It was a place full of memories. It had been such a place for Perry Nelson, too. Once when Perry and Julie were going through the motions of holding their tattered marriage together after Sharon had left for Texas, Perry started crying uncontrollably at the Pizza Hut.
“This is where Sharon and I used to go…I can’t stand to be here anymore,” he said to his heartsick wife. “This is where she told me good-bye.”
The Walsenburg Pizza Hut was the place where Sharon Nelson took her pointy heels and stomped on his heart like a Mexican hat dance.
The Thornton detective, along with his partner Elaine Tygart, still didn’t know what Sharon was going to confide when she asked them to drive there. Though they had no time to talk about it, both cops had the feeling the woman with the bunched-up Kleenex and smeared lipstick was going to inform them who had killed her husband, fireman Glen Harrelson. She knew something. Tygart and Trainor were sure of that. Somehow Sharon was up to her pretty eyeballs in it.
“I'm tired of living a lie,” she had said back in Trinidad before they drove the forty miles to Walsenburg.
Even though Sharon indicated she knew the truth would set her free, she was still quite frightened. At least, she had said so many times. She cried and gasped for air. She was so scared.
Of what? The police? A boyfriend? Who, Sharon? Who?
Det. Glen Trainor made a brief phone call to his captain in Thornton.
“She's going to talk,” Trainor said. “Send some people down here.”
Done. In a few minutes a posse would be sent for Sharon. The captain told Trainor to arrest her.
Advised of her rights and the little waiver signed, Sharon slid into the dark folds of a Naugahyde booth, while Danny and Misty were given a fistful of quarters to play arcade games in front of the restaurant. Neither child appeared to be aware their world was changing forever. Sharon knew she was in trouble. The silence she had maintained in front of her children en route to Walsenburg was about to end.
She knew she could go to jail.
“It all started a long time ago,” she began as if she were about to launch into a bedtime story. She started slowly, carefully. Words were chosen one at a time, giving her sentences a cadence that suggested worry and uncertainty. She told the detectives how she and her husband Perry had tax and financial obligations that were consuming their marriage. No marriage is easy, she said, but one with money problems can be doomed from the start.
Sharon stopped herself for a moment to ask a question.
“First of all, tell me why you—why do you suspect Gary Adams? What do you know?”
Det. Tygart did not want to reveal any more than necessary to keep the conversation going. She wanted Sharon to tell her story. And as she had at the interview at the sheriff's office in Trinidad, Sharon fixed her gaze on the female half of the pair of detectives.
“Well, his name came up amongst the townspeople,” Tygart said.
Trainor jumped in, adding it appeared Gary and Sharon had been involved in a love affair.
Sharon slowly nodded and continued. She referred once more to her financial worries. The lien the IRS had placed on her Round House in the Wet Canyon was a whopping $265,000.
Trainor tried to focus her on the issue at hand: the death of her husband, firefighter Glen Harrelson.
“Okay,” he said. “What happened after… what does that have to do with—”
Sharon complied. She continued recounting her see-saw marriage to Perry and her unhappiness. Though she clearly had an agenda that she hoped would ease her complicity in whatever crime had been committed, she still was going to tell the truth.
Yes, she knew, the truth would set her free.
“Okay. During our marriage, I fell in love with Gary. I don’t know why, but I did. I got to the point that I didn’t know what to do. Gary said he could arrange for Perry not to be around anymore.”
“Did he say how?” asked Tygart.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
Sharon wept into a tissue. “He said he’d do it,” she said.
Sharon Nelson spilled her guts in the sticky booth of a pizza restaurant. She was spinning a tale so strange that if there hadn’t been a recorder preserving every word, the detectives might have asked her to slow down so that they could log down every peculiar utterance.
“He rode with Perry from Trinidad to Denver—and I don’t know—I still don’t know whether he killed Perry first and then pushed the car in the river—or what happened. I really don’t know.”
She indicated there had been insurance money after Perry's death, and she figured the police could consider the money part of the motive.
Glen Trainor pressed the widow for further details. He wanted her to cough it up. He wanted it all. He wanted The Big Confession.