I hesitated over this one for reasons similar to those of my unnamed narrator, to sacrifice a good story idea in order to commit the perfect murder. In my case, I had to let go of the perfect murder in order to write a story. (Confess: You’ve fantasized along these lines yourself.) But then I probably wouldn’t kill anyone anyway, and there’s no sense letting a good idea go begging.
• • •
Watching Hufnagel take the strychnine, I felt a twinge of remorse.
Certainly not for Hufnagel, or for the fact that the primo cocaine he thought he was ingesting contained enough mole poison to ensure the pristine character of every lawn in suburban Michigan. He’d bought that fate five years before, when he plagiarized one of my best ideas and pissed it away on a desk-top novel that languished in Barnes & Noble and died on the remaindering table, forever beyond the reach of a writer who knew best how to make use of the subject matter. I’d have taken him out then, but there’d have been scant satisfaction in an act performed in the heat of first wrath. The thing needed time; to plan, to refine, to make friendly overtures, to overcome through patience and grim sincerity the natural suspicions of a thief whose victim has elected not only to forgive him, but to include him in his circle of intimates. The center of the circle.
The best con men, they say, con themselves first. It was necessary to remind myself of how close we were before the betrayal, in effect to erase all surface memory of the incident and re-create emotions formed in an innocence I no longer possessed. Fortunately, good writers and method actors have that ability in common, and if I may say so I succeeded as thoroughly as an Olivier, a James Dean. There had even been times, dining and drinking with the man I despised above all others, when I felt as close to him as a brother, and when thoughts of the despicable theft occurred unbidden, managed without much effort to convince myself it had all been a mistake, a laughable coincidence, and that since he’d failed so miserably to profit from it, that the thing was of no great consequence.
But an actor or a writer who is unable to separate himself from his self-delusion when not actually performing is a tiresome creature. A good con man never loses sight of the prize. In my mind, Hufnagel was as dead as the idea he’d appropriated and defiled with his hackery. It was a corpse I sat beside at ballgames. It was a cadaver I invited to my home in the country. All that remained was to put the concept into practice.
No, it wasn’t Hufnagel who made me contrite, and I’d lived with the plan too long to feel guilty for my deception. I grieved for the loss of another idea. It was as good as or better than one he’d stolen, there was an Edgar Award in it at least if I used it in fiction, and once I’d used it in fact, it would be lost to me forever. While writers make their best work public, murderers bury theirs. It’s a near thing for an artist or an entertainer to seek success through obscurity.
But a twinge was all it was. Ideas aren’t hard to come by, unless you’re so deficient creatively to have to filch them. I didn’t lament the one he’d made away with so much as the making away. The hard part had been winning his trust, and convincing him that I shared his drug habit. I drink in moderation, smoke not at all, and had been pompous on the point that I’d never taken an illegal substance. So in order to get the strychnine into my enemy, I was forced to present myself as a liar and a hypocrite. It was humiliating, especially considering the audience, to suffer his blubbery, condescending grin when at last he’d accepted my admission. So you’re no better than me after all, it said, complete with his indifference to elementary grammar.
No matter. It was a corpse’s grin.
I’m nothing if not a thorough researcher. I had no trouble getting him to believe that the Ziploc bag I showed him contained the purest cocaine from the coastal village of Canavieiras, at a cost commensurate with its quality.
He actually licked his lips when he saw the flaky white powder. “Your books must be in the black finally.”
“When did poverty ever stop one of us?” I placed a shaving mirror on the coffee table, picked up a razor blade, and separated the little heap I’d poured on the glass into parallel lines, as neatly as if I’d been practicing for years instead of hours.
I wasn’t a good host. I helped myself first, to remove any lingering doubt on his part. It was unnecessary. He was so intent on his own approaching pleasure he didn’t notice that what I inhaled through the rolled-up dollar bill was empty air from an unoccupied part of the mirror. Impatient as he was, he didn’t bother to count the remaining lines. I’d expected that. There’s no underestimating the greed of a plagiarist, especially one who is also a drug fiend. He seized the bill, bent to the line nearest him where he sat on the sofa, and made an appropriately porcine noise snorting it up into his nasal cavity, into his empty brain.
Would he have time to notice it was only all-purpose flour, or would the sting of the poison convince him it was as advertised? Even cyanide doesn’t work as swiftly as you’d think on the evidence of what some of my mystery-writing colleagues publish. But when you hate a man, truly detest him enough to see him punished, strychnine’s the thing. While it takes ten or twenty minutes for symptoms to appear when ingested internally (much less when taken directly into the exposed capillaries inside the nose), the time spent in violent convulsion is an eternity for the victim. Puzzling visibly over the immediate sensation, given the build-up I’d provided, he reached back a hand to massage his stiff neck. When he moved it around to probe at his face, stiffening as well, I got up from the sofa. I did this as much to remove myself from the range of his flailing arms and legs as to watch the show.
It was a hit. He crashed to the floor, knocking over the table and scattering its contents, rolled onto his back, and arched his stomach toward the ceiling, keeping his head and feet on the floor. (One of the accepted positions for both Lamaze and death throes.) His entire body quivered like a drawn bow. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth, which drew farther and farther apart in a rictus that was not at all similar to the superior leer he’d worn only minutes before. His face looked slimy. He sweated through his sports shirt, he made a gurgling noise in his throat that may have been an attempt to cry for help. He released the contents of his bladder.
Enough detail. I’m not a sadist. Soon enough he was dead, and I got to work.
The beauty part of the plan wasn’t the murder; that was pedestrian. It was the disposal of the body. That’s where most amateurs foul up, for not thinking things through. Either they chopped up the remains and parted them out, multiplying the chances of discovery, or buried them in a flowerbed or something on their own property or—just as bad—tossed them in the trunk of a car and drove to some secluded spot, risking a police pullover for a cracked taillight or failure to sign a turn or just because the cop was bored and wanted someone to talk to, and even if they succeeded and got back home undetected and removed all traces of the body from the trunk, some crime-lab geek going over the corpse collected traces of the trunk from the body, which was a guaranteed conviction. You couldn’t count on the remains not being found, not completely, and you had to prepare for the possibility that you’d be suspected and questioned.
With the advance from a three-book contract, I’d bought a house on a hundred acres in the country. It was mostly wilderness: hills good for hiking and not much else, patches of woods and swamp. A lot of empty acreage, perfect for keeping the neighbors at arm’s length and a writer in solitude. At the back, it bordered on a farm belonging to an old recluse named Lundergaard, whose wife had left him forty years ago, after which he’d retired from the world, working his field for his own subsistence and entertaining no visitors. In the ten years I’d lived there I had yet to lay eyes on him. We shared a dense stand of cedars and impassable swamp, with only a strand of twisted barbed wire to mark the property line, strung straight through the middle of the bog.
The dear old bog.
I’d gotten my bright idea the first time I saw that brackish green stretch of no man’s land, and had kept it in reserve while I worked on other projects, never dreaming at the start that I’d employ it anywhere other than in a novel or a short story. The bog was covered with a spongy layer of decayed vegetation, only inches thick, but resilient enough for a man to stand on if he was careful not to tear the fabric with the corner of a heel. How deep went the pool of muck and wriggler-infested water beneath it, I couldn’t guess, but when I tested it by piercing the loam with an eight-foot pole of dead stripling, it never touched bottom, and slid out of sight when I let go of the end. Nor was there any way of telling its age. For all I knew, there were bones of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers down there, still waiting to be exhumed after a couple of thousand centuries, on top of sixty million years’ worth of dinosaur. There was no reason to believe that a newer and much smaller skeleton shouldn’t remain there as long.
But I wasn’t counting on even that. That was the beauty part.
It was a long walk from my house to the bog, much of it uphill. It was tempting to consider throwing Hufnagel into the back of the four-wheel truck in the garage, drive as far as the cedars, and carry him the last hundred yards to his final resting place. But that meant tire tracks, simplifying things for the boys from Homicide. I put on dark clothes against the chance of being spotted by a late-night hiker, hoisted my guest into a fireman’s carry across my shoulders (he was stiff already, the strychnine having advanced the process of rigor mortis), and set out through the back door.
Forty-five wheezing, sweaty, mosquito-bitten minutes later, I came to the edge of the bog, which by moonlight glistened like fresh tar. The woods were alive with chattering raccoons, inquiring owls, and lead-footed squirrels, whose hopping gait through dry leaves sounded exactly like a SWAT team in full charge; I was shaking, and not just from fatigue. It’s one thing to stand among sunshine-dappled trunks planning to dispose of a body, quite another to stand supporting the weight of that body in striped shadows squirming with nocturnal predators and one’s own demons. I wanted to put Hufnagel down and rest. I didn’t; what if he left a scent that might attract a cadaver-sniffing dog? I shifted the burden a little to relieve one set of screaming muscles and stepped onto the squishy surface of the bog.
For a panicky moment I wondered if that thin layer of long-dead flora would support my weight and Hufnagel’s combined; I had a fleeting, vivid vision of the two of us plunging through icy, bottomless offal, my nose and throat and lungs choking with muck and algae, then blackness—Hufnagel and I joined for eternity along with all the other fossils.
But the surface held. Foul-smelling water bubbled up around the thick soles of my boots, forced through the porous moss and lichen and corrupted plant-flesh by my weight and Hufnagel’s, but the loam didn’t part. I took another tentative step, then another. It was like walking on a waterbed. I plunged ahead, growing more confident with each yard. I came to the wire that separated my property from Lundergaard’s. I improved my grip on Hufnagel’s arms and legs and high-stepped over it.
Trespassing.
With a murdered corpse, yet.
That was the big idea.
I wasn’t arrogant enough to assume I was the only one capable of looking beyond the bog to its possibilities. Any homicide detective with enough head to keep his hat from settling on his shoulders would obtain a warrant to excavate that part of the property if he were sufficiently motivated by suspicion, find the elusive bottom, and drag it for a corpse.
But a warrant was only good as far as the strand of barbed wire. Beyond it was my neighbor’s land, and without probable cause to suspect him of complicity (no danger there; no one could connect him with me, or for that matter anyone else), the police were barred from searching it. They probably wouldn’t even consider it. Premeditated murderers are far too wary to bury the evidence on adjoining property. The risk of the neighbors selling out and the new owners developing the land and turning up the body with a power shovel was too great. Much better to dig the hole in one’s own real estate and never move. A lifetime of self-imposed house arrest was a small price to pay to avoid discovery.
My case was different.
I had an accomplice.
His name was Uncle Sam.
The bog was registered with the county clerk as wetlands, and the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington prohibits draining and developing wetlands, which would endanger the wildlife that depends on the habitat. An act of Congress would be required to change the law, and since Congress acts about as swiftly as the brontosauri that dozed beneath my feet—and slower still considering the inevitable protest by the environmental lobby—I could have buried the corpse on my side, sold the property to a developer the next day, and gone to live wherever I pleased, secure in the knowledge that no bulldozer or backhoe would ever profane the bog’s natural beauty and incidentally fork up Hufnagel. After all, I didn’t own the property where he moldered, and no authority, local or federal, could unearth him.
Poor Hufnagel. The cokehead plagiarist never stood a chance against me and the District of Columbia.
For once in my life I’d kept my mouth shut about an idea. I’d been afraid I’d talk it to death and never write it. It occurred to me, as I trudged far enough onto Lundergaard’s to prevent the remains from drifting back onto my side (and also to observe a reasonable margin of error on the part of the surveyors), that if I’d taken the same precaution elsewhere, Hufnagel would never have had the opportunity to take advantage of my trust and I wouldn’t be forced to throw away a good plot situation on a real-life murder. But at least there was no one to educate the police. It would’ve been a joke on me if I’d told the little thief and there was an unfinished manuscript on his desk outlining my plans for his disposal, just waiting for the police to read.
Finally I stopped and lowered my burden to the ground; if the rippling sheet of compost I was standing on could be called that. I stretched, crackling my bones and lighting up all the pain points in my muscles, then took the garden trowel out of my hip pocket, squatted on my haunches, stuck the pointed end through the loam, and cut a slit three feet long. I dropped the trowel through the slit, having no more use for it, then slid Hufnagel by his collar to the edge, encountering no resistance at all from the smooth, moist surface of the bog. I got his feet in first; the rest was leverage. A little tip, and Hufnagel slid out of my life as quickly as the eight-foot pole I’d used to try to plumb the depth of his grave.
The job was finished. I’d thrown away the rest of the poison in a city Dumpster, keeping only the amount I’d needed to dispose of my pest problem, flushed the residue down the toilet, and washed the hand-mirror. The cheap bastard didn’t own a car, preferring to ride a bus to the nearest crossroads and walk the rest of the way.
I thoroughly enjoyed the stroll back to the house. It was a mild night. I had no corpse to weigh me down and the squirrels no longer frightened me. They were just rodents, after all. A bit of strychnine, and poof! No more squirrels. That gave me an idea for a story. I had Hufnagel to thank for it, which balanced things out and filled me with happy remembrances of our friendship.
The detective’s name was Congreave.
He was a sergeant, and from the dirty gray in his shabby comb-over and broken blood vessels in his cheeks, that would be his rank when he retired. He showed me his badge and I sat him on the sofa where Hufnagel had tooted his last toot and told me that Mr. Hufnagel had been missing for two weeks. An acquaintance had heard the missing party mention an appointment to visit me on the twenty-eighth, which if true made me the last person who had had any contact with him before he vanished. I said it was true, we’d had a drink or two and some enjoyable conversation, but I couldn’t have been the last person to see him because we’d parted early in the evening so he could catch the last bus home.
“He missed it,” Congreave said. “At least, the driver doesn’t remember him boarding, and he knew Mr. Hufnagel well enough to talk to. He was a frequent passenger.”
“Yes, old Huf was high on public transportation.” I kept my face straight.
The sergeant’s eyes got a little less dull. “Don’t you mean he is?”
I smiled.
“Did I say ‘was’? I must’ve caught it from you. You referred to him in the past tense.”
He grunted. “Did he say anything about going away somewhere? He missed an important meeting with his publisher. Something about writing a movie tie-in.”
Same old Hufnagel. Handed the chance to put his name on someone else’s plot, he was inspiration itself.
I said he hadn’t mentioned taking any trips. Congreave asked many more questions, wrote my answers in a grubby little notebook with a well-nibbled stump of pencil, thanked me for my time, and left.
Three days later he was back, more animated this time. He’d spoken with some people who remembered my grudge against the missing man. I told him that was water under the bridge, but he asked me if I’d consent to a search of my house and property. I refused indignantly. I’d given that inevitable question a lot of thought and decided that being too cooperative was as bad as obstructing justice, at least from a detective’s suspicious point of view. He said that was my privilege and he’d be back.
He got me out of bed the next day at dawn, with a squad of officers, crime scene investigators, officious-looking dogs, and a paper covered with archaic printing, signed by a judge. They went through the house from the attic to the basement, then went out to join the team that was probing around the bushes looking for freshly turned soil. Late in the afternoon the backhoe arrived. An officer stayed behind to keep an eye on me while the rest gathered around the excavation site. I gave Congreave credit for recognizing the bog’s potential much earlier than I’d predicted, based on the impression he made. I offered to put on a pot of coffee, but the officer declined. I put it on anyway. The sergeant might appreciate it when he came back empty-handed.
But there was no disappointment on his face when he showed up just before dusk. His eyes were bright and he was smiling. “You can change your story any time you like,” he said. “I’d pick now. It could be the difference between twenty years and life.”
I felt weak suddenly and started to sit down, but the sofa reminded me how clever I’d been, warned me not to fall for any tricks. I remained standing. Something made a purring noise and Congreave pulled a cell phone out of his inside breast pocket. He listened, then said, “Human, I’m sure of it. When? ’Kay.” He beeped off, looked at me. “What’d you use, some kind of acid?”
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter. Medical examiner’s on his way. He’ll know what you used to strip the meat off that corpse.”
“Meat?” Some writer. My vocabulary had been reduced to single-syllable words.
“I guess I should be grateful,” he said. “Bones are a lot less messy than your average eighteen-day-old corpse.”
That confused me. In my mind I’d rehearsed every conceivable method of interrogation, and this one hadn’t figured. I wondered if the bog contained some kind of scavenger that picked skeletons clean of flesh, and in doing so had dragged the remains back across the property line. Maybe the police had cheated, extended the excavation onto Lundergaard’s. That was infuriating. Didn’t we all have to obey the law?
Two hours later, we were joined by a scrawny middle-aged character, bespectacled and bald, dressed incongruously in a wrinkled tweed suit and rubber hip boots. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Damn arc lights are going to give me cataracts. What’s your victim’s name?”
“Harvey Hufnagel,” Congreave said.
“Well, unless her father wanted a boy, this isn’t her.”
“Her?”
“Remains are female.”
“No mistake?”
“Pelvises don’t lie.”
Congreave scowled at me. “What are you, a mass murderer? How many more you got buried back there?”
I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t sure English would come out.
“You might want to stop talking before you give this gentleman grounds for a slander suit,” the medical examiner said.
“You saying she died of natural causes?”
“No, I’m pretty sure that hole in her skull came from a bullet. But this gentleman couldn’t have been five years old when it happened. Those bones haven’t had skin on them in thirty or forty years.”
“Bullshit.”
“Cross my aorta.”
“I’ve lived here ten years,” I said. “I spent my whole life before that in Seattle.”
Very soon I was alone. The medical examiner at least was polite enough to say good night.
But the sergeant wasn’t entirely without manners. Two days later he knocked at my door and asked if he could come in. I was still sufficiently rattled from our last meeting to feel cold dread when I saw his face, but that evaporated when we sat down and he began to speak.
“I’ve made my share of mistakes, but when I’m wrong, I say it,” he said. “You know your neighbor, Mr. Lundergaard?”
“I know of him. We haven’t met.”
“No surprise. He’s a real hermit. He’s going to be tough to crack, because he’s been alone so long he’s gotten out of the habit of talking to anyone except himself. But he’ll crack. Those bones we found on your property used to be Mrs. Lundergaard. Her dentist is retired, but he still had her records, so the ID’s positive. She and her husband had an argument, apparently. He shot her and threw her in the bog. Told everyone she’d left him. He came over on your side to dump the body so a search warrant at his address wouldn’t turn her up. Pretty clever for an old Dutchman.”
Clever for anyone, I thought testily; it appeared I was as guilty of plagiarism as Hufnagel, albeit unintentionally. But I was feeling charitable toward Congreave, so I kept the edge out of my voice. “What about Hufnagel?”
“Still open. FBI’s tracking a serial killer who picks up pedestrians on country roads, cuts their throats, and ditches them at industrial sites. They think he came through Michigan last month. Maybe your friend ran into him on his way to the bus stop from here. Bad luck.”
“Rotten.” I shook my head sadly. I wanted to do a somersault.
He rose. “Anyway, sorry we gave you a hard time. We’ve got to be thorough.”
“I understand. It’s the same in my work.”
“I almost forgot you’re a writer. Not much of a story in Lundergaard, I’m afraid. He’s sewed up tight, once we find the gun he used. He didn’t dump it with his wife, so we’re getting a warrant to search the bog on his side of the line. I’ll be surprised if we don’t turn up something useful.”