Rules for Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  “You told your boss all this?”

  “Not at first. When I first brought it to him, I told him about your list, and how it connected with the bird murders, and with Bill Manso in Connecticut, and how I wanted to follow it up, but he didn’t bite. I made the mistake of mentioning that there was also a connection to my father’s death, and that was when I was told that I was barred from investigating any further, that it would be handed off to other agents if they saw fit. I was on vacation last week, when I questioned you, and when we went up to Rockland. Someone at the coroner’s office got in touch with my office instead of me directly, and that’s how I got busted, and that’s why I’m suspended. If they knew I was here now, I’d be fired for sure.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “I think …” she said, then paused. “I think I felt I owed you the truth. And maybe I’m warning you, as well. They know everything I know. You are a suspect.”

  “You must think I’m a suspect, as well.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore. Do I think you killed Elaine Johnson up in Maine, or Bill Manso, or Robin Callahan or Ethan Byrd? I don’t really think so. But that’s just a feeling. I know you’re not telling me the whole truth. If I had to come up with a theory, and I know it’ll sound ridiculous, but I think that maybe you talked someone into doing something to Eric Atwell, and maybe even my father, and now this person … whoever they are—”

  “Charlie, remember,” I said.

  “Right, Charlie. Look, I haven’t slept in days. I wanted to talk with you, and we’ve talked. I can’t have anything more to do with this investigation, not if I want to keep my job. Can I ask you to keep this meeting secret?”

  “Of course.”

  She took a sip of her beer, still three-quarters full. “And if you did have anything to do with the death of my father …”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But if you did … know that there is no one alive who mourned his death.”

  She stood up suddenly, banging her thighs against the table between us.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “I’m fine. I’m just exhausted.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to drive home, and I’m going to try and forget about all this.”

  I walked her to her car, wondering if I should offer her my couch for the night, but decided that was a bad idea for multiple reasons. Besides which, I don’t think she would have accepted. And I wasn’t sure I wanted her there, myself. She had not been honest with me, and I wasn’t convinced she was being entirely honest now.

  At her Equinox, parked near the Flat of the Hill Hotel, we stood for a moment in the whistling wind. Gwen had begun to shiver. “Are you still rereading the books?” she said.

  “I’ve been reading The Secret History,” I said.

  “Suddenly, that title takes on a whole new significance.”

  I laughed. “It does, I suppose.”

  “Any new insights?”

  “From the books?”

  “From anything.”

  “Can I tell you something that you won’t share unless you have to?”

  “I’m not even supposed to be here talking with you, so, yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s just a name that came up. I won’t say how. But if anything does happen to me, maybe take a look at someone named Nicholas Pruitt.”

  She repeated the name back to me, and I spelled it for her.

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s an English professor. It’s probably nothing, but …”

  “Okay,” she said. “Hopefully you’ll be fine, and I won’t have to look into his name.”

  We said good-bye, neither of us offering a handshake or a hug. Then I walked back to my apartment, thinking about everything we’d just said to each other.

  I’d been home for twenty minutes, wide awake, when I considered leaving again, driving to New Essex, and confronting Nick Pruitt that night. I had gotten his address online from searching the online version of the white pages, then found his house on Zillow, a place that posted real estate transactions. He lived in a single-family home on the outskirts of New Essex, in a neighborhood near the university. I could just show up at his door and knock on it. If Nick was Charlie, and I felt almost positive that he was, then he’d know me on sight. Maybe I could just talk with him, find out what he wanted, ask him to stop. But if I went to his house that night, who knew how he would act. Who knew if he’d even be alone.

  I decided to drive to New Essex early the next morning, stake out his house, watch him for a while. It might give me an advantage.

  CHAPTER 21

  Early the next morning, before driving to New Essex, I went to Old Devils. Nero came up through his cat door from the basement to greet me, walking with purpose, his head up. I picked him up and cradled him in my arms, scratching under his chin. I’d asked myself before whether it had been worth it to save him, and I believe it had. I don’t know if there really is a way to rate an animal’s happiness, but I believe he loves his life in the book-store. I put him down, picking one of his hairs off my wool coat. Would they have collected his hairs from Norman Chaney’s house in Tickhill during the investigation of his murder? Would they have considered them important or irrelevant? I didn’t really know.

  I left a note, with a list of things to do, for Emily and Brandon, then went back out into the cold morning.

  I was in New Essex a little over an hour later, idling along the curb across from where Nick Pruitt lived, a small square house with a mansard roof. It was eight in the morning, and I felt conspicuous. Corning Street was almost entirely residential, and all the houses had driveways. Mine was the only car parked along the curb. There was a corner store back about a hundred yards. I U-turned and parked in front of it, turned off my engine. I still had a view of Pruitt’s house, and if anyone questioned why I was sitting in my car, I could say I was about to go into the store.

  The car began to steam up, and I cleared a small patch on the bottom right of the windshield so that I could still watch the house while slumped in my seat. I took small sips from my thermos of coffee. There was a car parked in his driveway—something sporty that might be a Porsche—but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was still home. He worked at the university, only a few blocks away. If he was teaching a morning class, he could easily walk there.

  While waiting, I went over my list of books in my mind, connecting them with the murders. Unless Gwen Mulvey hadn’t spotted one of them, then Charlie had committed murders described in four of the eight books on my list, possibly five. The first one, of course, was done with me. Eric Atwell and Norman Chaney. The swapped murders from Strangers on a Train. Then Charlie had re-created the plot from The A.B.C. Murders, substituting people with birds in their names. Bill Manso had been killed using the idea from Double Indemnity. Elaine Johnson had been killed the same way that the playwright’s wife had been killed in Deathtrap. And was it possible that Steven Clifton had been murdered by using the method in The Secret History? How had Charlie even have known about Clifton? But, of course, he might have. He knew about me, and my wife. How hard would it have been to discover that Claire Mallory had gone to a middle school where a teacher had been accused of improper behavior with his students. It was unlikely, but not impossible. That left three books, three murders to go. The Red House Mystery, Malice Aforethought, and The Drowner. For all I knew, one or more of these had already happened, but somehow, I doubted it.

  At about eleven I got out of the car, stretched, then went into the convenience store. It was one of those places that sells milk and basic groceries, but only exists because of lottery tickets and cigarettes. I bought a granola bar and a dusty bottle of water from the man behind the register and paid in cash. As I walked back toward my car, I saw a young woman in jeans and knee-high boots striding toward Pruitt’s front door. She pressed the doorbell as I got back into the driver’s seat. I swiped a han
d across the inside of my windshield to watch the woman as she waited, rocking slightly on her heels. She rang the bell again, then tried knocking, then peered through one of the rectangular panes of glass that lined the side of the door. Finally, she gave up, looked at her phone, and turned around and walked back down the street.

  I got out of the car and began to follow her. I figured that if she was looking for Nick Pruitt, she’d eventually find him, and if I was following her, then I’d find him as well.

  She was walking fast, almost jogging at times, so I picked up my pace. At the end of Pruitt’s street, she turned left onto Gloucester Road, climbing a short hill toward New Essex University, and eventually entering a two-story brick building on the edge of the campus. A sign above the awning read Proctor Hall. I raced to the double glass doors, and pushed through into a lobby-style entrance, catching the retreating figure of the woman, her boots rapping down a long hall to the left. A bearded man behind an information desk looked up at me, and I smiled and nodded like I’d seen him a hundred times, then followed the woman down the fluorescent-lit hallway. She was pushing through the third door at the left. A small placard told me she was in Classroom 1C, and I peered through an inset window of wire-reinforced glass. All I could see was the curved back row of stadium-style seating, about twelve students sprawled at their desks. I pushed through the door and slipped inside, seating myself at the end of the back row. It was a large room that sloped down toward the front. It probably had room for about a hundred students, and I guessed that 60 percent of the seats were taken. The woman I’d followed had removed her black parka and her wool hat and was now standing at the front of the room, looking nervous.

  “Unfortunately,” she said. “Professor Pruitt won’t be able to make today’s class. I’ll be here for the remainder of the time in case anyone has any questions, but unless you hear otherwise, Friday morning’s class is the same as scheduled, and the reading assignment hasn’t changed.”

  Halfway through her announcement all the students had begun to slide their laptops into their backpacks and put their coats back on. I got up, as well, and quickly left the room, walking back down the hallway, then outside, hoping my presence hadn’t been too noteworthy to anyone. I wandered toward a bench, with a view out toward the Atlantic, dark gray under a leaden sky. I sat for a moment, angling my body so that I could see the front of Proctor Hall, students now streaming out, moving quickly out of fear that their professor would suddenly show up and they wouldn’t get the morning off.

  It was clear what had happened. Pruitt hadn’t shown up to his class, hadn’t responded to texts or calls to his cell phone. His teaching assistant had resorted to running down to his nearby house and seeing if he was home. I had a bad feeling but tamped it down. Pruitt was a drunk of some kind, at least that was what Jillian Nguyen had reported. Maybe he was hungover. Maybe this sort of thing happened all the time, and his TA would sometimes be able to rouse him by banging on his door.

  I kept my eye on Proctor Hall, curious to see what the TA might do when she departed the building, wondering if she might go back down to Pruitt’s house. Then I remembered her saying that she would stick around the classroom for the duration of the canceled class. I stood up, began to walk down the hill toward Pruitt’s street. My body was telling me to get back in my car and drive home. Something had happened. A line of poetry went through my mind—someone is dead, even the trees know it—and it took me a moment to remember that it was an Anne Sexton line, a poem about one of her parents dying, I thought. As I approached Pruitt’s house, I studied the line of trees along Corning Street. They were all leafless, of course, and against the dark sky they were just black shapes, pencil scratches. It was hard to imagine them full of leaves on a summer day. Yes, someone is dead. But it wasn’t enough just to know it.

  When I got to Pruitt’s house, I cut down his driveway, passing his car. I was wearing gloves and I unlatched the wooden door that led to his fenced-in backyard. Drifts of crusted snow filled the square yard. There was a grill under a tarp, but nothing else. Unraked leaves, black now, were banked up against the far fence.

  I climbed three steps that got me to a small deck and a back door. Through the windowpane I could see a kitchen with a checkered linoleum floor; beyond it was what looked like a dining room with a long table. The door was locked, and I knocked on the glass. I was about to punch through the window, but there was a row of old plant pots on the deck. Crouching, I lifted each one. Under a pot with rosemary in it was a single silver key. I pinched it between my gloved fingers; it fit the back door, and I was inside. I shouted “Hello” into the empty house, then waited for an answer. I walked through the uncluttered kitchen into the dining room, going slow, allowing my eyes to adjust to the dim interior. All the curtains were pulled. From the dining room I could see through into the front room of the house, to a long sofa. Pruitt was sitting there on one end of the sofa, his feet flat on the floor, his hands on either side of his thighs, and his head tilted back all the way, resting against the sofa cushion. He was dead. I knew that much just by looking at him, at how still he was, how exposed his neck was with his head at that uncomfortable angle.

  As shocked as I was by the sight of his body, I was equally shocked because it meant that Pruitt wasn’t Charlie. I’d been so sure that he was, and clearly, I’d been wrong. There was, I suppose, a minuscule possibility that maybe Pruitt really was Charlie, and the guilt of what he’d done had caused him to drink himself to death. But I knew, in my gut, that that wasn’t the case. Pruitt had been killed by Charlie, who was many steps ahead of me.

  There was a very strong smell of whiskey coming from the room, and I saw the bottle on the floor, tipped on its side on the thin Persian rug. It caught what little light there was in the room, glinting from a line of wire that encased its triangular shape. I recognized the brand—it was a scotch—but couldn’t remember exactly what it was called. There was also another smell, one that made me think of hospitals. I moved in a little closer so that I was standing in the doorframe. And from there I could see that there was dried vomit down the front of Pruitt’s sweater.

  Knowing I wasn’t going to go any farther into the room with Pruitt’s body there, I glanced around. Not surprisingly there were many bookshelves. In one corner was a large flat-screen television and what looked like an old stereo system. On the wall above the sofa was a large framed theater poster advertising a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; it included a line drawing of a bear with a crown on its head. I did notice that except for the bottle on the floor in front of the sofa I’d seen no other signs of liquor in the house.

  I slowly backed away into the dining room, and then the kitchen. I looked around there for liquor, as well, but didn’t see any. I opened his refrigerator. It was sparse inside, but there was a six-pack of beer on the top shelf, although looking at it closely I realized that it was nonalcoholic. I shut the refrigerator door, wondering if it would be worth it to look around the house some more, or if it would be foolish to stay any longer. I knew what had happened here, of course, although I hadn’t completely processed it yet. It was Malice Aforethought. In that book a woman who is a drug addict is killed with a drug overdose, making it look like an accident. Pruitt was an obvious recovering alcoholic, but Charlie had somehow gotten him to drink again, gotten him to drink a fatal amount. Or at least to make it look like he had.

  Chirping sounds, like crickets, suddenly filled the kitchen and I jumped, my heart ratcheting up to full speed. It was Pruitt’s phone, charging by the toaster on the kitchen counter. I went and looked at the screen. The person calling him was named Tamara Strahovski. I guessed that it was the TA, checking in once more. How soon before she called the police, asking for a wellness check? I had no idea of knowing. I made a quick decision to briefly look through the house—a five-minute search.

  The kitchen had two doors and I went through the other one. It led to a back hallway, a half bathroom, and a room that was Pruitt’s office. T
here was a standing desk, a laptop propped open on it, and more shelves, most of these filled with endless copies of his own book, Little Fish. I knew from visiting Brian Murray’s home that authors got a number of their own editions, but not as many as there were in here. Little Fish filled two bookshelves and there were stacks along the floor. It looked to be in the hundreds. I wondered if he’d bought copies of his own books, maybe to boost sales. From the office I worked quickly down a side hall that led to the stairs. At the top of the landing I peered into Pruitt’s bedroom, messier than any of the rooms downstairs. And sparser, as well. There was a pile of clothes on the floor, an unmade bed, and another hand-drawn theater poster framed on the wall. This time for Twelfth Night. I was able to get a better look at this poster. It was a production of the New Essex Community Playhouse, and the director was Nicholas Pruitt. Before leaving the bedroom, I glanced at the top of his bureau, cluttered with framed photographs, most of them old family shots, although I recognized a picture of Jillian Nguyen, posing with Pruitt in front of what looked like the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre in London.

  I let myself out the back door and returned the key underneath the potted rosemary. Then I got back into my car and drove home to Boston.

  CHAPTER 22

  I hadn’t gone back onto Duckburg since 2010, when I’d arranged the murder swap. But I was thinking I needed to revisit the site now, just in case I could get in contact with Charlie. As far as I knew I still had the site bookmarked on my work computer. It was early afternoon, and I walked from home to the Old Devils. Every time I blinked, I could see Nick Pruitt’s lifeless body sitting placidly on his sofa, his head tipped back, and his mouth hanging open.

  I pushed through the door. Emily was behind the register ringing up a sale, and I heard Brandon before I saw him. “The gang’s all here,” he said in his loud voice. He was crouched to my left, hunting one of the lower shelves, probably trying to find a book for an online order.