Perfect Crime

About the show

One Sunday night, at the home of the wealthy Brents, psychiatrists living in a swanky Connecticut community, a woman shoots a man. By the time handsome detective James Ascher arrives, the body is gone. Ascher suspects the wife, Margaret Thorne Brent, a smart and sharp-tongued psychiatrist and novelist, although her patients are also suspect. One of her patients, Lionel McAuley, seeks fame as the "Baseball Bat Killer": he had previously killed his wife's lovers. During the course of his week-long investigation, more people are murdered (with a baseball bat), and Ascher finally learns the following: Margaret and her husband Harrison had been rehearsing a nightmare, for some time, with her patient Carlotta Donovan involving Carlotta's pretending to shoot and kill a man. Six months ago, Harrison, during one of these role playing therapy sessions, committed suicide by putting real bullets in the gun he gave to Carlotta. Realizing that she had just killed Harrison, Carlotta also committed suicide. When Margaret returned home to find the dead bodies, she hid Harrison's body behind the fireplace brickwork and, after disfiguring Carlotta's dead body to disguise its identity, sank it in Scotty's Pond. Knowing that Harrison's huge fortune would revert to his family in England upon his death, she quickly arranged for a former lover, Phillip Reynolds, to impersonate Harrison until she could transfer all of his accounts. During Ascher's investigation, Reynolds kills Mrs. Johaneston, the cook, when she realizes that he is an imposter. Margaret's patient McAuley takes credit for the murders of Harrison and Carlotta and then Mrs. Johaneston. Nevertheless, Reynolds also kills McAuley, because McAuley witnessed Phillip and Margaret enter Mrs. Johaneston's apartment on the night of her murder. Believing that Margaret was falling in love with Ascher, the insanely jealous Reynolds, after beating McAuley to death, flees to England, leaving Margaret in the house with the dead body lying in her office as the police arrive. Ascher also finds, to everyone's surprise, that Margaret was Carlotta's birth mother, that Carlotta had tracked down Margaret and become Harrison's lover. It is not clear whether her birth father was Harrison or Reynolds. Carlotta had hoped to work her way into the Brents' lives, angry at her English upbringing by a sexually abusive adoptive father rather than by the wealthy Brents. When Margaret finds out that Carlotta was her daughter and that she will be arrested as an accessory to the murders of Mrs. Johaneston and McAuley, she tries to commit suicide, but Ascher has filled her gun with blanks. A key clue to Ascher's finding Harrison's body in the fireplace is a painting on the fireplace brickwork that Ascher realizes was altered when the bricks were replaced in the wrong order. Nevertheless, Ascher and Margaret seem to be falling in love. Because of the complexity, a two-page Perfect Crime answer sheet is available at the end of the performance.