Eight Perfect Murders(10)

The reason I thought that—the reason I knew that—is because the fifth victim that Agent Mulvey mentioned, the woman who had the heart attack at her house in Rockland, Elaine Johnson—thing is, I actually knew her. Not well, but as soon as I heard the name, I knew that it was the same Elaine Johnson who used to live in Beacon Hill, a frequent customer at the bookstore, and a woman who came to every author reading we ever hosted. I knew I should have told Agent Mulvey this at the time, but I didn’t, and until I felt I had to, I didn’t plan on telling her.

I was sure she was withholding information from me, so I planned on withholding this information from her.

I had to begin to protect myself.





Chapter 5




I was beginning to fall asleep on the sofa, so I got up, rinsed out the beer bottles, threw away the remainder of my sandwich, brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas. Then I went to my bookshelf and found the book I was looking for. The Drowner. I had the original Gold Medal paperback, printed in 1963. It had one of those lurid illustrated covers that adorn pretty much all of John D. MacDonald’s midcentury paperbacks. On this one, a dark-haired woman in a white bikini is being pulled down through the murky green depths by a pair of hands gripping one of her pretty legs. It promised, like all these covers, two things: sex and death. I ran my thumb along the edge of the book, riffling the pages, and that musty, prickly smell of an old paperback reached my nostrils. I’ve always loved that smell, even though the book collector side of me knew that it was a sign of a book that had been improperly maintained over the years, a book that had probably sat in a cardboard box on the floor of a damp cellar for too many seasons. But to me the smell took me instantly back to the Annie’s Book Swap where I began to buy books when I was in the sixth grade. I grew up in Middleham, about forty-five minutes west of Boston. The year that I turned eleven was also the year that I was allowed to ride my bike the mile and a half along Dartford Road into Middleham’s town center. There were only three stores: a convenience store that called itself Middleham General, in an attempt to sound like something quainter than what it was, an antiques shop located in the old post office building, and an Annie’s Book Swap, a franchised used bookstore run by an Englishman named Anthony Blake. It sold primarily mass markets—those paperbacks that could just about fit in a back pocket—and it was there that I bought the Ian Fleming novels, and the Peter Benchleys, and the Agatha Christies that got me through my younger years. It was there that I almost definitely bought The Drowner, having already purchased every available Travis McGee book, John D. MacDonald’s famous series. It was rare to find MacDonald standalones, but some devoted crime reader in my part of Massachusetts must have died around the time I started riding my bike to the town center, because Annie’s was suddenly swamped with stacks of pulp novels, not just John D. MacDonald but Mickey Spillane books, and Alistair MacLeans, and Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. I allowed myself three books per shopping expedition, which just about used up my allowance. In those days it took me less than a week to read those three books—sometimes it took me just three days—but I was always happy to reread books I already owned. I probably hadn’t read The Drowner since then, since I was a preteen, but the basic plot had stuck with me.

The villain—and she was a good one—was a highly religious secretary who sublimated all her repressed sexual energy into physical exercise. She murdered the sinful people around her, including a married woman having an affair with her boss. She drowned her by lurking, in scuba gear, at the bottom of the pond where this woman swam. Then she got hold of one of her legs and pulled her down under the water. That particular murder I never forgot. When I made up my perfect murders list, it had jumped into my mind. I didn’t reread the book, but I familiarized myself with it.

I brought The Drowner into bed with me. I read the first paragraph, its words hauntingly familiar. Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don’t just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself. The last time I’d cracked this particular paperback I was probably eleven or twelve. I like to think it was summertime and I was up late in my cramped bedroom under a single sheet, a mosquito probably whining in one of the corners of the room. My father was playing his records in the living room, too loudly, depending on how drunk he was. Most nights ended the same, with my mother turning down his music—jazz usually, although sometimes he’d listen to fusion stuff like Frank Zappa or Weather Report—and my father berating her for not understanding him. But this was simply background noise. Because I wasn’t really there in that bedroom. I was actually in Florida, in 1963, hanging out with shady real estate developers, and sexy divorcées, and drinking bourbon highballs. And now here I was again—almost forty years old—and my eyes were running over the same words, holding the same book I held twenty-eight years ago, the same book some businessman or housewife held fifty years ago. Time travel.

I finished the book at about four in the morning. I almost got out of bed to get another book from the list but decided to try and sleep instead. I rolled onto my stomach, thinking about the book, about what it must feel like to be swimming along in a pond when something grabs you from below, pulls you down to your death. Then, because I was starting to get sleepy, my wife’s face came into my mind, as it always did. But I didn’t dream of her, and I didn’t dream about The Drowner. I dreamed about running, about people coming after me.