Trust No One (42 page)

“But you believe me, right?”

“Of course I do, but I’m not the one who needs convincing. This guy has been exposed and taken care of because of you, not because of the police, and they’re not going to be too thrilled being made to look foolish by a crime writer dealing with Alzheimer’s. They’re going to look for any angle that could suggest your involvement. The flip side to that is you’ll be cleared, and once the media gets hold of the story, you’ll be a hero. The country won’t like a hero being convicted.”

“I’m not a monster,” Jerry says, and the relief is back . . . it’s back and it’s growing, it’s spreading its wings.

Hans is staring at him. He has that look he gets when he’s trying to figure something out.

“What?” Jerry asks.

“Let’s not forget the others,” Hans says.

“What others?”

“The others you’ve killed.”

Jerry thinks about Sandra, he remembers the florist, and Suzan with a
z,
whose real name is lost to him now. He looks down at the photographs, three of them representing women he has killed. Thoughts of his own innocence may have been premature.

“Is it possible I haven’t killed anybody?” Jerry asks.

“Two hours ago we dropped a man to his death,” Hans says.

“Other than him,” Jerry says.

“Possible? Anything is possible,” Hans says.

“Anything is possible,” Jerry says, letting the words hang in the air for a few seconds before chasing them with the reality. “But you think I did.”

“I’m sorry, buddy.”

“So now what?”

“Well I can keep looking around while you read the journal. Since he hid these,” Hans says, nodding towards the bags of hair and photographs, “then it stands to reason he might have hidden something else. It’s not uncommon for people to have more than one hiding space. Ultimately we—”

“That’s right! I haven’t told you yet, but I wrote in my journal that there is a second hiding place!” Jerry says.

Hans looks excited. “Where?”

“I didn’t say.”

“Well what did you say?”

“Just that there’s somewhere else. I think it’s where I used to hide my writing backups.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“You need to remember, Jerry,” Hans says, sounding urgent. “And we need to head to your house and find it.”

“I need a drink.”

“Seriously?”

“Who knows when I’ll get another chance? Plus it might help me think.”

Hans slowly nods. “After all you’ve gone through today, you probably deserve one. Hell, I think we both do.”

They head out to the kitchen and Jerry leans against the bench while Hans goes through the cupboards. Hans finds a couple of glasses and sits them on the table, then starts going through the pantry. He finds what he’s looking for. Not quite what he’s looking for—there’s vodka, and no gin, but it will have to do. He grabs some ice from the freezer. There’s no tonic anywhere, so he ends up making a couple of vodka and orange drinks. They sit down at the table. All very social, Jerry thinks.

All very mad,
Henry thinks.

“Why are you still wearing the gloves?” Jerry asks.

Don’t trust Hans.

“What do you mean?”

“With Eric being dead already, the police are going to figure out I’m involved.”

“That’s right.”

“And when they talk to me, they’re going to figure out you’re involved.”

“Not if you don’t tell them.”

“You don’t want them to know?”

“Of course not. I want to help you out, buddy, but I’d also really like to avoid jail too.”

“What if I forget that and tell them?”

“If you forget, you forget. But if you remember, and don’t drag me into it, then the police never need to know I was here. Look, Jerry, I know it’s not right of me to ask this, but I want you to take the fall for what happened to Eric. The police will go easy on you, and if they don’t . . .” Hans says, and doesn’t finish.

“If they don’t what?”

“You’re already a killer, mate. I’m just trying to help. I don’t want to be punished for trying to help you out.”

Jerry looks at his glass, then slowly sips from it. Not as good as a gin and tonic, but better than nothing. He sips a little more. It’s a fair point, he thinks, then tells Hans as such.

Hans starts sipping from his own drink. “You remember my dad’s funeral?” he asks.

Jerry looks up. He shakes his head. He wonders where Hans is going with this.

“The night before the funeral, you took me into town and we ended up at a bar that had run out of gin. You started bitching at the bartender, asking him what kind of bar it was, and he said the kind of bar where people who complain get their teeth kicked out. We ended up drinking these,” he says, taking a sip. “Only time I’ve ever had them. It’s not . . . I don’t know the word,” he says.

“Not masculine enough?”

Hans nods. “I knew you’d know. You’ve always been a gin-and-tonic guy, ever since we met.”

Jerry finishes his drink. He considers whether he wants a second. “I remember you brought bottles to me when I got sick.”

“Sandra wouldn’t let you drink, and she took your credit card off you so you couldn’t go and buy them. I would bring five of them to you at a time. I have no idea where you hid them, but maybe it’s the same place you hid the—”

“In the garage,” Jerry says, and he can remember it, can remember a tarpaulin beneath a bench, covering the gap behind the chain saw and the circular saw, and that was where he hid them, behind renovating tools that belonged to a much younger version of Past Jerry, back when Eva was a small girl and his books were still to be given life. He didn’t hide all of the bottles there, the rest were under the floor of his office. He can also remember a tarpaulin on his office floor, all laid out ready to catch the mess that a far more recent version of Past Jerry was going to make, one from last year.

“You got through them pretty quickly,” Hans says.

Only the bottles weren’t under the floor, were they, Jerry?
Henry says.
No, under the floor was reserved just for the gun that wasn’t there and the journal that also wasn’t there. The only thing under there was a shirt you can’t remember getting bloody.

“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Hans says. “You got a bad rap. Not one of the worst I’ve ever seen, but pretty damn close.”

Jerry isn’t listening to Hans. Instead he’s listening to Henry. He’s thinking about the floorboards. About the original journal. How it wasn’t under there. The gin wasn’t under there either. Nor the gun. Because it’s just like he said in Madness Journal 2.0—there’s another hiding place.

“Maybe—”

“Stop talking,” Jerry says, and he puts his hand out. He’s thinking about what he wrote in the journal. He’s thinking about those bottles of gin.

“Jerry? Are you okay?”

The writing backups weren’t under the floor, but he kept them somewhere safe and secure. Somewhere close. They wouldn’t be in the garage, or the kitchen, or a bedroom. Wouldn’t be somewhere he’d have to go looking for.

You used to hide them. You were paranoid somebody would come into your house one day and steal your computer, steal everything you worked with, steal your next big idea.

“Were my writing backups found?”

“Backups? I have no idea.”

He thinks about his office. Remembers the layout. His mind is becoming warm, the vodka and juice flowing through all the neural pathways in his brain, quickly fogging his thoughts the way it will to somebody who hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol in nearly a year, but it’s clearing things in other areas as those thoughts link across time, the way alcohol can do that, linking images, dragging out the random, and he’s back in his study where he’s pouring himself a drink, and those bottles of gin . . . well now, they weren’t hidden under the floorboards, were they . . .

“The backups were hidden. I always hid that stuff,” Jerry says.

“Under the floor maybe?”

“There was nothing under the floor.”

“Then where? Think, Jerry, come on, you’re almost there, you’re—”

“Shut up,” Jerry says.

It has to be somewhere else big enough to fit a few bottles of gin. Where? Not the bookcase. Not the desk. Nothing hidden in the wall. Nothing in the roof. Nothing under or inside the couch.

Wait . . . nothing hidden in the wall? Are you sure about that?

“I almost have it,” he says.

Hans says nothing.

“Just let me think,” he says, closing his eyes, and there he is, it’s a workday and every day was a workday back when he used to write, weekends and weekdays were all the same. He’d work on his birthday. He’d even let Henry Cutter out of the bottle for an hour or two on Christmas Day to get those thoughts down. That was the life of a writer—keep writing, keep moving forward, stay ahead of the crowd because if you don’t get that story written down then somebody else would. He’s in his office, he’s building the word count, and he’s wrapping up for the day and he needs to make a backup, needs to get those words secure, because to lose a few thousand of them, let alone an entire manuscript . . . that was one part of being a writer he could avoid. His office, his desk, he’s putting a flash drive into his computer, copy, paste, then he’s taking the flash drive back out. Then what? What does he do next?

Getting out of his chair. Past the couch and to the wardrobe. He opens the wardrobe door and—

“Jerry—”

Crouches down. There’s a box that holds half a dozen reams of paper there. He pushes it aside then—

“You have to focus, Jerry.”

Presses the bottom corner of the wall. An opposite corner juts out. It’s a false wall, no taller than his forearm but the width of the wardrobe. He pulls it away, and there’s the gin, there are the flash drives, one for each novel, there’s the gun and there’s—

“I know where the journal is,” he says, and he stands up so quickly he bangs against the table. The glass slides towards Hans, who catches it before it can fall.

“At the house?”

“In my office,” Jerry says.

“Then let’s go.”

“Let me grab my second journal,” Jerry says, and he’s already moving back towards the study. “I want to read it on the way.”

Okay, so it’s not really day one million, and I’m not sure how liberal I was with exaggerations in the books. Derek (it’s actually Eric, but I’ve come to think of him as a Derek) told me this morning it’s been eight months since I checked in. Which, by my calculations, is nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand days and change short of a million. Still, it feels like I’ve been here forever.

Today is a Jerry is Jerry day.

Jerry has Alzheimer’s—check.

Jerry used to be a crime writer—check.

Jerry knows he shouldn’t trust Derek—check.

Or Eric—check.

Jerry is making a checklist—check.

I’ve been flicking through the journal and seeing I’ve been piling crazy on top of crazy, and among some of those entries is evidence that Henry has been coming out to play. I’ve been having conversations with him. Henry and me shooting the breeze. There are two points here, Future Me, that I want to make. It’s two-for Tuesday. The first is to stop trusting Eric. Let me put that in big capital letters. DON’T TRUST ERIC. I came into my room earlier and found him elbows deep in my drawer. I think he was looking for my journal. For what reason, I don’t know. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was tidying up. Henry thinks he’s lying. Henry thinks there’s an ulterior motive for Eric wanting you to write in the journal, and Henry does, after all, deal in ulterior motives (most of the characters he creates have one). In this case the motive is Eric stealing my ideas because he wants to be a writer. One thing I can remember clearly from my life of crime (writing) is the amount of people who tell me they want to write a book. It’s one of those professions everybody thinks they can do, and I always wanted to say to a lawyer
I’ve been thinking about trying a case
or to a surgeon
I’ve been thinking about performing a heart transplant,
as if their job is no more challenging than mine. And the reason, according to them, they haven’t written that book yet? Time. It’s always that they don’t have time, but they’ll make it. How hard can it be? Eric is writing a book—and at least Eric is putting in the time, he’s said he writes a few hours every night, making it a passion as well as a hobby, and that’s something I always respect, and for that I wish him all the best. However, he has once committed what I’ve always thought of as the cardinal sin, and that’s to ask
Where do you get your ideas?,
as if I order a box online every year and have an assistant weed out the bad ones. I’ve told him
Write what you know,
because there is nothing truer when it comes to the job of making stuff up, but Eric wants to write what
I
know. That’s why he’s looking for my journal. Sometimes on the days I remember who I am, I wonder if it’s the writing that made me this way—all those crazy people running around inside my head—some of that crazy was bound to rub off on me, wasn’t it? If Eric wants to be a writer, then let his own crazy do to him what mine did to me.

On the subject of Eric . . . I had this very strange dream a few days ago. He was taking me somewhere. I don’t know where, and dreams are like that—just random images taken from random moments of your life. Only, if I’m to be honest, and Madness Journal Version 2.0 demands nothing but honesty, it feels more like a memory than a dream, because dreams are something that disappear even while you’re fumbling around, trying to hold the pieces together. But what the hell would I know? Jerry Version 2.0 has faulty software. It was a messy upgrade that’s been slowly wiping the original operating system. Whether dream or memory, it was me in the passenger seat, my head leaning against the side window, and we were somewhere in the city and the streetlights were burning bright, hotels and office buildings lit up like Christmas trees against a black sky. I would close my eyes and when I opened them again everything would be different: different snapshots of time, traffic lights, a convenience store, a couple of drunk people staggering along the sidewalk. Then there was a house, and that house didn’t move by, it wasn’t a snapshot of a moment, it was solid, it was real, and we were parked in front of that house for a while, and there were no lights on inside, there were no lights anywhere other than streetlights. Only it wasn’t we, it was just me. Just me waiting and doing nothing, unable to move, as if the signals to all my nerves and muscles and tendons had been severed. I drifted off again then, returning a while later to a world that had moved on, the house no longer there, instead I was in a park somewhere lying on the grass.