The Perfect Murder (11 page)

And how best to mutilate your victim? I can only point out that decapitation is unrivaled. There is something about a headless corpse—or, for that matter, a corpseless head—that takes hold of the imagination and just will not let go. Having severed the head, do something interesting with it. Stick it on a bedpost. Mount it on the dresser top like a wig stand. Hang it from the light pull.

“Having severed the head.
” That makes it sound easy, and you’ll find out that it’s not. You’ll have to bring a tool of some sort, probably a handsaw of some size. If that’s a problem, you might choose to forgo decapitation and stick to the mutilations that can be accomplished with a bolt cutter, say, or pruning shears, or a grapefruit knife.

It’s your choice, you see. I only ask that what you do be quite horrible, and that there be method in it, and more than a touch of theater. Cutting off the hands, for example, is not bad. Cutting off the hands and leaving them folded over the lower abdomen, or arranged so that each cups a breast, is a considerable refinement.

You get the picture.

One thing more. Take a souvenir. What sort, you ask? Something small, I should think, and something the absence of which will not pass unremarked. A finger, a nipple, an ear—something you couldn’t have picked up at K-Mart. Pop it in a Glad bag, truck it on home, and stash it in the freezer.

But you must not be solely a taker. Even as you take something away with you, so shall you leave something behind. Remember those hairs of Blazes’s? You’ll have brought them with you, and now you’ll leave a few behind. Tuck one or two into her pubic mound, and leave another where they won’t be likely to miss it. But for goodness sake don’t deplete your whole store. You won’t want to make another visit to the room where you are being repeatedly cuckolded—not now, not once the machinery of revenge is in motion—so you’ll have to ration your supply.

Oh dear. Is the implication upsetting to you? Writing these lines, I fancied I could hear your sharp intake of breath and see the color drain from your face. I can’t fathom why. Surely it has been obvious that you’ve killed this woman not so Boylan can be arrested for her murder but to establish a pattern, one which will ultimately be rounded off with the murder of your wife. One swallow, alas, does not make a summer, and neither does one pointless macabre murder establish a pattern of serial homicide. As you stab or strangle, as you saw through bone and cartilage, as you select a toe or a nose for ritual removal, do so in the knowledge that you will be doing this again.

And again. And again.

First, though, you’ll do nothing for a month.

By this I mean you’ll take no direct action. What you will do, like it or not, is you’ll spend the month living with what you’ve just done. At first you’ll be consumed with fear that murder will out, that you’ll be apprehended for your crime. And, I must admit, this is always a possibility. When I was a boy, I grew up secure in the knowledge that nobody gets away with murder. Since then I have come to realize the utter falsity of that statement; one comes closer to the truth by saying that everybody gets away with murder. Still, every once in a while a murderer does get caught, and you might be the one. Perhaps you’ll have left a trail, perhaps someone recognized you when you checked into that motel, perhaps you left a fingerprint behind. Who knows what you’ll do, especially under all the strain of first-time murder?

Ah, well. If they catch you, don’t say a word—not a single goddamned word—and get a good lawyer.

They probably won’t catch you, however. And fear will give way to guilt. How could you have done such a thing? What kind of person are you? How can you possibly live with yourself after what you’ve done?

These are all normal reactions, and you would be less a person if you did not have them. Perhaps the anticipation of these feelings will be enough to keep you from that initial act of murder. If so, I would call that a good thing. If you can predict your inability to stand the heat, you can stay out of the kitchen altogether.

But let’s assume that you’ve done it, and now you’re struggling to live with the guilt. Why, you’ll find yourself wondering, have you slain an innocent stranger? Why could you not have acted directly against your guilty wife, whose murder would be so much less disturbing, so much less an occasion of guilt?

Don’t you believe it. Although I can’t claim much fondness for you, I assure you I have your best interests at heart. I want to make this as easy as possible on you and for you. Accordingly, I’ve planned a string of murders that will not only leave Boylan neatly framed but will also condition you so that the most difficult possible act, the murder of your wife, will not be undertaken until you yourself will have been so transformed by your actions that it will be easy for you.

And make no mistake about it, it will be harder to kill your wife than a stranger. You think otherwise because you have a motive for her death, and because you hate her and wish her ill. Emotions, however, are not such a simple matter. For example, you also love her. How could you not? If love were gone, you wouldn’t hate her, wouldn’t care if she had an affair with Boylan, wouldn’t wish her dead. I could make a very persuasive case, my friend, suggesting that you have cast your wife and your best friend as the mother and father in your private little psychodrama. You are the little kid, locked out of the bedchamber while Mommy and Daddy are Doing Something Naughty. You want to punish them for leaving you out. All your fancy talk of artful murder doesn’t obscure the fact that you’re just a little boy, biting back tears at the bedroom door, heartbroken because you can’t climb in bed with your parents.

I’m sorry. I’m not your therapist, am I? And you most assuredly don’t want to hear all this.

Enough of psychology. Let us get back to murder. Artful murder, as you would have it. Murder most foul, I should call it, but I’ll try to suspend judgment.

One lunar month after your first murder it will be time for your second. I shall not trouble to provide a scenario for this second crime except to say that it should be the same in certain particulars but different in others. Again, the victim should bear a superficial resemblance to your wife. Again, the act should take place between 5:30 and 6:30
p.m
., at a time when your wife and her lover are taking pleasure (I presume) in one another’s company. Again, employ the same murder method and use the very instrument for dismemberment that served to make a dog’s breakfast of the first young lady. Make the same ritual cuts, carry the same souvenirs home with you, and, again, leave a few of Boylan’s body hairs where they will do the most good.

Those are the points of similarity. Here are points where change is acceptable, even desirable: The woman may be a little older or a little younger, a bit more or less attractive. If your first victim was a prostitute, let your second be a civilian—or vice versa. You might, for example, want to stalk the shopping malls and supermarkets and follow likely prospects home until you find one who will be at home alone at the chosen hour. Carry a clipboard when you make your visit—no one turns away a man with a clipboard—and do your dirty work right there in her living room.

The second murder may be more difficult for you than the first. Your initial venture into homicide, you see, will have had about it an air of unreality. Even as you go through the motions, all the way up to the point of no return, you will be able to tell yourself that this is all just a game, a bit of harmless tentative acting out—and, should you abort it at the eleventh hour, that is in fact all it will prove to have been.

Once the deed is done, once Woman #1 sleeps with her ancestors, that story just won’t hold up, will it? I presume you’ll have come to terms with the guilt—otherwise there will be no second victim—but as you stalk your victim and make your approach to her, you’ll know her fate and know equally how your role in her death will feel. You’ll know what’s involved in severing a head, for example. You’ll know how it feels, and the sort of nightmares it will give you afterwards. Knowing all this, and knowing that you are going to go through with it, that you have in fact gone through with it once already, will make this second murder chillingly real all the way through.

At the same time, of course, it will be a little easier. And for the same reason—you’ve done it before. Thus you will be sustained by the knowledge that you are equal to this awful task. You have done it before and you can do it again.

Or you can abort it, just as you could have aborted the first murder, and that’s an end to the whole thing. Your wife and your friend may continue forever with their abbreviated
cinq-a-sept
and you can resign yourself to being the ineffectual wimp you’ve been thus far. The single murder you committed will go forever unsolved, and you can sit up nights remembering every detail of the act, knowing that you could have gone on, that you could have ultimately included your wife in the roll of the dead. This knowledge may well be a comfort to you.
I could have killed her,
you will tell yourself.
But am I not a greater and more human person for having made the choice I did? I think so. I think, too, that I shall have another drink.

There will be a third murder, and a fourth murder. We need not talk much about them, except to say that the same points of similarity will be repeated, while other aspects may vary just as the second killing varied from the first. Again, these killings will be at one-month intervals, taking place just before the full moon, except that they are not to occur on the weekend. If the lunar calendar would have you make your kill on a Saturday, do the deed a day early. If the moon points to a Sunday murder, put it off until Monday.

Why four killings? Well, we want to establish a definite pattern, and to generate enough local hue and cry so that the public will go a little bit crazy when a suspect turns up in the happy person of Blazes Boylan. I think, too, that four’s a good number in that, having sliced and diced four women in as many months, you will have been tempered considerably by the process. You may not be Damascus steel, but I trust you’ll hold an edge. When it’s time to kill your wife, you’ll be a dab hand at the business. You won’t freeze up, won’t be paralyzed by soul searching. The enormity of what you’ve done won’t slow you down, because it will indeed be something you’ve done before. As a matter of fact, if you’ve managed to get this far, the next step will be quite easy. Killing, you see, is not all that hard for a killer—and by this point that’s exactly what you’ll be.

In fact, you may grow a little too fond of it.

Which could be something of a problem. I can see you now, seasoned by four murders, and looking forward to the final act, the murder of your unloving wife.
Wait a moment,
you’ll say to yourself.
Perhaps I’m being too hasty here. Perhaps I haven’t prepared enough. Wouldn’t it be better to make matters doubly (or, more accurately, quintuply) sure, and put one more scalp on the old coup stick before tackling the Big Enchilada?

If this thought comes to you, you must recognize it for what it is. You will not be playing it safe by taking this route, for in point of fact your risk of detection will rise sharply after the fourth homicide, as FBI profilers and serial murder specialists begin to draw a bead on you.

No, all this line of reasoning will indicate is a desire to postpone the end of your life as a killer. It may well be that you’ll have reached a point where the game is everything and the goal nothing, where pleasure is to be found not in completing your original scheme but in tracking and killing someone once a month. In other words, perhaps you have found meaning in life as a serial killer.

If this should happen—and, farfetched as it seems to you today, I assure you it is well within the realm of the possible—I say, if this should happen, you must be perfectly resolute and must adopt one of two courses of action immediately. Either you must follow through as planned, making your wife your fifth and final victim, or you must forever abandon all plans to kill your wife and must change the pattern of your serial killing so as to avoid the very attention you have thus far been at pains to create.

(I won’t go into detail as to how to manage this, but if murder turns out to be your metier you’ll probably come up with ideas on your own. First send your ripper killer off into the sunset, performing killings #5 and #6 in a city a hundred miles distant, and #7 still further away in the same direction. Then let your killings from that point on be random in nature, in time of occurrence, and in type of victim. If you take pains not to repeat yourself, there’s really no reason why you can’t go on indefinitely without even creating the suspicion that a serial killer is at work.)

But let us assume that you will not be sidetracked by the prospect of a lifetime of bloody murder. You are going to stick to the plan. You will want your wife dead, and Boylan’s neck on the block.

Fine. Nothing simpler.

On the day before the fifth full moon, the day when a fifth homicide is due to be performed, get into Boylan’s house and stash whatever souvenirs you’ve accumulated from your four prior victims. Perishables you’ll have kept in your own freezer. Now’s the time to transfer them to Boylan’s. If you’ve been collecting the panties of your victims, or odd bits of jewelry, or whatever, hide them in his house. Hide at least some of them in truly out-of-the-way places, where you can’t imagine anyone would think to look for them. Someone will.

Include a link to the murder weapon. For example, if you’ve been improvising garrotes out of wire, leave a spool of that very wire in Boylan’s hardware drawer. You get the picture.

At 5:30, contrive to be in the room where Blazes and your wife have spent so many happy hours together. Your wife will enter the room first. You will be waiting for her, hiding behind the door.

When she comes in, kill her.

Yes, just like that! There is no time to waste, no time even to let her know what’s happening. That’s part of why you’ve had to practice so much, so that you can now act decisively, without wasting an instant. Strike like a cobra, kill the bitch as you’d swat a fly, and then
lock the door.