The Kind Worth Killing

by Peter Swanson

  I decided to keep my eyes shut, pretend I was asleep. My heart beat in my chest like a jumping bean, but I kept my breathing regular. In through my nose and out through my mouth.

  I listened as Chet took a few steps forward. I knew he was standing right over me. I could hear his own breath, ragged and wet, and I could smell him. The fruity, musty smell, mixed with the smell of cigarettes and alcohol.

  “Lily,” he said, in a loud whisper.

  I didn’t move.

  He leaned in closer. Said my name again, a little quieter this time.

  I pretended I was in a deep sleep, and couldn’t hear a thing. I pulled my knees up a little tighter to my body, moving the way I thought a sleeping person would move. I knew what he was doing in my room, and I knew what he wanted. He was going to have sex with me. But as far as I knew that was only something he could do if I was awake, so I planned on staying asleep, no matter what he did.

  I heard the creak of his knees and the rustle of his jeans, then smelled the sour, beery smell of his breath. He had crouched down beside me. The song from downstairs—its thumping bass—stopped, and another song, that sounded the same, started up again. I heard the sound of a zipper being slowly unzipped, one tiny, metallic pluck at a time, then a rhythmic sound, like a hand being rubbed rapidly back and forth across a sweater. He was doing it to himself and not to me. My plan was working. The sound got faster and louder, and he said my name a few more times, in low hoarse whispers. I thought he wasn’t going to touch me but I felt the air shift a little in front of my chest, then felt a finger graze along the pajama fabric that stretched across my breasts. It was warm in the room but cold prickles coursed over all my skin. I willed myself to keep my eyes closed. Chet pressed his fingers against my chest, his sharp nails pinching, then made a sound that was halfway between a grunt and an intake of breath, and he pulled his hand away from my nipple. I listened as he zipped his pants back up and quickly backed out of the room. He thudded into the doorframe on the way out, then pulled the door closed behind him, not even trying to keep quiet.

  I stayed in my curled-up position for another minute, then got off the bed, took my desk chair and tried to jam it up under the doorknob of my door. It was something Nancy Drew would do. The chair didn’t quite fit—it was a little too short—but it was better than nothing. If Chet came back it would be hard for him to open the door, at least, and the chair would fall over and make a noise.

  I didn’t think I would sleep that night, but I did, and when morning came, I lay in bed, thinking about what I should do.

  My worst fear was that if I told my mother about what had happened, she would tell me that I should have sex with Chet. Or else she would be mad that I let him come into my room, or that I let him watch me in the pool. I knew that this was something I needed to take care of on my own.

  And I knew how I would do it.

  CHAPTER 3

  TED

  At nearly midnight, I stood on the front steps of the bay-fronted brownstone I owned with Miranda, the taxi’s red lights receding down the street, and tried to remember where I’d stowed the house keys when I’d left for London a week earlier.

  Just as I was unzipping the outside pocket of my carry-on, the front door swung open. Miranda was in midyawn. She wore a short nightshirt and a pair of wool socks. “How was London?” she asked, after kissing me on the mouth. Her breath was slightly sour and I imagined she’d been asleep in front of the television.

  “Damp.”

  “Profitable?”

  “Yes, damp and profitable.” I shut the door behind me, and dropped my luggage on the hardwood floor. The house smelled of takeout Thai. “I’m surprised to see you here,” I said. “I thought you’d be in Maine.”

  “I wanted to see you, Teddy. It’s been a whole week. Are you drunk?”

  “The flight was delayed and I drank a few martinis. Do I reek?”

  “Yes. Brush your teeth and come to bed. I’m exhausted.”

  I watched Miranda climb the steep stairs to our second-floor bedroom, watched the muscles in her slim calves tense and untense, watched the nightshirt sway back and forth with the movement of her hips, then thought of Brad Daggett bending her over the carpentry table, lifting her skirt . . .

  I went downstairs to the basement level, where our kitchen and dining room were located. I found a carton of red curry shrimp in the fridge and ate it cold, sitting at our butcher-block island.

  My head was starting to ache, and I was thirsty. I realized that without having fallen asleep I was already hungover from all the gin I’d had in the airport lounge, and then on the flight.

  The redhead from the bar had also been seated in business class, across from me, and one row behind. After boarding the plane, we’d kept talking across the aisle, even though we’d temporarily ceased our discussion of my wife’s infidelities. The old woman next to me in the window seat saw us talking and said, “Would you and your wife like to sit next to one another?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “We’d love to.”

  Once she was settled in, and once I had ordered a gin and tonic from the flight attendant, I asked for her name again.

  “It’s Lily,” she said.

  “Lily what?”

  “I’ll tell you, but first let’s play a game.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s very easy. Since we’re on a plane, and it’s a long flight, and we’re not going to see each other again, let’s tell each other the absolute truth. About everything.”

  “You won’t even tell me your last name,” I said.

  She laughed. “True. But that’s what lets us play by these rules. If we know one another, then the game doesn’t work.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Okay. I hate gin. I ordered a martini because you had one in front of you and it looked sophisticated.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “No judgment,” she said. “Your turn.”

  “Okay.” I thought for a moment, then said, “I love gin so much I’m worried sometimes I’m an alcoholic. If I had my way I’d drink about six martinis a night.”

  “It’s a start,” she said. “You might have a drinking problem. Your wife is cheating on you. How about you? Have you ever cheated on her?”

  “No, I haven’t. I have . . . what was it Jimmy Carter said? . . . I’ve had lust in my heart, of course. I’ve already imagined having sex with you, for instance.”

  “You have?” Her eyebrows raised, and she looked a little shocked.

  “Absolute truth, remember?” I said. “Don’t be surprised. Most men you meet are probably thinking disgusting things about you within five minutes.”

  “Is that really true?”

  “Yep.”

  “How disgusting?”

  “You really don’t want to know.”

  “Maybe I do,” she said, and shifted toward me in her seat. I drank a little of my gin and tonic, the ice knocking against my teeth. “It’s interesting,” she said. “I just can’t imagine what it would be like to meet someone and know right away that I want to have sex with them.”

  “It’s not that, exactly,” I said. “It’s more like an ingrained response where you just picture it. Like when we were standing in line at the boarding gate, I looked at you and pictured you naked. It just happens. That never happens to women?”

  “Like suddenly imagining sex with a man? No, not really. With women it’s different. What we wonder about is if the man we just met wants to have sex with us.”

  I laughed. “Well, he does. Just assume it. Trust me, though, you don’t want to know more than that.”

  “See, isn’t this game fun? Now why don’t you tell me more about how you want to kill your wife?”

  “Ha,” I said. “I don’t know if I was really serious about that.”

  “You sure? The way you told that story I couldn’t tell.”

  “I’ll admit that after seeing them together in our house, I think if I had a gun on me that I coul
d easily have shot them both through the window.”

  “So you are thinking of killing her,” she said, the plane starting its pre-takeoff hum. We each buckled in, and I took a longish sip of my gin. I had always been a nervous flyer. “Look,” she continued. “I’m not trying to trap you into saying something you don’t want to say. I’m interested is all. This is just part of the game. Absolute truth.”

  “Then you go first. All you’ve told me is that you don’t like gin.”

  “Okay,” she said, and thought a moment. “Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

  The plane’s hum turned into a whine, and the captain told the flight attendants to take their seats. I was grateful for a moment when I didn’t need to immediately respond to the woman next to me. Her words had echoed the persistent thoughts I had been plagued with for a week as I entertained fantasies of killing my wife. I’d been telling myself that killing Miranda would do the world a favor, and along came this passenger who was suddenly giving me the moral authority to act on my desires. And while I was shocked by what she had said, I was also in that state of drunkenness—gin buzzing through my body—that makes one wonder why anyone wants to ever be sober. I felt both clearheaded and uninhibited at the same time, and if we’d been anywhere semiprivate I think I would have taken Lily in my arms right then and tried to kiss her. Instead, after the plane took off, I kept talking.

  “I’ll admit that the thought of actually killing my wife is appealing to me. There was a prenup so Miranda doesn’t get half of all I have but she gets a lot, enough to be comfortable for the rest of her life. And there’s no clause about infidelity. I could hire a lawyer, get him to hire a detective, and make a case, but it would be expensive, and in the end I’d waste time and money, and I’d be humiliated.

  “If she’d come to me and told me about the affair—even told me that she’d fallen in love with Daggett and wanted to leave me—I’d have allowed a divorce. I would have hated her, but I would have moved on. What I can’t get over . . . what I can’t get past . . . is the way that she and Brad acted that day I saw them fucking in my house. When I’d spoken to them earlier, they were both so calm and convincing. Miranda lied so easily. I don’t know how she learned to be like that. But then I started to think about it, to add up everything I knew about her, the different ways she acts in front of different people, and I realized that this is who she is—a shallow, fake liar. Maybe even a sociopath. I don’t know how I didn’t see this before.”

  “I imagine she acted the way she thought you wanted to see her. How did you meet her?”

  I told her how we’d met, at a housewarming party of a mutual friend in New Essex on a summer night. I’d spotted her right away. Other guests were wearing summer dresses and button-up shirts but Miranda was in cutoff jeans so short that the white pockets hung below the tattered edges, and a tank top with a Jasper Johns target stenciled on the front. She was holding a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and she was talking with Chad Pavone, my college friend who’d bought the house we were there to celebrate. Miranda’s head was thrown back in laughter. I thought two things right away: that she was the sexiest woman I’d ever personally seen, and that Chad Pavone had never uttered a funny line in his life and what was she laughing at? I quickly looked away from them, surveying the party for someone I might know. Truth was, seeing Miranda had felt like being punched in the chest, a sudden realization that women like her existed outside of dirty magazines and Hollywood movies, and that, in all likelihood, she was here with someone else.

  I learned her name from Chad’s wife. It was Miranda Hobart. She was house-sitting in New Essex for a year. She was some sort of artist, and she had found a job at the box office of a local summer theater.

  “She single?” I asked.

  “Believe it or not, she is. You should talk with her.”

  “I doubt I’m her type.”

  “You won’t know if you don’t ask.”

  When we did end up talking, it was Miranda who approached me. The party had gone late, and I was sitting by myself on the sloping lawn at the back of Chad and Sherry’s house. Through a cluster of roofs I could make out the purple sheen of the ocean, lit periodically by the rotating beam from a lighthouse. Miranda sat down next to me. “I hear you’re very rich,” she said, her voice deep and accentless, slightly slurred. “It’s what everyone’s talking about.”

  I had recently engineered a buyout between a small company that had developed a picture-uploading program and a major social media site for a sum that even I considered vaguely ridiculous. “I am,” I said.

  “Just so you know, I’m not going to sleep with you just because you’re rich.” She was smiling, in a challenging way.

  “Good to know,” I said, the words sounding clumsy in my own mouth, the line of roofs in the distance tilting slightly. “But I bet you’d marry me.”

  She threw her head back and laughed throatily. It was the way I’d first seen her, laughing at something Chad had said, but up close, the gesture did not seem as fake. I studied her jawline, imagined how it would feel to press my mouth against the softness of her neck. “Sure, I’d marry you,” she said. “Are you asking?”

  “Why not,” I said.

  “So when should we get married?”

  “Next weekend, maybe. I don’t think we should rush into something like this.”

  “I agree. It’s a serious commitment.”

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said. “I know what I’m bringing to this relationship, but what exactly do you bring? Can you cook?”

  “Can’t cook. Can’t sew. I can dust. You sure you want to marry me?”

  “I’d be honored.”

  We talked some more, and then we kissed, right there on the lawn, awkwardly, our teeth clicking, our chins bumping. She laughed out loud again and I told her the wedding was off.

  But it wasn’t off. We did get married. Not a week later but a year.

  “Do you think she was playing me from the beginning?” I asked Lily. The plane had taken off, and we were in that peculiar bubble known as air travel, between countries, speeding at a terrifying velocity at ice-cold heights, yet lulled by fake air and soft seats and the steady purr of engineering.

  “Probably.”

  “But the way she approached me . . . the way she brought up how rich I was right from the beginning. It seemed like a joke to her, like something she would never say if she were trying to land a husband.”

  “Reverse psychology. Bring it up right away, and she looks innocent, somehow.”

  I was silent, thinking about it.

  “Hey,” she continued. “Just because she used you doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have feelings for you, that you don’t have a good time together.”

  “We did have a good time together. And now she’s having a good time with someone else.”

  “What does she get out of Brad, do you think?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “What’s the angle? She’s risking the marriage. Even if she gets half, she probably won’t get her dream beach house that she’s building. Being with Brad could wreck it for her.”

  “I’ve thought a lot about this. At first I thought she was in love with him, but now I don’t think she really loves anyone. I think she’s bored. She’s obviously done with me, except as a source of income. She’s not going to change, and she’s still young and beautiful enough to hurt countless people. Maybe I really should kill her, just to remove her from the world.”

  I turned toward my neighbor but didn’t look her in the eye. Her arms were folded on her lap, and I saw goose bumps spread along the exposed skin of her arms. Was the airplane making her cold, or was it me?

  “You would be doing the world a favor,” she said, her voice quiet enough that I had to lean toward
her a little as I raised my eyes. “I honestly believe that. Like I said before, everyone is going to die eventually. If you killed your wife you would only be doing to her what would happen anyway. And you’d save other people from her. She’s a negative. She makes the world worse. And what she’s done to you is worse than death. Everyone dies, but not everyone has to see someone they love with another person. She struck the first blow.”

  In the circle of yellow from the reading light I could see flecks of many different colors in the pale green of her eyes. She blinked, her papery eyelids mottled with pink. The closeness of our faces felt more intimate than sex, and I was as surprised by our sudden eye contact as I would have been had I suddenly discovered her hand down my pants.

  “How would I do it?” I asked, and felt goose bumps break out along my own limbs.

  “In such a way that you don’t get caught.”

  I laughed, and the temporary spell was broken. “That easy?”

  “That easy.”

  “Another drink, sir?” The flight attendant, a towering, slim-hipped brunette with bright pink rouge, was holding a hand toward my empty glass.

  I wanted one, but turning my head toward the attendant had caused a sudden rush of dizziness, and I declined, asking for a water instead. When I turned back, my neighbor was yawning, her arms outstretched, finger pads touching the back of the soft seat in front of her.

  “You’re tired,” I said.

  “A little. Let’s keep talking, though. This is the most interesting conversation I’ve had on a plane.”

  A prickle of doubt passed through me. Was I just an interesting conversation? I could hear her talking to a friend the next day: You’re not going to believe this guy I met at the airport . . . Freak told me all about how he planned on killing his wife. As though reading my thoughts, she touched my arm with her hand. “Sorry,” she said. “That sounded flip. I’m taking this seriously, or as seriously as you’d like me to take it. We’re playing a game of truth, remember, and truthfully I don’t have a moral problem with you killing your wife. She misrepresented herself to you. She used you, married you. She took the money you earned, and now she’s cheating on you with a man who is also taking your money. She deserves whatever she gets as far as I’m concerned.”