Joe Victim

Chapter Nineteen

Raphael is tired.

He can’t remember the last time he had a good night’s sleep. He has had them since his daughter was murdered, but only when his body has become so exhausted all its core systems have shut down and it was either sleep or die. Often he’d hope it was the latter, only to wake up to find it was the former. Often he thinks of ways to change that. Life isn’t great when you wake up in the morning and think about what your friends will say about you at your funeral. It’s not great thinking about the way you’ll die, the best way to not make a mess for everybody, and there are a lot of ways-a lot of clever ways and a lot of simple ways. He has planned his suicide how many times? A hundred? A thousand? Once a day, sometimes five times a day, sometimes more. Sometimes he can’t figure out why he hasn’t done it already. It’s just a matter of time. He knows that. Whenever he hears about somebody who has killed himself, he thinks Seems like a good idea to me.

Of course he wants to be strong. Wants to be strong for his dead daughter, for his son-in-law, and of course for his grandchildren. Not that he ever sees any of them. Three months after Angela died, his son-in-law moved away. He took the kids with him and traveled to the other side of the world. He had family in England. In a small village somewhere. A village, he said, that didn’t harbor crazy people like Joe.

Raphael is more alone than he has ever been in his life.

He stands in the doorway and watches the car pulling into the parking lot. Probably some other poor bastard who’s lost somebody in this city. The car comes to a stop. One person climbs out. Then a second. Both of them flick their collars up against the rain and walk quickly toward him. Schroder and somebody else. His heart races a little. Police don’t come visiting unless they have bad news. His wife? Oh God, has his wife followed through on his fantasy? Has she upended a bottle of sleeping pills?

“Detective,” Raphael says, his voice a little shaky. He offers his hand.

“It’s no longer detective,” Schroder says, shaking it, “just Carl now. This is Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent,” he adds, and then says to Kent, “and this is Raphael Moore.”

He looks at Kent. Her hair is wet and strands are stuck to the side of her face. He has the urge to reach forward and stroke some of them away, and thinks he has that urge because Detective Kent is an extremely attractive woman.

“It’s an awful night,” he says, and he figures if he can just keep them talking about the inane, then he won’t have to hear about the real.

“You’ve just wrapped up a session?” Kent asks, and all three of them glance through the open doorway into the hall where there are six stragglers sipping coffee and talking. He wonders if the two detectives-no, wait, one detective and one no-longer-detective-recognize them. At some point over the last few years these people were all given bad news. It’s a bad-news kind of country, a worse-case-scenario kind of city.

“About ten minutes ago,” Raphael says, looking back at them now. “Has something happened? Is it my wife?”

Schroder shakes his head. “No, no, it’s not that kind of visit,” Schroder says.

Raphael breathes a sigh of relief. Thank God. He glances back inside. Hopefully the others will leave soon. Hopefully he can get rid of these two quickly. He wants to get back to Stella. Stella with her fake baby and her plan to kill Joe Middleton, and really, has there been a day that has gone by where he has not thought about murdering Middleton just as often as he’s thought about killing himself? “We haven’t seen you in a while, Carl.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy,” Schroder says.

Raphael doubts that’s it. In the beginning both he and Schroder thought it was good to have a police presence at the group, but it turned out they were wrong-it turned out a police presence gave the group somebody to blame.

“You should come back,” Raphael says. “It was helpful. It made the people here feel like they had a voice. So why are you here then? Something to do with Middleton? This about his trial?”

“In a way,” Schroder says, and he steps closer to the doorway, but the rain is still getting him. Raphael doesn’t make any more room. He wants to keep this meeting outside. Wants to keep it short.

“Was Tristan Walker one of your group?” Kent asks.

“Tristan Walker?” he asks. “To be honest,” he says, “I’m not so sure I’m comfortable telling you who comes along here. I mean, all of these people have the right to privacy,” he says, and the moment the words are out of his mouth he knows it makes no sense-half a minute ago he was asking Schroder to start coming back.

“Please, Raphael,” Schroder says, “don’t make this difficult for us. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”

Raphael nods. “Why? Has he done something?”

“Did he come to the group?” Kent asks, and she flashes her smile at him and for a brief moment Raphael wants to tell her everything about his secret fantasy to wrap himself in plastic and hide himself beneath the house and take a bunch of pills so that nobody will ever find him, nobody will ever know what happened, so that he will have just disappeared from this life and this world. He imagines a lot of men would give in to that smile, and on other nights he would too. But not tonight. Not with Stella waiting for him, not with thoughts of killing Joe Middleton running around in his head.

“I contacted him a few times, but he always said no, then I stopped trying.”

“Why’d you stop trying?” Schroder asks.

Raphael shrugs. “Well, he wasn’t thrilled with me contacting him,” he says. “But then I heard a rumor and realized he wasn’t really the kind of person I wanted in this support group.”

“What kind of rumor?” Kent asks.

“I heard he used to beat his wife,” Raphael says, rubbing his hands to keep them warm. He heard it from another person in the group who heard it from a cousin or a neighbor or some such thing. “Is it true?”

“He’s never been charged,” Schroder says, rubbing his hands too.

“That isn’t the same as you telling me it wasn’t true. So why are you here asking about him? Has he beaten somebody else up?”

“He was murdered this afternoon,” Kent says, burying her hands into her pockets.

“Oh,” Raphael says, and he takes a small step back. “Oh,” he repeats, and isn’t sure what else to add. He can’t say Good, he probably deserved it, because he doesn’t know for a fact that the guy was a wife beater, and even if he was, does that merit the death penalty? The appropriate sentiment comes to him in the end. “Shit.”

“Walker was due to testify at Middleton’s trial,” Schroder says. “Just like you are. And other family members of victims. You probably had a dozen people in your group tonight who are all testifying.”

Walker slowly nods. The rain every ten seconds or so washes over them as the wind pushes it sideways. He thinks about what it’s going to be like testifying. He’s thought about it a lot. He’s thought about how far he could make it from the witness box to Joe before somebody stopped him. He thought about how difficult it would be to smuggle a weapon into the building. About carving a knife out of wood or bone. He thought about how many men it would take to stop him. All those thoughts were only a fantasy-the best he knew he could do was form this group, help others, and starting next week they would protest.

“What are you saying?” Raphael asks. “You think some of us are targets too?”

“We can’t rule it out,” Kent says.

“Who would want to target us?”

“We don’t know,” Schroder says, but Raphael doesn’t believe him. Something in his voice makes Raphael think Schroder may have an idea.

“So what can I do?” Raphael asks.

“We were actually hoping to get here before the meeting was over,” Schroder says, “so we could talk to you all as a group.”

“Well, I know who some of them are,” Raphael says. “I can make a list. And we’re all meeting again on Monday.”

“Another session?” Kent asks.

“Actually, no,” Raphael says. “We’re meeting outside the courthouse. We’re going to protest against those who are going to protest against the death-penalty referendum. There’ll be around thirty of us from the group going, and all of us will probably bring somebody, and no doubt there’ll already be others going anyway. Could be hundreds,” he says, but really he’s hoping for thousands and doesn’t see any reason why it won’t be. Like he thought earlier, it’s a bad-news kind of country. All that bad news has left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths-plenty of anger to go around, plenty of people willing to show up.

“And you’re leading it?” Kent asks.

“No,” Raphael says. “Just taking part. There is no leader.”

“But you’re helping organize it,” Kent says.

“I’m just doing my part as a concerned citizen.”

“You do know a protest like that has every possibility of getting out of hand,” Kent says, her voice hardening. “For both sides.”

Raphael frowns. “We need to be heard,” he says. “And we have every right to peacefully protest. We have every legal right. Joe Middleton is exactly the reason we need this law brought in,” he adds, keeping his voice level, but inside he’s yelling at her. “I intend to offer my complete support. We’re all planning on it.”

“And if somebody gets hurt?” she asks. “Then what?”

“We’re all victims,” Raphael says. “We’ve already been hurt. All we’re doing is peacefully protesting against the anti-capital punishment movement, and against the current system. I’m sure there will be enough police on the scene to keep everybody in check,” he says, but truth be told he isn’t so sure. Not having enough police hasn’t done well for the city over the last few years-and perhaps Monday’s protest won’t be any different. But it’s not his job to keep the city safe. It’s Kent’s job. And people like Kent. And people like Schroder too.

“Was Tristan Walker part of the movement?” Kent asks. “Was he going to be there?”

Raphael hadn’t heard anybody use movement to describe what he’s doing. It doesn’t quite fit right in some way. “We are a group of people trying to change the country,” he says, “and if that makes us a movement, then so be it.”

“And Walker?” Kent repeats.

“I don’t know. I hadn’t told him about it, but maybe he was coming. I’d have hoped he would be.”

“Were there any new faces tonight, anybody suspicious?” Schroder asks.

Raphael puts his hand to his chin and crosses his forefinger over his lips, then slowly taps the finger up and down. All he can think about is the woman in the car. “Suspicious? In what way?”

“Somebody who didn’t belong,” Schroder says.

He shakes his head, the finger remaining in place. “No, nobody,” he says. “I mean, there were new people here, there often is and always will be as long as people keep getting murdered. As for somebody suspicious, no, nothing. Nobody who didn’t belong.”

“You sure?” Schroder asks.

“It’s not like somebody came in here covered in blood and waving a knife,” he says. “Most people when they come, they don’t speak. It’s almost like an AA meeting. People are nervous. They don’t know what to expect. They want to hear other people’s pain before sharing their own. It takes them a few weeks to open up. We’re doing good work here. We’re helping people.”

“What about a woman?” Kent asks. “Were there any women tonight who stood out?”

“A woman?” he asks, and he has to make a conscious effort not to look back at the car. “Why? Was it a woman who killed Tristan Walker?”

“Nobody is saying that,” Kent says, “but there’s a woman we’re hoping to question. A blond woman,” she adds.

A blond woman. The woman in the car has black hair. Even so, the woman in the car wants to kill Joe. Why would a woman who wants to kill Joe also want to kill Tristan Walker? He thinks about the others who came along. There were blond women there, there always are, but there are. . what? Fifty thousand blond women in the city?

“You have a name? Or any other features?”

“Just blond,” Kent says, glancing at Schroder first. “A woman wearing a blond wig.”

“That’s not a lot to go on,” Raphael says. “There were new faces here tonight, there always are, and we don’t have any kind of sign-in sheet. There were blond women here tonight, but nobody stood out.”

“How about you make us that list,” Kent says, “of the people you do know who came along.”

“It’ll take me about five minutes,” he says.

“We can wait.”

Raphael nods once, then moves back inside. The final few people are leaving. They say their good-byes and offer sad smiles. He starts working on the list, but doesn’t put Stella on it, not wanting to draw attention to a woman who had no reason to hurt Walker, and who has the potential to bring him so much happiness.