Gone Bitch (8 page)

“You know it’s strange,” Boney said. “We mentioned you shooting a major motion picture with Keanu Reeves to a number of people, and they were all...surprised, let’s put it that way. Said that didn’t sound like you.”

I shrugged. “I mean, do I go and make major motion pictures all day? No. But do I go out in the morning and shoot a scene or two? Sure.”

“Hey, perhaps this might help,” said Gilpin. “Could you give us the name of your karate teacher? Then we could call him and have him confirm you were at the lesson.”

“I have no idea what his name is,” I said. “I’m doing this special karate class where the teacher is behind a screen and you never meet him face to face. The thinking is if you don’t see him, then nothing gets in the way of the ideas he’s conveying to you.”

“Look Nick,” said Boney, “the point here is that we can’t confirm your alibi for where you were the morning Amy disappeared, and that’s a problem.”

“But that’s not your only problem,” said Gilpin. “You see, Nick, we’ve seen a lot of home invasions.”

“Because you’ve
committed
them,” I said.

“And Nick, this home invasion...”—he gestured at the living room which was still in disarray—“it just doesn’t look right.”

“What are you talking about? It looks exactly how an invasion by somebody besides me should look.”

“Ask yourself this, Nick: why are the books lying on the floor behind the end table rather than in front of it?” said Boney. “From the angle the table fell, the books should be in front, not behind.”

“We’ve got a missing woman here and you’re worried about
books?
” I said. “No wonder she’s still missing!”

“Nick, those photos on the mantle stayed upright during the struggle, right?” said Gilpin. “But watch this.” He stamped his foot on the floor, and all the photos fell over.

“Oh my god you can do magic? That was friggin’ incredible! Hey can you do that one where—”

“And Nick, you know how that piano was supposedly flipped upside down in the struggle?” said Boney. “I’d like you to go over there and try to flip it right side up.”

“It
is
right said up,” I said.

“Huh?”

“In 2001 I went to this Elton John concert where during the final number Elton’s piano turns upside down and he plays it that way flying through the air. Coolest fucking thing I ever saw. So I installed this piano upside down so I could do the same thing. See?” I went over and slid under the piano and started playing it. The only thing I knew how to play was chopsticks, but I sang the lyrics to “Crocodile Rock” over it.

“Nick, did you do any housecleaning the day Amy went missing?” said Gilpin.

“‘Housecleaning?’ What’s that?”

“You sure you didn’t clean, Nick? Because our techs found traces of Amy’s blood on the kitchen floor.”

“
She messed up my new kitchen floor?
No! NOOOOOO! Just take the whole house now. I don’t want it anymore.”

“So you see, Nick, it’s not just your alibi that’s a problem,” said Boney. “The crime scene’s a problem, too. But there’s a third problem for you: just a couple weeks ago, you increased Amy’s life insurance policy to two million dollars. Why’d you do that, Nick?”

“I did it because I knew by the time she died and I was single again I’d be too old to get hot girls, so I wanted to have enough to afford hot hookers.”

“There’s a fourth problem as well, Nick—”

“You know, I’m getting a little tired of your ‘problems’ and your ‘questions about what happened,’” I said. “I think it’s time for me to get a lawyer.”

Boney and Gilpin gave each other another look. “Whatever you say, Nick,” said Boney, and they got up to leave.

“Yeah, that’s right, get the fuck out.
Mi
casa,” I said, and slammed the door after they left. But a second later, I opened the door again.

“Hey, you guys know any good lawyers?”

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE: July 30, 2011

Rule #1 of framing someone for murder: Everything is like five times more difficult than you think it’ll be.

Today I go to the gun store to ask about buying a gun, so that when I disappear it’ll look like I was afraid of Nick. Simple, right?

Except that it’s not simple, ‘cause I’m in Missouri. You know how in some states it’s hard to buy a gun? In Missouri, it’s hard to
not
buy a gun. If you walk in and ask about a gun, and then say you don’t want to buy it, they’ll keep lowering the price, and eventually they’ll just give it to you and say you can pay them later if you want. And if you still insist on not taking the gun, they’ll think you’re one of those leftie filmmakers making some anti-gun documentary about how easy it is to buy a gun in Missouri. They actually put you in a registry if you
don’t
buy a gun after asking about one.

So now I have this gun, and I have no idea what to do with it. And it turns out it won’t even help convince people that I was afraid of Nick, because practically everyone in Missouri has a gun. So now I have to step it up a level and look into military-grade armaments. On the bright side, I finally have an excuse to use that $100 gift certificate for bazookas.com.

NICK DUNNE: Six Days Gone

The night after my living room interview with Boney and Gilpin, there was a candlelight vigil for Amy in the town square. Go signed me up to speak there because she thought it’d be a good opportunity to rehabilitate my image. My image definitely needed some rehabilitation, because the media was continuing to batter me. Their newest thing was turning up purported “items of concern,” like the utterly irrelevant fact that in high school I was voted
Most Likely to Kill His Wife
.

There was a good side to all the media coverage, however: business at the cat cafe was booming. We’d hired three more baristas and 23 more cats. (Unfortunately these weren’t great cafe cats — they kept shedding on the biscotti.) Also, the cafe was now being sponsored by Fancy Feast. You’d think they might not want to sponsor a business co-owned by an alleged murderer, but I guess when it comes to cat food marketing there are only so many opportunities.

The town square was packed for the vigil, and there were TV vans everywhere. When it was my turn to speak I walked up to the microphone and looked out at the crowd, and I was a bit thrown by seeing Amy’s face everywhere on people’s T-shirts. Most of the shirts said
COME BACK AMY
and
WE MISS YOU
, but one of them said
I WENT TO SEARCH FOR AMY DUNNE AND ALL I FOUND WAS THIS STUPID T-SHIRT
.

I took out my prepared speech (unlike previous speeches, I’d actually written something in advance this time) and began to speak.

“Hi everyone. Thank you so, so much for coming out, I really appreciate it. As you know, my wife Amy is missing. Amy is my partner in every way, and I am incomplete without her. I miss her every second of every minute of every day, and I just want her to come home. Pause look left look right don’t smile especially don’t convey you’re happy Amy’s gone and that you pray every night she won’t come back and that you’d like to give her murderer a medal...”

Oops. That was supposed to be stage direction.

There was a loud chorus of boos. Go gave me the “cut it short” sign, chopping at her throat. But before I could finish, our neighbor Noelle Hawthorne had come out of the crowd and approached the stage.

“Hey,
Nick!
” she yelled. “I got a question for you!”

“Then you should raise your hand and wait and see if I call on you,” I said.

“Where’s your wife, Nick?” she yelled. “Where’s your
pregnant
wife?”

There was a collective gasp from the crowd.

I chuckled. “Pregnant? That’s impossible. I never came inside her. I only came on her face and on her tits. Oh also in her butt when she wasn’t being a bitch and was letting us have anal like normal people.”

I could feel the hostility of the crowd as they surged forward in anger. Go grabbed me and dragged me off the stage. As she did so, I could hear the questions shouted from the reporters:

“Nick, did you know Amy was pregnant?”

“Nick, had you chosen a name for the baby?”

“Nick, when you came on her face did she flinch or did she take it like a pro?”

I was about to complain about Amy’s constant flinching when Go shoved me into her car and drove away.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE: September 2, 2011

Next up on Amy’s Murder-Framing To Do List? Fake a pregnancy!

Why should I be satisfied with the public hating Nick for murdering his beautiful, innocent wife, when they could
really
hate him for murdering his beautiful, innocent, pregnant wife? It seemed like a no-brainer.

Faking my own pregnancy should
not
have been that hard. My plan was pretty simple: since my neighbor Noelle is pregnant, just get some of her pee, and use it as my own pee on a pregnancy test. No problem, right?

So I invited Noelle over one day for some lemonade. I’d turned off the toilet, so that when she inevitably had to pee, she wouldn’t be able to flush, and voila, I’d have my pregnant pee!

The problem is, I didn’t factor in that Noelle would come over right after eating a giant lunch. And that as soon as she walked in she’d have to take a giant shit.

So of course, as soon as Noelle walks in she says she needs to use the bathroom, and I tell her “the toilet isn’t working so don’t flush,” and then she shits and doesn’t pee, and so now we have to sit there making chit-chat and drinking lemonade while the entire house smells like shit.

What’s worse, I hadn’t factored in that Noelle has an enormous bladder from constantly drinking so much beer. So it takes forever for her to have to pee.

And finally, to top it all off, when Noelle finally does pee, I have to collect the pee from a bowl of shit.

Note to self: next time you fake a pregnancy, make allowance for shit.

NICK DUNNE: Seven Days Gone

It was time.

Somehow, through no fault of my own, I had become the prime suspect in my wife’s disappearance. So I needed to get a lawyer.
Today
. And that lawyer was going to have to be the best of the best, the man I wished I didn’t need but knew I had to have.

Tanner Bolt.

I knew of Tanner Bolt—heck, everybody knew of Tanner Bolt—from his high profile cases on TV. He’d defended some of the most famous celebrities accused of doing some of the most heinous things. And he always came out on top. Which is why last night after the candlelight vigil I’d jumped on a red eye to New York, and I was now sitting in the waiting room of Tanner Bolt’s office on the top floor of a skyscraper on 57th Street.

Tanner was so famous that he wouldn’t even take a meeting until you’d already paid his $100,000 fee and hired him. I’d wired everything in my bank account, which didn’t quite cover it, so Tanner Bolt LLP was now the proud owner of a 50% stake in a cat cafe. But if it kept me out of jail it was worth it.

When I’d first walked into Tanner’s office the pretty black receptionist had given me an odd look. I initially thought she was judging me for killing Amy. But then I noticed a pattern: every new person I saw working at the office was black, and every one of them gave me the same odd look.

I didn’t realize what was going on until I went to the bathroom, which was at the end of a long hall. The walls of the hall were covered with photos of Tanner’s famous cases. As I was walking down the hall looking at the photos one after the other, it finally hit me: all of Tanner’s clients were black. And all of his defenses of his clients were built on the fact that they were black, and were victims of racial discrimination, or institutional prejudice, or whatever.

I was about to ask the receptionist what their refund policy was when a door opened and another attractive black person appeared. “Nick Dunne?” she said.

“Yep, that’s me,” I said.

After the requisite odd look, she led me into Tanner’s office and sat me at a chair across from a desk, where Tanner was reading through some files. “Tanner, Nick Dunne is here.”

Tanner looked up from his files and just froze for a good 15 seconds. Then he smiled and reached out to shake my hand like everything was perfectly normal.

“Tanner Bolt,” he said.

“Nick Dunne, nice to meet you,” I said.

“Nick, look: I win. I win unwinnable cases.”

“Cool,” I said.

“For black people.”

“So...you’re not going to represent me?” I asked.

“And give back $100,000? Fuck no. I’m just warning you, it’s gonna be tough.”

“Right, because of all the circumstantial evidence against me.” I said.

“No, because you’re not black. We don’t have the race card to play here. That’s like playing poker without any aces. Or kings. Or queens or jacks or tens or nines or eights and only like two of the sevens.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well first, you’ve got to be completely open with me, and tell me absolutely everything,” he said. “We need to assume everything will get leaked, and there can’t be any surprises.”

Everything?
I thought. I had a vision of people finding out I often masturbated while watching women’s golf.

“Also, we’ve got to keep the support of Amy’s parents,” he said. “How are things between you and them?”

“I haven’t spoken to them since a few days after Amy hopefully was murdered.”

“
No
, Nick. You need to say Amy
wasn’t
murdered, especially not
hopefully
.”