Trust No One (27 page)

“Jesus, Jerry . . .”

His heart is hammering. “But I didn’t do it. I would know if I had.”

“Because you trust yourself.”

“You have to help me.”

“Help you how, Jerry? By stealing a detective’s badge and walking around the crime scene asking questions? Chasing down leads and bending the rules? Pulling a mobile DNA testing kit out of my ass?”

“No. Well, yes. I don’t know. Not exactly. But we can figure it out.”

They drive in silence again. The lunchtime traffic is fading as people return to work. He sees a boy of two or three accidently drop his ice cream on the pavement then start crying, his mother trying fruitlessly to console him. Behind them a bus comes through early on a red light and almost hits a cyclist. Jerry keeps rewinding the clock, going further back into the morning, but continually comes to a stop the moment he came to on that woman’s couch. As far as he can tell, time before that moment didn’t exist. His heart beats harder the closer they get to the police station. When they are two blocks away he’s sweating again.

“Can we pull over?”

“We’re almost there,” Hans says.

“Please. Just for a few minutes. Please, hear me out. As my friend, listen to me.”

Hans looks over at him, then indicates and pulls in against the side of the road. “Talk,” he says. “But you’ve only got a minute.”

“I didn’t do this,” Jerry says. “My DNA is on record. If they’d found my DNA at Belinda’s house, they’d have made the connection. But none was there.”

“You’re a crime writer, Jerry. You know how to commit a crime and get away with it.”

He remembers Mayor suggesting something very similar on the ride into the police station. “That’s not what happened,” he says.

“Then you have nothing to worry about. The police will figure it out.”

“No, they won’t. It’ll be worse than that,” Jerry says, and he can connect the dots ahead of him, he just can’t connect the ones behind. He’s not the man he used to be, but he certainly hasn’t gone from crime writing to crime committing. “If I go in there and tell them about today, and we tell them about the florist, then it’s going to be like writing a blank check.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They’re going to take every unsolved homicide over the last few years and they’re going to pin them on me. They’ll probably go back further too. They’re going to say I got sick five years ago. Or ten. Every open homicide is going to close with my name in the whodunit box.”

Hans shakes his head. He looks lost in thought. “That’s stupid.”

“Is it? You really think so?”

“They’re not going to take . . .” Hans says, then stops talking.

“What?”

Hans doesn’t look at him. Just keeps looking ahead. A truck passes close enough to the car to make it sway on the axles.

“What?” Jerry repeats.

“Nothing.”

“There’s something. Tell me.”

“It’s nothing,” Hans says.

“Tell me.”

Hans breathes out heavily. He sounds like a man who’s cutting wires and hoping a bomb isn’t about to explode. “Let me think for a few seconds,” he says.

“Tell me!”

“Goddamn it, Jerry, I said let me think.”

He thinks. And Jerry lets him think. And they stay parked on the side of the road two blocks from the police station, and Jerry stares out the window while his palms sweat and while Hans thinks some more. Hans tilts his head back and covers his face with his hands. He keeps them there, so the words are muffled when he talks. “There was another killing last week,” he says, then drags his fingers down to his chin, stretching out the skin on his face and tugging down the bottom of his eyes. “It’s still unsolved. A woman by the name of Laura Hunt.”

“I think I’ve seen it in the papers.”

“You can remember that but not this morning? I see what you mean about it all seeming convenient.”

“It’s the exact opposite.”

“Laura Hunt was twenty-five. She has the same sort of description as Belinda Murray. Eva told me that you wandered last week. It was the same day Laura Hunt was killed.”

Jerry doesn’t know what to say, not at first, but then reverts to what he knows is the absolute truth. “I didn’t kill her,” he says.

“Jerry—”

“They found me in the library in town,” he says. “If there had been blood on me, I’d have been arrested, but instead the police called Eva and told her to take me back to the nursing home. I didn’t hurt anybody, I promise you. If you take me to the police, I’ll become the ultimate scapegoat.”

“Can you even hear what you’re saying?”

“You’re supposed to be my friend. You’re supposed to believe me.”

“What’s wrong with your arm?” Hans asks.

“What?”

“You keep scratching it.”

Jerry looks down to see his fingers digging into the side of his arm. If he can scratch an itch on his arm without knowing it, what else is he capable of doing? “Nothing’s wrong with it.”

“The cops are going to look at the knife and think somebody was planning on hurting somebody at the mall then changed their mind,” Hans says. “They’ll find blood on it.”

“I washed it pretty good.”

“They can always find blood on those things,” Hans says. “It has a way of getting into nooks and crannies you don’t even know are there. What about the bag, Jerry? Are your prints on the bag?”

“What bag?”

“The plastic bag you put the knife and towel in.”

Jerry’s hands start shaking and he looks out the side window. “They’ll be on it.”

“It’s only a matter of time before they come for you anyway,” Hans says. “The longer you try and avoid them, the harder it’s going to go when they find you.”

“Then help me. Don’t let them pin every unsolved homicide over the last twenty years on me.”

“I’m sorry, Jerry. We have to go to the police.”

“You think I’m guilty.”

Hans doesn’t answer for a few seconds, then he looks down at his hands. “I’m sorry.”

“If you think I’m guilty, then you owe me, because you killed Sandra.”

Hans says nothing. He gives Jerry a cold, hard stare.

“You killed Sandra,” Jerry repeats. “If I’m guilty, then you’re guilty too.”

“Don’t go there, Jerry.”

“The night the florist died, if I killed her, then you should have gone to the police. But you didn’t. And because you didn’t, I was able to kill Sandra. If you’d taken me to the police then Sandra would still be alive. But you didn’t. And she’s dead. And that makes you an accomplice.”

“Jerry—”

“You can’t have it both ways,” Jerry says. “I don’t think I did any of it, but if I did, then Sandra’s blood is on your hands for not doing the right thing. You have to live with that. The only way to clear your conscience is to help me prove I’m innocent of everything.”

“You don’t think that every single day I’m aware how my decision to help out my best friend led to her dying? Huh?” He punches the steering wheel. “You stupid moron.”

Without any warning Jerry twists towards Hans and swings with his left arm. He punches his friend as hard as he can in the mouth, but the angles and the geometry of the enclosed car don’t give him as much leverage as he would like, making the punch less effective than he’d hoped. Hans’s head snaps to the side. Before he can get a second shot in, Hans gets his arm inside of Jerry’s and hits him in the throat, not hard, but hard enough to struggle for his next breath and to start coughing.

“What the hell, Jerry?” he asks.

“It’s,” he says, gasping for breath, “your fault. It’s. Your. Fault.”

“Shut up,” Hans says.

“If you—”

This time Hans reaches across and punches him in the arm. “I said shut up. I wish to God I had turned you in that night.”

Jerry wishes the same thing. Sandra, Hans, Eva—they were meant to protect him. They were his guardians, and now people are dead because of him.

If it’s true.

Which it can’t be.

“Help me,” Jerry says. “I would never hurt anybody.”

“You have to realize it’s not your fault,” Hans says. “None of it is. It’s this damn disease. You’re not the same guy any of us used to know. You’re a good guy, you’re not a killer. You’re not the Bag Man or even the bad man you think you are. I get you’re scared, I get you don’t want to go to the police. I understand what you’re saying, about the blank check, but—”

The cell phone Jerry took from the dead woman starts to ring. He gets it out of his pocket and stares at it.

“Who is it?” Hans asks.

“I don’t know. You’re the only one who has the number,” Jerry says.

“Where did you get the phone?” Hans says.

“From the dead woman. But the SIM card is new, I got that from the mall. Should I answer it?”

“Give it to me.”

Jerry hands him the phone. Hans answers the call and says hello then just listens. Jerry can hear talking on the other end but not enough to understand what is being said. After fifteen seconds Hans hangs up without saying anything. He hands the phone back.

“Who was it?” Jerry asks.

“Guy’s name doesn’t matter, buddy. Probably wasn’t his real name. Said he worked at lost and found at the mall. Said he found a package that he was pretty sure belonged to you.”

“Then why didn’t he call the police?”

“That was the police, you idiot,” Hans says, then takes a deep breath. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But it wasn’t lost and found, it was the police trying to get you to go back.”

“But how? How did they get my number?”

“I don’t know. Wait . . . wait . . . you said you went into the bathroom to put the SIM card in, right?”

“Right.”

“Because you just bought a new one,” Hans says.

“Right.”

“SIM cards come with the phone numbers written on the sides of the packet. Where’s the packet, Jerry? Do you have it or did you leave it there?”

Jerry pats down his pockets and then searches the supermarket bag. “I must have left it in the bathroom.”

“Then that’s it. They’re already tightening the noose, Jerry. But there’s another option,” Hans says. “An option I can give you because you’re my friend.”

“What option?”

“Take out the SIM card and switch off the phone.”

Jerry does as he’s told. Then he wipes the phone down with his shirt and tosses it out the window.

“You didn’t need to do that.”

“Well it’s done. Now what?” Jerry asks.

“Now they’re going to run the surveillance footage of the mall looking for the guy who carried a package into the bathroom and left it there. Then they’re going to follow you out and watch you climb into my car. Thankfully it’s a mall, not a bank—the footage of you climbing into the car is going to look like the kind of footage you see of Bigfoot. The prints will give them your name, only they’re not going to know where you are, but when they figure it out they’ll send an Armed Offenders Unit after us.”

“All that for a knife that got left behind?”

“No, Jerry,” he says, and he turns up the volume on the radio. “All this because the woman you don’t think you killed has just been found.”

That list of yours, the
I can’t believe it
list, well, here’s something juicy to add. You ruined the wedding, J-Man. Of course you did—you were always going to, weren’t you? It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, the wedding ruined for no other reason than because everybody, including yourself, believed you were going to ruin it. Really, what you should be doing is making an
I
can
believe it
list, and put this one on the top.

It is still the day of the WMD. The Wedding of Mass Destruction. The day your family went from a mixture of pitying you / being slightly put out by you / being somewhat amused by you, to straight out hating you.
Hate
is a strong word, but not strong enough. Thank God Sandra doesn’t know about the gun, otherwise right now you’d be bleeding from a dozen holes. At the moment you are hibernating in your office too scared to face her, and you’ve watched the footage from today over and over just like hundreds of other people have because Rick’s best man, let’s call him Prick, has posted it online. All the bloggers who hated you in the past now love you because you’ve given them one more reason to hate you. The video was posted online less than an hour ago and has already had over a thousand hits. The wedding itself went okay, but that’s because all the
Stand here, Don’t stand here, Walk like this
practicing got you through it. It was at the reception where things went downhill—and downhill is really understating it, partner. It’s a tough decision to put this into the journal for you, because in the future whatever little bit of your brain that hasn’t turned to soup is better off not knowing what happened. That’s what Alzheimer’s is, really—it’s a defense mechanism—it stops you from knowing how bad things are getting / have gotten. And for you, Jerry, things just got a whole lot worse.

But you know what? This journal is all about being honest. Best to write down all the details, and of course you can always go online and search
Jerry Grey Wedding Speech
if you want to see the moment it all happened, if you want to see your family watching in horror as what’s left of your dignity plummets.

Context. That’s what you need. There is some good news because the ceremony itself went off without a hitch, so let’s start there, huh? Your wife disappeared in the morning to be with Eva and the bridesmaids to go
ooh
and
ahh
as they had their hair done, to relax the nerves with a glass of champagne, to have their makeup expertly applied, and to just generally enjoy the morning. Hans came to look after you, and you sat out on the deck like always and you had a beer and since nobody else was around, he lit up a joint just like he used to. The morning was hot. It’s not even summer yet, but if today is anything to go by, then the city is going to blister and burn.

The wedding was scheduled for two o’clock. Around twelve you put on the new suit and it looked sharp, really sharp, and you can count the times in your life on one hand that you’ve worn one. You actually liked the feel of it, liked the way it made you look grown-up. All these years hanging out at home in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts always did make you feel like a kid. In a suit you looked like somebody to be taken seriously, and that’s something else you’ve always thought—nobody ever took you seriously. Why not? You were just a crime writer, and do you remember that time you were detained flying back into New Zealand because you wrote
Makeup
on your immigration form as your occupation? The woman at passport control didn’t find it funny and you were detained, but only for fifteen minutes during which you were given a stern telling off and a reminder that immigration was not a joke. But the fact of the matter is you
are
a makeup artist. Technically. Or were—because now you have a ghost makeup artist tapping those keys on your behalf.