Rules for Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  “I actually have,” she said, and for the first time since she’d arrived at the store, I saw a gleam of self-satisfaction in her eye. She really did believe she was on to something.

  “I don’t know much about it,” she continued, “but there was a woman named Elaine Johnson from Rockland, Maine, who died of a heart attack in her home last September. She had a heart condition, so it looked like a natural death, but there were signs that her home had been broken into.”

  I rubbed at my earlobe. “Like a robbery?”

  “That’s what the police decided. Someone broke into her home to rob it, or to assault her, but she had a heart attack as soon as she saw the housebreaker. So they took off.”

  “Nothing was taken from the house?”

  “Right. Nothing was taken from the house.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Think about it, though,” she said, moving a little forward in her chair. “Let’s say you wanted to murder someone by causing a heart attack. First of all, you pick a victim who’s already had one, which, in this case, Elaine Johnson had. Then you sneak into her house, where she lives alone, put on some sort of horrifying disguise, and leap out at her from a closet. She drops dead, and you’ve committed murder, just like in your book.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “Then the murderer bolts from the house and she can’t identify them.”

  “But she’d report it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did anyone report something like that happening to them?”

  “No. At least not that I know of. But that only means that it worked the first time.”

  “Right,” I said.

  She was quiet for a moment. I heard the ticking sound that meant Nero was coming toward us along the hardwood floor. Agent Mulvey, who heard it as well, turned and looked at the store cat. She let him sniff her hand then expertly rubbed his head. Nero sunk to the floor and flipped onto his side, purring.

  “You must have cats?” I said.

  “Two. Does this one go home with you or does he just stay in the store?”

  “He just stays here. For him the entire universe is two book-lined rooms and a series of strangers, a few of whom feed him.”

  “Sounds like a good life,” she said.

  “I think he does all right. Half the people who come in here just come to see him.”

  Nero stood back up, stretched out his hind legs, one at a time, and walked back toward the front of the store.

  “So what is it that you want from me?” I said.

  “Well, if someone really is using your list as a guide for committing murders, then you’re the expert.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I mean, you’re the expert on the books on your list. They’re favorite books of yours.”

  “I guess,” I said. “I wrote that list a long time ago, and some of those books I know a lot better than others.”

  “Still, it can’t hurt to get your opinion. I was hoping you’d look at some cases I put together, a list of unsolved murders in the New England region over the last few years. I threw it together quickly last night, just summaries, really”—she was pulling a stapled sheaf of papers from her briefcase—“and was hoping you’d go through them, let me know if any of them seem like they might have something to do with the books on your list.”

  “Sure,” I said, taking the pages from her. “Are these … classified, as well?”

  “Most of the information I’ve summarized is public information. If any of the crimes strike you as a possibility, I’ll take a closer look. I’m just fishing here, with these ones, honestly. I’ve already gone over them. It’s just that, since you’ve read the books …”

  “I’ll need to reread some of the books, as well,” I said.

  “So you’ll help me.” She sat up a little straighter and half smiled. She had a short upper lip, and I could see her gums when she opened her mouth.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  “Thank you. And there’s one more thing. I’ve ordered all the books, but if you had any copies here, I could get a quicker start on them.”

  I checked the inventory on the computer; it told me we had several copies each of Double Indemnity, The A.B.C. Murders, and The Secret History, plus one copy of The Red House Mystery. We also had one copy of Strangers on a Train, but it was a first edition from 1950 in perfect condition that was worth at least $10,000. We had a locked case near the checkout counter that held all our books that were worth fifty dollars or more, but it wasn’t there. It was in my office, also in a locked glass case, where I put the editions of books that I wasn’t quite ready to part with yet. There was a collector’s streak in me, not necessarily a good thing for someone who worked in a bookstore, and for someone whose own bookshelves in my attic apartment were filled to capacity. I nearly told Agent Mulvey that we didn’t have the Highsmith book but decided that I shouldn’t lie, at least not about something trivial, to an employee of the FBI. I told her what it was worth, and she said she’d wait for her paperback copy to arrive. That left The Drowner, which I definitely had at home, and Malice Aforethought, which I thought I might have at home, as well. I definitely didn’t have a copy of the playscript for Deathtrap, either here at the store or at home, but I did know that it existed. I told the agent all this.

  “I can’t read eight books in a night, anyway,” she said.

  “Are you going back to …”

  “I’m staying near here tonight, at the Flat of the Hill Hotel. I was hoping after you looked over the list, maybe in the morning … we could meet again, see if you’ve had any thoughts.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I don’t know if I’ll be opening the store tomorrow, not if this weather …”

  “You could come to the hotel. The FBI will pay for your breakfast.”

  “Sounds fine,” I said.

  At the front door Agent Mulvey said she’d pay for the books she was taking home with her.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You can return them to me when you’re done.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She opened the door just as a gust of wind ricocheted down Bury Street. The snow was piling up, the wind causing drifts, obliterating all the sharp angles of the city street.

  “Be careful out there,” I said.

  “It’s not far,” she said. “Tomorrow at ten, right?” she added, confirming the time for our breakfast meeting.

  “Right,” I said, and stood in the doorway, watching her disappear into the enveloping snow.

  CHAPTER 4

  I lived alone on the other side of Charles Street, up the hill in a brownstone attic apartment that was rented to me by a ninety-year-old Boston Brahmin who had no idea of the actual worth of her property. I paid a scandalously low rent and fretted selfishly about the day my landlady would die and pass her property on to one of her more financially astute sons.

  It normally took me less than ten minutes to get from the bookstore to my apartment, but I was walking against the storm in a pair of shoes with worn-out treads. The snow stung my face, and the wind was bending trees and singing down the empty streets. On Charles I considered checking to see if the Sevens was open for a drink but decided to pop into the cheese and wine shop instead, where I bought myself a six-pack of Old Speckled Hen and a premade ham-and-cheese baguette for my dinner. I had been planning on cooking the pork chop that I’d taken out to defrost that morning, but I was anxious to read through Agent Mulvey’s list that night.

  At my apartment building I climbed the unshoveled steps to the heavy front door, made from walnut and with cast-iron door handles. I let myself in after knocking the snow from my shoes. Another tenant, probably Mary Ann, had already sorted the mail and left it on the side table in the foyer. I picked up my damp credit card solicitations while I dripped onto the cracked tile floor, then climbed the three flights of stairs to my converted attic space.

  As always, during the winter mon
ths, it was stiflingly hot inside my place. I removed my jacket and sweater, then opened both my windows, one on either side of the slanted walls, just enough so that cold air could seep in. I put five of the beers into my fridge and cracked the sixth. Even though my apartment was a studio, there was enough space for a clearly delineated living room, and I stretched out on the sofa, put my feet up on the coffee table, and began to read through Agent Mulvey’s list.

  It was organized chronologically, every entry formatted the same way, the header specifying the date, the location, and the name of the victim. Even though it was a summary, dashed off at the last minute, it was composed of complete sentences and read like textbook journalism. Agent Mulvey had probably never received less than an A in her entire academic career. I wondered what had attracted her to the FBI. She came across as someone more suited to academia, an English professor maybe, or a researcher. She reminded me a little of Emily Barsamian, my extremely bookish employee, who couldn’t look me in the eye when we talked. Agent Mulvey wasn’t quite that awkward, just young and inexperienced, maybe. It was impossible for me to not think of Clarice Starling (another bird name) from The Silence of the Lambs. It was where my mind almost always went, to books and movies. It had been that way since I first began to read. And Mulvey, like her fictional counterpart, seemed too tame for the job. It was hard to imagine her whipping a gun from a holster, or aggressively questioning a suspect.

  She did question a suspect, though. She questioned you.

  I pushed that particular thought out of my head, drank some beer, and looked at her list, scanning the items before settling down to read the details. I knew right away that there wasn’t much here; at least nothing obvious was jumping out. Many of the unsolved murders were gun crimes. Young people in cities, mostly. One of the victims of gun violence sounded like a possibility but there wasn’t much detail in the description. A man named Daniel Gonzalez had been gunned down while taking his dog for a walk in the Middlesex Fells. It had happened early in the morning the previous September, and Agent Mulvey made a note that there were currently no leads in the case. The only reason this particular crime jumped out at me was because of the murder in The Secret History. The college-aged murderers in Donna Tartt’s book decide that they need to get rid of their friend Bunny Corcoran, fearful that he will reveal what he knows about a previous murder when the classics students had emulated a Dionysian bacchanal in the woods and accidentally (or not) killed a farmer. Bunny had not been part of the ritual, but he finds out about it and begins to leverage this information to get things—dinners out, trips to Italy—from his wealthy friends. They also worry he’ll drunkenly tell someone about what took place. Because of this, they plot to murder him. Henry Winter, the smartest of the group of students, finalizes their plan. They know that Bunny takes long walks on Sunday afternoon, and they lie in wait at a place where they think he might wind up, a trail above a deep ravine. When he arrives, they shove him off the edge, hoping it will look like an accident, hoping that the randomness of Bunny’s walk will hide the design of the murder.

  Could the case of Daniel Gonzalez, killed while on his morning run, possibly be related? The fact that he was shot made it seem unlikely, but maybe the idea behind this copycat murder was to take someone out while he was doing a predictable activity. I got my laptop and looked up his obituary. He had been an adjunct professor at a local community college, teaching Spanish. While it wasn’t Latin or Greek, he was a languages professor. It was a possibility, and I decided to tell Agent Mulvey about it the following morning.

  I went through the rest of the crimes. I was particularly looking for a drowning, thinking of John D. MacDonald’s book The Drowner. But, of course, if someone were drowned in such a way as to make it look like an accident, then it probably wouldn’t make a list of unsolved murders.

  There were also no listings for accidental overdoses. That was the method of killing in Malice Aforethought. The murderer, a doctor, turns his wife into a morphine addict. Then it is simply a matter of making sure other people know about her addiction, that it becomes local gossip. Then he kills her with an overdose. Of course, there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of drug overdoses in New England the past few years. Could one of those have been an intentional murder? The thing about my list was that, when I originally created it, I really was trying to come up with murders that were so clever that the perpetrator would never be caught. With that in mind, if someone successfully copycatted some of these murders, they’d be undetectable.

  I ate two bites of my sandwich then had another beer. The apartment was too quiet, and I didn’t want to turn on the television, so I played music instead. Max Richter’s 24 Postcards in Full Colour. I lay back on my sofa and looked up at the high ceiling, at a thin crack that zigzagged out from under the molding; it was a familiar sight, that ceiling. I thought about what I’d tell Agent Mulvey the next morning at breakfast. I’d tell her about Daniel Gonzalez, of course, and how it might be related to The Secret History. I’d suggest that she research accidental drownings, especially ones that happened in ponds or lakes, and I would also suggest that she look into overdose deaths, especially ones in which the deceased used a syringe.

  The album ended, and I restarted it, lying back down on the sofa. My mind was going in many different directions, so I decided to slow down and make a mental list. I told myself to list assumptions first. Assumption number one was that someone was using my list to murder random people. Well, maybe not random. Maybe the victims somehow deserved to die, at least according to the murderer. Assumption number two was that, while I was probably a suspect, I was in no way a serious suspect. As Agent Mulvey herself pointed out, she wouldn’t have come alone had that been the case. The purpose of her interview that afternoon had been to feel me out, try to get a sense of me. If she thought I was involved, I decided that the next time we met—breakfast tomorrow, or sometime after that—she would be with another FBI agent. Assumption number three: Whoever is doing this isn’t just using my list. The killer knows me. Maybe not a lot, but a little.

  The reason I thought that—the reason I knew that—is because the fifth victim that Agent Mulvey mentioned, the woman who had the heart attack at her house in Rockland, Elaine Johnson—thing is, I actually knew her. Not well, but as soon as I heard the name, I knew that it was the same Elaine Johnson who used to live in Beacon Hill, a frequent customer at the bookstore, and a woman who came to every author reading we ever hosted. I knew I should have told Agent Mulvey this at the time, but I didn’t, and until I felt I had to, I didn’t plan on telling her.

  I was sure she was withholding information from me, so I planned on withholding this information from her.

  I had to begin to protect myself.

  CHAPTER 5

  I was beginning to fall asleep on the sofa, so I got up, rinsed out the beer bottles, threw away the remainder of my sandwich, brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas. Then I went to my bookshelf and found the book I was looking for. The Drowner. I had the original Gold Medal paperback, printed in 1963. It had one of those lurid illustrated covers that adorn pretty much all of John D. Mac-Donald’s midcentury paperbacks. On this one, a dark-haired woman in a white bikini is being pulled down through the murky green depths by a pair of hands gripping one of her pretty legs. It promised, like all these covers, two things: sex and death. I ran my thumb along the edge of the book, riffling the pages, and that musty, prickly smell of an old paperback reached my nostrils. I’ve always loved that smell, even though the book collector side of me knew that it was a sign of a book that had been improperly maintained over the years, a book that had probably sat in a cardboard box on the floor of a damp cellar for too many seasons. But to me the smell took me instantly back to the Annie’s Book Swap where I began to buy books when I was in the sixth grade. I grew up in Middleham, about forty-five minutes west of Boston. The year that I turned eleven was also the year that I was allowed to ride my bike the mile and a half along Dartford Road
into Middleham’s town center. There were only three stores: a convenience store that called itself Middleham General, in an attempt to sound like something quainter than what it was, an antiques shop located in the old post office building, and an Annie’s Book Swap, a franchised used bookstore run by an Englishman named Anthony Blake. It sold primarily mass markets—those paperbacks that could just about fit in a back pocket—and it was there that I bought the Ian Fleming novels, and the Peter Benchleys, and the Agatha Christies that got me through my younger years. It was there that I almost definitely bought The Drowner, having already purchased every available Travis McGee book, John D. MacDonald’s famous series. It was rare to find MacDonald standalones, but some devoted crime reader in my part of Massachusetts must have died around the time I started riding my bike to the town center, because Annie’s was suddenly swamped with stacks of pulp novels, not just John D. MacDonald but Mickey Spillane books, and Alistair MacLeans, and Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. I allowed myself three books per shopping expedition, which just about used up my allowance. In those days it took me less than a week to read those three books—sometimes it took me just three days—but I was always happy to reread books I already owned. I probably hadn’t read The Drowner since then, since I was a preteen, but the basic plot had stuck with me.

  The villain—and she was a good one—was a highly religious secretary who sublimated all her repressed sexual energy into physical exercise. She murdered the sinful people around her, including a married woman having an affair with her boss. She drowned her by lurking, in scuba gear, at the bottom of the pond where this woman swam. Then she got hold of one of her legs and pulled her down under the water. That particular murder I never forgot. When I made up my perfect murders list, it had jumped into my mind. I didn’t reread the book, but I familiarized myself with it.