Worth More Dead

contained a duffel bag stenciled with the name “D. E. Woods.” Inside, they found only jeans and miscellaneous clothing. The duffel bag and its contents proved to have been reported as stolen by a D. E. Woods in a complaint filed three days before Dennis Archer was shot to death.
    Subsequent lab tests found no fiber, dirt, or grass matches between the crime scene itself and Pitre’s home and vehicles.
    For Detective Edwards, the father of small children whose wife was expecting another in November, the months ahead meant hours and hours of overtime, many trips across the country, and the wildest assortment of witnesses’ stories that any investigator had ever uncovered.
    Virtually none of the principals had told the absolute truth going in. It didn’t take Edwards long to find out about the seven-month affair between the widow Archer and Roland Pitre. Maria Archer willingly gave Edwards an hours-long taped interview a few days after the murder, an interview in which she freely admitted that she and Pitre had been emotionally and physically involved from November 1979 until April 1980. She told Edwards of her resolution to rebuild her marriage at that point and of Pitre’s seeming acceptance of her decision.
    More telling, she also admitted to Edwards that she had not in fact been with her friend Lola Sanchez on the Sunday evening her husband was killed. She had been at Roland Pitre’s apartment. “It didn’t have anything to do with anything—where I was—so I didn’t think it mattered.”
    By late June, when he returned from the East Coast with his little girl and his sister, Maria said Roland Pitre had changed dramatically in his attitude toward her. Where he had seemingly released her from all obligations to him, he suddenly began to cling to her like a drowning man. He didn’t seem to be able to handle anything by himself: raising his daughter, helping his sister, planning his life. Maria told Edwards that she was appalled to realize how weak Roland really was.
    He bombarded her with phone calls, begging her to come see him “just one more time…one more time.”
    He had become the very opposite of what attracted her in the first place. Scornful that a man could be so powerless, Maria told Edwards that she nevertheless felt she had to help Pitre with all his problems.
    She said she saw him in her regular judo classes between July 1 and July 13 and then he dropped in at her friend Lola’s one day when she was there. She agreed to have ice cream with Pitre and his sister one evening at his apartment. And she even invited his sister to her home for lunch one day. She wasn’t very surprised when Roland showed up too, and she had no choice but to let him join them. He then wangled an invitation to ride to Seattle with her to pick up costumes for the Spanish pageant on the pretext that his sister wanted to see the sights there. It was on that occasion, Maria believed, that he purchased a black wig, but she didn’t know what it was for.
     
    “What happened on that Sunday night, the thirteenth?” Edwards asked Maria.
    Maria deeply inhaled her cigarette’s smoke and recalled the last night of her husband’s life. She said Pitre called her that afternoon and pleaded with her to drop over in the evening to discuss his problems. She hadn’t really intended to go. She and Dennis had had a busy day: taking her children and their friends swimming, baking pizza for her family. She asked her son’s friend to spend the night, but his mother called to say that he had a doctor’s appointment early the next morning and that he’d better come home. So Maria had to deliver him there about eight. Then she visited with his mother, talking about the boys’ teacher and their school. Maria said she left and decided to drop in to see Roland, hoping that maybe she could finally get him straightened out so he wouldn’t be so fixated on her.
    “I am very independent,” she said proudly. “I never knew anyone could be so dependent.”
    When she arrived at Pitre’s apartment, she intended to stay only about twenty minutes. But she found him very anxious, and he said his sister was with friends for the evening. Maria said she meant to leave in plenty of time to get to the store to buy milk and bananas, but ended up talking with Pitre from about nine until eleven. She tried to explain to him that “responsibility is all around us—not just ourselves.”
    Edwards’s mind was calculating the time sequence of the