Free The Legacy by D. W. Buffa Page A

him. That would explain why he leaves both the gun and the wallet: panic. He has to get away. He knows someone will come, and in that fog, someone, even the police, might be just around the corner.”
    “If it was a robbery gone bad,”said Robert Sanders, staring at the ceiling and doing his best to sound bored, “and the guy is in such a hurry to get away that he doesn't bother to take the wallet, and he's in such a panic that he manages to leave the gun behind, how does it happen that he apparently had the presence of mind to wipe the murder weapon clean of his own fingerprints?”
    He knew everything he needed to know about the case: He had read it in the newspapers.
    “Maybe he wore gloves,”I replied with a shrug. “Jamaal Washington had them on that night. It was very cold.”
    “You said that was one possibility,”Bogdonovitch reminded me. “There is another?”
    “Yes. Suppose it was not a robbery at all. Suppose someone intended to kill Fullerton. Then what?”
    “I'm not sure I follow,”Bogdonovitch replied, leaning forward, his eyes still on me.
    “You still have the same sequence,”I explained. “Someone shoots him, doesn't take the wallet, and leaves the gun.”
    Bogdonovitch threw up his hands and laughed. “I still don't quite follow.”
    “Suppose someone killed him and tried to make it look like a robbery. What is your first question?”
    He twisted his head slightly to the side. A shadow came over his eyes as he thought about it. “Why didn't he take the wallet?”
    Then his face brightened and I knew he had the answer to his own question.
    “Because if he had taken the wallet—if he had taken the time to take the wallet—then why would he leave the gun?”
    “Yes,”I agreed. “And the gun was a cheap Saturday night special—not the kind an assassin would use, but the kind of gun everyone would expect to find if some kid had tried to rob someone he didn't know.”
    “Isn't there another possibility?”Sanders interjected. “It happened just the way the police said it did. Your client did it and they shot him when he tried to get away.”
    “No, Mr. Sanders, I can assure you, that is not a possibility.”
    Sanders crossed his legs and extended his arm over the back corner of his chair. He raised his head until he was looking at me down the length of his nose.
    “This has all been very interesting, Mr. Antonelli, and I'm sure you're a very good attorney, but I knew Jeremy Fullerton, so you'll have to forgive me if I don't have a great deal of sympathy for the young punk who killed him. You're going to lose this case, Mr. Antonelli, just as surely as our friend here lost,”he said with a dismissive nod in the general direction of Andrei Bog-donovitch.
    “Lost? I'm sorry,”Bogdonovitch inquired, “precisely what is it I'm supposed to have lost?”
    Sanders waved his hand in the air. “You, the Soviet Union, the fall of communism—that's what I meant,”he explained irritably.
    Quite deliberately, Naomi Sanders rolled her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, Andrei Bog-donovitch said something that caused an immediate sensation.
    “What makes you think we lost?”
    Robert Sanders stared at Bogdonovitch as if he had lost his mind.
    “I'll grant you,”Bogdonovitch remarked with an affable smile, “it certainly seems that the West, that capitalism, has won.”
    “Seems!”Sanders blustered. He planted both feet on the floor and both elbows on the table. “Seems that capitalism has won. Let me tell you something. We generate more wealth in a year in Silicon Valley alone than the entire Russian economy is likely to produce in the next decade.”He shook his head with contempt. “Seems!”
    “But what if this isn't the end of history at all, but just a stage? What if Marx wasn't wrong after all? What if the Soviet Union had to be destroyed before history could move beyond capitalism to communism? What does this new world market economy—the economy that