A Perfect Crime

by Peter Abrahams

  “Like what?” But he was already moving toward the car. Francie went with him. He opened the trunk: roof rack, rock salt, kayak paddle; and under the floor mat, tools and the spare. “What’s there to find?” said Ned, just as an old Bronco pulled into the driveway. Ned and Francie wheeled around, backs to the open trunk.

  Savard got out of the Bronco, carrying a shiny metal box. He nodded to Francie, spoke to Ned. “I’d like to see your wife’s paintings, if you don’t mind.”

  “Her paintings?”

  “Mrs. Cullingwood hasn’t explained?”

  “No,” said Francie. “I have not.”

  “It’s kind of pressing,” Savard said to Ned, “or I wouldn’t be bothering you like this. We found something after you and I talked last night.” He told Ned what Anne had written on the floor of Brenda’s cottage.

  He didn’t seem to understand, his eyes, those new eyes, going to Francie, back to Savard. “I haven’t even seen my daughter yet,” he said.

  “I won’t come inside,” Savard said. “You could bring them out here, if there aren’t too many.”

  “Her paintings?”

  “I’ll help, if you want,” Francie said.

  “I’ll do it myself.” Ned went into the house.

  Savard gazed into the open trunk, then at Francie. “Did Anne ever ask you to buy one of her paintings for your foundation?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering whether you ever turned her down.”

  “The answer is no to both.”

  “You must do that a lot-turn people down.”

  “It’s part of the job.”

  “Do you tell them the truth?”

  She met his gaze: surprising eyes, almost unguarded, almost as though interested in the answer for its own sake. “Enough of it, Mr. Savard,” Francie said.

  Ned came into the garage from the house with some paintings, went back for more, leaving the door open. Francie heard Em crying in another room, heard him talking to her, his voice closer to normal, comforting, sweet; Francie knew the effort that must have taken. He came back with more paintings, arranged them all in a row of seven leaning against the wall.

  Anne’s paintings: the still life with grapes, another still life with fish and wine, two seascapes, a desert landscape, an abstract with deep blue spirals, a self-portrait. Francie wanted them to be great, was already toying with a fantasy of Anne’s posthumous fame, and her its engineer. But they were not great; the still life with grapes was the best, and even it was not as good as she’d first thought, flawed in ways she hadn’t seen before; she argued with herself that the fault lay with the harsh strip lighting in the garage, and lost.

  “That them all?” Savard said.

  “Yes,” said Ned.

  But Francie knew it wasn’t. Where was his own portrait, the one that hung over the bed in the master bedroom? Francie didn’t look at Ned, or at Savard, kept her eyes on a slightly fussy cactus in the desert landscape. How could he have missed his own portrait? She thought of Dorian Gray.

  Savard examined the paintings one by one, spending ten or fifteen seconds on each. Francie had watched many people look at paintings, their levels of concentration ranging from superficial to profound. Savard’s was of the latter, but she had no idea what he was seeing. “Are there any works in progress?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Did she have a studio somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “So this is it?”

  “Yes.”

  Savard studied the self-portrait: a younger Anne in a black turtleneck, holding a paintbrush, a dull gold band almost invisible on her ring finger.

  “Will you be needing me any longer?” Ned said.

  Savard took his eyes off the self-portrait. “Just one more thing,” he said, and opened the little metal box, an evidence kit, Francie realized-she’d seen them on TV. At the bottom lay a road map of New Hampshire, folded open to a panel of the southern part of the state. She saw a small red X on the Merrimack River. “Have you seen this before?” Savard said.

  Ned shrugged. “A road map. Is it important?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  Ned reached for the map. Savard jerked the box out of his reach.“Haven’t dusted it yet.” He checked to see if they understood. “For fingerprints,” he explained. “We’ll also check for fibers-try to match car interiors, floor mats, that kind of thing. But does it look familiar, Mr. Demarco, at first blush?”

  Ned gazed down into the box. Savard turned to Francie, seemed suddenly to notice her presence. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cullingwood. Didn’t mean to keep you so long.”

  A dismissal. Polite, almost deferential, but a dismissal. Why? And why now and not before? Francie had no choice. She tried to establish the proper distance in her tone. “If there’s anything I can do, Ned.”

  “Thanks, Francie.” He did it better.

  Francie got in her car and drove away. In her rearview mirror, she saw Ned and Savard talking in the driveway, or more accurately, Ned talking and Savard listening, very still.

  Roger took his car to an auto glass shop and had a new window installed. On the way home, he stopped at the newsstand of the Ritz, found mention of Anne, but none of Mrs. Truax, none of Whitey. He parked in his garage, closed the door, carried the ax inside, and tucked it behind the woodpile in the storage room off his basement HQ, woodpile left over from the evenings when they’d had fires. Then he went upstairs and poured himself a Scotch, drank it looking down on the street from the living room window.

  Whitey was (A) dead in the woods, perhaps not to be found until spring, or (B) alive and somewhere out there. A would be lovely, but he had to plan for B. Roger tried to quantify the threat represented by Whitey, in the event he fell into the hands of the police. Not, based on the evidence on his digital recorder, that the police were much to worry about: a dumb cop confused in predictable ways. Roger had already dealt quickly with the puzzle of lover boy’s reluctance to explain his whereabouts. The answer was obvious: he and Francie had met somewhere else. Perhaps determining where might be useful.

  But not exigent. Exigent was identifying the points of vulnerability represented by Whitey. A leather jacket with no label. A small sum of money in untraceable bills. A story of alligators and a disputed painting. A name: Roger. Not much, but neither was it nothing, especially the name. Roger sensed a complex equation that could only be balanced by the death of Whitey. But the problem was deeper than that, much deeper, because the perfect solution, perfect in that it rendered him blameless, even sympathetic in some eyes, had involved tying two deaths together in an invulnerable little package, and how could he do that now? That meant-my God! — that in order to be rid of Whitey, to be rid of him and blameless of that ridding, he would have to design another, completely separate, perfect crime! Roger foresaw a horrifying string of perfectly unincriminating homicides stretching on and on into a never-ending future, horrifying in the vastness of its numerology, in the demonic intertwining of its permutations and combinations. What kind of a life was that? He had a dreadful premonition-no, not premonition, no such thing-that the truly perfect part of a perfect crime might be the inevitable, wired-in-from-the-inception, inclusion of its own punishment: the perpetrator being the true target from the start. But, no, that was sophistry of the most unscientific and moralistic kind, and in this case outrageous-he was not the one in the wrong. But what a thought, Whiteys row on row, all in need of being put down with all their fingers pointing elsewhere. Chaos. Chaos leading to madness, even in a being possessed of a thousand brains like his. Oh, A would be lovely.

  “Please, A,” he said aloud, as Francie came walking up the street. In a well-ordered world, in a world that meant something, Whitey would be lying frozen solid under a dark tree, but since this was what Roger had been given for a world, he had to plan for B.

  And there was Francie, so alive, alive at least in the sense a cow lives, unaware of the concept of slaughter-house. So lucky, and s
he didn’t even know it! But what was this? As she came closer, Roger saw that she was crying; not making a sound or anything like that-her mouth was closed-but tears were streaming down her face. Why?

  And then facets rotated slightly in his mind, and he thought, Of course! She blames herself, the whore. He took a little satisfaction from that, but there was more-he could feel it coming, coming: a tremendous improvisation. Nothing mystical about improvisation, nothing more than normal, logical thought process, simply speeded-up exponentially, like subatomic particles in an accelerator. His brain had an accelerator mode, and now it offered up an improvisation based on the theme of Francie’s despondency and guilt over-could he push it that far? yes! — over engineering the murder of her tennis pal, an improvisation that would end on the final triumphant note of her suicide.

  There was even a coda, written for a potential reappearance by Whitey: a few simple notes that tied Whitey, the instrument, to Francie, the mastermind. What credibility would a convicted killer like Whitey have, faced with the awesome probative impact of her suicide? And how tidy. The name Roger, for example? Why wouldn’t Whitey have heard the name of the mastermind’s husband, poor cuckold?

  Maybe there was a God, after all.

  Francie came up the brick walkway. Roger stepped back from the window. What kind of suicide would she choose, what method would be character-appropriate? An important question. Were there any asps in the house? Roger laughed aloud. What a brilliant joke! Francie would have loved it.

  32

  Savard walked into the station just before three that afternoon.“He cracked.”

  “Yeah?” said Carbonneau, looking up from his chair at the duty desk.

  Something was wrong; Savard knew that right away, but not what. “Cracked in the sense that he coughed up his alibi, anyway. And it checks out.”

  The next question should have been: What’s his alibi? Instead, Carbonneau said, “Well, uh, maybe not surprising.”

  Savard didn’t get that at all. Something was wrong: too crowded, for starters-Berry, Lisa, Ducharme, Morris, Feeney, more. The whole department in the room, every shift.

  “This a mutiny?” Savard said.

  “Oh, no, Chief,” said Carbonneau, but he didn’t seem to want to go on.

  “Then what?” said Savard, starting to smile; a birthday or something like that he was supposed to remember but hadn’t.

  “Those prints,” said Carbonneau, and glanced around for help that didn’t come. “Prints we lifted off that bedspread.”

  “Duvet,” said Lisa. “Goose-down duvet.”

  Carbonneau gave her a look; that wasn’t the kind of help he’d had in mind. “The lab got a match.” He bit the inside of his lip. Berry was doing it, too, biting the inside of his goddamn lip.

  “And what?” said Savard. “They were mine? What’s going on?”

  Their heads all swung around to Lisa, sitting at her desk with the coffee cup full of candy canes. She looked at Savard, almost in the eye. “They were Whitey Truax’s,” she said.

  The name did something physical to him, sent a cold wave down his shoulders and back, heated up his face at the same time. He sat down in someone’s chair, heard a voice saying, “You all right, Joe?”

  “Yeah.” Then, still in the grip of these weird physical sensations, he realized the mistake he’d made; the realization sent a pulse of adrenaline through him, made him normal again. He got up fast. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” someone said, but not Lisa; the best shot in the department, she was already unlocking the gun rack, taking her. 303 off the wall.

  They drove to Lawton Ferry in three cars, eighty miles an hour, lights flashing, sirens wailing, the whole performance. For once, all that sound and fury suited Savard’s mood, calmed him down, if anything. Beside him, Lisa buckled on her vest.

  “I called down to Florida,” she said. “You knew he was part of that rent-a-con thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He got parole early November, went missing from the halfway house after Thanksgiving. The asshole couldn’t even give me the exact date. But he’s wanted down there on an assault charge that could go up to something else if the victim succumbs. That’s what he said. The asshole, I’m talking about. Succumbs. A social worker.”

  “They never sent us anything?”

  “Nope.”

  He’d always known Whitey would be free someday, had even wondered at one time what he’d do if he saw him on the street. But as the years went by, he’d thought less and less about Whitey, and after hearing of the transfer to Florida, almost nothing. Hadn’t forgotten him, more a case of reclassifying him as one of those bad accidents that can happen to people. Now, with Anne Franklin at the medical examiner’s, it was all fresh again, and personal.

  They pulled up at 97 Carp Road, jumped out, took aim, summoned Whitey on the bullhorn. Nothing, of course. Savard walked up to the duct-taped front window and did what he’d been about to do the night before: looked through.

  “Goddamn it,” he said. No one’s stupidity bothered him like his own. He strode to the front door and broke it down. They went into the lousy little place and stood around the body of Mrs. Truax. The cat came in the open doorway and rubbed itself against Lisa’s leg.

  Whitey drank the last can of Pepsi, tossed it out the window. Late afternoon, deep in the woods on an old lumber road, maybe into Maine, running the engine from time to time to keep warm. The cold had never bothered him before, but it did now. Last can of Pepsi, and the gas-down to what? A quarter of a tank, although he could see space between the quarter line and the needle, a hair below. But call it a quarter. And on the radio, zip. Nothing but static-proving how deep in the woods he was.

  What else? He felt like shit, hurt all over, chest and face especially. And that face in the mirror: nasty. Hungry, too, and nothing to eat. He counted his money: $542. Not bad-had he ever had more in his pocket? — but he couldn’t figure out how to make it help him.

  Whitey saw his breath, smelled it, too. When was the last time he’d had pickles? He thought of the stripper bar where he’d had lunch before… whatever had gone down went down. Those silicone tits or whatever they were-was that the same stuff they made computer brains out of? — seemed a lot more appealing now, out here in the cold. Too fucking cold. He switched on the engine again, cranked the heat up full blast, lay down on the bench seat. From there he could gaze up at the trees, all bare and spiky, pressing down from high above. He didn’t like that at all, and closed his eyes.

  When Whitey woke up, it was dark and the needle on the lit-up dash was down, way down, almost on empty, dropping closer and closer as he watched. Not that empty meant empty-he knew his car. Then the warning light went on. He switched off the engine. Metal popped for a minute or two, and by then it was getting cold again, much too cold already. A man, even a man like him, could freeze solid in the woods on this sort of night. Without gas in the tank, he would die. He turned on the light, counted his money again. Five forty-two: piss. Seventeen years and that was what he had to show for it. Made him mad.

  And millions, or at least a million, had been in reach. He remembered how it felt to be a giant, capable of ripping trees out of the ground. He didn’t feel like that now. Master of puppets I’m pulling your strings. Those words meant something, contained some message for his ears alone, but he didn’t know what. And then there was the girl in the miniskirt, sucking on grapes. Sounded good. Worth a million or more, meaning it was painted by a famous artist, such as Picasso, or others, who didn’t come to mind at that moment. Had Roger ever mentioned the name of the artist? No. Just one more of his fuckups. Whitey went over the fuckups-no Brinks truck, no painting, no mention of a woman who would try to kill him. No mention either that Roger would park on the wrong side of the river, would be lurking around the cottage with an ax. What had Roger been planning to do with that ax? Whitey knew the answer to that, had seen it on Roger’s face under the porch light, had smashed in the window of Roger’s car beca
use of it, but still it made no sense. Did Roger blame him in some way for the fuckups? Whitey wasn’t able to think his way through that one. Could have been killed, twice, and didn’t even know why. Someone owed him an explanation. And what about benefits, like his medical expenses, and danger pay? He realized that everything had changed the moment Roger stepped on his toe. Why hadn’t he done something then and there? He dwelled for a while on the memory of what had happened to an inmate down in Florida who’d just brushed against him in the chow line, spilling Whitey’s pudding. This was a democracy. No special treatment for anyone. So what did Roger deserve now?

  But he was cold, hungry, weak, deep in the woods: all on the bad side. Was there anything on the good side, anything going for him? Only the fact that he knew where Roger lived. And the night. Night was his friend. Whitey fired up his truck.

  He nosed his way back out of the deep woods, out of the darkness, silence, long shadows, the chains taking him safely to the first plowed country road. A plowed road, but no sign of life, nothing but whiteness outside and the red of the warning light in the cab. By the time he saw the glow of the first crummy village, the needle had sunk far below the empty mark, almost the width of his baby finger. The engine stuttered once, twice, and died-just as he rolled up to a one-pump station at the cross-roads. He got the feeling it was meant to be.

  A kid appeared.

  “Fill it,” Whitey said.

  The kid didn’t move for a moment, staring at Whitey’s face in the glare of the pump lights.

  “Hockey game,” Whitey said.

  The kid nodded. “Sell Band-Aids inside.”

  Whitey went in, bought Band-Aids, sandwiches, candy bars, a shake, said, “Hockey game,” to the woman at the cash before she could even ask; he was coming back.

  “You guys,” she said.

  He was in Maine, all right, could tell by the way they talked. He got back in the pickup, stuck the Band-Aids over his stitches, tried a chicken sandwich. That hurt too much to eat, so he just downed the shake-had to keep his strength up for what lay ahead-and headed south.