I, Richard

Introduction to The Surprise of His Life

The inspiration for this story came from a double homicide that caught my attention in the early 1990s. It received a great deal of publicity at the time and although the defendant was found not guilty of the charges, I spent a lot of time considering his potential for guilt and how, if indeed he committed the crime, the killing might have come about. Here's what I concluded:

Although there were two victims of that crime-a young man and a slightly older woman-it seemed to me that the wife was the target.

The husband was an obsessive man estranged from his wife. His life was dominated by thoughts of her, specifically with thoughts of how she had left him and, in leaving him, how she had humiliated him. He was a minor celebrity. In his mind, she was nothing. Yet she walked out on him and, to make matters worse, she no longer gave any indication that things might work out eventually between them. She'd initially said she wanted a cooling-off period because their relationship was so volatile. He'd agreed to that. But now she was talking about divorce and the d-word made him feel like a fool. Not only would he probably lose his kids-they had two of them, a boy and a girl-but a divorce was going to cost him a bucket and she didn't deserve a dime of what he had.

Thoughts like these began swarming in his mind until every hour of every day was torture for the husband. Only when he slept was he free from the wife and from her plans to take his kids, take his money, and no doubt hook up with some young stud… all at his expense. But even then, at night, the husband dreamed about her. And the thoughts during the day and the dreams at night were driving him so crazy, he thought he'd die if he couldn't do something about them.

It seemed to him that the only way to wipe her out of his mind was to kill her. She deserved it anyway. He'd always watched how she came on to men. She'd probably been unfaithful to him a dozen times already. She was a lousy wife and a lousy mother and he'd be doing his kids a favor at the same time as he'd be wiping her out of his mind if he just got rid of her.

So he laid his plans.

He and the wife lived no great distance apart. If he got his timing down to the second, he could zip over to her house, kill her, and be back at his own place…all within about fifteen minutes. Maybe less. But he knew that the cops would want him to account for every second on the night his wife was murdered, so he decided to set things up for a night when he had a flight to catch to another part of the country. To make things look even tighter, he'd phone a limousine to take him to the airport. Who the heck, he thought, would ever figure that a killer would off his wife barely a half hour before a limo was picking him up?

The question of the weapon was a tricky one. He couldn't use a gun for obvious reasons: It was a crowded neighborhood and one gunshot would have everyone out in the street wondering what was going on. He couldn't shoot her inside her house, either, because their children would be upstairs in bed and the last thing he wanted was to have them wake up and come running down to find their dad standing over their mother's body with a smoking gun. There was always a garrote, but that allowed her to be able to fight him off. So, no. He needed something quick like a gun but silent like a garrote, and a knife seemed like the only answer.

So on the night in question, he dressed in black. So as not to leave any forensic evidence behind, he wore gloves on his hands and a knitted cap on his head. He was a big man-tall, hefty, muscular, and strong-and she was small. If everything went according to plan, he'd have her out of the way in less than a minute and then he'd be free of her at last.

He went to her house, a townhouse which was set back from the street behind a wall. He knocked on the door. She had a dog, but the dog knew him and shouldn't be a problem.

Oddly enough, she opened the door to his knock instead of asking who it was the way she normally did. But that also was of no account. He asked her if she'd just step outside so they could talk for a minute without waking up the kids.

I'm heading out in an hour, he told her. I wanted to talk to you about…

What? His decision to go ahead and not contest the divorce? The settlement she wanted? One or both of their children?

It doesn't matter because whatever he asked to talk to her about was what got her to step outside the house. And when she did that, he was upon her so quickly that she never knew what hit her. He spun her around, plunged the knife into her neck, and he slashed it across her throat with a power that came from the fury he felt toward her: because she wouldn't get out of his mind, because she was going to take his children, because she was going to rob him blind, just because.

It was over in an instant. He lowered her dead and bloody body to the ground and turned to leave… just as the gate opened and a young man entered.

He was on a friendly errand: simply returning a pair of sunglasses to their owner. He was on his way home from work and the last thing he expected to see was the husband with a knife in his hand and his wife's mutilated body on the ground before him.

The young man's first reaction was to draw a breath in shock. He said, What the-but he had time for no more. The husband leapt upon him with the knife in his hand, slashing and stabbing.

There was no noise. This was not a Hollywood movie where men fight for their lives to the accompaniment of sound effects and music. This was real. And in a real fight, there is only silence broken by grunts or groans, neither of which are audible behind a wall.

During the fight, the husband lost the knitted hat he had on. He lost one of the gloves. He was covered with blood and his own knife had cut him on the hand. But he prevailed. The young man died, his only crime being helpful.

The husband now had a problem on his hands, though. Valuable time had been lost in the second killing. He couldn't stop to find the hat and the glove. He also had to get home, throw his clothes into the washer, get into the shower, and get out to that limousine.

This was what he did, losing the second glove in his haste.

As for the knife, that was not a problem. He put it in his golf bag which he was taking with him on his trip. The golf bag might have been X-rayed at the airport with the baggage set to go into the hold of the jet. But among the golf clubs, it would hardly be noticed and even if it was, it didn't constitute an explosive so it would hardly be remarked upon.

When he arrived at his destination, his plan was simple to execute. He dressed in sweats and went out for an early-morning run. He took the knife with him and disposed of it somewhere along the route.

Within a scant few hours, he would be notified of his wife's murder. But he had his alibi and even if that didn't hold up, he had plenty of money to hire lawyers to get him out of whatever mess that kid with the sunglasses caused him.

When I considered that crime and the husband's potential for guilt, it triggered within me the idea for the short story that follows. In it, a husband begins obsessing about his young wife's faithlessness… with unexpected results.