Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “I want to do it,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says. He gets up and bangs on the door. The guard opens it and they talk for a few seconds, then my lawyer sits back down and a few minutes later Schroder comes back in. He looks tired. And annoyed. There’s a lot of that going around.

  “Do we have a deal?” Schroder asks.

  “We do,” my lawyer says.

  “Almost,” I say.

  Both men look at me. My lawyer sighs and breaks his don’t give a shit expression. Schroder sighs too and maybe they’ll leave here together and sigh each other to sleep tonight.

  “The thing is, it’s vague,” I say. “I can’t quite remember where he’s buried.”

  “Yeah. You said that a thousand times already,” Schroder says.

  “Because you need to understand just how vague it is.”

  “We get the point, Joe,” my lawyer says, “now how about you get to yours.”

  “Well, my sense of where Calhoun is is so vague it’s impossible to give directions. I’d have to show you.”

  Both my visitors go quiet. Schroder starts shaking his head. Then my lawyer starts shaking his head too. It looks like they’re having a competition. Then they look at each other. To their credit, neither man gives a What are you going to do? gesture.

  “You’re not showing us anything,” Schroder says. “We’re not making any deal that lets you outside of here even if it’s only for an hour.”

  “Then you’ll never find Calhoun,” I say.

  “Yes we will. Dead people have a way of showing up eventually,” he says.

  “Not all the time,” I answer. “And you know that. Let me show you. Maybe you’ll find something there that will help you track down Melissa—that’s what you want, right? More than anything? You get that, and your psychic sidekick gets what he wants.”

  “More than anything I’d like to see you hang for what you’ve done to this city,” Schroder answers, and I think what he really means is he’d like to see me hang for what I did to him. I made him look like a fool. He starts to stand up. My lawyer reaches out and puts a hand on Schroder’s arm, and if my mother were here she’d be convinced by now that outside of these walls these two men would start doing the kind of thing my mother would highly disapprove of.

  “Wait,” my lawyer says, and Schroder lowers himself back into the chair. My lawyer looks at me. “What exactly is it you want, Joe?” he asks. “What is it you’re trying to gain by showing where Calhoun is buried? Do you think that by showing instead of just telling that somehow you’ll manage to break free?”

  “I don’t need to break free,” I tell them, and then I laugh just to prove how stupid their suggestion was. Even if it is accurate. “No jury in the world is going to convict a man who wasn’t in control of his actions. But I can’t tell you where the body is because I just can’t,” I tell them. “If I could, I would. Honestly, Carl, it’s impossible. What am I supposed to do? Tell you to turn left at the third rock down a dirt path? It was a year ago. Come on, even you must know that’s impossible. You’re going to have to believe me,” I tell them, “no matter what else you think, this is the truth,” I say, but it’s not the truth. Not even close. “The absolute truth.”

  “You don’t deserve an hour out there, let alone a minute,” Schroder says.

  “Doesn’t matter what you think,” I say. “What matters is whether you want me to show you where Detective Calhoun is.”

  “What matters even more is you staying put,” Schroder responds.

  “Why? You think I’m going to escape? I can see how you’d think that—after all, you’re the man who let the Christchurch Carver roam free for years. It’s only natural you don’t think you can stop me from escaping.”

  “Nice try, Joe, but you’re not going to goad me into taking you out of here.”

  “Well, it’s your choice, Carl. You take it or leave it. There’s a lot riding on it. Your new boss is going to make a hell of a name for himself. And I need the money, so I want to make this work. And let me ask you, Carl, how much are you making on this? Huh? You wouldn’t be doing this unless there was a little something in it for you,” I say, holding up my hand rubbing my fingertips against my thumb in the We’re talking about money gesture.

  “Fuck you, Joe.”

  “And you want Calhoun back, don’t you?”

  “Gentlemen,” my lawyer says, putting his hands out. “Can we stay on point here?”

  “I’m not a cop anymore, Joe,” Schroder says. “You know that. I can’t organize a deal like that.”

  “You’ll find a way,” I say.

  Schroder shakes his head. “You just don’t get it,” he says. “God,” he says, throwing his head back and looking up at the ceiling. “How the fuck could somebody so stupid have gotten away with it for so long?” He looks back at me. “I must have been stupider than I thought for not arresting you sooner than I did.”

  “What are you going on about?” I ask.

  “For me to make what you’re asking happen would involve the police. If the police are involved, then there is no deal, because they’re going to know you led us there. And if the police are involved, then that doesn’t help Jonas Jones, does it?”

  It takes a few seconds for what he’s saying to sink in.

  “He’s right,” my lawyer says, and fuck it, he is. They both are.

  I shake my head. I could waive the deal, and just agree to show the cops. It just means no money. If I have to, then that’s what I’ll do. I have to do something to be outside tomorrow twilight. That’s all that matters.

  “You two need to figure out a way to make it happen,” I tell them, “and it needs to happen before the trial starts.”

  “Joe—” my lawyer starts.

  “We’re done here,” I tell them.

  “You’re so fucking stupid,” Schroder says.

  I stand up. The one thing I hate is being called stupid.

  The one thing I hate even more is looking stupid. My wrist is still cuffed to the chair and I’m almost pulled back into it. “Guard,” I shout out, and I bang on the table. “Guard!”

  The guard opens the door. He gives me a really unimpressed look. I tell him I’m done here. He comes in and takes off the handcuff.

  “Make it happen,” I tell Schroder when I reach the door, and I’m escorted back to my psychiatrist.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “She called me the following day,” I tell my psychiatrist, and I’ve switched from Joe Escape Artist back to Joe Victim, and that’s fine, because Joe Victim gets a much prettier view. “I thought she was going to wait for the weekend, but she called me after school. First she spoke to my mother and told her she wanted me to help around her house, and in return she would pay me. My mother thought it was a great idea because it meant that was less time I would be spending around our house. So I went there and mowed her lawns. Then it turned out she wanted the garage painted, inside and out, including the roof. So that became the project for a few weeks. Only it wasn’t the only project. She kept calling me day after day to go around there until . . . well, until she grew tired of me.”

  “Tired of you?”

  “Tired of me.”

  “Grew tired of you doing the chores?”

  “Not exactly,” I say, and I look down at my cuffed wrist, at the arm of the chair, at my feet and at the floor. The view might be prettier for Joe Victim than it was staring at my lawyer ten minutes ago, but looking into the past is ugly. “She grew tired of me about two years later.”

  “Joe?”

  I look up at her. “Do I have to spell it out for you?” I ask her.

  Slowly she’s shaking her head and she’s trying to hide the disgust on her face, but she’s not doing a great job. She pauses, taking a few breaths before continuing. “Are you trying to tell me your auntie kept your secret in exchange for sex?”

  “I’m actually trying not to tell you about it,” I say. “But yeah, that’s what happened. Like she said, she was
lonely. She hadn’t had a man around the house for six years.”

  “She blackmailed you.”

  “What else could I do? If I didn’t do what she wanted, she would go to the police. She would tell my parents. She said she would tell people I had raped her if I didn’t go along with it. So I had to keep going back. I mean, the only thing I could think of was to kill her. And no matter what you think of me, I’m not a killer. At least I don’t want to be one.”

  “Was it the first time you’d ever had sex?”

  “Yes.”

  She keeps staring at me as if she’s about to ask me how much I enjoyed it, and if it went anything like this, followed by her taking her clothes off and bending over the table. “Tell me about it,” she says.

  As much as I want her turned on, I don’t really want to tell her about my auntie. “Why?”

  “Because I asked you.”

  “About the sex itself?”

  “Tell me about your auntie. About leading up to what happened.”

  I shrug. Like it’s no big deal. Like being forced to have sex with one’s auntie is as trivial as talking about the weather, although marginally more entertaining. But it is a big deal. One that for a long time had stayed bottled up inside of me. After my auntie died and we were going through her house, after I saw the crossbow, and after mom packed everything away, I felt sick. I actually went to the cemetery she was buried in that night, and I found her grave and I took a shit on it. For me it was a form of closure. It was a way of saying good-bye to a woman who made me feel bad about myself, good about myself, and then bad about myself all over.

  “I had just finished painting the roof,” I tell my psychiatrist. “It was a hot day. Back then summer was always hot days and blue skies—at least that’s how it seemed. These days we’re lucky to see blue sky twice a week,” I say, and my earlier thought was right—auntie rape is as trivial as weather watch. “I got burned pretty bad up on that roof. I’d been working for my auntie for four days. The Big Bang happened on my fifth, which was our first Saturday together. I was up on the roof and—”

  “You call what happened the Big Bang?”

  “What would you have me call it?”

  “Carry on,” she says.

  “So my auntie came outside and called me down. I went down there expecting her to tell me that suddenly the garden needed doing or a lightbulb needed changing, or that I wasn’t painting the roof as well as she wanted, and when I got inside she reminded me why I was there,” I say, and I can still remember it, can still remember the dress she was wearing, and she was wearing lots of makeup too. I can almost feel the sunburn and smell the aloe vera she would rub into my skin later that same day. She told me to sit down on the couch and I did and she handed me a drink of lemonade that she had made that tasted how I imagined cat piss would taste if you carbonated it and threw in a slice of lemon. Then she sat down next to me. She put a hand on my leg, then told me not to flinch when I flinched. Then she told me she had another job for me, and that if I said no, I’d be going to jail. She put one hand in my lap and one hand on the back of my neck and told me to kiss her. I didn’t know what to do. She pushed her face into mine and I’d never kissed a girl before, and it tasted like cigarette smoke and was wet like coffee, and I still remember that my thought was to try and bite her nose off, but before I could think how, she was straddling me. I tried falling back further into the couch, I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her away. She said if I pushed her away again she would tell my parents what I had done and that I had raped her.”

  I tell the psychiatrist this and I can feel my face going red, as if the sunburn and shame from then is finding a way back into my life.

  “And in the bedroom,” the psychiatrist says, “your auntie was in control?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t really want to talk about it,” I say.

  “Joe—”

  “Please. Can’t we just drop it?”

  “What happened afterward? When you were finished in the bedroom?” she asks.

  “She sent me back outside to work on the roof.”

  “Just like that? She didn’t try talking to you first?”

  “A little, I guess. Mostly about my uncle. She said that I reminded her of him in many ways. I didn’t know what ways she meant and didn’t know if she meant sexually. Things had been . . . you know, pretty quick. Then she made me go back outside.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Well it was hot out there and I burned some more.”

  “I mean how did you feel about what your aunt had done to you?”

  “I’m . . . I’m not sure.”

  “Angry? Hurt?”

  “I guess.”

  “Excited?”

  “No,” I say, but maybe just a little. Not that excited though. There’s a reason my uncle died—looking at my auntie every day couldn’t have helped his health. If my auntie had been hotter—well, that might have been quite conflicting. As it was I felt strange about the whole thing. “It happened again a few days later. Then it just kept on happening, and every time when I got home all I could smell was the cigarette smoke.”

  “And this lasted two years?”

  “Almost, yeah.”

  “Did you try to stop it?”

  “I didn’t know how,” I say.

  “But you tried something, right?”

  I nod. “I killed her cat,” I say.

  She doesn’t look alarmed at my response. “You said earlier you hadn’t killed any animals.”

  “I pretty much forgot about it,” I say, and it’s true. In this case, anyway. “There’s a lot I had forgotten about that time until you wanted to talk about it.”

  “And the cat?”

  I shake my head. “The cat didn’t want to talk about it.”

  She doesn’t laugh. “You killed the cat, Joe. Tell me why.”

  “I thought if I killed her cat it would give her something else to focus on and she wouldn’t want to keep having sex with me,” I say, “only the opposite turned out to be true. She needed me more at that point.”

  “How did you kill it?”

  “I drowned it in the bath,” I say, “and then I used a hair dryer to dry it out so my auntie never knew what happened. She just thought it died naturally.”

  “At what point during the sexual abuse was this?” she asks.

  “What the hell? I didn’t fuck the cat,” I tell her. “I just drowned it. I had to do something.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Joe. I mean the abuse between you and your auntie.”

  “I wasn’t abusing her,” I say. “Why are you thinking the worst? How am I going to have a fair trial if everybody keeps—”

  She puts her hand up to stop me. “Listen to me, Joe. You’re misunderstanding me. Your auntie was abusing you. You were an innocent kid and she took advantage of a bad decision you had made. What I want to know is how long had she been abusing you for before the cat died, and how much longer after that did the abuse continue.”

  “Oh,” I say, and yes, that makes more sense. Only . . . the abuse? Is that what it was? “Oh,” I repeat, relieved that she’s on my side. Everybody is on my side once they get to know me a little. But really—once you start throwing that abuse term around, it makes me sound like a pussy. “It was halfway in, I suppose. A year into the . . . into the . . . abuse, then a year of abuse after the cat died.”

  “How did it stop?”

  “She just said that she was done with me. I didn’t understand it. Just like that. I should have seen it coming. I was going around there less and less near the end. I felt . . . I don’t know. I felt something.”

  “Rejected?”

  “No. Relief,” I say, only she’s right, I did feel rejected, then I realize that’s just the kind of thing that might be worth sharing, the kind of thing that will make me look more fucked-up than the stable person I really am. “I mean, of course I felt rejected. I didn’t want to be having sex with my auntie, but I didn’t unde
rstand why it just stopped. Was I not good enough for her?”

  “It’s not about that,” she says.

  “Then what is it about?”

  “You were the victim,” she says. “It was about power. It was about finding somebody she could dominate. She probably found you were becoming too confident, too grown-up. What kind of relationship did you have after that?”

  “We didn’t. I actually never saw her again.”

  “Not at Christmas, or other family events?”

  “My dad’s funeral,” I tell her. “I guess that’s the only other time. We didn’t speak to each other. I mean, I tried, but she didn’t have time for me. She was hanging around with Gregory, who’s one of my cousins, five years younger than me. It was weird. In some way, I missed her.”

  “That makes sense,” she says.

  “What does?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says, and she’s right, really. None of this matters. It’s just filling in time in a room slightly more pleasant than my cell until Melissa rescues me. Killing time in a room with a very pretty lady. Life should have more of those killing moments.

  “It wasn’t your fault what she did to you, Joe.”

  “Yes it was. If I hadn’t broken into her house—”

  “She took advantage of you, Joe. She was an adult and you were a kid.”

  “I know that,” I tell her. “But if I hadn’t broken into her house, then none of it would have happened. Who knows where I’d be now?”

  “What do you mean by that?” she asks, leaning forward, and I sense a red flag on the horizon.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I mean, maybe that was the start of everything.”

  She taps her pen against her pad. “Everything? It sounds like you’re self-analyzing, Joe.”

  “I don’t mean it like that,” I say. “I just mean, you know, maybe that path led to another, which led to another.”