Peter Abrahams - A Perfect Crime

As Francie sank, she had a strange thought, not her kind of thought at all. She wasn’t religious, certainly didn’t believe in any kind of quid pro quo, deal-making God. But still, the thought came- If you let me live, I’ll never see Ned again — as though she were guilty, and this the punishment.

Francie kicked again, once, twice, the bubble about to burst from her chest. Her head had struck something hard: the underside of the ice? She raised her hands in protection, and her fingers reached into night air. Francie broke through the surface, choking, retching, but alive. She floundered in a pool of black water, no wider than the top of a well.

Francie commanded her hands: on the ice. They obeyed. Pull. They pulled, but the ice broke off. Francie tried again, and again, and again, hands, face, body numb, teeth chattering at an impossible speed, breaking off chunks of ice, breaking, breaking. She heard a terrible cry, her cry, and then the ice held for her. She flopped onto it, drew herself up, inches at a time, to her chest, her waist, and out.

Some shivering mechanism now controlled her body. She staggered across the ice, onto the jetty, into her car. The keys? In her coat: gone. But then she saw them glinting in the ignition, left by mistake. What was happening to her? She turned the key, switched on the heater, full-blast. The engine was still warm. It had been only a few minutes. She clung, shaking, to the steering wheel, and remembered oh garden, my garden: gone, too.

It was after midnight when Francie got home. From his basement office, Roger heard her footsteps overhead. He waited an hour by the clock and went upstairs.

Francie’s boots were on the mat by the front door. They looked wet. Roger went closer. They were wet. He picked one up. Soaked, inside and out, and it was too cold for rain. Had she gone for a walk on the beach, strayed too close to the surf? He sniffed: no salty smell, but to be sure he gave the leather a lick of his tongue as well. Freshwater, then, and at least a foot deep. Fresh-water: ponds, lakes, rivers. He gazed up the stairs, thinking.

Roger put the boot down, aligned the pair neatly. He went into the kitchen. Francie’s purse lay on the table. He looked through it: wallet, with driver’s license, credit cards, forty-two dollars; zinc lozenges, tissues, vitamin C, a key ring. Key ring. Not like her. She always left her keys in the ignition when she parked in the garage, no matter what he said.

There were seven keys on the ring: car key; two house keys, front and back; a key to her locker at the tennis club-he had had one just like it-a small key that would be for luggage; and two he couldn’t identify. These two he removed from the ring and laid on the table.

Roger went to Francie’s kitchen desk, found paper and a pencil. He placed the keys on the paper and traced their patterns. Then he pocketed the paper, put the keys back on the ring, left the purse the way he’d found it, went downstairs to his basement room. The crossword waited, unfinished. One down, nine letters: loss. That would be ruination.

“Good show this afternoon, Ned,” said Kira Chang, vice president of Total Entertainment Syndication, raising her glass. “Here’s to Intimately Yours.”

Sitting at the table in Ned’s dining room, they drank to the show: Anne, at the far end; Trevor, Ned’s producer, on her right; Lucy, the director, next to him; Ned at the end; Kira Chang on his right; Trevor’s assistant next to her. Ned didn’t like the wine at all, wished that Anne could have done a little better. And he wished she could have done better with the whole dinner, despite the late notice.

Ned had called at 3: 30, and Anne had said, “I wasn’t planning any dinner at all-isn’t it Thursday?”

For a moment he found himself holding his breath. “Meaning what?” he said.

“Thursday, Ned. When you stay late to plan the shows.”

“Yes. Normally. But Kira Chang’s in town.”

“Who’s she?”

“I told you. Sweetheart. The syndicator.”

“I thought that was next week.”

“The meeting’s next week, but she happened to be in town today and she dropped in. Trevor says it’s a good sign, so we should take advantage of it.”

“I’ll do my best,” Anne said.

Her best: the oyster stew, the lemon chicken with snow peas, the tiramisu from Lippo’s. And this marooncolored wine, possibly Romanian-he couldn’t read the fine print on the label.

“Delicious, Anne,” said Kira Chang. “And I hear you’re quite a tennis player, too.”

Anne smiled nervously. The light in the dining room was a little too strong; it made her look washed out, or was that just the effect of Kira’s presence?

Trevor refilled his glass-not for the first time-and said, “One thing we’ve never discussed, Kira, is the name of the show. What do you think of it?”

Kira looked at Trevor across the table. “There’s only one answer to questions like that-I’ll let you know after we poll the audience.”

“To see what it thinks, you mean?”

“That’s right.”

“Isn’t that leading by following?”

Kira smiled at him. “This isn’t art, Trevor. It isn’t even politics. It’s just entertainment.”

“Total entertainment,” said Ned.

Kira laughed. “Bingo.”

She left soon after. Ned walked her out to the waiting taxi. A cold wind blew down the street, ruffling her glossy hair. She turned to him.

“Thanks for dinner,” she said. “And don’t forget to thank Anne again for me. I hope I didn’t upset your routine.”

“Not at all,” Ned said. Their eyes met. He said what was on his mind. “Did you really like the show today?”

“Not much,” Kira replied. “But that’s what I like, right there. The way you asked that question. You’re good with women, Ned. That’s your strength. And it goes a long way in this business.”

“But the show?”

“Too early to say. I hope you understand that when we green-light something like this we often bring in our own people on the production side.”

“The show was Trevor’s idea in the first place.”

“The cast-iron sincerity in your tone-that’s part of the appeal, for sure,” she said, opening the door of the taxi. “But the metaphor to keep in mind, if you want to make it big in broadcasting, in anything, is the multistage rocket.”

“Meaning the booster falls away?”

“Good night,” she said, closing the door. The taxi drove off.

“Did it go all right?” Anne asked when they were in bed.

“Fine.”

“What a relief. She made me so uncomfortable.”

“How?”

“She’s so poised, so… everything I’m not.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ned said. The booster falls away: that meant ruthlessness, and he wasn’t the ruthless type. He rolled over and tried to sleep; the headache awoke over his right eye, unfolding like a flower.

“Francie?”

Francie opened her eyes. Roger was standing by the bed, looking down at her. A jolt of adrenaline rushed through her, washing away decaying fragments of terrible dreams.

“Hope I didn’t scare you,” he said with a smile. “Not going in today?”

Francie started to speak, but her mouth was too dry, her throat, her whole body, hurting. She tried again. “What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty. You slept through the alarm.”

Francie glanced at the clock radio.

“I shut it off,” Roger said. “How can you bear that station?” He smiled again. “Coffee?”

“You’ve made coffee?”

“Should be just about done.” He reached out as though to pat her knee under the covers, thought better of it, went out. Francie sat up, saw her damp clothes lying in the corner. She rose, aching in every muscle, kicked the clothes under the bed, got back in just as Roger returned with a tray: buttered toast, marmalade, steaming coffee.