Joe Victim

by Paul Cleave

  “Okay, great, Mom, that’s great, but I also need you to tell her I got her message.”

  “What message?”

  “She’ll know what I mean.”

  “Hang on, Joe, let me write this down,” she says, and there’s a clunk as she sits the receiver on the table and shuffles off. Nothing for about a minute and I become increasingly concerned she’s either gotten lost or has fallen asleep or has got distracted by the TV. I twist my head and look at Adam who’s grinning at me. He taps his watch and winds his finger around in the air. Wrap it up.

  Scuffling as the phone is picked back up. Mom is back.

  “Joe? Is that you?”

  It’s not Mom. It’s Walt. “How are you doing, Walt?”

  “I’m doing fine. Weather report says it’s supposed to be fine all week now, but you know what weather reports are like-they’re like fucking your sister in an elevator.”

  “What?”

  “Wrong on many levels,” he says, and he starts to laugh.

  “I don’t get it,” I tell him.

  “It’s elevator humor,” he says. “It suggests having sex with your sister is okay on some levels. That’s what makes it great. I used to repair elevators. Didn’t you know that, Joe? That’s what I did for thirty years. Boy, we’d tell that joke all the time. Though it wasn’t always your sister. It could be your brother, or your dog or your aunt.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Just for a laugh. We didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “No. I mean why would you say it about my aunt?”

  “People always need elevators,” he says, “aunts and uncles too.” I wonder where the hell my mother is getting a pen from. The moon? “Buildings get bigger, elevator shafts get longer, more wear and tear. I wouldn’t want to be doing it these days, mind you. Too complex. Too much technology. Back then it was all about cables and pulleys, now it’s all about electronics. You gotta have an engineering degree in rocket science. There was this one time, ooh, let me think, twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago when Jesse, he was this neat kid who got his arm caught in one of the. . Oh, wait, hang on,” he says, then his voice is muffled as he holds his hand over the receiver, and then he comes back on the line. “Your mother is back,” he says. “Don’t tell her the joke,” he says, then disappears with his joke and with his Jesse arm story.

  “Joe? Are you still there? It’s your mother,” Mom says.

  “I’m still here,” I tell her.

  “Now what’s this number I’m ringing?”

  “You have the number,” I tell her. “For my girlfriend.”

  “Yes, of course, I know that. I just want you to repeat this message.”

  “I need you to tell her that I got the message.”

  “I. Got. The. Message,” she says, writing each word down. “No, Joe, what’s the message?”

  “That is the message.”

  “You’re saying the message is I got the message?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Does that mean you got the message or I got the message?”

  “It means I got the message,” I tell her.

  “What kind of message is that?”

  “I don’t know, Mom, it just is what it is.”

  “It’s a stupid message,” she says.

  “There’s more. Tell her I got the message, and that it’s happening tomorrow.”

  “It’s. Happening. Tomorrow,” she says, writing it down in that messy scrawl of hers. I know what’s coming up before she even asks. “Wait, Joe, are you saying you got the message and the message is happening tomorrow? Or that you’re not getting the message until tomorrow?”

  Adam is still grinning at me. Something here is amusing him.

  “Just say exactly what I told you,” I tell Mom. “That I got the message and it’s happening tomorrow.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she says.

  “It will to my girlfriend.”

  “Okay, Joe, but you’re really making this difficult,” she says, and I imagine she and my lawyer are going to get on great when he calls her. “I’ll talk to her first thing in the morning,” she says.

  “No. Call her now, Mom. And if she’s not home and you call her tomorrow, then the message changes, okay? In fact, change the message. Tell her it’s Saturday,” I say, because if she rings tomorrow she’ll say tomorrow, which will make it Sunday. “You get that? It’s very important. You’re telling her I got her message and it’s happening on Saturday. This Saturday. Tomorrow Saturday.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Joe.”

  “I know that, Mom.”

  “Then why do you talk to me sometimes as if I am?”

  “It’s my fault,” I tell her.

  “I know it’s your fault. Why would I think otherwise?”

  “So you’ll call her now then?”

  “Okay, Joe.”

  “I love. .” I start, but the phone is dead. “You,” I finish.

  I hang up the receiver. Adam smiles at me. He doesn’t need to say how much he’s about to enjoy this, because it’s written all over his face. He walks me back to my cell. The sandwich is where I threw it, wrapped up, sitting on the floor opposite my bed. I was hoping somehow it would have disappeared.

  “You remember the deal, don’t you, Joe. You remember there are two sandwiches.”

  “I remember.”

  “See? That’s good. Because lately all anybody hears from you is that you can’t remember anything. Pick it up,” he says, and points to the sandwich.

  I pick the sandwich up and unwrap it. “Before you take a bite,” he says, “why don’t you go ahead and take another look at what’s inside.”

  I take another look. Cheese. Some kind of meat that looks like it’s come from a part of the animal nobody could identify, or perhaps the animal itself couldn’t be identified. And in there the clump of pubic hair, tangled up and stuck to everything.

  I put the sandwich back together. I think of Melissa and escaping jail, the books, the message. I think of better times from the past and think about the better times coming up.

  “The deal,” Adam says.

  The deal. I hold my breath and take the first bite.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Shooting The Cleaner at the casino fell through. The casino wasn’t happy with the story line. They didn’t like a TV show suggesting desperate people in desperate times would go into the casino with a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A was to bet everything they owned on red or black. Plan B all depended on how plan A went. There were two plan Bs. The first was to take the winnings and pay off the mortgage. That was the Plan B everybody hoped for. A fifty percent chance of doubling your money to make your life much better. A paid mortgage, a new car, some cool toys. The problem was it also came with a fifty percent chance of losing your money and making it a lot worse. That’s where the second plan B came into effect. That plan B involved heading into the toilets and taking a bunch of pills or slicing up your wrists or sticking a gun in your mouth.

  The problem was the other Plan B happened more often than people would think. It wasn’t something the casino wanted people made aware of. It’s the sort of thing they would give low odds on if you could bet against it. They thought it wasn’t good for business. They were probably right too. Having posters on the wall of guys in suits throwing money into the air at the roulette wheel while pretty women laughed and smiled weren’t going to look good surrounded by posters of people dead in bathrooms with slogans saying Come roll the dice. So for the last month the casino has been saying yes and then last night they said no. The storyline is still going ahead. They have external shots of the casino. No problem there. And they have internal shots from a documentary shot five years earlier, and back then the casino signed a waiver to allow the footage to be used. Well, now it was going to get used in The Cleaner.

  Instead of the bathroom at the casino, they are using the bathroom on the second floor at the TV studio. Some set dressing has been added. Nicer d
oors. Nicer furnishings. They’ll fill in the background noise with some stock sounds of slot machines. It’ll work.

  “So what do you think?” the scriptwriter asks, and it’s the same guy he dealt with yesterday, a guy by the name of Chuck Jones. Chuck is no relation to Jonas, and sometimes Schroder doubts that Chuck is related to anybody. “Blood look authentic enough?”

  Schroder looks around the bathroom. Blood on the ceiling and high up on the wall. Blood from somebody putting a gun under their chin and pulling the trigger. Must be a powerful gun, going by all the fake blood. Must have made one hell of a make-believe sound. But he has seen it before, and this looks about right if only a little overdone.

  “Looks fine,” Schroder says.

  “So in this story line the body and police are long gone,” he says. “Suicide is three days earlier and the scene is clear.”

  “Scene would be cleared quicker than that,” Schroder says. “Especially in a place like this.”

  “Okay, cool, but in this case it hasn’t been. I don’t know, maybe there were complications. We’ll figure it out. Anyway the blood has dried. Dried pretty hard, and the guys are struggling to clean up. Jake, he climbs up on the toilet to try and reach up high and the toilet breaks away from the wall, and that’s when they find the hidden casino chips because they come out of the toilet tank. Of course the guys decide to keep them.”

  “Sounds. .” Schroder says, but doesn’t finish. Sounds what? Charming? Stupid?

  “It’ll work,” Chuck says. “Like all good drama you want to throw some comedy in there somewhere.”

  “The show is about cleaners scrubbing up after the dead,” Schroder says. “Here you’ve got some poor bastard who came into the casino hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, and the worst is what he got. You really think that can be that funny?”

  “Anything can be funny if you deliver it the right way,” Chuck says. “Like I said, it’ll work. So, the guys are struggling because the blood has dried really good. It’s stuck between the tiles in the grouting.”

  “You seem to have everything under control,” Schroder says.

  “Good. Good, I just wanted to make sure.”

  Schroder doubts that. Everything he’s pointed out so far since working on The Cleaner has been dismissed because it doesn’t work in with the story line. It’s like what Chuck said on day one-sometimes reality can get in the way of a good story. Schroder is learning that the other thing that gets in the way of a good story is bad writing.

  More lighting is added to the bathroom and the fake toilet is finally bolted to a fake tile wall. The scene is still being staged when his cell phone goes off. It’s Rebecca Kent. He’s been both looking forward to and dreading this phone call.

  “You heard the news?” she asks, and there is no hello, and he knows she’s pissed at him.

  “What news?”

  “The prosecution just made a deal with Middleton. He’s going to take us to Detective Calhoun’s body.”

  “That’s good news,” Schroder says.

  “They offered him immunity on Calhoun on account of the fact we know he didn’t kill him.”

  “Really,” Schroder says.

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” Kent says. “There’s more to the deal and you know it, since you’re the one who put it together.”

  “Look, Rebecca-”

  “This is a bullshit deal, Carl,” she says, raising her voice loud enough for Chuck to turn and look at him. He steps out into the corridor to take the abuse so that the dialogue doesn’t get added to a future episode. “And the worst part is fuck all people will ever know about it. You know how many people are taking Joe out there? Four. Four people. Including me, because they can’t have many people knowing what’s really going on. That’s a risk, Carl. If it’s a trap-”

  “It’s not a trap,” Schroder says.

  “That’s what people keep saying. But I’ll tell you this: if it’s a trap, the first bullet any of us fire goes straight into Joe.”

  “I understand.”

  “Jesus, Carl, what were you thinking? First you make a deal with Jones, now with Joe? What the hell happened to you? Four weeks ago you were one of us. Now you’ve turned your back on us.”

  “I wanted Calhoun found,” Schroder says, her words hurting. “He was a good man. He deserves to be buried. He doesn’t deserve to be out in the woods or in a river or wherever it is that Joe put him.”

  “This isn’t the right way to go about it. You’re paying Joe a lot of money. This is wrong, Carl. You know it’s wrong. You’re rewarding a criminal. What do you think that will do if this ever gets out? Crime isn’t only going to pay,” she says, “but it’ll be an investment that keeps on paying even after you’ve been arrested.”

  “Well somebody agrees with me,” Carl says. “Otherwise the deal wouldn’t be going ahead.”

  “That’s a bullshit answer, Carl. If anything happens tomorrow it’s on you,” she says.

  “I know,” he says.

  “And something is going to happen,” she says. “We had a time all set for tomorrow morning. Then the defense lawyer rings the prosecutor back and says that time wasn’t going to work. Says Joe is busy for the day with trial stuff. Says he can’t make it till four o’clock.”

  “Shit,” Schroder says.

  “See? It’s looking like Joe has a plan.”

  “It’s not a trap,” he says. “It can’t be. Joe hasn’t had time to make one.”

  “He’s made two phone calls tonight-both to his mother, both after his lawyer spoke to him.”

  “Trust me, Joe wouldn’t be using his mother to help him in any way. Whatever he planned with her would go the exact opposite way.”

  “There are going to be four of us and one of him,” she says. “That’s good odds if anybody is out there trying to free Joe. And that same somebody may be the reason two bodies were put into the morgue yesterday and we’re dealing with missing explosives.”

  “I’m sorry,” Schroder says.

  “If it’s a trap,” she says, “then at least we’re ready for it. And if we’re dealing with Melissa, hopefully we’ll be drawing her out into the open. Our people are trained for this,” she says. “That’s what the prosecution said. But we’re not trained to be blown up,” she says. “For all we know he’s leading us right into a bomb.”

  Schroder closes his eyes and pinches the top of his nose. In the darkness he can see gunfire and explosions. He can see blood. Chuck would be pleased. It would look just how people imagined it would look. Very cinematic.

  “Can I come with you?” he asks.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Carl.”

  “Please, Rebecca. I’d like to be there.”

  “If things go wrong you’d only get in the way, and honestly, Carl, I wish I could bring you along so if it is a trap that you’ve helped engineer, maybe we can use you as a shield. You fucked up working for Jonas Jones.”

  “I work for a TV station,” he says. “Not Jones.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself? And the worst part is, once we find Calhoun, we have to leave him there for that slimy boss of yours to put on a show and make money. It gives bullshit hope to people out there who believe in these bullshit salesmen,” she says. “You’re giving a very large slimeball a lot of credibility here.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “So you keep saying. Good-bye, Carl.”

  “Wait,” he says, and he’s surprised a few seconds later to find she hasn’t hung up. “Since you already hate me, there’s something else.”

  “Oh, this ought to be good,” she says, and she sounds the way he used to sound whenever Tate would call him. “You’re not going to ask me for a favor, are you?”

  “Look, I went and saw Raphael again today.”

  He can imagine her shaking her head. “Jesus, Carl? Why?”

  “To show him a photograph of Melissa,” he says, and he crouches down and leans against the wall.

&
nbsp; “And?”

  “And he’s hiding something. I don’t know what, exactly, but there’s something off with him.”

  “Off?”

  Schroder nods, then shrugs. “Off,” he says. “I’m telling you, something isn’t quite right with him.”

  “Something isn’t quite right with him,” she says.

  “And you’re repeating everything I’m saying,” he says.

  “Not repeating,” she says, “but absorbing. Want to be a little more specific, Carl?”

  “I got the feeling he recognized Melissa.”

  “Of course he would. Her photograph has been in the paper plenty of times.”

  “No. I don’t mean that. I think he knew her from elsewhere.”

  “You think? Is that all you have?”

  He pushes off from the wall and gets back to his feet. “He could know her from group. He could be lying to us.”

  “And why would he lie to us?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, and no matter what angle he looks at it from, he can’t come up with a reason. “I just don’t think it would hurt to follow him.”

  “Yeah? You really think we have the man power to follow everybody who has ever given you a bad feeling?”

  “I can follow him.”

  “Don’t do that. You’ve got no reason to, other than a bad feeling. How many people in a day give you a bad feeling, huh? Ten? Twenty? Right now you’re giving me a bad feeling. Does that mean I should follow you? Listen, I gotta go. I’ll be in touch tomorrow once we’ve found Calhoun.”

  Before he can say anything else, she hangs up. He tucks the phone into his pocket and goes and finds Jonas Jones to update him on the deal.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “How’d you get that?” my psychiatrist asks, looking at my black eye.

  I reach up and wince, unsure why in the hell I just put my finger against it. “I slipped and fell,” I tell her.

  “Who did that to you?”

  “This is supposed to be an honest relationship,” I tell her. “I want to be truthful with you, but I can’t tell you who did this because it will only get worse if I do.”