Eight Perfect Murders(52)

Halfway through her announcement all the students had begun to slide their laptops into their backpacks and put their coats back on. I got up, as well, and quickly left the room, walking back down the hallway, then outside, hoping my presence hadn’t been too noteworthy to anyone. I wandered toward a bench, with a view out toward the Atlantic, dark gray under a leaden sky. I sat for a moment, angling my body so that I could see the front of Proctor Hall, students now streaming out, moving quickly out of fear that their professor would suddenly show up and they wouldn’t get the morning off.

It was clear what had happened. Pruitt hadn’t shown up to his class, hadn’t responded to texts or calls to his cell phone. His teaching assistant had resorted to running down to his nearby house and seeing if he was home. I had a bad feeling but tamped it down. Pruitt was a drunk of some kind, at least that was what Jillian Nguyen had reported. Maybe he was hungover. Maybe this sort of thing happened all the time, and his TA would sometimes be able to rouse him by banging on his door.

I kept my eye on Proctor Hall, curious to see what the TA might do when she departed the building, wondering if she might go back down to Pruitt’s house. Then I remembered her saying that she would stick around the classroom for the duration of the canceled class. I stood up, began to walk down the hill toward Pruitt’s street. My body was telling me to get back in my car and drive home. Something had happened. A line of poetry went through my mind—someone is dead, even the trees know it—and it took me a moment to remember that it was an Anne Sexton line, a poem about one of her parents dying, I thought. As I approached Pruitt’s house, I studied the line of trees along Corning Street. They were all leafless, of course, and against the dark sky they were just black shapes, pencil scratches. It was hard to imagine them full of leaves on a summer day. Yes, someone is dead. But it wasn’t enough just to know it.

When I got to Pruitt’s house, I cut down his driveway, passing his car. I was wearing gloves and I unlatched the wooden door that led to his fenced-in backyard. Drifts of crusted snow filled the square yard. There was a grill under a tarp, but nothing else. Unraked leaves, black now, were banked up against the far fence.

I climbed three steps that got me to a small deck and a back door. Through the windowpane I could see a kitchen with a checkered linoleum floor; beyond it was what looked like a dining room with a long table. The door was locked, and I knocked on the glass. I was about to punch through the window, but there was a row of old plant pots on the deck. Crouching, I lifted each one. Under a pot with rosemary in it was a single silver key. I pinched it between my gloved fingers; it fit the back door, and I was inside. I shouted “Hello” into the empty house, then waited for an answer. I walked through the uncluttered kitchen into the dining room, going slow, allowing my eyes to adjust to the dim interior. All the curtains were pulled. From the dining room I could see through into the front room of the house, to a long sofa. Pruitt was sitting there on one end of the sofa, his feet flat on the floor, his hands on either side of his thighs, and his head tilted back all the way, resting against the sofa cushion. He was dead. I knew that much just by looking at him, at how still he was, how exposed his neck was with his head at that uncomfortable angle.

As shocked as I was by the sight of his body, I was equally shocked because it meant that Pruitt wasn’t Charlie. I’d been so sure that he was, and clearly, I’d been wrong. There was, I suppose, a minuscule possibility that maybe Pruitt really was Charlie, and the guilt of what he’d done had caused him to drink himself to death. But I knew, in my gut, that that wasn’t the case. Pruitt had been killed by Charlie, who was many steps ahead of me.

There was a very strong smell of whiskey coming from the room, and I saw the bottle on the floor, tipped on its side on the thin Persian rug. It caught what little light there was in the room, glinting from a line of wire that encased its triangular shape. I recognized the brand—it was a scotch—but couldn’t remember exactly what it was called. There was also another smell, one that made me think of hospitals. I moved in a little closer so that I was standing in the doorframe. And from there I could see that there was dried vomit down the front of Pruitt’s sweater.

Knowing I wasn’t going to go any farther into the room with Pruitt’s body there, I glanced around. Not surprisingly there were many bookshelves. In one corner was a large flat-screen television and what looked like an old stereo system. On the wall above the sofa was a large framed theater poster advertising a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; it included a line drawing of a bear with a crown on its head. I did notice that except for the bottle on the floor in front of the sofa I’d seen no other signs of liquor in the house.

I slowly backed away into the dining room, and then the kitchen. I looked around there for liquor, as well, but didn’t see any. I opened his refrigerator. It was sparse inside, but there was a six-pack of beer on the top shelf, although looking at it closely I realized that it was nonalcoholic. I shut the refrigerator door, wondering if it would be worth it to look around the house some more, or if it would be foolish to stay any longer. I knew what had happened here, of course, although I hadn’t completely processed it yet. It was Malice Aforethought. In that book a woman who is a drug addict is killed with a drug overdose, making it look like an accident. Pruitt was an obvious recovering alcoholic, but Charlie had somehow gotten him to drink again, gotten him to drink a fatal amount. Or at least to make it look like he had.