Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  The psychiatrist leans forward an interlocks his fingers. He must have seen other psychiatrists doing that on TV or maybe they taught it in psych 101 just before they taught him how to sew on the leather patches. Wherever he learned it, he doesn’t look as good doing it as he must think. This whole thing is a big deal for him. It’s a big deal for everybody. He’s interviewing the Christchurch Carver for the people who want to lock me away, and he’s trying to find out just how insane the Carver really is, and he’s learning that I’m a big bowl of retard.

  “You took a test,” he says. “It was thirty minutes ago. In this very room.”

  This very room is an interview room that is an awful room by anybody’s standards, particularly by Benson Barlow’s, I imagine, yet is nicer than the cell I currently live in. It has cinder block walls and a concrete floor and a concrete ceiling. It’s like a bomb shelter, only one that would collapse in on you if a bomb actually hit it, which, to be honest, would actually be a relief. It has a table and three chairs and nothing else, and right now one of those chairs is empty. My chair is bolted to the floor and I have one hand cuffed to it. I don’t know why. They think I’m a threat, but I’m not. I’m a nice guy. I keep telling everybody. Nobody believes me.

  “Here?” I ask, looking around at the different concrete views. “I don’t remember.”

  His smile widens, he’s trying to give me the look that suggests he knew what my response would be, and I get the idea that maybe he did. “See, Joe, the problem is this. You want the world to think you’re mentally challenged, but you’re not. You’re a sick, twisted man, nobody will ever question that, but this test?” he says, holding up a five-sheet questionnaire that I filled out earlier, “this test proves you’re not insane.”

  I don’t answer him. I get the bad feeling he’s leading somewhere with this. And the smirk on his face tells me it’s not somewhere I want to go.

  “This question here,” he says, and his voice rises and makes it sound like a question. He points to one that was pretty easy for me to answer. Some of the questions were multi-choice, some of them I had to fill in. He reads it out. “It says What color is this dog? And what did you tick? You ticked yellow. The dog is red, Joe, yet you ticked yellow.”

  “It’s yellowish,” I tell him.

  “This one here? If Bob is taller than Greg, and Greg is taller than Alice, who is the tallest? You wrote Steve, and then you said that Steve is a fag,” he says, and the way he says it is enough to make me laugh, but the prospect of where he’s going is enough to keep me worried, so everything balances out and I stare impassively at him.

  “Steve is tallish,” I tell him.

  “There is no Steve,” he says.

  “What have you got against Steve?” I ask.

  “This test has sixty questions in it. You got every single one of them wrong. Now that takes some real effort, Joe. Forty of them are multiple choice. Statistically you should have gotten a quarter of those right. At the least, a couple. But you got none. Only way you could get none right would be if you knew the right answers and chose the wrong ones.”

  I don’t answer him.

  “That actually proves you’re not dumb at all, Joe,” he says, carrying on, and he’s really warming up now, really hitting his stride. He even unlocks his fingers. “Actually proves the opposite. That you’re smart. That’s what this test was designed to do. That’s why it’s full of stupid questions.” His smirk turns into a full-blown smile. “You’re smart, Joe, not brilliant, but smart enough to stand trial.”

  He opens his briefcase and puts the questionnaire inside. I wonder what else is in there. It’s a nicer briefcase than the one I used to own.

  “Joe is smart,” I say, and I put my big goofy smile on, where all my teeth show and my face lights up. Only these days it doesn’t light up as much. The scar running down the side of it tightens and my eye droops a little.

  “You can cut that bullshit now, Joe. The test proves you’re not as smart as you like to think you are.”

  My smile drops away. “What?”

  The shrink’s smile widens and I think that’s because he thinks I’m not getting his point, and I’m not, and that’s because he’s not making it. “It was a time test. It helps weed out the guys not smart enough to pretend they really are that dumb.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s the only genuine thing you have told me,” he says. He stands up and walks to the door.

  I turn in my seat, but don’t stand up. I can’t, because of the cuff.

  He reaches out to knock on the door, but holds back. Instead he turns toward me. I must look pretty confused, because he goes ahead and explains it. “It was a time test, Joe. Sixty questions. It took you fifteen minutes. That’s four questions a minute. Each one of them you got wrong.”

  “I still don’t follow,” I tell him. Surely it’s a good thing that I can be that dumb that quickly.

  “You got them wrong too quickly, Joe. If you were as dumb as you wanted us to think, you’d still be doing the test now. You’d be drooling over it or licking the pages. You’d be thinking really hard searching for the answers. You didn’t search at all. You just answered each one in quick fire succession and that’s where you went wrong. You’re no idiot, Joe, but you were too dumb to figure out what was going on. I’ll see you in court.”

  “Fuck you.”

  He smiles again. His thousand-dollar smile that he’ll practice before being called up to speak in front of a jury, the thousand-dollar smile that won’t be worth a cent after I get out of here and learn where he lives and take that nice-looking briefcase off him. “That’s the Joe everybody is going to see,” he says, and then he knocks on the door and is escorted outside.

  Chapter Three

  It’s almost been a year since I was arrested. It’s felt longer. Every day for about a month I was the headline news. There were photos of me on every front page across the country. I even made some front pages around the world. Some were my ID photo from work; some were pictures of me younger, provided by schools I had gone to; and many were of me being arrested and many more were of me coming out of the hospital. Those of me being arrested were all snapped on cell phones. Those at the hospital were taken by reporters who arrived while I was still in surgery. Of course I was on TV a lot too. Footage from the same two events.

  There were requests for interviews that I wasn’t given the chance to accept or turn down. One week after the surgery I stood up in court and pled not guilty and was denied bail and was told a trial date would be set. Photos and footage were taken of me there too. My face was red and puffy, the eyelid purple, there were stitches and patches of ointment and I could hardly recognize myself.

  Then I started making the news only once a week. Other killers came and other killers went, taking up the headlines as more blood was spilled in the city. Then I was yesterday’s news, a mention of me perhaps once a month—if that.

  Now the trial is less than a week away, and I’m the headlining act once again.

  My arrest set a chain of events into motion. Actually, those events started two days before my arrest when the police figured out who they were looking for. Of course you could even say that chain of events was put into motion the night I met Melissa. I met her in a bar. We got on well. I was walking her home thinking how nice it’d be to see her naked and perhaps with a few twisted limbs and definitely some blood too, only she was thinking how nice it’d be to tie me up and rip apart my testicle with a pair of pliers. She was the one who got her wish because in the bar she had figured out who I was. She tied me up to a tree in a park and while she clamped the pliers on my testicle and squeezed, I could do nothing but wish for death. Her death, at first, and then my death.

  Only it didn’t work out that way. Instead she tried to blackmail me for money, then I filmed her killing Detective Calhoun, and then we fell in love. Opposites attract—but so do people who enjoy hurting others.

  I made my way ho
me, and that week Melissa kept showing up at my apartment to help me. At least I thought it was her who had come to help me. I was out of it most of that week, delirious. Half the time my head was full of bad dreams and the other half even worse dreams. It turned out I was wrong about who was helping me. It was Sally that had come to my apartment, not Melissa. Fat Sally. Simple Sally. And in the process of helping me, Simply Fat Sally, or, The Sally as I now think of her, had seen some things she shouldn’t have. The Sally had touched a parking ticket I had hidden away, a parking ticket I had hoped to use to frame Detective Calhoun for murder. Only the card had her prints on it too, so the police came to her house, and the rest, as they say, is one fucking annoying history.

  So the chain of events was started. The police went to my apartment on a Friday night, only I wasn’t there. I was with Melissa. They searched it and found a whole bunch of stuff that wasn’t too helpful for my cause. Then they waited for me, and I didn’t show up, and then they decided that I had run. Only I hadn’t. I came home on the Sunday morning and there was one police unit waiting for me. They radioed in, a minute or two later there were a dozen. I pulled a gun. I tried to shoot myself. The Sally stopped that from happening. She jumped on me and pulled the gun away.

  From there I was taken to the hospital. I started making the news. Then I began to experience loss. I lost my freedom. I lost my job. I lost my cat. It was a cat I had found weeks earlier that had been hit by a car. When I made the news, the vet who had taken care of that cat recognized me, and they came and picked it up. I lost my apartment. My mom started getting interview requests, and my mom would say all sorts of weird shit. Life moves on for everybody on the outside, but inside these walls life feels like it’s come to a standstill. If anybody ever wants to know how twelve months can feel like twelve years, all they have to do is get arrested for murder.

  My prison cell makes my apartment look like a hotel. Makes my mom’s house look like a palace. Makes the interrogation room look like an interrogation room. It makes me miss all of those places. It’s one room that’s about twice as wide as the bed and not much longer, and the bed I have isn’t that big to begin with. A real estate agent would call it cozy. A funeral director would call it roomy. I got four concrete block walls, one of them with a metal door stamped into the middle of it. No real view to talk of, just a small slot in the door that looks out to more concrete and metal and other cell doors if you can get the angle right. It’s a neighborly kind of place because there are people in cells to my left and right, people that won’t shut up, people who have been in here a lot longer than I have and who will continue to be in here long after I’ve been found not guilty.

  On one side of me is Kenny Jefferies. Kenny Jefferies is a man of three lives. In one life he is, or was, the guitarist for a heavy metal band. They called themselves Tampon of Lamb. They released two albums and built up an audience of people who like their music on the raw and bloody side, and went on tour. Then they released a greatest-hits album, and then people found out about Jefferies’s second life, which meant no more tours and no more albums. It was his second life that made him a household name—the media began to call him Santa Suit Kenny. In his second life he was a child rapist who would dress up as Santa to draw his victims away from their parents. As one of the prison guards here said a while ago, only the children can know which of those two professions Jefferies was better at. The guard summed it up by saying I sure as hell hope he was a better rapist than he was a singer, because he was a fucking awful singer.

  Jefferies’s third life is as a convict. Sometimes he sings or hums music I can’t understand. Sometimes he’ll play a guitar that isn’t there, he’ll strum the air and sing about torture and pain, which must hurt his throat. When I think about heavy metal music, I think the evolution of mankind has peaked and we’re surfing the downslope to becoming monkeys again.

  On the other side of me is Roger Harwick—though more commonly known as Small Dick. And it’s not like when people call the big guy Tiny to be ironic. Harwick struggled with his victims. It’s not that he didn’t have the desire to perform, he just didn’t have the “tools.” My guess is he was attracted to children because he thought they’d be a better fit. Only he was wrong. It made him famous in the media because his failed attempts made him a joke. He was the comical child molester—or at least as comical as a child molester can be—and compared to some of them in here, it makes him hilarious. So right now I’m surrounded by celebrity pedophiles—and it’s the safest place to be. That’s why I’m here. Away from general population, where my neck won’t get snapped by any one of a thousand inmates up to the task. My entire cellblock is full of guys like Jefferies and Harwick. In the mornings we’re all kept in our cells, but when twelve o’clock comes around we’re all let out into a common area, thirty of us in total, not too many inmates to control. Some of us stick to ourselves, some try sticking filed-down toothbrushes into each other, some try sticking body parts into each other. We share a kitchenette and a bathroom, and we can go outside into a caged area big enough to swing a dead puppy, but too small to swing a dead hooker by her ankles. If small is cozy in real estate terms, then a real estate agent would list this entire cellblock as being super fucking cozy.

  There isn’t a lot I can do in my cell, but I do have options. I can sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the wall, or I can stare at the toilet, or I can sit on the toilet and stare at the bed. It’s been a painful twelve months. There’s the occasional interview from the psychiatrist, but after this morning’s performance I think those might be over. My mom has come to see me twice a week every week. Monday and Thursdays. For the most part it looks like prison is all about boredom. If I was in general population I’d be less bored, but I’d also be dead. All I have is a couple of books in the corner of my floor and people in cells next to me who can’t go three hours without masturbating loudly. Next door, Santa Suit Kenny is humming “Muff Punching the Queen.” It’s the title track of their first album and the song that made them famous. He’s tapping his foot against the floor. I pick up one of the romance paperbacks and open the covers, and the words blend into one and hold no attraction for me whatsoever. I keep thinking I ought to write my own book. Teach some people the truth about romance. But that’s a stupid idea. Nobody would read it. But maybe they would read anything written by the Christchurch Carver. Maybe I should write a book on how I would have done the things they are saying I did, if I could remember doing them. Of course, if that were true, and I really couldn’t remember any of it, it would really just make it a book full of blank pages. I remember every detail, every woman, every word spoken. I think about them a lot. It’s the memories you have that stop you wrapping a sheet around your throat and hanging from the end of the bed.

  I throw the romance paperback back down in the corner. It makes no sense I’m still in here. I am better than this. Smarter. It makes no sense I couldn’t talk my way out of this when Schroder and his henchmen came for me. I can’t imagine spending twenty years in here. I’m only weeks away from becoming the same amount of crazy I’ve been pretending to be over the last few years.

  Most of all, I can’t stop thinking about the stupid test.

  It should have been so obvious. I missed the point completely. Is it possible I’m not as smart as Barlow told me I wasn’t?

  Santa Kenny goes quiet, and I’m pretty sure I know what he’s doing. Small Dick—or Little D as he’s called around here—has struck up a conversation with the guy in the cell next to him. It’s a shit conversation because they’re talking about the weather. They have no idea what it’s like outside because there’s no view. But they talk about the weather a lot, those two. I’d have thought they’d talk more about what they had in common—the reasons they are in here—but it turns out they don’t talk about that much at all. It’s like the memories are too exciting for them. They are pure adrenaline. It’s like if they touch on those experiences they’re going to start climbing the walls.

  The
sound of a door opening further up the corridor makes everybody in the block go quiet. There are footsteps down the corridor and voices outside, then the footsteps stop a few cells down from mine. I peek out the slot in the door, sure others in here are doing the same. There are three people standing out there. I recognize two of them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the two guards says, a guy by the name of Adam. “Let’s have a warm round of applause for the return of one of your favorite cellmates,” Adam says. “He’s come back to us after fifteen years in jail, six weeks on the outside, and the last three weeks in suicide watch. You know him, you love him, the one, the only, Mr. Caleb Cole.”

  Nobody claps. Nobody makes a sound. None of us know him personally. None of us care. Caleb Cole wasn’t in our cellblock. We’ve seen him on the news, but really, who gives a fuck?

  “Come on, ladies, that’s no way to treat a friend. Caleb will be joining your group because he’s no longer fit to be placed into general population. He has . . . what’s the word we keep hearing? That’s right—he has issues. So what do you say, Caleb, don’t be shy, you have a word for your new roommates? Want to share some of your issues with them?”

  If Caleb does have a word for us, he keeps it to himself. I remember twelve months ago being given the same treatment. Two guards escorting me down here and introducing me to what, they said, was my new family. I remember the absolute fear as few people clapped, and I got a few wolf whistles too, which, thank God, never led anywhere, and when asked to say a word I had the same response as Caleb. I’ve seen this a few times now, and nobody ever says anything. Back when I was first brought in, I didn’t know how I was going to make it through that night, let alone the months before the trial began. I mentally committed suicide about a hundred times, my mind drifting down those paths and visualizing the outcome, every time realizing nobody would really care. Maybe Melissa.