The Perfect Murder (16 page)

Review it now. Consider the weapons we propose. Tony Hillerman’s toxic mushrooms, Larry Block’s knife, Sarah Caudwell’s skene-dhu, and Don Westlake’s gun. Then consider
Chironex fleckeri,
my poisonous jellyfish. Is there any contest?

Compare the buildup to each killing. The visit to Dr. Dottage, the swift work in the deli, and
The ABC Murders
open on Boylan’s pillow. The decapitations and the distributing of pubic hairs. The trip to Scotland, the partygoing, and the substitution of the daggers. The resurrection of Minor DeMortis, the shooting lessons, and the casing of Room 1507.

Now consider the buildup I gave you: the shark at the front door, the house filled with fishtanks, the whale on the roof, and the Chocolate Binge. These are concepts that elevate murder into a new postmodern era. We’re into surrealism here. Can you imagine any cop capable of understanding it?

The last, crucial element is the killing. I devised a means of dispatch that is bizarre, unique, baroque, but safe. You’ll be 150 miles away when the lady dies. No need to drag the poisoned body to the bathroom; or slice bits off before Blazes arrives on the scene; or do a Lady Macbeth washing the spots from your hands; or shoot one of the lovers and spray the other. The jellyfish takes care of it. And the shock value of the killing is so much better.

I have almost finished. My analysis is complete. The case for the sea wasp is overwhelming. But I have to state that I trust you not at all. Your second letter confirms you as a ditherer, infirm of purpose. I have a stomach-churning suspicion that you’ll try to work out some shallow compromise from all the conflicting advice we have delivered.

Don’t.

I am tormented by a vision. You are dressed in Scottish costume—having acquired a false identity as the drunken Nobel Prize-winner, Weldon McWeinie—your sporran stuffed with pubic hairs and mushrooms, a can of Mace in one hand, an automatic in the other, and you are circling confusedly around the rim of your Jacuzzi, in which are ugly little bits of the bodies of your reviled wife and Blazes Boylan and Georgia and Ben and a couple of detectives and the famous giant crabs of Japan.

Stand firm. No compromise. It’s all or nothing, and it has to be the Jellyfish in the Jacuzzi. To quote Lady Macbeth once more, screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail. And kindly mail me my check by return.

MY DEAR TIM,

I begin to have misgivings. I open my newspaper with increasing apprehension. Any day now I shall read of a series of women who have been found in their baths apparently stung to death by jellyfish, but discovered, upon closer examination, to have succumbed to mushroom poisoning. Soon after that it will be reported that another such incident has occurred in Edinburgh, at a time when the husband of the victim claims to have been in the company of a mysterious woman named Diana.

No, Tim, this really will not do. You are, I appreciate, a novice in the art of murder, and display both the virtues and the failings of that condition: If one is touched by your enthusiasm, one should not reflect too harshly on the un-discernment which is, I suppose, its inevitable concomitant. Let me remind you again, however, that you have expressed the ambition to be not merely a murderer but an artist. If you are to succeed, you must resist the temptation to cram willy-nilly into your intended masterpiece everything which momentarily catches your fancy, without reflecting on its relationship with the other elements in your work and its place in the overall scheme.

You must learn to select—not only to reject bad ideas, but also to discard good ideas if they do not assist your final purpose. The Parthenon and St. Paul’s Cathedral are both very beautiful buildings, but putting the dome of St. Paul’s on top of the Parthenon would not produce a still more beautiful one. You must learn, above all, not to overdo things.

My distinguished colleagues, in their answers to your first communication, have already been somewhat severe in their censure, and are unlikely, I fear, to be less so in replying to your second. I am reluctant to distress you by adding to their reproaches—like you, I dislike causing pain; but my conscience does not permit me to say that they are unjustified.

It is Mr. Westlake, I dare say, who will feel that he has the most cause to be vexed with you. He will point out, I imagine, that he has devised for you, at considerable personal sacrifice—he might have used it for his own next novel—a plan of great beauty and artistic elegance, and that you, by your rash and self-indulgent action, have rendered it entirely useless. Against this accusation it is impossible to defend you.

Let us consider, in case you have failed to appreciate it, wherein lies the artistic beauty of Mr. Westlake’s plan. We begin with a simple, commonplace problem: a man is about to commit a murder and requires a witness to provide him with an alibi. One solution would be for him to bribe a complete outsider—someone not in any other way involved in the situation giving rise to the murder—to give false evidence on his behalf. This solution, as you will see, has little or no artistic merit: a truthful or apparently truthful account of it would have, at best, the interest of a good piece of journalism.

One of the most serious defects is that it offends the artistic principle of economy: the introduction of a character for the sole purpose of supplying an alibi, with no other part to play in the story, is wasteful and slovenly, and thus repugnant to Art. We might try to remedy this by making the witness someone who has some further role in the drama— the woman, let us say, not straining to avoid the obvious, on whose account our hero wishes to rid himself of his wife. Well, that is better from the point of view of economy; but the eventual disclosure that the lady is lying is hardly calculated, in such circumstances, to produce a thrill of astonishment.

We still lack, in short, a peripeteia—that complete reversal of the situation which Aristotle tells us is essential to a truly dramatic plot structure. We might therefore further modify our solution by concealing the relationship between the witness and our hero and making her someone who would be expected to be indifferent or hostile to him—let us say, for example, his inspector of taxes. We begin now to have the makings of an artistically satisfying plot.

Consider, however, the superiority of Mr. Westlake’s proposal to even this much improved situation. It provides the alibi without making addition to the minimum cast of characters necessary for a murder—the murderer and the victim: it is the very quintessence of economy. Moreover, it deceives the audience (that is to say the outside observer) not merely as to the motives and attributes of a character in the drama but as to the character’s very existence: the way is thus prepared for a magnificent peripeteia when the truth is finally revealed.

And what have you done? Despite Mr. Westlake’s careful and detailed advice, and for no better reason, so far as I can see, than that you thought it would be amusing, you have created an alter ego who is a woman. Have you still not realized that this is fatal to any chance of success?

Yes, fatal.

The artistic brilliance of Mr. Westlake’s plan should not blind us to the fact that from the practical point of view it is—how shall I put it?—just a trifle on the chancy side. There is Blazes Boylan, sitting in his cell, knowing that he saw you commit murder and that therefore your alibi must be false, and presumably saying so, vociferously and often, to the police, his lawyers, and the press. If, despite this, none of them feels that the alibi witness should be questioned a little more closely, it can only be because he seems to be a person with no imaginable motive for telling lies on your behalf. Do you really think, in that context, that a boring middle-aged businessman can safely be replaced by an attractive young woman in $500 shoes?

If you survive unscathed the indignation of Mr. Westlake, I can see little hope of your escaping the wrath of Mr. Lovesey. Indeed, unless he happens to find in his thesaurus some even more irresistible term of abuse than
slubberdegullion,
I seriously question whether Mr. Lovesey will bring himself to reply at all to your most recent letter. If he does, I suspect that it will be only in the hope of securing payment of the large sums of money which he apparently expects to receive from you.

I am referring, I need hardly to say, to the incident of the giant crabs.

To begin with the least important, that is to say the practical aspect of the matter: What steps have you taken to ensure that responsibility for the crabs will ultimately be attributed to Blazes Boylan? None, so far as I can see, though Mr. Lovesey made it clear in his letter that the inculpation of Boylan was a vital element of all the practical jokes in the apparent campaign against you.

Even taking the optimistic view—namely that you are right in believing your “fixer” to be genuinely unaware of your identity—this episode has achieved nothing more useful than a brief frisson of somewhat meretricious excitement. I myself am unable to take the optimistic view: a man of that calling does not omit the elementary precaution of finding out the names and addresses of his customers, and if they prove to be involved in any serious criminal activity he sings, as the expression is, like a canary.

Such willful and wanton incompetence is almost beyond belief—I am half tempted to hope that you have omitted something in your account of this transaction. But alas—I know you now too well to think it likely that you have been reticent about your achievements. Those of my colleagues who are versed in psychology may perhaps suggest that there is some deeper explanation than mere carelessness: such a pride in your exploit that your subconscious could not endure the thought of its being attributed to Boylan. This, if they are right, portends ill for your larger enterprise.

I do not wish to duplicate what Mr. Lovesey may already have said to you, doubtless in more bitter and eloquent terms. I must point out, however, since his habitual modesty will perhaps prevent him from doing so, that quite apart from its practical consequences your escapade has entirely wrecked the fine artistic structure of the plan which he devised for you. The central feature of his original conception was a series of incidents developing in a graceful progression from the mischievous to the homicidal—an effect, please understand, not to be achieved by mere accident, or without the exercise of care and judgment. What place is there, in this charming and elegant sequence, for your outsized crustaceans?

In my opinion, none—though, since you had evidently set your heart on them, one might have agreed to their being inserted between the dead shark and the plastic whale. It would not have been right, but it would have been no worse a concession than other artists have made to the taste of their patrons. As an initial incident, however, they are completely inadmissible. It is clear—or should be so to anyone with the slightest sense of proportion or climax—that the scene with the shark, not only delightful in itself but also an indispensable signal to the theme and motive of the sequence as a whole, must come at the beginning. To put it after the scene with the crabs reduces it to anticlimax, and the entire design is ruined. As I have said, I do not want to be harsh—but this is sheer vandalism.

At least you seem to have done nothing as yet to compromise the admirable plan proposed by Mr. Hillerman. I am assuming, of course—in view of the rest of your performance, I may be being unduly optimistic—that your newfound learning on the subject of mushrooms was not acquired by simply waltzing into your local library and borrowing, wholesale and in your own name, every volume on poisonous fungi to be found on the shelves.

With your usual rapid grasp of the inessentials, you regard the mushrooms as the most important element of Mr. Hillerman’s plan. In fact they are a merely incidental feature, though admittedly an attractive one. For once I am able to agree with you—the historical and mystical associations are extremely pleasing. You will find particular pleasure, no doubt, in remembering that they were used for a similar purpose by the Emperor Nero—a young man, as you will recall, who also enjoyed dressing up in women’s clothes and was always anxious for recognition of his talents as an artist. (Though it was his mother, Agrippina, if my memory serves me, whom he dispatched by this particular method—his wife he disposed of by less sophisticated means.)

The essential feature of Mr. Hillerman’s plan, however, is the creation of a structure which reveals you at the outset as the murderer, then conclusively shows that you are not the murderer, and finally reveals, to the astonishment of the audience, that you are the murderer after all. (By “your audience” I mean, if all goes well, the readers of your posthumously published memoirs; if ill, of course, the police.) This is a structure of dazzling audacity and brilliance, and if you can bring it off it will be without question a very considerable artistic achievement.

And yet, while I am reluctant to discourage you from an enterprise of such artistic quality, it is perhaps my duty to repeat at this point my earlier warning to you—that between Life and Art there are certain significant differences. One of these is that in a play or a novel the dramatis personae can generally be relied on to behave in character—their existence depends on it. In life it is otherwise.

Mr. Hillerman’s plan relies on a skillful and ingenious use of character—the propensity of policemen to disbelieve what they are told—to bring about the natural and convincing development of events toward the intended climax. From the artistic point of view, this is admirable; but suppose that in real life the investigating officer does not behave in character?

Suppose that he is idle, or incompetent, or in love with his wife and anxious to get home, and has no desire to question the obvious explanation? Suppose that the rather inexperienced doctor who conducts the autopsy—the more senior ones being fully occupied with the mushroom poisonings—does not notice, or is embarrassed to point out, the inconsistencies between your account and the medical evidence? Suppose that the time for your trial draws closer, and your lawyer is negotiating with the prosecution for a reduction in your sentence (say from twenty-five years to twenty) to reflect your candor and remorse for your crime, and still no one has raised the possibility that your confession should not be taken at face value—what will Mr. Hillerman advise you to do then? When, of course, the one thing you certainly cannot do is suggest to anyone that the evidence should be re-examined.