Hauck Exman is killed after Burke Devore uses a fabricated employment opportunity to draw him into reach. The murder grows out of Burke’s campaign against résumé competitors, but its decisive turn comes when the supposed interview fails: Burke discovers Exman working at Dolmen’s, then later exploits a staged car problem to approach him in a nearly empty mall parking lot. The sequence joins the false promise of work to the violence Burke has made part of his own search for employment, and ends with his attempt to make Exman’s body disappear among ordinary household waste.

Background and Selection

Burke’s scheme begins with the job market’s routine machinery. He places an advertisement in The Paperman, receives applications, sifts through them, and uses the addresses on the résumés to identify people he considers competitors. In this system, an applicant’s carefully prepared record of experience becomes more than a bid for work: it gives Burke a route to the person behind it. Exman is one of the candidates whose résumé draws Burke’s attention.

The résumé presents Exman as a manager-level applicant with extensive experience in the production and sales of specialized polymer paper products. Its omissions are deliberate. It includes no photograph and avoids employment dates, leaving only clues such as twenty-three years of experience and a 1969 college graduation. The document reflects the advice being given to older job seekers: conceal what might reveal age, appear impersonal and efficient, and emphasize professional qualifications. Burke judges it good enough to secure an interview, and therefore dangerous to him.

That judgment sits within Burke’s own experience of repeated rejection. Applicants pay their own travel costs, prepare carefully, meet interviewers, sometimes tour a plant, and then hear nothing. Burke has also come to see an interview as a sales pitch in which he must sell himself, a role he finds difficult after years in management. His recognition that his résumé merely gets him through the door helps explain the cruel symmetry of his plan: he turns the conventions of recruitment against another unemployed man, treating the application that should promise possibility as a means of locating a target.

The False Interview

Burke cannot reliably find Exman at home, so he develops a way to make Exman travel to a place Burke can watch. He writes in the name of B. D. Industrial Papers, claiming that the company had reconsidered its earlier decision and asking whether Exman remained available for an interview. The letter proposes lunch at one o’clock on Friday, June 20, at the Coach House in Regnery, with a supposed personnel director, Laurie Kilpatrick, as the interviewer.

The letter’s details are designed to make the invitation plausible while limiting the chance of a confirming phone call. It says the person to be replaced is still at the premises and that a call could cause trouble, so Exman is asked to reply by post. Burke knows the explanation may itself arouse suspicion. For the first time, he recognizes that this part of the scheme leaves a trail beyond the bullets and might warn his target. The missing telephone number on the letterhead is another vulnerability: if Exman tried to call, the deception might collapse and bring the police into it.

Burke checks the returned letter in Wildbury on Tuesday, June 17. Exman has sent it back promptly and accepted the invitation, apparently without challenging the absent number or retaining the main letter. Burke reads this quick response as evidence of how strongly Exman wants work. He also recognizes that the deception is different from the killings he has carried out before: the nonexistent interview and the invented attractive interviewer tantalize Exman with a prospect Burke knows is false. The invitation is therefore both a practical lure and a source of unease for its author.

On Friday, Burke waits near the Coach House shortly before one. He has chosen it because it is an upmarket restaurant on the town’s main street, with broad mullioned windows through which the waiting area can be watched from outside. The previous day he telephoned to reserve a table for two under Kilpatrick’s name. Exman should be told that the reservation exists but that the other person has not arrived, leaving him in the visible seating area. Burke walks past, looks through the windows, and identifies a man whose confident posture and expectant manner fit his target. Yet the anticipated meeting does not lead directly to the planned encounter: the day’s events redirect Burke toward Exman at his workplace.

Recognition and the Parking-Lot Attack

At Dolmen’s, Burke searches the store for Exman and becomes alarmed when he cannot find him. Exman then emerges from a doorway in menswear wearing an oval blue-and-white store nametag marked with his own name. Burke realizes that the well-dressed man he has been seeking is a suit salesman. His polished appearance, which had seemed like an identifying clue, belongs to the occupation he is performing. Their positions abruptly reverse: Burke is now a customer, and Exman approaches him with the practiced friendliness required by sales work.

Burke gives the name Hutcheson and pretends to shop for a suit. He says his wife is a teacher and cannot come that day; Exman suggests that Burke return with her the next day. Exman gives him a business card bearing the store’s name, his own name, and the designation Sales Representative. Burke accepts the card and shakes his hand. The encounter is a brief performance in which Exman’s work obliges him to welcome the very man who has come to kill him. Burke leaves with the pretext of returning, but the immediate opportunity has passed.

That evening, Burke returns to the mall and parks four spaces from Exman’s Taurus. The lot is nearly empty, and no nearby cars are close to either man. Burke has opened the side door of his own vehicle and its hood, arranging the scene to resemble an ordinary breakdown; he has also left a hammer where it appears to belong beside the exposed engine. When Exman comes toward his car, he notices the open door, the interior light, and the raised hood, and asks whether Burke is having trouble. Burke pretends the vehicle will not start, then acts as if he has only just recognized his earlier customer.

Exman responds to the apparent problem and leans in to help. Burke asks him for a flashlight, then sprays him in the face with Mace and strikes him twice with the hammer. Exman falls. Burke catches him and moves him into the covered interior of the vehicle, away from the open view of the parking lot. The planned disguise has brought the two men together without a formal interview: Exman’s alertness makes him notice Burke, while his helpful response gives Burke the opening he needs. The encounter ends with Burke closing the vehicle and driving away; when he turns the key, the engine starts normally, confirming that the breakdown was a performance.

Concealment and Significance

Burke is unwilling to stop along the route with Exman’s body in the vehicle. He considers his own garage safer than a seemingly secluded roadside place where people might arrive, lights might come on, or police might pass. Once home, he closes the garage door before beginning to handle the body. He uses large dark-green lawn-and-leaf bags and white cotton gloves bought at the mall, and separates the items that have contacted the vehicle from the body itself. The care he takes is not a change of heart: it is an effort to prevent the killing from being connected to his car.

Burke folds and secures Exman’s body so it can be contained in a second bag. He puts the tarp, blanket, tools, remaining picture wire, packaging, and gloves in a separate bag, then smears the plastic with his palms to avoid leaving fingerprints. The contrast between the neat household supplies and the violence they conceal carries the scene’s bleakest irony. Burke has made a murder out of a false job offer, then treats its physical traces as a disposal problem to be managed alongside the rest of the household’s errands.

The following evening, after telling Marjorie about a business proposal he regards as impractical, Burke loads the two bags into his vehicle and heads for the recycling center. The center is the neighborhood’s cheaper alternative to private collection: residents sort glass, tin, paper, and cardboard for free, while ordinary garbage costs fifty cents per large plastic bag and is compacted before transport to a landfill operation on Long Island Sound. Burke recasts that municipal route as a final journey for Exman. The mundane destination completes the attempt to erase him, placing the body inside a system built for the routine removal of household refuse.

The event exposes the full reach of Burke’s employment scheme. A résumé has supplied the address, a fabricated offer has supplied the pretext, and Exman’s own work as a salesman has briefly made him the person delivering a convincing performance. Burke’s concealed unemployment and frustration with interviews form the social setting of the crime, but they do not make its method accidental: each ordinary step, from the letter to the reservation to the simulated car trouble, is deliberately arranged. The false promise of work ends not in another rejection but in Exman’s death and Burke’s effort to return the evidence to the stream of everyday disposal.