Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

DAY THIRTY-ONE

Holeeee shit!

Hey Grumpy Smurf! How you doing, Grumpy Smurf?

All better? Yes. Yes, you are!

God you feel good. Gooooooood!

The last few weeks—they were stage four. STAGE FOUR! You’re really ripping through them now. Can you imagine going along to a support group with people treating it like a competition, people going No, I got depressed quicker, No, I got angrier than you did, or I accepted it first and you denied it longer.

Sandra came home yesterday with these little blue pills to make you feel better. To balance out your mood, and to be honest you didn’t want to take them, and then you thought, you know what? You should take all of them. So that’s what you decided to do, only Sandra wouldn’t give you all of them, instead she handed them out like clockwork, two every four hours, and then she made sure you were taking them too, she even made you open your mouth and go ahh so she could check you weren’t storing them up to take in one shot. By this morning you felt better, and by this afternoon betterer, and this evening even bettererer! You are on the mend! In fact, you are so on the mend that it’s looking like this Alzheimer’s thing can be kicked. People with dementia can’t feel this good, can they?

Time for a quick good news, bad news summation. Good news—you’re pretty sure the diagnosis is wrong, and that there is nothing wrong with you. So that’s not good news—that’s great news! That is the best news you could give yourself, which is exactly what is happening here. You’re no longer Grumpy Smurf. No longer Drinky Smurf.

Bad news—there is no bad news.

Eva came around today.

She left Hip-Hop Rick at HOME.

And she came ALONE.

Yo.

And she came with wedding magazines and photographs of dresses she had printed from the Internet, and she was buzzing with good news—oh yeah, more good news—none of the places she approached had any cancellations, but there is a church that has a spare date ahead and, get this: they are getting married in six weeks! That’s going to put it somewhere around day seventy in the Madness Journal. That gives you me us we something to look forward to. Even though your suit is only six years old, you need a new one, according to Eva. And according to Sandra.

You started working again today on The Man Goes Burning. You’ve had the house to yourself, as Sandra has been busy heading into work on and off this week. She’s defending a teacher who was fired from his job after photographs posted online showed him kissing another man—his partner. Enough parents complained about their children being taught science by a gay teacher that the school ended up terminating his contract. Homophobia doesn’t run very deep at all in this country, but it still pops its ugly head up every now and then. You’ve never understood homophobia. Gay guys tend to be better groomed and better dressed and more sophisticated than the rest of us—if they were straight, they’d be stealing all the women. You’d never have met Sandra. With Sandra at work, and you on the mend, the day has felt like one of the classics, just you and your stereo cranked up, that feeling you get from editing when you can feel the magic happening, and there’s no way you’d feel that way if you weren’t beating the disease. It’s quite possible you were misdiagnosed.

Good news—the other two bottles of gin showed up. You’d hidden them in the garage, and that came to you just this morning. You might have a celebratory drink later on. You shouldn’t, because of the pills, but you will, because you want to. More good news—if you can’t shake, shake, shake the Big A, then the Big Bill from the wedding won’t worry you so much.

Bad news—you get the idea Sandra thinks you need a good suit not just for the wedding. Every dying man needs a good suit in the end, don’t they?

“You don’t remember any of yesterday?” Eric asks him.

The two of them are outside, walking past a group of people being sung to by an entertainer who comes to the nursing home twice a week. The guy is playing a guitar, he’s playing a bunch of old-school songs, the kind of music Jerry loves, only he loves it on his stereo, with loud lyrics and drums and electric guitars and saxophones blaring. He loves the way it used to get his creative juices flowing. This guy is playing the songs as if this were a cruise boat for hundred-year-olds. There’s a van parked near the front door, a maintenance worker messing around with the outside lights, and Jerry wonders how hard it would be to stow away in the back of that van and go for a ride. Quite difficult, he imagines, because there’s a dog sitting in the front seat. The sun is out but not hot yet, however it’ll get there soon, and most of the residents are in short-sleeved tops. It’s ten in the morning and he’s only just gotten up. He hasn’t had breakfast yet. Eric’s question makes him realize he hasn’t even thought about yesterday. Hasn’t realized there should be something to remember. Whenever somebody points out to him that he’s forgotten a period of time, there’s a sense of disorientation. They keep walking. He runs through a small checklist that, when he remembers to use it, he finds useful. Where is he? Well, a hotel is a hotel is a hotel, but this isn’t that. This isn’t him on tour. This is a care facility. His name is Jerry Grey. He is a man without a future becoming a man forgetting his past. He is a man whose wife doesn’t come and visit because she filed for divorce because all of this was too difficult for her.

Jerry nods. “Sure,” he says, then realizes he doesn’t remember it at all. “Was it memorable?”

“What about the day before?”

This time he shakes his head.

“The name Belinda Murray,” Eric says, “does that mean anything to you?”

“Belinda Murray?” Jerry thinks about it, letting the name filter though his memory banks. It goes through his mind without catching. “Should it?”

Eric claps him on the shoulder and smiles. “Possibly not,” Eric says. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“I feel good,” Jerry says, which he knows is a stock-standard answer, which must mean at the very least he’s still remembering how human beings act in society. He also knows half an hour ago when he woke up, he was confused for a little while. He realizes he hasn’t asked how Eric is, so maybe he has forgotten a few of the social going-along-to-get-along rules. He does that now.

“I’m good, buddy,” Eric answers.

Then Jerry remembers something else. “How’s the writing?”

“Good,” Eric says, looking thrilled to have been asked, and Jerry is equally as thrilled to have remembered. “I’ve been inspired by something. In fact, I can have you to thank for that. You and your advice of writing what you know.”

Jerry wonders what that advice might be. “You’re writing about an orderly?”

“Ha,” Eric says, and slaps him on the back. “That’s closer to the truth than you’d know. I better go and get some work done, and you need to go and have some breakfast and get ready soon too, as you’ve got visitors on their way.”

“Sandra and Eva?”

“Sadly not, buddy.”

The visitors end up arriving just before noon, and it turns out to be a pair of policemen, which is disappointing, he thinks, but not as disappointing as being visited by your accountant. The first cop introduces himself. He’s a guy by the name of Dennis Mayor who looks nothing like any Dennis that Jerry has ever known, and the second guy is Chris Jacobson, who looks more like a Dennis than a Chris. They tell Jerry they came out yesterday to see him, and he almost calls them liars, because they weren’t here yesterday . . . but then he thinks it’s possible they were. Plus now that he thinks about it, they do look vaguely familiar. The introductions are made in a bedroom that is currently unoccupied, the previous patient dead, Jerry imagines, since nobody here really ever gets better. There are five of them—the two cops, Eric, Nurse Hamilton, and there’s him, Jerry Grey, crime writer. When they’re all sitting down he realizes this isn’t just an unoccupied bedroom but an interrogation room. The two cops are sitting opposite him, and Eric is to his left and Nurse Hamilton to his right. He feels concerned. He feels like he should be asking for a lawyer.

Before he can ask what this is about, Mayor leans forward and starts the proceedings. “Does the name Belinda Murray mean anything to you?”

Belinda Murray. Jerry compares the name to faces from the past, scanning through them the way fingerprints are scanned on TV shows, image after image flicking by. He doesn’t get a hit. Yet . . . there is something familiar about it. “I know the name.”

“You want to tell us about her?” Mayor asks.

He wants to, but . . . “I . . . can’t.”

“And why is that?”

“I don’t know who she is.”

“You just said you know the name,” Jacobson says.

“I know, but . . .” He runs the name against the faces again. “I just don’t know from where.”

“That could be my fault,” Eric says, and everybody looks at Eric, except Jerry, because he’s looking at the two cops who look annoyed with Eric. Eric follows it up. “I asked him earlier this morning if he knew the name. I’m sorry, probably—”

“Shouldn’t have?” Mayor asks.

Eric shrugs. “That might be where he’s remembering it from.”

“You’re right, you really shouldn’t have done that,” Mayor says.

“And why not?” Nurse Hamilton asks, glaring at Mayor. “Jerry was the one who told the name to us, and we’re the ones who gave that news to you. Don’t sit there trying to make out we’ve done something wrong here when all we’re doing is trying to uncover the truth.”

“You’re right,” Mayor says. “I’m sorry, and we’re grateful for your help. However, we’re here because he did tell you her name two days ago, so where was he remembering her from then?”

Jerry doesn’t like being talked about as if he’s not in the room. It makes him feel like an object. A subject. “Who is Belinda Murray?” he asks.

They all look back towards him.

“I don’t know who she is,” he says.

“Perhaps show him the photograph,” Nurse Hamilton says.

Jacobson nods, and opens up a folder that’s resting on his knee. He pulls out a photograph and hands it over to Jerry. It’s an eight-by-ten glossy of a blond woman with blue eyes and a beautiful smile, a girl-next-door smile, a midtwenties girl with all sorts of hopes and promises who would have had all sorts of men queuing across all sorts of miles for the chance to date her. Jerry already knows where this is going. Of course he does.

“You think I killed her,” he says.

“And why would you say that?” Mayor asks.

“Look, detectives, I may be losing my mind, but not enough to miss the obvious. This,” he says, and spreads his arms to indicate the room and all that is in it, “is an interrogation. You’re here because this girl is dead, and I’m sorry about that, I really am, but I don’t know her and I didn’t hurt her.”

“It’s because—” Mayor says, but then stops when Nurse Hamilton holds her hand up to him.

“Let me explain it to him,” she says.

Mayor looks at his partner, and his partner gives him a small why not shrug.

Nurse Hamilton angles the chair so she can face Jerry almost full on, and she takes his hand in both of hers and leans forward. He can smell coffee on her breath and she’s wearing the same perfume his sister-in-law wears. He can’t remember his sister-in-law’s name, or the last time he ever thought about her, but he can remember how she looks, and can imagine she had a hand in Sandra’s decision to leave him. He pictures the two of them slumped on couches, their feet up, drinking wine and listening to music and his wife saying it’s all too tough, her sister telling her she’s young enough to start over, to cut Jerry loose and find some guy half her age. Suddenly he wishes it were a picture of the sister-in-law they were showing him, not a complete stranger.

“Jerry, are you feeling okay?”

“What?”

“You left us for a little bit there,” Nurse Hamilton says.

“I’m fine,” he tells her.

“You sure?”

He thinks about it for a few seconds. “I’ve been better.”

“Tell me if things become too stressful, okay?” she says.

“Are you going to get to the point or not?” Mayor asks.

She ignores him. “Okay, Jerry?”

“Tell you if things become stressful. I’ve got it,” he says, Sandra and her sister fading from his thoughts.

“Do you remember where you are?”

He doesn’t need to look around. It’s a simple question and they must really think he’s a special kind of stupid to be asking him this, but he still looks around anyway, just to make sure. “Of course I do. I know who I am and where I am. I’m in a nursing home because I have dementia. I was placed here because my wife decided to divorce me rather than let me stay at home. I’m here because Captain A takes over sometimes and I wander.”

“Who the hell is Captain A?” Mayor asks.

“It’s what he calls the Alzheimer’s,” Nurse Hamilton says. She turns back towards Jerry. She still has his hand between hers. “Do you remember what you did for a living?”

He nods.

“Tell me.”

“I used to write books,” he says. “I wrote ten of them.”

“You wrote thirteen. Do you remember two days ago, when you were sitting in the garden?”

“Thirteen? Are you sure?”

“The garden, Jerry.”

He’s spent a lot of time in the garden. He was there today. Probably yesterday and the day before, but when every day is the same, how can you tell one apart from the other?

“Not really,” he says.

Without even looking at the two detectives, Nurse Hamilton puts her arm out to the side and slightly behind her, her index finger raised in a Don’t say a word gesture. “You were in the garden and you were pulling out the roses, remember? You said you were helping. You said you used to help your neighbor the same way.”

“I did?” he asks, unable to remember the neighbor, unable to remember two days ago, unable to remember he wrote thirteen books and not ten.

“I took you by the hand and we sat down in the shade and I gave you a drink of water, and we talked for a while. Do you remember what we talked about?”

“Roses?” he asks, but really it’s just an educated guess. Then he thinks about what she’s saying, about what he does for a living. “It was about the books.”

“He doesn’t remember a damn thing,” Mayor says, loosening the top of his tie. He sounds frustrated. Jerry thinks he’s probably had a lot of frustrated cops in his novels. These guys probably drink a lot of coffee and have a lot of ex-wives and eventually they snap. The room is getting warmer, no doubt the five of them helping to raise the temperature, and he wants to get out of here. Not just out of this room, but out of the care facility. He wants to go back home.

Nurse Hamilton looks back to Jerry after having thrown Mayor another of her angry looks. Jerry doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those. “Jerry, do you remember Suzan?”

Jerry frowns and tilts his head a little, gritting his teeth at the same time. Of course he remembers Suzan. She was his first. He remembers finding her door unlocked and walking through her house, trying his hardest to not make any noises, and not making them. “How do you know about her?”

“It’s okay, Jerry,” she says, and tightens his hand. “Tell us about Suzan.”

He shakes his head.

“Trust me, Jerry. Please, you need to trust me.”

“With a z,” he says.

“That’s right.”

He lowers his voice. “In front of the detectives?”

“They’re here to help you.”

He looks over at them, these two men staring at him, one with his tie askew, the other not wearing one, both of them in need of a shave. Neither of these men look like they want to help. “Do I have to?”

“Yes,” she says, and so it is said and so it is law. That’s the thing about Nurse Hamilton—he can imagine even if he did completely forget about her, he would still follow her orders.

He starts talking normally again. “Suzan with a z is somebody I used to know when I was younger. She used to live on my street, and I—” He looks back at Nurse Hamilton. “Do I have to carry on?”

“No, Jerry, you don’t, because Suzan with a z doesn’t exist. She’s a character in one of your books.”

“She’s a . . .” he says, then stops midsentence. Suzan with a z. From a book. A couple of synapses fire off somewhere in the Jerry gray matter and there he is, sitting at his computer, trying to come up with a name for the character, and he wanted something relatable but also a little different. When it came to the main characters those names could be tough because you had to get them right, the name had to match the character, a good name would make a character feel far more genuine.

He remembers writing the scene, getting to the end and then going back over it, adding some and deleting some. He remembers every single detail, as if it were only yesterday he labored over the keyboard. He remembers writing a scene from Suzan’s point of view, and then deleting it, the book moving forward, going through editing, cover design, then the big day when it was set free into the world, and by then he was already working on the next book. He understands exactly what Nurse Hamilton is saying. He made up Suzan. She is a combination of words on paper, born from his need to write, his need to entertain, his need to pay the mortgage.

“Jerry?”

He looks back at Nurse Hamilton. She’s staring at him. “She’s a character,” he says. “Sometimes I get her mixed up with the real world.” He directs that last bit to the cops, and then gives a small appropriate laugh to prove they’re all friends here, nothing going on, just a lighthearted misunderstanding. But it doesn’t work. If anything, it makes him sound like a madman. And he knows what madmen sound like—he’s created enough of them.

“Belinda Murray is in the real world,” Mayor says.

“Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, her hands still on Jerry’s, “two days ago when we were sitting in the garden, do you remember telling me about Belinda?”

“Belinda from the books,” he says, trying to sound confident, sure that’s where she’s from but unable to remember her.

“I just said—” Mayor says, but then stops talking when Nurse Hamilton throws him another Nurse Hamilton look.

“No, not from the books,” she says to Jerry. “Belinda is a real person. You spoke to me about her.”

He runs the name against the Jerry Grey database. No match. “Are you sure?”

“This is useless,” Mayor says. “I say we just take him down to the station and talk to him there. We’ll get in somebody more qualified.” Nurse Hamilton looks towards him, and this time he doesn’t back down. “Come on, even you can see this is a waste of time,” he says.

“What’s happening?” Jerry asks.

She turns back towards him. “Jerry, Suzan with a z, you know she doesn’t exist, you see that, right?”

“Of course,” he says, feeling embarrassed he ever made that mistake, and promising himself never to make it again.

“She isn’t the only one,” Nurse Hamilton says. “Over the last year that you’ve been here, you—”

“Wait, wait, hold up a second,” Jerry says, shaking his head. “There’s some kind of mistake. I haven’t been here a year. I’ve been here . . .” He looks at Eric and gives him a shrug. “What? Two months at the most?”

“It’s been a year,” Eric says. “Eleven months to be exact.”

“No,” Jerry says, and starts to stand up, but Nurse Hamilton keeps hold of his hand and pulls him back down. “You’re lying to me,” he says.

“It’s okay, Jerry. Calm down, please.”

“Calm down? How can I be calm when all of you are making these things up about me.”

“You have been here for a year, Jerry,” she says, quite forcefully too.

“But—”

You’re Jerry Grey, the man with Alzheimer’s as his sidekick, how can you argue this? How can you argue with Nurse Hamilton? Her word is law.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “And in the eleven months you’ve been here, you’ve confessed to a lot of crimes.”

“The first time you did it, buddy, it was quite a shock,” Eric says. “Nurse Hamilton here was getting ready to call the police, but there was something about what you were saying that was familiar. I’m a big fan of your books, and I quickly figured out you were describing a scene from one of them.”

“Since your time with us, you’ve confessed to a lot of make-believe crimes that you remember doing,” Nurse Hamilton says.

“They seem so real to you,” Eric says.

“Two days ago we were in the garden and you told me a story,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she glances at the photo, and Jerry knows what she’s about to say—the same way he always used to be able to predict how TV shows and movies would end one quarter of the way through. Is that where they are now? One quarter of the way through his madness? And the Madness Journal? Just where in the hell is it?

“You told me about a girl you had killed. You said you knew her, but you didn’t say how. Do you remember this?”

He doesn’t remember that at all, and he tries to remember. Hard. He knows that’s a thing people probably tell him, to try and think harder or try and remember better, as if he can tighten his brain muscles and put in the extra effort. But it is what it is, and in this case what it is is a whole lot of nothing. “I remember the garden,” he says. “And . . . there was a rabbit. Wally.”

“You stabbed her,” Mayor says.

“The rabbit?”

“Belinda Murray. You murdered her in cold blood.”

Nurse Hamilton puts a hand on Jerry’s knee when he goes to stand. “Wait, Jerry, please. Despite the fact Detective Mayor here is behaving in extremely poor taste, it’s what you told me. You said you knocked on her door in the middle of the night, and when she answered it you . . . you struck her. Then you . . .” she says, and she looks away from him, and he knows what it is she doesn’t want to say, and he wonders how she is going to say it, and she says, “had your way with her. Then you stabbed her. You told me all about it.”

“But if I’ve been here for the last year then—”

“It was just before you were sentenced here,” Mayor says. “A few days before the shooting.”

“What shooting?”

“That’s enough, Detective,” Nurse Hamilton says, then she looks back at Jerry. “Think about the girl, Jerry.”

But he doesn’t want to think about the girl because there is no girl. This Belinda Murray is only as real as the other characters he’s written about. “What shooting?”

“There was no shooting, Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she sounds calm. “The girl. Do you remember her? Belinda. Do you remember seeing her before you came here? It was a year ago. Look at the photograph again.”

He doesn’t look at the photograph. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he says, the statement directed at everybody in the room.

“Please, Jerry, answer the questions so these two men can be on their way.”

He looks at the photograph again. The blond girl. The attractive girl. The dead girl. The stranger. And yet . . . “When I think of Suzan, it’s like I know her, but this girl . . .” He lets the sentence peter out. “The thing is she does look familiar. Doesn’t feel familiar, but I do recognize her. And the name—I’ve heard the name before. When did I hear it?”

The cops are staring at him. He thinks about what he just said and wishes he hadn’t said any of it. He wishes Sandra were here. She’d be on his side.

“We think he should come with us,” Mayor says to Nurse Hamilton.

“Is that really necessary?” she asks.

“At this point I’m afraid it’s the next step,” Mayor says, but Jerry doesn’t think he sounds afraid.

They all stand up then. “Am I going to be put into handcuffs?” Jerry asks.

“That won’t be necessary,” Mayor says.

“Can I play with the siren?”

“No,” Mayor says.

They start to walk out of the room. “Are you coming with me?” he asks Nurse Hamilton.

“I’ll meet you there,” she says, “and I’ll call your lawyer along the way.”

He thinks about that for a few seconds. “Can you ask the detectives if I can play with the siren?”

“Don’t make us put you in handcuffs,” Mayor says.

“Detective—” Nurse Hamilton says.

Mayor shrugs. “I’m just kidding. Come on, let’s get out of here—this place gives me the creeps.”