The Perfect Murder (12 page)

Now you’ve got time, though hardly a great deal of time. When Boylan arrives in a minute or two, he’ll find the door bolted. This will confuse him. If he has his own key, the bolt will deny him entrance. If your wife has the room’s sole key, he’ll assume that she hasn’t arrived. In either event, he’ll remain outside while you do what has to be done.

And what is that? Ah, you must know the answer. You have to do whatever it is you’ve been doing all along, have to undress your victim, have to cut off such portions of her being as you’ve been in the habit of removing, have to set the stage even as you have set it four times already. However, you will not carry off any souvenirs, not this time.

Just how you extricate yourself from the room and how you leave Blazes Boylan will depend on circumstances, and may call for some improvisation on your part. If Blazes simply stands resolutely at the door, you might just unlock the door and stand aside. When he bursts into the room, surprise him from behind with a trustworthy blunt instrument, knocking him even more senseless than usual. Get a little of her blood on his hands and clothes, and you might consider slipping her nose, or whatever, into his jacket pocket. Then get out of there, and let him explain.

If you have to slip out the back door and leave Blazes out front, that’s fine, too. I can’t get hung up on technicalities, as they will vary with the precise nature of the premises where the murder is to take place, with which I’m unfamiliar, and with his behavior, which I cannot predict. No matter. You’ll find a way out. And Boylan, once the trap is sprung, will not.

I don’t think you’ll do any of this, and I certainly don’t think you’ll do all of it. I don’t think you’ve got the heart for it.

But if you do it, it’ll work.

DEAR FRIENDS,

Frankly, I was shocked by the five letters I received in response to my genteel query. Not shocked by the content; on that level, I was delighted, fascinated, even inspired. But, I am shocked by the contempt in which I seem to be held. I suppose everyone—even Vlad the Impaler, I would guess—wants to be loved. Love is not an emotion that binds me to much, however, so I would have settled for “admire” (perhaps with reservations) or “respect.” Instead, it seems I must be content with the title “employer.”

Commerce is not the most promising basis for a relationship, but it’s a beginning. After reading the introductions to many of your suggested solutions, I sensed that some among you, perhaps, fancied me, say, a shit. I think as you get to know me, you may change your minds. I may seem a bit practiced or stilted in character, too polite, overly politic, but etiquette is an inscrutable mask—a necessity in this line of work. While I am not praised coast to coast for my skills at deipnosophy, I am said to be a withering conversationalist, capable of fingering the swollen pride of any of the pompous gits who inhabit my social stratum.

I can skewer most men because I have spent years studying them. I think I do a damn good imitation because I know well the condition of men, at least what passes for it. I can brag in a manner that annoys half those within earshot. I can spit to the curb. I can sit in an airplane and loudly discuss the intricacies of the strategic plan of my booming business. I can tell jokes to a friend while standing at a urinal in a baseball stadium. I can chew with my mouth open. I can describe the pleasure of blowing the head off a duck. I can argue that the rich don’t make enough money, and later complain that the poor make too much. I can leave the company of an acquaintance on December 31st and say “See you next year” and then burst out laughing. I can assert that the media are to blame. I can smile so broadly that all my teeth show. I can have an opinion on any public issue and begin that opinion with a variation on the words, “It all depends on the context.” I can find an urgent reason to use my portable telephone in a crowded public situation. I can toast a young woman and say, “Here’s looking up your address.” I can slap a back. I can leave the impression that I have spent the better part of my youth on a swift sloop mastering the techniques of sailing.

And I can listen to another man do any of the above and pretend to wear an expression of serene indifference.

My credentials are secure, then. It is my motive that some of you find unworthy. But doesn’t every motive pale alongside the act itself? The revelation of the motive—in a good book or a bad newspaper—is always a disappointment. Murder is an occasion of splendid excess such that whatever circumstances drove one to it can never provide a successful accounting. If the motive did explain the act, it seems to me, then murder would hold no more interest than a barroom brawl—a great sport if you happen upon it in progress, but nothing to write about or even to contemplate.

Moreover, to consider my animal motive—mere revenge—without placing it in the context of art (to which I intend to raise it) is to whittle and pare my thinking so ruthlessly with Occam’s razor that you wind up with a skeleton meant to resemble flesh. Haven’t I indicated that this act should aspire to conditions far beyond the mundane? Reducing my intent to mere revenge is like arguing that Shakespeare wrote his plays to earn his pay from the Globe or that Michelangelo hauled his scaffolding to the basilica in order to win a few indulgences from the pope.

Since I first wrote each of you, the particulars of my life have not changed. The trysts still occur at the same place, same time—only the frequency has picked up. They meet
every
day now. My wife’s desire and cruelty are fueled, it seems, by the same engine. You might think that I am equally cruel—given the nature of this correspondence—but even I draw a line in my treatment of those on this side of the Styx. I might kill someone but I would never purposefully injure another’s feelings.

Cruelty in our age is difficult because so much of our lives have become an open book. And true cruelty requires the knowledge of another’s secrets. Today, with everyone jabbering to everyone else about their private fears, addictions, sins, and thoughts, it becomes harder to locate that tender spot in which to insert the verbal dagger. The other day, my wife found a bull’s-eye in the heart of a neighbor.

We had been invited to a friend’s house for a dinner party and were seated at a table of ten. Blazes was there, of course. He seems to show up at the most unexpected places these days. I know that audacity is the trademark of such affairs, but I will confess that his presence in the same room wounds me more than the pornographic pictures that play on the screen of my imagination when I am alone in bed, moments from sleep. Such are my circumstances.

Also present at the dinner table was an innocent and altogether sympathetic couple, Georgia and Ben. Because of a peculiar seating arrangement, Georgia was sitting next to another woman, an old friend of hers. They were talking quietly to each other. Otherwise, the table was lively, all mouths running, laughter rushing up the mahogany walls to a conservatory ceiling of glass through which we beheld the stars. Then, as it happens, one of those peculiar silences swept the table. Scientists claim such moments arrive in standard conversation every seven or eleven minutes. You know what I am talking about—that uncomfortable moment when each raconteur arrives at the conclusion of an anecdote simultaneously and all the chattering evaporates at once. At our table, every speaker went silent, save one. The staccato puffs of laughter climbing the walls simply slid back down, revealing that one person who was still talking. Georgia. She was midway through a thought, a tender moment of giddy confession to her friend: “… and I am so lucky because Ben is not only a wonderful father and provider but a great lover.”

Poor innocent Georgia. She was still speaking at a conversational volume. Her remark fell onto the table, naked, without context. For a moment, we all looked at her and smiles were about to sprout on our faces—at any other table, this would have been a comic accident—when my bride snapped, “No, he’s not.”

Is it possible to describe the savagery of this moment? Those three words seemed to still the winds out of doors. A menacing silence hunkered down upon the table. Everyone was acutely aware that if anyone at the table could possibly make such charges, it would be my wife. And therein lies the profound cruelty of the moment—not the adultery, but the realization that if my wife’s rejoinder cast doubt on Ben’s prowess as a man, it was certainly
true.

I remember seeing Georgia’s face contorted by a speechless horror. To have one’s emotion violently jerked from playful delight to disgusting epiphany leaves the head frozen at a tilt and the face rippling with tics. I remember turning away from Georgia, out of respect and perhaps empathy, to see a strangely similar expression, albeit in a minor key, moving its way onto the countenance of Blazes. Perhaps it was his first encounter with her kind of cruelty. Perhaps he was thinking what I had come to know. One day, after everything had been worked out to his specifications, with me safely at a remove, he would be on the receiving end of one of my wife’s impromptu observations.

The next day I realized that Blazes’ specifications would never be fulfilled. I checked the mailbox I maintain under an assumed name and eagerly slit open the envelope from Mr. Westlake. Perhaps my mood was influenced by the brutality I had witnessed the night before. Whatever it was, I read this solution with such happiness that I concluded that there was no point waiting for the other letters to arrive. I immediately set myself to the task.

According to Mr. Westlake’s instructions, I would need to create the life and times of another person in a nearby town. So, I located the right town and went to the local library to examine the obituaries. I found a great name listed on the exact birthday of my wife. I chose this poor child to be my alter ego, mainly because Diana Clement was a girl.

Given my physique, my smooth hairless face, and my androgynous features, I am occasionally mistaken for a woman. This solution offered me the role of a lifetime. I obtained Diana’s birth certificate. (Sure enough, births are not correlated with deaths at the recordkeeping department. This business seems too easy.) After a few experiments in cross-dressing, I realized that my transition from me to Diana required only that I carry three things in my unisex throw bag (J. Crew, $29.95, I recommend the Dijon color): a wig, a padded brassiere, and a pair of expensive pumps.

My transformation took only five minutes. I would wear a button-down-collar shirt, perfectly masculine. But, insert a modest bosom, and you have a casual blouse a la J. C. Penney, and seen from nine to five every weekday all over America. A pair of casual men’s slacks possesses the same office-attire ambiguity. This leaves the head and the feet.

Women’s wigs are realistic looking; the technology appears to be years ahead of toupees. The difference can be traced to the fact that women’s hair styles don’t necessarily entail a part. (Since all hairpieces—for men or for women—need to be partless, many wigs for women look natural. Yet, when anyone sees an arch of styled hair tracing a curve from ear to ear on a man, the first thought is, rug.) Finally, as to the feet, nothing feminizes a body like a pair of $500 pumps. You may quote me.

The beauty part is this: As a man, I slip into an unattended women’s restroom. Five minutes later, I exit with a bit of sashay to my step, a touch of makeup and lipstick on my face, and a voice modulated up the register (no problem for this tenor). I can even suppress my manly smile, coylike, to create a different face for me as a woman. I am a rather plain, almost tough, looking woman with long brown hair. But, add a bit of flirtation, and nearly any man will suddenly think of me as attractive. My transformation is complete. I am Diana.

The ease of such a change makes me wonder what a Sherlock Holmes would write about in contemporary America. Only 150 years ago, he was regularly publishing monographs proving a direct correspondence between a man’s cigar ash and his neighborhood in London or a woman’s taste in silk handkerchiefs and her station. Today he would have to forget writing about differences in class or address; he’d be lucky if the differences between all men’s and women’s appearances would fill his notebook.

My enthusiasm for this ruse provoked me to test it. As Diana, I have taken some clothing to a local dry cleaner, and become acquainted with the proprietor, a pleasant man. Over time, I arrived at a theory one could only formulate after extensive experience at transvestism: People come to recognize the features of a person not by their simple appearance but by the personality that animates them. Change the personality and you have a different look. To prove this, I entered the shop as a man. I was two inches shorter than Diana, had short red hair, my smile pulled back somewhat pretentiously at the corners, and I had about me the mildly disdainful air that most take as a sign of wealth. My shopkeeper never gave me a second look. He answered my request for directions and sent me away. A few days later, when Diana showed up, he was all hands and loud hellos.

I simply had too much fun in this role, getting credit cards and applying for various licenses. I realize the psychoanalysts will have a field day with this part of the autobiography, but so what, I’ll happily give them something to do. I won’t tell all the stories. Suffice it to say that a summer-stock version of
M. Butterfly
was nearly played out at the local motor vehicle department between Diana and a young patrolman eager to reveal to me the mysteries of parallel parking and the three-point turn.

Much of the pleasure of creating another character derives from the improvisation needed to project a distinct personality. To assist in this I had come up with an invention that allows Diana to return her phone calls—promptly if need be—seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. At Diana’s apartment, I installed an answering machine, the kind you can call from another phone to hear your recorded messages. But this machine is itself wired to a modem (Radio Shack, $100). After the machine records an incoming message, the modem is programmed to wait five minutes and then dial a certain 800 number. That phone number is my private beeper, a common item among those like myself who strive to maintain the appearance of active employment. Thus, five minutes after every phone call to Diana, I receive a beep. I check the machine. If it is important—and every phone call is when you are creating a character—I call back. (In the end, I can simply deprogram the modem—and since local phone companies don’t keep records of 800 phone calls, all evidence will disappear.) Needless to say, Diana maintains a low profile with the major players of her neighborhood—people who might want to know too much—but is already well known to the supernumeraries—the dry cleaner, the grocer, the video shop operator. The perfect fake identity for the perfect murder.