I did it! I pulled it off! I’ve committed the perfect murder. I stabbed the wealthy widow with an icicle as the train I was on passed through a tunnel where I wore her son’s clothing and my alibi was airtight. There’s only one last step to my plan, and it’s the most difficult one of all: don’t act like a total creepy freak in front of other people all the time ever again.
That means no standing in the shadow of a lamp that hides my face, no giving speeches about how people are animals, no forgetting myself and gripping objects so tightly that it looks like I’m strangling them. None of that.
Will it be tough? It will be almost impossible, I’m sweating at the effort already! After all, I am a total creepy freak weirdo psycho, that’s why I spent ten years plotting and executing the perfect murder for the sheer intellectual thrill of it. But I’m going to really need to work overtime to keep that to myself.
Because, you see, there are lots of people in my life who are in the perfect place to solve a murder mystery. My niece is an incredibly inquisitive young woman. My next-door neighbor is a famous crime novelist. There’s a detective who rents the spare room in my apartment. And then there’s the widow’s son who is on a mission to prove his innocence and is also a detective who moonlights as a famous crime novelist and is dating my inquisitive niece.
You’d think that with all these potential murder solvers around me, I wouldn’t have tried to commit the perfect murder. You’d think I would have decided it wasn’t really worth it. But people who plot the perfect murder don’t really think about stuff like that. We’re on a different wavelength. We’re different from other people. People, you see, are really like animals—stupid beasts writhing in the dirt, whose meager consciousness is nothing more than the spilled seed of God’s–
Whoops, there I go again!
Now, I’m no Dr. Kuhnemann (my psychoanalyst who I’ve never kept a secret from who also moonlights as a detective who moonlights as another famous crime novelist) but is there a chance that I behave like this because I subconsciously want to get caught? No! The very thought makes me so mad that I’m going to squeeze this doll I just got for my youngest daughter so hard that the head pops off and then say something like “there, there, sweetie, the dollie can feel no pain… Not the way… a human can…” while everyone else at her birthday party stares at me like they’re basically positive that I recently committed the perfect murder.
Maybe I just need to take a vacation and blow off some steam. Maybe I’ll just wait until any of the three detectives in my orbit ask me about the night in question, chuckle to myself as I answer their questions in cryptic riddles (just to throw them off their game), then catch a bus across the border where I’ll sit on the porch of a dark cabin, rocking in a rocking chair and slowly singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” until I get all these murder-y tics out of my system.
And if there happen to be any scrupulous detectives, famous crime novelists, or inquisitive nieces trying to solve a perfect murder up there too? Well, then they just lucked out, because I’m the perfect guy to talk to about that.