Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  What could he possibly want now? Hadn't he already been exposed enough? I didn't want any more information on Scott Boardman. Frankly, I was sick of him too.

  “Why now, Scott?”

  “I've probably tested your friendship to its limits and I just want to leave here as friends.”

  “Look, Scott, I don't hate you. I'm not mad. I'm just tired. Tired to the point of collapse.”

  “Please? Take your car home. I'll pick you up at your place if you want, and drop you back off. You don't even have to drive.”

  As by then I was almost to my underground lot, I agreed to let him pick me up.

  “It'll take me about fifteen minutes to check out of the hotel and get there. Meet me in front,” he said. “Brooke has been calling me here every ten minutes since you left, so I'm out of here as soon as I hang up with you.”

  I went upstairs to change out of my work clothes and wait for Scott. When I opened my apartment door, I stepped on a manila envelope the same size as the one Andy had delivered to Scott earlier that day. I assumed Brooke had sent me copies of the photos, hoping to curtail any romantic intentions I still harbored for Scott. By then I was dried up as far as Scott Boardman was concerned. No worries there, Brooke old girl. He's all yours, for what he's worth.

  I carried the envelope to the coffee table and dropped it there unopened along with my cell phone. My rare forays into the emotional pits were always brightened by a hot shower, so I headed for the bathroom, getting only halfway there before my curiosity got the better of me. I should have opened the package, at least peeked inside the flap. So I retrieved the envelope and took it to the kitchen and then poured the contents out on the counter. The familiar black-and-white graininess and the obscured lens of a cell phone camera initially convinced me they were only duplicates of those I'd already seen in Scott's hotel room, but as my eyes adjusted to one of the pics, the blurred head of a female came into view. And then another female. Two women on a bed, one lay facedown, the other in a sitting position, her face contorted in a howl of pain. It was Pat Boardman alive—and screaming.

  I quickly fanned out the other pictures. Picking one up, then another, and one after another, different angles of the same shot: a boat's berth, two women, one screaming, the other presumably dead.

  I picked up the phone to call Vince at the office, remembering too late that he had gone to the station to see the chief. As soon as Andy answered Vince's phone, I hung up and began to dial Chucky's cell number. As I waited for him to pick up, the downstairs intercom rang. Scott, I assumed. I hung up Chucky's still-ringing call and buzzed the visitor up. It had been almost twenty-five minutes since we spoke. I should already have been downstairs. I was late. He was coming up to get me—and I didn't want him to see the photos.

  I ran to the door and unlocked the deadbolt, then returned to the kitchen to hide the pictures from Scott and dial the police station number to try to reach Chucky on the main line. My doorbell rang. “It's open, Scott. I'm on the phone.”

  I shoved the pictures back into the envelope, turning to a high cabinet to put them safely out of sight while I held the phone to my ear.

  “Providence Police Station,” I heard on the other end.

  “Hi, Shannon Lynch from the AG's office. I need Chief Sewell immediately.”

  It was the clattering of the silverware drawer that drew my attention back to the realization that someone had entered my apartment and stood behind me like a shadow.

  “Scott?” I turned.

  “Scotty's not here,” she said. “Scotty's never coming here again. He's all done with me… and with you. Did you get those pictures of Pat? I took them with my cell phone camera. Not too good, are they?”

  Brooke Stanford was eerily blank-faced, her hair, as if ignited by an electrical storm, was wild and unkempt. I was used to seeing her manicured, made-up, and perfectly coiffed, and there she was, standing before me, no makeup and her hair a mess—devoid of any artifice to disguise the hatred in her eyes and neaten the windblown state of her mind.

  “Scott's all done,” she sang.

  And if that were all there was—the outrageous disorder of her appearance and the creepy singsonginess of her voice—I would have simply overpowered her and waited for Scott to arrive, at which time we'd escort her to the nearest insane asylum, where she'd be chained to a bed awaiting arraignment on some charge or another, the exact penal code statute, at the moment, not readily coming to mind. But it was the meat-carving knife she'd rustled from my cutlery drawer and, with an absent-minded stare, was holding breezily by her side that gave me pause to move even a millimeter from my frozen pose.

  “Put the phone down,” she said.

  I realized I still held the receiver in my left hand, the monotone voice of a taped operator droning on, “Please hang up and try your call again…. Please hang up and try your call again….”

  I put the receiver softly down. “Scott's on his way,” I said. “No point in hurting me. He'll find you here and you won't get away.”

  She smiled and slit her eyes closed, tilting her head to the side like a sly human cat. “I don't think so,” she said. “Scott's dead. I cut him up into little tiny pieces while he was sitting in his car waiting for you to come down. I left his big ego-bloated head in the front seat, and tossed his gay legs into the backseat. How dare he.” She jerked her deranged head in disgust. “His legs were heavy. I cut them in two”

  I knew she was lying. She was clean of blood, and the strength needed to accomplish such a surgical feat was beyond her. Even if she'd gotten as far as slashing at him, Scott could easily overpower her. With bleeding wounds and close to death, he could still overpower her before she killed him with a knife.

  “Brooke, you have no blood on you, and you just picked up that knife from my drawer. And I spoke with him no more than half an hour ago.”

  “And he's late, isn't he?” she said. “He should have been here by now, shouldn't he? Why do you think he's so late?”

  Good question.

  “Put the knife down, Brooke. I'll wrestle you to the floor before you can kill me with it. You may cut me, but I'll kill you with that knife long before you kill me.”

  She shook her head slowly. “Not if I get you right in the heart. Right where mine's dead, I'll stab yours.”

  “Your heart isn't hurting, Brooke. It's your ego. You wanted Scott because you wanted to piggyback on his social ladder. You convinced yourself you were in love with him. The man is gay. He was never going to marry you or me, because Pat Boardman was his cover.”

  “I would have replaced her. I told him I would take him any way he wanted. And I would never have cheated on him the way she did. I just wanted to be with him and I could have turned him around. We'd been together before, I could do it again.”

  “Where is he? Where is Scott now?”

  Why she did it just then, I'll never know. I'd simply asked her where Scott was, and she raised the knife from her side before I even saw it move and sliced it past my chest and then back up over her head.

  I looked down at my shirt. She had managed to cut through the fabric, but the slit in my shirt looked to be only that—a slit in my shirt—until the slit began turning scarlet at its edges and the stain began to spread slowly outward until the front of my shirt was a bull's-eye of blood.

  I jumped back against the cabinets, and she slashed at me again. My reflexes were sluggish. While I was thinking—trying to understand how I could have let her get in the first stab, and then why I could feel nothing even after the blood began to flow—she slashed at me again, and then again, until I reached out for the knife and caught its blade in the palm of my hand, the blade slicing deep into the flesh of my closed fingers until neither Brooke nor I knew whether the knife was under my control as it stuck fast into my flesh, or if Brooke could still wield it out of my impaled grasp. The advantage was hers. My fingers ached in pain. And just as suddenly as she had begun, she yanked the knife from my hand and moved away from me toward
the door, leaving me behind.

  I breathed and sank to the floor, trying to look around me, forcing myself to stay awake, but the room was blushing red as my vision blurred. Had the blood splattered into my eyes? I heard Brooke's voice in the background. Was she in the hall waiting for Scott? I could crawl and lock the door after her. Close the knife out of my apartment. It was the knife that was strong, not Brooke. The knife—I didn't realize until it was too late—was more powerful than me.

  “I buzzed him up,” I heard her voice say. Brooke was talking and she was closer than the hall. Still inside with me. She and the knife were still inside my apartment with me.

  “And when he comes up, I'll cut him into little pieces. His heart first. I'll cut his heart out.”

  How silly—I still had strength to think—how silly of her to think it was easy to break through a man's ribs and reach his heart. And then to hold the still-pumping thing in her fist with one hand and carve around it with the other. How naive of her to think that even hatred could give her the stomach and strength to cut a man's heart from his chest while he fought to keep it beating.

  I lay my head on the cold tile floor, feeling the cool porcelain against my burning cheek. But I couldn't stay there. Just a second, I thought, and I'll pull myself up. Warn Scott. He was on his way up and Brooke still had the knife.

  With my good hand, I pulled myself a few inches along the floor until I reached an opening to the living room from behind the kitchen's island. Brooke was standing at my windows, enjoying the view those few seconds before she would continue her mayhem on Scott.

  Where had I left my cell phone? I heard a soft knock at the door. “Shannon?”

  Brooke walked to the door and opened it, the knife hidden behind her back.

  “What's all over you?” Scott asked her.

  She started walking back to the windows. She knew he'd follow her. She held the knife in front of her as she walked, hiding it there as he followed on her heels.

  “Scott…” I managed a faint whisper. Like in a dream where the screams are muffled by unconscious sleep, I tried to call out, but the harder I tried, the more I breathed, and with each new breath I felt hot liquid spurting from my chest.

  “It's blood!” he said. “Where's Shannon? What the fuck did you do?”

  Brooke turned slowly to me, and I watched Scott's glance follow hers. Mistake, I thought, don't let your eyes wander from hers. Keep her in your vision.

  But my thoughts found no voice in me, and as Scott turned and took a step in my direction she plunged the knife into the back of his neck. I watched him reel in slow motion, falling back against the plate glass window. His head rising to the ceiling and then falling to his chest. He began a slow slump down the glass as blood stained the windows a pretty translucent rose.

  She came after him again, and this time the knife went to his chest. Brooke knew where the heart was. She'd been trying to find mine, and I think she hit the bull's-eye with Scott's.

  His mouth opened in a guttural scream as Brooke tried to pull the knife from his ribs.

  She'd be back to me when she was through with him. She was almost done with her work of butchering him to death. She'd be returning to me shortly if I couldn't move to get away.

  She leaned to his collapsed body and began whispering something to him. And I crawled closer, because there on the coffee table—near Scott's crumpled body and Brooke's hovering shape—was my cell phone.

  “You didn't love Pat,” she said to him. “Why couldn't you just leave her? You made me kill her, Scott. You're the reason Pat's dead. You and Virginia Booth.”

  “Muffie?” I heard Scott say, the fluid already gurgling in his throat.

  “Virginia did that. She made it easy for me to do the rest. They'd think Virginia did them both. So you see, Scott, we killed Leo for nothing because I wouldn't have let you go to jail for killing Pat. I would have confessed before that, if you'd only told me we could be together.”

  I had by now reached the coffee table, where the phone was a mere foot off the ground if only I could lift my burning hand—the broken one bathed in blood—to grab it while with my good hand I held myself up off the floor. I slid the phone to the floor. Brooke heard the crash and swung around. Quickly I hit some numbers, maybe 911, who knows, the keypad was obscured by the blood from my hand, but the voice I heard was Beth's.

  “Hey, Shannon, what's up?”

  Beth's voice had carried through the silence of the dying room. Brooke's eyes were wild again. She was angry. She had thought she was done. And I was calling her back to action.

  “Goddamn you!” she screamed, and ripped the phone from my hand, flipping it shut. I scurried away from her like a ferret from a wolf, crawling low to the floor on all fours. I waited for the stab to my back and prayed she would miss my spine.

  Oddly, I felt a pressure; the knife must have penetrated flesh, but my body's natural flow of anesthesia had taken effect. I felt little more than a hard hit to my left side, and I reeled around on my back and looked up at her. “Leo Safer?” I said, as if Leo Safer was my only concern during the last moments of my life. But then, what is there in the end when one's life is as empty as mine was? No children, no siblings, no mother, an estranged father. What else is there but getting answers to a few unanswered questions? An explanation was all I wanted. A closure to my own ignorance for letting an insipid weakling like Brooke Stanford bring me to this horrific end.

  “Who killed Leo Safer?” I asked again.

  “Scott,” she said merrily. “That's why you're still alive. If it had been me, I would have killed you on that boat too. Scott liked you too much. Probably because you look like a man. He was fucking Leo Safer, did you know that too?”

  “Leo knew it was you?”

  “Oh, no. Leo was convinced it was Scott who shot Pat. Leo told Scott he had the evidence that it was Scott who killed Pat. And he did have it. Because I gave it to him. I gave Scott's gun to Leo. The one I shot Pat and her girlfriend with.” She shook her head. “I think the girlfriend was already dead, but I shot her too, just to make sure.”

  “Why frame the man you love?”

  She lifted her gaze out my windows and into the sky.

  “Don't look to God,” I said. “The answers are in the blood you shed. Not God.”

  She looked down at Scott. Like a freakish sculpture in a wax museum, his mouth had fallen open into a hardened mask. “To regain control,” she stated simply. “Scott didn't care anymore about Pat's murder, about his career, and certainly not about me. I'd lost him.” She sat on the couch, cradling the knife in her lap. “Leo went to the boat that day you were with Scott. We didn't know you were with him. Leo was going to confront Scott…” She shrugged. “They must have fought for the gun. Leo was shot and Scott got hurt too. That's what Scott told me, anyway—that it was an accident. But Scott was lying about a lot of things, wasn't he? Like the fact that he was gay.”

  With the last strength I had, I reassessed my opinion of Brooke Stanford. She had planned the perfect crime and would have gotten away with it had not her “messy female emotions” gotten in her way.

  Brooke plopped on the floor next to me, sitting cross-legged, still holding the knife like it was a secret, and we were sisters at a pajama party wondering what silly pranks we should commit next. She coldly recited the details of Pat's murder. How she'd found Pat on the bed screaming over the lifeless body of Muffie Booth, then the shot that silenced her; the hiding of the gun as her security, the framing of Scott Boardman, and the subsequent death of Leo Safer. Brooke stared off into the storybook of her memory like she was telling me about her first kiss with the captain of her college basketball team. She seemed calm. Almost self-satisfied. Perhaps this was the first time in her life Brooke had ever felt successful, worthy, smarter than those of us who'd referred to her as an airhead.

  “You're bleeding heavily,” she said, finally coming out of her preteen trance. “It's slow, but eventually you'll bleed to death. Does it hurt?
”

  She looked over at Scott slumped against the glass window. I wondered if anyone outside knew what they were looking at when they glanced up at my floor-to-ceiling windows and saw, through the glass, the back of Scott's body sitting at the end of a trail of smeared blood.

  “Scott's dead,” she said, hoisting herself up. “And you will be soon. So I should go.”

  Yes, I thought. Please go before my friends get here. A thought I'd not considered: Brooke still had the knife, and Beth, if I knew her at all, was on her way with help, the rest of my worried friends.

  Brooke went to my kitchen. I heard her talking through the running faucet, but I couldn't make out the words. She was washing her hands, or scrubbing her prints from the knife. Did she assume, after Scott and I were both dead, that it would look as if we'd each died in our struggle against the other? I tried to see the evidence as Lucky Dack would. Was Scott's blood on me? Mine on him? We'd never really been together, either in life or death. Lucky Dack would see that, that the absence of his blood on me and mine on him suggested a third person, the one who would be drenched in both our blood. But Brooke was drying her clean hands on her shirt and was rifling through my closet for a coat to cover her bloody clothes. She picked a knee-length black trench coat. Perfect choice, I thought. Black to hide the red, falling midcalf on her, and belted tightly around her slim perfect waist. Perfect. The perfect crime.

  She retrieved the knife from the sink with a dishcloth. Went to Scott's body. She was smothering the knife in his fingerprints. I heard the elevator rumble in the hall. Brooke seemed unaware. Brooke thought she had more time. But I felt the steps in the hall as thuds against my cheek that lay flat on the floor. I could no longer lift my head. My strength had flowed from me into the blood puddle beneath me.

  “Who's here?” She looked at me like a frightened child. “Someone's coming? Who called the police?” she asked. “When did you do that?”

  At another time I would have laughed at her fear.

  Answered her calmly, “While you were stabbing away at the love of your life, I was dialing the phone—you fucking stupid, insane bitch.” But I could no longer form words, and I no longer cared. “Fuck you,” was all I could say.