Allen took the gun out to the car and put it under the seat …

Ragen reached down and took the .38 into his hand. He’d wanted Allen to buy it. Not his favorite weapon. He would have preferred a 9-millimeter. But it would be a good one to add to his weapons collection.

Allen decided to move out of the crummy apartment. Looking through the apartment ads in the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, he saw a familiar phone number.

He searched through his address book until he found it and the name that went with it: George Kellner, the lawyer who had plea-bargained him into Zanesville. Allen had Dorothy call him about renting the apartment to her son. Kellner agreed to let him have it for eighty dollars a month.

The apartment at 803 1/2 Roosevelt Avenue was a clean one-bedroom second-floor apartment in a white house set back from the street behind another building. Allen moved in a week later and fixed up the place comfortably. No more messing around with drugs, he decided. We’ve got to keep away from those people.

He was astonished when Marlene, whom he had not seen since the night of Barry Hart’s party, came in one day and made herself at home. He had no idea which of the others was dating her, but he decided she was not his type and he wanted nothing to do with her.

She would come in after work, make his dinner, spend part of the evening, then go home to her parents’ house. She was practically living there, and it made everything a lot more complicated than Allen liked.

Whenever she started to get affectionate, he’d leave the spot. He didn’t know who came on and he didn’t really give a damn.

Marlene thought the apartment was great. Billy’s periodic shifts into foul language and his explosions of rage shocked her at first, but she got used to his changing moods—one minute tender and affectionate, the next minute angry and storming all over the place, then funny, clever and articulate. Without warning sometimes, he’d become clumsy and pathetic, like a little boy who didn’t know which foot to put his shoe on. She knew he surely needed someone to look after him. It was all the drugs he was doing and the crowd he was hanging out with. If she could convince him that Barry Hart’s friends were just using him, maybe he would see that he didn’t need them at all.

At times the things he did frightened her. He talked about being worried that some other people would show up and cause trouble if they found her there. He hinted it was “the family,” and she assumed he was being a big shot and boasting that he was working with the Mafia. But when he went to all the trouble to devise a signal, she found herself believing it was the Mafia. Whenever she was in the apartment, he would put a painting in the window. That, he said, would be a message to the “others” that she was there and that they should stay away.