Free Single Jeopardy by Gene Grossman Page A

to imagine, but more likely: Koontz used Hansel to set me up for the suspension – maybe to get me out of the way so he could go after my wife. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The third scenario is the worst of all - my ex-wife may have been involved in it too.
    Looking at all three situations side-by-side I think that the second is the most probable. Koontz is a schmuck, but he isn’t stupid. There’s no way Hansel could have been with him for a couple of years without Koontz knowing he was a crook. They must have both been in on my frame-up together. My ex-wife should be ruled out of the conspiracy, because up until the suspension, we were having some communication problems in our marriage, but nothing bad enough to force her over to the dark side. Besides, getting me suspended would endanger her share of my future earnings. No, it’s just Koontz and Hansel, but I have no way to prove it. I’ll turn over this new development to Melvin’s office so he can let L. Martin figure out what to do with it. He’s the attorney handling my State Bar appeal, if he ever comes back from Thailand, so it should be his call.
    Having finished up meeting with my attorney a few stories above Koontz’s office, I feel better. He looked at the fax that Koontz sent me and is pretty confident that Myra’s acceptance of the boat on an “as-is, where-is” basis regardless of any repairs that might be necessary will hold up in any court – even the divorce court, should she want to drag me back in there for a modification. I was out of town when the boat burned and any experienced boat mechanic should be able to testify to the fact that the wiring was bad and could have gone at any time, without warning. True, I may have been negligent in not having the necessary repairs done in a timely matter, but negligence isn’t the issue here, so I’m home free on her waiver of half my law income for two years of practicing. And because the boat was insured, I should be getting a check that will cover me for most of my loss. I also think that because the loss took place before she took the boat as-is, she won’t even have a claim for any part of the insurance money. Life is good.
    Back at the boat, I e-mail my report on the Koontz-Hansel matter to Melvin’s office for forwarding to L. Martin in Thailand and decide to catch up on my reading. Several years having passed, it’s once again time to re-read The Complete Sherlock Holmes , sixty of the best crime stories ever written. I try to read this tome at least once every five years, and when I do, it’s like making the same new discoveries over again each time. The only thing that comes close to these gems of crime detection are the seventy-two short mysteries written by Rex Stout that feature Nero Wolfe , the original armchair detective.
    A good crime story is a lot tougher to solve than a television mystery because most TV shows give away the bad guy in the casting. If the only face you recognize in the television mystery show is the featured guest star, you can make book on the fact that he’s probably the one whodunit. Most of the television one-hour crime shows follow the same pattern: you meet the bad guy in the first act; someone will die before the first commercial break, and someone (usually the hero) will be in a situation of peril before the next-to-last commercial. The only TV crime story to break this pattern was Peter Falk’s Columbo, which wasn’t really a whodunit… right from the get-go you knew who ‘done it’ - instead, it’s a ‘how’s-he-gonna-catch-him.’
    In a way, Columbo resembles the police lieutenant in Fyodor Dostoyefsky’s all-time classic, Crime and Punishment . The reader knows that starving student Raskolnikov killed the usurious pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna, and so does detective Petrovitch of the Saint Petersburg Police. Just like Columbo, he keeps dogging Raskolnikov until he wears him down and gets the confession.
    When I first started