Peter Abrahams - A Perfect Crime

IQ 181, and possibly that had been an off day. Roger laughed at this joke, not a bark but long, gut-busting hilarity, tears rolling down his face.

The door opened: Francie, folded warm-up suit and other tennis clothes in her hands. He froze.

“Are you all right, Roger?” she said.

“Fine, fine,” he said, animating his body. “Just… something funny on the Internet.”

“Like what?” Francie said, turning to the computer. Roger stepped between them-his list lay by the keyboard-but casually, he made sure of that.

“Oh, it’s gone now, gone into space.”

“What was it?”

“A… a play on words. About ataxia. The more ataxic the state the higher the taxes. That kind of thing.”

“I don’t get it. What’s ataxia?”

“Just a word, Francie, just a word.” He rocked back and forth, beaming down at her. “Maybe not that funny after all. Maybe I’m simply in a good mood.”

She took another look at the computer, another at him, left the room. Soon after he heard the garage door open and close.

Theoretical phase complete. Now to find the sub. Roger thought right away of the man whose name had come up during the Puzzle Club discussion on capital punishment. He didn’t remember all the details of the crime, and the story, related by Rimsky, the prison guard, had been garbled in the telling, interrupted by on-line idiots, and would now indeed have disappeared into space, but the name came to him at once. Perhaps it had lain deep in his mind the whole time, steadying his thoughts like a keel.

All problems were fundamentally mathematical, their solutions wonderfully satisfying: an incoherent sea of data reduced to a simple equation.

Chinese penny = Whitey Truax.

Roger held a match to his list and dropped the flaming paper in the wastebasket.

“Got some pornos,” said Rey, Whitey Truax’s roommate at the New Horizons halfway house. He popped one into the VCR. They watched.

“Turn up the sound,” said Whitey.

“The sound? Who gives a fuck about the sound?”

Whitey gave Rey a look. He didn’t like Rey. He didn’t much like Hispanics anyway, not the ones he’d met inside, and on top of that, what was Rey? A nobody: drunk driver, deadbeat dad, some punk thing like that. Inside, he wouldn’t even have dared talk to Whitey. Here he had opinions.

But Rey turned up the sound without another word. They watched some more. “You think those women are real?” Whitey said.

“Real as it gets, Whitey,” Rey said. “They’re amateurs.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Says so right on the box-‘ Amateur Housewives, volume fifty-four. ’” He flipped Whitey the box.

Real housewives having real sex, Whitey read. You might see your neighbor. He watched two amateur housewives entertaining some men by a swimming pool. “They’ve got tattoos on their tits,” he said.

“So?”

“So since when do real housewives have tattoos on their tits?”

“Jesus, Whitey, where have you been?”

Of course that pissed Whitey off. He threw the first thing that came to hand-a Pepsi can, full-at Rey. Not playfully, like some frat boy: Whitey didn’t have that gear. The Pepsi hit Rey in the face, bounced on the floor, sprayed all over. The door opened and the social worker looked in.

“Boys, what’s going on?”

“Little spill,” said Rey, dabbing blood on his sleeve. “I’ll clean it up.”

The social worker’s gaze went to the TV. “Adult videos? ’Fraid not, boys-against regulations.”

“Innocent mistake,” said Whitey. “But seeing as you’re here, maybe you could settle something for us.”

“What’s that?” said the social worker, his eyes on the screen.

“Rey claims those women are real. I say they’re not.”

“Real, Whitey?”

“He don’t believe they’re amateurs,” said Rey, “even though it says right on the fucking box.”

“Is it anything to be angry about, Rey? But I agree with you, there’s no reason they couldn’t be amateurs-think of how many home video cameras there are in this country.”

Whitey was impressed. “Hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “Where would you run into one of these amateur housewives?”

“At home, of course,” said the social worker with a laugh. Rey laughed, too, and finally Whitey as well.

But because of the memories the joke stirred up in Whitey, there was nothing funny about it. They kept him awake that night, those memories of cottage country.

Whitey and his ma lived in a trailer close to Little Joe Lake, although not close enough for a water view. Little Joe wasn’t a big lake-Whitey first swam across at the age of nine-but there were about two hundred cottages, most of them owned by city people who didn’t seem to care that it was too small for speedboats and contained no fish worth the trouble. It was a good place to grow up: that’s what the locals said. In summer Ma was busy cleaning the cottages. In winter they had the welfare checks. Ma watched TV and drank; Whitey went to school, played on the hockey team, but mostly skated by himself on the frozen lake, sometimes long into the night.

Despite a personal visit by his coach-Whitey had made third team, all-state as a sophomore-he dropped out of school the next autumn. Algebra, history, biology: he was almost nineteen and he’d had enough. That winter he skated on the lake, shot a few birds, got bored. One day, he broke into a cottage, not to take anything but just to see how the city people lived. He liked the way they lived; even more, he liked being inside their cottage-quiet, secret, powerful. He got the feeling that the cottage somehow knew he was there but of course couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Whitey broke into another cottage the next week. This time he took an electric guitar. He tried to teach himself how to play, but that didn’t work, so he hocked it for forty bucks in a pawnshop across the Massachusetts line, where no one knew him. He bought a jug of wine, borrowed Ma’s heap, took one of the cheerleaders to a spot he knew. But she had signed some nondrinking pledge at her church and wanted to do nothing but talk about the high school kids and the teams and all that shit he’d left behind. Just to snap her out of it, he almost brought her to one of the cottages with the idea of breaking in together, like Bonnie and Clyde. But he didn’t-that would have destroyed the secret part; he tried to feel her up instead. She pushed him away; he pushed back, pushing her right out of the car, and drove off.

Whitey broke into cottages, two, three times a week. He was tidy: used a glass cutter to take out a windowpane, puttied it back in place when he was through. No one passing by-a state trooper patrolled once a month or so-would have suspected a thing. You had to go inside to see what was missing: TVs, microwaves, toasters, fireplace screens, golf clubs, cutlery, sleeping bags, tents, record players, scuba gear, crystal glasses, china figurines, rugs, paintings, barbecue grills, canoes, stone carvings, stuffed animals, chess sets, booze. No one knew. The city people didn’t come to open up until Memorial Day weekend, at the earliest. With the profits, Whitey bought himself a used pickup, a gold chain, a leather jacket.

Long before Memorial Day-he still had plenty of time to make plans for when the city people did return-Whitey broke into a cottage he had previously ignored. A little cabin, old and run-down, alone on a tiny island at the far end of the lake, connected to the shore by a footbridge.

Snow was falling as Whitey walked across the foot-bridge, cold, hard flakes blown sideways by the wind; they stung his face in a way he didn’t mind at all. Whitey circled the cabin, found a rickety door at the back, took out his glass cutter. But when he pressed it to the pane, the door swung open on its own-not the first unlocked cottage he’d found.