Rich Man, Dead Man. By. Gary Cartwright. March 1. 97. 7It was one of those hellish August nights when Priscilla Davis and her lover, Stan Farr, had their last drink and drove back to the Davis place. The Mansion it had come to be called, though mansion didn’t do justice to the eye- popping $6 million sprawl of trapezoids and parallelograms and oddly sloping white walls that multimillionaire Cullen Davis had built to immortalize his marriage to Priscilla eight years ago. It was more on the order of a museum, something cool and impersonal and unassimilable, yet awkwardly apparent to the heavy flow of traffic along Hulen Street.
Arranged as it was on the knob of a windy hill adjacent to the Colonial Country Club golf course in the heart of Fort Worth, the silhouette protruded from the landscape like an ocean liner. It was shortly after midnight when Stan Farr opened the heavy iron gates and they started up the hill to the garage.
Five mongrel dogs tumbled at Priscilla’s feet as she looked for the key, then she noticed something wrong. Uk Free Dating Personals That Required No Credit Card. Through the glass she could see the lights on the security panel, indicating that someone had opened the door during the three and a half hours they had been gone.
Maybe it was Andrea, Priscilla’s twelve- year- old, or maybe Dee, her eighteen- year- old, had come home early. Anyway, the door that opened onto the breakfast room was unlocked. Stan Farr, the onetime TCU basketball player who had taken up residence at the mansion earlier in the summer, headed upstairs to the master bedroom and Priscilla went to turn off the kitchen lights. That’s when she noticed the lights shining unexpectedly in the basement and a bloody handprint on the basement door — Priscilla had no way of knowing that Andrea’s body had already been stashed down there. She took a tentative step toward the basement, then changed her mind and called out to Stan.
He probably didn’t hear. As she started for the stairway leading to the master bedroom, a man emerged from the laundry room to her right. He was dressed in all black, wore a woman’s black wig, and kept both hands inside a black plastic bag. He said “Hi,” then shot Priscilla through the chest. At the sound of the shot and the scream, Stan Farr ran downstairs. The man in black shot Farr four times, then dragged him by the ankles to the kitchen. Priscilla staggered to her feet and shouldered open the sliding glass door leading to the courtyard.

She held her long denim skirt as she ran, and told herself not to panic. She could feel the blood and the bullet hole through her pink halter top. Later, she would remember hiding in some shrubs and hearing voices from the driveway. At first she thought it might be Dee coming home, and she thought Oh dear God, no not that!, then she was running down the grassy slope of the 1. She heard a scream and more gun shots, but she kept running.
She banged on a door, screaming, “My name is Priscilla Davis. I live in the big house in the middle of the field off Hulen. I am very wounded. Cullen is up there killing my children. He is killing everyone.
Sometimes as she fondled Stan Farr’s SAE ring, which fit her finger like a golden doughnut, she heard her own voice asking What could I have done? Sleep came hard and never lasted long.
Though the mansion sprawled over more than 1. Priscilla had effectively reduced her living quarters to the master bedroom, the adjacent sitting room with the six- foot TV screen, and the enormous pink bathroom lined on three sides by twenty- foot floor- to- ceiling mirrors. The pink bath was her room, the only one in the mansion Cullen had not personally supervised; with its giant mirrors, sunken marble tub, crystal chandelier, and the catbox next to the bidet, it was the one place that reflected her personality. She loved to sit yoga fashion in front of the mirror, doing her eyebrows. Mostly she sat on the double queen- sized bed with the silver fox spread and the stuffed animals and yellow- haired rag doll with the pink dress, using the bank of telephone lines to talk to her friends Judy or Lynda, or playing Scrabble or backgammon with Rich Sauer, Stan Farr’s old basketball buddy from his TCU days. There was always an armed guard downstairs, and the panel of lights on the bedroom wall told her that all locks were secure. Without moving from the bed she could adjust the three TV screens or talk to the security men or close the magnificent drapes to blot out the view of the downtown skyline.
There was a carton of Eves on the nightstand, laminated photographs of Stan and her children, and dainty little signs, such as the one that said: “Love is being able to let go.”Life had been reduced to a single ritual: every evening as the sun was going down, Priscilla walked through the mansion closing all the machine- operated drapes. She hardly set foot outside. Friends marveled at her tenacity; how could she stay there in that museumlike chill surrounded by art treasures and pursued by the ghosts of that incredible night in August? Maybe they didn’t understand; she had no choice. It was like a fairytale, only in reverse. Rich little poor girl, a prisoner in her own castle.

After all that had happened, the price she had paid, Priscilla was not about to walk away now. Her oldest daughter, Dee Davis, born eighteen years ago when Priscilla herself was just a teenager, had come home from her freshman year at Texas Tech and personally supervised Thanksgiving dinner. Priscilla was thankful that Dee was alive: the feeling persisted that a mere slip of fate spared Dee that nightmare in August.
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Priscilla’s son from her second marriage, Jackie Wilborn, had come to the mansion for the holidays. In some ways, Jackie had taken it harder than Dee. Jackie was only fifteen and had never lived under Cullen Davis’ roof; it was difficult for him to understand why a woman like Priscilla, with her natural flash, zest, and taste for the exotic, had not stayed with his father Jack, a man old enough to be her own father. Pricilla’s 7. 1- year- old mother had come over for Thanksgiving and so had a niece and other relatives. What was there to talk about? With the help of a half- dozen TV sets and a blitzkrieg of football, Priscilla had survived the gathering. Her mother was already talking about Christmas, for God sakes.
Priscilla wanted to ask her: what makes you think there is even going to be a tomorrow? The pink heart with the words ANDREA’S ROOM was still on the door.
In many ways Andrea had been a woman at twelve. She was five- seven and fully developed, a budding though larger replica of her mother. When Andrea was younger, Cullen called them “my big white pig” and “my little white pig.” But this was the room of a little girl, pink and soft and cuddly, and that’s the way Priscilla insisted on remembering Andrea.
She was the kind who could keep a cat and a canary in the same room.” Andrea loved to cook, too. For weeks after the funeral Priscilla would open the hotel- size refrigerator and discover small concoctions that Andrea had stored. Of all the enigmas and impassioned kinks and whims and inexplicable crossings, why Andrea? Stan was in his grave: Stan Farr, “the Bear,” the gentle giant, the former TCU basketball player and lovable hardlucker.
That part had to be accepted. Bubba Gavrel, a 2.
Dee’s friend Bev Bass, was still partially paralyzed from his gunshot wound. Bubba had had the misfortune to stumble into the night’s carnage. Priscilla suffered from a staph infection and other complications from her own wound, and the ulcer that she had developed from the 2. There were lawsuits and countersuits, lawyers by the package, private investigators trailing private investigators, the press, the gossip about her sex life, and of course the impending murder trial and all that it portended.
Millions of dollars were at stake, and so was Cullen Davis’ life: the district attorney was seeking the death penalty. Priscilla had not the slightest doubt Cullen’s attorneys intended to drag her through the mud. They would call her a money- grabbing slut and worse.
By innuendo, they would paint her as a Dragon Lady, corrupting youth and even trafficking in drugs. There was even the thought that she might not live to testify. According to her own investigators, a contract had been put on her life.
She had been advised to “stay off the street,” and when she did go out, usually late at night and always with close friends, Priscilla wore a silver- plated . Priscilla had never been the darling of high society in Fort Worth, not that she gave a damn, but they hadn’t exactly stoned her, either. Now she felt the black crones circling. A group of “prominent citizens,” including Amon Carter, Jr., and power broker Babe Fuqua, were using their weight to have Cullen released on bond. This was no act of charity or friendship but simply good business: every major bank in Fort Worth had a sizable stake in Cullen Davis’ welfare.
Cullen owed them $6 million, and he wasn’t much use to them in jail. For the first time in memory the subject of civil rights had a majority of the advocates at the Petroleum Club. The wife of a very rich, very prominent industrialist had telephoned Pricilla and asked her to “let Cullen off the hook.”“At first I assumed she was talking about the divorce settlement,” Priscilla said. She said how everyone knew Cullen was a weak person, but he wasn’t the only person in the world with money. By now I’m catching on what she’s talking about.
All I could think to say was: . June Jenkins, wife of author Dan, had written a warm note from their summer house on the island of Kauai. Phyllis Rowan had mentioned something about “getting in touch with Truman . But when the hard core of high society talked about Priscilla Davis, as they did almost every day, they spoke of that platinum hussy with the silicone implants who wore a diamond necklace that spelled out RICH BITCH and took pleasure in dragging her mink across the carpet at Shady Oaks Country Club.