The Perfect Murder (13 page)

Content in the accomplishment of creating Diana’s tidy world, I was ready to move on to the next step when Mr. Lovesey’s note arrived. Now, here was a rococo approach, touched up with flourishes of the bizarre—a shark answering the front door. I threw myself into the scheme.

I would need keys, car keys, house keys, the passkey to the inn. I feared this kind of labor at first. This is the kind of chancey spadework that makes the heart pound because it demands a degree of pluck lacking in most of us. I found it great exercise and a necessary preparation for the most brazen act of all.

To wear sheer confidence on one’s face is to conquer the world. For those of you warming up to admonish me about the dangers of arrogance and hubris, set down your pens. Overconfidence is a flaw, but confidence is a must. A confident man checks himself constantly, always keeping himself well within the range of his own talents. I was stunned how much will fall in the direction you want it simply by
willing
it to do so. The world is populated by hesitant men and women, anxiously awaiting their instructions. The world is open to those who unabashedly issue them.

At an out-of-town club full of old friends, to which Blazes and I had been invited, I realized I had my chance. I arranged for Blazes and me to travel in his car. Valet parking insists you keep your keys in the car. During lunch, I excused myself to go table-hopping. I said I would return in ten minutes. I walked straight to the parking lot and ordered the valet to bring around “the car.” Having seen me arrive in it, he simply assumed the car to be mine. I then drove it to an out-of-the-way locksmith (previously scoped out), had the car and house keys copied, and returned in well under ten minutes. The valet parked the car. On the way out of the club, to keep everyone’s suspicions in check, I made an excuse with Blazes to drive his car—something about some interesting houses I wanted to show him, would he mind if I drove? The valet was not at all surprised when I took command of the conversation out front and said, as if I were the owner, “Bring around the Lincoln.”

Of course, keys are but a minor part of this solution. Mr. Lovesey demands that I be a fisherman, which thankfully I am. Now, however, I had to make a spectacle of it. I invited a few guys on fishing expeditions. I bought the best equipment. I subscribed to
Cut Bait Magazine.
I began to exaggerate my catches. But after establishing this groundwork, Mr. Lovesey’s solution calls for a number of devilish pranks. I wanted to come up with my own. Granted, one shouldn’t overplay a bit like this, but let me be the first to say, and I probably am: Keys are easy, seafood is hard.

My acquaintance with the curator of the marine laboratory allowed me to know—all artfully overheard—that something extraordinary was soon due at the docks: two dozen
Macrocheira kaempferi,
the famous giant crabs of Japan. The big boys of this breed boast a chela-span of twelve to thirteen feet. Yes,
feet.
Long spidery critters, each with a dorsal housing about a foot in diameter from which radiates ten emaciated periopods or walking legs, each with the bore of, say, your index finger and capable of lifting the animal’s shell three to four feet in the air.

Transportation was crucial to my purpose, and this is where it helps being a man. Everyone has an acquaintance who maintains a collection of curious contacts, the fellow who whispers to you after a third bourbon, during a moment of ersatz camaraderie, that he knows a man to call when
you
need
real
work done. Your pal’s eyes widen and he gives you that conspiratorial click out the side of his cheek, meant to suggest that this is the kind of information just us serious men need to know and, by golly, he’s just one of those serious men.

I remembered the name of the fixer mentioned during one of these conversations, and one afternoon I paid a call. He operates out of a window. You don’t see him; he doesn’t see you. I got in the line with the crackheads and the penniless whores submitting their resumes. I whispered my request: Steal a number of large, unguarded crates at the pier; at 6
a.m.
drive them to a particular address (my own) and release the contents—a dozen large but harmless crabs—onto the lawn. The fixer asked a few questions of logistics—never suggesting that this request was any stranger than the last one he’d taken—and he named his price. I handed the money through the window and gave him the date of arrival.

On the appointed morning, the men delivered and unpacked the crates without a trace. Around dawn, about ten minutes of six, the phone rang. My wife, as usual, answered it. The neighbor called to suggest strongly that we look out to our front lawn. My wife ran down to my room shouting that something freakish was going on. I ran to my window to see what was the matter. And what before my wondrous eyes did appear? But… a scene that would frighten Dante. The crabs were only now beginning to stir from the lethargy of crate lag. Most of them were scratching their way across the yard, leaving alien glyphs in the grass. One had apparently died and stiffened en route, so the men had ingeniously suspended him from a tree branch by one claw. A nice touch. Another had made it to the driveway and was posting toward the street. I rapped on the window (although I kept up a face of alarm for my wife’s benefit, I also wanted to appear in possession of normal male curiosity). My wife and I both moved toward the window to get a better look: Two dozen eighteen-inch stalks topped with eyes like black dimes looked frantically in all directions. Scores of aimless claws wagged menacingly in the air with a clicking hiss.

The entire scene couldn’t have been more effective. And the serendipitous appearance of the dead crab creaking on the branch of the lawn’s showcase oak was truly artistic. My wife howled with horror, a sound more chilling than the scene out the window. I yelped (to lend more integrity to the production) and barked at absent servants to dial 911.

I was so happy with these results that I was contemplating a new trick that had to do with sperm whales when Mr. Hillerman’s solution arrived. I sat down to an afternoon’s reverie and contemplated the classical beauty of the mushroom. Mr. Hillerman’s choice of weapon is so resonant and rich in allusion. Mushrooms are fairy tales. They are Jung’s archetypal symbols. They are haute cuisine. They are sentinels of the corruption of nature. They are the poisons of kings. Mushrooms are history.

I threw myself into a study of mushrooms, quickly focusing my interest on the traits of the genus
Amanita,
always described in the books as “the most deadly poisonous.”
Amanita.
What a lovely name! It seems to mean “little loved one.”

The world of
Amanita
and its cousins, as you may know, is a many-splendored thing. The Jack-My-Lantern, orange as Halloween, long in the stalk and broad in the brim, is the perfect shade for a gnome. Its physical attractions are only surpassed by its deadliness. There is also Fly Agaric and Pungent Russula and the Death Angel. They are all beautiful compared to the gnarly grey phallic toadstools that nouvelle chefs pursue. And they are all fatal.

Most of the
Amanita
genus causes, as one tome put it, “vomiting and diarrhea, pronounced flow of saliva, suppression of the urine, dizziness, derangement of vision and loss of confidence in ability to make ordinary movements, succeeded by drowsiness, stupor, cold sweating, and marked weakening of the heart’s action.” Two days of this life and then you die. Now, as an artist I am attracted to the possibilities here. I especially like the “pronounced flow of saliva.” But, as I have said before, excess does not art make. So I pressed on to other sources.

I came across another rare species of
Amanita
that kills almost immediately, and contracts the muscles and skin of the face so quickly and violently that victims are often discovered with their nostrils splayed, their eyelids peeled back, and a demonic smile torn across the face from ear to ear. While this appeals on the level of the bizarre, it seems to me to be the effect one seeks in comic books or a late Friday night movie.

I pushed on in my work and eventually landed in the newspaper microfiche room of my local library. I wanted to know the latest in mushroom awareness. I came across an article about an extremely rare breed of
Amanita
that had been thought to be extinct. It had existed briefly in a particular basin of the Brazilian rain forest and then disappeared. Now, suddenly, it was showing up in abandoned coal mines or in shadowy alleys of ghost towns on the great plains. It’s as if nature had brought back this deadliest of mushrooms to thrive in the most devastating wounds man had cut into the earth.

This mushroom is not as technicolorful as its kin. It has the gray and white appearance of a shiitake and is said, by those few unfortunates who might know, to taste “sort of like chicken.” Its effect is to tighten the larynx enough to allow a slim column of air to rasp through, but not enough for intelligible speech. Minutes later, the joints begin to tighten, then stiffen and finally lock up. Victims typically pitch toward the ground with all the grace of a 4x8. There they flop about like fish, struggling toward an antidote that doesn’t exist.

Spanish explorers in the New World discovered the ill effects of this particular breed during one of their frequent and fruitless mountain raids for gold. They had cooked the local mushrooms and immediately felt the effects. The bodies were found at varying distances from the cold ashes of the campfire contorted in alphabetical shapes. Two of the men, according to the bishop who chronicled this disaster in suspicious detail, were found “locked in the union that most sinfully profanes the name of God. Staring upon these frozen satyrs, I was reminded of the observation by a fellow monk that animals on the verge of sacrificial death smell the blood of their kind and, inexplicably, move to couple. Perhaps the Lord will forgive them.” Naturally, as soon as I read these details, I knew I had discovered the perfect weapon.

But the next morning Ms. Caudwell’s solution arrived in the mail, and I couldn’t resist its possibilities. I was eager to imagine a solution that actually had me performing the act myself and so intimately. At the point of a knife, I was drawn to the concept that the method was as old as life—a knifing—but that the circumstances surrounding it had all the staging and melodrama of the
Ring Cycle.
This solution spanned several continents, had international implications, and made great use of costumes. Suddenly I was sampling different tartan patterns, setting the Campbell of Breadal-bane against the Campbell of Argyll, the Mackenzie against the Mackintosh.

But then Mr. Block’s letter arrived. How quickly I cast aside my kilt in order to gather a collection of body hair and to supplement that with nail parings and skin flakes. I explored the Lilliputian world of forensics. After slipping into Room 1507 once or twice (after a tryst; no one saw me enter), I had arrived to the point of amateur, able to distinguish between his and hers, and among the cranial, the pubic, and the eyebrow.

I had gathered enough small evidence to leave a forensic trail an inch wide, one any freshman gumshoe could follow and feel that he had come to his conclusions by his own Cartesian wits. Yet, as fate would have it, my wife announced that because of the continuing nightmares over the crab incident, she was carrying a can of Mace in her purse. She spoke of this to all her friends, setting up perfectly for Mr. Westlake’s scenario. Once again, I was drawn to its charms. I had come full circle, so I sat down to think.

Each of the letters before me had any number of attractions. The sheer brazenness of Mr. Westlake, macing the lover and then handing him the gun so that he could stumble into an inexorable mesh of evidence. The theatricality of Mr. Lovesey, pranking myself to establish a maritime theme. And Mr. Hillerman, reinvigorating the historic classicity of the mushroom with the contemporaneity of the serial killing at the local grocery. The grand pomp of Ms. Caudwell, replete with fancy dress ball and the skirl of bagpipes. The postmodern drama of Mr. Block, played out on the stage of a microscope slide.

I set aside my nights of study and my days of action to consider my extraordinary dilemma. And it struck me that if murder can be an art, then those of us sitting in judgment must be practicing art criticism. So I put it to you. Were you in my place, which solution would you choose? Given that you might prefer your own, consider the company you keep and convince me to make the same choice. I am beginning to enjoy our correspondence.

PROSPECTIVE CLIENT:

Now I learn that your original letter was not an assignment as you made it appear but a mere fishing expedition—an effort to pick my brains and those of four of my fellow practitioners without making a commitment to any of us. I consider such conduct reprehensible. I am sure the others you solicited feel the same. If your wife decides to turn the tables and do you in first, I would be happy to provide any guidance she might need.

But, though your behavior was at the sleazy level one expects only in Hollywood, your premise remains all too true. As you stated, murder as an art form is in a dreadful decline. The green pastures of crime in which the five of us graze have indeed turned dry and brown and need fertilization. The felony you propose offers that. Therefore, I will invest some more time to prevent you from screwing it up.

First, let me warn you away from Sarah Caudwell’s advice. Indeed, Scotland offers some obvious advantages. Since Great Britain—and Scotland in particular—enjoy relatively little crime, the murder you propose would be noticed there.

Done properly, it would gain wide Scottish attention and probably even mention in the
Times
of London. But the tone of your letter indicates you wish more than that—and much more than that is needed. To leave America to compete for attention with a crime in the British Isles is like leaving Iceland to compete for the North Sahara kayak championship. Remember, a sequence of three or four similar homicides is enough to have Fleet Street proclaim a “serial killer.” Bundy had done in about thirty in Florida and points West before anyone noticed, and he’s still way down the list behind some Californians.