The Perfect Murder (20 page)

They will eat you alive.

So perhaps you’ll turn to Mr. Block’s option. If so, it means you haven’t been reading with sufficient attention till now, and should go back to the beginning and study my words more heedfully. I’ll wait,
friend.
I have all the time you’ll need.

Yes, now you understand. My objection to Mr. Hillerman’s essay into mass murder holds equally true of the grisly swath Mr. Block would have you cut. In fact, I object even more strenuously to Mr. Block’s prescription, as being not merely kitsch but sordid kitsch. It is true, I admit, that the victims Mr. Block has chosen for you are less likely to raise the kind of hue and cry I suggested might ensue in a landscape littered with poisoned yuppies, but surely that isn’t the only consideration.

Art is the ennobling of the human experience, the concordance of our species’ dreams, fears, ambitions, histories. Squalor without pity is no more than squalor; barren soil for the nurturing of art. At least Mr. Hillerman’s broad strokes cut down a band of worthies, folk whose untimely cutting-off contains within it the potential for tragedy, or irony, or
some
component of art. But all these Baggies full of pubic hair, all these assignations with fallen drabs!

Really, sir, your history, your tastes, your current lifestyle, all suggest not the slightest hint of
nostalgie de la boue.
(Yes, of course, I’ve found you, despite your pseudonyms, your indirect methods of sending and receiving correspondence. This is the sort of expertise you expected me to have, isn’t it? The sort that led you to me in the first place, the sort that for some reason seems to have encouraged you to insult and denigrate me until now I must… Well, never mind, we’ll get to that. The point at this moment is that I have been observing you for some little time, have learned your habits and the round of your days, have studied you when you thought you were alone… Now, for instance. And I know the Block design—freezers full of fingers, noses nesting in ice cube trays,
really!
—is not for you.)

Not that it’s a method without attraction, without its uses for someone of a more adamantine cast. It is true that the police, being in general not overeducated, possess a mystic awe of science in all its forms, and particularly forensic science. Give the “lab boys” something to do and the coppers will stand about with their mouths hanging open, and then will go arrest whomever the physical evidence points at; usually to find the case lost a year later, when the jury, unable to understand the expert witnesses, and reacting in normal human fashion to aggravated irritation and boredom, finds the perp Not Guilty.

So there is potential value in Mr. Block’s mad method, but what he has given you is an off-the-rack solution, while what you need is something tailor-made. Yes. You need someone like me, who knows you and has found where you live and has any number of ideas precisely tailored to suit no one but you. You, my
friend.

But what about Mr. Lovesey? He does share Mr. Block’s obsession with human hair, but in a slightly more discreet fashion, so the hair fetish in this instance need not cause us as much concern from an artistic point of view. The stage significant consideration in your mind is that the plan you choose must be at the highest possible level of artistic accomplishment. Here, sir, I offer you neither coincidence nor pubic hair, neither exotic flora nor exotic fauna, no voyages into dangerously unknown terrain, nothing but a graceful arc of invention, employing guile
plus
audacity, talent
plus
technology.

You yourself have described my plan as containing “brazenness,” and is that not a hallmark of true art? Art is transformation, my
friend,
and transformation does not exist without brazenness, and willingness to rise above the pedestrian rules and enter the pure realm where the rules have not yet been formalized, where
you
are the rule-bringer, where you are the explorer and the exploration, the artist and the work of art.

For all these reasons, you should choose my plan. But now let me tell you, let me make it perfectly clear to you—do stop squirming in that chair, nothing’s going to happen to you now—why you
must
choose it.

The fact is, the thousand abrasions of your excessively abrasive personality I have borne as best I could, but when you ventured upon insult you went too far. I cannot look myself in the mirror ever again, if I let you live. You know now that I know you; who you are, where you are, the habits of your life. You know I have the ingenuity to do you in without the slightest suspicion ever turned in my direction, and I assure you I have the impetus as well. (Forcing me to look up
deipnosophy
is,
by itself,
reason enough.)

But shall I be content to snuff you without having first seen you act out the magnificent plan I have offered? Of course not. So long as I can see that you are moving forward with
my
scheme for doing away with your wife, I shall stay my hand. If, however, I see you take one step toward those jerry-built lesser options, believe me, your end is nigh. Alternatively, if it becomes clear to me you aren’t ever going to do for your wife at all, I shall not long remain either patient or bored, I assure you.

So let us assume that, in quite appropriate fear for your life, having been given this additional and even more compelling motive to kill your wife and frame Blazes Boylan, you proceed at a measured—but not too measured—pace, perform the act, escape the clutches of the law, and watch Blazes hustled screaming into the waiting patrol car. What then? Shall I dispatch you in the very moment of your triumph, with Blazes’ caterwauling still echoing so pleasantly in your ear?

Of course not. As I pointed out some time earlier, I am a gentleman. I would never be so unsportsmanlike, not even to you. I would leave you to savor your triumph, for some period of time.

Our triumph, I should say. Our triumph, for I shall be savoring it as well. I have before this seen my work in print. I have seen it performed on the stage. I have seen it expressed in film. Now I shall see it on the largest canvas of all, with you my brush. I can expect to feel the afterglow of that moment for quite some time, during which all I will do in your regard is keep an eye on you. I wouldn’t want you scampering out of sight, now, would I, like a mouse from some distracted cat? No, no, you shall not get away from
me.

Eventually, though, memory must fade, pleasure must begin to pall. The moment of triumph will have been experienced to the full. It will be time to move to endgame.

As Mr. Block suggests, this sort of thing could become seductive, even habit-forming. Not your problem, that; you won’t be forming any new habits, I don’t believe, apart from a tendency to look over your shoulder. Not in the time left you.

Let me assure you
, friend,
nothing in your life will have suited you like the leaving of it. I intend a much more spectacular finish for you than the one we are providing your wife. You shall be
my
work of art, solo, even more brazen, even more ingenious, even more foolproof than the one I have handed you.

You wanted to be a party to the finest example of the perfect murder, murder as a work of art, and so you shall be. Not, perhaps, playing the role you’d hoped for, but how important is that? You will be there, an integral element in the tapestry, an irreplaceable part. Surely you can take pleasure in that thought.

And think of the prospect ahead of you! Months, perhaps even a year or two, engaged magnificently in the most dangerous game. Your final months spiced with danger and accomplishment. And then the finish, at the service of the art you so love. And afterward,
your name
immortally linked to the most gorgeous, the most creative, the most extravagant, the
most perfect
murder of all time!

Why, it’s almost enviable.

I’ll be seeing you.

DEAR FRIENDS
(and you, too, Mr. Westlake),

Let me see if I have this straight. Half the members of the loftiest pantheon of the Mystery Writers Guild are skulking about in their libraries trying to figure out how to cast me in one of their upcoming novels, preferably as the corpse. Among some circles, somewhere, I am certain this is an honor. Now what I’ve got is this: Mr. Westlake is stamping about my garden bed, taking flight to my high hedges whenever a shadow darkens one of my windows. Is that a cutlass you have in your hand, or a Toledo, or a stiletto, possibly a tomahawk? What is the theme of this denouement? Maybe it’s a truncheon or some knuckleduster? A musketoon or a blowgun? A grenade? Or perhaps that is a cup of some Balinese poison you are sloshing about my posies? Be careful, Mr. Westlake: you will no doubt be bumping into Mr. Block in one of his furies, grinding his teeth and tormenting his own entrails, dragging his poleax. Perhaps the two of you can keep company with Messrs. Lovesey and Hillerman en route to an afternoon of hounding my accountant. Ms. Caudwell, no doubt in a mood as bitter as the others, has dressed it up as a kindness—so British—in the form of an invitation to Edinburgh. I suspect that the liveried servants are just now folding down the comforter in my reserved suite at the Bobby Burns Bed ’n’ Breakfast, and I am certain that my name has been entered onto the rolls for tomorrow’s caber toss. I see her there now, dressed in tartan and tam, squeezing out the baggie’s skirl—the famed hospitality of the Scepter’d Isle. Yet somehow I recollect something about the ankle hose of that notorious costume, somewhere near the shoe, a secret sheath of some kind, near the garter flash, for a poniard?

I hesitate to write back for fear that I might drive any of you over the edge—although judging from the mild contempt in which I am held compared to the Olympian loathing each of you directs to the others, I suggest that Mr. Westlake leave off advising me on the condition of my shoulder and scrutinize his own. Lawrence Block lives!

But I do delight in all the preening and swaggering. I am reminded of a story told me by one of the Maddens of Lexington, Kentucky. Keeping up the family tradition, he had trained several thoroughbreds that had won the Derby and the Preakness. Thoroughbreds, whether filly or stallion, are notoriously temperamental. No one, no trainer, no jockey, no one can simply take them to the track and demand that they run. They must be worked up to it, I am told. My friend said that it is best to feed thoroughbreds all alone in a closed stall—so that their equine solipsism may sustain the necessary fiction that he or she is the only horse on earth eating such rare and fine oats, and that the rest of the species might very well be starving to death while this one luxuriates with a snout plunged deep into the feedbag. On race day, the top doors of the stalls are flung open, and all the thoroughbreds are fed together in full view of one another, so that each might feel the dreadful sting of equality. Alas, is there a greater torture? But, my, how they run, each drawing on its own bile, chafing at the noseband and the throatlatch to best the others—although perhaps all the work is simply a vain attempt to flee the painful company of peers. My friend always insisted that he felt a perverse euphoria when he flung open those top doors on race day. I now know this happiness.

My race has produced quite a winner’s circle. I have five nearly flawless possibilities, each ornamented in detail as rugged as the Baggie of pubic hair, as excessive as the
Chironex fleckeri,
as complex as a fully created alter ego, as arcane as the skene-dhu, or as psychological as an outright admission of guilt. Each solution stands on its own as a work of art, worthy of an amateur’s marveling whether carried out or not. I should like to award each of you the white ribbon and a hearty thank-you-very-much, although someone must get the blue ribbon—but I get ahead of myself.

As an artist, as
the
artist, I cannot tell you how happy I am with your solutions, your
work.
I am even happy as an employer. I only bring up my state by way of contrast to my even greater bliss at the outcome of what might be called the second heat. I am not just talking about the savagery of the prose in the second letters. (I once thought the infamous theater critic for the
New York Times
could be brutal. He is a mere Mr. Rogers in print compared to any of you in a good mood.) But, if we may or may not have succeeded on breathing life into the corpse of murder-as-art (that depends on me now), we have done something even better, something that practically safeguards the original purpose. We have created the equivalent of murder’s literary criticism and begun the hard work of establishing a basic aesthetics. I imagine Ph.D. candidates sometime ages and ages hence (you’d better hope) deconstructing these texts to uncover the rudiments of our sensibility.

And I think one does emerge. I was struck at how coherent the critiques were, how consistent. Each of you was taken to task by the others for relying too much, in some way, on serendipity—whether it was Lovesey and his plane schedules, Caudwell’s tape recorder, Westlake and his pistol club, Hillerman’s dogged and suspicious detective, or Block’s false trail of micro-evidence. There must be, always, a degree of the ineffable in a great murder. I think we establish this as the sine qua non of any artful murder, the mere coming together of it all. The simple belief that it will work. Scores painted cathedrals in the Renaissance. But one can imagine only Michelangelo on his scaffolding—no doubt cringing from time to time that his monstrous plan, his arrogant epic, might end up looking like a garish throng of polychromatic peasants, from the distant perspective of the floor, seemingly cross-eyed and lumpen, dewlaps flapping—but believing in the mere chance of his idea, that one image would fit with another, and that the whole would constitute the greatest painting in the world. Modern scientists call this fitting together
contingency
—the importance of fortuitous concatenations. I am told that it is the origin, according to Oriental philosophers and mystical poets, of Buddha’s serene smile.

One, I think, simply has to believe that it will work—that the planes will leave on time that day, that the damned cassette recorder will click on when the button is pressed, that Blazes will join the club on cue, that the detective will sense a contradiction in the neat confession, and that the tiny evidence when magnified by forensic technology will appear to be a milewide swath leading to Blazes. One could make a case that the aesthetics of murder are the aesthetics of contingency—the beauty of luck. It is only fitting that an art form that aspires to such high ideals must raise itself above the aesthetics of craft associated with other pursuits. Who wants an art whose beauty is under the complete control of the artist? Who could care for a beauty that would undoubtedly be atomized and sifted into categories of technique and become the subject of soporific seminars at the annual PMLA meeting? Rather, let us have an aesthetics built upon the exacting hand of the artist and the palsied hand of fate, upon talent and faith. I like it.