The Perfect Murder (15 page)

You can probably rely enough on our airlines to carry out Westlake’s alibi plan, since no close timing is involved. (I say probably, because of personal memories: a dismal night spent in a Dallas Holiday Inn, courtesy of Delta Airlines, when I was supposed to be cozy in my own bunk in Albuquerque; trying to explain to a Denver bookstore seven minutes before a book signing was supposed to start there how I could be calling from the Salt Lake City airport, etc.) The alibi plan itself is sheer genius. I wish I had thought of it and I fully intend to plagiarize it as soon as enough time passes to make the theft seem less obvious. But you won’t need the alibi if you can’t get into the room to do the dastardly deed.

I have one final quibble. As Westlake instructs you, you shoot your wife twice, cause Boylan to grovel, then seem to come to your senses when he asks for the gun.

I quote Westlake: “You hand it to him, spray him with Mace, drop the can near your wife’s body… and leave.” (Disguised as a little old lady in a motorized wheelchair, as I recall the Westlakean scenario.) All very well, but I write this with a razor scrape burning on my chin, the scrape being caused by the failure of my Burma Shave spray can (which uses a mechanism very similar to Westlake’s Mace sprayer) to deliver shaving cream when I pushed its button this morning. Thus the scenario in Room 1507 deteriorates into something like this:

“You hand him the gun, push the button on the Mace can, and, when nothing sprays forth, shake it desperately. Boylan shoots you in the gizzard with your pistol. You drop the Mace can near your wife’s body and leave on a stretcher, disguised as a murder suspect heading off to prison.”

My penultimate advice: Eschew depending on Mace until you can find a roll-on dispenser. And always, always remember: What can go wrong will go wrong.

My ultimate advice: First, adopt my scheme fully and completely. Do not pamper yourself by avoiding that unpleasant first step of telling the fuzz that you drowned your wife. It is essential to get the cops in the properly adversarial mood. Second, take very seriously the enclosed sheet listing my charges and send the required poundage of used $20 bills via United Parcel Service, Federal Express, or some other private delivery system which will not involve the U.S. Postal Service. It has become as unreliable as Mace dispensers, airlines, and laboratory tests, and there’s no reason to involve the federal authorities in our business affairs.

I recommend prompt—indeed instant—payment of my bill. What’s the hurry? As I read that first letter of yours soliciting my help in this felonious effort, I noticed the paper seemed a bit more fragile than one would expect. It was brittle. Faintly and unevenly discolored. Prematurely aged. Something was amiss. I rushed it to my Xerox machine (which happened to be working) and made several clear copies, taking care that the final page and your signature were perfectly legible. I did the same with your equally incriminating second letter. Now, almost as you had planned, both of the original letters have crumbled away in my filing cabinet to something resembling ash. But I have plenty of copies for the police, if you carry out the plan but neglect to pay, or for your wife if your nerve fails you.

It was a clever idea, treating those letters with acid. But for once, the postman was prompt.

What could go wrong did go wrong.

SIR,

Your letter astonished me. Your wife is still breathing.

I am at a loss to understand why.

I expected my payment, the check for a million dollars. To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I am enraged. I am foaming at the mouth. I handed you a masterpiece—the Jellyfish in the Jacuzzi—and what have you done with it? Recognized it for the beautiful thing it is and secured its place of honor in the Pantheon of Crime? No, you have left it to gather dust, neglected, disregarded. Worse, you have betrayed my genius. You have passed on my perfect plot to a bunch of mystery writers.

I hear that Lawrence Block’s next book is to be entitled
The Burglar Who Pilfered Jellyfish.
Donald E. Westlake is at this moment tapping out the last paragraph of
Dortmunder and the Big Sting.
Sarah Caudwell (a slower writer) is trying to devise a first sentence involving a whirlpool and the law. And Tony Hillerman claims to have been told by a medicine man that Navajo sand paintings are based on a jellyfish motif—which, of course, will decorate the jacket of his forthcoming book,
Hidden Stings.

Each of them will be hearing from my lawyers.

As for you, sir, I would cheerfully dump you in your Jacuzzi and sling in one of your giant crabs. You don’t
deserve
my brilliant help. You actually embarked on my plan. As I suggested, you obtained the duplicates of Boylan’s keys. Nice work. And there was more. By good fortune, you are a fisherman (I should have divined it from your self-glorifying) and you took the necessary steps to publicize your devotion to the sport. Clearly, you took up the piscatorial joking with relish. The crabs were a happy embellishment of my idea. I’m willing to bet you got some media coverage. The plot was in top gear, racing to its destination.

Then you dropped it, diverted by Mr. Hillerman’s mushrooms.
Mushrooms.
I ask you! Where’s the alliteration?
Murder with Mushrooms
^?
How commonplace. Forty years ago, the man who founded the Crime Writers’ Association, of which I am currently chairman, the late John Creasey, wrote a novel with precisely that title, but Creasey was the first to admit that he didn’t have time to lavish on brilliant titles; he published over 500. As I thought I explained in my first letter, if you truly aspire to immortality, your method of murder must be reducible to some vivid, unforgettable phrase.
The Brides in the Bath,
or, with a neat, postmodern refinement,
The Jellyfish in the Jacuzzi.

You express some partiality for the word
Amanita.
True, the term has a certain rarefied charm, but it will never gain common currency, never bring you the posthumous fame that Mr. Hillerman promises. Beware of Tony Hillerman. He’s too kindhearted. He hasn’t told you the truth—that you’re a megalomaniac, in my phrase; a patina’d under-achiever, in Mr. Westlake’s; and an ineffectual toy husband, in Mr. Block’s. And if Tony hasn’t been frank about your personality defects, how can you trust his recipe for murder?

It is, after all, a tasteless dish, almost as revolting as Mr. Block’s, of which more anon. It involves the murder of at least eighteen hapless gourmet customers of the Yummie Yuppie Deli. This number, Mr. Hillerman blithely suggests, could be higher. Isn’t that what you Americans succinctly describe as overkill? We mystery writers were commissioned to suggest a way of killing your wife, not most of your neighbors as well. I do object to slaughter on this scale; some of the victims could be buyers of my books.

However, I bow to the brilliance of Mr. Hillerman’s concept of bluffing the investigators by admitting to murder. It’s a delightful twist. If he had devised a way of poisoning your wife without poisoning half of America at the same time, I would be willing to give it a grudging nod. The problem is that the police will be interested to know how everyone else died—how the poisonous mushrooms got into the display at the Yummie Yuppie Deli. They do have seventeen other homicides to account for. I would expect them to question every customer and store assistant that day, seeking descriptions of everyone who passed through the shop. Even if you were not spotted adding the poisonous fungi to the display, you must have been seen making the other purchases, to acquire the sales slip that you later smuggled into Blazes’ pocket. It’s a local shop. You’re known there.

You’ve blown it.

Forget it.

Since I mentioned Mr. Lawrence Block’s prescription, I’d better dispose of it. I find his method almost as profligate as Tony Hillerman’s, and much more messy. All those women, innocent except for a willingness to go to bed with you, murdered and mutilated? It’s overkill with trimmings, if you’ll excuse the double entendre. Four killings, he suggests, to establish Blazes as a serial murderer. That may not be random slaughter on the Hillerman scale, but it’s still expensive in human lives (four more bookstore customers, I keep thinking). And the ghoulish collecting of souvenirs demands the callousness of a true psychopath. I don’t really think of you as a psychopath, though I may have tossed in the word in passing.

Let’s be generous. The Lawrence Block method has a Grand Guignol quality that might just get you a footnote in the history of crime. It has the blood and guts; what it lacks is the poetry. Without wishing to labor my theme, how can it be encapsulated in a few unforgettable words? Why are Jack the Ripper’s crimes remembered a century later? Not because of the ripping, as Mr. Block would have you believe. No, it’s the brilliance of the name. Jack the Ripper. Inspired. We are told by those who make a study of Jack’s horrible killings—Ripperologists, they term themselves—that three letters, and only three, of the thousands sent to the police and press in 1888 are thought to have been penned by the murderer. They contain knowledge of the crimes that no one else could have acquired. The one sent on 25 September, 1888, was the first to use the title Jack the Ripper. Before that, the killer was known to the press as Leather Apron. How banal! A second Jack the Ripper letter was posted on 30 September. The third, enclosing a section of kidney from the latest victim, was unsigned, but gave the murderer’s address as “From Hell.” Brilliant! Jack the Ripper was a pure-born crime writer, no question. If someone had awarded him a Gold Dagger or an Edgar after he sent this first letter, the other victims would have been spared.

So you’d better think of a pithy, evocative name if you want to be remembered as a serial killer. There are too many in the trade these days. The Boston Strangler. The Yorkshire Ripper. The Zodiac Killer. They try their best.

On a more practical point, I have the gravest doubts whether you or anyone could commit four murders and decapitations without leaving some trace of yourself that would conflict with the planted evidence. Forensic teams are pretty good at picking up disregarded hairs and fragments of skin tissue. And DNA analysis is improving all the time.

I don’t see you as a latter-day Ripper.

Sorry.

Let’s turn to Miss Caudwell’s Caledonian extravaganza. It has plenty to commend it: the tartans, the jewels, the flattering glow of candlelight, and the icy glitter of the skene-dhu. Here, I thought, when I started Sarah’s letter, is a winning formula. We Brits have a precious asset: our history is irresistible to you Americans. By staging the murder in Scotland, she not only gives it a sense of occasion, she helps the British tourist industry. Edinburgh during the festival. The castle atop its granite outcrop; Princes Street; the Scott Memorial; Holyrood Palace. What a setting!

Before you book the flights, take a second look at the scenario. Is it to be played out on the castle battlements to the mournful skirl of a lone piper? Or in the Palace of Holyrood, where Mary, Queen of Scots, resided, and where her unfortunate secretary, Rizzio, was dragged from her presence and dispatched with fifty-seven dagger thrusts? Is it to be staged on the doorstep of 11 Picardy Place, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born?

No, it takes place in a hotel room.

Oh, what anticlimax! At bottom, stripped of its tartan accessories, the scene of the murder selected by Miss Caudwell is as dreary as Mr. Block’s or Mr. Westlake’s—a room with a number, and adjacent bathroom, and electric kettle, and an abstract print on the wall. You’ve flown three thousand miles to Room 1507 in the Edinburgh Holiday Inn.

Moreover, it’s messy. Not so messy as Mr. Block’s series of murders, but bloody nevertheless. A stabbing isn’t clean, like a jellyfish in a Jacuzzi. Some immediate laundering of your shirt cuffs may be necessary, Miss Caudwell cautions. She has kitted you in full Scottish costume, with plaid cloak, jacket, white shirt, cravat, sporran, kilt, socks, and shoes. You’re unaccustomed to it. Dressed as you are, like Bonnie Prince Charlie, can you carry out a clean stabbing, move the body to the bed, secrete the tape recorder in the folds of her dress, without getting blood on your clothes? And then in the short time before suspicion is aroused by the length of your absence, can you wash off any stains with cold water, examine yourself in the mirror, return to your guests, and mingle unconcernedly? With your plaid cloak tight around you to cover the stains, you’re going to cut a faintly ridiculous figure in a centrally heated hotel.

Thumbs down, reluctantly, to the Scottish play.

Which leaves you with the Westlake solution, or mine. Donald E. Westlake has devised a plot that I am bound to admit is brilliant. I am bound to admit it because to an amazing degree Mr. Westlake’s method overlaps my own. If I didn’t know for a fact that he types his deathless prose on a thirty-year-old Smith Corona portable, I’d believe that Westlake had hacked his way into my computer. Just examine the evidence.

Having delivered his masterly analysis of your personality defects, and, with total conviction, named Blazes Boylan as your real intended victim, Mr. Westlake outlines his plot:

1. You take up an outdoor sport and encourage Blazes to join you. In Westlake’s scenario, it is shooting; in mine, fishing.
   
2. You contrive to obtain an imprint of the key to Room 1507 at the inn. Westlake has Plans A, B and C; mine is another variant, but the object is the same.
   
3. To establish your alibi on the day of the killing, you take a flight to another locality, and then make a secret, unscheduled flight back, returning secretly after the murder. The plots are identical in this strategem.
   

Remarkable, isn’t it? Was it a case of great minds thinking alike? Or does Don Westlake have a spy working for him? Or am I becoming paranoid?

The rest of his plot is a letdown. I mean, it will probably work—the stuff in Room 1507 with the gun in the gloved hand and the Mace—but where’s the Art that makes it the perfect masterpiece? The ornamentation, the proper sense of the grotesque that is the hallmark of the baroque? As you, sir, remarked in the brief you gave us, perfect murders are easy. What you required of us was “not the perfect murder, but the perfect masterpiece … a crime so beautiful in construction and so ingenious in practice that it aspires to the condition of art… baroque in concept and rich in detail.” It’s another squalid killing in a hotel room. God knows, I’ve tried to be generous to my fellow professionals, picking out the finer points in their scenarios, but I can’t in all conscience recommend you to follow their advice. Two of the plots, in my opinion, are colorful, but dangerous; you won’t get away with them. The other two are intriguing in buildup, but disappointing in execution.