Trust No One

by Paul Cleave

  You don’t know. What to.

  Do.

  You don’t.

  Know.

  You want to wake up and find none of this has happened.

  Bad news—Sandra is dead.

  Bad news—Sandra is dead.

  “What the hell?” Jerry says.

  “I’ll explain on the way.”

  “On the way to where?”

  Hans starts the car. They leave Mrs. Smith and her neighborhood—Jerry’s old neighborhood—behind, the houses flicking by, houses he used to see every day but can no longer remember.

  “What do you remember?” Hans asks.

  “Five minutes ago none of it, but now I remember most of it, starting with waking up today in that woman’s house. I remember finding the park you told me to go to, and waiting for you. I . . . ah, hell, I think I must have fallen asleep. Then next thing I knew I was at my old house.”

  “I spoke to you a few times,” Hans says. “I thought the police might be tailing me, and I figured it was too risky to come and pick you up right away. I went online. The nursing home has a website because everything has a website, and aside from telling the world what they do, the site also tells the world who is doing it. They have a whole section with the staff there, including brief biographies. There was only one Eric there. I called you back and you were even more determined to question the guy. The way you were explaining it . . . it was making sense. Made sense to at least talk to the guy, right? But it made even more sense to go through his house when he wasn’t there, and see what I could find.”

  “So why is he in the back of the car?”

  “Because it didn’t work out as planned,” Hans says, and does it ever? Certainly not in any of Jerry’s books, Jerry thinks. “After getting his name online, a phone book gave me his address. Then I gave a buddy of mine a call. I drove to the mall, and I go in and meet him in the bathroom and give him my car keys, and he gives me his, and two minutes later he’s pulling the fire alarm. Everybody ends up moving outside, and in the sea of people I get rid of anybody following me. I head out into the parking lot and then I drive to Eric’s in my buddy’s car. This, by the way, is Eric’s car.”

  Hans says it all so matter-of-factly, as if this is the norm, and Jerry guesses for Hans maybe it is. He glances back over at Eric. There is duct tape holding his hands behind him, and more duct tape covering his eyes.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Hans says, and Jerry isn’t so sure. He’s also feeling less sure about the whole idea Eric could be guilty. “I gave him a shot, probably similar to the stuff he’s been giving you,” Hans says.

  “So how did you go from wanting to search his house to having him sedated in the back of his own car? What happened?”

  “What happened is I knocked on his door and I figured, you know, if he answers I can ask him some of those questions.”

  “And he answered?”

  “No. Which made me figure he wasn’t home.”

  “You broke in?”

  “Of course I did. I go inside, thinking that if he’s a writer, he probably has an office, and an office is a good place to start looking. Only he’s in there on his computer with a set of headphones on. He hadn’t heard me. He sees me, and he recognizes me right away because I’ve been to see you at the nursing home a number of times, and—”

  “You came to see me?”

  “Of course I did, buddy. Back to the point, Eric sees me because his desk is facing the door, and he jumps to his feet, and because he knows who I am he does the addition very quickly and figures out why I’m there. Or at least he thinks he knows. He doesn’t even say anything, but he throws a coffee cup at me, then comes charging at me. He doesn’t even get a shot in,” Hans says, smiling at Jerry. “Before I knock him onto his ass. He looks up at me, and he looks angry, and worried, and I tell him I’m there because he killed those girls. He tells me he has no idea what I’m talking about. I tell him I know he was framing you, but he shakes his head and tells me I’m making a mistake. He tells me you’re a psychopath, so then I kick him in the head. He’s out cold and I’m getting ready to tie him up when I notice his wedding ring.”

  “He’s married?”

  “Yeah. There are photographs on the walls of his house to prove it. So I figure the best thing to do is get the hell out of there. I tidy up the mess so the wife won’t think bad thoughts the moment she gets home, then I drag him through to his car and throw him in the back. I don’t want him to wake up, so I head to my car because I have a couple of shots in there—”

  “Shots?”

  “Shots to make sure he stays asleep.”

  “Your buddy had them in his car?”

  “No. I took them with me. They’re there for option number three, remember? One shot puts you to sleep, and that’s all I gave Eric. But enough shots . . . well, you go to sleep and you stay asleep. I give Eric one, and I’m on the way to pick you up from the park when I phone you. That’s everything. Now we have to go somewhere and question him.”

  Jerry isn’t sure what to say. It all seemed like a good plan back when Hans and Henry were bouncing around ideas the same way Henry would bounce around ideas with his editor. It all seemed possible at the time, but seeing Eric unconscious in the backseat changes the game in a similar way it would if Jerry walked into his publisher’s office dragging in a dead prostitute and a serial killer and pitched the plot for his next book. There is a world of difference, Jerry thinks, between making shit up and making shit happen.

  “Jerry? Earth to Jerry?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here,” Jerry says.

  “You zoned out.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “He’s guilty, right?” Hans asks.

  “Is he?”

  “He’s the one who told the police you confessed to him. And somebody drugged you, right? It’s either that—or you really did sneak out of the home and walk twenty miles to single out a woman you had never met. Plus he knew. The moment he looked at me, he knew he’d been found out.”

  “What if he wakes up?”

  “He won’t,” Hans says. “Not yet.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I just know.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “I know a place,” Hans says, and of course he does.

  The day is getting darker. Even though he doesn’t like Mrs. Smith, he hopes somebody has found her already. At the end of the month daylight saving time will kick in and the days will get longer, but right now there isn’t much light past six thirty. Hans has to turn on the headlights. Traffic isn’t too bad because rush hour was over an hour ago. The quality of the neighborhoods degrades the further they go, until they enter one in which every fence is tagged and the sidewalks have cracks with more weeds pushing through than there is grass on front lawns. They park out front of a two-story house that has no front garden, just a huge slab of concrete taking up the entire yard, patches of oil scattered across it, a hopscotch layout created by duct tape in the center. There’s a For Sale sign nailed to the fence that must be fresh since there’s no graffiti on it, or maybe there’s an amnesty on For Sale signs. The amnesty doesn’t stretch to the rag doll that has been nailed beneath the sign, a roofing nail going through the middle of the doll’s face, giving her a metal nose the size of a quarter.

  “Wait here,” Hans says, and he turns off the headlights before getting out of the car. Then he leans back in. “I mean it, Jerry. I’m only going to be gone a minute, but don’t wander off, okay?”

  “Is that meant to be a joke?”

  “It was meant to be, but halfway through it stopped being funny.”

  Hans walks up to the front door reaching into his pocket along the way, then he’s in the dark and Jerry can’t see what he’s doing, but he knows his friend is most likely picking the lock, something he’s always thought is a cool trick for his characters, but something he’d never be able to do in real life.

  You can do it, Henry says, and Jerry
decides it’s neither here nor there.

  A minute later Hans is heading back. He’s wearing a pair of thin leather gloves. He glances at the doll on the fence, and Jerry wonders if he’s conjuring up the same kind of images that Horror Book Henry would have thought back in the days when fiction and nonfiction were two completely different things. In another universe, that doll could pull the nail out of its own face and carry on doing what it was doing before somebody assaulted it.

  It’s awkward getting Eric out of the back of the car. He’s heavier than Mrs. Smith, and Jerry is sure he’ll have a sore back tomorrow from all this lifting. But they get Eric upright, and then they get him up the driveway and past the wide open door and into a hallway. Before lifting him, Jerry took Eric’s glasses off and put them into his pocket for safekeeping. It’s dark inside and Hans manages to point his cell phone light ahead as they walk, giving Jerry a brief rundown along the way.

  “Used to be a drug house,” he says. “It was just small-time stuff, mostly just a couple of guys selling weed to partying teenagers, but the guys were informants for the police, so the police let them do their thing as long as their thing didn’t go beyond that, but of course it went beyond that because they got into some beef with another couple of guys a few blocks away, and next thing you know the average life expectancy in the neighborhood drops substantially. Nobody wants to buy in this neighborhood, and nobody wants to buy a house where a couple of dealers got themselves nailed to a wall, and the cops never did find their dicks.” Jerry looks concerned, and Hans laughs. “Don’t worry, I’m kidding. They did find them. Anyway, that shit was months ago, and nobody ever comes by here, and the police have no reason to. Not while it’s empty. Come on, let’s get this guy upstairs.”

  There is no furniture in the house, nothing to try and avoid, no rug to trip on. They get to the stairs and it’s a tight squeeze and Jerry’s not sure what the difference is going to be upstairs compared to downstairs when it comes to questioning somebody, but there must be something significant to be going through all of this. He thought by now they’d have Eric strapped into a chair with a knife to his throat, but there are no chairs and no knives.

  Upstairs smells like cat piss and the air is stale. Every wall he looks at he can imagine two men nailed to it. They dump Eric on the landing because they’re both too exhausted to drag him further. Jerry starts to wonder if this is one of those moments when he’s actually in the off position, Functioning Jerry who can’t seem to store any memories, Functioning Henry who is calling the shots.

  “You okay, buddy?” Hans asks, puffing a little.

  “No,” Jerry says. “None of this is okay. Now what?”

  “Now we get him to talk.”

  “And just how are we going to mange that?”

  “We hang him out the window.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “It’s the easiest way.”

  “You’ve done it before?”

  “I’ve seen it done,” Hans says.

  “In real life?”

  “In movies,” Hans says. “It always works.”

  “But won’t he just tell us what we want to hear if we do that? It won’t count, right? I’d confess to anything if it’d stop me from getting dropped on my head.”

  “Then we make him tell us something only the killer would know.”

  “And what if he isn’t the killer? What if I really am?”

  “Then if you’re a killer, you shouldn’t be feeling too bad about this, right?”

  Jerry hates how that statement makes perfect sense.

  “Look at where we are, Jerry. Look at the situation we’re in. You’re lucky the taxi driver earlier didn’t figure out who you were. You’re a wanted man who is running out of time, and if you’re to be believed, an innocent man. If you don’t want to do this, then fine, we take Eric back home and drop you off with the police and you won’t get to look for your journal and you’ll plead guilty and Eva will continue to never want to speak to you, and the police will blame you for every unsolved crime over the last thirty years. Or we trust your gut, and we question him.”

  Jerry doesn’t know what to say.

  “The clock is ticking,” Hans says. “Are we doing this or not?”

  Jerry nods. The decision made.

  They drag Eric into the nearest bedroom. Houses always look sad when they’re empty, Jerry thinks, and this house looks so sad he feels like they ought to put it out of its misery by torching it when they leave. There is wallpaper hanging from the walls and large stains in the carpets and funny-shaped circles of mold on the ceiling. He can’t imagine what a real estate agent would say as a selling point—unless they listed it as an ideal home for the budding pyromaniac. The bedroom is facing south, over the backyard, where there is very little in the way of light, but just enough to see the backyard has been paved in concrete too. Jerry guesses the previous owner hated gardening. Hans unlocks the window, then has to shoulder it upwards because it’s swollen in the damp air. Eric is still unconscious, and he’s still wearing his orderly clothes from the home. Seeing him here is so out of context but not enough to jar Jerry back into the world of rational thought, because surely he can’t be there now.

  “We wake him up, and then we hang him outside,” Hans says, and he takes the tape off Eric’s eyes, but leaves the one over his mouth. “We let him get a good look around, and then we drag him back in. I’ll slap him around a little, and we don’t ask questions, what we do is we give him statements. We don’t say Did you kill those girls? What we say is We know you killed those girls. Got it?”

  “I got it,” Jerry says, his stomach turning at the thought, but not turning as much as Eric’s will be.

  “Don’t drop him,” Hans says.

  “I won’t.”

  “And I want you to keep thinking about where you hid your journal, okay?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Then try harder.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Jerry says.

  “You ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Hans wraps duct tape around Eric’s ankles, pinning his feet together. Then from his pocket he pulls out a small vial. “Smelling salts,” he says. “Trust me, Jerry, everything is going to be okay,” he says, and he opens the top and waves the vial under Eric’s nose.

  DAY SOMETHING

  You need to start trusting yourself. You are Jerry Grey, you are not a killer. Unless you killed your wife. And the florist. And, now that you think about it, just how did your cat die six years ago?

  Today is the WMD plus something, and the day of Sandra’s death plus one. You spent last night not phoning the police. You spent last night sitting on the floor in Sandra’s blood, holding her hand as she got colder and colder. Your clothes soaked up her blood, and you had to shower and change earlier because you couldn’t stand it any longer, and when you came back she was exactly where you had left her. You were hoping—well, it’s obvious what you were hoping for.

  Spending all night watching over Sandra, you thought mostly of how your actions had tainted all the good times you’d had. Your amazing life together, the passion with which you loved her. You poisoned all of that by taking away her future. You wondered what the future without her would be. The answer was simple—it would be empty. And Eva? The news will destroy her. Days after tying the knot, she has to go to her own mother’s funeral. She will never talk to you again. You hope her anger towards you doesn’t cloud the way she sees the world, that it doesn’t darken her music.

  And of course you wondered about Hans. About Nurse Mae. The discrepancy between what they told Sandra. There are answers you need, but how can you look for them when you don’t even know the right questions?

  You need to call the police but not yet. Aside from holding Sandra’s hand, you’ve also been reading the journal. There are things in here you simply can’t remember. Not just things when you were in the off position, like showing up at the old house or
at the florist’s, but other things too—like forgetting you had lost the gun, forgetting about asking Doctor Goodstory what else we could do.

  Before Sandra died, she asked if you had spoken to Hans, and you said no, but you had spoken to him. You’d called him the day after the wedding. He’d said There’s no point in worrying about something you can’t know about.

  Worry if you learn more, but until then, just try to act normal.

  You had even forgotten about Counselor Beverly, who spoke to you about the stages of grief.

  You haven’t forgotten the wedding speech.

  You still have no memory of the night after you snuck out your window, but the things that didn’t make sense a few entries ago still don’t make any sense now.

  Where did the knife come from?

  Did you have blood on your shirt and Nurse Mae missed it, or was Hans mistaken about that? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing anybody, let alone Hans, would overlook. Either something happened between you walking out the door of Nurse Mae’s house and climbing into Hans’s car, or . . .

  Now there are more questions. Why shoot Sandra? You don’t remember shooting her, is it possible you didn’t? But you don’t remember spray-painting the bad word across Mrs. Smith’s house, and you obviously did that, so there’s no denying the fact you do things and then forget. It’s all part of the Alzheimer’s package.

  The phone rang before and you let the machine get it. It was Eva. Hi Mom, hope you’re doing okay, just checking in before we leave for Tahiti tomorrow. We’ll try and head over in the morning to say bye.

  She sounded so happy, like her life was just beginning. She and Rick are going away on their honeymoon tomorrow and you can’t let them know what’s happened. Not yet. Let them enjoy their week.

  It means not calling the police.

  You can do that. For Eva.

  You’ll call her back tonight and say you’re busy tomorrow, that Sandra is taking you to check out a couple of nursing homes, and to make sure they call when they get to where they’re going.

  Good news—it’s doubtful there will ever be good news again.