Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

JERRY IS DEAD

Dear Future Jerry. It is now two days past the WMD. It’s hard to say exactly when to call your time of death, but the doctor wiped his forearm across his head, shook his head at the nurse, and walked out of the operating room sometime the night before last, knowing there was nothing more that could be done. That was the night you became a monster. The Jerry you used to be, the Jerry I used to be, he’s gone. All that’s left is this sick, twisted fuck who later today is going to blow his sick, twisted-fuck brains all over the wall. Damn you, Doctor Goodstory for not being able to fix me. Damn you, Past Jerry, for letting go, for giving up, for allowing yourself to become this way. It was your job! Your goddamn job to save us! Where was the fight? Past Jerry from day one and day four and five, you got yourself into this mess. You could have done it, you know. You could have done the world and that poor young girl a favor and put that gun into your mouth back when Doctor Goodstory gave you the news. But no, Past Jerry thought he knew best. For a guy who’s supposed to be able to see where things are going, you really made a mess of this.

People say suicide is a selfish act. They say it’s cowardly. People say these things because they don’t understand. It’s actually the opposite. It’s not cowardly, in fact it takes incredible courage. To stare Death in the face and tell him you’re ready . . . that’s a brave thing. A selfish act would be to hang on to life as you’re dragged through the media and the courts, your family dragged with you. Some will say escaping that is where the selfishness comes in, but that’s not true. Your death right now is like pulling off a Band-Aid—quick pain for your family that will fade. You owe them at least that. Journal. Suicide notes. Drink. Gun. That’s the schedule, partner.

Where to begin. Well, you know the beginning. The Big F taking you right past when you should have shot yourself, right into the heart of the WMD. The speech (two million hits now) and then the knife, and you and Sandra fought about that knife. You convinced her not to go to the police because, after all, what had you done? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps you had found it. Or stabbed a giant rat—and the world wouldn’t miss a giant rat now, would it?

After finding the knife, you and Sandra spent most of the afternoon watching the news. You said very little to each other. You just watched the news and waited for the call. You didn’t know who the call would come from, just that it would. Mrs. Smith was still alive, because Sandra had found an excuse to go over and check on her, and it wasn’t anybody from the wedding party, but that still left nearly four hundred thousand other people in the city. The call didn’t come. The rat scenario was building some strength. The idea had learned to walk. It was wobbly, but with enough time it would have a life of its own.

The idea died this morning. It died when Eva called and asked if we had heard. Heard what? Sandra asked. Heard about Belinda, Eva said. What about Belinda?, Sandra asked, though no doubt her mind was a little train, chugging its way through different scenarios, pulling into the My husband killed her station, and yes, that’s exactly where she disembarked. Belinda was dead. Somebody had stabbed her to death in her own home. Eva was crying on the phone, and Sandra was too, and even you cried, J-Man. You cried for Belinda, you cried for Sandra and Eva, and you cried for Past Jerry and for yourself.

The world is an awful place. Who would do this? Eva’s voice was coming through the phone, saying these things over and over. Sandra just kept saying she didn’t know, she didn’t know, but she did know. Her skin had gone so white she looked as though she had been stored in the fridge for the last two months. They spoke for ten minutes. You sat in the dining room while Sandra sat at the kitchen bar, her back to you for most of the call, and you watched the clock. It was ticking away the amount of time Belinda had been dead. It was ticking away the final moments of your life too. You knew it then, just as you’d suspected it the night before—you knew if you had hurt somebody, you would pay the ultimate price. You clock-watched while your mind constructed the final scenario. You would use the gun. It would be quick.

When Sandra got off the phone she continued to sit at the breakfast bar. She wouldn’t turn to face you. She was crying. Her body was shaking softly as she tried to contain it. You so desperately wanted to go to her, to put your arms around her, to hold her as she cried, but she would never allow it. And what would you say even if she would? If you touched her, she would scream. Or die. You just knew it. She was already on the edge. So you stayed sitting at the table, tracing your finger around the marks you had scarred into it with the fork.

What do we do now?

They were her words, her back still to you. She was like cracked glass, one slight knock and she would shatter.

I didn’t kill her, you said. I couldn’t have.

You were attracted to her. It was as clear as day, she said. It was only clear because she had been reading the journal. She wasn’t done. You have the gall to accuse me of having an affair, where you’re the one all this time who was obsessed with somebody half your age. I knew it, I knew it because you couldn’t take your eyes off her, and you even went to see her at work, Jerry! At work! And . . . oh my god, she said, and she spun the bar stool so she could face you, and you knew what was coming—it was another piece of the puzzle slotting into place. That day she brought you back home, she went to her house first! You knew where she lived!

Sandra—

Don’t, she said, and put her hand up in a stopping gesture. There is nothing you can say, Jerry, nothing, she said, and she was right.

She stormed out of the room. You didn’t call after her. You couldn’t. What could you have said? Even now she’s upstairs either having just called the police, or still building up the nerve to do so.

Future Jerry, you feel like a character in one of your books. You’ve done this. You own this.

So this is it. You’ve still got two suicide notes to write, one to Eva and one to Sandra. This journal will end up being nothing but the ramblings of a madman. Soon to be a dead man. Then it’s time to dig the gun out from its hiding place. Sandra will have to face the horror of running downstairs and discovering you, but at this stage it seems she’ll see that more as a relief than anything.

Good-bye, Future Jerry. If there’s another life waiting for you, hopefully you can do better in the rewrite.

The garage door closes behind them. They both stay sitting in the car in the dark.

“Last year you told me you were starting to talk to yourself,” Hans says. “You were holding conversations between you and Henry Cutter. Do you still do that?”

A year ago that would have embarrassed him. Now it’s just an everyday thing. “Sometimes. Why?”

“Henry is the one with all the big ideas, right? The one with the book ideas, the one who can put a plot together.”

“It doesn’t really work that way,” Jerry says. “He’s just a name, it’s like I put my author hat on when I go to work, but it’s still me who comes up with the ideas. Henry isn’t a different personality,” he says, but sometimes he isn’t so sure. Henry has been helping him today, and aren’t there times he suspects that Henry is just another name for Captain A?

“So put your author hat on now,” Hans says, “because that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to go to work.”

“Work?”

“I need to know if it’s possible.”

“If what’s possible?”

Hans opens his car door. The interior light comes on. Jerry can see tools hanging on the walls, some gardening equipment, some rope and a shovel and rolls of duct tape that are the go-to tools of Henry’s trade.

“I want you to think like an author while I pitch you this idea. Can you do that?” Hans asks.

“I can try.”

“You need to do more than try,” Hans says. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Good. So this is a story about a crime writer who’s in a nursing home. He has dementia. He keeps confessing to crimes he thinks he did, but he didn’t do them, he just wrote about them. There are crimes he has done—for example he shot his wife and he killed a girl just after his daughter was married, and there’s a chance he killed another girl when he was young, so he’s not an innocent person, but he doesn’t deserve to be punished for crimes he hasn’t committed. Today he wakes up in the middle of a crime scene, and he has no memory of how he got there or what he’s done.”

“Is there a point to this recap?” Jerry asks.

“The entire time he questions why he can remember some things but not others. The Alzheimer’s, of course, hides things from him. And he’s repressed painful things from his past. But he can’t remember walking into town, can’t remember these women, can’t remember any of it. He finds that he’s been drugged, and recently too. Nobody has ever figured out how he escapes from the nursing home, or how he makes his way into town.” Hans pauses and stares at him. “Come on, Jerry, keep thinking of it as a novel.”

“But it’s not a novel.”

“Get Henry to think of it. Goddamn it, Jerry, work with me here. Close your eyes and pretend you’re back in your office and you’ve got your author hat on, and you’re letting Henry do all the work. You and Henry are writing your next big seller.”

Jerry closes his eyes. He thinks about his office. He can remember the smell of the room, can feel the desk beneath his fingers, the jade plant on his desk he bought ten years ago that was still on that desk when he was there yesterday. He can remember the way the sun fell into the room, the angle fractionally different every day, the way it would hit and fade the framed King Kong Escapes poster on the wall. Only he wouldn’t see it fade, it faded the same way you don’t notice a child growing every day, but you know it’s happening. In King Kong Escapes, King Kong was pitted against his exact robot duplicate, a battle of the titans, and boy how he loved those B movie posters from half a century ago and how much Sandra hated them, how she wouldn’t let him hang them anywhere else in the house. He would sit in his office and he would use Henry Cutter as an alias, but he didn’t think he was Henry Cutter. He was Jerry Grey, the author, whose exact author duplicate built a life on creating fiction. He wrote during the day, and at night he watched stories other people created for TV. He would read books by other writers, go to movies. Fiction was his life. Henry Cutter was only a name and, like earlier today, he needs Henry’s help.

I’m here, Jerry. All you had to do was ask.

“Are you thinking of this as a novel?” Hans asks.

They think about it as a novel, Jerry and Henry together again, the dream team, and that’s always been how they’ve done their best work. “Yes.”

“Everything I just told you, if it were a book, what would be happening?”

“It’s easy,” they tell him, and it is easy. Henry and Jerry—they’ve always been the master of solving a mystery. How many times has Sandra told them to shut up when they’ve been at the movies, or watching something on TV, because they were unable to stop sharing their predictions? And this is the mystery to top all of them, and they’ve always enjoyed a good puzzle.

Jerry pictures it. He puts into words what he and Henry can see. Just how he used to do it, but instead of typing, he’s talking. “The crime writer with dementia couldn’t find a way to sneak out of a nursing home. Sure, maybe once, perhaps twice, but not more than that. Not when people are trying to keep an eye on him, which means he had help, but then the needle marks suggest he’s not being helped but being drugged. He’s being sedated and snuck out, then driven into town.”

“Why would somebody do that?” Hans asks.

Jerry pictures it. He bounces some ideas back and forth with Henry, and then they settle on one. “He’s being snuck into town on the days of the murders. Snuck into town and dumped somewhere. That way there’s a pattern. He’s not dumped at the first crime scene, because then whoever is doing this can’t kill any more women without the perfect scapegoat, because he knows the writer will be caught. He also knows he can’t keep doing it forever. He figures he can kill four women. The first three, he dumps the writer at random locations, but on the fourth he leaves him inside the house to wake up and get his prints and DNA all over the place, which is what happens, and the writer thinks he’s done it.”

There is silence in the car, and he looks over at Hans expecting him to laugh, but Hans doesn’t laugh. Instead Hans asks, “So who’s the killer?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“Indulge me.”

“Somebody who has access to the nursing home and to the drugs to sedate the patients. Somebody who knows the writer is confessing to crimes. Somebody who hides jewelry in the writer’s pockets so the writer will think he took them.”

“Somebody from the home,” Hans says.

Jerry nods. “Sometimes people say my books are implausible. I remember that.”

Hans shrugs. “Most crime novels are. If they weren’t, then they’d be no different from real life. People don’t want to read about real life.”

“This is real life.”

“True,” Hans says. “But keep thinking of it as a story. Do you remember what Eva told me earlier on the phone?”

“She said one of the orderlies said I’d confessed to him last night that I’d killed somebody.”

“Fiona Clark,” Hans says. “If somebody is sneaking you out, don’t you think it’s the same person who says you confessed?”

“Unless I did confess,” Jerry says. “I could have confessed because I did it, or I confessed because I saw it in the news and thought I did it.”

“In these books of yours,” Hans says, “what would be the next step? What would a person in your situation do?”

“Go to the police.”

“No he wouldn’t,” Hans says.

He wouldn’t, Henry says. Come on, be honest here.

“People never go to the police,” Hans says. “They should, but they never do, because if they did then that would be the end of the story, right? It would be wrapped up by chapter three. And anyway, the police would never believe this story. Somebody has been drugging you, Jerry, and I just don’t see you walking twenty miles, and I don’t see the police worrying about the fact that there are no witnesses who saw you walking all that way. Think about it.”

Jerry thinks about it. Both him and Henry. Then they carry on. “In a book the next step would be for the writer to go and see the orderly he confessed to. The same orderly who has access to injections, and who had injected the writer in the past.” Jerry remembers something else then. “The same orderly who wants to be a writer.”

“Write what you know,” Hans says. “How about we reverse that? How about we do what you write and go and pay this guy a visit.”

“His name is Eric,” Jerry says, “and he might be innocent.”

“That’s what we’ll figure out.”

Before they can start to figure it out, a car pulls into the driveway on the other side of the garage door. A moment later two doors are opened and closed. There are footsteps, and then knocking on the door. If this were a book, Jerry thinks, then this would be the police arriving ahead of schedule.

THE FINAL DAY

Before the gun does its dirty work, there is one more thing to report. This isn’t being written down because you think things are going to work out okay, or that Captain A has found a different white whale to chase and doesn’t need this vessel anymore, but because when your family looks back at everything, they can understand what it was like. Maybe it can help others. Hard to call it a silver lining, but maybe researchers in the near future might learn something here that can help them map the streets of Batshit County.

You are trying to keep the suicide notes short. One is written and the other is still pending. The written one is full of I’m sorry and I love you. The person you need to apologize to the most is Belinda Murray.

Sandra came down to the office earlier. She actually knocked before coming in, which is something she always used to do before opening the door, which always made your job feel so formal for lack of a better word. She knocked and she came in and sat on the couch. You sat in the office chair with the suicide note hidden beneath the pad you’re about to write the second one on. She glanced at the pad then at you.

Have you killed other people? she asked, and she sounded so resigned to the fact there would be more bad news.

No.

But how can you be so sure?

It was a question you’ve been asking yourself, and you gave her the answer you’d come up with. Because I’d know.

So you knew you killed Belinda?

It was a flaw, one you had seen, one you couldn’t get around. No.

Then how can you sit there and say you’ve never hurt anybody?

You had no answer, and didn’t offer one. Instead you asked a question of your own. Have you called the police?

No, she said.

Why?

I’m trying to make a decision. Tell me what you remember.

So you told her. You remembered the speech at the wedding, you remembered coming home and watching it online over and over. Her face tightened into a scowl when you told her you were drinking. You told her about sneaking out the window.

To go and see Belinda, she said.

You shook your head. Just to go for a walk. To stretch my legs. To find a bar somewhere.

She looked like she didn’t believe that. And then?

And then I was back in my office.

Tell me about the shirt, she said.

What?

Your shirt. I checked the laundry and it’s not there. I can’t find it anywhere. She looked at the floor. Is it under there?

You thought about lying, but what was the point? Yes.

You hid it, she said.

Yes.

Then why not hide the knife?

Because—

She held her hand up. I get it. Because you didn’t know you’d done it. You found the shirt, but not the knife. That’s why I’m not calling the police, she said, because I know you weren’t in control.

It was time to ask her the question. What are you going to do?

I think the question is what are you going to do?

She stared at you then, and finally you got it. She wasn’t deciding whether or not to call the police, she never had been. Sandra was giving you another option, an option that, under the circumstances, shows just how much she still loves you. It was an option you were already in the process of taking, and perhaps she sensed that. You had humiliated her and ruined Eva’s wedding, you murdered a young woman, but Sandra was only thinking of you. She was going to allow you to decide what was coming next. Future Jerry, just know that in that moment you have never loved your wife more.

I just need a little time to figure it out, you said, the words slow and even, their unspoken meaning clear, and you never looked away from her and she never looked away from you. How about you take a walk to clear your head?

She said nothing for a few seconds. You’re sure she already knew what she was going to say, but the silence was appropriate. It gave the moment the final bit of gravitas it needed. Then she said, I can do that. How long do you need?

You needed twenty minutes to write the second note. Most of everything else was in order, it was just going to come down to the semantics. You had to choose what you were going to wear, and what kind of mess you were going to make. You pictured how long it would take to line some plastic trash bags around the floor of the office so you wouldn’t ruin the resale value of the house. It will be messy, but your office is where you want to do it. You pictured cutting the bags open, laying them flat, and hanging a couple of them on the wall. You pictured drinking one more gin and tonic, then perhaps a second, sitting in the office chair, the doubts, the belief this was going to happen, more doubts, the stereo off, no sound at all, then one giant sound. You’re not sure if you’ll be thinking of the girl you killed when you pull the trigger, or your family. You’ll know soon. You did some quick addition: twenty minutes to place the trash bags and twenty minutes to sit in your chair drinking your drink and coming to the end.

An hour, you said. I need an hour.

She stood up. She wasn’t crying, but she was close. Her mouth was shaking a little. You walked over to her, and you felt strong. She put her arms out and you stepped into them and wrapped your own around her and she sobbed into your neck and held you tight, and she felt like she’s always felt, warm and comfortable, and before Captain A ruined your life you would hug Sandra like that all the time.

I love you, you told her.

She couldn’t bring herself to say the words back. She couldn’t say anything. Then she was running out of the office and out of the house, leaving you alone.

Completely. And utterly. Alone.

You will never see another person, Future Jerry. Never talk to another person.

Since then you’ve been busy. You told Sandra an hour, but that didn’t allow for the Madness Journal entry, but thankfully other things haven’t taken so long. The suicide note was ten minutes. It took fifteen to tape a couple of trash bags to the wall, and there was a tarpaulin in the garage that you’ve ended up laying across the floor. The mess should be pretty well contained. You also have a pillowcase to put over your head to contain the splatter. Since then you’ve been writing and ignoring the phone that keeps ringing, because what could you possibly say to anybody calling? Everything is ready to go now, and these words on this page are now nothing but a stalling tactic. It’s time, Future Jerry, to put down the pen and conclude this messy affair. What will the bloggers say? The ending was predictable, maybe. From Jerry Grey’s first book it was obvious he would blow his brains out in his office.

Still stalling. Sandra will be back in ten minutes. The gun is on the desk. It’s heavier than you remember. It’s going to make a hell of a sound, but with the office door closed, nobody is going to hear it.

Still stalling.

It’s time.