Rules for Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  “Oh my God, you think it’s me,” Jillian said, straightening up in her chair.

  “Oh, no, no,” I said. “Not at all. We have the accuser’s name. We’re just looking for any kind of corroboration.”

  “Okay,” she said and put her mug down. “Look, I do need to go. Besides, I don’t really have anything else to add.”

  She stood, and I did as well. “Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.” It was clear that I’d lost her trust, but I decided to test my luck. “Just one last thing. As far as you knew did Nick Pruitt own a gun?”

  She was sliding on her huge coat, and she shook her head. “I mean, no,” she said. “Besides the antique guns, but I don’t even think those work.”

  “The antique guns?”

  “He collects guns. Not to shoot, but old revolvers. Anything that was in an old crime film. It’s his hobby.”

  *

  OUR WAITRESS PUT DOWN our beers, a Stella for Marty and a Belhaven for me. We were in a back booth at Jack Crow’s Tavern that felt like its own tiny room, reminding me of the pews at the Old South Church. We each sipped our beer.

  “Good to see you, Marty,” I said. I’d seen him fairly recently, but he looked older to me. His white crew cut was sparser than ever, the skin underneath speckled with dark spots. And the large-knuckled fingers of his hands were bent in a way that suggested arthritis.

  “I’d forgotten about this place,” he said, leaning out from our booth to look at the busy bar. “Last time we came here we got nachos that had brussels sprouts on them.”

  “Really?” I said. “I don’t remember that.”

  “I’ll never forget it. Who puts brussels sprouts on nachos?”

  “Now I remember,” I said. “Let’s stick to beer tonight.” We touched glasses.

  “You find out anything new?” I said. I’d been debating whether I should tell him I’d gotten my own information on Nick Pruitt, especially what I’d heard about the gun collection, but I hadn’t decided yet.

  “Found out a little bit,” Marty said. “Don’t know if it will help you, but he’s no saint, Nick Pruitt.”

  “No?”

  “He’s been arrested twice, once for DUI, and once for drunk and disorderly after, get this, a Christmas Eve service. He got caught trying to steal a box of those little white candles they hand out. Also, he’s had two restraining orders filed against him. Hold on.” He reached into the pocket of his wool blazer and pulled out a spiral-bound notebook plus a pair of reading glasses. “The first was Jodie Blackberry. This was in Michigan, when he was a graduate student. She said she caught him peering through her window and following her around campus. The other one was much more recent. Just three years ago, filed by a Jillian N-G-U-Y-E-N. I won’t do her the indignity of trying to pronounce it. Kind of the same type of thing. Ex-girlfriend who claimed he wouldn’t leave her alone. He’d broken into her house.”

  “So, nothing violent on his record? Nothing gun related?”

  “Nope. But that fits, doesn’t it? If Nick Pruitt was the one who wanted Chaney dead, then he’d get someone else to do it. He’s not really a killer even though he’s clearly a peeper and a guy who can’t hold his liquor. Besides, I looked into the alibi and it’s rock solid.”

  “His alibi for when Norman Chaney was killed?”

  “Yep.” Marty looked down at his notebook again. “It was March of 2011. Nick Pruitt was in California at a family reunion. It checked out. But like I said, I don’t think he’d be the type who would beat his own brother-in-law to death, but he very well might be the type to have someone do it for him. Or maybe he asked someone to just rough Norman Chaney up and it went too far. Either way, he got away with it. My guess is, if you really want to know, it would be possible to shake it out of him, get him to make some sort of confession. I know his type, and if you bent him a little, I think he’d give it up. I’m not suggesting, just saying.”

  “Got it,” I said. “No, all I needed was the information. It’s helpful, Marty, thanks.”

  “No, thank you. I actually felt useful this week. First time in what feels like forever. The FBI still questioning you about this Chaney homicide?”

  I took a long sip of my beer, wondering, once again, how much to tell Marty. “They haven’t, no,” I said. “Apparently it all had something to do with a list I made on the Old Devils blog about a hundred years ago.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. You ever go to our blog?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck a blog even is,” Marty said.

  “I don’t do it anymore, but when I started at Old Devils, it was an online place where I wrote little articles. Reviews of new books. Lists of my favorite authors. That type of thing. I wrote a piece once about my eight favorite perfect murders in books, and someone in the FBI saw a connection between my list and a couple of recent unsolved homicides. They were pretty thin connections, though, so I don’t think they’ll follow up.”

  “What else did they ask you about?” he said, clearly interested.

  “A death down in Connecticut, someone who was found near the tracks of a commuter train. And they asked me about that newscaster, Robin—”

  “Robin Callahan, sure,” he said, jumping in. “Her husband did it. I can’t believe they haven’t made an arrest yet.”

  “You know that?” I said.

  “I don’t know it, but, yeah, she was the one who wrote the book about how adultery was good for marriages. I think I’m safe in saying they ought to take a hard look at the husband.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, so, I think I overreacted.”

  “I don’t know if you overreacted. It sounds like they overreacted. They asked you about all these cases?”

  I could tell he was getting more and more interested, and I just didn’t want to involve him. He reminded me of a dog with a bone, and if I told him all about the copycat murders, he’d start looking into it. Not to mention that I’d actually given him the name of Norman Chaney.

  “They just asked me if I had any relationship with them, with Norman Chaney, or this guy down in Connecticut, or Robin Callahan. And I said no. I asked you about Norman Chaney because for whatever reason they seemed more interested in that. Honestly, though, it was nothing. At least I hope it was nothing. Your daughter still coming to visit?”

  “What books did you put on that list?” he asked, ignoring my question about Cindy.

  I told him, pretending I was having a hard time remembering. I left off Strangers on a Train, however. Marty, who was always looking for book recommendations, wrote some of the titles down in his little notebook.

  “The A.B.C. Murders,” he said. “I like the sound of that. These days I think I like reading Agatha Christie more than I like reading James Ellroy. Don’t know what it is, but maybe I’m getting soft.”

  “You’ve been reading Agatha Christie?”

  “Yeah, like you told me to, remember? I just read Ten Little Indians.”

  “And Then There Were None,” I said, almost automatically. It was the less offensive title that the book was now sold under.

  “Right, that one. Now that was a perfect crime. Too bad more murderers don’t copy that book.”

  “Kill yourself after you commit the murders, you mean?” I said. I didn’t remember telling him to read Agatha Christie, but I’m sure I did. It sounded like me.

  We ordered another beer, and talked about books, and a little about his family. He asked if I wanted to stay for a third beer, but I decided to bow out. As always with Marty I liked spending time with him, but after a while we’d run out of things to say, and I would feel sad and lonely. I’ve always felt that being with people, as opposed to being alone, can make you feel loneliness more acutely.

  “You gonna do anything about Nick Pruitt?” he asked, as I was pulling on my jacket.

  “No,” I said. “Not unless the FBI decides to talk with me again. If they do, then I guess I could mention him, say that I had an ex-cop look into the Norman Chaney murder and how
Pruitt looked like a suspect.”

  “I wouldn’t mention my name,” Marty said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “No, of course not. In fact, I won’t mention it at all. I think I was just curious, was all. I was baffled that they’d made some connection between me and these crimes.”

  “I figured you were going to tell me it had to do with Nero,” Marty said, then finished off his beer.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Oh. I figured that the FBI came calling on you with questions about Norman Chaney because of your cat. Nero. In the store.”

  “Why?” I said, trying to sound relatively calm.

  “I was reading the police reports and Norman Chaney had a cat, a ginger one like Nero, that went missing after the homicide. I read that … then I thought that might be the connection.”

  “That’s funny,” I said.

  “He’s a little bit of a celebrity, that Nero, you know?”

  “I know he is. Half the people who come to our store come to see him. Emily tells me he has his own Instagram page, although I’ve never seen it. No, they didn’t ask me anything about my cat. And he doesn’t come from Vermont, anyway.” I laughed, and it sounded fake in my own head.

  “I might stay here for one more,” Marty said.

  I thanked him again and went out into the night. The temperature had dropped in the time I’d spent with Marty, and I walked home carefully, avoiding patches of black ice on the narrow sidewalks. When I reached my street, I didn’t immediately see her, waiting in the shadow of the dead linden tree in front of my house, but I did sense her. It was the feeling I’d been experiencing lately, that feeling that I was being watched.

  At my stairwell, she stepped out of the shadows and said, “Hi, Mal.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Hi, Gwen,” I said.

  “You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

  “I guess not. I spoke with two other FBI agents today, and they told me that you’d been suspended.”

  “Who did you talk to?” she said, stepping forward so that she was now in the light from the street. Her breath was billowing in the cold night, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to invite her in.

  “One agent from New Haven—”

  “Berry, right?”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m just not sure I should really be talking to you.”

  “No, I totally understand. I don’t want anything from you, but I was hoping to at least talk, just for a little while, explain what happened. I would have called you, but I couldn’t do that. Can I come up? Or could we grab a drink somewhere? Anywhere but where we’re standing right now.”

  We walked down my street to Charles and got a booth at the Sevens, where we each ordered a Newcastle Brown Ale. Gwen removed her coat but kept a thick woolen scarf wrapped around her neck. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were still red from being outside.

  “What do you want to know?” she said.

  “You’ve been suspended?”

  “Yes, pending a review.”

  “How come?”

  She took a sip from her bottle of beer, then licked foam from her upper lip. “When I presented what I’d learned to my supervisors … well, not what I’d learned so much, but what I suspected, that there was a connection between several unsolved crimes in the New England area, I was told not to pursue the case. I made the mistake of telling them what had initially led me to you. The thing is … I knew who you were, already. I’d heard your name, anyway, because once upon a time I knew your wife. I knew Claire.”

  Her eyes were looking at me but not looking at me, landing somewhere around my chin. “How did you know Claire?” I said.

  “I knew her because my father was one of her teachers, in middle school. Steve Clifton.”

  I needed to make a decision. I needed to decide whether I was going to play dumb, or if I was going to tell her the truth, most of it, anyway. I think the look on her face was what made me decide that I needed to be truthful. She looked terrified, and I realized that if she’d made a decision to be honest with me, I should return the favor.

  “Yes, I know all about him.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know that he molested Claire over the course of two years while she was in middle school. He screwed up her life.”

  “She told you about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did she say about it? If you don’t mind my asking. I understand if you feel …” She broke off, and I realized how hard this was for her.

  I said, “To tell the truth, we didn’t talk much about the details. She brought it up early on in our relationship, said it was important for me to know, but she always downplayed it. At least to me.”

  Gwen was nodding. “You don’t have to tell me exactly what she told you. I understand.”

  “Why don’t you have his last name?” I said. “Why aren’t you Gwen Clifton?”

  “I was, of course, for years, but I had my name legally changed. Mulvey is my mother’s maiden name.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. Then I added, “Did you actually know Claire?”

  “Yes, I remember her. I was younger than she was, by about five years, but she used to come to the house—several of my father’s students used to come to the house—and I remember her because she played Boggle with me a bunch of times. And then, later, when I was in high school my father confessed to me what he’d done, and hers was one of the names he told me.”

  “He told you what he’d done?”

  Gwen pursed her lips and breathed out. “At this point Claire had already graduated, but another student, or two students, maybe, had come forward and accused him of inappropriate touching. Everyone knew. We lived in the same town that he taught in. It was one of those already awkward situations where he was a teacher at the same middle school I attended, although he was never my teacher. He resigned—he was forced to resign—and there must have been some kind of legal settlement because it never went to court. Or else there wasn’t enough evidence. One night, he came to my room …” She stopped speaking and pressed her index finger against her left eye for a moment.

  “You don’t have to tell me all this,” I said.

  “He came to my room and told me the names of the girls he’d molested, including Claire’s name, and he said he did it to protect me. That he never wanted to do anything to me, so he did it to other girls.” She shrugged and pressed her lips together into something that looked like a half smile.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “So I never forgot Claire’s name, and I remembered later hearing how she died, and looking up her obituary and finding your name. So I knew about you, as well.”

  “What about you and your dad?”

  “That time he came and talked to me was the last time we ever talked. He left the house after that, and my parents divorced, and I never saw him again. He was killed, you know.”

  “He was murdered?”

  “Not officially, no. But, yes, I believe he was.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t you know?” she said.

  I was drinking from my bottle of beer even though it was empty. “You think I killed him?” I said.

  She shrugged again and gave me that odd smile. The color had disappeared from her cheeks and from her nose, and, as usual, I found it hard to read her face, the paleness of it, the flatness of her eyes. “I don’t really know, Mal, but at this point I don’t know what to believe. Do you really want to hear what I think?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay. Eric Atwell was murdered, and I know that you weren’t in the state, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have arranged it. My father was run down by a car when he was on his bicycle. It was a hit-and-run, but I always assumed someone had killed him for what he’d done. It would make sense. Both of those killings would make sense, would be justified, really, especially for the husband of Claire Mallory.”

  “I will admit that I don’t feel bad for either of them
,” I said and tried on my own smile that I’m sure looked as awkward as hers.

  “But that’s all you’ll admit?”

  “What does either Eric Atwell or your father have to do with my list, and the other murders?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. After my father was killed, I did think about you again. I’d also heard about Eric Atwell’s death, and I figured you might have something to do with that, as well. I didn’t care, even though I was training at the time to be an FBI agent. I knew someone had killed my father, and I actually hoped that it was someone with a reason for doing it, not someone who just accidentally ran him over, and then took off. I wanted his death to be revenge. And I assumed that it was. Honestly, it’s something that helps me sleep at night. And in my mind, I thought that it was probably you. There were other girls my father victimized but Claire is the one I always remember, probably because she was kind to me and I’ll never forget that.

  “And while I was learning about you I discovered the list. I’ve had it memorized, I think, for many years, and I thought of it right away—I thought of The A.B.C. Murders—after hearing about the feathers that were sent to the police station.”

  “You thought I committed all those murders?”

  She shifted forward on her wooden seat. “No, no. I didn’t. I don’t know what I thought, really, except that something was going on, something that might have to do with my father, and with you. I got obsessed with it, even thought that maybe my father’s death was related to The Secret History.”

  “How?” I said.

  “Because, in a way, he picked the circumstances of his death.”

  “Because he biked a lot?”

  “Uh-huh. He biked all the time, especially after the divorce, after he’d moved to Upstate New York. Not that I knew this from personal experience, but I read the police report on his death. He always biked alone, hills mainly, on quiet roads. He was hit by a car going the other way. So, yeah, I did think about Secret History. If someone wanted to kill him, then running him down while he biked would be the easiest thing to do. It would look like an accident, well, an accident that someone fled from, but it wouldn’t necessarily look like a homicide.”