The Perfect Murder (18 page)

Because what does it amount to? A lover kills his mistress and is speedily apprehended. Kills her by shooting her.

Ho fucking hum.

The artistry, you see, is all concealed. The only person who will know that this is anything but the most humdrum of homicides is Blazes himself, who will react by tearing down the façade. At that point, I admit, your ingenuity will become apparent to one and all, but only by placing you in the dock for murder.

Not quite as you would want it, I shouldn't think.

And now for Lovesey.

If Westlake characteristically began by padding out his narrative, Lovesey as characteristically opened by putting the whole thing in historical perspective. His most nearly satisfactory works are set in the Victorian era. They’re more convincing than his contemporary tales, perhaps because we aren’t in as good a position to realize that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The references to Smith and Haigh, then, got me off to a bad start. So, too, did Lovesey’s monetary demands. “An annuity of let us say a million dollars for the rest of my life.” (Does he mean a million a year? Or does he ask no more than a million-dollar annuity, which should pay out a respectable annual sum? It is characteristically unclear, isn’t it?)

I must say that it never occurred to me to ask you for money. I was happy enough to provide a suggestion which might prove useful. I can only guess that Lovesey, unlikely ever to earn a substantial sum from his fiction, saw his one shot at wealth through persuading you to part with some of yours. If you did pay him such a sum, I suspect the crass bastard would never write another word.

Hmmmm. I know a million dollars is a lot of money, but maybe you ought to give it some thought…

But, once again, I digress. All of these considerations aside, I am forced to admit that Lovesey’s scenario is nothing short of brilliant. It is bizarre, it is theatrical, and it is even alliterative.
The Jellyfish in the Jacuzzi
indeed. The man has a knack, and it is clear, is it not, that he missed his calling? All these years he would have been so much better employed writing headlines for the tabloids.

We cannot fault Lovesey’s crime as we did Westlake’s. Here, to be sure, is a crime which will not waste its piscine fragrance on the desert air. If everything artful about Westlake’s scheme was below the surface, Lovesey’s is very much the reverse. His murder is very much such stuff as headlines are made of.

As a matter of fact, his crime will make headlines before anyone has been murdered. Even as you are laying the groundwork, your efforts will be getting a considerable amount of attention, first from your friends, then from the national press.

There’s the problem.

“I want to see you on the front page of every paper in America,” Lovesey has written. I don’t know that a houseful of finned vermin will quite accomplish this feat, but it will come close. “There will be intense speculation as to which of your friends could have pulled such an elaborate trick,” he goes on. Indeed there will be, and the press, obliging publicists for your efforts, will not leave it at that. They will interview. They will investigate. They will stick their long journalistic noses into every nook and cranny. If you have laid a trail which will successfully implicate Blazes as the practical joker, his role will come to light long before there is a sea wasp in the whirlpool. More likely than not, they will probe beyond the false trail you have laid and establish that you played this practical joke upon yourself.

At which point, sir, you will be on the front pages again, looking like the greatest horse’s ass that ever lived. Having already been the butt of a bizarre practical joke, you will have emerged as the witless practical joker himself. Your wife, you may be sure, will join heartily in the general laughter.

What to do? Shoot her, I’d say. You’ll get off. Given the stunts you’ve pulled, people will be quick to assume that you were aiming at your own foot, and the shot went wide.

Even if all this doesn’t happen—and it will, it will—even, I say, if you manage everything, Lovesey’s scenario depends upon other people following an extremely arbitrary script. Suppose your wife passes on the Chocolate Binge, deciding that she has other fish to fry, as it were. Suppose she goes, and finds out the date is wrong, and spends the night anyway? Suppose she comes home and, for any number of reasons, decides to pass on the Jacuzzi? Suppose the poor sea wasp, moved one time too many, expires in its new home? (Sea wasps don’t travel at all well, you know.) Suppose—but I could list no end of suppositions, and that’s the point, you see. Altogether too much is left to chance. Lovesey’s plan might work as fiction—fanciful, improbable, sillier-than-life fiction—but it’s no way to disencumber oneself of a real wife in real life.

To drive a final nail into Lovesey’s coffin, consider the two chaps who serve as exemplars at the beginning of his narrative. George Joseph Smith and John George Haigh indeed. Why do you suppose we know their names? Because they got away with it?

Case closed, I’d say.

And now for Hillerman.

What an impressive scheme he has worked out here! It was hardly what I would have expected. I anticipated another earnest effort, a plodding narrative full of conflicted tribal police officers and insensitive Caucasians, with the murder pinned on Lo, the poor Indian. I thought surely I’d pick up some arcane bit of Zuni lore, something that would stay with me long after the reading experience itself was happily forgotten. I never expected such sheer cleverness from Hillerman, and I take my war bonnet off to him.

It could work, too. There’s a good deal of charm to the notion, certainly, of making yourself the most obvious suspect, and indeed of disarming the police by confessing right off the bat, leaving it to them to prove you innocent. It has worked time and time again in the fiction of writers every bit as resourceful as Hillerman, so why should it not work in real life?

The answer, I fear, lies in the complaint Hillerman himself makes in his opening pages. Crime is unimaginative, and only the dullest criminals get caught, and in the dullest manner possible. The police, perhaps in response, have become quite dull, and while the tools for forensic investigation grow ever more acute, they are employed in an increasingly slipshod manner.

A few years ago, for example, a woman’s body was recovered from the Hudson River and an autopsy performed by the New York medical examiner’s office determined that she had drowned. One of the personnel in the office, more playful than most, wound up keeping the severed skull as a desk ornament. (I am not making this up.) Months later, someone idly examining the skull noted for the first time there was a bullet in it. The woman had not drowned. She had been shot in the head.

Hillerman would have us assume that the police, having been presented with a dead woman in a bathtub and a husband who readily admits clouting her and holding her head underwater, will look further. It is unquestionably true that a careful postmortem examination would turn up inconsistencies, but how careful an autopsy do you suppose you’re going to get?

Your wife is rich and prominent, so perhaps caution and attention to detail would be the order of the day. (The woman with the bullet in the skull was monied and socially prominent, too, and her husband and murderer was a doctor. So one can take nothing for granted.) Let us assume, at any rate, that the autopsy would disclose what you would wish it to. The problem, then, is one of taking the noose which has just fallen from your own neck and fastening it around Boylan’s.

It all goes well in Hillerman’s script. You say this, the cop says that, you say thus, the cop says so, you say ee-ther, the cop says eye-ther—neat, isn’t it?

I don’t know that it would play that way.

I could say more, a great deal more, to dissuade you from pursuing the course of action Hillerman proposes. But did you ever happen to read a short story of mine called
The Ehrengraf Nostrum?
In it, the titular hero Martin Ehrengraf is called upon to defend a client who has seemingly murdered a whole host of strangers through product tampering, all with the aim of disposing of a spouse in the process.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the story. I’m rather more certain, however, that Mr. Hillerman is familiar with it, and my attorney seems quite sanguine about the possibility of a successful plagiarism suit.

Accordingly, on advice of counsel I’ll say no more about Hillerman’s delightful proposal.

Finally, Sarah Caudwell.

Once I got past the florid gush of the woman’s prose, I was quite overwhelmed by the glittering brilliance of Caudwell’s scenario. Her scheme is quite simple, yet highly stylized and unquestionably dramatic. All efforts aim at producing that one unparalleled moment, when Blazes is apprehended over your wife’s dead body with the murder weapon in his hand.

It is a grabber, this murder. It would go down in the annals of crime even if the actual circumstances were never to become known. Reading it, I several times pursed my lips to emit a soundless whistle. When I reached the end, I winced.

Why, this is quite excellent, I told myself. And eminently workable. And perhaps, I thought, ever quick to give credit where due, perhaps this is even better than my own proposal.

And yet, and yet.

The taped scream could be a problem. If the recording should come to light, if you are not able to retrieve the tape machine and get rid of it, the game is up. For you to do so requires perfect timing and demands that nothing whatsoever go wrong. Indeed, the entire scheme has that caveat, doesn’t it?

A minor cavil, that. I brushed it aside as unworthy. There was, I decided, nothing wrong with Caudwell’s plan.

But why did I hesitate to embrace it wholeheartedly?

I slept on it, and in the morning the answer was clear.

With the new day’s dawn, I could look at the Caudwell opus and see the serpent under it. There you’d be, staging an elaborate murder thousands of miles from home. I can see you now, telling your guests there is something you have forgotten to tell your wife about the next morning’s arrangements, and excusing yourself for a few moments. And hurrying to her room, and knocking on the door, and, when there is no response, letting yourself in.

“You still have your key,” Caudwell writes. Interesting, is it not, that she takes the trouble to point that out? You still have your key, and you use it and throw open the door, and what do you find?

Not, I shouldn’t think, your wife, waiting patiently to be killed. No, my friend, I fear you will walk in on something else entirely. A hired assassin who will stab you in the heart. A chambermaid, cruelly used and more cruelly slain, with your dagger in her heart. I can’t say precisely what you will encounter because I can’t guess precisely what Miss Caudwell will have arranged for you, but I am sure it will be a surprise, and I rather doubt it will be a happy one.

Do you see what you have done? You have engaged a woman to help you murder your wife. Oh, the towering folly of it! If Caudwell has her way you will be twice hoist, first on your own petard, then on the gibbet.

“I hope I may claim without boasting to have provided the climax that I promised you,” the cheeky bitch writes. “I do not know if you will find it as satisfying as you expected.”

Indeed.

As you can see, I was more than a little impressed with all four members of what I found myself thinking of as the backup crew. They had greatly exceeded expectations, and if each fell a little short of the mark, well, what of it? I was reasonably certain you would have little trouble in seeing the clear superiority of my scheme and would proceed forthwith.

Then I read your second letter with some attention, read it clear through this time.

At first I was greatly alarmed. Here you were, rushing to put Westlake’s plan in motion, and carrying it one toke over the line by making DeMortis into a girl! This man, I thought, this would-be criminal genius, has just been looking for an excuse to put on women’s clothes. Scratch an uxoricide, find a drag queen.

I was still recovering from the shock when you had abandoned Diana Clement to chase down Lovesey’s plan. And what do I find you doing but littering your own lawn with giant crabs.

Suddenly the crabs are gone. Is a call to 911 all it takes to get such creatures swept from one’s yard? You must live in a superior neighborhood. The crabs are gone, then, and I find you hunting mushrooms, eventually turning up one that will leave bodies contorted into alphabetical shapes. Do you hope to have your victims spell out a dying message? If you poison an infinite number of monkeys, will they spell out all of Shakespeare’s plays?

The mushrooms are tossed—with a little oil and garlic, I presume—when Caudwell’s Scottish idyll arrives. You begin to execute her plan, only to abandon it when my letter reaches you. And I read how you begin to carry out the steps I’ve outlined for you, only to lay off when a chance remark of your wife’s returns your attention once more to the Westlake procedure.

I almost washed my hands of you at this point. I almost bought the image you were so cleverly trying to sell us, of a dilatory dilettante, unable to stick to anything for any length of time, helplessly addicted to embroidering everything at hand until it was so overladen with needlework that one could see none of the whole cloth under it. “To hell with him,” I may have said aloud. “He is a bumbler and a time waster, he could not kill a fly, and writing further to him would only be throwing good paper after bad.”

Then I read one section a second time.

Interestingly, in your preliminary attempts to execute my proposal, you perpetrated no embroidery whatsoever. You gathered some body hairs and sundry bits of corporal residue, and that, on the face of it, is all you did.

I purchased newspapers from your city, back issues from the previous two weeks. I read. A scant three days before the date of your second letter, a young woman had been horribly murdered at a local motel. She seems to have gone to the room, registered to a Mr. J. G. Haigh, in response to a telephone call; she herself was employed as an outcall masseuse.