Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson Page 0,52
about what you’d expect a college English professor to look like, tall and stoop shouldered, with a slight paunch and hair that stuck up at the front as though he constantly ran his fingers through it. His hair was a brownish black, but his closely trimmed beard was salted with gray. In his author photograph he was turned to a three-quarters profile and was staring toward the camera with an expression that seemed to be asking for validation. Take me seriously, it said. I just might be a genius. Maybe I’m being harsh, but that was what I saw. I’ve always been suspicious of literary writers, with their attempts at immortality. That is why I much prefer thriller writers, and poets. I like the writers who know they are fighting a losing battle.
While there was plenty of online information about Nicholas Pruitt, who went by Nick, it seemed, there was very little information about his personal life. If he was married, or had kids, I couldn’t find any confirmation of that fact. The most telling thing I read about him was on a site that enabled students to anonymously grade their professors. The bulk of his reviews pointed to a decent professor who was sometimes a hard grader, but one user wrote: To be honest, Professor Pruitt gave me the creeps. He was FAR too into Lady Macbeth to be honest. I don’t know why he insisted on acting out all her parts.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. I had already constructed an entire fantasy of what might have turned Nicholas Pruitt into Charlie. The way I imagined it was that Pruitt’s sister Margaret marries Norman Chaney, who turns out to be not only a creep, but a criminal, and a man who murders Pruitt’s sister and gets away with it. Pruitt decides to kill Norman Chaney, but knows that if he does it, he will be the prime suspect. So, thinking he might be able to hire someone to kill Chaney, he goes onto Duckburg and finds my message about Strangers on a Train. He’s an English professor and knows that book well; he knows what I’m suggesting, and we exchange names and addresses. He kills Eric Atwell. It goes well, not just because he gets away with it, but because he actually enjoys it. It gives him the power he has always craved. When Norman Chaney dies, while Pruitt is away somewhere, establishing an alibi, he feels further empowered. Killing feels good. He decides he has to find out who he swapped with, who murdered Chaney for him. It wouldn’t have been hard. A little snooping and he’d discover that Eric Atwell had been questioned by police in regard to a motor vehicle accident that took the wife of Malcolm Kershaw. Not only that, but Malcolm Kershaw works at a mystery bookstore. He’d even once posted a list of eight perfect murders in fiction. It included Strangers on a Train.
Years go by, and Pruitt can’t forget how alive he felt when he’d taken a life. Every semester when he teaches Macbeth, he feels the bloodlust in him grow a little more. He decides that he needs to do it again, commit murder. Inspired by the list of eight perfect murders he begins to look for victims. Maybe he’ll even make it obvious; that way Malcolm Kershaw and he might finally meet.
It made perfect sense, and I was filled with excitement mixed with dread. I needed to meet Nick Pruitt and see how he’d react. But first I wanted to read his book of short stories. I logged on to the Minuteman Library Network to see where the book was available, hoping it was here at Somerville, but it wasn’t. There was, however, a copy listed as available at Newton Public Library. They weren’t open now but would be the following morning at ten.
CHAPTER 17
I began rereading The Secret History the next morning at the store. I was tired of waiting. Waiting for Newton Public Library to open so I could go get a copy of Nicholas Pruitt’s Little Fish, waiting to hear from Gwen, waiting for more information from Marty Kingship on the murder of Norman Chaney.
I read the prologue and the first chapter and was instantly swept up in the narrator’s obsession with the small coterie of classics students at the fictional college of Hampden. Like Richard Papen, I have always been fascinated by intimate groups, by close-knit families, by sibling bonds. But unlike Richard I