Rules for Perfect Murders

by Peter Swanson

  “How long have you been here?” I said. “Were you typing on that thing? On the Duckburg site?” I jerked my head to indicate the phone.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Not bad, right? With my sausage fingers. Hey, look, let’s go sit down.” He gestured with the gun. “Maybe around the table. You can put down whatever it is you’re holding in your hand, and I won’t have to point this at you. Then we can have a nice chat.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He turned and walked toward the table. I pictured myself sprinting and lunging, hitting him just as he turned with the gun, knocking him down on the ground. But all I did was follow him, and together we both sat at the table, in the same seats that Tess and I had been sitting in a few hours earlier. Marty pushed his back a few feet, then rested the gun on his thigh.

  “What is that you’re holding?”

  “It’s a rolling pin,” I said, setting it down on the table.

  “You pick it up here, or bring it with you?”

  “No, I picked it up here.”

  There was a hanging ceiling light above the table that was still on, and I could see Marty’s face much better in its light. He looked the way he always looked, sallow skin, disheveled, and like he’d forgotten to get any sleep lately, but there was something a little different about his eyes. I want to say they were more intense, more alive, but that wasn’t quite it. It was more that they were happy. He might not be smiling but his eyes were.

  “Thought you might come here with more firepower,” he said. “Although I realize that’s probably not your thing. Did you call the police?”

  “Yes,” I quickly said. “They’ll be on their way right now.”

  He frowned. “Let’s not lie to each other. Let’s tell the truth, and then, together, we can figure out where to go next. I know you’re thinking that your only chance here is to get the jump on me, but it’s not. I’m going to be reasonable. And, honestly, I’m not young, but what is that word they condescendingly use for old people when they can get around on their own two feet?”

  “Spry,” I said.

  “Right, spry. That’s what I am. And if you decide to suddenly lunge at me, I’ll put a fucking bullet right through your face.”

  He smiled.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Just warning you in advance. I don’t want you to get any silly ideas.”

  I held up both my hands. “I’ll stay right here,” I said.

  “Good. I trust you. Now we can talk. I keep thinking about the thing you just wrote me about fiction and reality. How your list of murders was fiction, and that there’s some difference. I think you’re right about that, Mal, but I think you’re seeing it the wrong way. Fiction is so much better than reality. I know. I’ve been alive a long time. And you know where I learned that from, about fiction? I learned it from you. You got me into reading, and you got me into murder. It changed my life for the better. Hey, do you think they have beer here? I wouldn’t mind a cold beer while we talk.”

  “I’m sure they do,” I said.

  He looked from the table all the way into the kitchen, where the large refrigerator gleamed in the dim lighting. “Can you go get us a couple? Can I trust you not to try and do something stupid?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I got up and walked to the kitchen while Marty pointed the gun in my direction. I passed the two couches; Humphrey the dog was now sprawled on the couch opposite from Tess, both of them asleep and oblivious. I opened the refrigerator, hunted around, and spotted two bottles of Heineken buried toward the back, located a bottle opener in one of the drawers, and popped their tops.

  “Oh, Heineken,” Marty said, smiling when I put it in front of him. “That’s a pleasant surprise.”

  He took a sip, and so did I. My mouth was dry and gluey, and the beer tasted good, despite the circumstances. “Yeah, twice you’ve changed me, Mal, you know that?” Marty said, as though the conversation we’d started had kept running through his brain while I’d gotten the beers. “You introduced me to killing, and you introduced me to reading. And my life got better.”

  “I doubt I introduced you to killing,” I said.

  He laughed. “Oh, you did. I was a cop. That didn’t make me a killer.”

  *

  IN ALL, I THINK we talked three hours that night. Marty talked the most, his voice getting hoarser the longer he spoke, but, despite this, the years seemed to fall away from him as he told his story. It was clear that doing what he’d done had brought new life to him. But it had not been enough. He also needed to tell someone about it.

  He told me how five years earlier, back in 2010, the year that Claire died, he’d still been an officer in the Smithfield Police Department, considering retirement, and living with an unfaithful wife. On at least two separate occasions he’d put a loaded gun into his mouth late at night. He’d even considered taking out his wife first just to ensure she wouldn’t enjoy herself anymore after he was gone. The only thing that really stopped him was his two kids, and the fact that they’d have to live with that for the rest of their lives. Still, he thought about it almost every day.

  Around this same time, he’d been part of a small task force that had taken down an amateur prostitution ring operating out of a Smithfield laundromat. They’d advertised their services on Craigslist, but also on a shadier website called Duckburg. Marty had started perusing both sites, late at night, wondering if maybe he should have his own affair, wondering if he could arrange something like that online, and if it would make a difference. It was where he found me, on Duckburg, looking for a fellow fan of Strangers on a Train. He hadn’t read the book—Marty wasn’t a reader, yet—but he’d seen the movie as a kid and never forgotten it. Robert Walker. Farley Granger. I do your murder, and you do mine. He’d responded to my query. He even considered asking me to kill his wife, but realized that he’d never get away with it, not even if he had an alibi. But there was someone he wanted dead even more than his cheating spouse. Norman Chaney had been a small-time business owner in Holyoke; he owned three service stations, none of them known for the excellence of their automotive service, but all of them known as being connected to the local drug trade. They’d never pinned anything concrete onto Chaney but it was clear that he was money laundering, at the very least, and possibly even dealing out of his stations. But what had gotten Marty’s attention had been when Margaret Chaney, Norman’s semi-estranged wife, had died in a house fire. All the local cops knew that Chaney had done it for the insurance money, property for the house and life for the wife, and that he’d subsequently fled to New Hampshire. He’d gotten away with it.

  After receiving Eric Atwell’s name and address from me via message, he gave me Norman Chaney’s name and address in return.

  Before shooting Eric Atwell in Southwell, Marty had done some research, just to make sure that he wasn’t killing some kind of saint. He’d discovered, of course, that Atwell was a known scumbag. There’d been a few arrests for minor violations: driving while intoxicated; possession of a controlled substance. But there’d also been three separate restraining orders filed against Atwell, from three separate women, all alleging abuse.

  Killing Atwell had not been hard. Marty staked him out for a couple of days, learning that in the late afternoon Atwell would often leave his house and go for long, strenuous walks, wearing headphones, utilizing the multiple isolated walking paths near his farmhouse. Using a gun that Marty had taken during an abandoned house search two years earlier, he followed him into a wooded section of Southwell and shot him five times.

  “You know that scene in The Wizard of Oz?” Marty said. “When it goes from black and white to color?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “That’s what it was like for me. The world changed. And I guess I just assumed the world had changed for you, as well. After I heard what happened to Norman Chaney.”

  “It didn’t,” I said. “Well, it did, but it was the reverse. The world drained of color.”

  He fr
owned and shrugged. “I guess I was wrong. Still, I figured that maybe you’d felt the same as me, and that I should find out who you were. Maybe even meet you.”

  As it was, I had been easy to find. Having done his prior research on Atwell, Marty had learned about Atwell’s involvement in the death of Claire Mallory, married to a bookstore manager in Boston. Once Marty had my name, he found my blog, and in particular he found the list I’d written, “Eight Perfect Murders.” And there was Strangers on a Train, sitting right there in the middle of the list. Marty read the book, then read the remaining recommendations, and the world opened up some more for him. Before all this had happened, he’d been in a broken, loveless marriage. His son was struggling with drug addiction and his daughter would still spend time with him, but he knew, down deep, that it was a chore for her. But now he’d discovered murder, and then, even better, he’d discovered reading. Marty signed the divorce papers, took early retirement, and moved to Boston.

  To be near me.

  In 2012, he started to come to readings, and eventually we got to know each other. I think he thought it was going to be enough to meet me, to become friends. Maybe we’d even eventually speak about what had happened, about the murders we’d committed for each other. But that didn’t happen. Yes, we became friends, but it wasn’t enough for him. And as I’ve already said, we started to spend less time together. And that was when he came up with the idea of finishing off the murders from the list I’d written. It was a way to bond with me because bonding over a couple of beers was not getting it done. In other words, if I’d been better company, a whole bunch of people would never have been murdered. Or maybe that’s simply not true. When Marty first killed Eric Atwell, it was like popping a bottle of champagne. The cork was never going to go back into the bottle. And now he had a whole bunch of murder methods to utilize for his new hobby. He just needed a victim.

  Before his wife had had an affair, back when Marty Kingship was still living out west in Smithfield, she’d read newscaster Robin Callahan’s infamous book about the benefits of adultery. It was called Life’s Too Long and had been published a year after she’d been caught in a love affair with her married co-anchor. It had been tabloid fodder for months, helped along by the fact that Callahan was a striking blonde, and seemingly unrepentant. She cashed in on her notoriety by publishing a book that essentially argued that adultery was more natural than monogamy, that life spans had increased too much to have it make sense for people to stay married forever. She made the talk-show rounds, and the book rocketed up the bestseller charts. Marty Kingship blamed that book for his wife’s subsequent fling with the family dentist. I’m sure he wasn’t the only man, or woman, with bad feelings about Robin Callahan. But Marty was someone who’d murdered before, gotten away with it, and was itching to try again.

  He went through my list of perfect murders, seeing if there were any good ideas for how he could get away with the murder of Robin Callahan. He had particularly loved Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders, in which a specific killing was hidden among a string of murders made to look like they’d been done by a madman. What if he could do the same with Robin Callahan? Maybe kill a few people who all had similar names—names of birds, for example. Then he thought he could even leave a single feather at the scene of each crime. Or better yet, mail a single feather to the local police.

  And that was what he did. He killed Robin Callahan inside her own home, having gotten inside by showing her his old police identification card. He also killed Ethan Byrd, a local student whom Marty found by searching through police reports looking for bird-related names. Ethan had been arrested at a sports bar in Lowell for threatening the bartender, and for disturbing the peace. He found Jay Bradshaw the same way; he’d been arrested for rape, but never convicted. It turned out Bradshaw spent most of his days on the Cape sitting in his garage, trying to sell used tools. Marty had pulled up in broad daylight, then beat Bradshaw to death with a baseball bat he’d brought and a sledgehammer he’d borrowed.

  As soon as he’d begun to plot the A.B.C. Murders, Marty knew that he couldn’t stop until he’d finished the list. Bill Manso was another name he pulled from browsing police records, a man who had been investigated in a domestic disturbance, but someone who had also been accused by a neighbor of breaking into her house during the daytime, stealing her underwear. This had all happened five years previous, but Marty read up on the case, discovering that Manso had gotten off because he was a regular train commuter into New York City, and that he’d provided evidence that he was commuting at the time of the break-in. The train made him think of Double Indemnity, another book on the list. Marty had read it, of course, but he’d also gotten the movie from the local library. He liked the movie better (“It gave me a brand-new appreciation of Fred MacMurray”). He decided to kill Bill Manso, bludgeon him to death, and leave him on the tracks. Then he’d take the commuter rail himself the following morning, bust out a window at just the right time to make it look as though Manso had decided to jump. He knew it wouldn’t wash. Scene-of-the-crime investigators would know almost instantly that Manso had been killed elsewhere, and that his body had been staged. But what excited Marty was that someone might start to figure it out, make a connection between the two books, and that it would lead back to me. Maybe they’d even arrest me. Either way, I’d become involved, and that was what he was hoping for.

  Marty wasn’t sure how to gain access to Bill Manso, but when he got down to Connecticut, it was made easier by the fact that Manso liked to drink at the bar nearest to the train station. Manso would go directly from his commute to the Corridor Bar and Grill at five thirty every day and stumble out of there at about ten at night, to drive the mile and a half to his town house condo. Marty killed him in the parking lot with a telescoping baton (“Much better than a baseball bat, let me tell you”) and left his body along the tracks. The next day he took the train and punched out a window in between cars using the same steel baton.

  Four murders in, Marty got impatient. He didn’t say that in so many words, but he decided it was time to get a little more obvious. Time to get me involved.

  Like all the regulars at Old Devils, especially anyone who came to our author readings, Marty had known Elaine Johnson. She’d cornered him on numerous occasions to let him know the books he should be reading, and the books that were a waste of time. She told him about that nasty lesbian who owned the apartment she lived in, and about how disgustingly dirty the city of Boston was, and about how, without her, the Old Devils Bookstore would have gone out of business years ago. And she told him about her heart condition, how her doctors had told her she should move to a quieter region, make sure that nothing stressed her out.

  Knowing she’d moved into her dead sister’s house in Rockland, Maine, Marty paid her a visit. He broke into her house when she’d been out—probably terrorizing a staff member at some local bookstore—and hid in her bedroom closet. He wore a clown mask with a large, hideous mouth, full of sharp teeth, and when Elaine Johnson came home, he waited patiently. He could hear her puttering around downstairs, oblivious to his presence. Eventually, she came upstairs to the bedroom, and went straight to the closet, opening it up. All he had to do was stand there, then take a step toward her. She turned white, then pawed at her chest, then did exactly what he’d been hoping she’d do. She died of a heart attack.

  “Why’d you leave the books?” I said.

  “I wanted them to come to you, at some point at least. I knew that the murder of Elaine Johnson was absolutely foolproof. There’d be no way any coroner would consider it a suspicious death. So I left the books, just hoping to muddy the waters. Hoping someone in law enforcement somewhere would be smart enough to put it all together.”

  “Someone did,” I said.

  “And you panicked and came running to me for help. I never thought that would happen, but I was thrilled when it did. It was good to hear your voice, asking me for a favor.”

  “You could have ended it there. Yo
u’d gotten what you wanted.”

  “No. What I wanted was to complete the project, but I wanted you along for the ride. And that’s what we have, now, the two of us. Do you want to hear the rest?”

  CHAPTER 29

  After you told me that the FBI had paid you a visit, I knew that someone had finally noticed. I knew that the closer things got to you, the faster you’d try and figure out who I was. So, just to delay the inevitable, I handed you Nick Pruitt.”

  Marty told me that it was true that Pruitt had made a formal complaint against Norman Chaney after the house fire that killed Chaney’s wife, Pruitt’s sister. And for that reason, Marty had already checked Pruitt out before I ever asked him for information on Chaney’s death. Pruitt was a recovering alcoholic with a few arrests on his record, someone Marty thought was the perfect candidate for the murder based on Malice Aforethought. If Pruitt suddenly died of alcohol poisoning, who would suspect it was a murder? He had a verifiable past as someone who abused alcohol.

  After Marty and I had drinks at Jack Crow’s Tavern on that Wednesday night, Marty went to a liquor store and bought a bottle of scotch to take to Pruitt in New Essex. “He just let me in. I’d shown him my gun, of course. Told him I needed him to take a few drinks. Once he started, he actually couldn’t stop. It wasn’t that hard to convince him to drink almost the whole bottle. I’d laced it with liquid benzos, just to be sure.”

  He smiled. “After Pruitt was a dead end, I figured I could push you toward thinking Brian Murray, or even Tess, was involved. Did it work? Did you actually notice the brand of scotch?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “That pleases me,” Marty said, as though I’d just complimented him on his sweater.

  “How well do you know Brian and Tess Murray?” I said.

  “Tess I just met tonight. Played a little hide-and-seek with her around the house before you got here. I know Brian pretty well, just through the store, but over the past few years I’ve gotten into the habit of stopping by that hotel bar he likes and having a few with him. I actually saw you with the two of them on Tuesday night. I knew Tess was back because of Brian’s broken arm. And now it’s all set up. Police’ll find Brian’s dead body in his home—I’m thinking a pillow over the face with a gun fired into it—and Tess will have disappeared. We can even pack a suitcase for her. It will be just like Red House Mystery. One dead body, one fleeing murderer. All we need is a good place to hide her body.”