Empty Promises

shape.
    “See for yourself,” the agent said to Homan, tapping a polished nail on a manila folder. “Larry Duerksen was in perfect health.” This was an unusual situation, but the agent said that, in the end, it wasn’t her job to refuse insurance just because the insured’s best friend had an outsize ego. She went on to say that it was Gareth Leifbach who paid the initial premium of $1,400, and he paid in cash.
    The policy was granted.

    Now Leifbach was running scared. He made a steady stream of defensive phone calls to the homicide detectives. He sounded increasingly anxious, asking often if the results of the neutron test had shown any gunpowder on his hands. The investigators stalled, telling him that it was a very complicated test and they didn’t have any results yet. In truth, it is not a particularly complicated test and results don’t take long. Leifbach was concerned about his coat too and asked to have it returned. They told him it was in evidence, which, indeed, it was. Larry’s relatives came to Seattle to settle his affairs. Larry Duerksen’s father was surprised when the detectives told him about the very large insurance policy his son had recently purchased. That wasn’t consistent with what Gareth had told him. “He said that Larry had taken out only a $5,000 policy—not a $500,000 policy!”
    The insurance company was far from ready to pay off that new policy. Gareth Leifbach continued to live in Larry’s apartment, although it was virtually empty after Larry’s family had removed his belongings. With no furniture in them, the rooms echoed hollowly. For a man who had “millionaires” lined up to back him, it seemed strange that Leifbach was clinging to three bare rooms with only a few more weeks of paid-up rent remaining. Mike Tando and Duane Homan went next to the pawnshop where Leifbach had purchased the gun which, according to him, was now in the water beneath the Aurora Bridge. They obtained a gun identical to the missing Beretta. The ballistics section of the Western Washington Crime Lab test-fired the gun, and found that ejector and extractor marks left on the bullet casings by the duplicate Beretta were microscopically almost identical to those on the casings found beneath Larry Duerksen’s body—almost, but not quite. Every gun, even of the same make and caliber, produces slightly different tool marks, but the casing comparison was so close that it seemed highly probable that it was indeed a .32 Beretta that was used to kill Duerksen. They knew that Leifbach had purchased a .32 Beretta from the pawnshop only hours before Duerksen was murdered. They wondered, however, if he had done so at the victim’s suggestion.
    Larry had been hit with .32 caliber Remington-Peters bullets, the same kind of ammo Leifbach had purchased.
    Both circumstantial and direct physical evidence tied Liefbach to Larry’s murder, and the case against him was growing.
    Detectives visited Gareth Leifbach once more in an attempt to heat up their subtle war of nerves. They asked him if they could take some pictures of him “for elimination purposes.” He agreed, but they could tell he was biting his tongue to keep from asking them what this was about. Once more he asked about the results of the gunpowder test and when his coat would be returned. “When will this be over?” he asked uneasily.
    “We don’t really know,” Don Cameron replied calmly. “Oh, yeah—that reminds me, we’ve heard you’re telling people that you’re a suspect and will be arrested any day. Why is that?”
    “Well, I was his roommate,” Liefbach said. “It’s only logical. Roommates are always the main suspect.”
    “No, that’s not always the case.”
    “I got another threatening phone call,” Leifbach offered. “I got mad and told the guy that his threats didn’t scare me, called him an s.o.b. and said I’d take care of him myself. He hasn’t called since.”
    Leifbach was protesting too much. The Seattle detectives felt certain he had invented his shadowy stalker.
    Two investigators showed a collage of photographs to Lorraine Lacey, the only witness to the shooting. Gareth Leifbach’s image was among the eight men pictured. She wrinkled her forehead and sighed. She could not say for sure—she could only narrow her identification down to two men. One of them was Leifbach.
    The detectives were positive now that Leifbach was their man, but they needed something more to take to the prosecutor’s office.