A Perfect Crime

by Peter Abrahams

  Roger went to his car, returned with the shovel, chipped away carefully. After a few minutes, the package came free. Then he was down on his hands and knees, tearing at the frozen paper.

  A painting. One half blurred and damaged, all murky brown and green. But the other half showed a crumbling plinth, a few dangling red grapes, the front wheels of a skateboard.

  The wind began to blow at the wrapping paper. Roger scrambled around, gathering it up. He came upon a white envelope, threw off his gloves, ripped it open. Inside a note: To Ned, with all my love, Francie.

  Roger stood in the middle of the river, snow falling harder, wind whipping icy flakes at him from different directions. His mind was the same-a turmoil of thoughts, racing by too fast for even him to examine. Must clear, must clear, must clear, he thought, and with great effort he forced his brain to stop, his mind to go blank. He stood panting, his head empty, feeling nothing, not cold, snow, wind.

  And into this calm, a meditational calm, although he’d always despised the idea of meditation, came a first brief thought, or rather, memory. A perfect crime: it’s got to be absolutely unconnected-a penny drops off the Empire State Building, goes right through your skull.

  8

  Roger drove back to the city, still at a prudent fifty-five, but his mind was racing. He was used to the speed of his mind, had known it to run far ahead of him before, but never in this supercharged way. His whole body was shaking slightly, like a shell that could barely contain the forces within. Hold on to one thought, he instructed it, or at most a single train of thought. He settled on one right away, a simple syllogism. Major premise: F tries to make a fool of R. Minor premise: R is not a fool and will not bear it. Conclusion: question mark.

  Not quite a question mark, because he knew that some action was required. She had come into their house-his house, his ancestral house-with another man’s sperm inside her, perhaps many, many times. Another man’s sperm: a vulgar, dirty, contemptuous betrayal, almost slimy, like a plot development in one of those movies about alien beings in human shape. Another man’s sperm-what a primitive fixation she had with the substance, on reflection-inside her, and she talking and smiling away at him. Smile and be a villain, Francie. There was no fixing anything now, no going back. And what was society’s answer? No-fault divorce. If this were Sicily, or Iran, countless other places, he could now-what? Kill her with impunity. A crime of passion, almost expected. Divorce implied nothing more than absence of affection, lack of feeling. Therefore divorce did not apply. He felt. He felt the opposite of everything husband should feel for wife. She was his enemy, had proved him wrong in one of the basic decisions of life, whom to marry. What action was appropriate? Question mark.

  Not quite a question mark. Deep in his mind, did he not already know the answer must be related to that penny dropping off the Empire State Building? Yes. The conclusion awaited, long before the thinking was done. But slow: this was not Sicily or Iran. America, land that had deteriorated so much as he grew older, had failed him so badly. Slow: there would be many steps along the way, down and down toward that coppery glint. And every step must be a careful step, all planning, all preparation thought and rethought.

  For example, on the front seat beside him sat the damaged painting and Francie’s note. To Ned, with all my love, Francie. His mind writhed away from the words. Get back on track, one thought, one thought. The painting, the note. Too risky to hide them in the house and he no longer had an office. Was there any other space over which he held exclusive control? The answer came at once, probably because of the morning’s business with the keys: his locker at the tennis club.

  Step one, then. There were two kinds of lockers at the club: full-size metal ones in the locker room, and half-size wooden ones lining the thickly carpeted hall that led to the courts. Because of his dislike for showering at the club, Roger had taken a locker in the hall. He walked to it now, the painting wrapped in the scraps of brown paper he’d salvaged, note tucked inside, and unlocked the door with his key. Inside he found equipment he’d forgotten about-racquets, cans of balls, tennis shoes, towels. No room for the painting. He put the painting down, the brown paper unfurling, glanced around, saw no one, took everything out of the locker, picked up the painting, rewrapped it imperfectly, one corner protruding, and was just placing it inside when a female voice spoke right behind him. “Roger?”

  He slammed the door shut, wheeled around, saw a big woman in a purple warm-up suit, a pair of racquets slung over her shoulder. “Oh. Nora.” Not very smooth, perhaps, possibly lacking in friendliness, so he added, “Hello. Nice to see you.”

  “Likewise. I didn’t know you were playing again.”

  “Playing again?” How to handle this situation? He looked at her: only Nora, after all, a jock, not very bright; he’d never understood what Francie saw in her. “Thinking about it, in any case,” he said. “Come to reintroduce myself to the gear. Shake hands with my racquet.” A witticism-shaking hands with the racquet was the age-old introduction to the forehand grip. He laughed.

  Nora didn’t. Her brow, in no way noble, or even intelligent, wrinkled. Must I explain the goddamned joke? Roger was thinking, when three women came down the hall on their way to the courts, talking woman-talk. “Say hi to Francie,” Nora said, joining them.

  “Will do,” said Roger with a smile, turning the key in his locker, then trying the handle twice to make sure it was locked.

  Driving home, Roger fought the urge to stamp down on the gas, to smash the cars around him. On track, stay on track, use your brain. He used it to think about crime.

  Roger knew that people sometimes got away with crime, but did any of them necessarily do so? Or did they simply rely, tacitly or explicitly, on sloppy police work, nonexistent police work, luck? He considered luck. A person could be taken on a cruise ship, for example, invited for a glass of champagne on a deserted stern deck at night, pushed over the rail. It might work, but was it teleologically guaranteed to do so? Of course not. Someone might be sitting in the shadows, obscured by a lifeboat, and witness the whole thing. Or the falling person might cry out, attract a quick glance through a porthole or from someone on a lower deck, leading to alarms, searchlights, rubber boats crisscrossing the wake. The person might even fall unnoticed but then happen on a piece of driftwood, cling to it until dawn, be rescued by a fishing boat. Therefore the cruise ship scenario, attractive because no body and therefore no evidence is found, required luck, would not succeed of necessity, was far from perfect.

  Calmer now, Roger was in no way downcast by the negative result of this speculation. Quite the opposite, if anything, for all at once he was hungry and thirsty, his appetite keener than it had been for a long time. He pulled into a suburban steakhouse, the kind of place he would never enter-wagon wheel by the door, cowboy pictures on the wall-and ordered a big steak and a double Scotch on the rocks. What was this strange feeling bubbling up inside him, strange but not quite forgotten? He put a name to it: enthusiasm. And in the next moment he realized with a shock-ironic, unsettling, but finally pleasant-that he had found a job at last.

  “I’ll have another,” he said to the waitress.

  “Another drink, sir?”

  “Another of everything.”

  “Including the garlic bread?”

  “Pourquoi pas?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Yes, garlic bread by all means.”

  Accidents, he thought, chewing his food with relish, trying to keep pace with his mind. Tampering with brakes, with steering rods, with ovens, with furnaces, with ski bindings all required technical knowledge; all carried the risk that evidence of tampering might remain. And if tampering was suspected, the first suspect would be the spouse.

  Roger removed the round paper napkin from under his glass, wrote on it: poison-no-expertise, traces contract killer-no-in his power arson (house)-no-evidence-accelerant infection (injection?) with some disease “Care for anything else, sir?”

  Roger slid his hand over
the napkin. “Just the check.”

  The waitress went off. Roger raised his hand slightly to peek at the napkin, like a poker player checking his hole card. The disease idea. Pro: like an accident, it provided a credible noncriminal explanation for death. Con: it required expertise, a disease not readily contagious yet fast-acting and certain. No, he wrote beside it, but reluctantly. He paid his bill, went into the bathroom, tore up the napkin, flushed the shreds down the toilet, got in his car, started home. He had gone a few blocks when he made a sudden U-turn and sped back to the restaurant. What if some scrap of the napkin was still floating in the toilet bowl? He hurried inside-“anything the matter, sir?” said the waitress-strode into the bathroom, peered into the toilet. Nothing but water; he flushed it again anyway, just to be safe.

  “Francie?” he called, entering the house on Beacon Hill; their house, under the laws of the Commonwealth, but his by moral right, since he had inherited it from his grandparents. No answer. He went into the kitchen, saw her purse still on the table and a stack of mail, some opened, on the desk. He riffled through it, found a letter from Tad Wagner: Please find a copy of your coverage statement. Once again, thanks so much, and if I can be…

  Roger checked the coverage statement. Amount: $500,000. Beneficiary: himself. Yes, he had found a job, and it came with a suitable performance bonus. Had his mind somehow known about Francie even then when he’d first thought of Tad and arranged to run into him on the street? A reunion that had led to a drink, talk of Francie’s success, proud exhibition of the Globe clipping-but no explicit discussion of her possible insurance needs, unnecessary with the Tads of the world. The human mind had unplumbed powers, his especially. He heard Francie moving about upstairs, left the desk the way he’d found it.

  Roger was putting cookies on a tray when Francie came into the room: the sight of her. Her face, once such an appealing mix of elements-bright eyes, strong features, soft skin-was nothing but a mask. How clearly he saw that now. Despite all the thinking he had done that day, despite the need for long and careful preparation, despite that glinting coppery goal sometime in the future, he wanted to beat her head in, then and there. “Care for a cookie?” he said, offering the tray.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes.”

  She was wearing a coat: an old one, he noticed, unworn for a year or two. “Going somewhere?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I’m playing in the tournament.”

  “Mixed?” he asked.

  “Women’s doubles, Roger,” said Francie, taking her purse and moving toward the door that led down to the garage.

  “Good luck, then.” She went out. He waited until he felt the vibration of the opening garage door under his feet before calling, “Don’t forget to bend your fucking knees.”

  “God, what fun,” said Anne. Still sweating slightly, they sat at a corner table of the tennis club bar, overlooking the courts. Seven-five, two-six, seven-five: they’d knocked the number one seeds out of the tournament. “That backhand down the line you hit at five all ad out-unbelievable. I wouldn’t have the guts to try that, not in a million years.”

  Francie just smiled.

  “And then your two best serves of the night, right after. Bang bang. I could have kissed you.” Beer came, and water, lots of water. Pink with exertion and victory, Anne talked on and on, reliving the match, her words sometimes tripping over themselves. Francie hadn’t seen her like this, suspected it didn’t happen often. She wondered about Anne’s husband.

  Anne paused for breath, took a big drink of water. “Was it Jimmy Connors who said that tennis is better than sex?”

  “Maybe his tennis,” Francie said. “Not ours.”

  Anne glanced at her, and in that glance Francie saw her realizing she’d been talking too much, at least in terms of some inner code. Her mood changed, the blood draining from her face, leaving her pale. Her eyes took on an inward look: something was on her mind, something unrelated to tennis. She tried some beer, started to speak, stopped, and finally said, “Can I ask you something, Francie? I hate to be too personal, but the truth is I find you so easy to be with-like someone I’ve known for a long time.”

  “Ask away,” said Francie.

  Anne said, “Are you a good cook?”

  “That’s the question?”

  Anne nodded.

  “I have two surefire appetizers, two surefire entrees, one dessert,” said Francie. “The rest is silence.”

  Anne smiled, an admiring smile that made Francie a little uncomfortable. “I thought my lemon chicken was surefire, too,” she said, “but I guess I was wrong.” The inward look again. Francie waited. “Does your husband ever bring people home for dinner at the last minute?” Anne asked.

  “He’s actually been doing the cooking lately,” Francie said.

  “Aren’t you lucky.”

  Anne added something else that Francie didn’t catch. She was thinking of their own dining room, and the happy sounds that used to fill it. At one time she and Roger had entertained a lot, then less, and since the loss of his job, not at all. Plotted on a graph, she wondered, would those dinners track the health of their marriage? Down, down, down, with upturns here and there: a stunted marriage, like a tree growing in the face of an impossible wind.

  “Thursday of all days,” Anne was saying, “when he usually works late. It was going to be a McDonald’s night, and then boom. So I threw together the lemon chicken, but they hardly touched it. And I suppose the wine wasn’t very good either, although that didn’t stop them from drinking plenty of it. I’d read an article on Romanian wine, goddamn it.” Was Francie imagining it, or had Anne’s eyes filled with tears? Tears, yes: and Anne saw that she saw, and tried to explain. “He cares so much about his career. The least I can do is put a decent meal on the table.”

  Francie could imagine Nora at this point, saying, Your husband sounds like a jerk. She toned that down. “I don’t see the connection. And if he’s any good at his job, a failed lemon chicken won’t make any difference.”

  “You think? He’s so ambitious.”

  “I do. Lighten up, for God’s sake.”

  Anne’s eyes cleared. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said. “You’re so clearheaded, Francie, so in control.”

  Francie, suddenly picturing herself under the ice at Brenda’s cottage, her breath escaping in silver-and-black bubbles, said nothing.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” Anne said.

  “But first do me one,” Francie said. “Stop asking if you can ask and just ask.”

  Anne laughed. “With pleasure.” She reached across the table, touched Francie’s hand. “Give me one of those surefire recipes of yours.”

  Francie took the paper napkin from under her glass and wrote:

  Francie’s Roast Lamb, serves 8

  7 cloves garlic, 1 halved, rest chopped

  2 pounds baking potatoes, peeled and…

  She came to the end, added the reminder to keep the gratin warm while waiting to carve the lamb, handed the napkin to Anne. “Enjoy.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I will,” said Anne. “The very next time we have company.” Her face brightened with an idea. “Maybe you and your husband would like to join us?”

  “That sounds nice,” Francie said.

  9

  Anne, having checked her watch and said “Oh my God, the sitter,” left in a hurry; Francie sat alone at the corner table in the bar. Looking down on court three beneath her window, she watched the second seeds playing their match. They were good, but nothing like the pair she and Anne had just beaten, nothing like the pair she and Anne had so quickly become. Francie couldn’t remember playing this well at any time in her life. How was it possible, with so much on her mind? Her near-drowning, her stupid on-air phone call, the loss of oh garden, my garden, Roger’s attempted seduction, to put the kindest light on it, and his subsequent attentiveness, just as disturbing. Some of it had to do with Anne, of course-they fit together
so well-but was the rest simply chance? Or was it one of those Faustian bargains, her life falling apart while her tennis got better and better? She wanted no part of that. Tennis was her game, but just a game. In any case, her life wasn’t falling apart-not with Ned in it, no matter what happened. Francie paid her bill, went downstairs to her car, started for home.

  Roger sat before his computer. The Puzzle Club was up, but he was not really attending. In fact, he was staring through the words on the screen, into a translucent beyond, his mind working out the possibilities of planting a bomb in an Israeli consulate, having first ensured that a visiting art consultant would be inside at just the right moment. A wretched idea, he concluded: messy, inelegant, leaking evidence, guaranteed to provide a full-scale investigation, and he knew nothing of bombs, bomb-making, bomb-planting. He leaned his head against the screen and thought, What am I doing? The computer hummed quietly against his brain.

  Perhaps he was wrong about everything. All his evidence was circumstantial. Even her note and the call to the radio show could be logically explained: maybe she had developed one of those fan manias for a celebrity, maybe it was all taking place in her head, maybe she and the smooth-talking poseur had not even met. Did that sound like Francie? No. But there was a basic instability to her character-indeed, in the character of every woman he had ever known-so nothing could be ruled out. For his own peace of mind, if nothing else, he required eyewitness evidence. For example, was she really playing in the tennis tournament, or was that a lie to cover her presence somewhere else?

  Roger pulled into the parking lot of the tennis club just in time to see Francie come out the door and walk to her car. She was wearing a warm-up suit and tennis shoes, didn’t look his way, and probably wouldn’t have noticed him if she had. He could see in his headlights that she was lost in thought, no doubt had fumbled away a close match, probably choking on a big point. No matter: she hadn’t lied about the tournament. She drove past him, out of the parking lot, turned north, toward Storrow Drive and home. He followed. Once inside, he would offer her a drink, perhaps make a fire, if there was any wood in the storage room. From there he knew he could find some subtle way of bringing the conversation around to call-in shows. He needed hard evidence.