Eight Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  I brought The Drowner into bed with me. I read the first paragraph, its words hauntingly familiar. Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don’t just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself. The last time I’d cracked this particular paperback I was probably eleven or twelve. I like to think it was summertime and I was up late in my cramped bedroom under a single sheet, a mosquito probably whining in one of the corners of the room. My father was playing his records in the living room, too loudly, depending on how drunk he was. Most nights ended the same, with my mother turning down his music—jazz usually, although sometimes he’d listen to fusion stuff like Frank Zappa or Weather Report—and my father berating her for not understanding him. But this was simply background noise. Because I wasn’t really there in that bedroom. I was actually in Florida, in 1963, hanging out with shady real estate developers, and sexy divorcées, and drinking bourbon highballs. And now here I was again—almost forty years old—and my eyes were running over the same words, holding the same book I held twenty-eight years ago, the same book some businessman or housewife held fifty years ago. Time travel.

  I finished the book at about four in the morning. I almost got out of bed to get another book from the list but decided to try and sleep instead. I rolled onto my stomach, thinking about the book, about what it must feel like to be swimming along in a pond when something grabs you from below, pulls you down to your death. Then, because I was starting to get sleepy, my wife’s face came into my mind, as it always did. But I didn’t dream of her, and I didn’t dream about The Drowner. I dreamed about running, about people coming after me.

  The same dream I have every night of my life.

  It was still snowing when I left my apartment in the morning, but it was a light, drifting snow, half of it kicked up by a wind that was still gusting. There was about two feet already on the ground. The roads had been plowed but no one had been out yet to shovel the sidewalks, so I walked in the middle of the street, careful going down the steep hill to Charles. Even though the skies were blanketed in clouds, the day was bright, maybe from all that pristine snow. I carried my old bike messenger bag, its strap over my shoulder.

  I got to the hotel early. The Flat of the Hill was a recent addition to my part of Boston, a boutique hotel inside a refurbished warehouse just off Charles. It had a high-end restaurant and a pretty bar that I occasionally went to on Monday nights when oysters were a dollar each.

  “I’m meeting someone for breakfast,” I said to the lone employee, a sad-eyed woman behind the check-in desk, and she directed me past the bar into a small dining area with about eight tables. There was no one there to seat me so I sat myself at a corner table by a large window that looked out onto a wall of brick. I was the only one in the room, and I wondered if anyone was actually working there, or if all the staff were unable to make it to work because of the snowstorm. Then, simultaneously, a man in a crisp white shirt and black pants pushed through a pair of swinging doors, while Agent Mulvey appeared at the entrance to the dining room. She spotted me and came over, just as the waiter was dropping off menus. We both ordered coffee and juice.

  “The FBI has a decent travel budget,” I said.

  She looked confused for a moment, then said, “Oh. I booked this place myself because it was close to your store. Who knows if they’ll reimburse me.”

  “How’d you sleep?” I asked. She had dark purple shadows under her eyes.

  “Very little. I was reading.”

  “Me, too. What book did you read?”

  “The Red House Mystery. I thought I’d start at the beginning.”

  “What did you think?” I said and took a sip of my coffee, scalding the tip of my tongue.

  “It was good. Clever, I guess, and I didn’t guess the ending.” She touched the side of her porcelain coffee cup then leaned down, pursing her lips, and sipped a little bit from the top. The maneuver made me think of a bird.

  “Honestly,” I said, “I know I included it on my list, but I don’t remember the exact details. I read it a long time ago.”

  “It’s pretty much how you described it. It’s a country house mystery that is kind of ludicrous. I kept thinking about Clue, the game—”

  “Colonel Mustard in the library.”

  “Exactly. But it was better than that.” She described to me the basic plot, and it started to come back. There’s a rich man named Mark Ablett who lives in a country house, the kind of English one that seems specifically designed to have a murder occur in it. He gets a letter from his estranged no-good brother, saying he’s coming to visit from Australia. When the brother arrives, he’s told to wait in the study for Mark Ablett. Then a shot is heard. The brother from Australia is dead and Mark Ablett is missing. It seems clear that Mark has killed his own brother and fled.

  The detective in the story is actually just a passing acquaintance of one of the country estate’s guests. His name is Tony Gillingham and together with his friend Bill they begin to investigate. It turns out that there is a secret tunnel that runs from the study underneath the house and all the way out to a golf course, and there are, of course, multiple suspects.

  “There’s no brother, right?” I said, interrupting her.

  “Right, exactly. The real brother died years ago and isn’t part of the present action. Mark Ablett had been talked into impersonating him, and then he’s killed. But that wasn’t the part of the murder that I found clever. Did you?” She was talking fast and only after she paused did I realize that she was expecting an answer.

  “I think I put it on the list because the murderer had basically provided a corpse and a killer at the same time. They were the same person, but only the killer knew that.”

  “Can I read a section I underlined last night?”

  “Sure,” I said, and she pulled the paperback from her bag and began flipping through pages. I could see from where I was seated that she’d underlined several passages. I thought of my wife, the way she would always read with a pen in her hand, ready to write in whatever book she was reading. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t given Agent Mulvey the expensive first edition of Strangers on a Train.

  “Okay. Got it,” she said, flattening the book on the table and leaning forward to read. “‘The inspector had arrived in it,’ the house I think he’s talking about, ‘to find a man dead and a man missing,’” she began. “‘It was extremely probable, no doubt, that the missing man had shot the dead man. But it was more than extremely probable, it was almost certain that the Inspector would start with the idea that this extremely probable solution was the one true solution, and that, in consequence, he would be less disposed to consider without prejudice any other solution.’” She finished reading and closed the book. “It’s got me thinking,” she continued. “If you were going to commit a murder based on this book, how would you do it?”

  I must have looked confused, because she added, “Would you shoot someone in the study of a country house?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess I would kill two people, then hide one of the bodies, and make it look as though the killer has gone on the run.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  The waiter was hovering, so we both ordered. Agent Mulvey got the eggs Florentine. I wasn’t hungry but ordered two poached eggs on toast, with fresh fruit on the side. After we ordered, she said, “This has me thinking about rules.”

  “What do you mean, ‘rules’?”

  “Okay,” she said, and thought for a moment. “If I was the one who had set myself this task . . . this goal of committing the eight murders that you described in your list, then it would be helpful to set some guidelines. Some rules. Do you copy the murders exactly? Or the idea behind the murders? How similar do they have to be?”

  “So, you think the rules dictate that the murderer adheres as closely as possible to the actual murders in the book?”

  “No, not the details of the murders, but the philosophies behi
nd them. It’s almost as though the murderer is testing these books in real life. If the idea was simply to mimic the books, then you could just shoot someone in a country house library and call it a day. Or, for the A.B.C. Murders, you’d actually copy them exactly. You know, find someone named Abby Adams who lived in Acton and kill her first, et cetera. But it’s not just about that, it’s about doing them right. There are rules.”

  “So, for The Red House Mystery, it’s all about pointing the police toward a suspect that they will never find, and never get to question.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Agent Mulvey said. “It actually is clever. I was thinking about it all last night. Let’s say I wanted to kill someone . . . my ex-boyfriend, for example.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “If I just killed him, then I would be a suspect. But let’s say I killed two people—like my ex-boyfriend, and my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, say—and made sure that the body of the new girlfriend wasn’t found. That way I could make it look like the killer had run away. The police wouldn’t be looking for the identity of the killer; they’d think they already knew it.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy, you know,” I said.

  “Ha,” she said. “I wasn’t really considering it.”

  “Because the killer would have to be willing to kill two people.”

  “Right.”

  “And hiding a body is not easy.”

  “You’re not speaking from experience, are you?” she said.

  “I’ve read a lot of mystery novels.”

  “I think I need to look for a crime in which the prime suspect has disappeared.”

  “Is that common?” I asked.

  “It isn’t, really. It’s not so easy to disappear these days. Most people leave pretty obvious trails. But it happens.”

  “I think you’re on to something,” I said. “It might be a matter of looking for two deserving victims—criminals, maybe—one of whom died and one who disappeared. That is, if your theory’s correct that—what should we call our suspect? We should have a name.”

  “Why don’t we call him . . . ?” She paused.

  “Something with a bird.”

  “No, that’s confusing. Let’s call him Charlie,” she said.

  “Why Charlie?”

  “It just popped into my head. No, that’s not true. I was trying to think of a name, and I thought of copycat, which made me think of a cat, which made me think of my first cat, when I was young, and his name was Charlie.”

  “Poor Charlie. Does he deserve to have his name used this way?”

  “He does, actually. He was a total killer. Brought us a mouse or a bird every day.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  “Charlie it is.”

  “So what was I saying? Right, look for deserving pairs of victims. Charlie doesn’t like to kill innocent people.”

  “We don’t know that for a fact, but it’s a possibility,” she said, pushing herself a little back from the table to allow her food to be put in front of her. “Thank you,” she said to the waiter, then picked up a fork. “Mind if I eat and talk? I skipped dinner last night and I’m starving.”

  “No, that’s fine,” I said. My poached eggs had arrived, and the sight of them, the edges of the whites slightly translucent, made my stomach flip. I speared a cube of cantaloupe on the end of my fork.

  “And maybe I’m wrong,” Agent Mulvey said, when she was done chewing her first bite of breakfast. “This could have something to do with you, of course. Someone trying to get your attention, maybe someone trying to frame you.” She opened her eyes a little wider as she said this. I jutted out my lower lip, as though thinking about the possibility.

  “And if that’s the case,” I finally said, “then it makes sense to ensure that the murders have obviously been based on the books on the list.”

  “Right,” she said. “That’s why I want to look more closely at what happened to Elaine Johnson, the heart attack victim—”

  “Who might or might not have been killed by Charlie,” I said.

  “But if she was, then I need to go to the crime scene. There might be something that connects it to Deathtrap.”

  “I have a confession to make,” I said and watched as Agent Mulvey’s cheeks reddened in anticipation. “I haven’t actually ever seen the play, or even read it. But I have seen the movie and I’m pretty sure that it’s very faithful. Anyway, I’m embarrassed.”

  “You should be,” she said, but laughed. Her face was no longer red.

  “So, in the movie, all I can actually talk about,” I said, “the victim dies of a heart attack when she sees a man she thinks is dead loom up in her bedroom and murder her husband. Was Elaine Johnson found dead in her bedroom?”

  “I’ll have to check,” she said. “I can’t remember offhand. You know, when you said you had a confession, I thought you were going to say something else.”

  “You thought I was going to confess to being Charlie,” I said, in what I hoped was a flippant way.

  “No,” she said. “I thought you were going to confess to me that you knew Elaine Johnson.”

  Chapter 6

  I hesitated, then said, “Is she the same Elaine Johnson who used to live in Boston?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then I did know her. Not well, but she used to come into the bookstore all the time, and she used to come to author readings.”

  “You didn’t want to tell me this yesterday afternoon?”

  “Honestly, it didn’t occur to me that it was the same person. The name rang a bell but it’s a common name.”

  “Okay,” she said, but her eyes didn’t quite meet mine. “What was she like, Elaine Johnson?”

  I pretended to think, just to buy a little time, but the truth was, Elaine was memorable. She had seriously thick glasses—I think you’d call them coke bottles—and thinning hair, and she always wore what appeared to be handmade sweaters, even in summertime, but none of that was what had made her memorable. She was memorable because she was one of those people who take advantage of the vulnerable nature of retail employees, by cornering them and subjecting them to endless monologues, more like diatribes, on her favorite subjects. Elaine’s favorite subject was crime writers—who was a genius, who was merely good, and who was bad (“fucking atrocious” was the phrase she generally used)—and she used to come into the store every day and corner whatever employee she encountered first. It was exhausting, and annoying, but we all figured out the best way to deal with her, which was to continue working while she talked, give her about ten minutes, then tell her, in no uncertain terms, that her time was up. It sounds rude, but the thing is, Elaine Johnson was rude, herself. She said outrageous things about the authors she didn’t like. She was casually racist, openly homophobic, and, surprisingly, loved to comment on other people’s appearances, despite her own. I think anyone who works in a bookstore, or any store probably, is used to dealing with difficult customers, including difficult customers who come in every day. The thing about Elaine Johnson was that she also showed up at all our author readings, and she was always the first to raise her hand, asking a question that subtly, or not so subtly, insulted the poor author onstage. We would always warn the authors in advance, but we’d also mention that she always bought a copy of the book to get it autographed, even when they were, according to her, “a no-talent fraud.” Most authors, I find, are willing to put up with an asshole if it means a book sale, especially a hardcover book sale.

  I knew that Elaine Johnson had moved to Rockland, Maine, because she told us about the move on a daily basis for about a year before it happened. Her sister had died and left her a house. On the day she finally left, my employees and I went out for a celebratory drink.

  “She was pretty abrasive,” I said to Agent Mulvey. “She came to the store every day and cornered one of us to talk about the book she was reading. I remember now that she did move to Maine, but I didn’t connect the name when you said it. I just knew her as Elaine, not Elain
e Johnson.”

  “Did she deserve to die?” she asked.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Did she deserve to die? Are you asking me personally? No, of course not.”

  “No, sorry. I mean, you said she was an abrasive personality. It’s clear, at least to me, that all the victims so far have been less than likable people. Did she fall into the category?”

  “She was definitely not likable. She told me once that lesbians made terrible writers because they didn’t spend enough time with men, who had superior intellects.”

  “Oh.”

  “She used to say stuff just to get a rise, I think. Ultimately, she was sad and lonely, more so than a terrible person.”

  “Did you know she had a weak heart?”

  After her surgery, I remember her pulling down the neck of her pilly sweater to show me the puckered scar on her wrinkled chest. I remember saying, “Please don’t ever show that to me again,” which got a laugh. Sometimes I thought that Elaine Johnson’s act was just that, an act, and what she really craved was people being rude to her back.

  “It rings a bell,” I said to Agent Mulvey. “I remember there was a time when she didn’t come in to the store—we were all thrilled—but then she started to come back. I remember it was medical.”

  The waiter had sidled over. Agent Mulvey’s plate was spotless, and my eggs were untouched. He asked if everything was okay.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m still working on these.”

  He cleared the agent’s plate, and she ordered more coffee. I decided to make an attempt on my eggs, thinking it would look strange if I didn’t. Agent Mulvey looked at her watch and asked me if I was going in to work.