"With friends like that...."

After I told the detectives the story of my "friend", and what he had said only an hour after the police arrived at my Mom's house, I also remembered how strange it was that I had been with him at all on the previous night. I hadn't seen him or talked to him in over a year, even though I was living with his sister at the time. And then, on that night...of all nights...for him to just walk back into my life, like an old lost friend...it was just very strange. And he hadn't shown up at the club until after midnight. At the time, I thought he was just putting an old problem we had, behind us...extending the olive branch...so to speak. He was a drug business connection, and we had a falling out a year earlier, over a shipment of hashish he had supposedly sent to me from Amsterdam, but I had never received. He wanted to be paid. I wanted proof that he had sent it. I wanted proof he wasn't in New York City, while just saying that he went to Amsterdam. The only thing that would have proved that to me would have been the hashish arriving...or some indications of legal intervention by the authorities. There were no reports of seizures, from Customs or the Postal Service, and no police inquiries, so I had serious doubts that this guy ever even went to Europe at all. He was a really nasty guy, and always said that if anyone ever crossed him, he'd get even, and they would never even know it when he did. If I wasn't with his sister, we probably wouldn't have had much contact with each other. He was very devious. And violent. After I mentioned to the police detectives the conversation I had with him, and his boast, they dropped a bomb on me and said... "you know Mike, that guy was your alibi for much of the night in question, but did you ever realize that that also means you were his only alibi for that same time period?" I was stunned. I had never thought of that. But it sounded just like this guy...it was exactly the way he'd plan a revenge. Not only killing the mother of an "enemy", but making that enemy the prime suspect in the crime, too...and at the very same time protecting himself by using the prime suspect to create his own alibi. I told the police my suspicions, and they said they'd look into it. A week later, the police told me that they had tried to question this guy, but he had said he had already talked with them  about all of this...and refused to answer any more questions. They said they had reached a dead end with him, unless they came up with new information, or unless something changed. I didn't know when they said that, just how much things were going to change...or how prophetic the words "dead end" would soon become...