The Perfect Crime by Les Edgerton

wasn’t for the color of his eyes. Soon as I saw his brown eyes, I knew he was either wearing a wig or had colored his hair. Another thing. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but it seems odd, doesn’t it? He kept looking over at Jack’s place. Like he was studying it.”
    Grady’s stomach muscles tightened.
    “Can you describe him any more?”
    Cheryl nodded, her eyes widening. “That’s easy. Not a real big guy, but one who works out. You could tell. Muscles. He looked...hard. Like his suit didn’t fit him right, you know? I don’t think he needed glasses, either. Don’t ask me why I think that. I don’t know, something about the way he was wearing them. Like he wasn’t used to them. He kept messing with them. Taking them on and off. Maybe he got glasses for the first time, I don’t know.”
    He slid his empty coffee cup over for a refill and asked a couple more questions trying to pin her down to a more detailed description, but she wasn’t able to add much more other than the color of the suit, which was blue. The man’s tie was blue as well, but that was the most she could remember. Grady wrote down his home phone number and told her to call him if she remembered anything else, no matter how slight or unimportant she thought it might be.
    “Thanks, Cheryl.” He put a dollar bill on the counter on top of his card. “I appreciate your help.”
    “You need anything...,” she said as he opened the door, “...you call. We all like your brother around here.”  You too,  he thought he heard her say as the door closed behind him.
    Grady climbed in his car and began the drive home. Along the way he went over in his mind the information he’d gathered. Why would a guy be wearing a wig? For a disguise, sure, but why? What would a guy in a disguise want from Jack? That is, if he  was  his brother’s attacker. Somehow, he knew Cheryl had described Jack’s assailant. There was no hard proof, just a gut feeling. Over the years he’d learned to trust such feelings.
    Sometimes, gut feelings were all you had to go on.

CHAPTER 9

    THE IDEA FOR THE perfect crime didn’t come full-blown out of, say, a beery conversation in some low-down, mean-streets bar, nor from the meanderings of an idle mind situated behind a pair of vacant eyes staring up at a two p.m. ceiling.
    No, it was like that horse-by-committee--the camel. A product--and that’s what it was--a product --of a lifetime. A development, as it were, of a mind formed and transformed by the abuses, excesses, and even banalities of a traditional run-of-the-mill lower-class family and social environment to which a son of genius was born. In other words, a dysfunctional background, common to more people than is supposed.
    The burst, that is the birth of the perfect crime
idea-- that came from the blank canvas of a ceiling, but there was more involved than merely the technical perfection of a criminal act. The crime that Reader Kincaid dreamed up was a felony only he could have invented. For the inspiration to come full circle and experience the miracle of birth, it required the particular genius of a certain species of man, not an immoral man, but more accurately an amoral individual.
    It began a germ of an idea while Reader was lying in a cell in Angola State Prison. It began with his asking himself a series of questions and answering them. Sometimes the answer didn’t come for a long time. He spent more than ten years in the planning of this one job.
    What’s the easiest way to pull a robbery and not get caught? That was the first question he asked himself at the beginning.
    Answer. Get the mark to pull his own robbery.
    How do you do that?
    His first idea was to kidnap a family member--of say a bank official--and hold that person, child or spouse, for ransom. The ransom being the bank’s money. He soon discarded that idea for all the reasons kidnappings usually go wrong. One day the answer came to him. He was talking to Bobby out in the