Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

  Since you’re a Let’s guess what happens a third of the way through guy, then you already know it was the knife she found in there. It was loose in the pocket, blade pointing up, and she was lucky not to have cut herself. She pulled it out and held it away, the same way she does sometimes when she’s holding hair she just pulled out of the shower drain. You could both see it wasn’t one of your kitchen knives and you could both see the blood on it and you could both see the horror on each other’s face. This knife with a blade no longer than six inches, its dark wooden handle, its serrated edge, this little knife that was the biggest knife in the world.

  What the hell is this, Jerry?

  Seeing that knife told you that as bad as the WMD had been, you had managed to top it. It put the bloody shirt into a different context.

  Jerry?

  I don’t know.

  You don’t know?

  You were standing in the doorway with hair dripping wet even though you had gotten dressed, and then you realized all of you was dripping wet. At first you thought it was sweat, but then you realized you hadn’t dried yourself after the shower, that you had just put your clothes straight on. I don’t know.

  Stop saying you don’t know. Please, Jerry, think. You need to think. This has blood on it, she said. It’s blood!

  We don’t know that, you said, hoping it might be something else. Maybe sauce. Maybe paint. Whatever was on the knife was probably the same stuff you got on your shirt. Something that looked like blood but certainly wasn’t.

  It’s blood, she said.

  I don’t know, you said, and you said it a few times, over and over.

  While you said it Sandra had her own words that she said over and over, and hers were, What have you done, Jerry, what have you done?

  What have you done?

  Sandra wants to call the police. You’ve begged her not to, after all, nothing was certain, everything was unknown. She called Eva instead and asked her how her lunch went, and asked if anybody else hadn’t shown up. Everybody was accounted for. Even Rick’s best man who had put the video online, and if you were going to stab anybody to death it would have been him.

  It should have been him.

  Sandra agreed she wouldn’t call the police. Not at that stage. But she would, if anything showed up on her radar.

  You called Hans. You told him everything about the shirt, the knife, the blood. He said you probably just found the knife somewhere. It was actually a really simple explanation. He said the blood could be from anywhere, from a cow, a dog, or maybe it wasn’t even blood.

  There’s no point in worrying about something you can’t know about, he said. Worry if you learn more, but until then, just try to act normal, he said, and you could picture him using his fingers to make quotation marks around the normal part, the same way people will be doing at your trial during their Jerry used to be normal cross-examinations.

  I don’t remember any of it.

  There’s nothing to remember, he said, or words to that effect. You don’t know whether he was being vague, or whether he feared the worst.

  Is it possible you just found the knife somewhere, like he said?

  Good news—really? You think there’s good news?

  Bad news—the bloody shirt, the bloody knife, is it possible you’re more than just a dessert guy?

  Jerry is getting off the couch when a photograph of him is shown on the TV, his name beneath it. The reporter says, “Jerry Grey, who became an Internet sensation last year with video of him giving a speech at his daughter’s wedding, has been linked to the crime scene by an anonymous source.” Then Internet Sensation Jerry Grey shows up on the TV calling his wife a whore, his daughter and her new husband looking shocked in the background of the slightly shaky footage, and the hit counter keeps ticking over.

  Jerry Grey. Shot to fame.

  Jerry Grey. Shot his wife.

  Somebody will write a song or a TV movie about him.

  He sits back down as the wedding footage ends and then it’s back to today’s crime scene, cops moving around in the background, somebody in a suit carrying a fat metal briefcase, somebody with a camera hanging around their neck while they reach into a bag for a different lens. Today’s field reporter has the look of a working-class man, sleeves rolled up and no tie, and that makes the news far more real, so jaw-droppingly urgent this man didn’t have time to put on a jacket or a tie or even shave. He looks into the camera and carries on talking.

  “Details are sketchy, but what appears to be a murder weapon has been located, and evidence at this stage suggests a connection to the former crime writer, which in itself suggests that Grey may now be living inside one of the realities he used to create. Furthermore, a bloody shirt found yesterday at the last residence of Jerry Grey connects him to the homicide of Belinda Murray, a Christchurch florist who was murdered last year, two days before Grey went on to kill his wife. An anonymous source has stated—”

  Hans switches off the TV.

  Jerry gets to his feet. “Let’s go.”

  “We can’t go to the police until we find your journal,” Hans says.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” Jerry says.

  “Of course it does. If there’s a chance—”

  “Fine, then let’s not go to the police. Let’s go for option number three. I want a nice view, some good gin, and I want it to be painless. I just want to escape everything. Can we do that?”

  Hans says nothing for a few seconds, then slowly nods. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. Will you help me?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “I want to talk to Eva first,” Jerry says.

  “You can’t tell her.”

  “I know. I just want to hear her voice. I want to tell her I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  Hans dials Eva’s number as they walk back through the house. Jerry remembers that Hans has always been good with numbers. If Hans ever gets his own Captain A, numbers will be the last thing to go. Eva answers the phone and Hans tells her that he’s with Jerry, and that Jerry is okay. Then he says yes and no a few times as she fires some questions at him, then he says nothing as she gives him an update of her own, by which point they’re leaning against the car in the garage.

  “Okay,” Hans tells her, and then he hands Jerry the phone. He looks like he’s just heard some news that has made all of this even worse. He leaves Jerry by the car and disappears back into the house.

  Jerry puts the phone up to his ear. “Eva?”

  “Are you okay, Jerry?”

  Despite everything, it’s good to hear her voice. “I’m sorry about your mom,” he tells her.

  “I know you are,” she says, “and we can talk about that later. I’ll meet you at the police station with your lawyer, okay?”

  “Sounds good,” he says, and he pictures her sitting there waiting, waiting, and he never shows up. The nice view, the sun on his face, pills and booze—that’s where he’ll be. There are worse ways to go.

  “Jerry . . . there’s something you need to know.”

  He breaks out in a cold sweat and almost drops the phone. Nothing good ever comes after those words.

  “The shirt found yesterday, it was—”

  “I know,” he tells her. “I saw it on the news.”

  “What wasn’t on the news is that the police have been searching your room at the nursing home.” Hans comes back into the garage. He’s carrying two bottles of gin and has a bottle of tonic tucked under his arm. He has a sad look on his face. He climbs into the car. “They found a small envelope with jewelry in it,” Eva says, carrying on.

  “Your mother’s?” he asks, and it’s Henry that answers first, using his indoor voice.

  Not Sandra’s, no. Remember what you had in your hand when you switched on earlier? He reaches into his pocket and the earrings are still there.

  “No, not Mom’s,” Eva says. “But they seem to think . . . it’s .
. .” she says, but then she starts crying.

  “Eva—”

  “I can’t do this. I love you, Jerry, but I can’t do this, I’m so sorry,” she says, and then she’s gone, the line is dead, and Jerry stares at the phone willing her to return, willing for things to be different. He climbs into the car and hands the phone to Hans, who slips it into his pocket.

  “She hung up on me.”

  “I’m sorry, buddy.”

  “The police have been searching my room and they found something.”

  “She told me,” Hans says. “The pieces belong to three women, all of whom were killed on days you were found wandering in town. I’m sorry, buddy, but it really . . . well . . . I’m not sure what to say.”

  Jerry closes his eyes. How many have there been?

  Hans uses the remote to open the garage door. He starts the car and they back down the driveway.

  “There’s more,” Hans says.

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “One of the orderlies says you told him last night you killed Laura Hunt. She was killed last week in her own home. He said he dismissed what you were saying, that he thought you’d probably seen it on the news and you got mixed up the way you’ve been doing lately. Now, of course, he sees it differently. As do the police. It was the day you were found in the library.”

  If people had listened to his confession, they could have stopped the monster. But all they heard was Captain A making shit up.

  “You promise you’ll stay with me till the end, right? You’ll make sure everything goes okay?”

  “I promise,” Hans says.

  Jerry thinks of his Eva, and the pain he is sparing her.

  “The journal,” Hans says. “Are you sure about it? Are you absolutely sure you had one?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “Where else could you have hidden it?”

  Jerry closes his eyes. He pictures his office. He can see the floor, he can see himself prying up one of the boards with a screwdriver. “There was nowhere else.”

  “If I were to sneak in there later tonight to look for it, where would I start?”

  “You’d do that for me? You’d hide it if there are bad things in there?”

  “I’d destroy it. But where would I look, Jerry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s important,” Hans says.

  “I know,” Jerry says, scratching at his arm harder now.

  “What’s wrong with your arm?” Hans asks.

  Jerry looks down to see his nails dragging across his skin. He’s been doing that a lot lately. He rolls up the sleeve of his shirt, exposing the needle mark that looks raw and inflamed. “Everything is wrong with me,” he answers. “Come on, let’s go before we miss the sunset.”

  “Show me your arm,” Hans says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I asked.”

  Jerry shows him his arm.

  “They’ve been injecting you?” he asks, and they’re still in the driveway.

  “Just yesterday, when we went to look for the journal. They had to give me a shot to calm me down. I told you that already. I guess my skin is a little irritated.”

  “You’ve got a few other marks there,” he says.

  “I don’t remember the other time.”

  “They look like they’re faded injection points. They make a habit of injecting the people at the nursing home?”

  “I don’t think so. Like I said, they did it yesterday because we were at the house, and—”

  Hans shakes his head before interrupting him. “Let me think a moment,” he says, his voice hardening.

  “Why?”

  “Just shut up. Let me think.”

  Jerry shuts up. He lets his friend think. He starts drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. Over and over. Thirty seconds pass. A minute. He stops drumming his fingers. He looks at Jerry.

  “There is something that has been bothering me about this all along,” he says. “The nursing home is a long way out of the city. It’s a good fifteen miles. Just how do you think you covered that distance? You didn’t drive, right?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I think I walked.”

  “It’s a long walk.”

  “It’s the only explanation.”

  “Do you remember walking?”

  “No.”

  “So let’s say you did walk. In which case you walked aimlessly all that way to the house of somebody you had never met,” he says. “With your neighbor when you were young, and with the florist, you knew them. Why would you kill people you don’t know? How did you choose them?”

  “At random,” Jerry says, because it’s the only senseless answer that makes any kind of sense.

  “If it was random, why somewhere close to town? Why not somewhere on the outskirts of town? If you walked, you would have passed through dozens and dozens of other streets. A thousand homes. Two thousand. Why walk fifteen miles to the edge of town, then another five miles to the victim’s house, especially when it’s somebody completely random?”

  “I don’t make those decisions,” Jerry says. “That’s Captain A.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Hans says.

  “Captain A seldom does.”

  Hans starts drumming his fingers again. “All that walking, and then you go up to the door of a house you’ve never seen before, and a woman you don’t know lets you in. You choose the house of a woman who somehow you know is alone. That’s what we’re saying here, right?” Before Jerry can answer, Hans carries on. “Twenty miles between where that woman died and the nursing home, and you’ve got injection marks on your arms. You can remember everything after but nothing before.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Hans uses the remote control to open the garage door back up. They drive inside. He unclips his seat belt and looks over at Jerry. “I’m saying there’s a reason why it seems so convenient you can’t remember killing any of these women, or breaking into their houses. I’m saying maybe you didn’t do this after all.”

  JERRY IS DEAD

  Dear Future Jerry. It is now two days past the WMD. It’s hard to say exactly when to call your time of death, but the doctor wiped his forearm across his head, shook his head at the nurse, and walked out of the operating room sometime the night before last, knowing there was nothing more that could be done. That was the night you became a monster. The Jerry you used to be, the Jerry I used to be, he’s gone. All that’s left is this sick, twisted fuck who later today is going to blow his sick, twisted-fuck brains all over the wall. Damn you, Doctor Goodstory for not being able to fix me. Damn you, Past Jerry, for letting go, for giving up, for allowing yourself to become this way. It was your job! Your goddamn job to save us! Where was the fight? Past Jerry from day one and day four and five, you got yourself into this mess. You could have done it, you know. You could have done the world and that poor young girl a favor and put that gun into your mouth back when Doctor Goodstory gave you the news. But no, Past Jerry thought he knew best. For a guy who’s supposed to be able to see where things are going, you really made a mess of this.

  People say suicide is a selfish act. They say it’s cowardly. People say these things because they don’t understand. It’s actually the opposite. It’s not cowardly, in fact it takes incredible courage. To stare Death in the face and tell him you’re ready . . . that’s a brave thing. A selfish act would be to hang on to life as you’re dragged through the media and the courts, your family dragged with you. Some will say escaping that is where the selfishness comes in, but that’s not true. Your death right now is like pulling off a Band-Aid—quick pain for your family that will fade. You owe them at least that. Journal. Suicide notes. Drink. Gun. That’s the schedule, partner.

  Where to begin. Well, you know the beginning. The Big F taking you right past when you should have shot yourself, right into the heart of the WMD. The speech (two million hits now) and then the knife, and you and Sandra fought about that knife. You co
nvinced her not to go to the police because, after all, what had you done? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps you had found it. Or stabbed a giant rat—and the world wouldn’t miss a giant rat now, would it?

  After finding the knife, you and Sandra spent most of the afternoon watching the news. You said very little to each other. You just watched the news and waited for the call. You didn’t know who the call would come from, just that it would. Mrs. Smith was still alive, because Sandra had found an excuse to go over and check on her, and it wasn’t anybody from the wedding party, but that still left nearly four hundred thousand other people in the city. The call didn’t come. The rat scenario was building some strength. The idea had learned to walk. It was wobbly, but with enough time it would have a life of its own.

  The idea died this morning. It died when Eva called and asked if we had heard. Heard what? Sandra asked. Heard about Belinda, Eva said. What about Belinda?, Sandra asked, though no doubt her mind was a little train, chugging its way through different scenarios, pulling into the My husband killed her station, and yes, that’s exactly where she disembarked. Belinda was dead. Somebody had stabbed her to death in her own home. Eva was crying on the phone, and Sandra was too, and even you cried, J-Man. You cried for Belinda, you cried for Sandra and Eva, and you cried for Past Jerry and for yourself.

  The world is an awful place. Who would do this? Eva’s voice was coming through the phone, saying these things over and over. Sandra just kept saying she didn’t know, she didn’t know, but she did know. Her skin had gone so white she looked as though she had been stored in the fridge for the last two months. They spoke for ten minutes. You sat in the dining room while Sandra sat at the kitchen bar, her back to you for most of the call, and you watched the clock. It was ticking away the amount of time Belinda had been dead. It was ticking away the final moments of your life too. You knew it then, just as you’d suspected it the night before—you knew if you had hurt somebody, you would pay the ultimate price. You clock-watched while your mind constructed the final scenario. You would use the gun. It would be quick.