Joe Victim

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 doors. 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.

“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.