Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

DAY FIFTY

You actually started the Day Fifty entry earlier today, got two paragraphs into it and tore those pages out and tossed them into the trash because your thoughts were too jumbled, your spelling too messy, you couldn’t figure out what you were trying to say because you were too upset. Tearing out the pages and starting from scratch seemed the way to go, as if by doing so, you could delete the events of the day. If only it were so simple (yet in a way it is. If I don’t write it down, it will become easy for you to forget. Not now, but when the Dark Tomorrow comes). There are, it turns out, some speed bumps. You were, it turns out, premature in your decision to part ways with the Madness Journal. You need the journal to help remember who you are, because this disease you’re pretending you don’t have, well, you have it. You can’t kid yourself anymore.

The speed bumps.

Let’s start with Nicholas, the lawyer you came up with for the novel number unlucky for some. Nicholas—the no-good son of a bitch who you trusted, who you gave life to, who let you down because Mandy, your editor, didn’t like him. What happened? Why didn’t she like him?

Mandy said that for the first time you’ve taken an edit backwards. They were hard words to hear. Bloody hard. So for the last week you’ve been taking Nicholas back out of the story. Mandy said to take your time, but doesn’t she get there is no time? If Captain A has his way, you won’t be able to write your own goddamn name let alone rewrite a novel. Captain A, by the way, is the new name you’ve given the disease, because when that Dark Tomorrow arrives, it’ll be Captain A steering the ship. You’re really all at sea with this manuscript, partner. You sent the revised manuscript to Mandy two days ago, and she rang this morning and said maybe it was time to look at getting a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter! One more thing to add to the I can’t believe it list.

That’s Nicholas and Mandy for you. You do know that Mandy is looking out for your best interests. You know that. It just, well, it’s just the entire thing. You’ve let her down, and you’ve let yourself down.

Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, is a different story. Mrs. Smith isn’t just your neighbor, but also the mayor of Batshit County. She has her own Captain A steering her own ship. A while ago she complained about your garden (though good ol’ Hip-Hop Rick did spend a day in the yard a week ago, mowing and weeding and pruning and making things look nice before Sandra’s upcoming surprise birthday party), and now she seems to think you tore the roses out of her garden, but come on, you’re a forty-nine-year-old crime writer who has better things to drink than rip out her damn roses. Ha—not drink. Do. Better things to do. Yesterday, however, the police got involved, and now Sandra is angry because she took You Know Who’s side of the argument.

Basically here’s what happened—yesterday you all woke up to see the word CUNT had been spray-painted onto the front wall of Mrs. Smith’s house, the C on the front wall, the U covering the width of the door, the N on the wall next to that, and the T on the window. Nobody saw anything happen because it probably happened at night, and Mrs. Smith didn’t hear a thing because years of nagging her husband to death have perforated her eardrums. Naturally she came over and banged on your door. Of course she did. You’re the go-to guy when people have had obscenities painted on their walls. Somebody spray-painted the word asshole on your door? Go see Jerry. Fucktard on your letterbox? Go see Jerry. Shitburger on the car? Go see Jerry. So she came and saw Jerry while Sandra was at work, and Jerry told her he had no idea what in the hell she was talking about, and she pointed out that Jerry had the same goddamn color spray-paint on his fingers, which Jerry pointed out wasn’t paint, but ink, because he’d written one hundred and ten goddamn names on one hundred and ten goddamn place cards the previous night for the wedding, and he’d been using a felt, so stop accusing him of spray-painting on her wall when, obviously, she was a cunt and everybody in the street knew it, giving everybody in the street a motive.

The words were barely out of your mouth before you regretted them. Mrs. Smith, though she is nosy and annoying, didn’t deserve to be spoken to like that, especially after what was done to her house. There was a time when you were very neighborly with her. In fact, back in the day of book tours, when your family would go with you, it was Mrs. Smith who would look after your house and fetch your mail and feed the cat while you were gone. You and Sandra went to her husband’s funeral, and she always popped over with muffins on Sandra’s birthday. So of course you regretted saying those things, you regretted that somebody had done this mean thing to her, and most of all you regretted that Captain A had changed you into the type of person who could be blamed for anything wrong on the street.

You slammed the door on her.

It was an hour later when the police arrived. They asked to look at your fingers, but by then you’d cleaned up, of course you had—you do shower, you try to stay clean, and hygiene isn’t a crime. They asked if they could look around. Of course by then you had phoned Sandra, and she had come home, and she told them no. She said she wouldn’t allow them to treat you as suspect, but if there was evidence to suggest otherwise, then she would gladly allow them to search the house once they obtained a warrant. They asked if they provided you with a can of spray-paint, if you could paint the same word that appeared on the neighbor’s house so they could see if there was a match in technique. You actually thought they were kidding, and laughed, but they actually did want a handwriting sample on a scale where the letters were five feet high. Sandra told them no. She told them she was sorry for what had happened to Mrs. Smith’s house, but that neither her nor you had anything to do with it.

Is it possible you did this without being aware of it? one of the officers asked.

No, you said. And it wasn’t possible. You’d know if you had done it.

They said they would talk to others in the neighborhood, and would get back to you. As soon as they were gone Sandra asked if you had done it. You said no.

Are you sure?

Of course I’m sure.

Show me the hiding place, she said.

What hiding place?

The one beneath the desk.

How the hell do you know about that?

Just show me.

So you showed her. After all, you had nothing to hide. You hadn’t spray-painted Mrs. Smith’s house. You pushed the desk aside and got out the screwdriver and pried up the loose floorboard.

Want to take a guess as to what was under there?

Nothing. That’s right. Nothing.

You found the spray can later that night. It was where you hide the writing backups, next to the gin and the gun.

They drive to the hospital without any more barbecue conversation. Mayor sits cradling his hand and Jerry stares out the window, his mind tense, his anger hot, his pain deep. His face is wet with tears. Being told you’ve done something and having no memory is like being told black is white and up is down. They’ve told him Sandra is dead, but she can’t be dead because he’d know it. Even if he doesn’t remember killing her, he would at least sense her absence from the world. They have been married twenty-five years. He can clearly remember his conversation with Eva last week on the beach. She said Sandra had left him. Things had gotten too difficult. Sandra wasn’t dead—the weight of Jerry’s sickness had been too much for her, and she had left rather than let it crush her.

At the hospital Mayor gets out of the car and throws angry looks at Jerry as he makes his way inside, and Jerry guesses he can’t blame him. He walks with his hand held against his chest, protecting it as if it were a small bird. Then it’s just Jerry and Chris, and Jerry says nothing as they make the five-minute drive from the hospital to the police station parking lot. They take an elevator up to the fourth floor. It all looks vaguely familiar, and Jerry suspects he’s been here before, that at some point in his career he must have been curious enough about the police station to ask for a tour. Write what you know, and fake the rest. He wonders how many books he faked this place in, then he remembers he was here last week, that it’s from here Eva came and picked him up. He’s led to an interrogation room. Chris undoes the handcuffs and Jerry starts massaging his wrists.

“You want something to drink?” Chris asks.

“A gin and tonic would be great.”

“Sure thing, Jerry. I’ll bring you one right away. Would you like anything else? You want a small umbrella in it?”

Jerry thinks about it. “Sure, if you’ve got them.”

Chris places the photograph of Belinda Murray on the table, then leaves the room. Jerry knows what’s going on—he’s put enough fictional people into this situation before to know they’ll let him sweat in here for a while, before hitting him with a round of good cop, bad cop. Fifteen minutes later he’s still alone and sitting down. Maybe they’re waiting for Mayor to have his fingers set. Maybe they’re going to wait for the bone to knit back together and for Easter to roll around. His lawyer hasn’t arrived. His gin and tonic hasn’t arrived. He tries the door and finds that it’s locked. He paces the room a few times then sits back down and stares at the photograph of a woman he’s never seen before until today, and he wonders why it is they think he killed her, and if she was involved with his daughter’s wedding then of course he wouldn’t know her—all that stuff was taken care of by Sandra and Eva.

Then the door opens up and a man Jerry has never seen before comes in and sits opposite and says his name is Tim Anderson and that he’s his lawyer. They shake hands. Tim is in his midfifties with silver hair slicked back on the sides and flattened on top. He’s wearing glasses that make his eyes look smaller, like looking backwards though a pair of binoculars, and has a summer tan even though it’s spring, which means it’s either paid for or he’s just back from an overseas holiday. He has a nice suit and a nice watch, and Jerry figures that means he gets paid well, and that probably means he’s good at his job.

“What happened to your eye?” Tim asks.

“I was hoping for my usual lawyer.”

Tim has his briefcase open and is pulling out a pad when Jerry says that. He stops in midmovement and stares at him. He looks concerned. “I am your usual lawyer,” he says. “That answers my question as to whether you recognize me.”

Jerry shrugs. “Don’t take it personally.”

Tim puts the pad on the table. He puts a pen next to it. Then he puts the briefcase on the floor and interlocks his fingers and leans his elbows on the desk and his chin on his knuckles. “I’ve been your lawyer for fifteen years.”

“I’m sorry,” Jerry says, shaking his head a little. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“That’s why I’m here, Jerry, to get things cleared up,” Tim says, and he shifts the pad a little closer and picks up the pen. “Tell me everything you remember, starting with that lump under your eye. Who hit you?”

Jerry tells him everything he can about the two policemen, how they think he killed the girl in the photograph. He tells him about the car ride, getting handcuffed and punched along the way. He tells him they’re trying to convince him Sandra is dead, and then stares silently at the lawyer, waiting for a confirmation he doesn’t want, and that confirmation comes in the way his lawyer drops his pen, sighs, and looks down at his hands for a few seconds.

“I’m afraid that it’s true, Jerry. Did they tell you how?”

This time the news isn’t as big a shock, but it is just as hard to hear. He opens his mouth only to find he can’t answer.

Tim carries on. “She was shot. You . . . you didn’t know what you were doing,” he says. “It’s why you’re in a nursing home and not in jail. You weren’t of sound mind enough to stand trial. It was an awful, awful thing, and nobody is to blame.”

Jerry thinks that’s a stupid thing to say. Nobody to blame? So what, the gun just magically appeared in the house, just magically pointed itself at Sandra and went off? He knows who is to blame. It was Captain A. These people have known about Sandra’s death for a year, but for him the news is fresh. For him she’s only been dead half an hour. He puts his hands over his face and cries into them. The world goes dark. He thinks about Sandra, the good times, and there are no bad times—there never were. All those smiles, all the times they’ve laughed, made love, held hands. His chest feels tight. The world without Sandra is a world he doesn’t want to be in. He doesn’t know how he can cope without her, even though he has for the last year, though that wasn’t coping. That was forgetting. He pushes away from the table and throws up on the floor, the vomit splashing and hitting his shoes. His lawyer stays where he is, probably figuring he can’t charge any more than he already is so there’s no point in patting Jerry on the back and telling him everything is going to be okay. No point in risking getting anything gooey on his suit. When Jerry’s done he wipes his arm over his mouth and straightens back up.

“The disease is to blame, not you,” Tim says. “I’m sorry about Sandra, I really am, and I’m sorry about what happened to you, but we have to talk about today. We have to talk about Belinda Murray. Go over again everything that happened today,” he says, and he picks the pen back up and positions it over the notepad.

Jerry shakes his head. The smell of vomit is strong. “First tell me about Sandra.”

“I’m not so sure that’s going to be helpful.”

“Please.”

Tim puts the pen back down and leans back. “We don’t know, not exactly. Do you remember the wedding?”

“No. I mean . . . yes,” he says, and the wedding he can remember, but not what happened to Sandra. He ruined the wedding. “Is that why I killed her? Because of that?”

“Nobody knows. The disease was progressing quickly by that point. By the time the alarms were installed all through the house, you—”

“What alarms?”

“Sometimes you would wander,” he says. “Sandra hid your car keys so at least you couldn’t drive, but you would sneak out of the house and you would disappear, so she had to get them in.”

“Really? I would sneak out?”

“The alarms were for your protection. If you tried to leave, she had a bracelet that would notify her. If Sandra went out, she would take you with her, or she would call somebody to come over. By then she was taking time off work to look after you. You didn’t like how it made you feel.”

“I would have felt babied,” Jerry says.

“The problem is you used to sneak out the window. Alarms were going to be put on those too after Sandra found out, but then . . . well, they were scheduled to go in the same day she died. The problem now, Jerry, is that it shows a pattern of escape. The police are going to think that you killed this woman, then killed Sandra because she figured it out.”

“I . . . I couldn’t have done it. Any of it.”

“The police don’t know exactly what happened. They didn’t even find the gun. You were tested for gunshot residue and none was found, but you showered several times over the days between her death and you calling the police.”

“How long?”

“Four days,” he says. “Because your office was soundproofed, nobody heard the gunshot. The other forensics were hazy. If there was blood splatter on your shirt, it was hidden by the fact you sat in your wife’s blood for considerable stretches of time, holding her. When you did call the police, you confessed. We don’t know why you shot Sandra, Jerry, we just know that you did.”

Jerry wonders how many times over the last year this news has been broken to him, then he thinks of Eva telling him that Sandra left and was filing for divorce, not wanting to tell him the truth, wanting to spare him unnecessary pain. It hits him then as to why his daughter calls him Jerry, and not Dad. Not because he messed up the wedding, but because he killed her mother. He imagines sitting on the floor of his office, a smoking gun in one hand, holding his dead wife in the other. He imagines it the same way he’s imagined dozens of other deaths over the years, deaths that have made it between the make-believe pages of his books. What he wouldn’t give to have Sandra’s death be make-believe.

“Why can’t I remember killing her?”

“The doctors believe you’ve repressed the memory because it’s too traumatic for you. Bits of your life are going to come and go, but they believe it’s unlikely that will be one of them. Your doctor thinks you just may never remember it. I’m sorry, Jerry, I really am, and I don’t want this to sound awful, but we really need to focus on why we’re here. Tell me what you told the police.”

Jerry buries his face in his arms as he thinks about Sandra, and if it’s true, if he did hurt her, then what does anything else matter? He should pick up the lawyer’s pen and, if the door is unlocked, run among the desks threatening to stab somebody until they put him down and end this nightmare.

“Jerry, come on, we need to work on this, okay? I’m sorry about Sandra, but now we need to concentrate on you. You need to work with me if we’re to get you out of here.”

“I don’t care if I get out,” Jerry says, talking into the table.

“Well you should, because if you didn’t kill this girl, and the police believe you did, then the real killer is going to get away with it. Is that what you want?”

Jerry looks back up at him. He hadn’t thought of that. The smell of vomit seems to be getting stronger. He shifts in his seat for a better angle, trying to block the smell somehow.

“Wait here a minute,” Tim says, and he steps out of the room. He’s back thirty seconds later with a janitor. The janitor brings in a mop and bucket and takes care of the mess, and a minute later Jerry is alone again with his lawyer and the room smells a little better. “Tell me everything,” Tim says.

“Okay, okay. Let me think,” Jerry says, and he takes a few deep breaths and he tries to push thoughts of Sandra aside and focus on today. He sniffs and wipes his eyes then runs through everything. He doesn’t think anything in his story changes, but how can he possibly know? He’s the man who can’t even trust himself. He starts talking. Tim takes notes along the way.

When Jerry’s done, Tim says, “I spoke to Nurse Hamilton before I came in. She says it’s common for you to get confused between reality and fiction. She says there are days where you think things in your books are real and you’ve done them. She says you sometimes confess to killing your neighbor when you were at university. She says you were so adamant about it that they looked through old news reports and they spoke to Eva about it, but it just didn’t happen.”

“I remember her,” Jerry says. “Suzan.”

“She doesn’t exist, Jerry.”

“I know. I mean I remember her in the books.”

“And Belinda Murray? Do you remember her too?”

Jerry takes another look at Belinda Murray, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t picture her in any context other than this photograph. She seems far less real than Suzan. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Do the police have any evidence I hurt her?” he asks. “Any DNA?”

Tim shakes his head. “Doubtful. They already have your prints and DNA after Sandra’s death. If there’d been a match in the system it would have come up eleven months ago. Could be your confession is the only lead they’ve had, that they weren’t able to get anything from the scene.”

Jerry thinks about that. He remembers Mayor asking him in the car if he thought he could outsmart the police, whether crime writers thought they could get away with murder. Is that the theory here? “I didn’t do it. That’s why they’re not finding any evidence of me at the scene.”

“Was there a history back then of you doing other things you don’t remember?”

“You mean other than killing Sandra?”

“There was a report last year of your neighbor having an obscenity spray-painted across the front of her house. Do you remember that?”

“What neighbor?”

“Mrs. Smith.”

Jerry shakes his head. He can remember the neighbor, but not what Tim is talking about. “I remember somebody pulled her flowers out.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Tim says, “but she believes you were the one who spray-painted her house.”

“Then she was wrong.”

“There’s another report from four days later. Mrs. Smith’s car was set on fire. You don’t remember that?”

He thinks back, but there’s nothing there—no neighbor, no car, no fire. “No.”

Tim taps the pen against the table. “Okay, here’s the way I see it. Do you watch the news?”

“Sometimes.”

“And read the newspapers?”

“Sometimes.”

“Good. We’re going to get the detectives back in here now and we’re going to tell them what we think is going on.”

“Which is?”

“Which is not only do you confuse your books with the real world, but also news reports too. You have an overactive imagination. You can’t switch it off. We’re going to tell the police you have confused the news story with your own reality the same way you confuse your fiction with your reality. We’re not going to answer any questions because you have no memory of the event and can’t help with any answers, and any questions they ask at this point may only end up having you confess to a reality that never happened. We get through this, then we can get you out of here and back home.”

“Back home or back to the nursing home?”

“To the nursing home.”

He taps the photograph. “I didn’t hurt her.”

Tim puts his pen and his pad back into his briefcase. “Wait here for me, Jerry, I’m going to go and talk to the detectives alone. I’ll be back shortly.”

“They were going to bring me a gin and tonic,” Jerry says.

“What?”

“The detective asked if I wanted a drink. He said he’d get me one right away.”

“Okay, Jerry. Wait here and let me see what I can do,” he says, and then he slips out the door and once again Jerry is left waiting in the interrogation room, thirsty and all alone.