Malta convicts the men who supplied the bomb, acquits the man accused of ordering it

…(cont) Accessories. That's the word I keep circling. You want to know what an accessory is—I've got a fan belt hanging on a hook in my garage, cost me forty-one dollars, does nothing by itself. It's an accessory to the engine. Take the engine out, that belt's just a loop of rubber. An accessory needs a principal to be an accessory to. That's not my opinion, that's the word's meaning—I looked it up, wrote it down too, three pages later.

So I had it: two men, convicted, as accessories, in June of last year. And further back, the killing itself—the woman, the bomb, the year, 2017. What I did not have, what my notebook never had a page for, was anybody convicted of ordering the thing done. Not until this week.

This week a jury in Malta acquitted the businessman who stood accused of orchestrating the whole killing. The man they said arranged it, the man the accessories were supposedly working for. Acquitted.

Now here's where I get stuck, and maybe you can straighten me out. If the two men who carried the bomb to her car were convicted as accessories to her murder, and the man accused of ordering that murder was acquitted this week, what does the record now say they were accessories to?

I drove down to the corner store to think it over, needed cigars anyway, the cheap ones, the only kind I ever buy. Fellow behind the counter said something while he was ringing me up. He said an accessory's the piece you're still holding after you return the thing it went with. I don't know where he heard that. I wrote it down anyway, right under the fan belt.

Because that's what's sitting on the page now. A conviction, dated June 2025, for supplying the explosive used in a murder. And an acquittal, dated this week, of the man accused of ordering that same murder. Same bombing. Same woman. Same year, 2017, going in. One page says accessory. The other page, as of this week, says nobody.

I was about to close the notebook, put the cigars in the glovebox, call it a night.

Excuse me—one more thing, before you go. The two men who supplied the bomb are still convicted, still accessories, still on the books as of this morning. So which murder, exactly, does that conviction attach to now?