Chapter 28
If Arthur March had not implicated himself in the conspiracy concocted by his son to murder the Levines in the first two telephone conversations with Farris through innuendo and direct statements, he certainly would during the course of the next three calls from the supposed hit man. Farris called him again under the same controlled conditions from the Criminal Justice Center in Nashville, on Thursday, October 20, 2005, with Postiglione and Pridemore overseeing the planned deception. After three or four rings, Arthur March answered the phone.
“Bueno,”
March said.
“Hey, Colonel?” Farris responded.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, how you doin’? This is . . . Bobby.”
“Oh, hi, Bob.”
“How’s everything goin’?”
“Well, so far as I know,” Arthur trailed off. “How’s it goin’ on your end?”
“Everything’s pretty much a go here. . . . Have you talked to Perry?”
“Yeah, I talked to him day before yesterday.”
“Did you give him my message?”
“That I had talked to you? Yes.”
“Is he okay with that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Is . . . he doin’okay?”
“He seems to be. Seems to be up a little bit better and his lawyers keep tellin’him, I think they’re giving him a lot of courage and . . .”
“Yeah.”
“They don’t have anything, so . . . it’s just a matter of whatever. . . . How’d you do at your end?”
There was buzzing, an interference of some kind on the line, that interrupted their conversation for a moment or two.
“I’ve got me an instrument,” Farris said when the telephone line cleared up. “I got me a silencer, too.”
“Okay.”
“Well, you know, the gun, it didn’t cost much,” Farris said. “The silencer cost me a little bit, but that’s okay. . . .”
“Well, by the time you get down here, I’ll be able to help you out a little financially,” Arthur said.
“Yeah, well, I’ve done a little bit more surveillance and I’m about ready to do this.”
“Okay,” Arthur replied. “Just let me know when you get to Texas or when you get someplace on the bus.”
“Oh, well . . .”
“You want a bus?”
“Well, see, I’ve checked on that, too, and, uh, like a Greyhound from Nashville to Laredo is like a hundred twenty-one bucks for the ticket. . . . Then I’d have to get on another bus from Laredo and go to Guadalajara.”
“Once you get here, I can help you,” Arthur said. “You understand?”
“Yeah . . . only thing I’m havin’ a concern with is that when I get there . . . to Laredo . . . I’m kinda nervous about crossin’that border by myself.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have any trouble,” Arthur assured him. “If you got, uh, either a passport or have a birth certificate.”
“Yeah, well . . . I’m gonna get, you know, some old bogus-ass birth certificate.”
“Okay. That’s all you need . . . and you won’t have any trouble. Just tell ’em you’re a tourist goin’ down to visit a friend in Ajijic.”
“There ain’t no way that . . . like maybe you or Carmen could meet me at the border or somethin’?” Farris asked.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea, because I can’t leave Carmen alone, that’s my problem.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I think if you just walk through . . . after you get off the bus, you just walk across the border . . . and get on the bus.”
“Just get on the bus,” Farris repeated.
“It’s no problem,” Arthur said. “They speak English, so don’t worry about it. . . . You’re gonna go to Guadalajara. Get on the evening bus so you can sleep on it overnight. . . . They’re good buses, they got johns, everything on ’em.”
“Yeah, well . . . the people I talked to at the bus station up here said it’d take like a day to get to Laredo.”
“It’s a twelve-to-fourteen-hour [bus ride] from Laredo to here.”
“Well, I’ll be comin’by myself, too.”
“All you gotta do is get here. . . . You can call me from someplace in Mexico, at a bus stop, or you can call me when you get to Guadalajara and I’ll be there at the bus station in thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes? Okay. When would be a good time to call you . . . when I get to the bus station down there? Just anytime?”
“Anytime, like now. Anytime in the evening. I’m always home.”
“I tried to call earlier, about five-thirty, maybe, and I didn’t get—”
“I was at the restaurant, but normally I would be home. I’m always home at this time.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, good luck.”
“I guess so . . . I guess everything . . .”
“Just call me . . . You can call me from the States, too, you know, and let me know . . . when you expect—and then I’ll be lookin’ for you.”
“Yeah. Well . . . there’s a couple things I want to go over with you, just to run by you . . . get your opinion about it. . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Okay . . . what I plan on doin’ is that . . . I’ve surveil-lanced everything and I pretty much know the routine. But it’s just like some days it’s the wife that . . . comes out and some days it’s Lawrence.”
“Yeah.”
“But, see, Lawrence has been goin’to his office, you know, pretty much regularly this past week—”
“Okay, and watch. . . . Keep an eye out for the kid.”
“I haven’t seen the kid at all,” Farris said.
“Well, he may be in Washington,” Arthur said.
“I’ve already got a car parked . . . and I’m gonna leave . . . the car, leave my other car—”
“So will it be next week or the week after?” Arthur asked. “Is that what you’re plannin’?”
“Yeah, I was tempted to do it earlier, today, but . . . it’s a whole lot of traffic. . . . I want to do it maybe like on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday.”
“That’s fine,” Arthur said. “That would be next Tuesday or Wednesday?”
“Yeah.”
“That’d bring you in here . . . ,” Arthur said, apparently thinking aloud as he trailed off. “And that’s fine . . . see I get my money on the first, so we’re, we’re in hallelujah land.”
“Yeah.”
The voice of an operator suddenly came on the line.
“Somebody’s on this line with us,” Arthur said.
“Huh? Hello?” Farris asked.
“I think somebody’s on this line. Did you hear that?”
“I’m gonna call you back, okay? Hello? Colonel?”
The line went dead, and Farris dialed Arthur’s number again.
“What the hell was goin’ on?” Farris asked.
“Well, we got cut off, and then you got caught up in the Mexican telephone system,” Arthur said.
“I know it sounded somethin’ like an operator,” Farris said. “I didn’t know what the hell it was in here.”
“You’ll get used to it . . . after you’re here a week or so.”
“It kinda spooked me a little bit,” Farris said.
“It’s not a bad system,” Arthur explained about the Mexican telephone company. “It’s just not good.”
“Yeah . . . it kinda spooked me for a second . . . at first . . .”
“Now, now, don’t worry about it. We were all right.”
“Okay. Well, good . . . my heart was kinda racin’, I didn’t know what to—”
“No, no, no . . . just relax,” Arthur said. “Everything else okay? Are the kids okay? Have you seen them?”
“I’ve seen ’em twice this week,” Farris said. “You know, just . . . getting out of the car.”
“They’re still livin’ . . . in that condo?”
“Yeah, they’re livin’ in a condo.”
“At Hillmeade or someplace like that?”
“Yeah. It’s not that far from the house. . . . It’s pretty nice, actually. . . . What I was plannin’to do . . . just like I told you, I got me a silencer for my gun. But, uh, I’m . . . gonna try to catch the—hopefully, Lawrence—Lawrence will be gone to the office whenever she gets back. Sometimes she gets—”
An operator cut into the line again, and seemed to be attempting to put other calls through. Because of the interference from the operator, Arthur told Farris to call him back in three or four days.
“Okay, Colonel, I’ll talk to you.”
“And you’ll know better [by then] what you’re gonna do.”
They were cut off again, but Farris called Arthur back to finish the conversation.
“Hey, Colonel? Damn, it’s hard to hear you. I’m probably not gonna be able to use this phone again once I leave here tonight. . . . Probably the next time you hear from me, all this’ll be said and done.”
“Okay, I can hardly hear you,” Arthur said.
“Yeah, I can hardly hear you, too.”
“Give me a call tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.”
“’Cause I can’t understand you.”
“Okay,” Farris said.
“Bye.”
When the telephone call ended Farris, still in police custody, was taken back to the secret location where he was being held to await further instructions from Postiglione and Pridemore. To make the plan work, it was imperative that Perry believe that Farris was on the outside. If Perry got word from another inmate, or even a jailer, that Farris was still in jail, the game would be over.
While the telephone calls between Arthur and Farris had been going on, Perry languished in his jail cell, totally oblivious to the trap that was being set, and into which his father had leaped headfirst, from where there would be no returning. What seemed particularly amazing to many people at this point was Perry’s unconscionable eagerness in getting his seventy-eight-year-old father, who was in ill health and who, he knew, would not turn him down in his quest to commit capital offenses, involved. It seemed even more amazing that his father, a man who retired as a high-ranking officer in the military and held a Ph.D., went along with Perry’s sociopathy. Nonetheless, Perry continued meeting with his lawyers and gave the appearance that he truly believed he would win the cases against him, calling the murder case a “house of cards.” Although he expressed the fact that he was not happy about being in jail, he said that he welcomed the opportunity to clear his name.
“The good thing for me in this case,” Perry said, “is to finally put an end to accusations and allegations against me. I want a quick and fair trial.”
When asked about the offer that Postiglione claimed that Perry had made to him to plead guilty for a reduced sentence, Perry denied he had ever made such an offer to make a deal.
“I’m absolutely not interested in making a deal with anybody for something I did not do,” Perry said. He again denied killing Janet.
“Nothing pleases me more than a final resolution to this,” he said. “I look forward to trial and winning an acquittal. The police and DA had nine years and have spent money to build cases against me, a frame-up, that’s what I’m fighting right now.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors began publicly stating that they believed others may have helped Perry dispose of or hide Janet’s body. They alleged that as many as three other people may have been involved, but declined to say how they had come up with the information to make the allegations. The district attorney’s office named Paul Eichel, one of Perry’s former clients, who, at one time, ran a few trendy nightclubs in Nashville. Eichel had retained Perry for his expertise as a corporate attorney. Eichel later pleaded guilty to money laundering. They had also named Morris Clinard, who died in 2000. Clinard was only connected to the case through Eichel, with whom he was acquainted.
Eichel adamantly denied to local news media outlets that he had helped dispose of Janet’s body. Eichel insisted that throughout the years of the investigation into Janet’s disappearance, he had always told the authorities the truth—that he had no idea regarding what had happened to Janet.
“The bad part about it is the DA and the detectives, when you tell them the truth, they don’t like the answer you’re giving—you’re not cooperating with them.”
Eichel said that he had asked Perry about Janet and what had become of her, and Perry had always denied having killed her. Eichel told reporters that he had no idea whether Janet had been murdered or not, and that although he and Perry had a business relationship, they had never become friends.
“He never called me to go to dinner, never a drink, and then he’s going to call me to move a body? That’s ridiculous,” Eichel said.
The third man that the district attorney’s office named as a possible coconspirator was Arthur March. When asked by a news outlet if there was any truth to the allegations, Arthur denied having anything at all to do with Janet’s disappearance.
“How could I dispose of a body when there is no body?” Arthur asked. “You’re assuming. The court is assuming there’s a body. They can’t even prove she’s dead. My comment is this: I wasn’t even in the fuckin’ country. I didn’t get there till she had been gone a week. . . . I’m not sure she’s dead. Nobody’s proved to me she’s dead . . . and I have very little faith in the judges in Nashville and Tennessee.”
Arthur’s tone seemed like he was daring the authorities to charge him with a crime in connection with Janet’s disappearance, and did dare them to come after him. He said he would not return to the United States willingly.
“Well, I’m telling them if they fucking want to come down here and serve me, go ahead and see what happens.”