Mr. Mercedes: A Novel (14 page)

Here was Mr. Smiley-Face.

The sexual abuse went on until my stepfather died of a heart attack when I was 12. My mother said if I ever told, I would be blamed. She said if I showed the healed cigarette burns on my arms and legs and privates, she would tell people I did it myself. I was just a kid and I thought she was telling the truth. She also told me that if people did believe me, she would have to go to jail and I would be put in an orphan home (which was probably true).

I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t!”

I never grew very much and I was very thin because I was too nervous to eat and when I did I often threw up (bulimia). Hence and because of this, I was bullied at school. I also developed a bunch of nervous tics, such as picking at my clothes and pulling at my hair (sometimes pulling it out in bunches). This caused me to be laughed at, not just by the other kids but by teachers too.

Janey Patterson has returned and is once again sitting opposite him, drinking her coffee, but for the moment Hodges barely notices her. He’s thinking back to the four or five interviews he and Pete conducted with Mrs. T. He’s remembering how she was always straightening the boatneck tops. Or tugging down her skirt. Or touching the corners of her pinched mouth, as if to remove a crumb of lipstick. Or winding a curl of hair around her finger and tugging at it. That too.

He goes back to the letter.

I was never a mean kid, Mrs. Trelawney. I swear to you. I never tortured animals or beat up kids that were even smaller than I was. I was just a scurrying little mouse of a kid, trying to get through my childhood without being laughed at or humiliated, but at that I did not succeed.

I wanted to go to college, but I never did. You see,
I ended up taking care of the woman who abused me
! It’s almost funny, isn’t it? Ma had a stroke, possibly because of her drinking. Yes, she is also an alcoholic, or was when she could get to the store to buy her bottles. She can walk a little, but really not much. I have to help her to the toilet and clean her up after she “does her business.” I work all day at a low-paying job (probably lucky to have a job at all in this economy, I know) and then come home and take care of her, because having a woman come in for a few hours on week-days is all I can afford. It is a bad and stupid life. I have no friends and no possibility of advancement where I work. If Society is a bee-hive, then I am just another drone.

Finally I began to get angry. I wanted to make someone pay. I wanted to strike back at the world
and make the world know I was alive
. Can you understand that? Have you ever felt like that? Most likely not as you are wealthy and probably have the best friends money can buy.

Following this zinger, there’s another of those sunglasses-wearing smile-faces, as if to say Just kidding.

One day it all got to be too much and I did what I did. I didn’t plan ahead . . .

The fuck you didn’t, Hodges thinks.

. . . and I thought the chances were at least 50-50 that I would get caught. I didn’t care. And I SURE didn’t know how it would haunt me afterward. I still relive the thuds that resulted from hitting them, and I still hear their screams. Then when I saw the news and found out
I had even killed a baby
, it really came home to me what a terrible thing I had done. I don’t know how I live with myself.

Mrs. Trelawney, why oh why oh why did you leave your key in your ignition? If I had not seen that, walking one early morning because I could not sleep, none of this would have happened. If you hadn’t left your key in your ignition, that little baby and her mother would still be alive. I am not blaming you, I’m sure your mind was full of your own problems and anxieties, but I wish things had turned out different and if you had remembered to take your key they would have. I would not be burning in this hell of guilt and remorse.

You are probably feeling guilt and remorse too, and I am sorry, especially because very soon you will find out how mean people can be. The TV news and the papers will talk about how your carelessness made my terrible act possible. Your friends will stop talking to you. The police will hound you. When you go to the supermarket, people will look at you and then whisper to each other. Some won’t be content with just whispering and will “get in your face.” I would not be surprised if there was vandalism to your home, so tell your security people (I’m sure you have them) to “watch out.”

I don’t suppose you would want to talk to me, would you? Oh, I don’t mean face to face, but there is a safe place,
safe for both of us
, where we could talk using our computers. It’s called Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. I even got you a username if you should want to do this. The username is “otrelaw19.”

I know what an ordinary person would do. An ordinary person would take this letter straight to the police, but let me ask a question.
What have they done for you except hound you and cause you sleepless nights
? Although here’s a thought, if you want me dead, giving this letter to the police is the way to do it, as surely as putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger, because I will kill myself.

Crazy as it may seem, you are
the only person keeping me alive
. Because you are the only one I can talk to. The only one who understands what it is like to be in Hell.

Now I will wait.

Mrs. Trelawney, I am so so so SORRY.

Hodges puts the letter down on the coffee table and says, “Holy shit.”

Janey Patterson nods. “That was pretty much my reaction.”

“He invited her to get in touch with him—”

Janey gives him an incredulous look. “
Invited
her? Try
blackmailed
her. ‘Do it or I’ll kill myself.’”

“According to you, she took him up on it. Have you seen any of their communications? Were there maybe printouts along with this letter?”

She shakes her head. “Ollie told my mother that she’d been chatting with what she called ‘a very disturbed man’ and trying to get him to seek help because he’d done a terrible thing. My mother was alarmed. She assumed Ollie was talking with the very disturbed man face-to-face, like in the park or a coffee shop or something. You have to remember she’s in her late eighties now. She knows about computers, but she’s vague on their practical uses. Ollie explained about chat-rooms—or tried to—but I’m not sure how much Mom actually understood. What she remembers is that Ollie said she talked to the very disturbed man underneath a blue umbrella.”

“Did your mother connect the man to the stolen Mercedes and the killings at City Center?”

“She never said anything that would make me believe so. Her short-term memory’s gotten very foggy. If you ask her about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, she can tell you exactly when she heard the news on the radio, and probably who the newscaster was. Ask her what she had for breakfast, or even where she is . . .” Janey shrugged. “She might be able to tell you, she might not.”

“And where is she, exactly?”

“A place called Sunny Acres, about thirty miles from here.” She laughs, a rueful sound with no joy in it. “Whenever I hear the name, I think of those old melodramas you see on Turner Classic Movies, where the heroine is declared insane and socked away in some awful drafty madhouse.”

She turns to look out at the lake. Her face has taken on an expression Hodges finds interesting: a bit pensive and a bit defensive. The more he looks at her, the more he likes her looks. The fine lines around her eyes suggest that she’s a woman who likes to laugh.

“I know who I’d be in one of those old movies,” she says, still looking out at the boats playing on the water. “The conniving sister who inherits the care of an elderly parent along with a pile of money. The cruel sister who keeps the money but ships the Aged P off to a creepy mansion where the old people get Alpo for dinner and are left to lie in their own urine all night. But Sunny’s not like that. It’s actually very nice. Not cheap, either. And Mom asked to go.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,”
she says, mocking him with a little wrinkle of her nose. “Do you happen to remember her nurse? Mrs. Greene. Althea Greene.”

Hodges catches himself reaching into his jacket to consult a case notebook that’s no longer there. But after a moment’s thought he recalls the nurse without it. A tall and stately woman in white who seemed to glide rather than walk. With a mass of marcelled gray hair that made her look a bit like Elsa Lanchester in
The Bride of Frankenstein
. He and Pete had asked if she’d noticed Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes parked at the curb when she left on that Thursday night. She had replied she was quite sure she had, which to the team of Hodges and Huntley meant she wasn’t sure at all.

“Yeah, I remember her.”

“She announced her retirement almost as soon as I moved back from Los Angeles. She said that at sixty-four she no longer felt able to deal competently with a patient suffering from such serious disabilities, and she stuck to her guns even after I offered to bring in a nurse’s aide—two, if she wanted. I think she was appalled by the publicity that resulted from the City Center Massacre, but if it had been only that, she might have stayed.”

“Your sister’s suicide was the final straw?”

“I’m pretty sure it was. I won’t say Althea and Ollie were bosom buddies or anything, but they got on, and they saw eye to eye about Mom’s care. Now Sunny’s the best thing for her, and Mom’s relieved to be there. On her good days, at least. So am I. For one thing, they manage her pain better.”

“If I were to go out and talk to her . . .”

“She might remember a few things, or she might not.” She turns from the lake to look at him directly. “Will you take the job? I checked private detective rates online, and I’m prepared to do considerably better. Five thousand dollars a week, plus expenses. An eight-week minimum.”

Forty thousand for eight weeks’ work, Hodges marvels. Maybe he could be Philip Marlowe after all. He imagines himself in a ratty two-room office that gives on the third-floor hallway of a cheap office building. Hiring a va-voom receptionist with a name like Lola or Velma. A tough-talking blonde, of course. He’d wear a trenchcoat and a brown fedora on rainy days, the hat pulled down to one eyebrow.

Ridiculous. And not what attracts him. The attraction is not being in his La-Z-Boy, watching the lady judge and stuffing his face with snacks. He also likes being in his suit. But there’s more. He left the PD with strings dangling. Pete has ID’d the pawnshop armed robber, and it looks like he and Isabelle Jaynes may soon be arresting Donald Davis, the mope who killed his wife and then went on TV, flashing his handsome smile. Good for Pete and Izzy, but neither Davis or the pawnshop shotgunner is the Big Casino.

Also, he thinks, Mr. Mercedes should have left me alone. And Mrs. T. He should have left her alone, too.

“Bill?” Janey’s snapping her fingers like a stage hypnotist bringing a subject out of a trance. “Are you there, Bill?”

He returns his attention to her, a woman in her mid-forties who’s not afraid to sit in bright sunlight. “If I say yes, you’ll be hiring me as a security consultant.”

She looks amused. “Like the men who work for Vigilant Guard Service out in the Heights?”

“No, not like them. They’re bonded, for one thing. I’m not.” I never had to be, he thinks. “I’d just be private security, like the kind of guys who work the downtown nightclubs. That’s nothing you’d be able to claim as a deduction on your income tax, I’m afraid.”

Amusement broadens into a smile, and she does the nose-wrinkling thing again. A fairly entrancing sight, in Hodges’s opinion. “Don’t care. In case you didn’t know, I’m rolling in dough.”

“What I’m trying for is full disclosure, Janey. I have no private detective’s license, which won’t stop me from asking questions, but how well I can operate without either a badge or a PI ticket remains to be seen. It’s like asking a blind man to stroll around town without his guide dog.”

“Surely there’s a Police Department old boys’ network?”

“There is, but if I tried to use it, I’d be putting both the old boys and myself in a bad position.” That he has already done this by pumping Pete for information is a thing he won’t share with her on such short acquaintance.

He lifts the letter Janey has showed him.

“For one thing, I’m guilty of withholding evidence if I agree to keep this between us.” That he’s already withholding a similar letter is another thing she doesn’t need to know. “Technically, at least. And withholding is a felony offense.”

She looks dismayed. “Oh my God, I never thought of that.”

“On the other hand, I doubt if there’s much Forensics could do with it. A letter dropped into a mailbox on Marlborough Street or Lowbriar Avenue is just about the most anonymous thing in the world. Once upon a time—I remember it well—you could match up the typing in a letter to the machine that wrote it. If you could find the machine, that is. It was as good as a fingerprint.”

“But this wasn’t typed.”

“Nope. Laser printer. Which means no hanging
A
s or crooked
T
s. So I wouldn’t be withholding much.”

Of course withholding is still withholding.

“I’m going to take the job, Janey, but five thousand a week is ridiculous. I’ll take a check for two, if you want to write one. And bill you for expenses.”

“That doesn’t seem like anywhere near enough.”

“If I get someplace, we can talk about a bonus.” But he doesn’t think he’ll take one, even if he does manage to run Mr. Mercedes to ground. Not when he came here already determined to investigate the bastard, and to sweet-talk her into helping him.

“All right. Agreed. And thank you.”

“Welcome. Now tell me about your relationship with Olivia. All I know is it was good enough for you to call her Ollie, and I could use more.”