Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

  Thanks, Henry, that’s enough. Don’t give up your day job!

  You don’t really think that’s what is waiting for everybody on Saturday, but you can’t shake the feeling something bad is going to happen because it’s been a year of bad feelings, hasn’t it? Both Sandra and Eva are being extremely encouraging, and seem to have a lot more confidence in you than you have. In the church Sandra keeps squeezing your hand and telling you everything is going to go great, and she seems so happy, which makes you happy. Being in the church with your hand in Sandra’s, and your arm around Eva, watching them smile, watching them laugh, it gives you a sense of completion. This is the way life is meant to be. Yes, things are going to change, but right now, right in this moment, your family is happy and that’s all that matters. In fact, this week’s episode of you sneaking out and getting confused is a good thing. If you think of the Big A as a pressure cooker, then letting out some steam to walk into town means it’s not going to blow anytime soon.

  The rehearsal went well. More instructions. Jerry, stand here. Dad, walk there. Jerry, hold Eva like this. You will do nothing if not follow orders. As for the speech—you don’t get to give one. Of course not, because Pressure Cooker Jerry needs to be contained, and even though that makes you sad, you can understand it. It is, sadly, just the way things are now.

  Oh, by the way, speaking of the way things are now, guess what happens on Monday? That’s right, alarms are being put on the windows. It’s official—soon you’re going to be a prisoner in your own home.

  Good news—the alarms mean Sandra isn’t planning on putting you into a care facility right away.

  Bad news—your world is getting smaller. You don’t really need the alarms now because you don’t even want to go outside. You just want to curl up on the couch and drink. You used to think the difference between being a good author and a great author was . . . ah, hell, you’ve said that already.

  They pull out from the side of the road. Jerry plays with the radio until he finds a news channel. Hans makes the next left to take them towards the center of town. Jerry plays with the label on the water bottle. His legs are still jittering.

  “It’s tough, you know? Thinking of myself that way,” Jerry says. “Thinking of myself as a killer. It doesn’t feel right. No matter how I try to see it, no matter what angle I come at it from, I can’t get the label to fit.”

  “What happens in your books, Jerry, when people are hoping for the best?”

  “They get the worst.”

  “I’m sorry, buddy, but that’s what this is.”

  Jerry nods. His friend couldn’t have summed it up any better. Still . . . “It’s not right. I know what you’re saying makes sense, that there’s a certain kind of logic to it, but it just feels too convenient that I can remember some things but not others. Why can’t I remember any of this morning?”

  “The doctors say that you blocked out what happened with Sandra, that it’s too difficult for you to accept. Stands to reason you’d be doing the same thing now.”

  “I’m not that guy, Hans. I’ve never been that guy. I shouldn’t have wiped down the knife. If I’d left it alone, then the real killer’s prints would have been found on it.”

  “It sounds like you were trying to get away with it,” Hans says.

  The words annoy him. “It’s not that. I just knew how things looked. That’s why I took the knife to the mall with me.”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t going to dump it there. I just went there to get food and a SIM card. I was going to dump it later.”

  “You should have called the police.”

  “No,” Jerry says. “I called you because you can help. Because you’ve always been there for me. Because you’re the only person who will believe me. When I came out to meet you I realized I’d left the bag with the knife and towel behind in the bathroom.”

  “Jesus, Jerry, are you kidding me? Or just yourself? You called me because you think I can help you get away with murder. Just like you did last time. Only this time I’m not helping you.”

  Jerry shakes his head. “That’s not true. Somebody wants me to think I’m the Bag Man.”

  “What?”

  “The Bag Man. From the books.”

  Hans shakes his head. “I know who the Bag Man is, Jerry, and you’re not him.”

  “I didn’t say I was. I said somebody wants me to think I am.”

  “Was the woman this morning killed the way the Bag Man kills?”

  Jerry thinks about the woman on the lounge floor, the bruises and the blood. He thinks about her eyes open and staring at him. He tries to remember the Bag Man. He can’t remember the who or the why, but he can remember the how. The Bag Man stabbed his victims and when they were dead he tied a plastic garbage bag over their head. He was impersonalizing them. “She was stabbed in the chest. I even had a black garbage bag on me.”

  “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.”

  WMD

  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.