Joe Victim

Chapter Forty-Six

When Ali arrives and I’m escorted through to see her, I’m nervous. Suddenly there’s a lot more riding on me convincing her I’m an innocent man. I may have just earned myself fifty thousand dollars, but I’d gladly part with every one of them to have her believe me.

“Tell me about your mother,” she asks, once we’re seated and I’m cuffed to mine.

“My mother? Why?”

“Because I asked.”

I shrug, the handcuff rattling against the chair. “Well, Mom is Mom,” I say. “There’s not much to say,” I add, which is about as much as I feel like adding.

“You have a good relationship with her?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Most serial killers have very strained relationships with their mother,” she says.

“Can you not use that term?” I ask her.

“Serial killer?”

“Yeah. It sounds so. . I don’t know. Something. I don’t like the label,” I say.

“You don’t like the label.”

“That’s right,” I say.

She stares at me as if she can’t really believe I just said that. As if innocent until proven guilty isn’t relevant in my case. “Whether you remember it or not,” she says, “you still killed those people. The serial-killer label is accurate.”

“Is that the label my lawyer will be using?”

She nods. “I get your point,” she says. “But let’s get back to my point, which is most people in your. . situation. . don’t have great relationships with their mother.”

“Joe isn’t most people,” I tell her, and truer words have never been spoken.

“How long did you live with her for?”

“I moved out of the house when Dad died,” I tell her.

“Why?”

“My mother became unbearable. When Dad was alive it gave her somebody to talk to all day long, but when he died that only left me.”

“She ever abuse you?”

“What?” I say, and the handcuff goes tight as I pull my arm up. “No. Never. Why would you ask something like that?”

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m fucking sure,” I tell her. “My mom’s a saint.”

“Okay, Joe. Try to stay calm.”

“I am calm.”

“You don’t sound it.”

I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I say, which are words I’m not sure I’ve heard myself address to anyone before other than my mother. “I just don’t like it when people think bad things about my mother,” I say, but I’m not sure anybody has ever had good thoughts about her either. “Plus I miss my goldfish,” I tell her.

“What?”

“My goldfish. There were two of them. Pickle and Jehovah. They were murdered.”

“We were talking about your mother,” she says.

“I thought we had moved on,” I tell her.

She jots down something on her pad. Then the pen moves back and forth as she underlines something. I’d almost give my right-and only remaining nut-to see what that is.

“You killed your goldfish?” she asks.

I try to stay calm, but I can feel the anger building up inside of me. For her to ask that means she just doesn’t get me. It seems to be a common problem. What is wrong with people? First she thinks my mom abused me, now she thinks I killed my fish. What is the world coming to? Now I’d almost certainly give my right and only remaining nut to get hold of the pen she’s using and drive it into her neck.

“No. No I didn’t,” I say forcefully. “It was a cat.”

“You look angry, Joe.”

“I’m not angry. I just hate the fact people always think the worst of me.”

“You killed a lot of people,” she says.

“I don’t remember any of them,” I say, “and I sure as hell didn’t hurt my fish.”

She writes something else down. She underlines it, then she rings a couple of circles around it. I’m pretty sure she’s doing it deliberately. I think she’s trying to throw me off guard, and that’s why her questions are all over the place. It’s not going to work. I think good things about my mom and about my fish, good things about Melissa. I think about doing good things to Ali once I get out of here. I might be a bad-thoughts kind of guy, but I’m a good-things kind of person. I’m Optimistic Joe. It’s how I roll.

“Tell me,” she says, “does the name Ronald Springer mean anything to you?”

Ronald Springer. Now she really has thrown me off guard. “No,” I say. “Should it?” I ask. The police asked me about Ronald a few months ago. Schroder did. They asked if I had known him. If I had any idea what had happened to him. I told them I never knew him, and they seemed disappointed, but had no reason not to believe me. No reason, sure, but they still spent a few hours questioning me about him.

“It means nothing?”

“It means something,” I tell her, knowing I’ve already reacted to the name, knowing she’ll have been told about my previous interviews. “Detective Carl came to see me a while ago to ask if I had known him. Ronald went to my school.”

“Did you know him?”

“No. I knew who he was, but that was only after he was murdered. I could tell Schroder wasn’t expecting any connection, he was just hoping to wrap up a cold case, only I had nothing to do with it.”

“You’re positive?”

“Of course I’m positive.”

“So how is it you can be positive when you don’t remember killing any of these other people?” she asks.

“Because killing isn’t in my nature.”

“That’s a quick response,” she says.

I shrug. I don’t really know how to respond to it.

“Killing is in your nature,” she says. “You just don’t know you’re doing it. Which means it’s possible you did hurt Ronald and just don’t remember it. Ronald went missing the same month your auntie stopped raping you.”

“Raping?”

“That’s what she was doing, Joe,” she says, but I’m shaking my head.

“That’s the wrong word,” I tell her.

“What’s the right word then? Punishing you?”

“No. She was forgiving me. Forgiving me for breaking into her house.”

“Is that really how you see it, Joe?”

“Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You say you only knew of him after he was murdered,” she says.

“That’s right.”

“The police never said he was murdered. Ronald just disappeared. How would you know he was murdered?”

“It’s just an assumption,” I tell her, and I hate her for trying to fool me. “The police thought so. Everybody thought so. That’s what normally happens when people go missing, right?”

“Sometimes,” she says.

“Well if he wasn’t murdered, what then?”

“Tell me about Ronald.”

“There’s nothing to tell. He was a kid that nobody knew until he was mur. . until he went missing, then people were figuring out who he was, then suddenly he’d been everybody’s best friend. People were going around school telling Ronald stories. There were rumors, right, that he had run away, that he had been abducted, that his parents had killed him. School was nearly over and the way people were talking, you’d think Ronald had been a hot topic since school started. It was weird. Knowing Ronald made you popular. I didn’t understand it. Ronald would have hated all of those guys. Every one of them.”

“You knew him, then?”

“No. I mean, I’d spoken to him a few times because we were in some of the same classes. But people gave him a hard time. They gave me a hard time too. We had that in common, I suppose.”

“Sounds like you knew him a little.”

“I mean we didn’t hang out. Maybe a few times at school we’d eat lunch together because neither of us really had any other friends.”

“Why did the other kids pick on him?”

“You know already,” I tell her. “If you’ve read about him.”

“Because he was gay,” she says.

I shrug. “It didn’t matter if he was gay or not, not for real,” I say, “but once people start throwing around labels like gay boy or serial killer, they stick. People need to be more careful with that kind of thing-but at that age nobody is.”

“How long had you known him?”

“For always. We started school together when we were five, so I’ve always known who he was.”

“Did you kill him, Joe?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Or you did, but can’t remember.”

“I guess that’s possible,” I say. “Why are you so interested in Ronald anyway?”

“Because your lawyer asked me to ask you about him. It seems the people prosecuting you have been looking into the case. We don’t know what their interest is, but they may introduce it at trial.”

I shake my head. “I liked Ronald,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t have hurt him.”

“How long were you friends?”

“We weren’t friends. I just knew who he was, and I liked him because he was the guy people teased, and you need kids like that in school so the rest of us are safe.”

“How long had you been having lunch with him?”

I shrug. I think about it. “A year. Maybe two. Not long. And it wasn’t every day.”

“Did you see him outside of school?”

“Never.”

“Did you used to think that he was attracted to you?”

I almost laugh at that. “What? No. No way. I’m not gay,” I tell her.

“That’s not what I asked,” she says. “I asked if you thought he liked you.”

“I’m sure he probably did. I was the only guy who talked to him that wasn’t giving him a hard time.”

“I mean, Joe, do you think he liked you in a sexual nature?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know where you’re going with any of this,” I say, “but I didn’t kill him. I don’t know what happened, and the prosecution can dig into it all they want because I had nothing to do with it. Can we move on?”

“No. Not yet. Tell me something else about Ronald. Tell me about the last time you saw him.”

“Jesus, why the hell is everybody hung up on Ronald? I’m telling you, I don’t know what happened to the guy.”

She stares at me and says nothing and I realize I’ve been shouting. I shake my head and I think about Ronald, and I picture him the way I saw him last. School wasn’t a whole lot of fun for either of us, and I imagine it’s like that for most people. We weren’t best friends, but he was a pretty good friend. He’d come around after school sometimes, we’d head down to the beach, sometimes mountain bike around the sand dunes, or climb trees in the park. We’d talk about the kind of stuff that sixteen-year-old boys talked about, except for women. We didn’t talk about them. I knew he was gay. When we were fifteen, though, he was so deep in the closet I’m sure he could taste Turkish delight. I knew he liked me. I didn’t mind-having a gay guy like you doesn’t make you gay, it just makes you feel flattered. Then things changed. The Big Bang happened, followed by two years of smaller bangs, and my friendship with Ronald got pushed aside. I saw him around at school, but I hardly spoke to him. I saw him getting a hard time, but that just meant things were easier for me, and now that I was paying off my bullies, life was actually pretty good. Except for the auntie-loving rape, as Ali would put it.

When my relationship with Auntie Celeste stopped, I started hanging out with Ronald again. Only things were different-I think the most awkward thing between us was the fact he didn’t want me hanging out with him anymore, but I’d still follow him around anyway. I knew he’d come around. After all, the guy had had a crush on me the previous year, and crushes like that don’t disappear. It only made sense he’d want to be my friend again. Truth is, him ignoring me annoyed me just as much as my auntie ignoring me. I felt abandoned all over.

I wanted to punish my auntie. Not for what she had done, but for finally making me enjoy it, and then for cutting off the supply. So when Ronald started rejecting me too-well, I didn’t just feel abandoned, but I felt angry too. The same anger I felt toward my auntie-only with Ronald I could do something about it.

“I can’t really remember the last time I saw him,” I tell her. “One day he was there, and the next day he wasn’t, and that’s how most people will always remember him.”

“But not you,” she says. “You remember him in a different way.”

The way I remember him is indeed different. The way I remember him is with a hole in the side of his skull that a claw hammer would fit nicely into. “I didn’t kill him,” I say, only I did kill him. He rejected me and I hit him with a hammer. People say you always remember your first-and people don’t get much right, but in this case it’s spot on. Ronald was my first-I remember him-I just don’t think about him.

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“Positive,” I say.

“He didn’t come on to you, and you rejected him by killing him?”

“Nothing like that happened at all,” I say.

“That’s a shame,” she says. Again it takes a few seconds for her words to sink in. They only just have when she carries on. “If you had, then we could have linked everything back to the events with your auntie. We could have shown it all started back then, and that what has happened to you since were results of that. People aren’t going to believe that you let twelve years slip by between the events of your auntie and killing your first person.”

It feels like a test, like she is baiting me to suddenly say that I do remember killing him.

“Joe?”

“Yes?”

“I think I have what I need,” she says.

“Already?”

“Yes,” she says, and she stands up.

“And?”

“And what?” she asks.

“What are you going to tell the courts?” I ask.

“I’ll spend the rest of the day going over my notes, Joe, and then I’ll talk to your lawyer.”

“So you believe me?”

She knocks on the door and turns toward me. “Like I said, Joe, I’ll talk to your lawyer,” she says, and then she is gone.