Sex. Murder. Mystery. (19 page)

Over time, he discovered what it took for his lover to be satisfied. He shared his information with a friend.

“A lot of times,” Gary explained matter-of-factly, “she has to grab a man’s dick and actually move it herself and position it and move it and rub it the way she wants it. And once I found that out, I was able to do it real easy with her. She had to be in control, I guess.”

When Sharon finally climaxed she would let out a scream that Gary Adams was sure carried across the mirrored surface of the lake. She’d stiffen her body, and pull him in tightly against her torso. She was frozen as if she could hold the moment longer.

Gary also craved oral sex with Sharon.

“She tasted so good,” he told a friend, “I always called it her ‘special sauce’. She’d get real wet and it was almost like an addicting drug. Once I had it [oral sex] with her, I just had to have it.”

Sometimes they’d arrange to meet in the timber between their homes at a place where Gary had stashed a couple of sleeping bags to make Sharon more comfortable when they made love outdoors. She was a real lady, and she needed to be treated just so. No screwing in the brush like a couple of dogs in heat.

Whenever they met, wherever they met, it was always about sex. By a lake at a ski area near Raton, at a motel in Trinidad, at Round House when Perry was gone; it was always about sex.

“Perry’s getting suspicious about us,” Sharon said as Gary slid down past her ample breasts. “If he catches us, he’ll kill me. I swear he will.”

Gary tried to allay his lover’s concerns. They had been very careful. No one knew they had been sleeping together. Perry would never know for sure.

The days turned into weeks; weeks into months. The yellow deck lamp that was Sharon’s signal down to the Dude Ranch that the coast was clear for a tryst flickered like a strobe light whenever struggling Perry was working late or on a trumped-up errand for his wife.

For Sharon and Gary, it was sex and promises—the kind that only leads to trouble. Some would say the subject was inevitable. Sharon wanted out of her marriage, but she didn’t want to be penniless. She was entitled to the Good Life, a big juicy slab of the American Dream. The fact she was unhappy with her doctor husband had not been her fault. If he had amassed the kind of fortune she had expected, she might have felt differently. Some thought so, anyway. But as the affair with Gary increased in intensity, their talks took a darker turn. Sharon told Gary how Perry had slapped her and was abusive to the children. She even showed a bruise that she insisted Perry had left on her during one of his drunken inquisitions.

“I’m afraid of him,” she said tearfully.

Gary felt sorry for Sharon. He wanted to put her up on a pedestal and protect her. Though he never thought Perry was a violent man, no one really knew what went on behind closed doors.

“Have you ever thought of him having an accident?” Gary asked after one of their trysts.

Sharon nodded. She had. She said she had thought of getting rid of Perry for years. She reached out and held Gary close. She was glad her mountain man had come to the rescue.

“He doesn’t have that much insurance on him,” she said, pulling Gary closer.

He kissed her, the smell of her “secret sauce” still on his mouth.

“Think about it and see what you want to do about it,” he said.

In time, their lovemaking escalated to the kind of fever-pitch reckless abandon that Sharon had always said she dreamed about. Perhaps the element of danger, the thrill of the kill was part of the ecstasy. Perhaps it was merely the combination of those two particular people?

Sharon was in love with the man.

“He had a body like I’d never seen before on anyone,” she said, once she tried to put into words her deep attraction for the man. “Not really muscular… but there was not an ounce that he didn’t know how to use. For whatever he chose to use it for. I’d never had anyone in my life who accepted me so totally, in any state, any stage. I could have been working out in the garden with sweat running down my neck, dirt between my toes… and it never detracted.”

Gary Adams liked to think locals called his place at the foot of the mountain “the Dude Ranch” because in the 1930s it had been one. Fat chance. Most called it what it was: an added-to shack, the type that in a Warner Bros, cartoon would have an outhouse with a moon cut in for ventilation. But to Gary, wife Nancy, and their youngest of two, a son nicknamed Skip, it was home, sweet, home. While Gary roofed houses up and down the Canyon and earned less than twelve thousand a year, Nancy rolled up her sleeves and went to work as a waitress or cabin maid for local motels and cafes. It wasn’t a particularly generous lifestyle—not like the Nelsons up the mountain. But Gary Adams didn’t have any bills and he figured that work was a means to pay for food and gas. Nothing more. He didn’t see the need to push himself to a better job. Things were just fine in Wet Canyon. Just fine.

A wartime baby, Gary Starr Adams was a one-year-old when his mother and carpenter father moved from Missouri to Colorado to settle in Denver. His family was small, only his parents and a brother, four years older. There was no hardship. No unstable childhood. The Adams family didn’t move around much. They ate meals together. No one drank. The Adams, by all accounts, were close.

Gary was always a standout. He was handsome, bright and more than a bit stubborn. He wanted to do things his own way. When he was a junior at Jefferson High he let his hair grow just a tad longer than what school officials considered appropriate. It wasn’t outlandish for 1960. It wasn’t even noticeable to many, but the fact was most other boys were having their hair buzzed into flattops.

“The vice principal told me either get a haircut or don’t come back… so I didn’t come back,” he once told a friend.

Instead, a few months later he joined the Marines and they shaved off all his hair.

In 1962, Gary married Nancy in California. His stint in the Marines as a tank mechanic over, the Adams family returned to Denver. Gary quickly followed in his father’s footsteps and found work with a hammer and nails as a roofer for Arrow Roofing.

By then, Gary Adams was an average Joe. He liked hunting elk and deer. He liked tipping back a few beers, shooting the breeze with his buddies and imagining his life would go pretty much as his parents’ had. And that was just fine with him. He wasn’t looking for anything better.

But that was before Sharon.

Gary was a man with odd loyalties. He was able to compartmentalize his actions to keep his guilt in check. That he was screwing Perry’s wife made no difference as far as the two men’s friendship was concerned. When Perry Nelson needed help with a project, it was more friendship than guilt that brought Gary Adams to the eye doctor’s aid. When he helped Perry pour the driveway slab for Round House, Gary was rewarded with a pair of brand-new designer sunglasses. “Real nice,” he recalled.

Chapter 13

AS HIS PRACTICE GASPED FOR SURVIVAL, PERRY Nelson was in a desperate search for ways to save money. The rent on his office space in downtown Trinidad was not outlandish, but when he saw space for rent on Country Club Drive that cost less money than what he was paying, he jumped on it. The owner of the medical building was chiropractor Terry Mitchell. The space was nice, albeit smaller than what he had been used to over the years. It also needed to be remodeled and finished up, but Perry said he’d take it. The reason? The rent was a paltry $35 a month.

Dr. Mitchell liked Perry from the first day they first met to discuss the rental. He was outgoing, friendly and enthusiastic. He had plans for the office space. If he was down on his luck, he didn’t complain about it much. When he consummated a deal, which culminated in the sale of what was left of his Rocky Ford practice, Dr. Mitchell loaned Perry a truck to move his equipment to Trinidad.

From the beginning it was clear the Nelson finances were in shambles. Dr. Nelson was late on his rent and apologized profusely for requiring a couple of extra days to come up with what in better days would have been pocket change.

It wasn’t hard to see why Nelson was in financial quicksand. Dr. Mitchell and his wife Kay, who worked in his office, could see the reasons for all the problems. It was Sharon. Sharon. Sharon.

“She got him in over his head with the house, with the cars, with everything she wanted. Perry, for some reason, kept right on going along with her. Perry was the nicest, sweetest guy in the world. He never had a bad word for anyone. What he saw in that wife of his… poor old Perry,” Terry Mitchell said later.

Trinidad was a town with more than its share of country bumpkins. Guys worked hard on the ranch or in the mines four days a week, getting so drunk on the fifth day they needed a long weekend to sleep it off. Their wives got together and talked about how many kids they had, how many more they wanted and what they could get from the shopper's catalog if their men had just worked a little harder. Sharon wasn’t like that. She arrived on the scene with a different attitude; different interests. She came in and showed everything she had. She was the Vargas pinup for the rough-and-tumble Hee Haw set.

Terry Mitchell, for one, couldn’t stand her tarted-up attire and sleazier-than-thou attitude. The chiropractor scratched his head as he figured out what it was that attracted a normal, nice guy like Perry to a woman like Sharon. That something had to be sex. It sure wasn’t her personality. Her sparkling conversation. Her brains. Sharon showed everything she had to offer.

“She was the type of woman who would flash all the sexual stuff she had. She had the big boobs and round butt and she was swishing everything she had all over town.”

In time, Dr. Mitchell's patients remarked about the woman they saw flitting about the adjoining office. All had a tale to tell. They had seen her putting the make on a buddy. One woman said they had gone to a dance out in the country and Sharon had practically forced herself on another woman's unsuspecting husband.

“Right on the dance floor rubbing that guy's dick!”

Another told of driving up to Sharon's house and catching her outside sunbathing in the nude. Dr. Mitchell heard a story of how Sharon had supposedly gone hitchhiking across country, picking up different guys, screwing them in the cabs of the semis before moving on.

If it had been any other woman, the chiropractor would have discounted the cruel remarks. With Sharon Nelson, however, it just seemed so plausible. It just seemed likely that she’d get into that kind of behavior. She had no limits.

Dr. Mitchell always saw his colleague's wife for what she was. In high-school days, she’d most certainly been called a tart, a slut. No doubt about it, the way the chiropractor saw her, Sharon had a mighty big problem: she believed sex was the cure.

Terry Mitchell often applied an old saying to Sharon Nelson: “If she had as many dicks sticking out of her as had been stuck in her, she’d look like a porcupine.”

Whatever she wanted, she got. At least, it seemed so to the people on the fringes of Sharon Nelson's life. When she spotted a pretty ring in the local jeweler's case it was as good as already on her finger. Even when their bank account was starving, money was no object. Not for Sharon. One afternoon, she waltzed into the medical office brandishing a set of car keys for a brand new Jeep Eagle 4x4 from Hadad Motors.

“Look what I bought for me,” she said.

Perry took a moment to say something, though the look on his face of utter amazement and disbelief was swift.

“Who's going to pay for it?” he asked.

Sharon spun around the office, letting the keys dangle against each other like a shiny charm bracelet.

The sound of a new car… the smell of a new car. All hers.

“You worry too much,” she finally said with the smile of a woman who knew more than those looking at her. “It’ll be paid for before too long.”

Terry Mitchell was also surprised and a little pissed off when he got wind of the Nelsons’ new car. Perry owed him back rent for the office and his wife kept spending money they simply didn’t have.

After sex with Gary during one of their little rendezvous, Sharon insisted her only way out of her dismal life was to get rid of Perry. On one of those occasions, Sharon told Gary she and another of her Rocky Ford lovers had tried to kill Perry during the Nelsons’ estrangement the previous year.

“They got Perry real drunk and pushed him in the pool, and from what Sharon says, they thought Perry was drowning. They went in the house. They just left him floating in the water facedown. A few minutes later, Perry comes knocking on the door. He couldn’t remember what happened. He thought he fell in,” Gary remembered.

Sharon needed a man who would get it done—right.

“I want him out of my life,” she said. “I want to be free.”

A small group of eye doctors, all Seventh-Day Adventists with a bond of friendship forged over several decades, gathered together after a professional meeting in Denver. It was usually a group of jokers, all vying to top the other as they laughed about their lives and the absurdity of the world. One of the men wasn’t laughing. It was Perry Nelson. He was talking about his troubles with Sharon.

Tears rolled down his face and his breath heaved, heavy with booze and remorse.

“I ruined my life,” he said. “I have lost everything: my girls, my wife, I have lost my church. I have lost everything. Look what I did to Julie. Look at the mess I have made of my life.”

The men tried to console their friend, telling him that, above all, he still could have the church. He could still come back to God.

Perry continued to cry and stare down at the floor.

“I wish I could,” he said. “I really do.”

When the friends finally calmed Perry, they were full of anguish themselves. None had seen a man break down as Dr. Nelson had. None had seen such sorrow.

Booze was his buddy. Before his marriage to Sharon, Perry Nelson seldom drank socially—and never in a bar. As an Adventist, alcohol was verboten, and if he dared slam down a beer with the boys, it was behind closed doors. Never where he could be judged so harshly. But once Sharon had her hooks in him, everything taboo was accepted. When it came to bar-hopping, it was surprising how quickly Perry adapted.