Trust No One (13 page)

Jerry nods. “Sure,” he says, then realizes he doesn’t remember it at all. “Was it memorable?”

“What about the day before?”

This time he shakes his head.

“The name Belinda Murray,” Eric says, “does that mean anything to you?”

“Belinda Murray?” Jerry thinks about it, letting the name filter though his memory banks. It goes through his mind without catching. “Should it?”

Eric claps him on the shoulder and smiles. “Possibly not,” Eric says. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“I feel good,” Jerry says, which he knows is a stock-standard answer, which must mean at the very least he’s still remembering how human beings act in society. He also knows half an hour ago when he woke up, he was confused for a little while. He realizes he hasn’t asked how Eric is, so maybe he has forgotten a few of the social going-along-to-get-along rules. He does that now.

“I’m good, buddy,” Eric answers.

Then Jerry remembers something else. “How’s the writing?”

“Good,” Eric says, looking thrilled to have been asked, and Jerry is equally as thrilled to have remembered. “I’ve been inspired by something. In fact, I can have you to thank for that. You and your advice of writing what you know.”

Jerry wonders what that advice might be. “You’re writing about an orderly?”

“Ha,” Eric says, and slaps him on the back. “That’s closer to the truth than you’d know. I better go and get some work done, and you need to go and have some breakfast and get ready soon too, as you’ve got visitors on their way.”

“Sandra and Eva?”

“Sadly not, buddy.”

The visitors end up arriving just before noon, and it turns out to be a pair of policemen, which is disappointing, he thinks, but not as disappointing as being visited by your accountant. The first cop introduces himself. He’s a guy by the name of Dennis Mayor who looks nothing like any Dennis that Jerry has ever known, and the second guy is Chris Jacobson, who looks more like a Dennis than a Chris. They tell Jerry they came out yesterday to see him, and he almost calls them liars, because they weren’t here yesterday . . . but then he thinks it’s possible they were. Plus now that he thinks about it, they
do
look vaguely familiar. The introductions are made in a bedroom that is currently unoccupied, the previous patient dead, Jerry imagines, since nobody here really ever gets better. There are five of them—the two cops, Eric, Nurse Hamilton, and there’s him, Jerry Grey, crime writer. When they’re all sitting down he realizes this isn’t just an unoccupied bedroom but an interrogation room. The two cops are sitting opposite him, and Eric is to his left and Nurse Hamilton to his right. He feels concerned. He feels like he should be asking for a lawyer.

Before he can ask what this is about, Mayor leans forward and starts the proceedings. “Does the name Belinda Murray mean anything to you?”

Belinda Murray.
Jerry compares the name to faces from the past, scanning through them the way fingerprints are scanned on TV shows, image after image flicking by. He doesn’t get a hit. Yet . . . there is something familiar about it. “I know the name.”

“You want to tell us about her?” Mayor asks.

He wants to, but . . . “I . . . can’t.”

“And why is that?”

“I don’t know who she is.”

“You just said you know the name,” Jacobson says.

“I know, but . . .” He runs the name against the faces again. “I just don’t know from where.”

“That could be my fault,” Eric says, and everybody looks at Eric, except Jerry, because he’s looking at the two cops who look annoyed with Eric. Eric follows it up. “I asked him earlier this morning if he knew the name. I’m sorry, probably—”

“Shouldn’t have?” Mayor asks.

Eric shrugs. “That might be where he’s remembering it from.”

“You’re right, you really shouldn’t have done that,” Mayor says.

“And why not?” Nurse Hamilton asks, glaring at Mayor. “Jerry was the one who told the name to us, and we’re the ones who gave that news to you. Don’t sit there trying to make out we’ve done something wrong here when all we’re doing is trying to uncover the truth.”

“You’re right,” Mayor says. “I’m sorry, and we’re grateful for your help. However, we’re here because he did tell you her name two days ago, so where was he remembering her from then?”

Jerry doesn’t like being talked about as if he’s not in the room. It makes him feel like an object. A subject. “Who is Belinda Murray?” he asks.

They all look back towards him.

“I don’t know who she is,” he says.

“Perhaps show him the photograph,” Nurse Hamilton says.

Jacobson nods, and opens up a folder that’s resting on his knee. He pulls out a photograph and hands it over to Jerry. It’s an eight-by-ten glossy of a blond woman with blue eyes and a beautiful smile, a girl-next-door smile, a midtwenties girl with all sorts of hopes and promises who would have had all sorts of men queuing across all sorts of miles for the chance to date her. Jerry already knows where this is going. Of course he does.

“You think I killed her,” he says.

“And why would you say that?” Mayor asks.

“Look, detectives, I may be losing my mind, but not enough to miss the obvious. This,” he says, and spreads his arms to indicate the room and all that is in it, “is an interrogation. You’re here because this girl is dead, and I’m sorry about that, I really am, but I don’t know her and I didn’t hurt her.”

“It’s because—” Mayor says, but then stops when Nurse Hamilton holds her hand up to him.

“Let me explain it to him,” she says.

Mayor looks at his partner, and his partner gives him a small
why not
shrug.

Nurse Hamilton angles the chair so she can face Jerry almost full on, and she takes his hand in both of hers and leans forward. He can smell coffee on her breath and she’s wearing the same perfume his sister-in-law wears. He can’t remember his sister-in-law’s name, or the last time he ever thought about her, but he can remember how she looks, and can imagine she had a hand in Sandra’s decision to leave him. He pictures the two of them slumped on couches, their feet up, drinking wine and listening to music and his wife saying it’s all too tough, her sister telling her she’s young enough to start over, to cut Jerry loose and find some guy half her age. Suddenly he wishes it were a picture of the sister-in-law they were showing him, not a complete stranger.

“Jerry, are you feeling okay?”

“What?”

“You left us for a little bit there,” Nurse Hamilton says.

“I’m fine,” he tells her.

“You sure?”

He thinks about it for a few seconds. “I’ve been better.”

“Tell me if things become too stressful, okay?” she says.

“Are you going to get to the point or not?” Mayor asks.

She ignores him. “Okay, Jerry?”

“Tell you if things become stressful. I’ve got it,” he says, Sandra and her sister fading from his thoughts.

“Do you remember where you are?”

He doesn’t need to look around. It’s a simple question and they must really think he’s a special kind of stupid to be asking him this, but he still looks around anyway, just to make sure. “Of course I do. I know who I am and where I am. I’m in a nursing home because I have dementia. I was placed here because my wife decided to divorce me rather than let me stay at home. I’m here because Captain A takes over sometimes and I wander.”

“Who the hell is Captain A?” Mayor asks.

“It’s what he calls the Alzheimer’s,” Nurse Hamilton says. She turns back towards Jerry. She still has his hand between hers. “Do you remember what you did for a living?”

He nods.

“Tell me.”

“I used to write books,” he says. “I wrote ten of them.”

“You wrote thirteen. Do you remember two days ago, when you were sitting in the garden?”

“Thirteen? Are you sure?”

“The garden, Jerry.”

He’s spent a lot of time in the garden. He was there today. Probably yesterday and the day before, but when every day is the same, how can you tell one apart from the other?

“Not really,” he says.

Without even looking at the two detectives, Nurse Hamilton puts her arm out to the side and slightly behind her, her index finger raised in a
Don’t say a word
gesture. “You were in the garden and you were pulling out the roses, remember? You said you were helping. You said you used to help your neighbor the same way.”

“I did?” he asks, unable to remember the neighbor, unable to remember two days ago, unable to remember he wrote thirteen books and not ten.

“I took you by the hand and we sat down in the shade and I gave you a drink of water, and we talked for a while. Do you remember what we talked about?”

“Roses?” he asks, but really it’s just an educated guess. Then he thinks about what she’s saying, about what he does for a living. “It was about the books.”

“He doesn’t remember a damn thing,” Mayor says, loosening the top of his tie. He sounds frustrated. Jerry thinks he’s probably had a lot of frustrated cops in his novels. These guys probably drink a lot of coffee and have a lot of ex-wives and eventually they snap. The room is getting warmer, no doubt the five of them helping to raise the temperature, and he wants to get out of here. Not just out of this room, but out of the care facility. He wants to go back home.

Nurse Hamilton looks back to Jerry after having thrown Mayor another of her angry looks. Jerry doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those. “Jerry, do you remember Suzan?”

Jerry frowns and tilts his head a little, gritting his teeth at the same time. Of course he remembers Suzan. She was his first. He remembers finding her door unlocked and walking through her house, trying his hardest to not make any noises, and not making them. “How do you know about her?”

“It’s okay, Jerry,” she says, and tightens his hand. “Tell us about Suzan.”

He shakes his head.

“Trust me, Jerry. Please, you need to trust me.”

“With a
z,
” he says.

“That’s right.”

He lowers his voice. “In front of the detectives?”

“They’re here to help you.”

He looks over at them, these two men staring at him, one with his tie askew, the other not wearing one, both of them in need of a shave. Neither of these men look like they want to help. “Do I have to?”

“Yes,” she says, and so it is said and so it is law. That’s the thing about Nurse Hamilton—he can imagine even if he did completely forget about her, he would still follow her orders.

He starts talking normally again. “Suzan with a
z
is somebody I used to know when I was younger. She used to live on my street, and I—” He looks back at Nurse Hamilton. “Do I have to carry on?”

“No, Jerry, you don’t, because Suzan with a
z
doesn’t exist. She’s a character in one of your books.”

“She’s a . . .” he says, then stops midsentence. Suzan with a
z.
From a book. A couple of synapses fire off somewhere in the Jerry gray matter and there he is, sitting at his computer, trying to come up with a name for the character, and he wanted something relatable but also a little different. When it came to the main characters those names could be tough because you had to get them right, the name had to match the character, a good name would make a character feel far more genuine.

He remembers writing the scene, getting to the end and then going back over it, adding some and deleting some. He remembers every single detail, as if it were only yesterday he labored over the keyboard. He remembers writing a scene from Suzan’s point of view, and then deleting it, the book moving forward, going through editing, cover design, then the big day when it was set free into the world, and by then he was already working on the next book. He understands exactly what Nurse Hamilton is saying. He made up Suzan. She is a combination of words on paper, born from his need to write, his need to entertain, his need to pay the mortgage.

“Jerry?”

He looks back at Nurse Hamilton. She’s staring at him. “She’s a character,” he says. “Sometimes I get her mixed up with the real world.” He directs that last bit to the cops, and then gives a small appropriate laugh to prove they’re all friends here, nothing going on, just a lighthearted misunderstanding. But it doesn’t work. If anything, it makes him sound like a madman. And he knows what madmen sound like—he’s created enough of them.

“Belinda Murray is in the real world,” Mayor says.

“Jerry,” Nurse Hamilton says, her hands still on Jerry’s, “two days ago when we were sitting in the garden, do you remember telling me about Belinda?”

“Belinda from the books,” he says, trying to sound confident, sure that’s where she’s from but unable to remember her.

“I just said—” Mayor says, but then stops talking when Nurse Hamilton throws him another Nurse Hamilton look.

“No, not from the books,” she says to Jerry. “Belinda is a real person. You spoke to me about her.”

He runs the name against the Jerry Grey database. No match. “Are you sure?”

“This is useless,” Mayor says. “I say we just take him down to the station and talk to him there. We’ll get in somebody more qualified.” Nurse Hamilton looks towards him, and this time he doesn’t back down. “Come on, even you can see this is a waste of time,” he says.

“What’s happening?” Jerry asks.

She turns back towards him. “Jerry, Suzan with a
z,
you know she doesn’t exist, you see that, right?”

“Of course,” he says, feeling embarrassed he ever made that mistake, and promising himself never to make it again.

“She isn’t the only one,” Nurse Hamilton says. “Over the last year that you’ve been here, you—”

“Wait, wait, hold up a second,” Jerry says, shaking his head. “There’s some kind of mistake. I haven’t been here a year. I’ve been here . . .” He looks at Eric and gives him a shrug. “What? Two months at the most?”

“It’s been a year,” Eric says. “Eleven months to be exact.”

“No,” Jerry says, and starts to stand up, but Nurse Hamilton keeps hold of his hand and pulls him back down. “You’re lying to me,” he says.

“It’s okay, Jerry. Calm down, please.”