That’s about all there was to it. The police swarmed all over the place for a while, going over the Berringers’ apartment with a fine tooth comb, but they found nothing. They questioned all the tenants — and found nothing. Some of us had heard the shot, and some had not. Some knew the Berringers by sight, as I did, but no one knew them intimately, or had exchanged visits with them.
The cops picked up Elise at the bank and brought her home. All she could do was sob, “Why would anyone want to kill Sam? He didn’t know a soul in New York. He was a poet. He wasn’t interested in people. He wasn’t interested in anybody...”
And that was that. No clues. No motives. No nothing. The perfect crime.
Two things did happen in the weeks that followed that may be of interest to you. They certainly were very disturbing to me.
The first was that Sam’s mother and father came from Texas and stayed in the apartment with Elise, to comfort her in her sorrow. That, of course, prevented me from seeing her alone and doing a bit of comforting of my own. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went up to their apartment... to express my sympathies.
Elise met me at the door. The black she wore accentuated the cool, pale alabaster of her skin. Her eyes were luminous, but expressionless.
“It’s one of the neighbors,” she said over her shoulder to the old couple sitting inside. “Mister... Mister...”
“Drake,” I said. “Steve Drake. I live downstairs.”
I sat for about five minutes listening to the old folks tell me how wonderful Sam had been, and how wonderful Elise had been to him.
“We lost a son,” Mrs. Berringer said tearfully patting Elise’s hand. “But we have a wonderful daughter now.”
The old man sniffed and nodded.
I got out of there as soon as I could. Elise walked me to the door.
“It was kind of you to come,” she said. “Thank you... for everything.”
She looked at me for that one fraction of a second too long, then one of her eyelids flickered in a shutter-quick wink.
She left for Texas with her new “parents” two days later. She left me no message. Nothing.
I hadn’t expected that. I refused to accept what my instinct told me. I was still trying to figure it out, when my editor tossed me the job of illustrating the Sunday feature on perfect crimes. I couldn’t turn him down.
I did the illustrations absent-mindedly, trusting my years as a professional and my natural zeal for accuracy to stand by me until the job was done. I got the backgrounds for some of my drawings from old police pictures we had in our morgue. The rest I filled in as best I could from the imaginary reconstructions of the unsolved crimes. The editor liked the job. He thought my illustration of the Berringer case was one of the most perfect I had ever turned out.
It was.
I didn’t realize how perfect until I came out of my daze long enough one Sunday morning to see my illustrations in print. By that time, the editions had hit the stands. Millions of them. People all over the country were looking at my illustrations. You probably were one of them. You, of course, had no way of knowing that, in my unconscious zeal for artistic accuracy, I had made some very serious mistakes in one of them. It was in the one of the Berringer murder.
The illustration showed Sam Berringer standing in the doorway of his apartment. He looked every bit the poet with the smoking jacket he was wearing and the highball in his hand. In back of him was the room, perfect in every detail to the two cocktail glasses, the bottle of bourbon on the table and the ball game on the TV set. There wasn’t much shown of the murderer. Just his back, and the hand holding the small automatic beneath Sam’s heart.
You, and the millions of others who were looking at the illustrations at the same time that I was, could have noticed nothing wrong with these details. But then, you could not have known that the ball game was over by the time the body was discovered. For that matter, you could not have known that Sam was holding a highball glass in his hand when he was shot, or about those two cocktail glasses or about...
Of course you could not have known. Only the police — and I — knew those things.
So you see, like I told you at the beginning, those old saws about crime not paying and there being no perfect murders are just the bunk. This perfect crime paid plenty.
Sure, I’ll probably get the chair for killing Sam Berringer. But it’s like I told you... The only criminals who get caught are the ones who get over-elaborate — which I didn’t, get squealed on — which I was not, or squeal on themselves out of the subconscious desire to be punished. I suppose that’s what I did when I let a few million newspapers publish what amounted to a confession... I confessed.
But Sam Berringer’s real murderer will never get punished. Elise didn’t make any of these mistakes. She’s in Texas now, playing the role of doting daughter to the Berringer fortune.
Of course, Elise may get tired of waiting for the old folks to die — and people in Texas sometimes take a long time dying — and she might help them a bit in the process. If she does, I don’t doubt that she’ll try to find someone to do the helping for her — someone who’s real lonely and in his loneliness dreams big dreams of alabaster turned to white fire. If she finds someone like that, she’ll look at him with the promise of that fraction of a second that in all eternity seems the longest, then she’ll move away with the grace of a cat... and wait.
Only, I don’t think she’ll ever find acoustics as perfect as those that connected her apartment with my closet. She might get impatient. And she might try something more elaborate...
A Nice Cup of Cocoa
by Roland F. Lee
Beware the landlady who is overly attentive, bearing a nice cup of cocoa, as an excuse to enter one’s room. Take the cup from her hand in the door way, if you would remain untroubled in the privacy of your own room.
The night he came it was raining slow and drizzly, and the air was cold for July. I was all set to tell Mrs. Coombs I was leaving, but he changed my mind. He was about fifty years old, small in build and had small features that made him look like a mouse. With his gold-rimmed glasses, he looked like a scholarly mouse. I figured him for a drudge.
After Mrs. Coombs had shown him the room, they both sat down in the front room while she asked him questions. I just sat there pretending to read the paper. Her phony brown hair was swept into a net, and those pale eyes with no lashes were fixed on him. Mrs. Coombs was about fifty too, but she didn’t look like a mouse. She didn’t act at all like one, either.
“The room is nine dollars a week, payable in advance,” she told him. “It’s worth more, but that’s what I’ve been getting. It’s a nice clean room, no dust or dirt.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “Nice and quiet. Would it be all right if I moved in tonight about nine-thirty?”
“Of course you can move in tonight. The room is always ready. I believe in keeping things ready. What did you say your name was?”
“West, James West.”
“Well, you’re just as welcome as you can be to the room, Mr. West. You seem like a fine person to me, just a fine person.”