Eight Perfect Murders(6)
She was watching me expectantly, making eye contact, and I felt my own eyes skidding away from hers, taking in the large expanse of her forehead, her nearly invisible eyebrows. “Am I a suspect?” I said, then laughed.
She leaned back a little in her chair. “You’re not an official suspect, no. If that were the case, then it wouldn’t just be me here questioning you. But I am investigating the possibility that all these crimes were committed by the same perpetrator, and that that perpetrator is purposefully mimicking crimes from your list.”
“Mine can’t be the only list that includes both Double Indemnity and The A.B.C. Murders?”
“To tell the truth, it pretty much is. Well, yours is the shortest list that contains them both. Both books were on other lists together, but those lists were all much longer, like there was one called ‘a hundred mysteries you need to read before you die,’ that sort of thing, but yours jumped out. It’s about committing the perfect murder. Eight books are mentioned. You work at a mystery bookstore in Boston. All the crimes have happened in New England. Look, I know it’s probably all a coincidence, but I thought it was worth following up.”
“I get that it’s somewhat clear someone is copycatting The A.B.C. Murders, but a body found near the train tracks? That seems a stretch to say that’s from Double Indemnity.”
“Do you remember the book well?”
“I do. It’s one of my favorites.” This was true. I’d read Double Indemnity around the age of thirteen and was so thrilled by it that I sought out the film version with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck that was made in 1944. That film led me down a rabbit hole of film noirs, my teenage years spent seeking out video stores that stocked classic film. Of all the noirs I saw because of Double Indemnity, none of them topped that first viewing experience. Sometimes I think the Miklós Rózsa score to that movie is permanently embedded in my brain.
“On the day that Bill Manso’s body was found on the tracks, one of the emergency windows on the train had been busted open, near to where the body was found.”
“So, is it possible he really did jump?”
“Not a chance. The scene-of-crime officers could tell that he’d been killed in a separate location and driven to the tracks. And the coroner confirmed that he’d died from blunt force trauma to the head, probably from some kind of weapon.”
“Okay,” I said.
“That means that someone, probably the person who killed him, or an accomplice, was on the train, and smashed the emergency window to make it look like he’d jumped.”
For the first time since we’d started talking, I felt a little jolt of alarm. In the book, and the movie as well, an insurance agent falls for the wife of an oil executive and, together, they plot to murder him. They do it for each other, but also for the money. The insurance agent, Walter Huff, fakes an accident policy on Nirdlinger, the man they plan to murder. Included in the policy is a “double indemnity” clause that doubles the amount of the payoff if death occurs on a train. Walter and Phyllis, the unfaithful wife, break the husband’s neck in a car, then Walter poses as Nirdlinger and goes onto the train, himself. He wears a fake cast on his leg, and has crutches, since the real Nirdlinger had recently broken his leg. He figures that the cast is perfect because other passengers will remember seeing him, but not necessarily remember seeing his face. He goes to the smoking car at the back of the train and jumps off. Then Walter and Phyllis leave the dead man by the tracks, so it looks as though he fell.
“So, you’re saying it was definitely made to look like the murder from Double Indemnity?” I said.
“I am,” she responded. “I’m the only one, though, the only one who’s convinced of the connection.”
“What were these people like?” I asked. “The people who were killed.”
Agent Mulvey glanced toward the drop ceiling of the bookstore’s back room, then said, “As far as we can tell, there’s no way to connect them, besides the fact that all the deaths happened in New England, and besides the fact that they seem to be copycat murders from fictional sources.”
“From my list,” I said.
“Right. Your list is one possible connection. But there’s also a connection . . . it’s not really a connection, more of a gut feeling on my part, that all the victims . . . weren’t bad, exactly, but weren’t good people. I’m not sure any of them were really well liked.”
I thought for a moment. It was getting darker in the back room of the bookstore, and I instinctively checked my watch, but it was still early afternoon. I looked back toward the stockroom, where two windows looked out onto the back alley. Snow had begun to pile in both of them and the portion of outside that I could make out through the windows was as dark as dusk. I turned on my desk lamp.
“For example,” she continued. “Bill Manso was a divorced investment broker. The detectives who interviewed his grown children said they hadn’t seen him in over two years, that he wasn’t exactly the paternal type. It was clear that they disliked him. And Robin Callahan, as you’ve probably read, had been pretty controversial.”
“Remind me,” I said.
“I guess a number of years ago she broke up a marriage of one of her co-workers. And, subsequently, her own marriage. Then she wrote a book against monogamy—this was a while ago. A lot of people don’t like her. If you google her name . . .”