Mortal Danger

Tavares sisters checked, Stephanie found that nine dollars was gone, and Heather was missing thirteen dollars.
    They were angry and decided not to go to the club. Danny lied and said he hadn’t taken the money; the babysitter had. “We suspected he’d taken it, but what were we going to do?” Stephanie asked. “We decided to go and have a good time—Danny said he’d pay for us.”
    They arrived at Kokomo at ten minutes after nine, and Danny bought them each a beer and two for himself before he left them at the bar and started shooting pool.
    “We kept watching Danny,” Stephanie said, “because he’d taken the ‘V’s’ and we had no money to buy drinks or anything. He came over to our table around eleven, bought us each another beer, and danced one fast song with Heather. Not too long after that, we noticed he was gone.”
    As far as she knew, Danny drank just two beers in the ninety minutes he was at the Kokomo. She had no idea how many he’d had before he arrived at her sister’s apartment.
    Heather said Danny had spent only ten or fifteen minutes with them all evening. They were stuck without a ride home, and with no money. He’d bailed on them a few weeks before, too, and they were chagrined that they had trusted him again.
    Ben Benson read on. Danny Tavares and his mother had had an unusual living situation: Ann Tavares, her currentboyfriend of seven years, and her former boyfriend each owned a third interest in the house on Winslow. Apparently there were no bad feelings between the men in Ann’s life.
    John Latsis,* the former lover, lived in a basement apartment, Ann and Kristos Lilles* lived on the main floor, and Danny had his own attic apartment.
    Sometime after eleven on Thursday night, July 11, Danny Tavares had called his mother and told her that someone had put three tablets of LSD in a White Russian he was drinking, and he was afraid of the effect it might have on him. Since he didn’t drive, his mother was used to picking him up from one club or another. She and Kristos drove to the Kokomo to get him, and the three of them got home about midnight.
    What happened after that was almost inexplicable. Kristos was tired and went to bed. After driving Danny and the two young women to the Kokomo earlier that night, John Latsis had returned home. When Ann, Kristos, and Daniel returned, he and a male friend were visiting in the lower apartment when they heard screaming and shouting from somewhere upstairs. With Latsis in the lead, they sprinted up the steps. They saw an out-of-control Danny Tavares with a large butcher knife in his hand, and Kristos Lilles struggling with him.
    They had no idea what had happened but were relieved when Kristos managed to disarm Danny. Told to calm down, Danny yelled, “Get back or I’ll fucking kill you!”
    John shouted at his friend, “Run downstairs and call 911. Ann needs help!”
    John Latsis was bleeding from the right side of hischest. Danny Tavares banged his own head so hard against the wall that it burst through the attic ceiling, as he cried, “Mama! Mama!”
    At nine minutes after midnight, Somerset patrol officers W. E. Caravallo and Peter Massa were dispatched to the house on Winslow by radio: “Domestic dispute—involving a mental party. Possible stabbing.”
    As they ran up the stairs, they observed Sergeant John Solomito leading a zombielike handcuffed prisoner down. There was such chaos in the house that it was impossible to tell what had happened.
    They were stunned to see how bad it was in Danny Tavares’s room. An attractive woman in blue shorts and a white T-shirt lay on her back in the center of the room, bleeding profusely from her chest, belly, and face. The two officers knelt to administer first aid and CPR to the victim. It was all in vain. Caravallo tried one compression on her sternum and saw blood squirting out of her left side. Somerset Fire Department EMTs had entered the room, and after four compressions, they touched Caravallo on the shoulder and shook their heads.
    Ann Tavares was dead. It would take an autopsy to determine how many times she had suffered what were obviously deep penetrating wounds.
    John Latsis was hospitalized for his chest wound; he couldn’t remember whether Danny had stabbed him deliberately or if it happened during the struggle to get him off of his dying mother.
    Kristos was in shock and baffled. The ride home from the Kokomo had been completely uneventful, and the threeof them had carried on