Eight Perfect Murders(67)
“I’m sure they do,” I said.
He looked from the table all the way into the kitchen, where the large refrigerator gleamed in the dim lighting. “Can you go get us a couple? Can I trust you not to try and do something stupid?”
“Sure,” I said.
I got up and walked to the kitchen while Marty pointed the gun in my direction. I passed the two couches; Humphrey the dog was now sprawled on the couch opposite from Tess, both of them asleep and oblivious. I opened the refrigerator, hunted around, and spotted two bottles of Heineken buried toward the back, located a bottle opener in one of the drawers, and popped their tops.
“Oh, Heineken,” Marty said, smiling when I put it in front of him. “That’s a pleasant surprise.”
He took a sip, and so did I. My mouth was dry and gluey, and the beer tasted good, despite the circumstances. “Yeah, twice you’ve changed me, Mal, you know that?” Marty said, as though the conversation we’d started had kept running through his brain while I’d gotten the beers. “You introduced me to killing, and you introduced me to reading. And my life got better.”
“I doubt I introduced you to killing,” I said.
He laughed. “Oh, you did. I was a cop. That didn’t make me a killer.”
In all, I think we talked three hours that night. Marty talked the most, his voice getting hoarser the longer he spoke, but, despite this, the years seemed to fall away from him as he told his story. It was clear that doing what he’d done had brought new life to him. But it had not been enough. He also needed to tell someone about it.
He told me how five years earlier, back in 2010, the year that Claire died, he’d still been an officer in the Smithfield Police Department, considering retirement, and living with an unfaithful wife. On at least two separate occasions he’d put a loaded gun into his mouth late at night. He’d even considered taking out his wife first just to ensure she wouldn’t enjoy herself anymore after he was gone. The only thing that really stopped him was his two kids, and the fact that they’d have to live with that for the rest of their lives. Still, he thought about it almost every day.
Around this same time, he’d been part of a small task force that had taken down an amateur prostitution ring operating out of a Smithfield laundromat. They’d advertised their services on Craigslist, but also on a shadier website called Duckburg. Marty had started perusing both sites, late at night, wondering if maybe he should have his own affair, wondering if he could arrange something like that online, and if it would make a difference. It was where he found me, on Duckburg, looking for a fellow fan of Strangers on a Train. He hadn’t read the book—Marty wasn’t a reader, yet—but he’d seen the movie as a kid and never forgotten it. Robert Walker. Farley Granger. I do your murder, and you do mine. He’d responded to my query. He even considered asking me to kill his wife, but realized that he’d never get away with it, not even if he had an alibi. But there was someone he wanted dead even more than his cheating spouse. Norman Chaney had been a small-time business owner in Holyoke; he owned three service stations, none of them known for the excellence of their automotive service, but all of them known as being connected to the local drug trade. They’d never pinned anything concrete onto Chaney but it was clear that he was money laundering, at the very least, and possibly even dealing out of his stations. But what had gotten Marty’s attention had been when Margaret Chaney, Norman’s semi-estranged wife, had died in a house fire. All the local cops knew that Chaney had done it for the insurance money, property for the house and life for the wife, and that he’d subsequently fled to New Hampshire. He’d gotten away with it.
After receiving Eric Atwell’s name and address from me via message, he gave me Norman Chaney’s name and address in return.
Before shooting Eric Atwell in Southwell, Marty had done some research, just to make sure that he wasn’t killing some kind of saint. He’d discovered, of course, that Atwell was a known scumbag. There’d been a few arrests for minor violations: driving while intoxicated; possession of a controlled substance. But there’d also been three separate restraining orders filed against Atwell, from three separate women, all alleging abuse.
Killing Atwell had not been hard. Marty staked him out for a couple of days, learning that in the late afternoon Atwell would often leave his house and go for long, strenuous walks, wearing headphones, utilizing the multiple isolated walking paths near his farmhouse. Using a gun that Marty had taken during an abandoned house search two years earlier, he followed him into a wooded section of Southwell and shot him five times.
“You know that scene in The Wizard of Oz?” Marty said. “When it goes from black and white to color?”
“Sure,” I said.
“That’s what it was like for me. The world changed. And I guess I just assumed the world had changed for you, as well. After I heard what happened to Norman Chaney.”
“It didn’t,” I said. “Well, it did, but it was the reverse. The world drained of color.”
He frowned and shrugged. “I guess I was wrong. Still, I figured that maybe you’d felt the same as me, and that I should find out who you were. Maybe even meet you.”
As it was, I had been easy to find. Having done his prior research on Atwell, Marty had learned about Atwell’s involvement in the death of Claire Mallory, married to a bookstore manager in Boston. Once Marty had my name, he found my blog, and in particular he found the list I’d written, “Eight Perfect Murders.” And there was Strangers on a Train, sitting right there in the middle of the list. Marty read the book, then read the remaining recommendations, and the world opened up some more for him. Before all this had happened, he’d been in a broken, loveless marriage. His son was struggling with drug addiction and his daughter would still spend time with him, but he knew, down deep, that it was a chore for her. But now he’d discovered murder, and then, even better, he’d discovered reading. Marty signed the divorce papers, took early retirement, and moved to Boston.