A Perfect Crime

by Peter Abrahams

  Francie’s car phone buzzed. She answered.

  “Are you on speaker?” Ned. He had never called her on the car phone before.

  “No.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. What-”

  He interrupted. “What’s that sound?”

  “I don’t hear anything.” She checked her rearview mirror: two rows of double headlights winding back toward the western suburbs.

  Silence.

  “I’m at the place,” he said.

  “The cottage?”

  “Don’t say that. It’s a cellular call, for God’s sake.” Pause. “Can you make it?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight. I’m here tonight.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Just can you make it.”

  “Yes, but-”

  “Good.” Click.

  “-the ice.” But the ice. Would he try to cross before she arrived? No. Not having the key to Brenda’s, he would wait in the warmth of his car. But what if he didn’t? Francie didn’t know Ned’s cell phone number; the rules made it unnecessary. She tried information-unlisted.

  Francie exited at Mass. Ave., crossed the Charles, drove north. But what if he didn’t wait in the warmth of his car? Was she willing to let him die to follow the spy-craft rules? No. She called information, asked for Ned Demarco in Dedham-she didn’t know the street-found the home number, too, was unlisted. She stepped on the gas. Some time passed before she realized Ned wasn’t in danger: she’d locked Brenda’s wrought-iron gate and he had no key to that either, couldn’t drive down to the river. But she stepped on the gas anyway.

  Francie drove north into winter. The roads were bare but lined with snowbanks that rose higher and higher as she crossed into New Hampshire, the tree branches sagging lower and lower, weighted down with white. Had there ever been this much snow so soon? Behind her the long tail of headlights, like a wake of yellow phosphorus, slowly dwindled down to one lone pair. Not long before she turned onto the last and most minor of the roads that led to Brenda’s, it, too, disappeared.

  Is something wrong?

  Just can you make it.

  Francie came to Brenda’s gate-and found it wide open. Had she left it unlocked last night in her distress? What other explanation was there? She looked once more in her rearview mirror, saw nothing but bright moonlight shining on a black-and-white wilderness: deep, crisp, even, but ahead of its time. She drove through.

  Ned’s car, an all-wheel sedan, had cut two well-defined tracks in the snow. Francie followed them down to the jetty, found the car. But Ned wasn’t in it, and the inside of the windshield was already frosting over with the freezing breath he had left behind. In the moonlight-the dazzling moonlight of a full moon in a clear sky over clean snow-she saw footprints leading across the white river. She followed them.

  Reasoning that where he had gone, she was safe to go, that the river had had one more day to freeze, that she had to see him, Francie walked across the river and didn’t think once of the night before. She reached the other side, still in Ned’s footprints, their inch-deep walls black-shaded in the moonlight, took the path under the elms to the dark cottage-at least she hadn’t left it open, too-and climbed the stairs to the porch.

  Ned stepped out of the shadows. She jumped. “What the hell were you thinking?” he said.

  Francie put her hand to her breast. “The call?”

  “Yes, of course, the call.” He came closer, his face strange in the stark light: much older, its future lines blackened by the night. “How could you do something so-so flippant?”

  “It was meant to be funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “And a private message as well.”

  Ned’s voice rose, lost its beautiful timbre. “Message? What message?”

  “Ned-I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too, believe me, since I’m the one at risk. But what was this message that was so important? Tell me now. You have my full attention.”

  He was even closer now, in her space, as if they hadn’t been lovers, and a droplet of his spit-tiny, insignificant, barely felt-landed on her cheek. Unintentional, he wasn’t even aware it had happened, but all at once Francie remembered the deal she’d made under the ice with the god she didn’t believe in, and she felt her whole body stiffening, and words came out of her mouth unedited, unconsidered, but from deep within: “Maybe we’d better call this off.”

  “What did you say?” He stepped back, as though struck by a sudden gust.

  Francie didn’t repeat it; she just watched his eyes, dark and still.

  Ned spoke again, his voice nearer its usual range. “I didn’t mean to get into something unpleasant, Francie. I just wanted an explanation.”

  She shook her head. “I’m starting to see what I should have seen already. This is too much for you, Ned-it’s making you unhappy.”

  He stared at her. His eyes changed, grew damp, reflected the moonlight. “What are you saying?”

  “You don’t need this.”

  “You’re telling me my needs?”

  “I think I know you, Ned.”

  “Do you?” The dampness spilled over his lower eyelids, onto his face. She had never seen Ned cry, had never seen any man cry, except at funerals and in the movies. “You can be goddamn arrogant sometimes,” he said, his voice quiet and thick. “You think I don’t know what you’re really saying?”

  “What am I really saying?”

  “And now you’re going to toy with me, too. You’re really saying this is making you unhappy, you don’t need me.”

  “Please, Ned. No psych one-oh-one.”

  His face crumpled. “When did you stop loving me?” Ned pushed past her, hurried down the stairs, down the path toward the river. Somewhere behind the house a clump of snow fell from a tree and landed with a thump. Ned stumbled on snow-covered rock, kept going. Francie went after him.

  He didn’t walk back across the river to the jetty but straight out into midstream, in the direction he’d come paddling from in his kayak the very first time. Francie caught up to him out in the middle of the river, in the middle of all that whiteness, as bright as day on some planet where the skies were always black.

  She touched his shoulder. He stopped at once. “It’s dangerous,” she said. “Come back.”

  He turned, stood before her, hands at his sides, moonlit tears streaming down his face. “When? Just tell me that. When did you stop?”

  “Never,” Francie replied, and put her arms around him.

  “Oh, Francie,” he said, taking a deep breath, letting it out slowly, a white cloud-the only one-rising in the night. He nuzzled against her, leaned on her-she felt his weight. “Do you know how rare this is?” he said. “Wouldn’t there be something wrong with two people who could just throw it away? We’d be… diminished.”

  Francie held him tight. Ice cracked, but far away.

  “You do love me?” he said.

  “Yes.” He was right: she’d never felt this for any human being, knew she never would again. Now she was crying, too.

  They walked back to the island. Francie unlocked the cottage. They went upstairs to the little bedroom, to the world under the down comforter. They lay still for a long time, holding each other. A long, healing time to get back to their places in the relationship; Francie, at least, couldn’t find her old place, but the new one was not far from it, and maybe better. The lying-still phase came to an end.

  After, Francie said, “There will have to be some changes.”

  “I know.”

  “I have to be able to call you. Somewhere, sometime.”

  “All right. I’ll figure something out.”

  “And there’s someone I have to tell. I won’t say it’s you, if you don’t want, but I have to tell.”

  “Who?”

  “My best friend. She already knows, anyway.”

  Ned’s body tensed beside her. “How does she know?”

  “Nora knows me. She hasn’t said
anything, but she knows.”

  “Nora?”

  “You’d like her.”

  Pause. When it came, his response was a surprise. “Maybe I’ll meet her someday. After… after Em’s grown up.”

  He had never before held out the promise of a better future. Francie lay beside him, savoring the implication of his words. “I’m going to get a divorce,” she said.

  Another silence, longer than the last. “Maybe not right away, Francie,” he said.

  “Why not? It’s no pressure on you.”

  “I know that. But aren’t there ever times you feel you’re in a very delicate situation, where everything is poised just so?”

  “I’m not sure,” Francie said, and it occurred to her that in some ways he had more feminine intuition than she had. If there was an emotional IQ test, Ned would probably come out on top, the same way Roger did intellectually.

  “You must have felt that sometime in your life,” Ned said. “When the slightest disturbance, even of something that doesn’t seem related at first, upsets everything.”

  Francie immediately pictured deformed sperm under a microscope. “I won’t do anything right away.”

  “Or without telling me?”

  “Or without telling you.”

  He kissed her. “Now you’re thinking.”

  She laughed. He did, too. “You’re a bastard,” she said. “You know that?”

  “All men are bastards,” he said.

  “Some more than others.”

  “Then there’s hope for me?”

  “Yes,” she told him.

  He switched on the bedside lamp, checked his watch. “Oh my God,” he said. “The sitter.” He started to get up, turned to her. In the yellow light of the lamp, his face was its youthful self again. “Maybe I can get out here on non-Thursdays once in a while,” he said.

  “That would be nice.”

  “And it might help if I had a key. It’s cold out there.”

  “I’ll get you one,” Francie said. “Wimp.” She smacked his bare butt as he got out of bed.

  There was a toolshed behind the cottage. Roger had found an ax inside. He held it now in his gloved hands, staring up at the light in the window, through which had come sounds Francie had never made for him. It was easy to muse on perfect crimes and abstract killers when evidence was circumstantial. It wasn’t easy now when evidence was hard. Why not simply crash his way inside, charge up to that lighted room, start swing swing swinging this goddamned ax? His blood rushed through his body at the thought, his muscles tensed, his teeth ground together. He took a step toward the door, and a few more. A bird-owl-glided down from the sky and settled on the roof. Great horned, Bubo virginianus. Roger halted.

  Why not? Because of after. Would the ax-swinging feel good enough to render him content to spend the rest of his life in jail? For that would surely happen, given the shambles there would be inside the cottage, the pools of DNA, the two cars parked by the jetty, the obvious suspect with no alibi.

  Roger returned the ax to the shed, crossed the river a few hundred yards upstream, retracing the route that kept his footprints out of sight, made his way to the wrought-iron gate where he had left his car. From there, he could just make out the upstairs light in the cottage, dim and partially blocked by trees. He was glad of the sight: a guarantee that he had imagined nothing. The light went out as he watched.

  10

  Think.

  A penny drops from the Empire State Building. Someone in China pushes a button.

  Think.

  Think, Roger told himself, sitting in his basement office, of murder most antiseptic. He went over his list, now committed to memory. Accidents-mechanical, house hold, while on vacation; poison; contract killer; arson; dis ease; bombing. All wrong, for one reason or another. Think. All thinking boiled down to two procedures, rearranging the pieces on the board and inventing new ones. What were the pieces? Motive, means, opportunity; evidence, suspects, alibis. A complexity of permutation and combination, orbiting this central problem: if a wife is murdered, the husband is the first suspect and remains so until ruled out with certainty. That was what made murder disguised as something else-accident or disease, for example-so attractive. The murderer would be left with nothing to do but mourn, and he could do so without anxiety, no crime being suspected.

  To mourn: Roger knew exactly what suit he would wear to the funeral, a black wool-and-cashmere blend from Brooks Brothers, bought years before. Did it still fit? He went to the closet, tried it on, checked himself in the mirror. Perfect. Still wearing the suit, he returned to the computer. Roger entered none of his thoughts on it, just felt better being near it when there was thinking to do.

  A penny. A Chinese penny. Rearrange the pieces: husband, wife, lover, cottage, painting. Was he missing something? Yes: killer. Husband, wife, lover, cottage, painting, killer. Six pieces, four human, two objects. Deep in his brain, Roger felt a slight tectonic shift. These were promising numbers, might be made to work, and this was in all likelihood a fundamentally mathematical problem, as most problems were.

  Item six: killer. Almost from the beginning, he had rejected the idea of a contract killer, automatically forcing item six, killer, into congruence with item one, husband. Had he been too hasty? At first he couldn’t see why. A contract killer had power over the contractor. Before-the-fact power: what if the contract killer was also an informer, for example, or decided to become one in order to extricate himself from some past or pending legal difficulty the contractor knew nothing about? The contractor thus sets up himself. And after-the-fact power: supposing everything follows plan but sometime in the future the contract killer decides he wants more money or is arrested on some other charge, say another murder, and starts casting about desperately for a deal? The contractor is thus dealt.

  But was this flaw so basic that the contract killer idea must be abandoned? The flaw, thought Roger, start by isolating the flaw. Trust, it was a matter of trust. The contract killer could not be trusted. But trust was a factor only in honest relationships. Rearrange the pieces. In a dishonest relationship, dishonest now from the contractor’s point of view as well as the subcontractor’s-yes, that was the proper term, subcontractor; getting the terms right was half the battle-trust was irrelevant. Deep in his brain, he felt a further shift.

  What followed from that? His fingers shifted to the keyboard. The urge to make a list was overwhelming. Roger gave in to it, but with great care. No computer, of course, with its memories so hard to erase completely, possessed, like humans, of a kind of subconscious, but pencil and a single sheet of paper, torn from the pad so no impression could be left on the page beneath. Under the heading Dealing with subcontractor, he wrote:

  1. The contractor is Mr. X. In this scenario, the subcontractor does not know the contractor. Either he is (a) working for a middleman, (b) thinks he is working for someone else, or (c) does not know whom he is working for.

  A was out. It merely transferred the flaw of the subcontracting method to someone else. B was intriguing. Who could this someone else be? Supposing, as one had to, that the crime was “solved”; then the subcontractor would be arrested, and would eventually lead the police to the person he thought he was working for. This person, this false contractor, would therefore be required to have a plausible motive of his own, or the police would keep looking. Rearrange the pieces. Some artist, perhaps, some disappointed artist, one of those scruffy, half-mad types she so often dealt with, is finally rejected once too often? Why not? Roger foresaw procedural difficulties but couldn’t see a mistake in the theory, so didn’t rule out the artist at once.

  Who else would have a motive? The lover’s wife, if indeed he had one. Roger toyed with a wild idea of finding this wife, seducing her. What triumph that would be! But not to the purpose. The wife had a motive-enough. He disciplined his mind, running a line through A, circling B, and ran his eyes down to C.

  C: does not know whom he is working for. That would mean the subcontractor never
meets, talks to, or has written communication with the contractor; ideally does not even suspect the existence of the contractor. The implication: he believes that the crime originates in his own mind!

  Oh, this was wonderful, to work so hard, to drive his mind through all these difficulties like an icebreaker. Ice. Roger thought at once of Brenda’s cottage, and then of cubes floating in a tumbler of Scotch. Perhaps one little snort would help him think even better. He went upstairs to the kitchen, saw through the barred oval window on the landing that it was day.

  And there at the table sipping coffee with a faraway look in her eye sat Francie, wearing a robe. Roger composed his face into friendly upturned patterns-that was essential from now on-and said, “Morning, Francie. Not working today? I thought you were feeling better.”

  “It’s Saturday, Roger.”

  “So it is.” He checked the clock: 9:45, perhaps too early for a drink. He poured himself a cup of coffee instead.

  “But you look like you’re going somewhere,” Francie said.

  “I do?”

  “Somewhere dressy,” she said. “Or a funeral.”

  Roger glanced down, saw with dismay that he was still wearing his black Brooks Brothers suit. And just as sloppily, he’d left his list on the desk in the basement office. Suppose she’d been in the laundry room, not the kitchen, and wandered in while he was upstairs? “The fact is,” said Roger, “I was going to ask you out to lunch.”

  “With the godfather?”

  He made himself laugh, that strange barking sound. But how could it be a normal laugh when he had no desire to take her to lunch at all? And to think how recently he had tried to get into her bed! It suddenly hit him, after the fact, and perhaps harder for that reason, what her state of mind must have been that night. He laughed again, needing some outlet for the hot surge inside him, and said, “That’s a good one, Francie-your reference being to the suit again, I take it.”