“How do you mean?” asked Charlie, digging his spoon into the syrup-glazed mound that was his butterscotch sundae. “I mean, how’s that going to work — the stranger I get to kill my wife looks just like me? Would you consider this one of your better ideas?”
“Wait, hear me out. Say, let’s blow this place. Where are you staying?”
“The Brown Palace.”
“Good. We’ll go there. I’m at a bedbug motor court on 85.”
The two men went to the Brown Palace. They held up in Charlie’s room in the company of a fellow named Jack Daniel who had long been a friend to them both.
For the first three hours of that long, sleepless night, the men traded stories from their own lives — from the life of the twin who was the shrewd and calculating businessman with hopes of some day taking over his uncle’s construction supply house, and from the life of the artist with a camera who created works of beauty on Kodak paper when he wasn’t taking incriminating snapshots of adulterous spouses and their future divorce court corespondents.
The rest of the night was spent plotting the murders of the women who held them back — the women who carped and whined and pinioned their husbands unmercifully.
Because what had started out as mere whim had, in that long night, transformed itself first into distinct possibility and then into glorious reality.
The key element in the planning was the creation of high-profile, indisputable alibis for each of the two brothers. Just as it was proposed by the character of Bruno in Strangers on a Train, each man would be committing the other man’s murder. (Under some sort of disguise, of course, bowing to the slim possibility that one or both of the brothers might be seen going to or coming from the scene of the crime.) But here was the beauty of the entire setup: each brother would be quite some distance from his wife at the time of her murder, with a perfectly engineered and strongly corroborative alibi.
It seemed like a perfect plan. All of their adopted parents were dead. No one else knew of their true biological origins. Charlie’s friends and relatives were as ignorant of his roots as he had been. Bob was certain that his younger sisters in Philadelphia had never been told about Charlie. Why should they have been? Bob’s mother hadn’t seemed all that eager to tell him, and the confession had come almost as an afterthought from her deathbed. (“Be good to your sisters, don’t spend your inheritance all in one place, and, oh, you’re adopted.”)
Charlie’s alibi was this: a birthday party for a country club chum. It was a party which Charlie’s wife Edna had no desire to attend. She loathed the man. She even hated his parvenu wife. The to-do was scheduled for Friday night, March 28, at the country club. The murder (strangulation was thought best; Edna had a pencil-thin neck that wouldn’t take much torque to successfully wring) would take place during the party. At least thirty people who knew Charlie would see him there at the time of the murder.
Knowing that in spite of the soundness of the alibi there might be need by the police authorities to keep Charlie from leaving town for a few days (even suspects with rock-solid alibis can remain persons of interest), Bob would have to wait until sometime in the summer to have his own wife, Mitzi, cross-dispatched by his brother. There was simply no way to commit the murders simultaneously or even within a few days of each another, and Bob lost the draw.
The first murder went off without a hitch.
As predicted, the air had cleared by midsummer. In fact, by the date of Bob’s own agreed-upon alibi event, the 1952 All-Star Game at Shibe Stadium — a game that Bob was set to attend with several of his baseball buddies, some of whom had yet to see Jackie Robinson play — the air had cleared quite nicely. Thanks to Bob’s inspired decision to open a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes over his murder victim’s head, police psychologists rapturously surmised that Edna’s strangler was signaling his intent to kill again and again. Cereal killer—therefore—serial killer.
On July 8 in Philadelphia, it rained off and on. Bob sat in the sodden stadium with his sodden friends, wondering if the All-Star Game would be cancelled.
Bob was lucky. The game started late, and though it went only five innings, that was more than enough time for Charlie to slip into Bob’s row house in South Philly and slit the throat of Bob’s wife, Mitzi. And besides, regardless of the length of the game, Bob and his pals almost never went home right after their baseball outings. By custom they usually gathered at some agreed-upon drinkery and wet their collective whistles with a couple rounds of beers first. As Bob was listening to his buddies argue the merits and demerits of various Philadelphia-area saloons, the conversation taking place in the middle of the torrent that would eventually put an asterisk next to this particular All-Star Game in the stat books, he couldn’t help smiling. To think that it was now done. Bob and his brother Charlie, having successfully deconcatenated their respective balls and chains, were now free to marry the women they were always meant to wed. For Charlie, this meant the shapely bookkeeper for his company, and for Bob, a fellow artistic free spirit with a penchant for bedroom acrobatics.
At least this is the way it was supposed to go.
Bob kept smiling. And then in that next instant, he stopped smiling. Few of the All-Star fans had left the stadium. Most were waiting for the rain to let up a little before trooping out to their cars. Like Bob and his baseball buddies, people stood huddled in small groups under awnings and overhangs. One man in Bob’s line of vision stood alone. His look was familiar — frighteningly familiar. Because he looked exactly like Bob. And, by natural extension, Charlie.
“Double cross” was the first thing that insinuated itself into Bob’s thoughts. That he had held up his end of the bargain while his brother had reneged. And reneged in a big way. And for what reason? Blackmail? Bob had no money. It was Charlie who had the fat income, the country club membership, the big house in Riverdale. (Bob knew the house well. He’d strangled his sister-in-law in the largest of its four bedrooms.)
With rising anger, Bob Fletcher stepped away from his rain-drenched companions. He pushed past all the people who stood between him and the object of his ire. The man noticed Bob coming toward him. He smiled. He smiled in the same way that Charlie had smiled when the two brothers first discussed the possibility of ridding themselves of their unwanted marital appendages.
But that man wasn’t Charlie.
The man who wasn’t Charlie was still smiling as Bob reached him and grabbed him roughly by the arm. “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Where am I supposed to be?” asked the man, his smile dissolving into a look of genuine perplexity.
“Did you do it? Or did you come here to tell me you couldn’t do it? Answer me!”
The man didn’t seem to know what to say. He looked at Bob, disconcerted, helpless.
Bob seemed equally helpless. “I beg you. Go. Get out of here.”
The man, as if wishing to be accommodating, took a step back, and then another, but had he wished to leave, circumstances would not have allowed it. Because at that moment Bob’s friends joined him, and one in that group did not hesitate to exclaim, “Bob, you ol’ son of a bitch — you never told us you had a brother.”
“A twin brother!” marveled another.