´MURDER STORIES, short story in English, by Viviana Claudia Giménez®

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Murder Stories

short story, by Viviana Claudia Giménez®

Just another dining-center conversation over supper.  Who could have been interested in this chat?  Anyone walking past that table could have thought, Oh my God, what are they talking about? It was always hard to figure out what the topic was.  Nothing and everything.  One at a time, everyone at the same time.  It was easy for me to just have my usual out-of-body experience and keep myself far away from this table, this dining-center, this school, this town, maybe even this country.

“Have you heard about the Susan Smith case?”  Well, now the conversation seemed to be getting a little bit more promising.  Now we were going to discuss yellowish, criminal cases.

“Yes, the murderous mom.”

“Poor Susan, they’ve ripped her apart!”

“What do you mean ‘poor Susan’?”

“Well, you know, like, I totally understand her.  She flipped.  Anyone can flip.”

I could sympathize with that myself.  Especially now that I felt like my ovaries were doing the conga line and my hormones were bouncing off the walls.  Why isn’t our period torture enough?  Why do we have to get PMS too? 

“You know, her boyfriend dumped her, probably because of her two little boys, she was upset, she was probably mad, angry at her kids, and there’s nothing worse than driving when you are really mad, you know, and she probably thought about killing herself and taking her children with her, because she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them without their mom, and she probably stopped there by the lake . . .”

“Well, you’ve really thought about all this, haven’t you?”  

“Just trying to put myself in her shoes.  She pulled over by the lake, knowing that once in there she wouldn’t have to think anymore, she’d stop being miserable.  She had been abused by her step-father too, sexually abused and everything... And then, it was just an impulse, you know, she stepped on the gas, and when she was really, really close, so close she couldn’t have braked, she panicked, opened the door, and jumped. It was primal life instinct, preservation, survival.  To her horror, she saw the car, being driven as if it were by a ghost or death itself, plunging into the water with her two kids in there.  She must have gone totally nuts! And that’s how she made up that story about the black man hijacking the car and taking the kids with him and all that.  I feel for her, I guess.  It’s easy for everyone to tear her apart because she’s a mother and somehow she got her two little babies killed but you have to try to understand why a mother would do something like that.  She’s not totally insane, she just had an insane moment.”

From that we somehow ended up talking about crime in general, but more specifically about murder. 

“You know, you could commit the perfect murder, and nobody would know about it.”

“What do you mean? Do you believe in the perfect murder?”

“Sure! I think you just have to realize that the only reason why murderers are caught is because they had a motive.  They have a poor alibi and they don’t seem to have a clear motive and because of that, because they do the same thing again, all over again and they end up putting themselves in a dangerous position because nobody may know exactly why they are doing it but eventually they get caught, while if today you just went to the end of town and killed a total stranger, nobody would know: no motive.” 

Everyone at the table was silent.  I guess we were all wondering if this guy really meant this.

“Is that the voice of experience talking?”

He laughed really loud.

“Of course not.  Just giving you girls a little thrill tonight.”

Anyway, whatever his motives to tell that story, he certainly put ideas in people's minds.  So much so that the next day four murders were reported in town.  We had been five at the table the night before. 

I don’t know about the others, I just know about me.  I was certainly challenged and I went ahead with it.  Took the phone book, picked a total stranger, took down the address, made a phone call from a public phone, found out a few things about this person’s routine, pretending I was a telemarketer, and when I made sure this was a single person living by herself, I proceeded.  I don’t know what the others did, but that was a silent table the next night.  I guess we all felt implicated in the same crime.  We could all feel for each other too.  May be because the perfect crime had been committed after all.  Hadn’t it?