Frank Zafiro - No Good Deed

A picture was beginning to form in my mind. There were a lot of soft spots and more than a few what ifs, but it fit what I knew. Anne Marie and Richard were having an affair. Both of them admitted it. Most of the town knew it. If Anne Marie was unaware of her husband’s financial troubles and still thought he was loaded, there was a motive there for her to kill him and make it look like a suicide. It wouldn’t be the first time someone was killed for their money. Then she could run off with Richard.

I set my Styrofoam cup on the hood of my car and rubbed my palms together. It made sense, but at the same time, it didn’t. She already had the money and Richard. What would she gain by killing her husband? Was he tight-fisted with money by nature? Or had his financial troubles forced him to become that way?

Maybe he found out about her affair and planned to divorce her. But in that case, wouldn’t she get half of his assets? She would, unless she signed a pre-nuptial agreement of some kind. And Carter wouldn’t let on either way about whether one existed or not.

Drugging Stoll would be easy enough, I figured, but there was the suicide note to fake, too. Then again, how close would they look at a situation where it came out that the dead guy’s business had failed and his wife was having an affair? Would they even do a handwriting analysis?

The gas nozzle clicked off and I replaced it on the pump and put the gas cap back on my car. Then I grabbed my to-go cup and got back on the road. It was another sixty miles to River City.

As I drove, I wondered where Richard came in. If she murdered Stoll, did Richard know she killed him? Did he help her cover it up? Do it for her? Or was he involved at all?

It seemed that I had more questions coming home than I did leaving.

Clell sipped his Maxwell House and shook his head. “It’s an awful lot of guesswork,” he said.

“Sure it is. But what if it is true?”

“If it is true, then that woman killed her husband for money.”

“Of which there was none.”

“That would be the irony,” he said, sipping again. “Seems a terrible shame when someone dies, but all the more so when he dies for nothing.”

“I’m guessing pretty close to nothing is what Anne Marie is getting, whether she killed him or not.”

“So she’s blackmailing the hockey player?” Clell asked, his voice doubtful. “Why would she do that? Why not just wait and go through the courts? A public figure like him wouldn’t be able to avoid paying child support of some kind.”

“Unless the baby isn’t his and she knows it,” I said.

“That’s as much a long shot as her killing the husband for his money, you ask me.”

“Something’s not right,” I insisted. “Why did they pay me four hundred dollars for nothing?”

We sat in silence, drinking coffee and listening to the light hum of the building’s heating system.

“I saw something on TV once,” Clell said.

“TV?” My voice was doubtful.

“Uh-huh. It doesn’t fit exactly, but it seems there was a guy on a show that needed a witness, so he hired one.”

“Hired a witness?”

“Yup.”

I thought about that. The longer I thought about it, the less stupid it seemed. “You might have something. After all, who would make a better witness than an ex-cop? But a witness to what?”

Clell shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. You’re not the witness. Your friend is.”

“Matt?”

Clell nodded. “I think so. I don’t think the hockey player or his lawyer planned on you getting involved. But once your friend insisted that you could help, they had to go along with things to avoid suspicion.”

I considered his words. They were sound.

“They gave me some make-work and paid me off,” I said, shaking my head.

Clell nodded. “It would seem so.”

“That still leaves the question, what did they want a witness to? To the woman blackmailing him?”

“That,” Clell said, “and maybe to her being obsessed or unbalanced.”

“Unbalanced?”

Clell nodded. “Yeah. In case she killed herself.”

My stomach sank. “Oh, Christ.”

Several marked and unmarked police units were parked at the Celtic Spirit motel. The area was roped off with yellow crime scene tape, but I slipped under the outer perimeter simply by walking with purpose. When I approached cabin twelve, a muscular, young black officer stood in my way.

“Who are you?”

“What’s going on?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“A crime scene,” he said. “How’d you get past the outer perimeter tape?”

“Is she dead?”

“Are you family?”

That answered the question. I sagged and shook my head.

“Then who are you?”

“He’s Stefan Kopriva,” a voice came from behind him.

I looked up to see Officer Rick Hunter approaching. I glanced down at his sleeve and saw sergeant’s stripes. That didn’t surprise me.

“You’ve never heard of Kopriva?” Hunter asked the officer, who shook his head no.

I gave Hunter a neutral nod, hoping to cut him off. He ignored me.

“Kopriva was a folk hero for a little while, back in the early nineties. Had a little shootout with a robber. Oh, and he let a cop and a little girl die.”

“Rick-”

“My name’s Sergeant Hunter,” he said coldly. “And you are about to be under arrest for violating a crime scene.”

“I just want to know-”

“McClaren,” Hunter said. “Get him out of here.”

The black officer grabbed my right arm at the wrist and the elbow. He had a grip as strong as Richard’s.

“-if she’s dead,” I finished.

“Hold it,” Hunter ordered.

McClaren stopped.

“You know something about this situation, Kopriva?” Hunter asked me.

I almost laughed at his choice of words. “Pound sand, Sergeant. ”

Hunter scowled. “Get him out of here.”

McClaren walked me to the edge of the perimeter and released me. “If you come back inside, I’ll have to arrest you for obstructing an investigation, sir.”

“I won’t. Tell me something, though.”

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Just tell me how she was killed. That’s all.”

McClaren stared at me, then said, “It was suicide. She took some pills.”

I sat in the darkness of my apartment, staring up at the ceiling. A ray of light from the streetlight outside cut a large swath through the center of the room, and I stared at the yellowish tint and ran things back and forth through my head. I asked the hows and the whys and in the end, I decided I was trying too hard to make the thing too complicated. It was never anything more than it seemed to be just below the surface. All you had to do was follow the money.

Of course, I didn’t have any proof.

And then I knew what I had to do.

Phillipe Richard came out of the dressing room and into the hallway. Sweat matted his hair and rolled down the sides of his face. It was in between periods of the Flyers game versus Nelson. Richard had a goal and fight in the first period.

“I will get some fine for this,” he told me, wiping his sleeve across his forehead. “Coming out of the locker room.”

“You should get prison,” I told him.

“For what?” His expression was one of surprise, but irritation rimmed his eyes.

“You killed Aaron Stoll,” I said. “You poisoned him for his wife. Or the money, I don’t know which.”

“You’re crazy.”

“It’s true. We both know it. And when it turned out that he didn’t have any money left, things got rough between the two of you. That’s why you broke up.”

“I broke it off with her because I was traded here,” he insisted.

“And then she followed you here.”