Empty Promises

why would he do that?”
    David ate his pie with relish—but when Carole cleared the table, she saw that he had pushed the venom sac to one side. He saw her staring at it and said, “I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t look edible—it’s probably a leaf or part of the blackberry vine.”
    If David had linked the recent odd events together, they would have seemed ominous, but hindsight is always 20-20. If he thought about the oddities in his life at all, he would have recalled: a clumsy slip in the bathroom, a day of stomach flu, and a leaf in his pie. He didn’t know about the lye-in-the-gin idea because the women had never tried it.
    Things weren’t working out as neatly as they did on television, but Carole and Teri were only slightly daunted. They kept refining their scenarios for homicide. “If we could slip sleeping pills into his beer,” Teri said, “he’d go to sleep in a hurry, and then we could inject an air bubble into his bloodstream. I’ve heard that a bubble goes straight to your heart and you die—and they can’t tell a thing when they do the autopsy. It looks like you had a heart attack.”
    Twenty-three was a little young for a healthy marine to die of heart failure, but the women were confident the doctors would assume that David had some kind of congenital heart defect. They got him to sleep all right, with a mug of beer loaded with sleeping pills. But when Teri jabbed inexpertly at his arm, he jumped and the point of the hypodermic needle broke off in his arm. Now, they had to get the broken point out of his arm without waking him up. Luckily, he was sound asleep and the point of the needle wasn’t deeply embedded in his flesh. They managed to retrieve it and immediately threw away the evidence.
    David Hargis awoke in the morning with a very sore arm and assumed that some desert insect had bitten him during the night. He still didn’t have a clue about the danger he was in.
    Teri and Carole were becoming exasperated. All that lovely insurance money just beyond their grasp, and they couldn’t seem to kill David. They considered grinding up poisonous insects and sprinkling them on his spaghetti, but they weren’t sure they could convince him it was only oregano. And there was no guarantee that bugs in tiny fragments were toxic enough to do the job.
    Carole and Teri were not the smartest women in San Diego. Their murder plots grew increasingly bizarre and ridiculous. They even thought they could put bullets into the carburetor of David’s car, which would make the engine explode. But Teri nixed this idea because it seemed awfully complicated and they couldn’t be sure that the bullets wouldn’t be found in the wreckage. She wasn’t sure how bullets could be traced, but she had heard that was possible.
    While all this devious plotting was going on, David Hargis continued to go to work happily every day and sleep beside the woman he loved every night. Teri couldn’t stand to think of her lover being in bed with David, and she decided they would have to take stronger action, even though it meant they would actually have to get their hands bloody. Their problem had been that they were too squeamish about actually confronting David. Carole, particularly, didn’t want to look in his eyes if he ever realized that she wanted him dead.
    “We’ll put the rest of the sleeping pills in his beer,” Teri said firmly. “You don’t have to do anything. When he’s asleep, I’ll hit him with a heavy sash weight. Once we’re sure he’s finally dead, we can take him out somewhere and dump him.”
    “But somebody will find him,” Carole said, horrified.
    “If they do,” Teri said, “we can say that he was missing—and how worried you were. Nobody is going to pick on you—you’ll be the broken-hearted widow with two little boys to care for.”
    On July 20, 1977, David Hargis took his two stepsons to a Boy Scout meeting. While they were gone, Teri came over, ostensibly to play Scrabble. When David came home, he joined Carole and Teri and they continued to play—and drink beer—until nearly 10 P.M.
    The ever-trusting David Hargis went to bed, this time for the last time. Teri looked at the man sleeping so peacefully as she held the sash weight in one hand. She was appalled at herself, and she suddenly felt guilty. She went out to the hall where Carole was waiting. “Carole, I just can’t do it,” she whispered. “I really do kind of like him—he’s a nice