The Perfect Murder (17 page)

Should you decide, having reflected on this possibility, that the high artistic rewards he offers you are nonetheless not quite worth that particular risk, I shall not take it on myself to blame you. The choice you are left with, in that case, will be between Mr. Block’s solution and my own.

Mr. Block’s solution I would rule out on artistic grounds—that is to say, as being both morally and aesthetically repulsive. I need make, I think, no apology to Mr. Block for saying so, since he himself has been at pains to tell you that murder is not and cannot be artistic, being of its very nature an act of monstrous brutality. Perhaps implicitly rebuking those of us who would allow you to believe otherwise, who let you imagine murder as an affair of elegance and artifice, of rubies and champagne, he has offered you a solution designed to demonstrate that murder is a sordid and disgusting business—not at all the thing to be chattered about over cocktails, still less read about during lunch.

His purpose, it would seem at first sight, is to concentrate your mind on the grim realities of murder, and thus to discourage you from committing it: if so, then plainly his position is morally impeccable. And yet, if that is indeed his purpose, how curiously he goes about it. He begins by suggesting that you do not mean what you say—that you really have no serious intention of harming either your wife or your friend. This conclusion, however, does not give him the satisfaction one might expect—he does not congratulate you on being a better man than you have led us to suppose. On the contrary, he contemptuously derides you for being indecisive and ineffectual—for being, he seems to be saying, not man enough to kill anyone.

One somehow begins, despite the urbanity of Mr. Block’s literary style, to hear echoes of the school playground—of one small boy daring another, with taunts of “sissy” and “Mummy’s boy,” to pull some little girl’s pigtails or tie a can to the tail of the school cat. And as he guides you down the unpleasant paths of butchery and mutilation, pointing out their horrors with the zeal of a puritan conscientiously measuring every inch of flesh on display in the strip club, his tone still somehow seems always to imply that to contemplate them without flinching will be a proof of your manhood and a passport to his regard.

Your other advisors, it is true, have done little to draw your attention to the nastier aspects of murder: you may even perhaps have begun to suspect that we are really not very much interested in killing people, but rather in the art of ingenious deception. Have we, by our omission of the disagreeable details, encouraged you to believe that murder is a seemly and acceptable pastime?

I should not like to think so, nor indeed do I. I draw comfort from the reflection that in England in the 1920s and ’30s, when the genteel murder mystery was at the height of its popularity, there appears to have been no corresponding increase in the level of homicide. Members of the peerage were able to spend quite long periods in their libraries without being stabbed by any of their relatives; a number of tea parties took place at which the vicar refrained from putting arsenic in the cucumber sandwiches; and remarkably few of the butlers employed in country houses considered it proper to enliven the weekend by shooting one or two of the guests.

It is possible, I suppose, that Mr. Block’s solution to your problem will appeal to you more than the others which have been proposed. It may be that your wish to murder your wife has nothing to do with her individual qualities or with the specific difficulties of your relationship—that what you really want is to kill not a particular woman, but any woman, indeed if it were possible every woman, and that your wife is merely the nearest available representative of the sex you detest. If that is the case, then Mr. Block’s solution, offering a virtually infinite series of indistinguishable victims for slaughter and decapitation, will no doubt attract you—if not as a practical plan of action then as an agreeable fantasy for the beguilement of your hours of idleness.

But in that event I must ask you, I fear, to excuse me from communicating further with you on this or any other matter: since I am a woman I must presume myself to be included among the objects of your detestation, and I should not, in those circumstances, feel able to maintain, even at a distance, that minimum semblance of amiability which is required for civilized discourse.

You will say, perhaps, that I am making too much of the matter. To imagine the pleasures of killing me and cutting me up in bits is not, you will say, a sign of any particular ill will toward me, you intend no unkindness by it—it is murder in jest, mutilation in jest, no offense in the world— and surely I am not so unsportsmanlike as to take it personally? But I do, Tim, I do—I take it damned personally, and in devilish bad part.

But forgive me—I have no evidence for imputing to you such a motive as I have mentioned: the fantasy is Mr. Block’s, not yours. Should he offer further admonishment on the state of your psyche, bid him look first to his own. Assuming, as I trust I may, that his solution is as repugnant to you as it is to me, mine is the only one left. I take this opportunity to enclose a copy of the program for the next Edinburgh Festival, and remain yours as sincerely as ever.

It’s all right. I forgive you.

But I must say I was furious with you for a while there. Your second letter had me snarling and snapping and ready to break all my furniture into kindling And, I must admit, it was largely my own fault. You made things nixonially clear in your initial correspondence. “Dear friends,” you began. Somehow my eye missed the letter
S
. Somehow my
amour-propre
led me to assume, not that I was your only friend, but that I was the sole person to be consulted about the particular problem at hand. You had sketched out a problem. I proposed, rather skillfully I must say, a solution. You would either put the solution into practice or (as I rather expected) acknowledge its brilliance while admitting your own psychic incapacity to carry it out. I was prepared to find either response gratifying.

Then your second communication reached me. “Dear friends,” it began. The first sentence made certain that I took note of the plural: “Frankly I was shocked by the five letters I received…”

Shocked, were you? No more than I was by the news that you had consulted four other admittedly lesser talents for help. I could see your going to them after having received my reply. Aware that you lacked the strength of character to follow the plan I’d sketched out, you might explore other alternatives before giving the thing up altogether. Or, for that matter, I could understand your having made the rounds of my four colleagues
before
coming to me; when their advice proved worthless, you would then have come to the person whose counsel you should have sought in the first place.

But to have gone to us all at the same time! I can only suppose you thought it more efficient that way, like the young woman who slept with nine men in the hope of having a baby in a month. I was frankly infuriated, with you and with myself. How could you have had the effrontery to ask me to enter some sort of sweepstakes, preparing an elaborate (and damned sensible) plan for homicide and tossing it into a fishbowl, hoping my proposal might be drawn as the winning entry?

Has he no idea, I thundered, how long I have occupied a preeminent position in my field? Has he no sense of my stature in my profession? Does the bugger think I write on spec?

Doesn’t he know who I am?

Ah, ego, ego. If it’s conscience that makes cowards of us all, surely it’s ego that makes of us buffoons. Still, one must not be too quick to denigrate the ego. It is, after all, the only thing that separates us from the saints.

But I digress.

If I was mad at you, think how furious I was with myself.

How could I have missed the obvious implication of your first letter? Rereading it, I wondered at my own narrowness of vision. It was abundantly clear that you were seeking assistance from several of us, and I don’t know how I failed to spot it right away.

It’s just as well. Had I known, I would have tossed your initial missive in the round file, along with the offers of cut-price luggage and magazine subscriptions. You would have had to choose your murder method from the contributions of Mr. Westlake, Mr. Lovesey, Mr. Hillerman, and Ms. Caudwell. It’s an ill wind and all that, and in this instance I should think all the good would be blown to your wife, who might reasonably expect to live on into her second century.

My first impulse, I must admit, was to toss out their contributions unread. I have for years been doing just that with their novels, which their publishers persist in sending me in the hope of eliciting promotional blurbs. A word from me, evidently, goes a long way in establishing a lesser writer’s reputation, and I’m continuously besieged with galleys from hopeful editors. I have thus long since formed my opinion of the work of Westlake, Lovesey, Hillerman, and Caudwell, and could well imagine what sort of murder they would lay out for you.

Westlake would enlist the aid of some bumbling criminals, and he’d have all of them try to kill your wife, and they’d all fail, until she died laughing. Lovesey would have her slain in the ring by a bare-knuckled pugilist. Hillerman would dress you up in a feather headdress and have you make a sand painting, calling down the Great Spirit to crush your wife to death in a buffalo stampede. And Caudwell would shuttle you between Lincoln’s Inn and the Isles of Greece, in the company of people named Ragweed and Catnip.

It was with this attitude that I sat down with their manuscripts and read them in turn. And, I have to say, I was greatly surprised. All four of these worthies attained a level of logic and clarity, and indeed of imagination and creativity, which I have never observed in their fiction. Perhaps they missed their true calling, perhaps they ought years ago to have taken a different direction vocationally, perhaps they might even now be writing marketing programs for major corporations. That’s by the way; they’re all of them too long in the tooth for new careers, and one can only hope the ingenuity and resourcefulness they’ve displayed in the present undertaking will someday find its way into their novels.

I read the manuscripts in the order you yourself received and read them. First was Westlake’s.

Impressive!

Oh, his response was a little slow getting off the ground, with all of that tedious instruction in the art of setting up a false identity. I would hardly think the process needs so much in the way of spelling out, given the considerable amount of media attention the topic has drawn in recent years, including a segment some time ago on “60 Minutes.” Such a wealth of unnecessary detail suggests that Westlake has not forgotten his days writing for two cents a word, where nothing was told in a sentence that could be stretched to a paragraph. Perhaps those days are not so far behind him.

Still, once Minor DeMortis had been called into existence, Westlake’s scheme had much to recommend it. The nicest touch, certainly, lay in the fact that your false friend Blazes would know exactly who had dropped him in the shit, and how. You shoot your wife, you hand him the gun, and there he is, holding the murder weapon, his hand full of nitrite particles, with the corpse stretched out beside him.

Then, while Blazes tries to explain, you manage the neat turn of providing your own alibi. This is all very Westlakean, isn’t it? One envisions a stage farce, with the hero emerging from one door even as another is slamming behind him, now wearing a wig, now wearing an eye patch, now tall, now short. The DeMortis persona, seen only by police and strangers in another city, will not draw that intense a glance. It is, Westlake argues, a deception that can be successfully maintained.

I wonder. The same policemen will have questioned you and your alter ego DeMortis on the same evening. Even if we assume that you are a master of disguise, even if you can vary your facial expression and the pitch of your voice, are you prepared to stake your life, your wife’s fortune, and your sacred honor on the premise that not one of those cops will smell a rat in sheep’s clothing? It might work, I’ll allow that much, but you in turn must allow that it leaves a lot to chance.

So too does the scheduling. The cops question you. You will spend the night, you tell them, and return home in the morning. Meanwhile, they may establish your alibi by consulting with your friend DeMortis.

Off they go, looking for DeMortis. And off you go, looking to
be
DeMortis.

Fine, but where’s the margin for error? “Come with us and help us find DeMortis,” they say. And how, pray tell, do you handle that?

For the sake of argument, I’m willing to assume that it does all get handled, that the unlikely deception fools everyone, and that your alibi stands up. It will ultimately fall apart, however, not in the light of police investigation but in that of the private investigation which your friend Blazes will commission.

If Westlake’s strength is that Blazes knows who framed him, there too is Westlake’s weakness. Armed with this knowledge, Blazes will know who to attack. He will unquestionably engage a team of detectives, who will know that your alibi has to be false. They will accordingly go looking for Minor DeMortis, and either they will not find him or they will readily pierce his diguise.

Then they will begin to pick your alibi apart. They will go to the restaurant where you had your sumptuous post-murder dinner. They will interview the captain, the waiter, the busboy. They will examine the check and the charge slip. They will conclude that you dined alone.

They will fall on you like a ton of bricks. Even Westlake, himself a few bricks shy of a load, can scarcely claim otherwise.

And it has to happen this way. Blazes has to attack your alibi. Once attacked, it has to fall apart. It is a Potemkin village, all false front. Peer at it for an instant from other than the intended angle and it ceases utterly to deceive. I’ll tell you something. It’s just as well. Because, for all its ingenuity, for all the slick superficiality which is so characteristic of Westlake’s work, it lacks one of your requirements. You wanted a murder which would make the world stop and take notice. This one would lead the world to shrug and turn its attention elsewhere.