Rough Trade

Chrissy’s Suburban, that’s why Avco blew up in my face.
    I had no doubt that was also why understanding Beau’s murder had always seemed out of focus and just beyond my grasp. A firefighter will tell you the hardest kind of blaze to battle is the kind that rages on two fronts. From the very first, from that day I drove up to Milwaukee to listen to Jack McWhorter deliver L.A.’s proposal, I had been dividing my attention and my energies—with disastrous results.
    I emptied the bin onto the floor of Chrissy’s preternaturally clean garage and began going through the papers, carefully pulling out the Wall Street Journals and putting them in a separate pile. From the crime scene photos it had been clear from the configuration of the masthead that the newspaper in question had been the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
    Thanking my lucky stars for Chrissy’s tidy-mindedness, I assembled the papers for the week preceding Beau’s murder, even though I was pretty sure that what I wanted was the edition from the day of his death. Then I carefully cleaned up, turned off the lights, and went back upstairs to examine my find.
    Comparing the papers to the one in the photographs, it was easy to see that I’d been right. The newspaper in question was indeed the edition that had been published the last day of the team owner’s life. More than that, I knew that I’d seen it before. I remembered quite clearly having read the article about the two-year-old who’d passed the night forgotten and locked in a Porta-John at the flea market. There had been a copy at Beau’s house that I had read while waiting for Jeff to wake up from his pharmacologically induced slumber.
    While I pondered the significance of this, I read the entire paper from cover to cover, beginning with the headline about the threatened teachers’ strike and ending with the final classified for a cottage for rent at White Bear Lake. I went back to the articles about the Monarchs, beginning with the front-page article about the proposal for renovating the downtown stadium.
    And then I felt it click, that feeling somewhere between eureka! and oh my that tells you from deep in your gut that you finally understand. I sat up in bed and set the newspapers aside, feeling my face drawn wide in what was no doubt a ridiculous expression of amazement.
    The police had been right from the very beginning. Not about who, of course, but about how. Beau may have been strangled, but he had not been deliberately murdered. He had been killed in the heat of an argument by a killer who’d almost instantly come to regret what he’d done.
    I’d wasted all my time mentally running in the wrong direction because I’d started from the assumption that whoever killed Beau had done so in order to profit from his death. Beau’s murderer had never intended to kill him; indeed, he’d had the most to lose from his best friend’s death.
    From the beginning Harald Feiss had insisted that Beau had intended to move the Monarchs to the suburbs. But Beau had been playing every end against the middle, not even willing to confide in his son what his plans really were. I could only imagine how furious and betrayed Harald must have felt when he’d woken up and read in the newspaper that Beau and the city had reached “an agreement in principle” to renovate the downtown stadium. Especially after Harald, despite being nearly as strapped for cash as his friend, had been making the payment on an enormous tract of empty land in Wauwatosa month after month, waiting for his big payoff.
    Of course, he’d been playing the police from day one, from the day he’d stayed down at the stadium feeding them lies while he sent Jeff home with Bennato with instructions to dope him up to keep him quiet. Who better to convince the cops that Chrissy had been having an affair with McWhorter, and what better way to try to sour the deal with L. A. than to try to convince Jeff that his wife had an ulterior motive for wanting to be in L.A.? But Jeff had been reluctant to believe that Chrissy had been unfaithful, and then what? He’d demanded proof. That’s where Darius Fredericks came in, Darius and the fax luring Jeff back into his father’s house.
    Perhaps Fredericks really had been a burglar—either that or Feiss had set him up to take the fall. I didn’t really care which one of them had been the shooter. As far as I was concerned I knew who had been behind the crime irrespective of who had actually pulled