Peter Abrahams - A Perfect Crime

“Never,” Francie replied, and put her arms around him.

“Oh, Francie,” he said, taking a deep breath, letting it out slowly, a white cloud-the only one-rising in the night. He nuzzled against her, leaned on her-she felt his weight. “Do you know how rare this is?” he said. “Wouldn’t there be something wrong with two people who could just throw it away? We’d be… diminished.”

Francie held him tight. Ice cracked, but far away.

“You do love me?” he said.

“Yes.” He was right: she’d never felt this for any human being, knew she never would again. Now she was crying, too.

They walked back to the island. Francie unlocked the cottage. They went upstairs to the little bedroom, to the world under the down comforter. They lay still for a long time, holding each other. A long, healing time to get back to their places in the relationship; Francie, at least, couldn’t find her old place, but the new one was not far from it, and maybe better. The lying-still phase came to an end.

After, Francie said, “There will have to be some changes.”

“I know.”

“I have to be able to call you. Somewhere, sometime.”

“All right. I’ll figure something out.”

“And there’s someone I have to tell. I won’t say it’s you, if you don’t want, but I have to tell.”

“Who?”

“My best friend. She already knows, anyway.”

Ned’s body tensed beside her. “How does she know?”

“Nora knows me. She hasn’t said anything, but she knows.”

“Nora?”

“You’d like her.”

Pause. When it came, his response was a surprise. “Maybe I’ll meet her someday. After… after Em’s grown up.”

He had never before held out the promise of a better future. Francie lay beside him, savoring the implication of his words. “I’m going to get a divorce,” she said.

Another silence, longer than the last. “Maybe not right away, Francie,” he said.

“Why not? It’s no pressure on you.”

“I know that. But aren’t there ever times you feel you’re in a very delicate situation, where everything is poised just so?”

“I’m not sure,” Francie said, and it occurred to her that in some ways he had more feminine intuition than she had. If there was an emotional IQ test, Ned would probably come out on top, the same way Roger did intellectually.

“You must have felt that sometime in your life,” Ned said. “When the slightest disturbance, even of something that doesn’t seem related at first, upsets everything.”

Francie immediately pictured deformed sperm under a microscope. “I won’t do anything right away.”

“Or without telling me?”

“Or without telling you.”

He kissed her. “Now you’re thinking.”

She laughed. He did, too. “You’re a bastard,” she said. “You know that?”

“All men are bastards,” he said.

“Some more than others.”

“Then there’s hope for me?”

“Yes,” she told him.

He switched on the bedside lamp, checked his watch. “Oh my God,” he said. “The sitter.” He started to get up, turned to her. In the yellow light of the lamp, his face was its youthful self again. “Maybe I can get out here on non-Thursdays once in a while,” he said.

“That would be nice.”

“And it might help if I had a key. It’s cold out there.”

“I’ll get you one,” Francie said. “Wimp.” She smacked his bare butt as he got out of bed.

There was a toolshed behind the cottage. Roger had found an ax inside. He held it now in his gloved hands, staring up at the light in the window, through which had come sounds Francie had never made for him. It was easy to muse on perfect crimes and abstract killers when evidence was circumstantial. It wasn’t easy now when evidence was hard. Why not simply crash his way inside, charge up to that lighted room, start swing swing swinging this goddamned ax? His blood rushed through his body at the thought, his muscles tensed, his teeth ground together. He took a step toward the door, and a few more. A bird-owl-glided down from the sky and settled on the roof. Great horned, Bubo virginianus. Roger halted.

Why not? Because of after. Would the ax-swinging feel good enough to render him content to spend the rest of his life in jail? For that would surely happen, given the shambles there would be inside the cottage, the pools of DNA, the two cars parked by the jetty, the obvious suspect with no alibi.

Roger returned the ax to the shed, crossed the river a few hundred yards upstream, retracing the route that kept his footprints out of sight, made his way to the wrought-iron gate where he had left his car. From there, he could just make out the upstairs light in the cottage, dim and partially blocked by trees. He was glad of the sight: a guarantee that he had imagined nothing. The light went out as he watched.

Think.

A penny drops from the Empire State Building. Someone in China pushes a button.

Think.

Think, Roger told himself, sitting in his basement office, of murder most antiseptic. He went over his list, now committed to memory. Accidents-mechanical, house hold, while on vacation; poison; contract killer; arson; dis ease; bombing. All wrong, for one reason or another. Think. All thinking boiled down to two procedures, rearranging the pieces on the board and inventing new ones. What were the pieces? Motive, means, opportunity; evidence, suspects, alibis. A complexity of permutation and combination, orbiting this central problem: if a wife is murdered, the husband is the first suspect and remains so until ruled out with certainty. That was what made murder disguised as something else-accident or disease, for example-so attractive. The murderer would be left with nothing to do but mourn, and he could do so without anxiety, no crime being suspected.

To mourn: Roger knew exactly what suit he would wear to the funeral, a black wool-and-cashmere blend from Brooks Brothers, bought years before. Did it still fit? He went to the closet, tried it on, checked himself in the mirror. Perfect. Still wearing the suit, he returned to the computer. Roger entered none of his thoughts on it, just felt better being near it when there was thinking to do.

A penny. A Chinese penny. Rearrange the pieces: husband, wife, lover, cottage, painting. Was he missing something? Yes: killer. Husband, wife, lover, cottage, painting, killer. Six pieces, four human, two objects. Deep in his brain, Roger felt a slight tectonic shift. These were promising numbers, might be made to work, and this was in all likelihood a fundamentally mathematical problem, as most problems were.

Item six: killer. Almost from the beginning, he had rejected the idea of a contract killer, automatically forcing item six, killer, into congruence with item one, husband. Had he been too hasty? At first he couldn’t see why. A contract killer had power over the contractor. Before-the-fact power: what if the contract killer was also an informer, for example, or decided to become one in order to extricate himself from some past or pending legal difficulty the contractor knew nothing about? The contractor thus sets up himself. And after-the-fact power: supposing everything follows plan but sometime in the future the contract killer decides he wants more money or is arrested on some other charge, say another murder, and starts casting about desperately for a deal? The contractor is thus dealt.

But was this flaw so basic that the contract killer idea must be abandoned? The flaw, thought Roger, start by isolating the flaw. Trust, it was a matter of trust. The contract killer could not be trusted. But trust was a factor only in honest relationships. Rearrange the pieces. In a dishonest relationship, dishonest now from the contractor’s point of view as well as the subcontractor’s-yes, that was the proper term, subcontractor; getting the terms right was half the battle-trust was irrelevant. Deep in his brain, he felt a further shift.