in the past had had luck finding rare editions of crime novels. If for some reason I wound up being a suspect in Chaney’s death, if my car had been spotted by someone, then at least I’d have had some reason for being in New Hampshire on that particular Monday. It was a very thin alibi, but it was better than nothing. I supposed that now I could say that I was planning on driving to a favorite bookstore but turned back because of the snow.
Of course, none of that would explain the presence of a murdered man’s cat in my apartment, a cat that was now rubbing its chin up against my ankle. I found a can of tuna, tipped it into a bowl, then filled a second bowl with water. I also found the lid from a cardboard box, and scattered some dirt from one of my spider plants into it, hoping it would work as a litter box. While the cat ate, I went onto my computer and did a Google search to find out how to know if a cat was male or female. After some poking around, I decided that the cat was male. I spent the day inside with him, at one point both of us sleeping together on the sofa, the cat down by my feet. Toward nightfall, he’d found his way onto the bed, and he curled up on my current book, a paperback copy of Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks. I named the cat Nero.
*
ONE MONTH LATER—ONE MONTH after I had left Norman Chaney’s corpse in Tickhill, New Hampshire—two things were clear. One, the police weren’t coming for me. Even though I hadn’t gone online to look up anything about the Chaney murder case, I felt, deep in my bones, that I’d gotten away with it. The second realization was that Nero, who’d taken to his new home pretty happily, needed more people around him. I was often gone for twelve hours at a time, and when I returned home, Nero was right at the door desperate for affection. Mary Anne, my downstairs neighbor, told me she could hear him crying during the day.
I was beginning to think that Nero would make an excellent store cat at Old Devils.
CHAPTER 13
Being an avid mystery reader as an adolescent does not prepare you for real life. I truly imagined that my adult existence would be far more booklike than it turned out to be. I thought, for example, that there would be several moments in which I got into a cab to follow someone. I thought I’d attend far more readings of someone’s will, and that I’d need to know how to pick a lock, and that any time I went on vacation (especially to old creaky inns or rented lake houses) something mysterious would happen. I thought train rides would inevitably involve a murder, that sinister occurrences would plague wedding weekends, and that old friends would constantly be getting in touch to ask for help, to tell me that their lives were in danger. I even thought quicksand would be an issue.
I was prepared for all this in the same way that I wasn’t prepared for the soul-crushing minutiae of life. The bills. The food preparation. The slow dawning realization that adults live in uninteresting bubbles of their own making. Life is neither mysterious nor adventurous. Of course, I came to these conclusions before I became a murderer. Not that my criminal career satisfied the fantasy life I had as a kid. In my fantasies I was never the murderer. I was the good guy, the detective (amateur, usually), who solved the crime. I was never the villain.
Another skill set I thought I’d utilize more in my adult years was the ability to follow someone. And conversely, the ability to know when I was being followed. Again, these things never really came up. But on that Saturday night, after closing up Old Devils, I walked across the Boston Common, wind cutting through my clothes, and wound up at the bar at Jacob Wirth, drinking German beer and eating Wiener schnitzel. It was the middle of February but there were still Christmas lights strung up along the high ceilings of the beer hall, and, somehow, this place made me feel okay about eating alone. That was how I judged restaurants near me; there were the ones that made you feel lonely when you ate alone, like some of the higher-end haunts that clutter