Eight Perfect Murders(68)
To be near me.
In 2012, he started to come to readings, and eventually we got to know each other. I think he thought it was going to be enough to meet me, to become friends. Maybe we’d even eventually speak about what had happened, about the murders we’d committed for each other. But that didn’t happen. Yes, we became friends, but it wasn’t enough for him. And as I’ve already said, we started to spend less time together. And that was when he came up with the idea of finishing off the murders from the list I’d written. It was a way to bond with me because bonding over a couple of beers was not getting it done. In other words, if I’d been better company, a whole bunch of people would never have been murdered. Or maybe that’s simply not true. When Marty first killed Eric Atwell, it was like popping a bottle of champagne. The cork was never going to go back into the bottle. And now he had a whole bunch of murder methods to utilize for his new hobby. He just needed a victim.
Before his wife had had an affair, back when Marty Kingship was still living out west in Smithfield, she’d read newscaster Robin Callahan’s infamous book about the benefits of adultery. It was called Life’s Too Long and had been published a year after she’d been caught in a love affair with her married co-anchor. It had been tabloid fodder for months, helped along by the fact that Callahan was a striking blonde, and seemingly unrepentant. She cashed in on her notoriety by publishing a book that essentially argued that adultery was more natural than monogamy, that life spans had increased too much to have it make sense for people to stay married forever. She made the talk-show rounds, and the book rocketed up the bestseller charts. Marty Kingship blamed that book for his wife’s subsequent fling with the family dentist. I’m sure he wasn’t the only man, or woman, with bad feelings about Robin Callahan. But Marty was someone who’d murdered before, gotten away with it, and was itching to try again.
He went through my list of perfect murders, seeing if there were any good ideas for how he could get away with the murder of Robin Callahan. He had particularly loved Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders, in which a specific killing was hidden among a string of murders made to look like they’d been done by a madman. What if he could do the same with Robin Callahan? Maybe kill a few people who all had similar names—names of birds, for example. Then he thought he could even leave a single feather at the scene of each crime. Or better yet, mail a single feather to the local police.
And that was what he did. He killed Robin Callahan inside her own home, having gotten inside by showing her his old police identification card. He also killed Ethan Byrd, a local student whom Marty found by searching through police reports looking for bird-related names. Ethan had been arrested at a sports bar in Lowell for threatening the bartender, and for disturbing the peace. He found Jay Bradshaw the same way; he’d been arrested for rape, but never convicted. It turned out Bradshaw spent most of his days on the Cape sitting in his garage, trying to sell used tools. Marty had pulled up in broad daylight, then beat Bradshaw to death with a baseball bat he’d brought and a sledgehammer he’d borrowed.
As soon as he’d begun to plot the A.B.C. Murders, Marty knew that he couldn’t stop until he’d finished the list. Bill Manso was another name he pulled from browsing police records, a man who had been investigated in a domestic disturbance, but someone who had also been accused by a neighbor of breaking into her house during the daytime, stealing her underwear. This had all happened five years previous, but Marty read up on the case, discovering that Manso had gotten off because he was a regular train commuter into New York City, and that he’d provided evidence that he was commuting at the time of the breakin. The train made him think of Double Indemnity, another book on the list. Marty had read it, of course, but he’d also gotten the movie from the local library. He liked the movie better (“It gave me a brand-new appreciation of Fred MacMurray”). He decided to kill Bill Manso, bludgeon him to death, and leave him on the tracks. Then he’d take the commuter rail himself the following morning, bust out a window at just the right time to make it look as though Manso had decided to jump. He knew it wouldn’t wash. Scene-of-the-crime investigators would know almost instantly that Manso had been killed elsewhere, and that his body had been staged. But what excited Marty was that someone might start to figure it out, make a connection between the two books, and that it would lead back to me. Maybe they’d even arrest me. Either way, I’d become involved, and that was what he was hoping for.
Marty wasn’t sure how to gain access to Bill Manso, but when he got down to Connecticut, it was made easier by the fact that Manso liked to drink at the bar nearest to the train station. Manso would go directly from his commute to the Corridor Bar and Grill at five thirty every day and stumble out of there at about ten at night, to drive the mile and a half to his town house condo. Marty killed him in the parking lot with a telescoping baton (“Much better than a baseball bat, let me tell you”) and left his body along the tracks. The next day he took the train and punched out a window in between cars using the same steel baton.
Four murders in, Marty got impatient. He didn’t say that in so many words, but he decided it was time to get a little more obvious. Time to get me involved.
Like all the regulars at Old Devils, especially anyone who came to our author readings, Marty had known Elaine Johnson. She’d cornered him on numerous occasions to let him know the books he should be reading, and the books that were a waste of time. She told him about that nasty lesbian who owned the apartment she lived in, and about how disgustingly dirty the city of Boston was, and about how, without her, the Old Devils Bookstore would have gone out of business years ago. And she told him about her heart condition, how her doctors had told her she should move to a quieter region, make sure that nothing stressed her out.