The Perfect Murder (19 page)

The woman, a Ms. Thelma Rackowski, seems to have been strangled. It must have been a difficult matter examining the throat for ligature, however, as part of that organ reposed on the bed with her body while the other was attached to her head, which had been mounted upon one of the wall lamps. (The shade had been removed, the head forced neck-down onto the bulb. Was the bulb lit? Did light shine out of her mouth, like a jack-o’-lantern? The newspaper story lacked detail.)

Other portions of the young lady’s anatomy had been artfully removed, with various portions placed in curious juxtaposition to one another.

I called the police in your town. Knowing they would keep certain clues from the press, I avoided representing myself as a journalist. Instead, I passed myself off as a state police officer from a state five hundred miles distant. I allowed that the Rackowski homicide had some touches in common with a recent series of murders in our own bailiwick. Had the killer left any physical evidence behind?

Indeed he had, I learned. A careful investigation had turned up an array of body hair, some of which could have been previously present in the room, spotless housekeeping not being a trademark of the motel in question. Several hairs, however, had been recovered from the body of the victim, including a pubic hair which had depended from the young woman’s lower lip. It was not one of the victim’s own hairs, I was told, and had been tentatively determined to have been supplied by a male Caucasian.

I could have put a name to that male Caucasian, couldn’t I?

By the time I terminated the call, I had taken care to establish several cardinal differences between the homicides I was presumably investigating and the work of the Motel Ripper. Once I’d hung up I no longer needed to hide my jubilation. Had I been wearing a hat, I’d have taken it off to you. Hell, I’d have tossed it in the air.

You were following my plan!

And how clever you were to have pretended to put my colleagues’ plans into operation, botching them all the while. You’ll understand, won’t you, if I allow myself to revel in your accomplishment? I bear no ill will for the late Ms. Rackowski, to be sure. Nor do I have anything against your wife, or your friend Boylan. Even so, their deaths and indeed the deaths of whatever other innocent victims perish along the way cannot fail to bring me a certain unwholesome but undeniable satisfaction.

You can’t blame me, can you, for surrendering to the pride of authorship?

I thought not.

DEAR FRIEND,

So. You’re beginning to enjoy our correspondence, are you? That may change, my
friend.
 

Granted, I had understood from the outset that you were adding to your risk of exposure by consulting others as well as myself—yet another indication of your ambivalence toward the entire operation—but I had expected you would be forming a jury of at least my, if not your, peers. The latest Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, say. Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Pol Pot. Imelda Marcos. A member of the Senate’s Intelligence Oversight Committee. An executive from Drexel Burnham. People, in other words, who had
already
gotten away with murder. I’d thought, quite naturally, you understood that my own…

Well. Never mind. The point is, I had no idea at the outset that you intended to insult me in such a fashion; to cobble me together with these, these
scriveners.
I had no thought that you expected me to hobnob, rub elbows, shuffle along with the likes of these makeweights, these cutpennies, these
artificers.

Well, it’s not their fault, I mustn’t blame them overly. They’ve done their best, poor catchpoles, and I shall give them—not you, my
friend,
them—the decent respect of treating their humble offerings with sympathetic patience and a critical eye well tempered by compassion for human imperfectibility.

(Though I freely admit that the thought of their being invited to criticize, pass judgment on, grade, and rate
me
galls rather severely. I grind my teeth at the prospect, as though at the sight of a fine lace antimacassar in the paws of Sylvester Stallone. Which is only one of the reasons, my
friend,
why I have chosen to… Well, never mind. We’ll get to all that, in good time.)

Are you comfortable? Where you sit reading this missive, I mean. Are you comfy now? Have you chosen to read in the music room downstairs, with its tacky Mafia-like red flocked wallpaper? Or in your cream-and-gold dressing room upstairs, with the child-porn videos in the bottom left locked drawer of the Louis XV commode? Wherever you’ve chosen to settle with this communication, I do hope you’re comfortable. For now. No drafts on the back of your neck? No discomfiting itch at your elbows? No uneasy sense of eyes watching, observing your every movement? Good. Read on.

Being a gentleman—I am always a gentleman, fortunately for you—I shall begin with the lady’s contribution. The flaws in this proposal glare brightly enough, I should think, for even you to see them, though the hugger-mugger with the dirk and the cassette player has a certain
jeu de paume
which would no doubt have a certain appeal for frivolous minds; the sort of people who can never guess the ending of a “Columbo” episode.

But what of the blood? This skene-dhu you’re waggling about with such amateurish abandon will surely sever some artery, some primal blood canal. Have you ever been to the stockyards? Stabbing victims bleed prodigiously, my
friend,
they spout, they spew, they gush, they fountain over, and over everything in sight. With every desperate final beat of their hearts, these doomed wretches disembogue yet another hot sticky stream of the stuff, in an arching carmine torrent. Are you really agile enough to dance out of the way of that flood, encased as you are in that unfamiliar and unflattering costume? And even if you could scamper lithely aside, a homicidal Baryshnikov, what of the tape recorder? You must secrete it in your wife’s blood-soaked garments without getting blood on yourself and without jamming the mechanism of the machine with gore. And then you must reclaim it! Hide it on your person without leaving a single stain!

Ho ho. May I watch?

But this isn’t even the primary difficulty with the operation. No, the primary difficulty is simply stated: If you leave your home, your neighborhood, your nation, and go to some foreign land, you will be
a fish out of water.

Anyone who chooses to commit a murder on alien soil had best be in uniform and at war; otherwise, the unknowns are just too many. You can have no idea, ahead of time, what customs, characteristics, local eccentricities may confound your plotting.

And if this is true generally when away from home, it is doubly true in the British Isles, where the illusion of a shared language creates the dangerous impression that you understand what’s going on. You do not. Behavior which may seem to you perfectly innocuous could raise eyebrows and suspicion along those cleared moors, could make you an object of more than cursory observation even before you make your blood-soaked move. You’ll never know what nuances you’re getting wrong, what subtle clues of national character and local arcanity you are leaving in your wake, spoor that Scottish policemen would fall on with that dour glee and guilt-ridden doggedness and blunt-minded persistence that has made the race of Scots such feared bores wherever in the world their rotten bagpiping has sounded.

That chauvinism is fatal to clarity of thought should go without saying. That Ms. Caudwell’s invitation to your ruin reeks of it does go without saying. Go without it.

In fact, the only good thing to be said for this first suggestion is that when you are caught—and you will be caught—you will be tried in a Scottish court. You have the money to hire the finest barristers and solicitors. There is a finding available to you in Scotland unlike the possible conclusions to a criminal trial in virtually any other jurisdiction in the world, where the choices are usually between Guilty and Not Guilty. In Scotland, and nowhere else in the British Isles, and in fact nowhere else in the civilized world, there is a third possible conclusion: Not Proven. It has been said, with some accuracy, that Not Proven means, “You didn’t do it, and don’t do it again.”

Well, of course, unless you remarry you won’t be able to do it again, will you? And surely your pricey Edinburgh legal servants will find a way to steer you through the Not Proven door.

Still, that’s hardly a particularly artistic finish to your endeavor, to be sneered at by old duffers in white wigs who speak as though tree roots had been implanted between their teeth. But if that’s your idea of a grand exit, go right ahead.

Or perhaps it is Mr. Hillerman’s plan you’d prefer, even though, in my initial letter to you, I pointed out what was wrong with that whole approach. If I may quote from myself (I only quote from those I deeply admire):

“My dear sir,
you studied to be a doctor!
Don’t you think the police will investigate your background? They will, I assure you, and do so much more exhaustively, I may say, than you have offered it up to inspection in your letter to me. If the police are presented with a woman dead by poisoning, whose husband had once studied to be a doctor, they will not for a second be duped or distracted, not by all the false trails and false alibis in the world. Your cleverness, plus mine, plus as much more cleverness as you can bring into play from other sources, will all be wasted against the blunt wall of their conviction. And yours; for murder.”

Well, so much for “as much cleverness as you can bring into play from other sources,” eh? Of course, at that time, I had no idea of the composition of the group with which you intended me to consort. It’s only since then that I’ve realized I must…

Well, never mind that. The point is poison. A bit after the advice I have just cited, I made the point again, and even more bluntly: “[I]f you once upon a time studied to be a doctor, leave the poison on the shelf.” I can hardly be clearer than that.

But even if your personal medical background were limited to overstatement of insurance claims, Mr. Hillerman’s advice would still be fatally flawed. You wanted one perfect murder; he gives you a bargain basement of manufacturers’ seconds.

Can there be an artistic mass murder? Mass murder, by its very nature, is not art but kitsch. It displaces nuance with sensation, individual craftsmanship with cheap mass production methods, specific impulse with generalized marketing strategy. You have asked for caviar-to-the-few and Mr. Hillerman has responded with Egg-McMuffin-to-the-many. Of course, if you
want
a Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach, go right ahead. After all, Mr. Hillerman’s exercise is not without its antic charm. The whole business of rushing into a bathroom to murder an already-murdered wife, confessing it at once to the police, all that rutabaga is quite endearing. One can see where you might be tempted to play such a part.

But wait; not quite so soon. The inadequacies of this scheme have not as yet been exhaustively tolled. There is the matter of the by-products of Mr. Hillerman’s version of your crime, by which I mean that slag heap, as it were, of eighteen bodies, stacked like so many Yule logs, mushroomed in their prime. He does not give much consideration to those eighteen shells of blighted hopes, those foreshortened shadows, disturbed dreams, does not give them much consideration in any sense of the term, but if you are to be the one who drop-kicks them through God’s goalposts, my
friend,
if you are to be in the most final sense their man from Porlock, it behooves you to get to know these people, and to know them well.

Why? They are nothing to you, am I correct? Merely a smokescreen, a diversion. Eighteen human lives, snuffed for a sleight-of-hand. Standards
are
slipping.

But let us pause a moment in our headlong self-satisfaction, let us focus our attention on these eighteen souls as they shuffle disconsolately from the stage of life, all together crowding into the wings for their wings. Who are they? Is it possible to know anything about them?

As a matter of fact, it is. They are a part of the clientele of something called the Yummie Yuppie Deli, where they purchase, among other things, exotic mushrooms. We can presume from this that all or most of the eighteen will be well educated, well off and fairly young; under forty. With living parents, for the most part.

This is not a case of the burning to the ground of a nursing home full of ancients who had already lived their lives, run their races, worn their laurel wreaths. These are people on the rising curve of life, people whose successes so far are merely precursors of the triumphs sure to be ahead, people whose families and significant others are excessively, dotingly, mawkishly proud of them; perhaps even living their own lives vicariously through these superpersons’ accomplishments.

How many of those families, how many of those significant others, will not be satisfied with the rather hurried latticework Mr. Hillerman has placed around your connection with the affair? How many will have the money, the interest, the grief, the rage, the irritation, and the time to hire private detectives? How long will it take before your town begins to fill up with these creatures?

(Private detectives are, despite popular belief, distressingly easy to pick out of a crowd. They look like unemployed parking lot attendants, and they have bad breath. Also, their pockets are filled with small pieces of paper containing hurriedly scrawled notes.)

Yes, that’s the future you can look forward to, should you choose the Hillerman scenario. Twenty or thirty scruffy, hungry, completely unscrupulous private detectives sniffing away at your trail. Even assuming the police accept the ludicrous notion of the innocence of a former medical student in the poisoning death of his wife, you will still have that Boschian army all over you like leeches in a swamp.

Remember this about private detectives. They have no ethics, and no morals. They are not bound by the rules of evidence, as the police are. They are not bound by any rules. They are not above manufacturing evidence to earn their paltry pay. Success is their only criterion, accomplishment their only option.