The Perfect Murder (8 page)

Detective: “How?”

You: “Well, I said, why not invite him to some sort of party with some of the right people. People with manners. Let him show himself up. I understand he’s a boorish fellow. Poets often are, you know.”

Detective: “Like how?”

You: “How boorish? Remember Bernard Shaw said a gentleman was a man who knew how to play bagpipes but doesn’t. Well, McWeinie does.”

Detective: “No. I meant like how to show him up.”

You: “Maybe bore everybody by playing bagpipes. Turn my wife off.” (Take another small sip of martini.)

Detective: “What did you decide? And how the hell does any of this bear on a murder of eighteen people?”

You: “You see, Blazes loves to cook. He decided he would talk her into inviting McWeinie to a dinner at our place. He would cater the thing. Cook the fancy dish. Put something in McWeinie’s portion to make him sick all over himself. He said that would be off-putting for her.”

Detective: “Wait a minute. Why would he think she would go along with having this dinner?”

You: (Show of laughter recommended here.) “Blazes isn’t very smart but he knew her. Entertaining her new boyfriend in front of her husband and her lover would be exactly what would appeal to her. And it did.”

Detective: “And Blazes cooked mushrooms?”

You: “I don’t know. I backed out. In fact, so did McWeinie. Blazes said McWeinie wasn’t coming. But he was cooking a fancy meal for her and me anyway.” (A shudder is recommended here.) “I can’t stand seeing her at work on another man.”

Detective: “Well, somebody fed her mushrooms. What do you know about that?”

You: (Thoughtfully, slightly drunk tone, another martini sip.) “Well, we talked about the mushrooms. I think I told him that some make you throw up. Some are totally lethal. I must have mentioned studying such things in medical school because he asked me about whether we had them in the lab there. And one thing led to another and—” (Hesitate. Look guilty.) “I finally made a call to the pharmacology people and got this friend of mine there to arrange for a visit.”

Detective: “You went to the pharmacy lab. And someone showed you these poison mushrooms.”

You: “Dr. Dottage, it was. An old professor of mine when I was a student. I told him Blazes was a mushroom gourmet and wanted to make sure he recognized the baddies.”

Detective: “And Blazes took some of the poisonous ones?”

You: “Not that I know of. I certainly didn’t see him take any.”

Detective: “Could he have?”

You: “Well, yes. I suppose he could have snitched a few. While Dottage and I were recalling old times. I guess he could have slipped some into his pockets.”

Detective: “We’ll check.”

Of course, you will have disposed of most of the mushrooms you picked up right under old Dottage’s nearsighted eyes by sprinkling them into the mushroom display at the Yummie Yuppie Deli, saving only enough to cash in your wife and a bit of evidence to plant on Blazes. When the detective checks he will find mushroom soil and mushroom fragments in the left-side coat pocket of Boylan’s jacket, exactly where you put the stuff. He will also find the sales slip from the Yummie Yuppie Deli, showing the purchase of a bunch of gourmet stuff
definitely not including mushrooms
, because you put it there. When he goes to the lab, old Dottage will remember Boylan being there and notice, sure enough, that some of his mushrooms have disappeared. I also recommend that you slip a copy of
The ABC Murders
open on Boylan’s pillow to plant the notion with the detective that Blazes had got the idea there for hiding one motivated murder in a line of random ones. Detectives love such notions.

When the detective talks to McWeinie, what will the awful Scot say? He’ll say: Yes, indeed, some fellow named Boylan called and invited him to a meal. He’d told the fellow to flit off. All of which is perfectly true, except that it was you calling, not Blazes.

What will Boylan say when the detective talks to him?

He’ll say he didn’t call McWeinie. He never heard of McWeinie. He didn’t cook dinner for your wife. As a matter of fact, he will insist that during that entire period when you told the detective he was cooking this dinner, he was with you—seeing
Driving Miss Daisy
at the Paramount Theater. (You had arranged this, of course, to make absolutely sure he had no witness except you, and I hope you appreciate my sensitivity to your tastes in films. I could have as easily sent you to
Rocky V.)

Is it necessary to pause here and instruct you on how to get the mushrooms inside your wife? I doubt it. Obviously it should be done on the cook’s day off and, if you need a suggestion, try sprinkling a few bits and pieces on the salad you make for her. If you try soup,
do not
overcook the mushrooms.

If you have any doubts about any of the above, it is probably about Boylan’s motive. The detective has been offered a reason why Blazes would want to kill McWeinie (if a second reason is needed for bagpipers). But why would he want to kill your wife? We’ve offered him no clue to that.

Exactly! And be sure to keep it that way. If he asks, assure the man that you can’t imagine. You haven’t a clue. After all, he seemed to love the woman. And, despite the anger you described earlier, you find it hard to believe that he ever really thought she would leave you to marry him.

Why this strategy? Remember the thesis of your letter. If you and I (mere amateurs) suffer from the decline in the art of murder, think how much more frustrating it must be for the professional who lives with it every working hour. A bank robber fills out a loan application while biding his time to rob the teller’s cage—and leaves it behind complete with correct name, address, and telephone number. Another bank robber hands the teller a note demanding all her cash. She says she can’t hand it over without seeing some identification. He shows her his driver’s license. Investigating officers called to check a burglarized business notice that the felons have dragged the safe up the street behind their car. The safe being heavy, the street being asphalt, tracks are left. The police follow the tracks to the driveway of the offenders’ home. Not much fun in any of that for a dedicated detective. So let’s give ours some small something to work on.

However, in the event years of dealing with brain-dead modern criminals has blunted his own intelligence, I enclose two “marriage contract forms” picked up at a local office/legal supply store. I’ve taken the liberty of typing the names of Blazes and your wife in the proper places (using a demonstration typewriter in the same store). You will notice that the proviso I typed in merges their estates upon their marriage, and that if the marriage is dissolved by either party, all property accrues to your wife. I recommend that you leave one copy atop her desk after you drag her into the bathroom and dump her into the tub. The other should be torn into tiny fragments (detectives love to reconstruct such documents) as if ripped apart in a rage. Deposit these fragments in Boylan’s wastebasket when you pick him up for the movie.

Do I need say that my fee should be paid in cash?

MY DEAR TIM,

Let me say, before we go any further, that I cannot hear of your committing a murder in the United States of America. It is, quite simply, out of the question.

You aspire not merely to murder but to Art, and in any work of art the choice of background is of critical importance. The background, in addition to having some intrinsic charm or interest of its own, should subtly echo those qualities of the main subject which the artist wishes to emphasize; it should supply those literary and historical allusions which are so essential to depth and resonance; but above all it should provide contrast, so that the main subject stands out against it as something striking and unusual. If one is painting a portrait of a beautiful young woman, one does not paint her as one of a group of similar young women.

I should be sorry to offend your patriotic sensibilities—but you do see, don’t you, that the United States simply will not do? In a country where the homicides of a single day are too numerous to be fully reported on the television news—where every schoolchild expects a firearm for the next Christmas or birthday present—where minor disagreements between motorists are commonly resolved by an exchange of bullets—in such a country any murder, however interesting or bizarre its incidental features, is doomed to be essentially commonplace.

No, Tim, if you are to achieve distinction you must cross the Atlantic.

There are many places in continental Europe which would be, from the purely aesthetic point of view, satisfactory settings for murder. The peaceful and beautiful valley of the Loire, where the stones of such castles as Blois and Amboise are steeped in the blood of medieval intrigues—the great cities of Italy, whose streets seem haunted by the ghosts of masked and cloaked assassins with jeweled daggers in their hands—the dark hilltop overlooking the Aegean where Clytemnestra welcomed Agamemnon home from Troy—golden and murderous Mycenae.

To the novelist all these are almost irresistible. But you have a murder to commit, and one must be practical about it. You will have enough difficulties to face without the addition of possible linguistic problems. I propose, therefore, that you should commit your murder in England.

In England, despite the ravages of modernity, you will find an ample choice of appropriate picturesque locations and a social climate (at the time I write) in which the crime of murder is still thought of as uniquely extraordinary and terrible. You may also consider it an advantage that England does not have the death penalty. (I realize, of course, that even in your own country you, being white, well educated, and rich, are in practice exempt from so extreme a penalty; but in England there is not even a theoretical risk of it.)

Moreover, England is the birthplace of the classic murder mystery, in which murder is merely the starting point for a fascinating intellectual exercise and the corpse no more than a distasteful necessity. Yes, if you wish to achieve the status of a classic, an English background seems almost a sine qua non.

And yet. And yet. In spite of everything, is England quite the right place? Forgive me—Scotland is the country of my ancestors—will you think it is a sentimental prejudice on my part to claim that for a truly magnificent murder there is nowhere to compare with it?

I am not thinking only of the savage grandeur of the scenery, its dark glens and desolate moorlands, its somber mountains and unfathomed lochs. The murders of Scotland somehow seem to me to have a quality of drama and richness seldom if ever achieved south of the border. They are not, as English murders so often are, the casual result of some unconsidered impulse, but the fruit of some bitter passion long nursed in darkness under a reserved and dispassionate exterior.

No country to compare with Scotland, and no city to compare with Edinburgh.

A city one might almost think designed with deliberate purpose to symbolize the dichotomy between reason and passion, the light and dark aspects of the human psyche. Through it runs the long, deep cleft of Princes Street Gardens; on one side is the orderly decorum of the eighteenth century, wide streets and elegant squares, the quintessence of rationality; on the other the tenebrous wynds and narrow stairways of the old medieval town; and dominating all, the dark, majestic outline of the Castle and Cathedral.

Your crime, I need hardly say, must take place in the autumn, at the time of the Edinburgh Festival. Artists from all over the world—dramatists, actors, composers, singers, and poets—will have gathered there to present their finest work to an international audience; and there you too will present your masterpiece. Surely you must find it irresistible.

And yet—is it possible, Tim, that you are becoming impatient with me? Do you feel that I have dwelt too long on the question of background when I ought rather to be advising you on such matters as weapons and alibis and untraceable poisons and other gadgetry of that sort? Are you even beginning to say that to commit murder in Edinburgh is simply too much trouble? Oh, I do hope not.

Of course, if you wanted to commit merely an ordinary, serviceable, workmanlike murder—if your only object was to bring about your wife’s death and avoid detection—then there would be no need to go to all this trouble. Without stirring beyond your front door, you could arrange with no great difficulty one of the innumerable accidents which statistics show to be among the normal hazards of life in one’s own home. Your wife could meet her death in the scullery or coal shed, dressed, I dare say, in unbecoming overalls and surrounded, poor woman, by all the sordid and trivial impedimenta of domesticity. But if that is all you want, then pray seek advice elsewhere—you are not the murderer I took you for.

You have said, let me remind you again, that you wish your murder to attain the status of art. How can you expect to achieve this if you are not prepared to take as much trouble over it as would be required for a novel or a great painting?
Ars longa, vita brevis.

Every element of a work of art must be chosen with the utmost care to contribute to the building of the final climax—to what Aristotle would have called the catastrophe. This, however, should be done with such skill—the great paradox of art—that it appears to have required no skill at all: the catastrophe should seem to flow naturally and necessarily from the actions of the characters, their actions to be the natural and necessary product of their attributes and circumstances. In truth, however, it is the artist who commands their destiny—art has no place for the random and unintended.

That is why a motiveless murder can never, in my view, have any artistic merit, though sometimes, no doubt, it may possess some incidental feature which creates an illusion of artistry. You mention, for example, the crimes of Jack the Ripper as having a certain appeal to your imagination; but that is because they happened to take place against the backdrop created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes. It is the Victorian gaslight, the mournful wailing of foghorns on the Thames, the rattle of hansom cabs over cobblestones, the burly figure of Inspector Lestrade in incompetent pursuit, which lend a mysterious and picturesque quality to a series of crimes otherwise irredeemably banal. To the murderer himself there is due, I fear, not even that modest degree of credit which might be allowed to the judicious plagiarist—I suspect that there was no more art in his choice of background than there is in a rock formation which happens to look like a piece of sculpture.