Free The Perfect Murder by Jack Hitt

TV news?”
    You: “Not up to it.”
    Detective: “It was mushroom poisoning. Eighteen dead so far. Apparently they all came from the Yummie Yuppie Deli.”
    You: “The dead?”
    Detective: “The mushrooms.”
    (I’m guessing at the number of victims, of course. It could be higher, but you didn’t spread very many of the deadly ones in the mushroom display at the Yummie Yuppie Deli. Anyway, since it is an expensive ruling-class grocery and your victims will be Ivy League types, it doesn’t take many to make a celebrated, historic murder case. It’s not like gassing a Greyhound load of Blue Collars.)
    You should display shock. Put down your glass with a clink. Remember that your face should register both the surprise of hearing information you didn’t know and the shock of getting caught in your charade. The detective will have no doubt unraveled your cleverly disguised motive: that being a vain man with a notoriously unfaithful wife you saw more honor as a rich man convicted of a murder of passion (and soon released) than as a penniless wretch repeatedly called into the witness chair to publicly testify yet again to another of your wife’s past affairs. You shouldn’t have much to say during this exchange. Allow the detective to do the talking for you. Resist his theory at first and then allow him to comfort you with his version of the truth. This is the easy part. Now your face must show the shock of revelation—the mushrooms! As the detective unburdens you of your dark, humiliating secret, you begin to try to figure it out yourself. The detective’s spadework will already have turned up Blazes Boylan’s name. So, with careful timing, drop in the connection, like so: “My God. Mushroom poisoning. But the only meal we ate out of the house in the last few days was at Blazes’s.”
    Detective: “Blazes Boylan?”
    You: “Yeah. Do you know him too?”
    Detective: (Leaning forward, I’ll wager, with considerable eagerness.) “Tell me about it.”
    And so, of course, you tell him about it. Not right away because you are almost, but not quite, incriminating yourself. But you gulp some more martini and let him bluff you into it. You tell it with every evidence of embarrassment and shame.
    It seems, you tell the detective, that you had long since stopped loving your wife, a woman of voracious appetites and no warmth at all. But you needed her money. (If the detective doesn’t already know this he soon would find out.) For several years it had been a marriage of convenience. Then, two months ago, she decided to add Blazes Boylan, your old friend, to her list of victims. She seduced him. Despite your warnings about her nature, he fell madly in love. Boylan came to you and asked you to divorce your wife so that he could marry her. (No, you weren’t entirely candid when you first talked to the detective about this.) Nothing you could say would persuade him that she was toying with him. And so you said you would discuss it with her at the first opportunity.
    (About here I recommend pouring yourself another martini, but keep it small!)
    When you told her that Boylan had fallen in love with her and asked her to let him down easily, she simply laughed. But about then her interest in him seemed to flag. Boylan noticed it, too. He asked you about it. You told him you hadn’t a clue. Boylan said he would investigate. The next day he called you, very upset. He asked you to meet him at the club. When you got there he told you about Weldon McWeinie.
    Detective: “Weldon McWho?”
    You: “Weldon McWeinie, the famous Nobel Prize-winning Scottish poet, womanizer, bon vivant, and drunk. He is in the city doing poetry readings. Boylan said she had met him at some gathering of the elite, and McWeinie had made a play for her and now she was having an affair with the fellow.”
    Detective: “So?”
    You: “Well, we talked about it.”
    Detective: “About what?”
    You: “Blazes wanted to hit back at McWeinie.”
    Detective: