for her, but for him as well. Cops could be useful. One of his friends, Cyrus, was CPD, and back in his drug-pirate days Cyrus would run plates and names for Art. That usefulness, however, extended only as far as their friendship, and the more Art saw of Ned Fagan, the more he became convinced he was a facing an enemy.

Spoken or not, Fagan’s name seemed to pop up in every conversation Art had with Karen. He would have been a perfect antithesis except that in Art’s experience, half of Bridgeport cops were dirty. Art asked around and heard stories that Fagan’s side business sheltered corrupt cops who’d drawn too much attention on the force. When he told Karen about the rumors, she interpreted it as another attack on her dreams, which of course it partially was. In the ensuing fight, she took the baby and moved out, but according to Karen, the irony was that she still loved Art. “He was so paranoid about Ned Fagan that he couldn’t see it. Nothing was happening between me and Ned. I loved Art, but all of a sudden he became fixated, convinced that he was losing me to Ned. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The rivalry came to a head when Fagan called Karen’s apartment one day while Art was visiting. Art answered the phone, and when he heard Fagan’s voice he decided it was time to draw a line.

“I don’t care if you’re a cop or not, motherfucker,” Art hissed. “If you don’t stay away from my family we’ll both go down, you and me together.” Fagan hung up without responding.

Art’s threat completely backfired: Karen banned him from her apartment, and within a few weeks she was seeing the only man who seemed to understand her, Ned Fagan. Incensed with jealousy, Art began tailing Fagan, studying his patterns the way he used to surveil drug dealers. He noticed that the cop passed a dark stairway on his way to his apartment—and began planning an ambush. He went out and bought some piano wire, then looped the ends through two wooden handles he made in the Dungeon. His plan was to hide under the stairway by Fagan’s apartment, and as soon as the cop passed by, he’d drop it over his head, tug him back into the shadows, and quickly strangle him, leaving a minimal crime scene. He’d then throw the piano wire into the South Branch of the Chicago River and it would be done.

Art was on the verge of executing his plan to garrote Fagan when he received a phone call from his mother in Texas. Word had reached Malinda that Art was on the verge of losing it, and when she spoke to him she was at her best, with a lucidity and compassion that was worthy of the crisis. She was terrified for her son and would not take no for an answer. “She told me, ‘Listen, baby, will you please just come to Texas? Just come here and give it a shot, leave the city today. I feel something bad going on with you, please come.’ And I listened to her. I went, packed my clothes, went to the Greyhound bus station, and took a bus to Texas.”

6

TEXAS

Things haven’t worked out quite liked we planned, but that’s all right, because there’s no better place than Texas to start over. . . .

—JOHN CONNALLY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF TEXAS

 

 

 

 

Art sold off his printing equipment and vacated the Dungeon prior to leaving Chicago. In his anguish over losing Karen, he wanted to cut all ties to his old life. Counterfeiting and crime, he realized in a depressive epiphany, had caused him to lie, and lies were a major reason why his relationship had failed. Like that of a smoker throwing away a full pack, shutting down the Dungeon was a gesture intended to help propel him into a new life without temptation.

For a big-city criminal, Valley View, Texas, was a desert monastery. An eyeblink of a town about sixty miles north of Dallas, it consisted of about a hundred buildings, most of them one-story ranch homes hugging Interstate 35. The town’s population was about seven hundred, the majority of them blue-collar workers or dairymen who had farms in outlying plains. There was a bank, a couple of small stores, and one bar.

At the time Art arrived, Malinda was dating Evan Wright, a local who kept a small farm on the outskirts of town and also ran a construction firm. One of the ways she had enticed Art to come down to Texas was by convincing Wright to give Art both a construction job and a place of his own to live—an unused trailer on the side of Wright’s house. Since Art had construction experience from his days working with Morty Bello, he took to the work quickly. Young and pissed off at life, he could lug siding all day long, pushing for that moment when his anger momentarily dissipated through his sweat glands. He’d spend his days framing houses in nearby towns like Frisco and Plano, and at night he’d return to the trailer exhausted, sit outside on a lawn chair, and pound beers until he felt himself falling up toward the stars. He’d gone from inner city trash to trailer trash and it wasn’t so bad. The stars were lovely, and Texas had other, more earthly distractions as well.

One of Wright’s next-door neighbors was a blond, country-bred girl named Lucy Rasmussen. Art first glimpsed her when she stopped her car to say hello to Wright as they passed on the road. Evan introduced them and her Lone Star hospitality kicked right in. She dropped by a day later with some food, and after a few more visits he finally confessed some selective yet emotionally honest details of how Karen had shattered his heart beyond repair. He was convinced that it was a hopeless situation. If true love, the only good thing in the world, could be broken, then what was there left to believe in? Lucy sympathized completely and, with a solemn sense of purpose, set out to restore femininity to its rightful place.

“Oh, God, was she something,” Art muses. “A wild-ass country girl who knew how to have fun. Blond, big tits, slim waist, a deep drawl. She was always happy and really, really sweet. She’d even wear Daisy Dukes with her shirt tied up and everything.” Evan Wright’s ranch was ten acres, and on one corner of it sat dozens of old cars—a real redneck garden. Art’s favorite activity was to take Lucy out among the Chevys and Fords at the end of the day, when the cars had cooled and the sun was setting. She’d let her Daisy Dukes slip into the dust, perch herself her up on one of the hoods, and they’d go at it like demons while the glass and metal around them glowed gold.

Moments like those snapped Art back into the present, but Lucy quickly realized that Art’s broken heart was beyond even her capacity to heal. A few weeks after the rehabilitation project started, she confessed that she already had a boyfriend, but wanted to introduce him to some friends of hers from the nearby college town of Denton, home to Texas Women’s University. At a party later that week, he found himself sitting with Lucy and three new women, all of them Texans. The new girls—Janet, Susan, and Natalie—had not only also been raised in the comparatively Spartan cultural confines of North Texas, but had the added insulation of having been brought up as conservative Christians, ingrained with the kind of sensual and moral taboos that Art happily violated on a regular basis. At the party, sensing their curiosity, he doled out generous portions of South Side grit and tales of his urban adventures. “We’d never met anyone like him,” says Natalie, the youngest of the three girls. “You gotta understand that I was raised in the middle of a bunch of pastures, I’d never left the country, and I’d only left the state a few times. He starts going on about Chicago and gangs and getting shot, plus he’s really cute. I mean, he was
different
. His world was like an alternate universe.”

To Art, so were the girls. Their accents, naïveté, and country breeding were delightfully new, and they were much less psychologically serrated than the South Side warrior women he’d grown up with. All three were beauties. Janet was tall and fair-skinned, with bright blue eyes and reddish brown hair, while Susan and Natalie were petite, curly-haired brunettes with blue eyes and fruited lips. Their personalities were markedly distinct: “Lucy was wild, Janet was very conservative and kind of snooty, Susan was real artsy, and Natalie was the quiet one.”

He went for Janet, the snooty one, first. She was a student at TWU, and Art sensed that much of her attraction toward him was based on the fact that he was precisely the sort of man that her parents had sent her to a women’s college to avoid. Although she let him kiss her at the party, he pursued her for weeks before she let him go further—not that she was an obstacle to maintaining periodic visits to the car yard with Lucy. “I couldn’t help it. Lucy was just . . . I loved her in bed. She wasn’t one of those girls who would just lay there. She was too much fun and she lived too close to me.”

School was just getting out at the time Art met the girls, and that first summer in Texas became the most idyllic season of his life. On weekends he and the four girls would meet up at the north end of Ray Roberts Lake, a sprawling man-made reservoir created by the Army Corps of Engineers that includes two state parks. They’d park in a remote public lot, then hike down to the water and set up camp. “I had this place, my spot that I found that I used to love,” Art reminisces. “No one would ever come there. It had this real big cliff that you could dive off into the water. We’d go out there with rafts, throw them out into the water, and the girls would be laying on the rocks with their bikinis on. We’d have the grill out there, we’d have grass to smoke, and all that water. And I’d be the only dude with four girls, just fucking loving life!”

After six months, Art had had encounters with all of the girls, as they passed him off to each other not unlike a beloved puppy who, though fun to play with, proves too hard to housebreak. “At one point I tried to talk three of them into it at once, but they didn’t go for it,” he says with a laugh. He kept things casual through a combination of charm, well-selected lies, and somber reminders that he had a family back in Chicago, although he was in no hurry to return.

“He’d call once a week,” says Karen. “He sent me five hundred dollars one time. I know that Art loved our son, but he wasn’t around much. He was hurt.” Art’s failings as a father would almost rival that of his own dad, but his early days in Texas had all the appearances of a man who was getting off the criminal path. Pot smoking aside, he went nearly a year without committing so much as a misdemeanor. More importantly, he was content with his new life. “I thought about getting a ranch, maybe buying a few horses, setting up my own construction firm,” he says.

It’s a nice vision to entertain. Current quantum theory supports the idea that every choice we make or don’t make generates an infinite number of parallel “multiverses,” meaning there could indeed be one in which Art Williams is sitting contentedly on a corral fence this very moment, chewing the hay and watching the sunset under the wide Texan sky. The choice was always his. Farther off in the bushy ramparts of space-time, there may even be a universe in which he’s a district attorney or a successful businessman. One of Art’s most endearing traits is that he has never lacked for imagination when it comes to envisioning the majestic peaks of a straight-and-narrow future. He just has serious deficiencies when it comes to the dirty act of scaling them.

 

 

 

ABOUT NINE MONTHS after he’d moved to Texas, a magical date rang out in Art’s memory: June 4, 1994. Nearly a year earlier, Morty had informed him that his daughter Risa was getting married that day, and Art had filed the date away in his mind—not that he planned to attend the wedding. For him, it was significant because he knew that on that day Morty Bello and everyone in his household would be gone.

Working construction in Texas had inflamed Art’s resentment toward Morty for paying him so little during the two years he’d toiled for him. He calculated that if Morty had paid him merely minimum wage, he would have had tens of thousands of dollars more, but what really angered Art was that he had allowed his feelings for the gypsy to make him vulnerable to exploitation. That anger, along with the date, had hibernated in his head for months, and when May rolled around, his criminal alarm clock started clanging as surely as Big Ben. Having gone all that time with barely a thought of crime, he was now confronted with a decision: stay clean, or rob the most despicable man he knew. “As the calendar got closer and closer, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” says Art. “I was really enjoying my time with these girls, and I knew if I went back to Chicago I’d be taking a risk. But that date . . . it was really the only opportunity I’d ever have to get revenge on this guy.”