“Interview with Jeremy Thorn, son of Donald Thorn, Saturday, November fifth, seven ten a.m.” she says.
My scars seem to sear on my knuckle, anticipating that, as per tradition, I would plunge my thumbnail into them once more in the wake of the lies I’m about to tell.
“Where were you Thursday night?” Beth asks. The words have come out of her mouth so many times that it feels false that they’re aimed at me this time. No beating around the bush with me, though, which I appreciate.
“At home,” I say.
“Were you with anyone?”
“Just my dog.”
“What time did you get home from work?”
“Around six fifteen. Then I walked my dog and picked up some groceries.” All true.
“And then what?”
“I got home around seven fifteen and put my groceries away, read a book for a while, and went to bed.”
“Sleep through the night?”
“No. I woke up at about two o’clock to pee.” I can’t tell whether she’s actually trying to pin me, but this interview seems fairly routine so far.
“Is there anyone who might be able to verify when you have been home the past couple of days?”
“Not that I know of. You could try my neighbor, Jenny Lewis. Sometimes she gets after me for making so much noise. She lives in the apartment below mine.”
Beth smiles gently. “You make a lot of noise at home?”
“I don’t think I do. But she apparently does.”
“How was your relationship with your dad?”
“We haven’t spoken much recently, but it was mostly because I’ve been so busy.”
“Busy with what?”
“Work. Taking care of a dog. Taking care of my body.”
“And you couldn’t find a spare minute here and there to visit him? Maybe even just take the dog over there?” Yeah, right. Odin would’ve ripped his throat out before I had the chance to do so.
“I guess it’s less that I didn’t have time and more that it wasn’t a priority. I just took him for granted, I suppose.” She looks at the table and nods, her hands clasped on its surface, nearly touching the mystery stain. I mentally pat myself on the back for simultaneously answering the question and playing the pity card.
“Do you know how he spent his time?”
“Working. Drinking here and there.”
“Did he have any friends?”
This is an opportunity. I can create a tie between him and Keroth right here.
“Just one, that I know of,” I say, hoping that it comes off as casual as I intend, “Jeremy Keroth. I think he works with Portland Metro.”
Beth scribbles onto her legal pad. “How often did they get together?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “They used to get together two or three times a month. Keroth would come to the house. But since I moved out, I’m not really sure whether that continued.”
Beth nods and scribbles on her legal pad once more.
“That may be useful. Is there anyone else that you could think of that might have had a reason to want revenge on your father? Did he owe anyone money?”
“I’m sorry. There’s nothing that I can think of.” The weight of the lie almost makes me fidget, but I control it.
The interview finishes quickly, never veering from routine and standard questioning. For this I am grateful. As we exit the interview room, I glimpse Beth’s legal pad. She had written down Keroth’s name and doodled the Batman symbol. Now to assess my work.
I approach the scene, managing to look like I belong there. I stop at the yellow tape, where Officer Simmons says, “Sorry, Thorn. I can’t let you through here.”
“That’s all right,” I say, “I’m not here to investigate. Just … sentimentality, I suppose.” It’s half true. One of the hidden gold mines of endorphins that I didn’t anticipate as a perk of this particular role is watching the teams run amok at the murder site, trying to figure out whodunit with no real lead in sight, until I give them one. I’m the puppeteer of this investigation.
I meander around the perimeter of the scene, feigning as much interest in small objects as in the goings-on of the investigation. A glance at a butterfly, a nod at a cluster of dandelions, a peek at the … head of blazing red hair in a custom-tailored suit walking directly toward me.
My name is Jeremy Thorn, and I’m in deep shit.
Three
“Little Jimmy!” Jimmy isn’t even short for Jeremy, you fuckwad. Standing before me is the shining, gleaming son of a bitch who made all of my dad’s work possible and profitable. The reason I started going by ‘Remy’ instead of ‘Jeremy.’ And if I can pull it off, our finest prison’s newest ginger. I know that ‘Remy’ is typically reserved for ‘Remington’s,’ but there are only so many ways to shorten ‘Jeremy,’ and I’m no ‘Jerry.’
He winks at me.
I fight off the urge to kick him in the balls so hard that he’d have to bend over and open his mouth to take a piss.
It’s a point of pride, with me, to act on reason and ration, rather than emotion. I’m convinced that my emotions were buried under the mountains of bruises and welts I got as a child, and are evoked only by very specific catalysts, and one of them now extends a hand toward me for a handshake.
Willing my emotions back into their fortress of numbness, I extend a steady hand and look him in the eye, almost hoping that he catches the daggers I’m sending him. His handshake is firm, his hand sickly warm in a way that makes me want to scrub my hands with lava and steel wool.
“Been a while! You’ve grown up.” Translation: I’m no longer a viable product for his ‘business.’ If there’s a word in any language for how much I despise this man, I haven’t yet learned its English equivalent.
“Listen, I’m sorry about your dad. I know you two didn’t always see eye to eye.” Ah shit, you’re right; just a buncha regular ol’ father-son disagreements. “But it still must be hard for you. My condolences.”
“Thanks,” I say. I don’t have the capacity to interact with him more than that, so I start to walk away. As I do so, he pulls out a cigarette and lights it—with the lighter that I planted on scene—and winks at me one more time. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I leave the park, every ounce of my concentration spent on walking slowly and casually, keeping my heart rate slow and my pace slower. I feel his smug, satisfied gaze boring a hole into the back of my head, and it’s all I can do not to turn around and floor him in a full-body tackle. But alas, I need to put this one in jail. While he is a filthy excuse for a human, he wasn’t actually the one molesting the kids; that was my dad’s work. He is enabling it as a career, though, and he needs to be stopped.
My mind races at speeds previously unachieved, which is quite the feat, for me. Keroth knows somebody’s trying to frame him. Odds are, he knows it’s me. I stole that lighter from him years ago, when he and my dad were conducting some ‘business’ and Keroth left his jacket out, draped over a chair in the adjacent room. At the time, I hadn’t known how it would come in handy, but I used a fork to extract it and deposited it into a Ziploc bag. I don’t think I’d intended to frame him then, but instead kept the lighter as a physical recipient of my rage.
And now, he knows he’s in my crosshairs. And he’ll be ducking and weaving and checking his six o’clock every other step. He’s a man hunted, but the hunt becomes complicated when the prey is a fellow accomplished hunter.
Simply put, we are now hunting each other. That wink said it as clearly as if he’d had an airplane write it in the sky: Game on.
As I near the edge of the park, one of the new detectives, Rosmond, I believe, catches up to me and claps me on the shoulder. “Hey man, did you see? We got a couple of people from Portland Metro out here. Crazy, right? No offense to you or your dad, but he is just one guy, right? Why are we calling in the big guns?”
Because they found his number in my dad’s phone. Because I told Beth they were friends. Another oversight on my part; if I�
��m going to have a hand in this, I need to be more subtle, more deliberate. I need the ideas planted, yes, but I need them to be their ideas. I’ve made the mistake of framing Keroth as a good guy. Now I need to find a way to demote him, make him nice and neutral again, anything to get him back onto the list of potential suspects. A pernicious anxiety begins to grip my mind once more, with fingers made of further potential mistakes I’ve made and will continue to make. The fears of my already-present mistakes and their consequences are dwarfed by the immense terror amassing in my gut, fueled by other mistakes that I might have made. If I was sloppy here, I could have been sloppy anywhere.
They’re times like this that I really wish I were the drinking type. Normally my poison is a prolonged session of figuring, reasoning, calculating. But this isn’t a problem that could be reasoned away. This is a problem that needs active attention, subtlety, effectiveness. I’m nearing the bottom of the deck and need my next four draws to be aces.
I walk home, reversing the route that I used to approach the scene yesterday morning. In times of anxiety, my OCD returns. There are times when things get chaotic and brim with anarchy, and in order to make sense of the world in these times, I need rules, and if there aren’t enough rules around me to follow, to tell me exactly how things should be, I employ my own.
I like this route because the sidewalk is consistent. Each rectangle fits exactly two steps for a guy my height walking at a moderately brisk pace. There are several blocks with cracks in them, but they’ve happened in such a way that allows me to perpetuate my pace without breaking stride or even adjusting my steps on these particular blocks. The number of these chunks per block (sixteen) is deeply satisfying to my obsessive-compulsive rituals (being four squared and two to the fourth simultaneously), and the width of the streets that I cross allows me to do so in sixteen steps. Few others often take this route, as the main road offers more, both in terms of goods and services and in terms of sunlight and human exposure. Fortunately, I’m a fan of neither.
I enter my apartment but feel none of my usual sensation of peaceful isolation. Odin greets me in a manner no observably different than normal, but still, I can’t shake the sensation of Keroth’s gaze. While I’m aware that to do so would seem paranoid, I’m also willing to embrace the possibility of paranoia, if it helps to ensure that Keroth hasn’t been to my place, hasn’t bugged my furniture, and hasn’t pet my dog.
After systematically upturning and replacing everything I own, which takes well into the afternoon, I determine that a long, hot shower is the most enticing and probable option in the endeavor of ridding myself of Keroth’s taint.
My favorite kind of shower is the kind where you lose track of time, forget that you’re showering, and zap into the realm of whatever place currently holds your thoughts. This is precisely the kind of shower I take, letting the heat of the water turn my skin red, and remaining in the cascade far beyond the time necessary to apply shampoo and body wash.
I emerge feeling moderately scumbag-taint-free, and take Odin for a long walk, with considerably less step-counting and block-measuring. Upon returning, the pair of us are sufficiently tired, and after eating briefly and lapping up a bit of water from his bowls in the bathroom, Odin walks a tight circle on his bed, settles into it, and falls into a canine slumber.
I walk back out to the window on the east side of the living room and gaze out the window, to the right. Orion is bright on his journey across the sky.
Never at any point in my life have I been religious, superstitious, or remotely fun to have at parties. But, despite my disbelief, as a kid, I found myself looking to the stars in times of adversity (so, all the time, really), and something about the sight of the constellation Orion set me at ease. Maybe there was some psychological element of association that was escaping my reasoning, but from what I could tell, there’s no real reason for me to feel this connection with an arbitrary connection of stars mapped out by third-rate artists two thousand years ago.
And yet, even to this day, I look to Orion for comfort when shit hits the fan.
And shit has indeed hit the fan. I’m glad my boy Orion is in season.
I brush my teeth and go to bed, finally having shed the feeling of being surveilled. While usually sleep greets me within minutes of my head hitting the pillow, this time it eludes me for what feels like hours, at length succumbing to my pursuit and allowing me a dreamless sleep.
I wake up feeling like I haven’t slept at all, the only evidence to the contrary being that I last remember the clock being at 3:17 a.m., and now the sun’s rays stab into my room and my eyes, and Orion has long since said his farewell for the day.
By the time I pour my bowl of cereal, my mind has snapped back to the reality of the events of the past couple of days, and particularly yesterday. A chessboard assembles itself in my mind. Here I thought that I was the only one making moves, optimizing my pieces for a swift checkmate, picking off little white pawns with no repercussions, but in reality, there have always been two players, and my opponent has been making his moves unseen.
And now we are fully engaged, both watching the other attentively, waiting for the most opportune moments to remove an opposing rook or bishop from play. The only way to win this battle is to disguise my offensive moves as defensive and vice-versa. The problem is that he, too, is aware of this. It now comes down to who disguises their moves better, and who has the discerning eye to distinguish fact from façade.
I have a sharp eye, but this is a man so heavily immersed in lies and illusion that I fear that even I won’t be able to hone in on reality. At this point, though, inaction is the worst move I can make.
Let the games begin. If they must.
Four
I figure a week is an acceptable amount of time to pretend to be grieving before I head back to work. In this amount of time, I need to capitalize on not being expected at the office at any point, in addition to Keroth being expected at both his own office and ours. His house would be heavily surveilled, alarmed, or otherwise defended, due to his second line of work, and even more so now that we’re engaged in the most high-stakes chess game of all time.
This leaves me with few moves left, but I need to do something, if only to seem like I’m plotting my next strike.
To that end, I finish eating, shower, and stumble down the steps to the street. I’m sure there’s a park bench with a nice view of the crime scene, and I intend to spend much of the next five days perched there. With any luck, I can get into Keroth’s head. One big advantage for me is that he doesn’t know what other tricks I have up my sleeve. He certainly didn’t know that I’d taken his lighter, at the time, or else he’d have told my dad, who would have knocked me unconscious.
He didn’t know that I had slowly stolen things from him over the years. His wallet was tricky, but as I found myself passing behind him on my way to the office one morning (as he was in line at a café, no doubt in town to rendezvous with my dad), I found my hand wandering. I grabbed it by the very corners where the fold is, and carefully wiped only those corners down upon arriving at home.
Coffee and newspaper in hand, I sit on the bench at the park. Evidently, Beth is certain that she will get no further with her investigation of the crime scene, for it has been cleared of uniforms, floaters, techs, and red-haired douchebags, as well as the yellow tape.
Even so, I knew that Keroth would be back. Not during office hours, no. He wouldn’t want to try to convince the squad that there was something they missed; otherwise it might be found by one of them, and could raise suspicions toward him.
No, he needs to do this on his own time, so that he can be the one to find anything else I might have planted (which was nothing), and, at all costs, keep the piercing gaze of law enforcement as far removed from himself as possible.
And every time he comes by, I’ll be here. I have a convenient excuse in the form of the sentimentality of a grieving survivor, but he can’t play the same card without revealing some dark parts of hims
elf as well.
I think I need Beth on this. I don’t have to try to pin it on him all at once, but raising suspicions about him will put him on the defensive, and I can’t have him getting comfortable. I compose a text to Beth: “Saw a redheaded detective at the scene today. Who’s he?” Innocence. Play dumb. But not too dumb.
A reply, within the minute: “Jesus, Thorn, you’re not supposed to be at the scene. That’s Detective Keroth. People seem to like him. I think he’s a kiss-ass.” I love Beth.
“The same Keroth I told you about in my interview? I thought that might be him, but I wasn’t sure.”
“Wait really? What the fuck …” It worked. They know that the two were in contact, because of my dad’s phone. But the two were careful with their calls and texts. Never anything more than “I have a bit for you; when can you pick it up?” To the unaware observer, it would appear that they were nothing more than business acquaintances, innocent and platonic.
Another text from Beth: “He said that he bought meat whenever your dad got back from a hunting trip, but nothing more. And the text history is pretty consistent with that. Are you sure it’s the same guy?”
“More and more sure with every minute.”
“I’ll see if I can’t get anything more out of him. You stay out of trouble, though, you hear me?”
“Yes ma’am.” That might be a lie.
“How you holding up?”
“It’s hard.” Definitely a lie. “But I’ll get through it.”
“Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks. Will do.”
Having set into motion the volatile yet entertaining chain of events that is sure to come, I sip my coffee pensively. As I do so, a voice, from behind me:
“You did it. I know you did.” Detective Jeremy Keroth, grand asshole of the century, approaches from behind. His hands are in the pockets of his neat black slacks, and his walk is slow yet purposeful. He circles the bench and sits down beside me.
[Darkthorn 01.0] Pond Scum Page 3