A Curtain Falls by Stefanie Pintoff

set of circumstances in his life. So our question becomes, what formed him? You, Ziele,” he said, his eyes twinkling, “will like it better if I frame the question this way: what forms his motive? Why does he behave as he does? Why—”
    “Why does he kill as he does?” I cut him off before he could finish.
    “Exactly.” His voice was low and grave.
    We regarded each other in silent understanding.
    Alistair spread the letters on the table at an angle, allowing each of us to see them. Then he continued to talk.
    “First, I ask you: what do these two pieces have in common?”
    And he waited. He could have told us, of course. But it was clear he wanted us to see it for ourselves.
    “Uh . . . each letter talks about a dead woman,” Mulvaney responded gamely.
    “Exactly!” Alistair’s enthusiasm was as great as if we’d just discovered something very important.
    Mulvaney was dubious. “But if he didn’t write the poetry, why does it matter?”
    “Because he
used
it to communicate something specific,” Alistair said.
    “What about where he says he
played Pygmalion
at the beginning of the letter? Ziele disagrees with me, but we found the actor who played that role in
Pygmalion
’s revival last fall. I think it could refer to him. He even knows one of the murder victims.” Mulvaney was insistent, even stubborn in his conviction.
    Alistair answered him with infinite patience.
    “Normally, I would disagree with Ziele, too. But here, I think he’s right. The writer of these letters is too sophisticated. Or, to put it a different way, he’s doing something far more complex than merely referring to an actual role in a play.”
    “Huh?” Mulvaney appeared thoroughly confused.
    “What Alistair is saying is that it would be too obvious,” I said.
    Alistair smiled with approval. “And why are these women dead?”
    “Some guy killed them. What does it matter?” Mulvaney was growing impatient and began to grumble.
    “I think it matters
how
they were killed,” Isabella said, sensing Mulvaney’s increasing frustration. “Porphyria’s lover is strangled and Shakespeare’s Desdemona is smothered. But what’s similar in both cases is that the woman bears no physical sign of it, so there’s no visible evidence of her pain.”
    She paused for a moment.
    “Simon, is that consistent with the actual deaths you’re investigating?” She eyed me with curiosity.
    I nodded yes, but it was Mulvaney who spoke up.
    “Definitely. We have been saying all day that our killer wants them to die pretty.”
    Mulvaney’s comment was music to Alistair’s ears. “That’s exactly my point.” Alistair’s broad smile revealed his perfect, white teeth. “Mark my words, once we understand more about him and why it’s important to him not just to kill— but to kill in this manner— then we’ll have discovered the key to understanding him.”
    Mulvaney and I went on to describe how each death had been staged, in the most literal sense of the word.
    Alistair said, “I think it is in the staging that the figure of Pygmalion comes into play. I’m not referring to the production that Timothy Poe starred in,” he cut off Mulvaney, who had opened his mouth to say something, “but to what the character of Pygmalion represents. So I’m certain he knows the legend of Pygmalion, the man who created a beautiful woman made of marble and fell in love with her. What seems important here is the act of creation.”
    Isabella added even more. “Yes, and look at what the linesemphasize about her. In both cases, the man loves her. He doesn’t actually wish to harm her, as the Othello quote suggests when he refuses to
shed her blood
or
scar her skin
. In the Browning passage, the poet-killer wants to preserve a perfect moment, and even when she’s dead, he continues to see her features as lifelike. See the final phrase, where he says,
again laughed the blue eyes
?”
    She pointed to the relevant phrases from the first letter. “He sees