Undermind: Nine Stories (11 page)

He pulled forward as soon as I had gotten in,
before I’d even shut the door. The car behind us was honking its
horn and the light in front of us was green. I blurted out
everything on my mind without thinking of what I was going to
say.

“Who are you? What did you do to me? Why did you
kill that girl? Are you fucking insane? What the hell is going
on?”

“Slow down, Tommy boy! One thing at a time. You
sure woke up full of questions, didn’t you?”

“I woke up next to a dead girl! And the last
thing I remember was drinking beer with you, so this is all your
doing. What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you doing
this?”

“Listen, Tommy. If we’re—“

“Stop calling me Tommy!”

“Okay, Tom. Listen up. To have a conversation,
you’re gonna have to slow down. First things first. What’s the
first thing you’d like to know before you go to prison for
murder?”

We stopped at a red light and I couldn’t decide
if I should get out and run, reach over and strangle him, or try to
engage in a conversation that might result in some answers. I also
wanted to ask him where we were going, but that seemed like the
least important matter at the time.

“I didn’t kill her!”

“Sure you didn’t. But you can save it for the
judge. I already know what you’re guilty of. And I know you’re
going to be punished. Justice is being served, as we speak.”

My head was spinning again. Nothing made sense.
He agreed that I didn’t kill her, but he was certain that I’d go to
prison for her murder.

“Why are you framing me for this? I don’t even
know you!”

“You may not know me, Tommy boy–sorry,
Tom
, but you know
of
me.”

He got in the left hand turn lane and tapped the
turn signal control down. The air conditioner was on, but I could
clearly hear every tick as the left arrow blinked on the instrument
panel.

“How do I know of you?” I managed to ask a sane
question when I felt like I was losing my mind completely. As far
as I knew, that Twix bar was the first thing I’d eaten in
twenty-four hours and my blood-sugar was as fucked up as my life
was now.

“Lisa told you about me.”

“Lisa? Who’s Lisa? Is that the girl at the
house?”

“Yes, Lisa is the girl you killed – for all
intents and purposes.”

“I don’t know her. I never met her before in my
life. You’ve got the wrong fucking guy.”

“Oh no. I have the right guy. I made sure of it.
This is the culmination of years of planning, so you can be sure I
didn’t go to all of that effort to setup the wrong guy.”

“Why? Why are you setting me up? I swear I don’t
know you or Lisa. You have to have the wrong guy.”

The signal presented a green arrow and he pulled
through the intersection, staying in the left hand lane and once
again getting into the turn lane. We were making a gradual U-turn,
erasing the progress I’d made walking.

“I’m motivated by the oldest reason there is.
Revenge.”

“But I didn’t
do
anything to you!”

“But you did, Tom. You ruined my life. You took
away everything I cherished. And now, in keeping with the law of
‘an eye for an eye’ I’m ruining your life, and taking everything
you love away from you.”

“I’ve told you that I don’t know either of you,
so rather than repeating myself, how about you just tell me what
you
think
I did?”

“Does the screen name
moanalisa86
ring
any bells?”

“No. I’ve never heard of it.”

“Yes, you have, Tom. You heard of it, saw it,
and wrote a response to a request for advice that was posted by
someone using it.”

“Okay, then. I don’t recall it.”

“I believe you. As I said, it’s been years, so
that makes sense. Allow me to refresh your memory.”

“Please do.”

When we reached the street that I had walked
down to get to Lankershim, he pulled over to the curb in front of a
house. He was apparently taking me back to where I woke up a short
time ago – but not yet.

“Lisa posted to Yahoo Answers about her
relationship in 2009. She complained about her boyfriend, saying
she suspected he was insane, and possibly violent. She said she
wanted to leave him, but literally scared for her life to do so.
She said she was in a bind and didn’t know what to do. She asked
for help. Are you starting to remember any of this?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Well, you should. It was your advice that she
took.”

“What did I advise?”

“You said, and this is verbatim, ‘You are
definitely with a classic psychopath. The sooner you leave the
better. He will not change, you cannot appease him, and sooner or
later, you won’t even think of asking for help. Your life will be
over. Get out now, while you can. Tell everyone you know when you
leave him, why you’re leaving him. The more you get the word out,
the less he’ll be able to do anything to you. Be safe, and good
luck!’ Does that refresh your memory?”

“No. Maybe, vaguely. I used to write a lot of
responses on Yahoo Answers. I don’t remember all of them.”

“Yes, you did answer a lot, and your answers
were frequently chosen as the best. You had a very high ranking.
But I’m surprised you don’t remember advising Lisa, since it was
such a serious departure from the standard idiotic questions that
most people could’ve answered themselves by just using Google, or
were we still using AltaVista then?”

“It may have been a serious issue for her – it
was her life – but to me, it would’ve just been words on the screen
for a few minutes. That’s not something I would’ve committed to
memory. It was too insignificant.”

“That’s rich. The ruining of my life was
insignificant to you.”

“You’re the guy she wanted to leave?”

“I’m the guy she
did
leave. Because of
you.”

“How do you know it was because of me? I’m sure
plenty of other people told her to do the same thing. It’s common
sense. You think you’re living with a psycho, get the fuck out. How
can you pin this solely on me?”

“You’re right. Seventeen other people also
advised her to leave me. But she chose your response as the Best
Answer, and she quoted you when she broke up with me. She said
she’d been told that I was a classic psychopath, that I wouldn’t
change, I couldn’t be appeased, etc. Later, I logged in to her
account and saw the email from Yahoo with a link to her question. I
read your advice, and I vowed that I’d get revenge. It’s been a
long time coming, but now it’s here. Today is the day of
retribution.”

“I was right. You
are
a psychopath.
You’ll never get away with this. Especially now that you’ve just
confessed to me that you killed her and framed me for it. The
police will know that I don’t have any connection to her. But you
certainly do. You have motive. I don’t. How do you think you’re
going to convince the cops that I had any reason to kill someone
that I don’t even know? Someone that I posted to on Yahoo years
ago. The police aren’t that stupid, you know.”

He reached into his inner suit jacket pocket and
pulled out something that looked like a wallet. He let it fall
open, revealing his identification as a Los Angeles County police
detective, and his badge.

***

I woke up in the backseat of his car, my hands
and feet bound with zip-ties. The last thing I remembered was him
reaching into his pocket to put his wallet away and then his hand
came back out with a black thing with silver tips on the end. His
hand flew toward my neck before I realized what was happening.

I struggled into a sitting position and looked
out the window. We were back at the house with the dead girl. The
guy got out of his car and walked over to some cops standing next
to a cop car. Crime scene tape was strung around the yard and
driveway.

This was really happening.

The driver’s side window was down about two
inches. I leaned forward and turned my head to the side, straining
to hear what he was telling the other cops.

“What brings you here, Detective Ladd?”

“Oh, I was just in the neighborhood.”

The three of them laughed briefly. I never
understood how cops could make jokes at a crime scene. I guess they
get used to dead people.

“Did they put you on this?”

“No. Actually, I was driving nearby when I
spotted what looked like an attempted burglary. Guy was going from
window to window at a house, so I came up behind him and asked what
he thought he was doing.”

“You shoulda waited till he broke a window or
somethin’. You probably can’t get him on Attempted B&E
now.”

“I got better. Listen to this. First thing the
guy says to me is he got high on Ketamine last night, killed a
blonde girl, and now he’s just really thirsty. Says he’s just
looking for some water. He’s not looking to steal anything.”

“Oh. Well if that’s all, you shoulda let him
go.” Again, they all laughed as they broached the subject of murder
as they stood on the lawn, with a fresh corpse inside the
house.

“I’m thinking I’ll take him in as a 5150, just
in case he’s violent, bein’ that he’s talkin’ that way. And then I
notice he’s got what could be blood around his fingernails. I made
the connection with the homicide here just a few blocks away and
thought you guys might wanna take him and verify if that’s blood,
and see if his prints match the ones on the knife used on the
vic.”

“How’d you know she was knifed?”

“Uh... I guess it was radio chatter. I don’t
recall. But anyway, I got this guy in the backseat. If it turns out
I just delivered a gift-wrapped perp, tell the FOS he owes me a
case of Heineken.”

“Will do. Let’s see what you got.”

“One more thing. When I asked the guy to repeat
what he’d said about killing someone, that’s when he lost his
marbles and started saying he didn’t kill anyone. He said I was the
killer. Then he started ranting about how I was framing him, and
some shit about Yahoo and the internet, and I just lost track.
Definitely a 5150, whether or not he did the girl. When he went
totally nutso, I had to Taze him.”

They came over to the car and let me out, but
only to transfer me to the back of a squad car. I was burning with
the desire to tell them what was really going on and how the
detective was the real killer, but he’d already primed them to
think I was crazy if I started talking about that, so I just kept
it inside. I knew from watching cop shows that it doesn’t
accomplish anything to protest your innocence to arresting officers
anyway. They don’t care. And why should they? It’s not their job to
determine guilt or innocence.

That’s left up to the judge and jury. So
anything you say to the cops is a waste of time and breath. As it
turns out, everything I said to anybody about this case was wasted
effort. My court-appointed attorney couldn’t find any reference to
any of the things I told him about. He said he couldn’t find Lisa’s
question, or my answer. I’m not sure if he even bothered looking.
He also said there was no record of a moanalisa86 anywhere online.
And he couldn’t find anything in The Wayback Machine.

My prints were on the knife. Lisa’s blood was on
and under my fingernails. My saliva was found on her left breast.
And hair matching mine was on the carpet near her body. It was not
only an open and shut case, but the prosecutor made me sound like
the most vile of killers, suggesting that I had sucked on one of
her breasts while stabbing the other. If I had been in the jury, I
would’ve voted to hang me too.

I guess you could say I got lucky though. Since
Ketamine was found in my system, along with alcohol, my public
defender argued that I had blacked out and didn’t know what I had
done, so he negotiated with the District Attorney and got me a deal
for a reduced charge of 2
^nd
Degree Murder, meaning I
hadn’t pre-meditated the killing of the poor girl.

Now I’m doing fifteen to life for a crime I
didn’t commit. My only crime was offering advice to a stranger on
the internet. I posted a single paragraph to help a total stranger.
And now, life as I once knew it is over.

My cellmate is petitioning for the inmates to
get internet access like they have in some other states. Every
prisoner in here is looking forward to the day they can get
online.

Except for me.

All I can think about now is my mother’s advice
when I was a kid. She always said, “Don’t talk to strangers.”

###

The sirens had long
since faded out and were never heard again. The only sound on the
street came from the rustling of windblown debris, like the page
from a newspaper that skittered to a stop against the CEO’s legs.
He bent down and picked it up, reading the headline at the top of
the page. It was about the plummeting stock market. Old news. He
turned a little to the side and spread his fingers, letting the
paper fly away. He turned further, looking behind him at the
skyline in the distance. New York was his town. It was his playing
field. He practically owned it. Dollars ruled, and he had billions.
His money was securely stored in banks in multiple countries, but
it couldn’t help him now.

Looking at the skyscraper he owned, his mind
drifted to thoughts of his empire and the power he wielded. With
just a few words, he could change lives – for better, or worse. And
he did, depending on how he felt at any given moment. There were
times when he fired a person just for the rush he got from knowing
that he turned someone’s little world upside down – because he
could. It served as a reminder of the power he had. Less
frequently, when he was in a good mood, he would surprise someone
by giving them a bonus.

He had never lost his taste for the finer things
in life, and he enjoyed indulging in luxuries, but he had to admit,
it got boring after a while. Being the boss and making decisions
wasn’t really work. It was more of a game, with the employees as
pawns. Other business owners he dealt with were players on his
side, and some were competitors. Most of them were weaker, smaller
players, and winning all the time was another thing that got
boring. There was something to be said for having a challenge;
having to expend some effort to achieve something worthwhile. He’d
had everything handed to him his entire life and never had to
literally work for anything.