Chapter 2

My best chance to snoop for evidence came Saturday night. We hosted a small dinner party for some work friends of Rita's and everyone (except me) had hit the wine cellar pretty heavily. My wife had consumed almost a full bottle of red wine all by herself. She's not normally much of a drinker and when she does drink it hits her hard and fast.

By the end of the evening, she was hinting loudly that she'd have 'a surprise' by the end of next week but wouldn't even tell anyone (especially me) what her 'good news' was. I had watched my wine glass like a hawk in case she decided to spike it instead of my coffee, as she had publically stated. In any case, not five minutes after our guests had gone my darling bride was stumbling toward bed and was soon out like a light and snoring up a storm.

This was my golden chance to snoop about in her purse and her locked attaché laptop case. Come to find out I didn't even need to try and pick that lock, the evidence I needed was right inside her purse.

In a small glass vial labeled pancuronium bromide I found all of the proof I needed. I had to look the stuff up on the Internet to find out what it did but the knowledge brought me little satisfaction. It's an extremely high powered muscle relaxant that is usually too dangerous for medical use. Just a few drops will stop your heart from beating ... forever. Now it was time to decide what to do about it!

I had an old syringe in my bathroom closet at home left over from some vet medicine we'd given to our dog a few months ago. I cleaned it and filled it full with some of her poison, leaving the vial still mostly full. She'd never notice the missing amount. I wasn't going to simply inject her with it. No, too simple, too easy and too detectable. It was best used dilated in something and I soon decided where best to administrate it.

I didn't get a moment of sleep all weekend.

I cannot explain why I did what I did next. If put to the question I could plead extreme sleep deprivation and temporary insanity, but in truth my heart was really far more broken than I would have expected. I had not wanted a divorce, and now it looked like there could never be one.

Monday afternoon while brooding in my dark office at work, with the lights off and window shutters closed, I came to my terrible decision. I couldn't file for divorce now, it was too late and I'd still end up poisoned. I had to turn the tables somehow, even if that meant striking the first blow in self-preservation.

While I was searching Rita's purse Saturday night, I had found her little portable day-timer calendar and personal scheduler. This was one of her most secretly kept items and I had long been dying for a quick delve into it. It was very educational. Apparently at the start of the relationship, Rita and Roger met monthly at a local café to discuss their business. Starting last month their meetings became weekly, every Friday afternoon at a local hotel for two hours.

So much for 'business'. They reserved the room a week in advance each time and would be there again at Room #243 this coming Friday. This was where I now planned to set my trap.

Getting a copy of the hotel key on Monday afternoon was simple. I requested that particular room and paid cash, and then I took the key off of its distinctive hotel chain and, on my very first try, found a dodgy locksmith willing to make a copy of the key for a hundred dollar bribe.

I had a few other preparations to make that week but the hardest part was just waiting for Friday to come. Rita was starting to be suspicious that I no longer had any interest in drinking her coffee, or anything else for that matter in the morning before work. I pleaded nerves and made sure that I fixed my own drinks in the evening at home, mostly sealed bottled waters. The atmosphere at home started to become extremely strained as if both of us knew that the other was up to something.

Since she never bothered to tell me her secrets, I certainly wasn't about to tell her any of mine!

I gave her one last chance on late Thursday evening while we were watching TV and not even sitting very close to each other.

"Rita, you've been keeping a lot of secrets from me lately, even more than usual ... even for you. Marriage is supposed to be based upon love and trust and I'm not sure we have either one of those two things right now. Do you have any confessions that you want to make to me or should I find a good divorce lawyer and leave you and your paranoid world of secrets in peace?"

Ok ... maybe I shouldn't have stated that last little bit. In my defense I was bone weary, annoyed, angry and very tired of playing her little mind games.

She screamed at me incoherently for five full minutes without a break even for air and after throwing anything and everything within arm's reach at me she stomped off angrily to bed and slammed the bedroom door. I stayed on the sofa but couldn't say that I managed to get any sleep, but I did feel a whole lot more relieved about my plans than I had all week.

In the morning she stomped out the door without saying a word to me. It only made what I had to do that much easier.

My plan for Friday worked like fine clockwork. I arrived late at work with big black circles under my bloodshot eyes and instructed our company receptionist that I was 'in' but not to bother me unless it involved either fire or someone bleeding to death. I shut the door to my office and stayed there for the rest of the morning brooding.

Just before noon I made my surreptitious escape down the service freight elevator. There is a security video camera that covers the loading dock but only where the trucks park and are unloaded. There is a side door leading to the lobby that is not covered and I took it.

I had parked in my normal reserved spot in the garage that required a parking card to enter. I used mine as normal in the morning but I didn't need it to leave the garage. There were no security cameras anywhere in the garage and when I returned I would use the parking card of a former employee to get back in. It still worked. I had checked it yesterday. Security was very lax in our office building and our building management were a bunch of lazy sods that had to be reminded at least five times in order to do anything. My departure and return would not be recorded nor noted.

The hotel room was near the back end of the building in a fairly remote corner, perfect for a little mid-day privacy for their dalliance. There was one security camera that covered the parking lot of the hotel near where I could walk up the outside staircase to the room without otherwise being observed. I'd already taken care of it. I'd shot it out with my .22 scoped rifle late on Wednesday night from a dark and vacant parking lot across the street. It was a very easy short range shot and I'd nailed it on the first try. It hadn't been replaced or particularly noticed. I guess security cameras break all the time around hotels as they are hotbeds for low-lives stealing luggage from travelers and auto theft.

I went in and did my business and was out in less than five minutes. No panic or rush and I was, oddly, as cool as a cucumber. I still had nearly twenty-five minutes to wait for the happy couple to arrive. Rita I knew I could count on being early. She always tended to be at least five minutes early for any appointment, but I had no way of knowing how Roger's internal clock ran. I moved my car off to a remote corner of the parking lot where Rita wouldn't be able to see me when she drove up and I slunk down low to wait.

I didn't have to wait long to find out that Roger's clock was running early too today since they both arrived at almost the same time in separate cars. They shared a big hug at the hotel door and went inside without any further displays. Rita wasn't much for public displays of affection and didn't normally even like me to hold her hand when out in public. Still I was a bit disappointed, I'd wanted to see a big fat sloppy kiss or her hand reach down to his crotch or something. I think I wanted my last memory of her to be something sluttish, with her doing something overtly for her lover that she never allowed her husband to do. Something definitive to hammer down that last little peg of doubt in the back corner of my mind, but I wasn't going to get it.

Now I had one last piece of work to do. This morning after Rita stomped out of the house, I had taken a solid hour to pack up several of her suitcases with some of her better clothes, her best jewelry, her skimpiest lingerie and nightwear (not that there was much of it), and so on. Anything that I figured a woman would pack up on short notice for a separation, or a wild weekend with a new boyfriend. I had a set of keys for her trunk and I put her three bags inside and shut it, my work now done.

Using the old employee gate access card, I returned to work and slunk back up in the freight elevator and into my office without anyone seeing even a hair of me. No messages taped to my door and no blinking red lights on my phone. I hadn't been missed.

I made a token pass around the office to be seen but soon slunk back into my cave of despair to brood for the remainder of the afternoon, my nerves now totally shot and my mental batteries completely drained. Now I had nothing left to do with my life except wait ... and I had to wait for quite a long time.

There were no phone calls at work that afternoon and no phone calls at home later that evening. Nothing in fact happened all night long. I had a drink or two to try and settle my nerves and keep myself from pacing holes in the carpet, but it just made things worse. So I drank some more and broke open a good bottle of rum that I'd been saving for a special occasion and sipped on that in front of late night TV until nearly dawn Saturday when I finally passed out on the sofa.

When I woke up mid-afternoon I started the party off again where I had left off the night before and was pretty pickled by the time a pair of police officers arrived at my door a little after 6 p.m. After a lot of preliminaries, such as establishing that Rita lived here (or used to until yesterday morning) and my name and relationship with her, we got down to some brass tacks.

"Sir, do you know where your wife is?"

"Don't know and can't say that I care anymore! We separated yesterday morning. She's off with her boyfriend I think ... she's been having an affair with her literary agent. Go ask him. She packed her bags and everything. I'll be filing divorce papers on Monday."

"She has had an accident, but we can't tell you anything more at this time."

I did my best to look surprised, but was really too drunk and depressed to really much care. That settled most of their questions right off of the bat. Good, because in my current state I wasn't entirely sure what answers I was giving. It did appear that my fairly genuine performance of a cuckolded and abandoned husband was spot on the mark and didn't raise any red flags with the officers. They weren't investigators; they were just patrol cops that got the call from dispatch to notify the next of kin.

I told them to look around anywhere they wanted and I went into the kitchen to wage war with Rita's sophisticated Italian coffee maker. I was a sleepy, maudlin drunk at the moment and wanted some coffee to sober up enough to become a fully wide awake drunk. I fought with the machine for nearly half an hour before admitting defeat and unplugged the bastard and offered it as a door prize to the officers.

"Rita loved that damned thing ... more than me apparently and I'm surprised that she didn't take it with her. It grinds, roasts, and brews everything except plain bloody coffee. She can make espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, and so forth, but the damned thing won't make a plain cup of joe!" They declined my gift so I set the machine out on the curb next to the trashcan. I noticed that it then disappeared about the exact same time the officers left. Sneaky bastards!

After they left I resumed my little one person party and pretty much finished the remainder of my rum bottle before curling up on the bathroom floor in front of the toilet for a long uninterrupted sleep until Sunday morning.

I showered but decided to skip the shaving part ... and skipped any more alcohol as a substitute for breakfast. In fact I cooked enough for three people and ate it all. Then I spent the afternoon packing up everything of Rita's that was left in house and moved it all into the garage. By early evening I was still feeling ambitious and had started to mow the lawn when a police detective finally arrived to formally question me.

Officially, I was finally notified that my wife and another man were both found dead in a hotel room under extremely odd circumstances, but more than that he wouldn't give me any additional information. Did I wish to make any statements? Sure! I told him everything I thought he needed to know.

"What's so odd about it? Ask anyone who knew my wife, and I'll give you at least a dozen names if you want them, and they would all agree that she was a raving psycho. Well actually, most of her friends have better manners and would just say that she was 'excitable' and had 'numerous eccentricities'. Rita was seriously manic-depressive, just like her mother, and no one could ever get her into a doctor's office to get medicated. Last weekend she was on a manic high telling everyone that she'd have 'good news soon' but by Thursday night she was in a depressed fit about something. She loved to keep secrets and never told me any of them. Between you, me and the lamppost, I think she had plans to run off with her lover, but he might have gotten cold feet on her. She admitted Thursday night that she was having an affair and wanted out, and took some suitcases with her when she left for work Friday morning. I think her affair was with her literary agent but I can't prove it — I've never met the man."

"I see." The detective said, hinting that I should continue.

"Can you tell me how she died? Wait, skip that ... I honestly don't really care. Since you're standing here asking me questions I have to assume its something nasty like murder-suicide ... and that would fit Rita to a 'T'. I'll even bet you that there isn't even a suicide note! That would require some measure of consideration for others that she didn't have a drop of. Not even an 'I'm sorry for the inconvenience'. My guess is that she snapped when he told her that he wasn't going to run off and play house with her, and she stabbed him something like thirty or forty times before leaping to her own death upon the busiest freeway in town ... probably during rush hour traffic. Just to cause the maximum amount of inconvenience for everyone! Did I nail it?"