Eight Perfect Murders(48)

“What books did you put on that list?” he asked, ignoring my question about Cindy.

I told him, pretending I was having a hard time remembering. I left off Strangers on a Train, however. Marty, who was always looking for book recommendations, wrote some of the titles down in his little notebook.

“The A.B.C. Murders,” he said. “I like the sound of that. These days I think I like reading Agatha Christie more than I like reading James Ellroy. Don’t know what it is, but maybe I’m getting soft.”

“You’ve been reading Agatha Christie?”

“Yeah, like you told me to, remember? I just read Ten Little Indians.”

“And Then There Were None,” I said, almost automatically. It was the less offensive title that the book was now sold under.

“Right, that one. Now that was a perfect crime. Too bad more murderers don’t copy that book.”

“Kill yourself after you commit the murders, you mean?” I said. I didn’t remember telling him to read Agatha Christie, but I’m sure I did. It sounded like me.

We ordered another beer, and talked about books, and a little about his family. He asked if I wanted to stay for a third beer, but I decided to bow out. As always with Marty I liked spending time with him, but after a while we’d run out of things to say, and I would feel sad and lonely. I’ve always felt that being with people, as opposed to being alone, can make you feel loneliness more acutely.

“You gonna do anything about Nick Pruitt?” he asked, as I was pulling on my jacket.

“No,” I said. “Not unless the FBI decides to talk with me again. If they do, then I guess I could mention him, say that I had an ex-cop look into the Norman Chaney murder and how Pruitt looked like a suspect.”

“I wouldn’t mention my name,” Marty said. “If you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not. In fact, I won’t mention it at all. I think I was just curious, was all. I was baffled that they’d made some connection between me and these crimes.”

“I figured you were going to tell me it had to do with Nero,” Marty said, then finished off his beer.

“Huh?” I said.

“Oh. I figured that the FBI came calling on you with questions about Norman Chaney because of your cat. Nero. In the store.”

“Why?” I said, trying to sound relatively calm.

“I was reading the police reports and Norman Chaney had a cat, a ginger one like Nero, that went missing after the homicide. I read that . . . then I thought that might be the connection.”

“That’s funny,” I said.

“He’s a little bit of a celebrity, that Nero, you know?”

“I know he is. Half the people who come to our store come to see him. Emily tells me he has his own Instagram page, although I’ve never seen it. No, they didn’t ask me anything about my cat. And he doesn’t come from Vermont, anyway.” I laughed, and it sounded fake in my own head.

“I might stay here for one more,” Marty said.

I thanked him again and went out into the night. The temperature had dropped in the time I’d spent with Marty, and I walked home carefully, avoiding patches of black ice on the narrow sidewalks. When I reached my street, I didn’t immediately see her, waiting in the shadow of the dead linden tree in front of my house, but I did sense her. It was the feeling I’d been experiencing lately, that feeling that I was being watched.

At my stairwell, she stepped out of the shadows and said, “Hi, Mal.”





Chapter 20




“Hi, Gwen,” I said.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“I guess not. I spoke with two other FBI agents today, and they told me that you’d been suspended.”

“Who did you talk to?” she said, stepping forward so that she was now in the light from the street. Her breath was billowing in the cold night, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to invite her in.

“One agent from New Haven—”

“Berry, right?”

“Look,” I said. “I’m just not sure I should really be talking to you.”

“No, I totally understand. I don’t want anything from you, but I was hoping to at least talk, just for a little while, explain what happened. I would have called you, but I couldn’t do that. Can I come up? Or could we grab a drink somewhere? Anywhere but where we’re standing right now.”

We walked down my street to Charles and got a booth at the Sevens, where we each ordered a Newcastle Brown Ale. Gwen removed her coat but kept a thick woolen scarf wrapped around her neck. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were still red from being outside.

“What do you want to know?” she said.

“You’ve been suspended?”

“Yes, pending a review.”

“How come?”

She took a sip from her bottle of beer, then licked foam from her upper lip. “When I presented what I’d learned to my supervisors . . . well, not what I’d learned so much, but what I suspected, that there was a connection between several unsolved crimes in the New England area, I was told not to pursue the case. I made the mistake of telling them what had initially led me to you. The thing is . . . I knew who you were, already. I’d heard your name, anyway, because once upon a time I knew your wife. I knew Claire.”