Eight Perfect Murders(74)

It had actually snowed a lot less north of the city. There was a scrim of white over everything, more frost than snow, and in the dawn hours the sky was a checkerboard of thin clouds. The world was colorless.

I reached Rockland by midmorning. I considered waiting somewhere until it was dark again but decided to risk it instead. There was only one other house with a view of Elaine Johnson’s old property, and I would just have to hope that whoever lived there was not spending the morning looking out the window. From my previous visit to Elaine’s house, I’d noticed the single-car garage. Its door had been up, and I remembered it as being empty inside. Elaine’s car, a rusty Lincoln, probably too big for the garage, had sat encased in ice in the driveway.

I found the house immediately, not far from Route 1, and turned into the unplowed drive with enough speed so that I didn’t get stuck. I pulled around the Lincoln and into the garage, killed the engine, then got out and yanked down the garage door by its rusted handle. I had briefly looked across the street before I did this, toward a boxy, shingled house, smoke billowing from its chimney. I was happy that the front of the garage wasn’t angled toward the street. Hopefully no one would notice that its door was now down.

I popped a single pane of glass from the back door, reached in, and unlocked it. Once I was inside with my food and my duffel bag, I found some cardboard and tape and sealed the door back up.

The heat was still on, although the thermostat was set to the low sixties. It was cold, but bearable. I unpacked my food and put the beer in the fridge next to what remained of Elaine’s unclaimed provisions. It was clear that she had been living on cottage cheese and tinned fruit. There was a decent couch in the living room, midcentury style with wooden legs and a low back. I decided that I would sleep there. I went upstairs to look for clean sheets and a blanket and found them in the master bedroom closet. All I could think about was Marty in his clown mask emerging from this very closet to scare Elaine Johnson to death. She wasn’t my favorite person, but she hadn’t deserved that. When I got back to the living room, I knew that I would never go upstairs again.



It’s been four days and I’m still here. I work on this manuscript, and I eat canned beef stew and tomato soup. The beer is gone but I found several gallon bottles of Gallo burgundy in the cellar and I am working steadily through those.

Mostly what I do is read. During the day I sit in a comfortable club chair by a window. At night I read on the couch, using a penlight under a blanket to see. I am reading mysteries again, not just because they are the only books here, but because I don’t have much time left and I want to revisit some of my favorites. I find that I am most drawn to books I first read when I was barely a teenager. Agatha Christie novels. Robert Parkers. Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels. I read When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block in one sitting and cried after finishing the last sentence.

I do wish there were more poetry books in this house—I found an anthology of American poetry that had been published in 1962. But I also managed to write down some of my favorite poems from memory. “Winter Nightfall,” of course, by Sir John Squire, “Aubade” by Philip Larkin, “Crossing the Water” by Sylvia Plath, and at least half the stanzas from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray.



There is no internet here, and I don’t have a phone.

I am sure they are looking for me, the man who killed Marty Kingship, the man who has the answers to a string of related murders. I don’t know how much Gwen has helped them out. I assume that she has told them everything about our phone call. Maybe she hasn’t told them how we met in Boston after she’d been suspended. I wonder if she might figure out where I am. So far no one has come knocking on this door.

They’ll still have plenty of questions. Gwen, I’m sure, still has questions. That’s one of the reasons why I’m writing this memoir. I want to set the record straight. I want to tell the whole truth.



I wrote that I burned Claire’s entire diary after reading it. That’s not entirely true. I saved one page, probably because I wanted some proof that she had loved me, something in her own handwriting.

The entry was from the spring of 2009, and this is what she wrote:

I don’t write enough about Mal in these pages and how happy he can make me. I come home late and he is always on the couch waiting. More often than not he is asleep, a book cracked open and across his chest. Last night when I woke him up he was so pleased to see me. He said he’d read a poem that he thought I’d like.

I did like it, maybe even loved it. It’s a Bill Knott and I’m going to copy it down here so I will never forget. It’s called “Goodbye.”



If you are still alive when you read this,

close your eyes. I am

under their lids, growing black.





What else have I lied about?

I don’t know if this was a lie so much as an omission, but when I killed Norman Chaney up in Tickhill, New Hampshire, I made it sound as though after I strangled him, I left him there on the floor. But in reality, after checking his pulse, I must have panicked, because I picked up the crowbar and hit him in the face and head repeatedly. I won’t describe what he looked like when I’d finished, but I sat down on the floor and thought that I would never get up again, that I would never be sane again. It was Nero coming across the floor that eventually saved me. He gave me a reason to get up and out of the house. I think I made it sound as though I’d saved Nero, but he was actually the one who saved me. Trite, I know. But the truth sometimes is.