“Lisa told you about me.”
“Lisa? Who’s Lisa? Is that the girl at the house?”
“Yes, Lisa is the girl you killed – for all intents and purposes.”
“I don’t know her. I never met her before in my life. You’ve got the wrong fucking guy.”
“Oh no. I have the right guy. I made sure of it. This is the culmination of years of planning, so you can be sure I didn’t go to all of that effort to setup the wrong guy.”
“Why? Why are you setting me up? I swear I don’t know you or Lisa. You have to have the wrong guy.”
The signal presented a green arrow and he pulled through the intersection, staying in the left hand lane and once again getting into the turn lane. We were making a gradual U-turn, erasing the progress I’d made walking.
“I’m motivated by the oldest reason there is. Revenge.”
“But I didn’t do anything to you!”
“But you did, Tom. You ruined my life. You took away everything I cherished. And now, in keeping with the law of ‘an eye for an eye’ I’m ruining your life, and taking everything you love away from you.”
“I’ve told you that I don’t know either of you, so rather than repeating myself, how about you just tell me what you think I did?”
“Does the screen name moanalisa86 ring any bells?”
“No. I’ve never heard of it.”
“Yes, you have, Tom. You heard of it, saw it, and wrote a response to a request for advice that was posted by someone using it.”
“Okay, then. I don’t recall it.”
“I believe you. As I said, it’s been years, so that makes sense. Allow me to refresh your memory.”
“Please do.”
When we reached the street that I had walked down to get to Lankershim, he pulled over to the curb in front of a house. He was apparently taking me back to where I woke up a short time ago – but not yet.
“Lisa posted to Yahoo Answers about her relationship in 2009. She complained about her boyfriend, saying she suspected he was insane, and possibly violent. She said she wanted to leave him, but literally scared for her life to do so. She said she was in a bind and didn’t know what to do. She asked for help. Are you starting to remember any of this?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well, you should. It was your advice that she took.”
“What did I advise?”
“You said, and this is verbatim, ‘You are definitely with a classic psychopath. The sooner you leave the better. He will not change, you cannot appease him, and sooner or later, you won’t even think of asking for help. Your life will be over. Get out now, while you can. Tell everyone you know when you leave him, why you’re leaving him. The more you get the word out, the less he’ll be able to do anything to you. Be safe, and good luck!’ Does that refresh your memory?”
“No. Maybe, vaguely. I used to write a lot of responses on Yahoo Answers. I don’t remember all of them.”
“Yes, you did answer a lot, and your answers were frequently chosen as the best. You had a very high ranking. But I’m surprised you don’t remember advising Lisa, since it was such a serious departure from the standard idiotic questions that most people could’ve answered themselves by just using Google, or were we still using AltaVista then?”
“It may have been a serious issue for her – it was her life – but to me, it would’ve just been words on the screen for a few minutes. That’s not something I would’ve committed to memory. It was too insignificant.”
“That’s rich. The ruining of my life was insignificant to you.”
“You’re the guy she wanted to leave?”
“I’m the guy she did leave. Because of you.”
“How do you know it was because of me? I’m sure plenty of other people told her to do the same thing. It’s common sense. You think you’re living with a psycho, get the fuck out. How can you pin this solely on me?”
“You’re right. Seventeen other people also advised her to leave me. But she chose your response as the Best Answer, and she quoted you when she broke up with me. She said she’d been told that I was a classic psychopath, that I wouldn’t change, I couldn’t be appeased, etc. Later, I logged in to her account and saw the email from Yahoo with a link to her question. I read your advice, and I vowed that I’d get revenge. It’s been a long time coming, but now it’s here. Today is the day of retribution.”
“I was right. You are a psychopath. You’ll never get away with this. Especially now that you’ve just confessed to me that you killed her and framed me for it. The police will know that I don’t have any connection to her. But you certainly do. You have motive. I don’t. How do you think you’re going to convince the cops that I had any reason to kill someone that I don’t even know? Someone that I posted to on Yahoo years ago. The police aren’t that stupid, you know.”
He reached into his inner suit jacket pocket and pulled out something that looked like a wallet. He let it fall open, revealing his identification as a Los Angeles County police detective, and his badge.
***
I woke up in the backseat of his car, my hands and feet bound with zip-ties. The last thing I remembered was him reaching into his pocket to put his wallet away and then his hand came back out with a black thing with silver tips on the end. His hand flew toward my neck before I realized what was happening.
I struggled into a sitting position and looked out the window. We were back at the house with the dead girl. The guy got out of his car and walked over to some cops standing next to a cop car. Crime scene tape was strung around the yard and driveway.
This was really happening.
The driver’s side window was down about two inches. I leaned forward and turned my head to the side, straining to hear what he was telling the other cops.
“What brings you here, Detective Ladd?”
“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood.”
The three of them laughed briefly. I never understood how cops could make jokes at a crime scene. I guess they get used to dead people.
“Did they put you on this?”
“No. Actually, I was driving nearby when I spotted what looked like an attempted burglary. Guy was going from window to window at a house, so I came up behind him and asked what he thought he was doing.”
“You shoulda waited till he broke a window or somethin’. You probably can’t get him on Attempted B&E now.”
“I got better. Listen to this. First thing the guy says to me is he got high on Ketamine last night, killed a blonde girl, and now he’s just really thirsty. Says he’s just looking for some water. He’s not looking to steal anything.”
“Oh. Well if that’s all, you shoulda let him go.” Again, they all laughed as they broached the subject of murder as they stood on the lawn, with a fresh corpse inside the house.
“I’m thinking I’ll take him in as a 5150, just in case he’s violent, bein’ that he’s talkin’ that way. And then I notice he’s got what could be blood around his fingernails. I made the connection with the homicide here just a few blocks away and thought you guys might wanna take him and verify if that’s blood, and see if his prints match the ones on the knife used on the vic.”
“How’d you know she was knifed?”
“Uh... I guess it was radio chatter. I don’t recall. But anyway, I got this guy in the backseat. If it turns out I just delivered a gift-wrapped perp, tell the FOS he owes me a case of Heineken.”
“Will do. Let’s see what you got.”
“One more thing. When I asked the guy to repeat what he’d said about killing someone, that’s when he lost his marbles and started saying he didn’t kill anyone. He said I was the killer. Then he started ranting about how I was framing him, and some shit about Yahoo and the internet, and I just lost track. Definitely a 5150, whether or not he did the girl. When he went totally nutso, I had to Taze him.”
They came over to the car and let me out, but only to transfer me to the back of a squad car. I was burning wit
h the desire to tell them what was really going on and how the detective was the real killer, but he’d already primed them to think I was crazy if I started talking about that, so I just kept it inside. I knew from watching cop shows that it doesn’t accomplish anything to protest your innocence to arresting officers anyway. They don’t care. And why should they? It’s not their job to determine guilt or innocence.
That’s left up to the judge and jury. So anything you say to the cops is a waste of time and breath. As it turns out, everything I said to anybody about this case was wasted effort. My court-appointed attorney couldn’t find any reference to any of the things I told him about. He said he couldn’t find Lisa’s question, or my answer. I’m not sure if he even bothered looking. He also said there was no record of a moanalisa86 anywhere online. And he couldn’t find anything in The Wayback Machine.
My prints were on the knife. Lisa’s blood was on and under my fingernails. My saliva was found on her left breast. And hair matching mine was on the carpet near her body. It was not only an open and shut case, but the prosecutor made me sound like the most vile of killers, suggesting that I had sucked on one of her breasts while stabbing the other. If I had been in the jury, I would’ve voted to hang me too.
I guess you could say I got lucky though. Since Ketamine was found in my system, along with alcohol, my public defender argued that I had blacked out and didn’t know what I had done, so he negotiated with the District Attorney and got me a deal for a reduced charge of 2nd Degree Murder, meaning I hadn’t pre-meditated the killing of the poor girl.
Now I’m doing fifteen to life for a crime I didn’t commit. My only crime was offering advice to a stranger on the internet. I posted a single paragraph to help a total stranger. And now, life as I once knew it is over.
My cellmate is petitioning for the inmates to get internet access like they have in some other states. Every prisoner in here is looking forward to the day they can get online.
Except for me.
All I can think about now is my mother’s advice when I was a kid. She always said, “Don’t talk to strangers.”
###
The CEO
The sirens had long since faded out and were never heard again. The only sound on the street came from the rustling of windblown debris, like the page from a newspaper that skittered to a stop against the CEO’s legs. He bent down and picked it up, reading the headline at the top of the page. It was about the plummeting stock market. Old news. He turned a little to the side and spread his fingers, letting the paper fly away. He turned further, looking behind him at the skyline in the distance. New York was his town. It was his playing field. He practically owned it. Dollars ruled, and he had billions. His money was securely stored in banks in multiple countries, but it couldn’t help him now.
Looking at the skyscraper he owned, his mind drifted to thoughts of his empire and the power he wielded. With just a few words, he could change lives – for better, or worse. And he did, depending on how he felt at any given moment. There were times when he fired a person just for the rush he got from knowing that he turned someone’s little world upside down – because he could. It served as a reminder of the power he had. Less frequently, when he was in a good mood, he would surprise someone by giving them a bonus.
He had never lost his taste for the finer things in life, and he enjoyed indulging in luxuries, but he had to admit, it got boring after a while. Being the boss and making decisions wasn’t really work. It was more of a game, with the employees as pawns. Other business owners he dealt with were players on his side, and some were competitors. Most of them were weaker, smaller players, and winning all the time was another thing that got boring. There was something to be said for having a challenge; having to expend some effort to achieve something worthwhile. He’d had everything handed to him his entire life and never had to literally work for anything.
Up ahead, he saw two men standing next to a metal barrel with flames flickering around the top of it. They were roasting something that smelled like some kind of meat he didn’t recognize. The men were filthy and wore shabby clothes that looked like they’d been withdrawn from a landfill. As he got closer, he saw that they were holding sticks over the fire inside the barrel. Definitely cooking something, using the trashcan like a barbecue. It was hard to believe the depths to which people could sink. Filthy and stinking and eating roasted garbage. The sight of it made him sick with disgust, and yet, the closer he got, the more his mouth watered at the smell of flame-broiled meat. What was it they were cooking?
They watched him approach and appraised his clothing. He wore a custom-tailored Armani suit, Italian loafers, and a Rolex worth more than their annual salaries combined. They smiled as he stepped up and cleared his throat.
“Excuse me, gentlemen. Could you possibly spare some food? I haven’t eaten for a few days. I have money.”
“Your money’s no good. You should know that. What have you got to trade?”
The CEO reached into the pockets of his grimy pants and pulled out his keyring with the Jaguar fob. He looked at his keys with sadness, then dropped them on the ground. They were useless. His homes and his cars were gone. He opened his tattered suit coat and reached into the breast pocket. He withdrew his lambskin wallet and thumbed through its contents. Black and platinum credit cards and several crisp hundred dollar bills. Worthless. He shook out the cards and money. The cards scattered around his feet. The wind snatched the bills and carried them down the street. He offered them the empty wallet. They shook their heads.
“I don’t have anything,” he cried out, on the verge of tears, his stomach aching for food.
“Is that watch made of real gold?
The CEO drew back his frayed sleeve, exposing his watch. He slipped it off with his other hand.
“Yes. Yes, it is!” he said, holding it out to them.
The man closest to him looked at the other man who nodded.
“Okay. One squirrel for the watch. And half a bottle of water.” He handed over the stick with the charred meat skewered on the end of it and reached down for something by his feet. He came up with a plastic bottle half-filled with cloudy water and handed it over.
The CEO took them both, grateful for the chance to eat and drink, but at the same time, he worried about where his next meal would come from now that he’d traded away the only thing of value that he still owned. He had no practical skills, or anything with which to bargain in this post-nuclear world.
Even though he ate slowly, his meal only lasted a moment. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then drank the last of the water. He was about to toss the empty bottle into the burning trash barrel, but one of the men held up his hand, signaling him to stop. He realized that the bottle was a resource, so he screwed the cap onto it and stuffed it into his coat pocket, smiling. He was learning.
“Do you want to help us look for squirrels? We’ll split whatever we find.”
“Yes. I do. Thank you!”
It was turning out to be a great day. He’d eaten, and acquired a bottle, and he had made two friends who could teach him things. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been so happy.
###
I Didn’t Kill Her
The sound of a chainsaw yanked me from my slumber and when I opened my eyes, I saw a pretty, nude blonde lying next to me with a knife sticking out of her chest and blood running down her sides, pooling in the shallow depth of her abdomen.
Surely I was still dreaming. No one wakes up like this. I closed my eyes and squeezed them shut really hard, then I opened them again. She was still there. So was the blood, and the knife. What the fuck?
I scrambled up and looked around. Where the fuck was I? How did I get here? The house was empty and looked vacant. There was no furniture and nothing hanging from the walls. Just trash scattered around the carpet. Empty beer cans, snack food wrappers and cigarette butts that had been crushed into the carpet. The place smelled like bug spray and urine.
I looked down at myse
lf and saw that I was still dressed, but my hands were stained with blood. That made no sense at all. I would never kill anyone. And if I did, it would be in self-defense. The girl lying on the floor did not look anything remotely like a threat to anyone. She was naked and unarmed. She looked far more like a victim of a crime than a perpetrator of one. Even though I had no memories of how I got here, and I did not recognize this girl from anywhere, I was certain that I didn’t kill her.
I tried to recall where I was last night but I couldn’t remember a thing. I had a better chance of remembering the weird dream I’d been having before I woke, and it was all but evaporated now. I needed to look at the girl, even though the thought of doing so filled me with fear and revulsion, but first, I had to get the blood off my hands. I could imagine someone saying, “We caught him red-handed.” Great. My sense of humor was intact. Maybe I really was crazy. This was no time for joking around.
I went into the kitchen and turned on the faucet. Some rust-colored drops of water sputtered into the sink as the faucet gave a final exhalation. No water. Despite my foggy and rattled brain, I still had enough mental processing left to think of checking the toilet tank. I found the bathroom, and lifted the lid off the tank. I briskly scrubbed my hands in the rusty water, urgently trying to get the blood off of them. I got most of it. It had caked around my cuticles and under my fingernails, but that would have to do for now.
I went back to the living room for the task I dreaded. I needed to really look at this girl and see if I recognized her from sometime before last night, which I had no memory of. When I walked back into the living room, it seemed as if her arm was in a different position than it was when I left. Could she possibly be alive? I bent down and started to reach two fingers toward her carotid artery, but stopped myself, remembering that fingerprints could be left on skin.
I know it looked like I was the one who killed her, but I was still certain that I hadn’t, despite having no memory of the night before. And if I wasn’t the killer, I wasn’t going to provide evidence to the contrary – beyond that which already existed. I placed my hand in front of her nose instead of feeling for a pulse. While I waited to feel even the tiniest breath, I looked at her chest for any sign that she was breathing. I had the strangest feeling as I looked at her. On one hand, she was very beautiful, but on the other, she was a bloody corpse. She presented a horrible mixture of beauty and violence. I don’t know how anyone could do that to another person. I know I couldn’t.
Undermind: Nine Stories Page 7