A Perfect Crime Read online

  N: You never told me what a shit he is.

  F: Didn’t I?

  N: No. Why the hell did you marry him? Or is that out of bounds?

  F: You can ask me anything. He was different then.

  N: No one changes that much.

  F: And maybe I misjudged him. He seemed so… original to me then.

  N: Original? He’s a throwback, Francie.

  F: It’s not that simple. And please, don’t bring out your tool bag. It’s been a long, slow decline, maybe worse since he lost his job, which you knew about, if I’m not mistaken.

  N: I was just making conversation.

  F: Were you?

  N: No.

  F: A long, slow decline. I didn’t realize the extent of it, until …

  N: Until what?

  F: Till you came in your kayak.

  N: I want you.

  PAUSE: laughter, cutlery on china, scraping chairs.

  N (cont’d): Monday night. At the cottage.

  F: Monday?

  N: There’s no show-they’re broadcasting the Pops Christmas concert. Six-thirty?

  LONG PAUSE: more laughter, cutlery, scraping.

  R: So. What’s the plan?

  Peter Abrahams

  A Perfect Crime

  21

  Late Saturday afternoon, the sky glowing orange through the grillwork of bare black trees-oak, maple, poplar-around Little Joe Lake. Riding in his own car, a ten-year-old Bronco with 124, 000 miles on the odometer-many of the taxpayers knew Saturday was his day off, and wouldn’t care to see him swanning around at their expense in the cruiser with CHIEF on the side-Joe Savard followed the lane that ran up the east side of the lake. With snow on the ground he preferred the Bronco anyway, at least until the town came through with new tires for the cruiser. His request had been tabled till the April meeting, along with the school textbooks, the cable TV contract, and the landfill amendment. And of course the streetlight question, he added to himself, nosing over to the side to let a white pickup go by; the streetlight question, a hopeless perennial, like mud in the spring. The driver raised his hand in thanks, perhaps flashing the peace sign, although with the pickup’s windows so dirty, Savard couldn’t be sure. The body, too, although not so dirty he couldn’t read the words on the side panel: LITTLE WHITE CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER. Savard pulled back into the lane and kept going.

  At one time, there’d been many Savards in the area and they’d owned the whole lake. It was probably named after a Savard: in a box somewhere lay a family Bible signed by generations of them, and they seemed to have restricted themselves to three male names, Joseph, Lucien, and Hiram; so he could have done worse. Now he was the last one, and all he owned was the single cabin built on what wasn’t much more than a big rock a few yards from shore at the north end, reached by the lop-sided little footbridge that might not last another winter. That rock being the last of the land, him being the last of the people: probably the reason he hadn’t sold the cabin back when he should have, after Sue.

  Not that he’d done much reasoning during that period. He’d just left the cabin unattended for a few years, unwilling to see it or even think about it. But after his second marriage, he’d started renting the cabin out in summer, hoping to raise extra cash for some of the little things his second wife seemed to like. Later came the divorce, another good time for selling out. But it was around that time that he’d discovered his hobby, and now he drove out to the cabin almost every day off.

  Savard parked at the end of the turnout that led from the lake road to the footbridge. Lifting his chain saw off the passenger seat, he stepped down and noticed that someone else had parked there, not long before. He could tell from the way the tires had pressed four deep prints in the snow after tracking in from the south, as he had-old tires with hardly any tread left at all. He followed their route with his eyes, backing out, returning to the south, through the long shadows of the trees on the snow, snow turning red-black in the dying light.

  The footbridge creaked once or twice as Savard walked across. He wasn’t especially tall-six feet if he stood his straightest-but he had the broad and powerful family build. Many Savards had anchored the Dartmouth line, going back to the early years of football, although not him-he’d gone to Vietnam instead. Not by choice; he just hadn’t been able to get the kind of math scores Dartmouth required. Algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2: a maze he’d wandered through in high school without finding his way, despite never missing class, sitting in the front row, staying after for extra help, puzzling over the homework problems every night, but too often failing to solve for x. SAT math score: 470. He still remembered that goddamned number, probably the only number that had ever been solid in his mind. Four seventy led to war; war led to law enforcement, which became a profession after Sue. End of story. The truth, which had come to him years later the way truths did in his case, if at all, was that he hadn’t liked school anyway, except for sports, and would probably have disliked Dartmouth, too.

  Savard opened the cabin door, went inside. It was no longer the kind of cabin anyone would want to rent. Savard had gutted it, sledgehammering all the partitions on both floors-some emotions had got loose that day, the room where it had happened, all the rooms, were now gone-ripping out the second floor itself as well, down to the structural beams. He’d left one toilet, one sink, both unusable now with the water turned off and the pipes drained for winter. The rest was space, high and open, mostly shadows at this hour, except for the red glare on the lakeside windows, a color reflected dully on the unpolished surfaces of the bears.

  Savard still thought of them as bears because that was what he’d been after at the start, life-size bears carved-if cutting with a chain saw could be called carving-from the biggest cedar trunks he could find, dead standing and naturally dried when he could get it. After the divorce, those days off had gotten a little too long, and he’d gone to work once a week for a woodlot across the Maine line, not far from Kezar Falls. The work was hard; he’d been handy with a chain saw since boyhood; he got to wander around in the woods; they paid him: a good job. One evening, while he was walking back toward the logging road and his ride out, a big bear had reared up at him through the trees. He did what you were supposed to do, which was nothing. He wasn’t afraid, not with that chain saw in his hands-the noise alone would do the trick. The bear didn’t move either, as if following the same guidelines, and after watching for a minute or so, Savard realized it wasn’t a bear, but a tall tree stump that looked like a bear.

  Savard went closer, circled the stump, then without thinking, pulled the cord and raised his saw-a heavy Black amp; Decker four-footer-and gave it a little more definition between the head and shoulder. Almost too much: he went at the snout with more finesse, narrowing it, then rounded off that big muscle pad behind the neck. He stepped back for a better look-terrible.

  But he’d gotten the bug, and the next Saturday he drove home with ten foot of cedar, most of it sticking out the back of the Bronco. White cedar, specifically: he’d always liked the soft, sunny glow hiding under its sappy skin. Savard had floated his log across the water to the cabin, dragged it up to the door with the ATV he’d had then-one of those little things he’d thought would please his second wife; she’d ridden it once-and humped it through the door.

  The carving had taken a year. By the end of that time he’d settled on the right tool-an electric Stihl 14, only four pounds or so, delicate enough for eyes, claws, nostrils-and had learned the most important lesson: to let the wood guide the saw. His first bear was man-size and stood by itself on its hind legs, but he didn’t fool himself into thinking it was anything but crude. There was just one good thing about bear number one: it had that poker face that makes bears so dangerous. Savard brought back a new tree trunk the next week to see if the poker face had been an accident.

  Savard didn’t finish bear number two, if finishing meant carving a complete bear down to the ground; in fact, he never attempted another complete bear. He’d gotten the se
cond bear’s poker face almost right away-this one was even more ambiguous, if that was the word-and was sawing his slow way down to the chest when he lost focus. As he worked, he began to find himself watching not the side of the chain where the bear was emerging, but the other side, the tree side. For no reason, he decided to make bear number two half-bear, half-tree. There was a… relationship between the bear and the tree, a complicated one, not especially pleasing to either of them, if that made any sense. It took Savard four months to reach that point with the second bear. Bear three began the next Saturday.

  By now Savard had lost track of the number of bears he’d carved with his chain saw. Many had ended up in the woodstove, making floor space for new bears. Not that anyone looking at the recent ones would have identified them as bears. Savard was interested in only two things now: the struggle, if you could call it that, between the bear and the tree, and the pokeriness, if that was a word, of the face, even though there no longer was anything resembling a face. Struggle and pokeriness, his terminology for what he was doing with the bears. It didn’t have to make sense because he never discussed it with anyone. No one else ever came inside the cabin; no one else had ever seen them.

  Savard lit the woodstove, dragged the floor lamp-the only piece of furniture in the place-into position, switched it on. He surveyed his latest bear, a big one because the trunk was big: old, slow-growth cedar, with thin-spaced rings and a grain that felt like satin. His latest bear-a massive, twisting shape, almost too massive to be able to twist, but it did-locked in combat with some force in the wood. He knew the force was real, having felt it through the saw. Strapping on his Kevlarlined chaps-he’d had over thirty stitches in his legs by now, didn’t want more-he filed the teeth and rakers in the chain as sharp as he could get them, put on his headphones. In the beginning he’d kept his ears uncovered, lost in the sound-much quieter than a gas-powered saw, but still whining and buzzing nastily as metal turned wood to dust. Later, noticing that his hearing wasn’t as sharp as it had been, he’d worn protection. Now he preferred music, Django Reinhardt specifically. That was the way he worked: Paris singing in his ears-he’d never been to Paris, never been anywhere, really, except Vietnam, but Paris must have been something like Django’s music, if it wasn’t still-Paris singing in his ears, the saw throbbing in his hands, sawdust shooting through the yellow pool of lamplight, swirling past the blazing windows that faced the setting sun.

  Joe Savard worked all night. When dawn came, and the east side windows lit up, first milky, then butter-colored, he saw what he had seen so many times before, that he’d only made things worse. Still, as in all those other times, he felt good just the same. Hard to explain. A feeling kids get when they stand in a doorway pressing their arms against the jambs, then quickly step free, arms levitating by themselves, as though weightless; a feeling like that, but all over.

  A good feeling, followed by ravenous hunger. Savard closed up and drove to Lavinia’s, a diner he liked a few miles up 101. Black coffee, bacon and scrambled eggs, side of hash browns. While he waited for his order he asked for a phone book. He found a listing for the Little White Church of the Redeemer in Lawton Ferry, on the eastern border of his territory.

  Food came. He ate it all, almost ordered the same again; would have, even a year or two ago. But he was up to 220, and that was the limit.

  “How about a blueberry muffin, Joe?” asked Lavinia. “Baked personally in the oven of yours truly.”

  No refusal possible. He ate the muffin, but without honey, even though he was very fond of honey.

  “I like appetite in a man,” Lavinia said, clearing his plate, refilling his cup.

  “Sure you do,” Savard said. “You own a restaurant.”

  She gave him a look, a complicated one that he didn’t meet for more than a second. He had no desire to get closer to Lavinia. Not true: he had a strong desire to get closer to Lavinia, but only once or twice, and that wasn’t for him.

  Savard drank up, paid his bill, leaving a bigger tip than usual, and was halfway out the door when he paused, then went back inside and picked up the pay phone. He dialed the Little White Church of the Redeemer.

  “You have reached the house of God. No one is here to take your call right now.”

  Savard left a message after the tone.

  22

  “Ah, right on the dot,” said Roger, standing beneath the statue of George Washington, Sunday at ten. “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.”

  “It is?” said Whitey, red-eyed, yellow-faced, blue-lipped, rumpled, as though he’d spent the night drinking and then slept, or passed out, in his car. But he didn’t have a car, and where had he slept, come to think of it? An unknown factor, quite certainly inconsequent; still, it was a relief to remember that Whitey wouldn’t be around much longer.

  “Just an expression,” Roger explained, at the same time calculating with some precision the time remaining to Whitey-thirty-three hours, at most, thirty-two and a half, at least. A romantic concept, in a way: hadn’t innumerable potboilers been based on the conceit of a character given only a short, fixed time to live? Although not, Roger thought, a character like this. He found himself smiling at Whitey.

  “Never heard of it,” Whitey said. Not a conventionally likable character, but a character nonetheless, in his silly leather jacket and pointy cowboy boots, beyond vulgar.

  “No matter. How about some coffee?”

  “Now you’re talkin’,” said Whitey.

  They walked out of the Public Garden, waited for the light to change. Just as it did, Roger caught sight of a large, well-dressed family coming out of the Ritz across the street: an unmatronly mother with upswept blond hair, two tall young adults, some teenagers, one smaller child, and then the father. Something familiar about the father, and in that instant, Roger said, “Go.”

  “Huh?” said Whitey.

  There were people in front of them, blocking at least their lower selves from view. Roger ground his heel on the toe of Whitey’s cowboy boot. “Fast. Be back in one hour.”

  “What the fuck?”

  But then the light changed and Roger had no choice but to step off the curb and start across the street, couldn’t look back to see whether Whitey was following instructions, or tagging after him and thus aborting his plans, possibly forever. Roger’s path intersected that of the monstrously teeming haut-bourgeois family, and in its rear guard the father-Sandy Cronin-spotted him and said, “Hello, Roger.”

  But therefore, if spotting now, hadn’t spotted him earlier, as he waited for the light. “Sandy. Well, well. And all the little ducklings. Merry Christmas.”

  “And to you, Roger. You and Francie both.”

  “Thank you, Sandy. I’ll make a note to pass it on.”

  Roger walked on, across the street, along the side-walk, to the awning of the Ritz, and there, passing behind a top-hatted doorman, he glanced back. The Cronins were well inside the park now; the little one had tossed a chunk of ice at one of the bigger ones, and they all seemed to be laughing. Sandy himself, in his camel-hair coat, was patting a snowball into shape. What kind of justice was this, that a mediocrity like Sandy could so prolifically pass on his mediocre genes, while he, Roger, had been denied? Beyond justice, for justice was merely a human construct, after all, what kind of science was it? How could nature select Cronins over Cullingwoods, unless the degradation of the species was the goal? In his mind’s eye he saw again that ineradicable microscopic image of deformed sperm-his-twitching spastically in the petri dish. Ineradicable, yes, but also ineradicable was his suspicion that somehow, in some way yet unknown, it was Francie’s fault: Francie, with her babbling of adoption, missing the whole point.

  Roger noticed that the Cronins were gone. Noticed, too, that there was no sign of Whitey. The Cronins hadn’t seen Whitey-more important, had not seen the two of them together. The plan remained viable, but it had been a near thing. Roger recalled chaos theory, how a butterfly fluttering its wings in the wrong patch of sky could dest
roy the world. No amount of planning could permanently overcome the inexorability of the natural forces. But all he required was thirty-three hours, to keep those butterflies at bay for thirty-three hours.

  Whitey wandered around for a while, at one point sensing he was close to the old Garden, but failing to see any sign of it or its replacement. He did find a bar in the shadow of an overpass and, gloveless, hatless, feeling the cold through his leather jacket-not as warm as he’d expected-went inside. Had a beer. Two. Three. And a shot. He didn’t like being stepped on. What was the word? Literally. He’d been stepped on, literally. Why did he have to put up with that shit? He was a free man.

  Whitey, pissed, looked around the bar, hoping for some customer who might rub him the wrong way. But he was almost alone, the only other drinkers being a few old drunks with disgusting faces. Stepped on, literally. He knew why, too, had figured it out immediately: Roger hadn’t wanted to be seen with him, not by his buddy in the camel-hair coat. A buddy of some kind, no question: screened by the statue of George Washington, Whitey had watched them gabbing in the middle of the street. Roger couldn’t have been ashamed to be seen with him, or why would he have offered the assistant’s job in the first place? A legitimate assistant, and therefore someone who should be introduced to camel-hair-coated buddies crossing the street. Instead he’d been stepped on. Why? Whitey couldn’t figure that out.

  He checked his watch, had one more shot to ward off the cold, laid a fifty on the bar. A fifty: that made him think. Just days back in the world, not the halfway house world but the real one, and already making good money. And it wasn’t like Roger was some kind of dangerous dude-he was in the art business, for Christ’s sake-while Whitey had known many genuinely dangerous dudes, had spent almost half his life with them. Roger: not dangerous, a well-paying employer-but maybe not to be trusted either, not completely. That was all, Whitey told himself. Just be smart. He left the bar feeling much better.