"I Understand You Can Perform a Perfect Murder"

"The Killer."
By J. T. Oliver (1927-88).
First appearance: Imagination, March 1952.

Short short short story (3 pages).
Online at Project Gutenberg (HERE) and The Luminist Archives (HERE; original text; scroll down to page 85).

     "Smith made a profitable business out of murder. It was all quite simple—he killed a man and then disposed of the body—forever!"

They never see it coming . . . .

Main characters:
~ Wilma:
  "'I want you to kill my husband,' she said pleasantly."
~ Smith:
  "Here's to a policeman's nightmare—the perfect murder."
~ Rogers:
  "Who are you?"
~ Graevod:
  "Oh but there is a body."

Typo: "envelope their bodies".

Resources:
- Sooner or later even lumbering bureaucracy will catch up with the cleverest killers; see John E. Stith's short short short story, "Goodbye, Howard Henning," featured (HERE).
- The ISFDb bibliography lists only five stories for superfan Joseph Tombs Oliver (HERE). There's a photo tribute site (by Bill Plott) to our author (HERE; PDF), with snippets of background information about the SFF scene that Oliver inhabited; also see (HERE).

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