“Oh, Nero,” she said, with affection in her voice.
I remembered that she had cats of her own and asked her, “Who’s looking after your cats?” As soon as I said it, I realized that it was a very personal question. It also sounded as though I was trying to figure out if she was single. I wondered if she thought I was hitting on her. I wasn’t a whole lot older than she was—ten years maybe—although I did know that my hair, prematurely white, made me look a little older.
“They’re fine,” she said, avoiding the question. “They have each other.”
I continued to eat, and she glanced at her phone, then put it facedown back on the table.
“I do have to ask you where you were the night of September thirteenth, the night that Elaine Johnson died.”
“Of course,” I said. “What night was it?”
“It was the thirteenth.”
“No, the day of the week.”
“Let me check.” She picked her phone back up, scrolled for ten seconds, then said, “It was a Saturday night.”
“I was away,” I said. “In London.” I take the same vacation every year, two weeks in London, usually at the beginning of September. It’s low tourist season because the kids are back in school, but the weather is usually still good. Plus, it’s an okay time to be away from the store.
“Do you know the exact dates you were away?” she asked.
“If the thirteenth was Saturday then I flew back the next day, on Sunday, the fourteenth. I can send you the flights I was on, if you’d like. I know it was basically the first two weeks in September.”
“Okay, thanks,” she said, which I took to mean that she wanted me to send her my exact flights.
“If Elaine Johnson was killed by Charlie …” I said.
“Yes?”
“Then it makes it much more likely that Charlie is definitely using my list.”
“Yes, it does. And it means that he not only knows who you are, but that he knows people around you. I’m assuming it can’t be a coincidence that one of the victims is someone you knew personally.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Is there anyone who has a grudge against you, maybe an ex-employee, someone who might have known that Elaine Johnson was a regular at Old Devils?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “There aren’t that many ex-employees from the store, actually. I only need two extra people, and the two I have now have both been with me for over two years.”
“Can you tell me their names?” she said, pulling a notebook out from her bag.
I gave her Emily’s and Brandon’s full names and she wrote them down.
“What can you tell me about them?” she said.
I told her what I knew. It wasn’t much. Emily Barsamian had graduated from Winslow College, outside of Boston, about four years ago, and gotten an internship at the Boston Athenæum, a prestigious and historic independent library. She’d supplemented her income by coming to work at Old Devils for twenty hours a week. When the internship was finished, she upped her hours and had been with me ever since. I knew hardly anything about her personal life because she rarely talked, and when she did, it was only about books, or sometimes movies. I suspected that she was a secret writer but hadn’t confirmed it. Brandon Weeks was my gregarious employee. He still lived with his mom and his sisters in Roxbury, and both Emily and I probably knew everything about him, certainly everything about his family, and about his current girlfriend. When I’d hired him, as extra help during the holiday season two years ago, I admit that I had doubts about whether he’d show up with any kind of regularity. But he stayed on, and as far as I remembered, had never missed a single day or even been late.
“And that’s it?” Agent Mulvey asked.
“For current employees? Yes. I go in every day, myself. And when I go on vacation, either we hire a temp, or Brian, my co-owner, comes in and does a few shifts. If you want, I’ll put together a list of past employees and send it to you.”
“Brian is Brian Murray?” she said.
“Yes, you know him?”
“I saw his name on your website. I’ve heard of him, yes.”
Brian is a semifamous writer who lives in the South End, and who writes the Ellis Fitzgerald series. He’s easily up to about twenty-five books by now; they don’t sell as well as they used to, but Brian writes them anyway, keeping his female detective Ellis at a perpetual thirty-five years old, and keeping both fashion and technology advancements out of his narratives. The books are set sometime in late ’80s Boston, as was the TV series called Ellis that ran for two years and provided Brian with the town house he bought in the South End, his lake house in the far north of Maine, and enough extra money to invest in Old Devils.
“Include other people on your list, if you think of them. Pissed-off customers? Any exes of yours we should know about?”
“It’s going to be a short list,” I said. “My only ex is my wife, and she’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, but it was clear from her expression she already had that information.
“And I’ll keep thinking about the books on the list.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Don’t hold back. Let me know any thoughts you have, even if they seem insignificant or unlikely. It can’t hurt.”
“Okay,” I said, folding my napkin and putting it over the uneaten portion of my breakfast. “Are you checking out, or are you staying here?”
“Checking out,” she said. “Unless for some reason the train is canceled, then I guess I’ll spend one more night here. But I’m not leaving right now. You haven’t told me if you looked at the unsolved crimes I gave you last night.”
I told her that none of them had jumped out at me, except for possibly Daniel Gonzalez, the man who’d been shot while jogging.
“How does it relate to your list?” she asked.
“It probably doesn’t, but it made me think of the Donna Tartt book, The Secret History. In that book the killers wait for their victim at a place they think he might be hiking.”
“I read that book, in college,” she said.
“So you remember?”
“Sort of. I thought they killed someone doing a sex ritual in the woods.”
“That’s the first murder; they kill a farmer. The second murder is the one I reference in the list. They push their friend off a cliff.”
“Daniel Gonzalez was shot.”
“I know. It’s a long shot. It has more to do with the fact that he was out walking his dog. Maybe it’s a walk he does every day, or once a week. It probably has nothing to do—”
“No, it’s helpful. I’ll look into it further. There were several persons of interest in the Daniel Gonzalez case, including a former student who is still under investigation. But it does seem like a possibility.”
“Was Daniel Gonzalez … an asshole?” I said. “For lack of a better word.”
“That I don’t know, but I’ll check it out. It seems likely, though, if there were several persons of interest in his killing. So that was the only case, the Gonzalez one …?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did think that you should look outside of unsolved homicides, though. Look at accidental drownings and, also, accidental overdoses. Oh, that reminds me.” I opened my bike messenger bag and pulled out the two books I’d brought with me, the paperback copy of The Drowner that I’d reread the night before, plus a paperback copy of Malice Aforethought that I’d found in my personal collection that morning. It was a Pan Books paperback in very poor condition, the cover almost falling off. I slid both across to Agent Mulvey. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll make sure they get returned to you.”
“Don’t worry too much about it,” I said. “Neither is irreplaceable. And I read The Drowner last night. Read it again, I mean, because it had been a while since I last read it.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Any insights?”
“There are two murders in it. There’s the woman who gets killed while swimming. She’s pulled down fro
m below, basically what the cover is showing you. But there’s a second murder, a really disturbing one. The killer, who’s this very physically strong woman, almost supernaturally strong, kills a man by giving him a heart attack with her hand. She holds it rigid like this”—I demonstrated by holding up my hand, fingers extended—“and pushes it slowly up under his rib cage until she can feel his heart and then she wrenches it.”
“Ugh,” the agent said and made a face.
“I don’t know if it’s even possible,” I said. “And even if it was, I’m pretty sure an autopsy would show what happened.”
“I’d think so, too,” she said. “I still think we should look for drownings. I think our Charlie would want to copy the drowning killing, especially since it’s the title of the book.”
“Right,” I said.
“Did you get anything else from the book?”
I didn’t tell her how I hadn’t remembered just how sexualized the killings were. That Angie, the insane murderer, imagined two personalities for herself, a Joan of Arc side in which her purity made her impervious to pain, but then there was a side to her that she called her “red mare” feeling, her back arched, her nipples erect, and how she experienced both of these personalities when she committed a murder. It made me wonder if all murderers needed to do this, needed to disassociate during the act, become someone else. Was Charlie like this?
But what I said to Agent Mulvey was “It’s actually not a great book. I love John D. MacDonald but, except for the Angie character, this wasn’t one of his best.”
She shrugged and put both the books in her own bag. I realized that my critical assessment of the book was not exactly relevant. Still, she looked up and said, “You’ve been incredibly helpful. Do you mind if I send you anything I might have for your opinion? And if you’d keep rereading the books …”
“Of course,” I said.
We exchanged emails, then stood, and she walked me to the entrance of the hotel. “I want to look at the weather,” she said, stepping outside with me. The snow was barely falling now, but the city was transformed, drifts of snow gathered in corners, the trees bent over, even the brick walls of nearby buildings coated with a scrim of white.
“Good luck getting home,” I said.
We shook hands. I called her Agent Mulvey, and she asked me to call her Gwen. As I walked slowly away, through the shin-high snow, I decided it was a good sign, her asking me to call her by her first name.
CHAPTER 7
When I got to the store, twenty minutes later, Emily Barsamian was under the awning, looking at her phone.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes. When I didn’t hear from you, I just figured we’d be open for regular hours.”
“Sorry. You should have sent me a text message.” I said this knowing that in four years she had never sent me a text message, and that she probably never would.
“I didn’t mind waiting,” she said, as I opened the door, then followed her in. “It was my fault for forgetting my keys.”
Nero came over to greet us, meowing, and Emily crouched down to scratch his chin. I went behind the checkout desk and turned on the lights. Emily stood and removed her long green coat. Underneath she wore what I had come to think of as her work uniform, a midlength dark skirt, chunky boots, a vintage sweater over a button-up shirt, or, occasionally a T-shirt. The T-shirts she wore provided rare clues as to Emily’s likes and dislikes. Some of the shirts were book related—she had one with a vintage cover of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle with an illustration of a black cat in tall green grass—and several were T-shirts for a band called The Decemberists. The previous summer she wore a T-shirt that advertised SUMMERISLE MAY DAY 1973 and I spent all day with a nagging feeling that it sounded familiar. I finally asked her, and she told me it was referencing The Wicker Man, a horror film from the 1970s I hadn’t seen in many years. “You’re a horror fan?” I asked.
As usual when we spoke she was looking at either my forehead or my chin. “I guess,” she said.
“What are your top five?” I said, hoping to continue the conversation.
She frowned briefly, thinking, then said, “Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Black Christmas—the original one—Heavenly Creatures, and, um, The Cabin in the Woods, I guess.”
“I’ve seen two out of five. What about The Shining?”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head rapidly, and I thought she might elaborate, but that was the end of the conversation. I didn’t mind that she was a private person. I was, as well. And being a private person is a rare trait these days. Still, I did wonder about her interior life. And I wondered if she had ambitions besides being a bookseller.
As she hung up her damp coat, I asked her if it had been hard getting to the store. “I took the bus. It was fine,” she said. She lived on the other side of the river, near Inman Square in Cambridge. All I knew about her living situation was that she shared a three-bedroom apartment with two other Winslow College graduates.
Emily went to the back, to the table where I stacked the new arrivals. Her primary job was updating and monitoring our online stores. We sold used books through eBay, and Amazon, and a site called Alibris, and a few more that I didn’t even know about. I used to do some of it myself, filling orders, but Emily had taken over completely. That was one of the reasons I was anxious about her future plans. If she ever left here, I’d be in big trouble.
I stayed behind the counter and checked the phone for messages—there were none—then logged on to the Old Devils blog, something I rarely did these days, but the visit from Gwen Mulvey made me interested in taking a look. There were 211 total blog entries, the last one entered two months ago. It was called “Staff Picks” and it was something I periodically forced Emily and Brandon to do: write two sentences on the last book they’d read and loved. Brandon had picked Lee Child’s last Jack Reacher novel, and Emily had written a quick blurb on Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place. My pick had been Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson. I hadn’t read it, of course, but I’d read enough reviews and summaries to feel as though I had; also, I was fond of the title.
I spent the next hour or so scrolling backward through blog entries, and it was like living the past ten years of my life in reverse. There was John Haley’s first and last entry, posted on the week he left the store, leaving me in charge. He’d sold Old Devils, and all its stock, to Brian Murray and me in 2012. Brian had put up most of the capital, but given me 50 percent ownership share, since I’d be the one running it. So far, it had worked out. I thought at first that Brian would want to be more involved than he was, but that hadn’t been the case. He came to the store for our annual holiday party, along with attending almost all our readings, but, other than that, he has left me in charge, except for those two weeks a year when I take my annual trip to London. I did see Brian frequently, though. It took him about two months to write an entry in his Ellis Fitzgerald series. The rest of the year he called his “drinking vacation,” most of which he spent on a leather-padded stool at the small bar of the Beacon Hill Hotel. I stopped in often to have a drink with him, although I tried to do it early in the evening. If I arrived too late, Brian, a habitual storyteller, would play his greatest hits for me, stories I’d heard a hundred times already.
I scrolled farther back through the posts, noting the absence of any from five years ago, the year my wife died. The last entry before that event had been a list I’d written called “Mysteries for a Cold Winter Night,” posted on December 22, 2009. My wife died in the early morning hours of January 1, 2010; she’d been in a car accident, sliding off an overpass on Route 2 while inebriated. They’d shown me pictures for identification purposes, a white sheet covering her head from the eyebrows up. Her face looked unmarked even though I imagined her skull had completely collapsed from the impact.
I read the list of mysteries I’d selected, all ones that took place in wintertime or during a storm. At this point
in my blog-writing career I was happy to just list books, and not describe them. This was my post:
The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie
The Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) by Nicholas Blake
Tied Up in Tinsel (1972) by Ngaio Marsh
The Shining (1977) by Stephen King
Gorky Park (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith
Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992) by Peter Høeg
A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith
The Ice Harvest (2000) by Scott Phillips
Raven Black (2006) by Ann Cleeves
I remembered putting it together, remembered worrying about including The Shining, because it was a horror novel and not at all a mystery, but included it anyway because it was a book I loved. It was strange to remember such minutiae, these insignificant thoughts I’d had less than two weeks before my world would change forever. If I could go back to late December of that year, then I would never have written this list. I would have spent all my time fighting tooth and nail for my wife, telling her that I knew about her affair, that I knew she was doing drugs again, telling her I forgave her, and that she could come back to me. Who knows if any of it would have made a difference? But at least I would have tried.
I scrolled back some more, found another list, “Crime Novels About Cheating,” and quickly checked the date. I didn’t officially know about my wife at that point, but I must have guessed, must have known something was going on at a gut level. I kept scrolling backward, the blog posts coming more and more frequently as I reached the years when I’d been better at keeping the blog updated. I thought, not for the first time: Why does everything need to be a list? What compels us to do that? It was something I’d been doing ever since I became an obsessed reader, ever since I started spending all my money at Annie’s Book Swap. Ten favorite books. Ten scariest books. Best James Bond novels. Best Roald Dahl. I suppose I know why I did it back then. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to understand that it was a way of giving myself an identity. Because if I wasn’t a twelve-year-old who’d already read every single Dick Francis novel (and could name the five best), then I was just a lonely kid without friends, with a distant mother and a father who drank too much. That was my identity, and who wants that? So I guess the question is, Why keep doing it, making lists, even after I was living in Boston, had a good job, was married and in love? Why wasn’t all that enough?
Rules for Perfect Murders Page 5