Rules for Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  Eventually I made it all the way back to the start of the blog, to “Eight Perfect Murders.” I’d read it so many times in the past twenty-four hours that I didn’t need to read it again.

  The front door opened, and I lifted my head. It was a middle-aged couple, both encased in puffy winter coats with hoods. They were probably already large under their coats, but the added layers rendered them almost spherical. They had to walk single file through the door. When their hoods were down and their parkas unzipped they approached me, smiling, introduced themselves as Mike and Becky Swenson from Minnesota. I recognized them immediately as a certain kind of customer we occasionally get, fanatical mystery readers who make a point to visit us during their trip to Boston. Old Devils is not a famous store, but we are famous to a certain kind of reader.

  “You brought your weather with you,” I said, and they both laughed, told me how they’d been planning on coming to Boston for years.

  “Got to see Cheers, got to try some clam chowder, and definitely got to come to Old Devils,” the man said.

  “Where’s Nero?” his wife said, and as if on cue, Nero rounded the New Releases shelf and visited the pair. We all had to chip in, I guess.

  Mike and Becky left an hour and a half later. It was 90 percent talking and 10 percent shopping, although they did buy a hundred dollars’ worth of signed hardcovers, giving me their address in East Grand Forks so that we could mail the books to them. “We forgot to leave any room in our suitcases,” Becky said.

  It had stopped snowing when they left. They had taken several of our bookmarks with them as souvenirs, plus I’d steered them to a few restaurants in the nearby area that were better than Cheers. As I held the door for them, Brandon arrived, dressed only in a hooded sweatshirt, although he was wearing gloves and a wooly hat under the hood. I’d forgotten he was scheduled to come in today. “You look surprised,” he said. “It’s Friday.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Thank God it’s Friday,” he added, in his booming voice, stretching the vowel sound on the word God to an impressive length. “And thank God I’ve got work to go to, so I don’t have to be home all day.”

  “Your class was canceled?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. He was taking business classes, mostly in the mornings, and had been since he’d started working at the bookstore. Last I checked he would graduate soon, and I knew I’d most likely lose him. It was going to be fine, but I was going to miss his nonstop chatter. It was a nice counterpoint to Emily’s silence. My silence, as well, I guess.

  He pulled a paperback—Richard Stark’s The Hunter—from the pouch at the front of the hoodie and handed it to me. “Effing awesome,” he said. When he’d first started at the store, I had to keep reminding him not to swear, because of the customers, so he’d amended his ways. He’d borrowed the book from the store at my suggestion just two days earlier. Between working full-time and going to school and maintaining (according to him) a pretty active social life, he also managed to read about three books a week. I looked at the paperback, one in which the name of the book had been changed to Point Blank! in order to reflect the Lee Marvin movie that was made in 1967.

  “That’s the way I got it, Mal,” he said, meaning the condition of the book. The borrow policy for employees meant they could take any book home to read just so long as they didn’t add any extra wear to it.

  “No, it looks fine,” I said.

  “Yeah, it does,” Brandon said, then shouted, “Emily,” in three equally accented syllables. She came out from the back, and Brandon hugged her, something he occasionally did if it had been more than a day since he’d last been in the store. He only hugged me at the holiday party, and at the few occasions when we’d close up the shop then grab a quick beer at the Sevens. I am not a natural hugger, even though it is now standard greeting protocol among men of my generation. I can’t get the movements down, especially if the hug involves one of those manly backslaps. Claire, my wife, when I told her about this particular anxiety, started to practice with me. For a while there we’d greet each other at home with a man hug.

  Brandon followed Emily into the back room where he took the mail order list and began to assemble piles of books for shipping. A huge advantage of having the same employees here for so long is that I hardly ever have to tell them what to do. Because of their loyalty, I pay them far more than I suspect other retail places offer. I don’t need the store to make a big profit, and I don’t think Brian Murray cares that much, either. He’s just happy to be able to call a mystery bookstore his own, or half his own.

  I listened to Brandon tell Emily the entire plot of The Hunter while I updated New Releases. Four more customers came in, all alone: a Japanese tourist, a regular named Joe Stailey, a twenty-something guy I knew by sight who always browsed through the horror section and never bought anything, plus a woman who had clearly come in only to escape the cold outside. I checked my phone for the weather. The snow was done now, but temperatures were dropping over the next few days into the teens. All the snow that had fallen was going to harden into piles of ice, black with city grime.

  I went back to my computer to check on emails, then glanced again at the blog site, still on the “Eight Perfect Murders” list. A sort of byline at the bottom of the list said that it was posted by MALCOLM KERSHAW, then gave the date and time of the post, then indicated that there were three comments. I remembered there being only two, so I clicked through to read them. The latest comment was posted less than twenty-four hours earlier, at three A.M., from a user named Doctor Sheppard, and read, I am halfway through your list. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, done. THE ABC MURDERS, finally finished. DOUBLE INDEMNITY, kaput. DEATHTRAP, saw the film. When I’m finished with the list (it won’t be long now) I’ll get in touch. Or do you already know who I am?

  CHAPTER 8

  That night I cooked myself the pork chop that was in the refrigerator, although I was still shaken, and I overcooked it. Its sides curled up, and it was as tough as jerky.

  Since late afternoon, and through until our closing time of seven, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that third comment on the “Perfect Murders” blog post. I must have read it thirty times now, parsing every word. The name used by whoever had written the post—“Doctor Sheppard”—nagged at me until I finally googled it. It was the name of the narrator in Agatha Christie’s famous novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. That was the book that put Christie on the map, so to speak. Written in 1926, it is most famous for a very clever plot twist. The book is told in first person, from the point of view of Sheppard, a country village doctor, and a neighbor of Hercule Poirot’s. Honestly, I don’t remember anything about the crime itself, except for the name of the victim, obviously. What I do remember is that at the end of the novel it is revealed the narrator is the actual murderer.

  When I got home, I went immediately to my bookshelf and found my copy of Christie’s book. I owned the Penguin paperback edition, one from the 1950s, with the simple green cover, and no artwork. I flipped through to see if it would somehow jog my memory as to the actual plot, but it didn’t, and I decided I’d read it that night.

  Was it possible that whoever posted the comment was really only a reader, working his or her way through my list? I’d think it was a possibility, a very slim one, except for the fact of the books mentioned as having been read. They were the books for which there had already been a crime. The A.B.C. Murders, Double Indemnity, and Deathtrap. Strangers on a Train, as well, although Gwen Mulvey doesn’t know all about that one yet. I do. And someone else does, as well.

  If these words are ever read, then I am sure that the reader might have already guessed that I have more to do with these crimes than I’ve been letting on. It’s not as though there haven’t been clues. For instance, why did my heart beat faster when Gwen Mulvey first began interviewing me?

  Why didn’t I immediately tell her that I knew who Elaine Johnson was?

  Why did I only eat two bites of my sandwi
ch the night after I was visited by the FBI agent?

  Why do I dream of being chased?

  Why did I not immediately tell Gwen about the comment from Doctor Sheppard?

  And a really astute reader might even have noticed that my name, shortened, is Mal—French, of course, for bad. That’s taking it too far, though, because that really is my name. I’ve changed some names for the purposes of this narrative, but not my own.

  *

  IT IS TIME TO tell the truth.

  It is time to speak of Claire.

  That was her real name, as well. Claire Mallory, who grew up in a wealthy town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of three sisters. Her parents were not particularly good people, but they weren’t bad enough to really figure into this story. They were well-off, and shallow; her mother, in particular, was obsessed with all three of her daughters’ attractiveness and weight, and because she obsessed about it, that meant their father—devoid of any independent thoughts, himself—agreed with her. They sent their children to summer camps in Maine and to fancy private schools, and Claire, who was the oldest, chose to go to Boston University, because she wanted to be in a city, and both New York City and Hartford felt too close to where she’d grown up.

  At BU she majored in film and television, wanting to be a documentary filmmaker. Her first year was okay, but in her second year, prompted by a boyfriend majoring in theater arts, she got heavily into drugs, particularly cocaine. As her habit grew, she began to have panic attacks, and that caused her to drink excessively. She stopped going to classes, was put on academic probation, briefly rebounded, then failed out her junior year. Her parents tried hard to get her to come home, but she stayed in Boston, instead, renting an apartment in Allston and getting a job at the Redline Bookstore, where I’d just been promoted to manager.

  It was love at first sight, really. At least for me. When she came in to interview it was clear that she was nervous, her hands trembling slightly, and she kept yawning, which seemed weird, but I was able to recognize it as a sign of extreme anxiety. She sat on a swivel chair in Mort’s office, her hands resting on her thighs. She wore a corduroy skirt and dark leggings, plus a turtleneck. She was thin, noticeably so, and with a long neck. Her head seemed too big for her body, her face almost perfectly round. She had dark brown eyes, a thin nose, and lips that looked puffy and bitten. Her hair was very dark, cut in what I thought of as a bob. It looked like a dated style to me, something an intrepid amateur detective might wear in a 1930s film. She was so pretty that a dull throb had taken up residence in my solar plexus.

  I asked her about work experience. She had very little, but during the past few summers she’d worked at a Waldenbooks at her local mall down in Connecticut.

  “Who are your favorite writers?” I’d asked, and she’d looked surprised at the question.

  “Janet Frame,” she said. “Virginia Woolf. Jeanette Winterson.” She thought for a while. “I read poetry, as well. Adrienne Rich. Robert Lowell. Anne Sexton.”

  “Sylvia Plath?” I’d asked, and inwardly cringed. It sounded stupid, mentioning the most famous confessional female poet, as though I were somehow reminding her of the name.

  “Sure,” she said, then asked me who my favorite writers were.

  I told her. We kept talking this way, about writers, for the next hour, and I realized I’d only asked her one question about the actual job.

  “What hours will you be available?” I said.

  “Oh.” She touched her cheek when she thought. I noticed it right away, not aware in that moment of how many times I’d see her make that gesture, and how eventually I would see it not just as something endearing and individual, but as something worrying. “I don’t know why I’m thinking about it,” she said, laughing. “Any hours.”

  It was six weeks before I got up the nerve to actually ask her out.

  Even then, I’d framed it as a work outing. Ruth Rendell was doing an event at the Boston Public Library and I asked Claire if she wanted to join me. She’d said yes, then added, “I haven’t read her books, but if you like them, I should,” a sentence that I analyzed in the following days the way a graduate student might pick apart a Shakespeare sonnet. “Maybe we can get a drink afterward?” I said, and my own voice in my head sounded relatively calm.

  “Sure,” she said.

  It was a November night, dark by the time we were diagonally crossing Copley Square to get to the library, and the park was littered with brittle leaves. We sat toward the back of the small auditorium. Ruth Rendell was interviewed by a local radio personality, who was far too interested in himself. Still, it was an interesting conversation, and afterward, Claire and I walked to the Pour House for a drink, sitting in a corner booth until closing time. We talked about books, of course, and the other employees at the bookstore. Nothing personal. But when we were standing in front of her apartment building in Allston at two in the morning, the wind causing us both to shiver, she said, before we’d even kissed, “I’m a bad idea.”

  “What do you mean?” I laughed.

  “I mean, whatever ideas you’re having about me are bad ones. I’ve got issues.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, and I followed her inside.

  I’d had two girlfriends in college, one of whom was a German exchange student studying for a year in Amherst, and the other a freshman when I was a senior, a girl from Houlton, Maine, who joined the literary magazine that I was then editing. I’d had roughly the same feelings toward both of them. What drew me to them was the fact that they were drawn to me. Both were nervous talkers, and since I tended on the quiet side, it had worked out. When Petra returned to Germany, I told her that I’d be visiting her as soon as possible. Her response, that she never expected our relationship to last beyond her time in America, was both confusing and somehow an enormous relief. I had been under the impression that she was in love with me. Two years later, when I’d graduated, I’d told Ruth Porter, my freshman girlfriend, that now that I was moving to Boston, and she was staying in Amherst, we should end the relationship. I’d expected a happy indifference on her part, but she looked as though I’d shot her in the stomach. Through a series of wrenching conversations, I did finally manage to break up with her, realizing that I’d also broken her heart. I decided then that I was not good at reading women, or maybe just people in general.

  So when I stepped into Claire Mallory’s apartment, and when we began to kiss before we’d even gotten our jackets off, I told her, “Just so you know, I think I’m terrible at nonverbal cues. I need you to tell me everything.”

  She laughed. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, and it was all I could do to not tell her I was already in love with her.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you everything.”

  She started that night. In bed, with the dawn light filling her two dusty bedroom windows, she told me how her middle-school science teacher had molested her over the course of two years.

  “You didn’t tell anyone?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s a cliché, but I was ashamed. I thought it was my fault, and I kept telling myself that he wasn’t having sex with me, at least. We’d never even kiss. In fact, he was nice to me in a way, both him and his wife. But when he got me alone, he’d always manage to somehow get behind me, pull me in for a hug, put one hand in my shirt, and the other down my jeans. I think he used to come that way. But he never took my clothes off, or his, and afterward he’d always look a little sheepish, say something like ‘That was nice,’ and then he’d change the subject.”

  “Jesus,” I’d said.

  “It wasn’t a huge deal,” she said. “Other shitty things have happened to me and that was just one of them. I sometimes think my mom fucked me up even more than my molester did.”

  She had tattoos on the insides of her arms, and along either side of her rib cage. Just straight lines, dark and thin. I asked her about them, and she told me she loved the feeling of gett
ing a tattoo but could never pick any image that she’d want on her body forever. So she just got lines, one at a time. I thought they were beautiful, just as I thought her body, unhealthily thin, probably, was also beautiful. I think our relationship worked so well for a time because I never judged her, never questioned what she told me. I knew she had issues, that she drank too much (although she hadn’t taken drugs in close to a year), and that she ate too little, and that, sometimes, when we had sex, I could feel her wanting me to objectify her, that it wasn’t always enough to have normal, loving sex, that she wanted more. When she was drunk, she’d turn her back to me, pull my hands around to her front, grind herself up against me, and it was impossible for me to not think of her teacher in middle school and wonder if she was thinking of him, as well.

  But all this darkness, if that’s what it’s even called, was only part of what we had for the first three years we were together. Most of what we had was an incredible closeness, the happiness that comes with finding someone who seems to fit inside of you like a key in a lock. That’s the best metaphor I can come up with. I know it’s trite, but it’s also true. And it was the only time that this type of connection ever happened with me, then or since.

  We got married in Las Vegas, our witness a blackjack dealer we’d met five minutes earlier. The major reason we eloped was because Claire could not deal with the prospect of her mother hijacking her own wedding. It was fine with me. My own mother had died three years prior from lung cancer. She’d never smoked a day in her life, but my father, the chain-smoker, was still alive, of course, now living in Fort Myers, Florida, and still, as far as I knew, an alcoholic and a three-packs-a-day Winston man. After Claire and I were married, we moved to Somerville together, rented the middle floor of a triple-decker near Union Square. Claire had left Redline Bookstore by this point, getting an administrative job at Somerville’s cable access station, where she had begun to make short documentary films. And a year later, after Redline shuttered its doors, I got the job at Old Devils. I was twenty-nine years old and felt as though I’d found the job that I would have for the rest of my life.