Trust No One (30 page)

That’s when you went ahead and made things even worse.
It’s your fault.

Now she was the one who looked like she had been slapped.
My fault?

If you hadn’t been cheating on me none of this would have happened.

She burst into tears and ran out of the room.

Good news—there is none.

Bad news—you’re probably in your final few days at home now. Your wife can’t handle the truth (what movie is that from?), and the hit count of you ruining Eva’s wedding just topped thirty thousand.

Good news. You have two unopened bottles of gin with your name on them.

Hans’s house is twenty years old, a single-story brick home with a neat and tidy yard on a neat and tidy street, a pleasant-looking area in which Jerry can’t imagine Hans fitting in too well. His tattoos alone must make him stand out. But then again he’s never been one for company. Hans has had a few girlfriends come into his life, girls with sultry smiles and big tattoos. But just as easily they’d drift away and move on to bigger or lesser things, drugs or booze or a different bad boy on the path to aging fast. Hans has always been one to move on as well, literally moving to a different house every two or three years.

Hans pulls the car into the garage and uses the remote to close the door behind them, putting them into darkness. The garage windows have been covered with pieces of cardboard taped into place.

“Nosy neighbors,” Hans says.

“The rest of the place the same way?”

“Not all of it, no,” Hans says, opening the car door. The interior light comes on.

“Have I been here before?”

“Not here, no. I only moved in six months ago.”

They get out of the car. Jerry grabs his plastic bag and Hans flicks on the garage light so Jerry can follow without walking into a lawn mower or shelf. They head into the house. It’s neat and tidy and there isn’t a lot in the way of furniture.

“You’ve been here six months and you don’t have a dining table?” Jerry asks.

“You want to discuss the way I live, or what we’re going to do about your situation?”

“Fair point,” Jerry says.

They head into the lounge. There’s a TV and a couch and nothing else, no coffee table, no bookcase, no pictures on the walls. He imagines Hans sitting in here watching TV while his dinner plate rests on his legs. No wonder he hasn’t had a girlfriend stick around longer than two months. Jerry sits on the couch and Hans disappears then comes back thirty seconds later carrying a wooden stool. He places it opposite Jerry and sits down. Jerry starts to work on the sandwich. He can’t remember the last time he ate. It’s chicken and ham with tomato. He picks out the tomato and offers it to Hans who shakes his head. He dumps it back into the bag. Hans switches on the TV to a news channel and puts it on mute.

“When the police come knocking on my door,” Hans says, “and they will, I’m going to—”

“I thought you said they wouldn’t be able to make out the license plate of the car?”

“They’re going to cross-reference people you know with vehicles they own, but this address isn’t the same address my car is registered to. So that gives us time. My guess is we have a couple of hours then we have to hit the road. You have two hours to figure out where this journal of yours is.”

“I already know where it is,” Jerry says, and he’s been thinking about it the entire drive here. “The new owner has it. He found it under the floor and for some reason he wants to keep it.”

“And what reason would that be?” Hans asks.

“I haven’t figured that bit out yet.”

“Okay, so let’s keep that as a possibility. But I want you to consider something else. I want you to think about where else you could have hidden it. If we go in there and it turns out this guy really doesn’t have it, then where do we look? That’s what you need to figure out now, Jerry. Where else can we look?”

“Okay,” Jerry says.

“And once we find it, we read it, and we go to the police no matter what it says, okay?”

“Gary has it.”

“Okay, Jerry?”

“Yes, fine, okay.”

“Think about where else you could have hidden it.”

Jerry takes another bite from the sandwich. “Fine, I’ll think about that, but we also need to figure out who would want to frame me,” he says, talking with a mouth half full.

Hans shakes his head. Then he sighs. Then he looks at his watch and then he shifts a little on the stool. Then he says, “Fine. Then let’s think about that. Do you have any suggestions?”

Jerry puts the last bit of sandwich into his mouth. He hits a piece of tomato he’d missed on his earlier pass through. He perseveres and chews on, and he thinks about who would want to frame him, and then he lets Henry Cutter think about it too. In fact he lets Henry do all the thinking because Henry’s got the better mind for it and, sure enough, Henry comes up with an answer.

It’s the guy,
Henry says
. Gary is the one framing you.

“It’s Gary,” Jerry says.

“What?”

“He found the journal, and I’ve obviously written enough in there for him to realize I can’t remember things, so now he’s killing women and leaving me at the scene. The shirt under the floorboards was probably one of his.”

“Jesus, Jerry, can you even hear how ridiculous that sounds?”

Yeah, my bad, Jerry. That was a bit of a stretch.

“Forgetting about the fact that I dropped you off at home that night, and I saw you wearing that bloody shirt, how does he do it?” Hans asks, carrying on. “He waits outside the nursing home every night in a van hoping you’re going to escape? Then, the times you do, he picks you up, kills somebody in front of you, you take a nap and wake up and forget where you are? Then conveniently forget everything leading up to it?”

Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“Do you have any idea how that sounds?” Hans asks.

Again Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“Okay, so let’s say some version of that is true, then why?”

“Because he can’t fake it,” Jerry says.

“What?”

“He’s trying to be a writer. He wants to be like me. Only so far all he has is a room full of rejection slips.”

“You’re still not making any sense.”

Jerry looks at the TV. There’s footage of bags of tightly wrapped cannabis and a bunch of police officers talking to people, footage of officers searching a house, of people being put into cuffs. The cops have put a dent in the nightlife of partygoers across the city, forcing the teenagers heading into town to damage their livers on alcohol now that all that weed has been confiscated. He remembers he once wrote a book about a gang who sold meth to high school kids. It didn’t end well for any of the characters. Is that where he’s heading now? To one of Henry Cutter’s bad endings?

“The biggest piece of advice I give people is write what you know, and fake the rest. There’s only so much research you can do. There’s only so far you can get into somebody else’s head.”

“I remember,” Hans says.

“Gary is killing these women so he knows how it feels, what they feel, what the whole thing looks like. It’s research. He can make his fictional world believable.”

“There are a million crime writers out there, buddy. If what you were saying had any merit, the good ones would all be killing people. Look, Jerry, let me be honest here—what you’re saying just doesn’t add up.”

Jerry knows it doesn’t. Of course he knows that. But throw a drowning man a brick and tell him it’ll float and he’ll pray to God you’re right.

“And the blood on your clothes today?” Hans asks.

“He put it there.”

“And the plastic bag in your pocket?”

“Okay, fine, so it’s not him,” Jerry concedes. “But it’s somebody, right? Because I’m not that guy. I can’t be that guy you see on the front page of the paper, the sick, twisted pervert who hurts women. I can’t be that guy, and if you don’t trust me, then trust Sandra. She would never have married somebody who
could
become that guy.”

Hans rubs his hand back over his scalp. “You do make a good point,” he says, “and I have to give you marks for trying. But everything you say can be contradicted by the fact you have Alzheimer’s. It’s a wild card. I know you want to think differently, but it does make you a different person.”

“But it doesn’t make me a killer. People don’t just wake up one day wanting to kill people. There has to be something wrong with them, something fundamentally wrong in their past. The guy who bought my house, maybe he’s innocent in all of this, but I still think he has my journal. We need to make him talk.”

“And how are you going to do that? You going to torture some poor guy on the hunch of a man who five days a week wakes up forgetting his own name?”

Jerry doesn’t answer him.

“And this guy, does he have a wife?”

“I think so.”

“You want to tie her up too so she can’t go for help? Threaten to kill her in front of her husband? Cut her fingers off until he tells you where the diary is? Kill him if you have to, even though you’re not a killer?”

“It’s a
journal
not a
diary,
and it won’t come to that.”

“Okay,” Hans says, “okay. Look, you said you can’t be a killer, because if you were there’d be something fundamentally wrong in your past, right?” Hans asks.

“Right.”

“What about Suzan with a
z
?”

“She’s not real,” Jerry says.

Hans shakes his head. “She is real, mate.”

“Don’t say that,” Jerry says. “It’s not funny.”

“No, it’s not funny at all, and the last thing I wanted to do was tell you this, but you’re really leaving me no choice here. Suzan with a
z
existed. She lived a few doors down from the house you lived in for six months when your other place was being fixed up. Her real name was Julia Barnes and I think you killed her.”

It’s been an hour since the argument. Ten minutes since your last drink. The online video now has over a hundred thousand hits. You’ve been called ten different types of gay and ten different types of asshole, and a hundred types of everything else. The office door is slightly ajar, which means you can hear other sounds from around the house, the last of which was the bedroom door softly shutting when Sandra went up to bed. You’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight, though you won’t have to get too used to it—you’ll be sentenced to the nursing home very soon.

This may be one of your last free moments in the office, so you’re feeling nostalgic. Some details are fuzzy, others are clear. You can remember the time Eva got stung by a bee when she was nine years old, which led to her throwing out a plushy bee toy she’d had since she was a baby, plus every one of her children’s books that had pictures of bees in them. You can remember the day your mother called with news dad had died. You can remember teaching Eva to fly a kite, how the string broke, how it disappeared on the wind and you convinced her it was going to head into space, and how every night for the following few weeks she would ask where the kite was now, and you would say it was near Mars, near Jupiter, how it was stuck on the rings of Saturn but working its way free, and she asked how you knew all this and you said NASA would call every night because they were tracking it with one of their giant telescopes. For the last few hours you’ve let multiple memories flood your brain, enjoying the process, very well aware that soon they will be walled off by the changing landscape of neurological pathways.

The video has now had more than a hundred and ten thousand hits. Hard not to wonder what it will max out at, or wonder if your publishers know about the speech, or what tomorrow will bring. So many people you know will have seen that video, from your editor to your doctor to your lawyer to the florist. Hard not to wonder what these people are all thinking of you right now.

All this wondering . . . you need a walk. You need some time apart from the Madness Journal. It’s time to sneak out the window, maybe find a bar somewhere and just . . . sit. Kind of like your dad used to do instead of coming home to the life that was making him unhappy. Maybe take a nap first.

Good news—let’s see . . . you’re still alive.

Bad news—you’re still alive.