The Perfect Murder (14 page)

I concede that Sarah’s proposal has élan. And the notion of having Blazes so thoroughly framed and frustrated has its appeal. But Sarah has overlooked the Peter Principle. What can go wrong
will
go wrong. Being a writer she should know all about what happens when one depends on tape recorders, and can imagine how the odds of disaster multiply when one adds the remote control element into the equation. None of us would be writers if we could master things more complicated than screwdrivers, doorknobs, and pencil sharpeners.

So take Ms. Caudwell’s climactic scene and imagine what would really happen.

You allow the proper moments to tick away, anticipating the prerecorded scream.

Silence.

You wait a bit longer, sweat appearing on your brow.

Silence.

Then Blazes appears at the doorway, looking befuddled.

“I say,” he says, “someone seems to have stabbed Tim’s wife.”

How do you handle that?

Or, worse:

You wait for the prerecorded scream.

A terrible sound emerges from the room, like the frantic quacking of a demented duck. You have done something or other wrong with the tape, as always seems to happen when writers try to use electronic devices intended for their betters, and it is running some forgotten conversation backward at rewind speed.

You rise to your feet, no longer having to pretend your intended panic, and shout: “My God, that’s my wife—what the hell’s happening to her?”

And another guest seated beside you will shout: “Ducks! Ducks in the house!”

Whereupon Blazes appears in the doorway, looking befuddled.

“I say,” he says, “someone seems to have stabbed Tim’s wife. And I think there are ducks in there. Under her dress.”

In summation, I recommend you send Ms. Caudwell a polite note of dismissal. Forget Scotland. If you want an epic art-form murder, commit it in our native land, home of the National Rifle Association, where homicide kills more folks than the nineteen most common viruses, where violence is appreciated and understood. And above all, dismiss any notion of expecting electronic or mechanical devices to work for you. Why do you think the concierge of every hotel used on book-signing tours instructs bellhops to spend an extra five minutes showing visiting writers how the key works in the door, how to change channels on the TV set, how to avoid scalding in the shower, how to manage the telephone?

And while you are writing the note for Caudwell, run off a second copy for Peter Lovesey. No American would cite George Joseph Smith, whose bag total was only three, as a serial killer. The English have no sense of proportion in such matters.

Admittedly Lovesey’s scheme would get a better press than Mistress Caudwell’s. Alas, however, once again the Peter Principle applies.

Lovesey sets up his clever deception with a series of self-imposed practical jokes—climaxing with one grotesque and expensive enough to attract the press. Or, if not the press, at least the TV cameras. This is indeed astute and upon it depends, if not the success of the homicide, at least the certainty that it will become a homicide celebrated enough to meet your requirements for posthumous fame. (Alas, once we would have called this notoriety.) But what actually happens?

About the time the inflated whale is secured atop the house and the interior converted into an aquarium something more important will certainly happen somewhere. “Kill that story about the breakthrough on cheap fission power and those items about the cancer cure and the Nazi coup toppling Chancellor Kohl,” news editors will be shouting, “the Queen’s second cousin has developed hangnails. And to make room for pictures, kill that inflated whale piece.” And at BBC-TV, the image of you looking gravely into the lens with a background of tropical fish is being erased from videotapes to make room for one hundred and eighteen seconds of a physician explaining that while royal hangnails are rarely fatal they are inevitably inconvenient. If you are carrying this off in America substitute Donald Trump or some other member of our version of royalty. It doesn’t matter. Something will crowd your practical joke out of TV time and all will be more or less for naught.

Your wife, you say, would still be dead. Maybe, but you won’t have raised murder to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Without the well-publicized sequence of jokes, this business of killing somebody with a squid, or whatever that beast is that Lovesey is selling you, wouldn’t make it as a historic crime. Exotic, true, but hardly memorable. I’ll wager you can’t remember who committed the snake-in-the-mailbox caper of a few years ago, or even the identity of the two kidnappers who buried a school bus full of students in California a bit earlier. No. To make death by Jellyfish in the Jacuzzi memorable in this sated world, Lovesey wisely saw you have to set up a sequence.

But there are other flaws as well. They’re not failures of Lovesey’s imagination, but products of his European background. Lovesey presumes a level of efficiency, or things happening when and how they are supposed to happen, which is totally foreign to this side of the Atlantic. I will cite a single example.

In setting up your crime while protecting your alibi, Lovesey instructs you as follows:

“You take the 3
p.m
. [flight], which gets you back to your hometown by 3:45.” Thereupon he allows you two hours and fifteen minutes to walk to Boylan’s garage, don your laboratory costume, drive to the laboratory, steal the jellyfish, plant incriminating clues, get home no earlier than 5:10 to make sure that the maid will have departed (the Peter Principle provides, of course, that on this day she
won’t
have departed; she will be taking advantage of your absence to entertain friends in your living room), deposit the jellyfish in the 80-degree Jacuzzi (if your thermostat is as temperamental as mine, that jellyfish will become either stewed or chilled to total lethargy), hustle back to the Boylan homestead, leave car and assorted clues, and fly back to your fishing spa. “There is one [flight] at 6
p.m
.,” Lovesey assures you. And indeed, it all seems to click together as smoothly as a British railroad timetable.

Alas, alas. Therein lies the problem. Lovesey’s confidence is based on habitual use of British public transportation, where planes, trains, and even buses leave and arrive as scheduled. You and I, veterans of American public transportation, know better. Even as I write this, the U.S. Open Tennis competition is being held at Flushing Meadow, which I gather is near New York’s La Guardia airport. The fatuous fellow announcing this event for the TV network has just told his straight man in the broadcasting booth that the audience and players won’t be annoyed this year by the sound of passing airliners. It seems the mayor, himself a tennis fan, arranged for flights to be rerouted. I mention this not to illustrate to Peter and Sarah that we, despite our democratic pretensions, have a privileged class but to note that if your flights to establishing your alibi happened to be through La Guardia on that day you would have been squirming in one of those miserable plastic airport chairs with tens of thousands of common folks—your plans gone awry because the establishment wished to avoid irritating the spoiled darlings cursing and snarling at the referees on the courts or the social elite watching them.

Of course you could schedule the murder to avoid such events. But be realistic. The 3
p.m
. printed in the airline timetable means only that the plane won’t leave
before
that time. When it will leave, only God knows. I formed several lasting friendships waiting in the airport at Boise, Idaho, because the pilot decided not to board us until he could get permission to land at Denver’s notoriously overtaxed airport. I read enough of
Foucault’s Pendulum
to reach almost catatonic boredom while waiting for my plane to leave the Chicago airport.

Your flight “gets you back to your hometown by 3:45,” Lovesey says. Forget it. With a little luck you enter the holding pattern about 4:10, touch down about 5:05, get clearance to connect to the gate about 14 minutes later, and actually stumble into the terminal at 5:32. By the time you get downstairs to discover your luggage didn’t make it, it’s time to rush back upstairs to catch that 6
p.m
. flight back to the fishing lodge.

But don’t bother to rush, because the video screen will show that it’s 30 minutes late.

Well, then, how about Lawrence Block? His plots are as astute as Lovesey’s or Caudwell’s, and—being American—he is familiar with our native problems. The solution he offers you is certainly clever and seems to meet all of your criteria.

Seems
to meet. Be warned, prospective client. Reread Lawrence Block. Notice the subtlety of his plots. In the distinguished company of mystery writers, Lawrence Block is known as an intellectual; as a man who does not suffer fools gladly. As the tone of his letter makes clear, he considers you a foolish man. He holds you in contempt. He is playing a game with you. He is setting you up for disaster.

The scheme Mr. Block gives you, involving a sequence of murders with trademark characteristics and its climax leaving Blazes Boylan deliciously framed, has distinct appeal. Even though you report that your wife now carries a Mace dispenser in her purse, I fear you will be tempted back to it. (You might, for example, slip the can from her purse in her absence, exhaust its contents Macing resident cockroaches, and return the empty can.)

Avoid that temptation. Here’s why.

Yesterday’s
Albuquerque Journal
carried a report of a disagreement in Philadelphia. Over a period of eight months, eight young women have disappeared from various Philadelphia bars, only later to turn up dead. The local press has concluded from this the possibility of a serial killer. But the local cops declare themselves skeptical. Since such events (contrary to the impression Block would give you) are routine, it might as well be eight different murderers as a hardworking single.

Why am I telling you this? Because this isn’t England, where murder is rare, treasured, and worthy of close scrutiny. Even if you don’t stop at 5, even if you run the score up to 8, or 18, or 80, how can you count on the police to notice if (statistically speaking) nothing unusual is happening? And the more you do it, the more you increase the risk that one of these bimbos you pick up has intentions as murderous as your own and will be armed with something worse than Mace.

I concede that Dame Agatha Christie used this idea with great success in her
The ABC Murders
and the book has become a classic. But that was set in England, a gentler place, and the year was 1936—gentler times. When Ed McBain revived the idea for one of his police procedurals a generation later he had to modify the plot considerably to make it work in America.

In summation: Forget Block.

Which brings us to the distinguished Donald Westlake and his proposal that you establish a double identity and thus serve as your own alibi. Very clever and so simple that it might work were it not, alas, for the Peter Principle again—and the business of the hotel key.

First, there’s the matter of getting Blazes Boylan to fire a pistol on the gun club range. As you describe him Boylan seems the sort who would flinch away from guns, and while it may be true, as Westlake states, that “Psychologically, he cannot refuse” membership after you set him up for it, he can, psychologically, stall off the day when he actually has to fire a pistol. Such stalling and foot-dragging are normally only an irritation, but when the timing of a murder depends on getting that burned powder into the skin of Boylan’s fingers, I predict it will become a major problem.

“Can’t manage it today, old fellow. Handball with Roger.”

“Sorry. Bit of a headache this morning. The noise would make it worse.”

You’ll hear those and a thousand other excuses until one day you’ll find yourself deciding that Boylan must be the victim instead of your wife.

But let’s say you actually get him to fire the damned pistol. Says Westlake: “… the criminological laboratory’s tests
will
[the italics are Westlake’s] demonstrate that Blazes has recently fired a gun.” Will they? I have just read a news account in which a woman is suing a laboratory for getting the blood type (a much simpler, more foolproof test) of every single member of her family wrong.

Perhaps, even probably, the test will show up the burned powder. We’ll say nothing went wrong on this day. The lab tech was unusually sober, his cigar ashes didn’t dribble into the solution rendering the results “inconclusive.” He didn’t pull the wrong bottle of chemicals out of the locker. The Peter Principle took a vacation.
Probably
everything will work as planned. But remember, your life will depend on it.

And this element of chance isn’t the worst of it. Once you get those powder burns into Boylan’s skin, you are committed to a tight schedule. Every passing moment produces a bit of body oil, a bit of sweat, a bit of friction, which reduces the powder, and the chances of its detection, a trifle. Every shower and hand washing reduces it much more. Once Boylan quits stalling and shoots the pistol, you are in a hurry. That’s dangerous.

Which brings us to the hotel and to Room 1507.

Mr. Westlake’s fame among mystery readers is long established. For him the day has passed when his publisher’s marketing people bundle him up and send him off on those awful tests of stamina known as book tours. Thus, while Westlake remembers that a hotel with a room number as high as 1507 must be a big hotel, he seems not to know what has happened to hotel keys in such monstrous places. We who still must endure these mind-numbing journeys from one hotel to another know that Room 1507 isn’t opened by a key these days. The hotel key is another victim of America’s progress in crime and technology. The door to Room 1507 these days is opened by a little rectangular strip of stiff plastic. The hotel patron slips this into a slot on the door. When he finally manages to insert it proper side up and proper side out and to the proper depth with the proper authority, it causes something to click and unlocks the door. Thus there is no passkey to press into Silly Putty for subsequent reproduction. Nor is there any use in saving the little plastic strip for future use after you have checked into Room 1507 to reconnoiter it. In their continuing efforts to stay a jump ahead of criminals (such as yourself and Westlake) the hotels change the magnetic coding in these locks so that the strip which opens 1507 on Tuesday will open 1384 on Wednesday—thereby baffling the burglars.