Love Me To Death. Steve Jackson

      With a smile on his face, Neal asked Suzanne Scott to remove her glasses. When she complied, albeit reluctantly, he tied a piece of bath towel around her eyes as a blindfold. “Can you see?” he asked the twenty-one-year-old woman.

      If she looked down, Scott could see the floor of the garage at her feet. She was getting nervous about where this dress rehearsal for her roommate’s “surprise” was headed and decided that the blindfold attempt was good enough. “No,” she answered, “I can’t see.”

      Neal placed a strip of duct tape across her mouth. It was uncomfortable but not painful. Still, she wished he’d hurry and get his playacting over with.

      She knew Neal through her roommate, Beth Weeks, a woman she’d met at work. Weeks was thirty-five years old, divorced with three kids, and struggling to make ends meet. They had became close friends and often went out together.

      One of their hangouts after work, and sometimes even during lunch, was a dark, smoky bar called Shipwreck’s. That was where she first saw and heard about a guy named Wild Bill Cody Neal. Weeks and some of her other coworkers knew him from the bar, where he could often be found starting at noon until closing most any day of the week. He was a character who enjoyed playing the role of a cowboy. He was always in a black cowboy hat, black T-shirt, blue jeans, and if the weather was colder, he donned a black duster. But she had never actually talked to him until late 1997, about the same time she and Weeks became roommates.

      Weeks wanted her to double-date with Weeks’s boyfriend, Jimmy Gerloff, and Neal. Scott wasn’t real thrilled about the idea; Neal was quite a bit older and a little strange, but with a lot of persuading, she at last agreed to go.

      Neal called and asked her to meet him at the Sheraton Hotel at Sixth and Union. She was to let the front desk know that she was with him and his party. “They’ll take good care of you,” he said in that low, rumbling voice of his.

      Weeks and Gerloff were already there when she arrived, but Neal didn’t join them right away. Still, Scott had to admit that the guy seemed to have some pull. Everyone on the hotel staff was very nice and accommodating, making sure she had whatever she wanted in drinks and food. He finally showed up and escorted them up to a floor in the hotel that he’d rented out for the evening’s party. She quickly discovered the reason behind the staff’s attentiveness as Neal tipped lavishly.

      By early 1998, Weeks and Gerloff had split up, and Weeks began seeing more of Neal. Scott began to learn more about Neal, and how he seemed to relish cloaking himself in mystery. Some regulars at Shipwreck’s said he was a bounty hunter; others hinted that he might have once been a hit man for the mob.

      Neal never told the women exactly where he lived. He said he split a lot of his time between Denver and Las Vegas, where he apparently had a home. He even showed them photographs of a mansion, which he kept in a white three-ring binder with sheet protectors. But he said he wouldn’t stay there until his little girl, whom he was trying to win custody of from her wicked mother, could stay there with him.

      As far as Scott could tell, Neal seemed to have another girlfriend, a woman named Angela Fite. One night he called and asked Weeks and Scott to come see him and “Angie” down at a swank south Denver restaurant. “We’ll have a drink to celebrate Scott’s birthday,” he insisted.

      They only stayed for one drink, but Scott left with the impression that Neal and Fite were intimate. Still, after the meeting at the restaurant, Weeks and Neal seemed to be together all of the time. Weeks confided that she was really starting to care for him.

      Scott had to admit that Neal could be a lot of fun and that she benefited from his largesse as Weeks’s roommate. He liked going out in limousines and threw money around without a care in the world. He would never allow anyone else to pay when they went out, whether it was dinner or the extravagant tips he insisted on giving the restaurant staff.

      A night or so before her birthday, shortly after meeting Fite, Scott was asleep in her room when she heard Neal and Weeks enter through the front door of the apartment. A few minutes later, Weeks knocked and walked into her room. “Cody wants to know if he can come wish you a happy birthday,” Weeks said.

      “OK,” Scott answered sleepily, wondering what this was all about.

      Neal came in and began tossing dollar bills onto her bed, $100 in all. “We’ll use some of this when we go out to celebrate your birthday,” he said. The gesture surprised her. She didn’t really think of him as being a close friend, but later, Weeks shrugged and said that it was just an example of Cody’s generous nature.

      Around mid-June, Neal started talking to Scott about having “a surprise” that he was planning to give Weeks. He’d talked often about helping Weeks with her financial situation before, saying he was thinking about buying her a new car or helping with some of her expenses. This was different, he said; this was going to be a big surprise.

      When she brought up the conversation later with Weeks, her roommate happily confided that he’d told her that he was buying her a home. She wasn’t sure whether that also meant he intended to live with her, though he’d said something about wanting to keep some of his things there.

      Neal said he also wanted to help Scott out. He asked her to work for him in “his” mortgage-lending business. He was talking about a lot of money, a lot more than she was making at her present job, and it involved some travel between Las Vegas and Colorado, which sounded like it could be fun.