The Perfect Murder (3 page)

Is the public ready for the cold honesty you and I demand of them? I think so. This is the end of the Age of Freud, an era obsessed with revelation and candor. Throughout our society we continually see those who have laid bare uncomfortable realities to an audience that roars kudos and tosses bouquets of roses. In our time, we have seen yesterday’s perverts become today’s sex therapists. They confess (and in such wicked detail!) their particular quirks and kinks in bestselling “self-help books.” The dominatrix of old probably has her own talk show today and dispenses her techniques like some fly fisherman on public television. Only a few decades ago, we disguised the foulest passions of the human heart with the polite vocabulary promoted by Amy Vanderbilt. Today, all etiquette is dead. We are told it is better to spew our bile
honestly
—to tell, however cruel, the bitter truth to those we love—than to suppress it. Our politicians confess their various maladies—alcoholism, gambling, malfeasance—in the space of a television commercial, and are hailed as statesmen for it. Everyone is coming clean. I saw on the Phil Donahue show the other day that the Satanists have abandoned their dark covens and joined the United Council of Churches. Is the public ready for candor from the likes of me? My friends, they are howling for it.

Murder is ready, then. An old art form is reborn. You and I stand poised at the border; ready, in the words of De Quincey, “to graze the brink of horror.” Let us seize the aesthetics of this new art and mold them in our fashion. We shall be the Bloomsbury Group of murder, a founding generation who will shape the postmodern killing. We shall strip the world of its last language of euphemism and set it free to contemplate and enjoy the world’s finest art form. You shall be seen as its authors and I shall be your Stephen Dedalus. We shall make Joyce’s greatest words come true again: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” And you will be my father and my mother. You, my artificers! Stand me now and ever in good stead!

DEAR FRIEND,

I have received your recent letter, and I have thought long and seriously about it, and this is my response. What your story demonstrates initially is that it is never too late to begin acting sensibly. You yourself will, I think, admit that your choices till now have been less than satisfactory. Let us begin by recapping the erroneous steps that have led you to this impasse; an impasse at which, happily, you seem at least to have delved deep within yourself to tap some previously unsuspected lode of wit and make the
right
move for a change, by turning to experts for their guidance and counsel. Would you install your own plumbing? Take out your own adenoids? Prepare your own tax return? Park your own car at a better restaurant? Of course not. In the very nick of time, at the ultimate brink of fate, you have suddenly realized what we all must sooner or later acknowledge: You need help.

What were the unsound measures that led you to your current predicament? I would begin with the fine education you somehow received, though you describe your background as “common” and seem to have had no money till you married. This fact suggests a native intelligence you only sporadically demonstrate in the potted history you have provided. Either you got your education through the winning of a scholarship, or you struck the fancy of some benefactor; both possibilities require the possession of a nimble wit.

But, having attained an education far superior to that which destiny might seem to have intended for you—hark back if you will to the educational histories of your childhood chums—what did you do with the opportunity? Very little. Did you prepare yourself to cut a swath through any of the arts or professions? Not at all. You seem to have been content to use the advantages thrust upon you merely to give yourself a pleasing veneer of culture and civilization. In brief, my friend, you sold yourself short. Given native ability, plus opportunity, you did no more than prepare yourself to be a rich woman’s lap dog. And now, constricted by the role you freely chose for yourself, you come whining to
me
to pull you from the mire.

Very well, very well, reproofs are idle at this point. It is not my intention, in fact, to rub your nose in your own inadequacies, since you were intelligent enough to note them for yourself and to ask for aid; though rather late in the day. But it is important that you have a clear view of your own proclivities and impedimenta, if you are to rise above them and succeed at
something
at last.

So. To go on with the descending path of your career, you say you studied at one time to be a doctor, but that you failed to complete those studies, and so today have only a smattering of medical knowledge. This, I take it, would be a part of that education you so fortunately came by, and is further indication that you either squandered the scholarship you’d won or betrayed your benefactor’s benevolence. Here is an early suggestion that, though capable of thinking in terms of long-range gains and goals, when put to the test you lack the stamina, initiative, elan, self-confidence, call it what you will, for the long haul. (A not insignificant fact, given the project you now contemplate, and on the behalf of which you have come to me.)

Having proved yourself a dilettante by the time you’d finished the educational process, it is clear that you then made small or no efforts to secure your future through your own talents and accomplishments, but looked about for someone to marry who could support you in the style to which you longed to become accustomed. (It is this fact which tends me to favor the benefactor theory in re your education, as opposed to an earned scholarship. I see, perhaps, an unworldly widow, or a lonely homosexual music teacher of a certain age.)

But even in choosing the path of least resistance, you somehow seem to lack the capacity to follow through. You married a rich woman. Clearly, the bargain, whether stated or tacit, was this: You would be her husband. She would give you access to her wealth. But did you keep the bargain, once it was agreed to? You and your wife not only don’t share a bed, or a bedroom, you don’t even share a
floor.
She sleeps on the third, you on the second. You will probably claim it was her wish to arrange your private accommodations that way, but even if that’s true, how strongly did you try to persuade her out of it? Weren’t you secretly pleased at the opportunity thus provided-to distance yourself from your wife, from, to be blunt, your shame of
not
living up to your end of the bargain? Surely it is your attitude toward the woman, as well as any defects in her (which would have been known to you prior to the wedding, when they weighed so much less than her bank balance), which led her to Blazes Boylan and the current situation.

So here you are, a patina’d underachiever in chafing bondage to a contemptuous rich wife. Your thoughts, rationally enough, turn to murder. Fortunately for yourself, to judge by your own hesitant plans (as hinted at in your letter), you decided to seek expert counsel before undertaking the project.

Oh? Did you think I wouldn’t notice as you hinted at your own solutions to the problem, dropping them in slyly, as though innocently, in the hope (doomed, I’m afraid) of professional praise? Think about it; if I were obtuse, you wouldn’t have come to me.

What were those suggestions you offered so coyly? Well, there was the “pharmacological solution,” to use your term, by which of course you meant poison. My dear sir,
you studied to be a doctor!
Don’t you think the police will investigate your background? They will, I assure you, and do so much more exhaustively, I may say, than you have offered it up to inspection in your letter to me. If the police are presented with a woman dead by poisoning, whose husband had once studied to be a doctor, they will not for a second be duped or distracted, not by all the false trails and false alibis in the world. Your cleverness, plus mine, plus as much more cleverness as you can bring into play from other sources, will all be wasted against the blunt wall of their conviction. And yours; for murder.

Let me emphasize a point I know you know, but believe you perhaps do not really believe. When a married woman is murdered, the police
always
concentrate their attention on the husband. The only exception I know is the case where the actual murderer is found at the scene of the crime in flagrante delicto, and even then, you may be sure the police will not fail to satisfy themselves that the husband didn’t instigate the matter.

Police suspicion is to be diverted from the husband only with the greatest difficulty, even in the simplest and cleanest of situations.
Add
the slightest detail to their preexisting suspicion, and it will not be diverted at all. If you were an airline pilot, you should not bomb your wife; if a carpenter, not tap her with a hammer; if a magician, not saw her in half; if an editor, not cut her to pieces. And if you once upon a time studied to be a doctor, leave the poison on the shelf. I hope I make myself clear.

And what is another of your hints, another of your plans in embryo? You are very obviously, my dear chap, toying with the idea of taking into your confidence the chauffeur whose professional services you share with your wife, but whose “sympathies,” to quote you, you suspect to tend in your direction.

What? Take an
employee
into your confidence? Place yourself at the very real risk of exposure or blackmail on the basis of the calculated “sympathy” of a fellow whose main thoughts when in converse with you must be of his job security and his Christmas bonus? In his driving of you or your wife on your separate errands, won’t the both of you from time to time have engaged him in conversation? And won’t he, the sensible servant I presume him to be (because the very rich can afford sensible servants, and quite often absolutely need them), express “sympathetic” reactions to you both? And on the basis of this pecuniary bonhomie you would risk your success, your freedom, and your future? By Harry, sir, you came to me just in time.

Again, in emphasizing the access you hold to “enormous sums of money” (you aren’t a drug dealer, are you?), plus your availability for travel and/or research, you would appear to be suggesting an even more broadly based and highly populated scheme. A conspiracy, in fact, of the sort that James Bond tends to stumble over. Did you think to lay her low by laser? For a man in your position, the obvious display of wealth expended in the commission of a crime—furnishing the laboratory within the volcanic island’s mountain, purchase of the submarine, all those armed and uniformed minions carried as “seasonal labor” on the corporate books—would be as bright red a flag to the police as the use of poison by a husband who had studied to be a doctor. Except for the small expenditures that would be possible to the common pocket—enough rope, for instance—keep your wealth as well on its shelf.

So much for your own schemes. Now, on to other elements of your letter. I notice you made only the barest of references to your two sisters-in-law, who, having been done out of their natural inheritance by your wife (would Lear be the family name, by any chance?), would be the second most obvious suspects to the police after your own self. Here, it would seem, awaits a ready-made diversion to dazzle the police mind; two attractive and hard-nosed upper-crust women, infuriating to the Columbo in every workaday cop, who could with only the most minimal effort be tailored to suit your crime. (I base my description of them on your description of them. Your comment that their disinheritance “forced” them to the same “cruel” fate as your own; i.e., “to marry money rather than make it.” This gloss on your own history gives you rather too much of the benefit of the doubt, but never mind, never mind. In re your sisters-in-law, they would not have been disinherited were they not even more odious than your wife. Were they not attractive and hard-nosed and elitist, they would have been unlikely to succeed in the rather formidable task of marrying money. I detect something Gaboresque here, and we already know how a policeman and a Gabor are likely to affect one another.)

But you are uninterested in implicating a sister-in-law to dispatch a wife. Why? It is possible that you have for reasons of security or embarrassment neglected to mention an
affaire de coeur
with one of the sisters which would make her an inappropriate foil for your
affaire d’intérêt,
but I somehow doubt it. You already know what hell these Lear-Gabors mean for you; your next sentimental conjunction is likely to be a hell of quite a different stripe; an antifur activist, for instance, or an ex-nun. (Here I have revealed one reason for my own concentration on your problem; I fully expect repeat business.)

But I get ahead of your story. The issue at this moment is, Why not frame a sister-in-law? Easy, convenient, obvious, and pleasing to the police mind. The reason would appear to be only that your hatred of Blazes Boylan is so intense that you are determined that
he
will take your place in the dock (and on the seat over the cyanide capsule, too, if your state is one of those which still indulges
itself
in murder). He, and no other.

You detest Blazes, in fact, much more than you do your wife. Her you will be content to dispatch to a better world at a stroke; you don’t even much care if she shuffles off this mortal coil painlessly, like an ultimate visit to the dentist. Blazes you wish to harm, to mortify and to punish, as deeply as possible and for as long a time as possible. And why is that?

I suggest envy. Your “best friend” Blazes was born to a silver spoon, you to a McDonald’s plastic stirrer. You have caught up with him, in some ways, but plainly you still feel inferior. You must pretend to be a businessman, but isn’t your position a mere sinecure, purchased with your wife’s money? Whereas Blazes, born to wealth, then went on to make “a considerable fortune,” as you say, on his own. You belong to the same club, but do you, while within its ivied walls,
feel
that you belong? As much as Blazes does? Do you find yourself, at your tailor, modeling your appearance on his, and then are you privately humiliated and shamed at such apery? Was your automobile purchased either in imitation of his or in reaction to it (which is the same thing)? Do you find yourself just a bit inhibited in speech in his presence, both in your choice of subject matter and in your choice of words? Has he always been an exemplar to you, and have you always resented him for it?