Eight Perfect Murders(30)
Of course, none of that would explain the presence of a murdered man’s cat in my apartment, a cat that was now rubbing its chin up against my ankle. I found a can of tuna, tipped it into a bowl, then filled a second bowl with water. I also found the lid from a cardboard box, and scattered some dirt from one of my spider plants into it, hoping it would work as a litter box. While the cat ate, I went onto my computer and did a Google search to find out how to know if a cat was male or female. After some poking around, I decided that the cat was male. I spent the day inside with him, at one point both of us sleeping together on the sofa, the cat down by my feet. Toward nightfall, he’d found his way onto the bed, and he curled up on my current book, a paperback copy of Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks. I named the cat Nero.
One month later—one month after I had left Norman Chaney’s corpse in Tickhill, New Hampshire—two things were clear. One, the police weren’t coming for me. Even though I hadn’t gone online to look up anything about the Chaney murder case, I felt, deep in my bones, that I’d gotten away with it. The second realization was that Nero, who’d taken to his new home pretty happily, needed more people around him. I was often gone for twelve hours at a time, and when I returned home, Nero was right at the door desperate for affection. Mary Anne, my downstairs neighbor, told me she could hear him crying during the day.
I was beginning to think that Nero would make an excellent store cat at Old Devils.
Chapter 13
Being an avid mystery reader as an adolescent does not prepare you for real life. I truly imagined that my adult existence would be far more booklike than it turned out to be. I thought, for example, that there would be several moments in which I got into a cab to follow someone. I thought I’d attend far more readings of someone’s will, and that I’d need to know how to pick a lock, and that any time I went on vacation (especially to old creaky inns or rented lake houses) something mysterious would happen. I thought train rides would inevitably involve a murder, that sinister occurrences would plague wedding weekends, and that old friends would constantly be getting in touch to ask for help, to tell me that their lives were in danger. I even thought quicksand would be an issue.
I was prepared for all this in the same way that I wasn’t prepared for the soul-crushing minutiae of life. The bills. The food preparation. The slow dawning realization that adults live in uninteresting bubbles of their own making. Life is neither mysterious nor adventurous. Of course, I came to these conclusions before I became a murderer. Not that my criminal career satisfied the fantasy life I had as a kid. In my fantasies I was never the murderer. I was the good guy, the detective (amateur, usually), who solved the crime. I was never the villain.
Another skill set I thought I’d utilize more in my adult years was the ability to follow someone. And conversely, the ability to know when I was being followed. Again, these things never really came up. But on that Saturday night, after closing up Old Devils, I walked across the Boston Common, wind cutting through my clothes, and wound up at the bar at Jacob Wirth, drinking German beer and eating Wiener schnitzel. It was the middle of February but there were still Christmas lights strung up along the high ceilings of the beer hall, and, somehow, this place made me feel okay about eating alone. That was how I judged restaurants near me; there were the ones that made you feel lonely when you ate alone, like some of the higher-end haunts that clutter Back Bay, and then there were those places—Jacob Wirth, a restaurant called Stoddard’s—that were boisterous enough, and dark enough, that being alone didn’t seem to matter so much.
It was when I left Jacob Wirth, and began the cold walk home, that I felt sure I was being watched. Maybe I really have read too many books, but I felt it in my neck, an almost physical sensation that eyes were on me. I turned back, scanned the heavily bundled residents and tourists, but saw no one who seemed suspicious. But the feeling continued all the way to Charles Street, and when I turned up Revere toward my apartment, I looked back and saw a man, in the hazy light of the gas lamps, walking slowly across the intersection, his gaze in my direction, his face in shadow. The only distinguishing characteristic that I could make out was that he wore a hat, something with a narrow brim. He kept walking, a slow, rolling gait, and for a moment I almost considered turning around to confront him. But then he disappeared behind a building, and I changed my mind. Everyone walking along Charles Street glances up the residential side streets, especially in wintertime when they are at their prettiest.
When I was inside, I thought some more about the man on the street and decided that I was being paranoid. No one was literally following me. But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t being watched, somehow, that I wasn’t being toyed with.
Ever since Gwen Mulvey had arrived at Old Devils, asking me about the list of perfect murders, I’d been thinking about my shadow, the man (I always thought of him as a man) whom I’d met when he answered an anonymous message about Strangers on a Train. The man who killed Eric Atwell for me. The man who wanted Norman Chaney dead.
What if he’d figured out who I was? It wouldn’t have been too hard. Maybe he found me by doing some research into Eric Atwell. If he’d done just a little looking, he would have found out about Claire’s car accident, and the husband left behind, a man who worked at a mystery bookstore. Not only that, but a man who had once published a blog post about his eight favorite perfect murders, one of them being Strangers on a Train. It would have been easy to find me. And once he did, then what? Maybe he’d enjoyed killing Eric Atwell, and he wanted to keep on doing it? What if he decided to use my list as a blueprint for further murders? It would be a way to get my attention. It had, hadn’t it? Was it all some kind of game?