Mark Dunn - American Decameron

It seemed like a perfect plan. All of their adopted parents were dead. No one else knew of their true biological origins. Charlie’s friends and relatives were as ignorant of his roots as he had been. Bob was certain that his younger sisters in Philadelphia had never been told about Charlie. Why should they have been? Bob’s mother hadn’t seemed all that eager to tell him , and the confession had come almost as an afterthought from her deathbed. (“Be good to your sisters, don’t spend your inheritance all in one place, and, oh, you’re adopted.”)

Charlie’s alibi was this: a birthday party for a country club chum. It was a party which Charlie’s wife Edna had no desire to attend. She loathed the man. She even hated his parvenu wife. The to-do was scheduled for Friday night, March 28, at the country club. The murder (strangulation was thought best; Edna had a pencil-thin neck that wouldn’t take much torque to successfully wring) would take place during the party. At least thirty people who knew Charlie would see him there at the time of the murder.

Knowing that in spite of the soundness of the alibi there might be need by the police authorities to keep Charlie from leaving town for a few days (even suspects with rock-solid alibis can remain persons of interest), Bob would have to wait until sometime in the summer to have his own wife, Mitzi, cross-dispatched by his brother. There was simply no way to commit the murders simultaneously or even within a few days of each another, and Bob lost the draw.

The first murder went off without a hitch.

As predicted, the air had cleared by midsummer. In fact, by the date of Bob’s own agreed-upon alibi event, the 1952 All-Star Game at Shibe Stadium — a game that Bob was set to attend with several of his baseball buddies, some of whom had yet to see Jackie Robinson play — the air had cleared quite nicely. Thanks to Bob’s inspired decision to open a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes over his murder victim’s head, police psychologists rapturously surmised that Edna’s strangler was signaling his intent to kill again and again. Cereal killer —therefore— serial killer.

On July 8 in Philadelphia, it rained off and on. Bob sat in the sodden stadium with his sodden friends, wondering if the All-Star Game would be cancelled.

Bob was lucky. The game started late, and though it went only five innings, that was more than enough time for Charlie to slip into Bob’s row house in South Philly and slit the throat of Bob’s wife, Mitzi. And besides, regardless of the length of the game, Bob and his pals almost never went home right after their baseball outings. By custom they usually gathered at some agreed-upon drinkery and wet their collective whistles with a couple rounds of beers first. As Bob was listening to his buddies argue the merits and demerits of various Philadelphia-area saloons, the conversation taking place in the middle of the torrent that would eventually put an asterisk next to this particular All-Star Game in the stat books, he couldn’t help smiling. To think that it was now done. Bob and his brother Charlie, having successfully deconcatenated their respective balls and chains, were now free to marry the women they were always meant to wed. For Charlie, this meant the shapely bookkeeper for his company, and for Bob, a fellow artistic free spirit with a penchant for bedroom acrobatics.

At least this is the way it was supposed to go.

Bob kept smiling. And then in that next instant, he stopped smiling. Few of the All-Star fans had left the stadium. Most were waiting for the rain to let up a little before trooping out to their cars. Like Bob and his baseball buddies, people stood huddled in small groups under awnings and overhangs. One man in Bob’s line of vision stood alone. His look was familiar — frighteningly familiar. Because he looked exactly like Bob. And, by natural extension, Charlie.

“Double cross” was the first thing that insinuated itself into Bob’s thoughts. That he had held up his end of the bargain while his brother had reneged. And reneged in a big way. And for what reason? Blackmail? Bob had no money. It was Charlie who had the fat income, the country club membership, the big house in Riverdale. (Bob knew the house well. He’d strangled his sister-in-law in the largest of its four bedrooms.)

With rising anger, Bob Fletcher stepped away from his rain-drenched companions. He pushed past all the people who stood between him and the object of his ire. The man noticed Bob coming toward him. He smiled. He smiled in the same way that Charlie had smiled when the two brothers first discussed the possibility of ridding themselves of their unwanted marital appendages.

But that man wasn’t Charlie.

The man who wasn’t Charlie was still smiling as Bob reached him and grabbed him roughly by the arm. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Where am I supposed to be?” asked the man, his smile dissolving into a look of genuine perplexity.

“Did you do it? Or did you come here to tell me you couldn’t do it? Answer me!”

The man didn’t seem to know what to say. He looked at Bob, disconcerted, helpless.

Bob seemed equally helpless. “I beg you. Go. Get out of here.”

The man, as if wishing to be accommodating, took a step back, and then another, but had he wished to leave, circumstances would not have allowed it. Because at that moment Bob’s friends joined him, and one in that group did not hesitate to exclaim, “Bob, you ol’ son of a bitch — you never told us you had a brother.”

“A twin brother!” marveled another.

“He isn’t my twin brother,” said Bob, all color having left his face.

“He’s right,” said the man. “We aren’t twins. We’re part of a trio. Triplets .” And turning to Bob: “Have you met up with our other brother yet? My adopted mother told me I was one of three. I never quite believed her until today.”

I know this story well, because I am that third brother. I didn’t want to speak of myself in the first person until now, so as not to spoil the ending of the story. And of course, to be fair, the logical ending to this story should include my attendance at the executions of my two brothers for the insensate, cold-blooded crisscross murders of their respective sisters-in-law. But as I write this, two years after my chance meeting with my triplet brother Bob at Shibe Stadium (I can still hear the crack of the bat that sent Jackie Robinson around the bases), my brothers’ convictions are still working their way through the appeals process. So they’re both still very much alive. And I get to pay them visits every now and then. That is, when my wife lets me out of the house. Should I tell you about that smothering, nagging shrew? Oh, please don’t make me.

Everybody laughs when Billy Sherman, the dentist’s boy, nudges his friend, one of the Hollis twins — I think it’s Casper, although it could have been Jasper — and points to one of the Abernethy ranch hands who are in town on some errand or another for his employer and goes, “Shane! Come back!”

Shane has just opened at the town picture show and everybody just has to see it because it’s set on the high plains over by Jackson Hole, though somebody said most of the movie was actually shot in California — which isn’t anywhere near Wyoming. Anyway, it has Jean Arthur in it and Cornelius (that’s my dad) likes Jean Arthur, and so Cornelius and I have seen it twice already, which means that Cornelius laughs harder at Billy’s little Shane funny than anybody else.

It’s Cornelius and me and the two boys and Mrs. Sherman and Mr. Reese, who has the sugar beet farm south of town, and then a uranium man I don’t know, and an evangelist who’s in town for a tent show that nobody’s been going to, because Riverton folks don’t much go in for Bible thumping and holy rolling.