AT FIRST OF COURSE it just looked like a burglary where the guy walked in at the wrong time. But it didn’t take long before we started asking questions.
For starters, we figured they must’ve broken in the back door, so why didn’t we see some evidence of tampering with the lock? Then there was the way they just disconnected the television set. Left the CD in place, the amp, the color TV. The jewelry we found scattered, that came from all the way upstairs. You’d think they’d have finished with the stereo stuff first before working their way up to the bedroom.
Everyone we talked to said what bad luck it was, the dog not being home. “If he was around when someone tried breaking in, the whole condo development would’ve heard him carrying on,” the father said. Noisy little critter I guess. So it was either bad luck he was off getting his shots, or else good planning.
But the main thing that just didn’t jibe with the theory of unplanned assault on a burglary victim was the way they shot him. Point blank, and at close range. Someone held him down while someone else put a gun up to his head and pulled the trigger. And not in the middle of the living room either. This was right next to the door. Right next to where he’d put his briefcase down. Like they’d just been waiting for him.
Of course you had to wonder about motive. Guy had a clean record, no signs of drug abuse, no gambling debts. Didn’t appear to be any other woman in the picture. Looking at her, you wondered about other men. And then there was that insurance money. A hundred thousand dollars might seem like enough to kill for, to some people anyway. I worked on a case one time where a guy blew a gas station attendant away for charging him the extra penny when he ran over the ten-dollar mark filling his tank. You figure.
Other than the nature of the bullet wounds, we didn’t have much to go on. No fingerprints. No sighting of the perpetrators or a vehicle. No gun.
But then there was the wife. She seemed like a solid person. Real cute, nicely spoken. There was just something about her I didn’t trust. She had an airtight alibi of course. At the instant her husband was being shot, she was having an interview for some sort of television reporter job, over in the city. They actually had tape of her there, talking about some movie.
Fact is, it was something she said about this job audition of hers that got me wondering. We’re sitting there going over the details of that evening. How she walked in and found him and all. And right in the middle of telling me how he was lying there with the top of his head blown off, she says to me, “Isn’t it ironic?”
“Beg pardon,” I say. “How’s that?”
Him dying on the very night when everything was going so great for her, she says. Almost like that was the price she had to pay for having something go so well like that.
“Have you ever noticed the way every time something really good happens to you, usually something bad has just happened, and vice versa?” she said. “Almost like life just has to balance itself out.”
I was thinking it didn’t seem to me like much of a balance, getting a job at a TV station maybe, in exchange for a guy’s life. But then what do I know?