A Perfect Crime

10

Think.

A penny drops from the Empire State Building. Someone in China pushes a button.

Think.

Think, Roger told himself, sitting in his basement office, of murder most antiseptic. He went over his list, now committed to memory. Accidents-mechanical, house hold, while on vacation; poison; contract killer; arson; dis ease; bombing. All wrong, for one reason or another. Think. All thinking boiled down to two procedures, rearranging the pieces on the board and inventing new ones. What were the pieces? Motive, means, opportunity; evidence, suspects, alibis. A complexity of permutation and combination, orbiting this central problem: if a wife is murdered, the husband is the first suspect and remains so until ruled out with certainty. That was what made murder disguised as something else-accident or disease, for example-so attractive. The murderer would be left with nothing to do but mourn, and he could do so without anxiety, no crime being suspected.

To mourn: Roger knew exactly what suit he would wear to the funeral, a black wool-and-cashmere blend from Brooks Brothers, bought years before. Did it still fit? He went to the closet, tried it on, checked himself in the mirror. Perfect. Still wearing the suit, he returned to the computer. Roger entered none of his thoughts on it, just felt better being near it when there was thinking to do.

A penny. A Chinese penny. Rearrange the pieces: husband, wife, lover, cottage, painting. Was he missing something? Yes: killer. Husband, wife, lover, cottage, painting, killer. Six pieces, four human, two objects. Deep in his brain, Roger felt a slight tectonic shift. These were promising numbers, might be made to work, and this was in all likelihood a fundamentally mathematical problem, as most problems were.

Item six: killer. Almost from the beginning, he had rejected the idea of a contract killer, automatically forcing item six, killer, into congruence with item one, husband. Had he been too hasty? At first he couldn’t see why. A contract killer had power over the contractor. Before-the-fact power: what if the contract killer was also an informer, for example, or decided to become one in order to extricate himself from some past or pending legal difficulty the contractor knew nothing about? The contractor thus sets up himself. And after-the-fact power: supposing everything follows plan but sometime in the future the contract killer decides he wants more money or is arrested on some other charge, say another murder, and starts casting about desperately for a deal? The contractor is thus dealt.

But was this flaw so basic that the contract killer idea must be abandoned? The flaw, thought Roger, start by isolating the flaw. Trust, it was a matter of trust. The contract killer could not be trusted. But trust was a factor only in honest relationships. Rearrange the pieces. In a dishonest relationship, dishonest now from the contractor’s point of view as well as the subcontractor’s-yes, that was the proper term, subcontractor; getting the terms right was half the battle-trust was irrelevant. Deep in his brain, he felt a further shift.

What followed from that? His fingers shifted to the keyboard. The urge to make a list was overwhelming. Roger gave in to it, but with great care. No computer, of course, with its memories so hard to erase completely, possessed, like humans, of a kind of subconscious, but pencil and a single sheet of paper, torn from the pad so no impression could be left on the page beneath. Under the heading Dealing with subcontractor, he wrote:

1. The contractor is Mr. X. In this scenario, the subcontractor does not know the contractor. Either he is (a) working for a middleman, (b) thinks he is working for someone else, or (c) does not know whom he is working for.

A was out. It merely transferred the flaw of the subcontracting method to someone else. B was intriguing. Who could this someone else be? Supposing, as one had to, that the crime was “solved”; then the subcontractor would be arrested, and would eventually lead the police to the person he thought he was working for. This person, this false contractor, would therefore be required to have a plausible motive of his own, or the police would keep looking. Rearrange the pieces. Some artist, perhaps, some disappointed artist, one of those scruffy, half-mad types she so often dealt with, is finally rejected once too often? Why not? Roger foresaw procedural difficulties but couldn’t see a mistake in the theory, so didn’t rule out the artist at once.

Who else would have a motive? The lover’s wife, if indeed he had one. Roger toyed with a wild idea of finding this wife, seducing her. What triumph that would be! But not to the purpose. The wife had a motive-enough. He disciplined his mind, running a line through A, circling B, and ran his eyes down to C.

C: does not know whom he is working for. That would mean the subcontractor never meets, talks to, or has written communication with the contractor; ideally does not even suspect the existence of the contractor. The implication: he believes that the crime originates in his own mind!

Oh, this was wonderful, to work so hard, to drive his mind through all these difficulties like an icebreaker. Ice. Roger thought at once of Brenda’s cottage, and then of cubes floating in a tumbler of Scotch. Perhaps one little snort would help him think even better. He went upstairs to the kitchen, saw through the barred oval window on the landing that it was day.

And there at the table sipping coffee with a faraway look in her eye sat Francie, wearing a robe. Roger composed his face into friendly upturned patterns-that was essential from now on-and said, “Morning, Francie. Not working today? I thought you were feeling better.”

“It’s Saturday, Roger.”

“So it is.” He checked the clock: 9:45, perhaps too early for a drink. He poured himself a cup of coffee instead.

“But you look like you’re going somewhere,” Francie said.

“I do?”

“Somewhere dressy,” she said. “Or a funeral.”

Roger glanced down, saw with dismay that he was still wearing his black Brooks Brothers suit. And just as sloppily, he’d left his list on the desk in the basement office. Suppose she’d been in the laundry room, not the kitchen, and wandered in while he was upstairs? “The fact is,” said Roger, “I was going to ask you out to lunch.”

“With the godfather?”

He made himself laugh, that strange barking sound. But how could it be a normal laugh when he had no desire to take her to lunch at all? And to think how recently he had tried to get into her bed! It suddenly hit him, after the fact, and perhaps harder for that reason, what her state of mind must have been that night. He laughed again, needing some outlet for the hot surge inside him, and said, “That’s a good one, Francie-your reference being to the suit again, I take it.”

Francie gave him an odd look. Well, it might be odd, you slut, you whore. He kept his eyes from veering toward the block of knives on the counter.

“Did you say something?” he said, vaguely aware that she had.

“I said I won’t be able to make lunch today, but thanks.”

“Otherwise engaged?”

“The tournament,” Francie said. “Second round.”

He had forgotten that she had indeed been at the tennis club last night, had not lied about that; he sensed gaps in his knowledge, gaps that might undermine his thinking, thinking being no substitute for research. “You won?”

Francie nodded.

“And celebrated long into the night?”

“If you call one whole beer a celebration,” Francie said.

He could have killed her easily, right then. “Who’s your partner?” he heard himself ask.

“You wouldn’t know her.”

He busied himself with cream and sugar, mastered his emotions. “Don’t be so sure. I’ve traveled widely in tennis circles, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Her name’s Anne Franklin.”

“I knew Bud Franklin-played for Dartmouth. Is she married to Bud?”

“I haven’t met her husband.”

“Is he in real estate? Bud went into real estate.”

“I don’t remember what he does. But it wasn’t real estate.”

C. Back downstairs, Roger had trouble bringing his mind to bear on the problem. How he regretted that night in her bedroom. How hobbled he was by his breeding, education, background. Any bricklayer or welder would have punched wifey in the mouth and raped her on the spot, restoring order. On the other hand, he suddenly thought, what if she was now the carrier of some disease? Maybe he’d been lucky after all.

C. He began to focus. C: does not know whom he is working for. Ah, yes. This concerned the subcontractor never communicating with the contractor, ideally not even suspecting his existence. The subcontractor believes the crime originates in his own mind. An elegant concept, but did it have any practical application?

How could there be no communication between contractor and subcontractor? Even a map sent in the mail, or an anonymous call from a phone booth, constituted communication and therefore carried risk. Roger spent an hour on this problem, by the clock, dwelling on hypnosis, confessionals, memory-altering drugs, and other fancies, without finding a viable way of hiding the contractor from the sub. Therefore he must abandon C or approach it from a different angle.

A different angle. What was the essence of the idea? Was it the noncommunication of contractor and sub? No. Another tectonic shift, this time a big one. No. The essence of the idea was the subcontractor’s belief that the crime originated in his own mind.

Yes.

Roger gazed into the computer, seeing not what was on its screen, the Puzzle Club, but an image of Francie lying dead, the sub standing over her, the police bursting in. Caught in the act and with a guilty mind: nice.

Nice, but in the next instant, Roger had an idea so brilliant, so glittering that it took his breath away. Indeed, for a few moments he couldn’t breathe, put his hand to his chest, felt his heart racing, thought he was about to die right there and then, at the worst possible moment, as if Columbus’s heart had burst at the first sight of land.

Roger’s heart did not burst. Its beat slowed, not quite to normal, but out of the danger zone, and he recovered his breath. Then, too excited to sit, he rose and paced back and forth in the basement office, contemplating his revelation. Francie lies dead, the sub standing over her, yes, but is it the police who come bursting in? No. It is the husband.

The husband: with no record of violence in his past, no criminal record of any kind. But even if he had such a record, would any prosecutor try him for what would happen next, any jury convict? No. The husband, in his rage, in his grief, in a red blackout, could take his vengeance with impunity. He would be a hero. And therefore, to bring C to its conclusion, whatever thoughts the subcontractor had about the arrangement did not matter in the end because he would not live to reveal them.

IQ 181, and possibly that had been an off day. Roger laughed at this joke, not a bark but long, gut-busting hilarity, tears rolling down his face.

The door opened: Francie, folded warm-up suit and other tennis clothes in her hands. He froze.

“Are you all right, Roger?” she said.

“Fine, fine,” he said, animating his body. “Just… something funny on the Internet.”

“Like what?” Francie said, turning to the computer. Roger stepped between them-his list lay by the keyboard-but casually, he made sure of that.

“Oh, it’s gone now, gone into space.”

“What was it?”

“A… a play on words. About ataxia. The more ataxic the state the higher the taxes. That kind of thing.”

“I don’t get it. What’s ataxia?”

“Just a word, Francie, just a word.” He rocked back and forth, beaming down at her. “Maybe not that funny after all. Maybe I’m simply in a good mood.”

She took another look at the computer, another at him, left the room. Soon after he heard the garage door open and close.

Theoretical phase complete. Now to find the sub. Roger thought right away of the man whose name had come up during the Puzzle Club discussion on capital punishment. He didn’t remember all the details of the crime, and the story, related by Rimsky, the prison guard, had been garbled in the telling, interrupted by on-line idiots, and would now indeed have disappeared into space, but the name came to him at once. Perhaps it had lain deep in his mind the whole time, steadying his thoughts like a keel.

All problems were fundamentally mathematical, their solutions wonderfully satisfying: an incoherent sea of data reduced to a simple equation.

Chinese penny = Whitey Truax.

Roger held a match to his list and dropped the flaming paper in the wastebasket.