IF FEAR WAS THE YARDSTICK, this Monday morning was the most critical in Paul Feldman’s life. 

Desperate to get to the airport in time to make the 10:50 morning flight to Houston, Feldman felt sick as he fought murderous traffic for over an hour to the Richmond International Airport.  Forcing down his roiling stomach, Feldman drove into the maw of the parking garage and punched the illuminated button for his parking ticket.  He reached for the ticket just as a gut-wrenching wave of nausea hit.

Oh, God – not now!

Feldman raced to the first open space in the packed garage and threw up the second he stepped outside his car.  After nearly ten minutes of vomiting, he managed to retrieve his cell phone from his briefcase and call his office– too sick to make the flight.

After more retching and heaving, he got behind the wheel of his car, weaved raggedly across the sky bridge to pay the cashier and leave.

“Sir, you all right?” the young cashier asked.  “You don’t look so good.”

Feldman started to answer, but flung open his door and vomited again.  The cashier jumped back to prevent the foul-smelling liquid from splashing on her shoes.  Finally Feldman could only expel a small amount of spit.

“Sorry about the mess.  I’ll be okay,” he said in a raspy voice. “I just need to get home and get to bed.”

What the hell would his boss say now?  After laboring in obscurity for seven long years, Paul Feldman’s career finally looked as if it might take off like one of the solid fuel boosters manufactured by his company, Rocket Science, Inc.

For the very first time the company president himself had asked that Feldman fly to Texas and present the latest strategic plan to the Houston office.  The company’s travel office had booked Feldman on the morning flight.  Only vice presidents were ever sent to Houston.  It looked to Feldman like he was definitely in line for a promotion.  

On other business trips, Feldman had always asked his stunning wife, Marian, to accompany him.  Thanks to indulgent parents, Marian was used to fine, expensive things, and Neiman Marcus in Houston was perfect for her up-scale brand of shopping.  But there would be no time for shopping or sightseeing on this trip, he’d told her.  This trip was going to be all business.  It was the meeting, the pivotal point in his career.

Marian made a baroque show of disappointment, but in the end had wished him well.  As he left, she pulled the blankets up around her and with a little girl smile sleepily kissed him goodbye.  She was stretching and lazily reaching for the bedside phone as he backed out of the driveway.  “All clear.  Come on over.”

After collecting his change and receipt, Feldman drove off toward home, wondering whether he should head for the nearest emergency room instead.

BY THIS TIME, Marian was entertaining Police Detective Arnold Carey in the Feldman marital bed.  Marian knelt on the edge of the bed doggie style . . . and the detective, wearing only his socks, assumed his position behind her, with his back to the bedroom door several feet away.

Marian moaned with pleasure.  For her, anal sex was exactly what she craved.  “You like it like this, don’t you baby?” Carey asked her over and over.

“Yes, oh YES!” Marian shouted.   And in a low, thick voice, pleaded: “Deeper.”   Carey grabbed her hips and drew her toward him while he thrust forward roughly.  “OH GOD YES!  Like that.”  Neither of them heard the door quietly open. 

The visitor stepped inside, took the detective’s automatic from its holster hanging with his clothes on a chair near the door, aimed and squeezed the trigger.

The automatic’s report filled the bedroom.  The lead round hit the back of Carey’s head, propelling him forward  so that Marian was now face down on the bed, with Carey on top of her.

Marian couldn’t hear her own screams as she struggled to get the detective’s body off her.  Nor, from her position, could she see the visitor’s gloved hand slip the automatic back in its holster and exit the bedroom.

Adrenaline poured into Marian’s system and she began to function well past her normal limits.  She shrugged off Carey’s lifeless two hundred pounds and got herself free.  

Marian’s mind raced.  She dragged Carey’s body to the floor, then over toward the bedroom window.  She struggled to keep the detective on his stomach as she moved him.  She was aware of blood leaking from the wound.  A trail of blood would tip investigators to her having moved the body.

With what seemed like superhuman strength, Marian managed to dress the deceased detective.  All the while she was reviewing in her mind TV crime shows and what criminals did to cover up evidence.  Bleach, she remembered, was used to eradicate blood stains.  Okay, she could do this . . . she had some bleach in the bathroom.  Marian wiped up the blood, flushed the paper towels and reshelved the bleach.  That done, she showered and called 911.

PAUL FELDMAN WOULD later tell homicide investigators that on his drive home from the airport he had stopped a couple of times so that he could vomit by the side of the road.  And that when he tried to turn onto his street, both lanes were blocked by squad cars.  

Still desperately nauseated, he had abandoned his car and staggered toward home. The place was alive with cops, firemen, and EMT people.  Police cruisers, fire trucks and medic vans were parked all over the place, their intense blue and white overhead lights flashing while their radios crackled out unintelligible instructions.  Shrill sirens in the distance announced the arrival of even more official vehicles.

When Feldman had walked up, a gurney carrying a covered body rolled to a waiting ambulance and Marian was being escorted to an unmarked police car.  Feldman called to his wife from behind the yellow crime scene tape, and, although she didn’t respond, their eyes met for a second before she entered the back seat.

When questioned at the scene, Marian said that she had called Detective Carey about noises she heard outside her bedroom window the previous night.  A uniformed cop wanted to know why she reported the noises to Detective Carey?  Why not report them to police headquarters?  She answered that she had met Detective Carey socially and thought contacting him directly would speed up the investigation.

MARIAN AND PAUL Feldman were on their separate ways downtown to police headquarters when Homicide Detective Lieutenant Sammy Ditsel arrived at the scene.  Behind his back, Detective Ditsel’s subordinates called him “the weasel,” which, with his pointed nose and receding chin, he uncannily resembled.  The fact that he was good at his job made them like him even less, if  that were possible.

     After speaking with the uniformed cop who had briefly questioned Marian and Paul, Ditsel thought their stories implausible and unconvincing.  In fact, in Ditsel’s professional opinion, both Feldman stories were, as he put it, “unadulterated cow flop.”

Ditsel had of course known of Carey’s reputation for banging married women and had assumed that’s what had happened here, except that in this case Carey finally got paid off, probably by the husband. 

Ditsel was a percentage player.  All U.S. domestic murder statistics pointed overwhelmingly to the husband in cases like this 50 to 1.  Ditsel asked himself who the hell was he to buck those odds?

There was no question in Ditsel’s mind that his late colleague had been redressed by someone after he died and that elaborate pains had been taken to wipe everything clean, but he said nothing to the other cops.  Better to ask the Feldmans those questions back at the station.

It appeared to Ditsel that rigor mortis had begun by the time he entered the bedroom, which told him that Mrs. Feldman did not call 911 immediately.  It was his experience that it took at least an hour, usually longer, for a body to become as rigid as Carey’s.  Also, the knot in Carey’s tie was a four-in-hand, not the fat Ronald Reagan Windsor knot that Carey favored.

A forensic examination would later bear out Ditsel’s discovery of blood on the heel of Carey’s left sock and nothing on his left shoe, not even fingerprints.  This would confirm what Ditsel had already surmised: except for his socks, Carey was naked when he was shot and then redressed afterward.

The ballistics report that followed stated unequivocally that Carey had been shot with his own gun, which was consistent with the husband’s happening on the scene, becoming enraged, grabbing the convenient gun and shooting his wife’s lover. 

But Carey had been shot in the back of his head, and that was puzzling, because surely the enraged husband would have shouted something out before firing.  If so, Carey would have turned to face the killer and gotten shot in the face, or at the very least, half-turned and taken it in the temple.

Then there was the husband’s failing to take a scheduled business trip because of sickness and returning home just in time to see his wife leaving in a police car.  To Ditsel’s mind, that just had to be blatant bullshit.  Yet, he was actually sick.  Although Ditsel had seen first time murder perps throw up when they confessed, this apparently was different.  According to a uniform at the scene, Feldman’s shirt was soaked with sweat and he heaved every few minutes.

Something was off somewhere.  Ditsel had gone over the room a dozen times, and it felt all wrong— and weird.  That Feldman woman knows something, he thought.  The shower’s dry, but the squeegee under the sink is wet.  It has to be the husband, goddamnit, and she’s covering for him. 

The evidence against him so far was all circumstantial and on the thin side at that, but Ditsel had made up his mind to press the Commonwealth Attorney hard to charge Paul Feldman.  He’d camp outside the CA’s office day and night if he had to.  If Feldman was charged with murder, something more would shake loose.  Ditsel would bet his new Grand Cherokee on it.

In Ditsel’s book, this was a classic domestic homicide: cheating wife diddles lover in the marital home; husband arrives unexpectedly; husband blows lover away. 

In his long career, Ditsel had seen hundreds of these domestic killings play out.  Absent a criminal history and evidence of premeditation, the husband would be charged with murder two, which would be pled down to voluntary manslaughter.  The husband would be sentenced to three years, released in 24 months, over and out. 

If, on the other hand, the judge wouldn’t accept a manslaughter plea (and Ditsel had also seen this happen more than once), the husband was looking at serious time: from 5 to 40 years.  And that meant a trial on a charge of murder two for sure. 

Ditsel knew that the big difference in this case was that the husband had killed a cop, and no cop killer would ever be charged with anything as lenient as murder two.  No, Paul Feldman would be charged with capital murder and the Commonwealth would demand the death penalty, and that made Ditsel smile.

PAUL AND MARIAN were questioned separately at the station and both requested lawyers when the interrogators started making accusations.

When Detective Ditsel returned to the station, he had come unglued when he heard that the Feldmans had lawyered up.  Why, he railed, had the interrogators put them on the rack before they tested them for gunpowder residue?  And why hadn’t they waited for him in the first goddamn place?  Now he’d never get a crack at them.

Suddenly Ditsel screamed, “SHIT PISS FUCK!” at the top of his lungs, shocking the squad room into silence.  The other detectives stared at Ditsel like he’d lost the last of his little rodent mind, and the secretaries glowered at him sullenly, and not for the first time.

Ditsel didn’t give a damn what they thought.  How many goddamn times had he taught them that the classic method of interrogation was to start off nice as pie, and gradually apply gentle pressure?  When that tactic had run its course, they should then say: “We’d like to run a routine test for gunpowder residue just to rule you out of the investigation.” 

Only after the residue test did you get tough.  Ditsel discovered that the clowns doing the interrogation had jumped right in with the thumbscrews.  “These fucking people aren’t garbage off the street,” he ranted.  “Goddamnit, they’re smart enough to know they don’t have to answer jack after asking for a lawyer.”

All it took was the mere mention of wanting to talk to a lawyer to stop further questioning on a dime.  But Ditsel knew that the one thing lawyers couldn’t prevent was a demand that their clients give nontestimonial evidence.  For both Feldmans, this meant a test for gun powder residue, which theoretically would prove that one of them had recently fired a gun.  For Marian Feldman it also meant a request for a medical examination for rape, which she refused.  “A man was murdered.  I wasn’t raped, you idiots!”

The harm was already done, but Ditsel still wanted to nail down his suspicion that Carey was banging the Feldman woman at the time of his death.  After giving her a drooling once-over at the station, Ditsel knew he was right.  In addition to Carey’s reputation and Marian Feldman’s lusciousness, Paul Feldman was several years older than his wife, and for Ditsel, who had a stormy May-December marriage of his own, that cinched it.

He threatened Marian with a court order if she continued to refuse his request for a rape kit.  At that, Marian, obviously confident that no judge would issue such an order, simply turned and walked away from the seething detective and caught a cab home.

    “WHAT HAPPENED, MARIAN?”

    “I’m a wreck, Paul.  I don’t want to talk about it right now.”  Marian was pacing the room in a haze of cigarette smoke.  She kept hearing the shot and smelling the burnt gun powder.  Try as she might, she couldn’t forget the dead weight of Carey’s body when he collapsed on her.  One second, he was very much alive; the next second, irretrievably, irrevocably dead.  Christ!

“They think I shot that detective,” said Paul.  “They said I did it out of jealousy.” 

Marian stopped pacing momentarily and glanced at Paul.  He looked sick and weak and desperately out of control.

“You have bigger balls than I thought.”

“What?  You think I did a thing like that?”

Okay, have it your way, she thought. You didn’t shoot him.

Paul looked utterly confused and Marian could have kicked herself for mouthing off, but it never occurred to her until that moment that it could have been anyone but Paul who had shot Carey.  Yet, as she looked at him and thought for a moment, the idea of Paul as a killer was laughable.  Whatever the truth, somehow she had to repair the damage her quick, sarcastic mouth had caused.

“No, of course not.  You couldn’t shoot a mosquito, but the cops don’t know it.” And neither do I, for sure.  “All they know is that another cop was shot in your home while your wife was there with him, alone.  They think that this was some kind of love triangle with you as the wronged husband who shot his wife’s lover in a jealous rage.  I told them what really happened.”

“Is that the way it was, Marian?  Was he your lover? Because if he was, then I think I’d better move into an apartment downtown.”

“Emphatically not, you son of a bitch, and I’m insulted that you’d ask me a thing like that!” 

Marian knew that if Paul were truly innocent, he’d be desperate to hear a lie, the balder the better.  She also knew that there were going to be explosive repercussions. She had lied to the cops, which they had probably expected.  But one of their own had been murdered, and they wouldn’t give up without nailing somebody.  They would dither for a while, with their thumbs firmly planted up their asses, then they would come after Paul with everything they had.

“As for your moving, right now I’d be happy as hell if you did move,” said Marian, praying to God that Paul was buying her insulted act.  Because if he wasn’t, he’d divorce her and she’d lose everything.  She’d lose her magnificent home and her lavish life, both of which were financed by Paul’s inherited wealth and therefore not reachable by her in a divorce action.  “But I think you’d better consult a lawyer before you do.  Any lawyer will tell you to STAY-FUCKING-PUT!” she cried.  “Meanwhile, you can sleep in the guest bedroom.”

PAUL HAD LEFT the house and walked out in the late winter cold to a small city park where he heaved into the bushes again and again, until there was nothing left in his stomach.  He sat on a concrete bench and fought back the green waves of nausea.  My life with Marian and everything I’ve worked so hard for at Rocket Science are on the line.  It will be a miracle if I don’t lose it all.  The police will find a way to arrest me for killing that detective, I know they will.  Then I’ll be tried and probably convicted. Game over, whether they execute me or not.

Shivering and exhausted after standing on the curb in the freezing cold for what seemed like hours, Paul finally hailed a cab.  He told the cabby to take him to a local motel, then sat with his head back, looking up at the headliner. 

After he checked in, he stumbled to his room, fell into bed, and escaped the living nightmare for a few precious hours by slipping into oblivion.