Joe Victim: A Thriller

I shake my head. “No. Never.”


She nods. And I know what she’s thinking. She’s forming a connection between my mother and these people. She’s trying to figure out if each of these women I killed was a way for me to kill my mother without killing her, that these people were surrogate victims.

“Tell me about your mother,” Abby-Ali says, and her voice is seductive, sultry, and I can’t figure out why they’d have sent a woman into a place like this to interview a guy like me, then realize she must have a bad-boy complex. Then I realize that isn’t it at all—a woman testifying in my defense is going to play well with the jury. They’re going to see that she spent time with me and in that process the percentage of rape and murdering that went on between us was an absolute zero. My approval rating is going to go through the roof.

“She’s getting married,” I tell her.

“How does that make you feel?”

I bet asking that question was the next thing she mastered right after the hand steeple and before they learned how to sew leather elbow patches onto jackets. Remember, students, if all else fails, fall back on “How does that make you feel?” That’s what psychiatry seems to be. An if all else fails routine. Psychiatrists not comfortable with their own opinions, and having to solicit answers from their patients first.

“Feel? It doesn’t make me feel anything,” I say.

“It doesn’t make you feel angry?”

“Why the hell would it make me feel angry?” I say, feeling angry, not just at Ellen, but also at my mother.

“It might make you feel abandoned,” she says. “It could make you think that your mother is forgetting about you and your situation and moving on to a new man in her life, whereas you’ve been the only man in her life since your father died. When’s the wedding?”

“On Monday,” I tell her.

She nods, as if that confirms it then. “The day the trial begins.”

“I don’t feel any of that stuff you just said,” I say, more angry than ever about my mother. Already she has moved on. Already she has proven the only person she cares about other than herself is Walt. “I just don’t understand why she chose now to get engaged, now, of all times, and if they are getting engaged now, why get married next week? Why not give it a few years first?”

“You want them to put their lives on hold?” she asks, and she asks it in a way that I can’t tell whether she’s judging me or not.

“On hold? Yeah, I want them to consider it. I mean, what harm could that do? Put it on hold at least until the trial is over.”

“Maybe they think you’re never getting out of here.”

I shake my head. I don’t think anybody can really be thinking that. “They’re wrong.”

“Because you didn’t kill anybody?”

It’s an important question, and one she no doubt rehearsed a few times on the drive out here.

“I know I killed them,” I say. “That’s what everybody keeps telling me. In the beginning it was hard to believe, but if you have a thousand people all telling you the sky is going to fall, then it’s going to fall,” I say. Then I look glum. My Joe is sad look. Tried and perfected on others. “I guess if that’s true, then I don’t deserve to be let out of here. I guess I do . . .” I say, then add the slight theatrical pause, count off one beat, off another, “I guess I do deserve to die. That’s what . . .” pause, one beat, two beats, “that’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to kill me, you know. They’re going to pass this bill everybody on TV is talking about and I’m going to be number one on the hanging list.”

She doesn’t answer. I don’t mean any of what I said, and I’m not sure whether she believes it either. The silence grows and I feel the need to fill it with something that makes me sound retarded, but not too retarded.

“I mean, the things they say I did—that just isn’t me. I’m not that person. Ask anybody. Ask my mom, or the cops I used to work with,” I say, and a series of events starts running through my mind—previous women, previous victims, eggs jammed in mouths and the groans of the dying. I shift a little in my chair, thankful the table is in the way of her seeing my growing erection. It’s one of the few times I’ve hated something being between it and a woman like Ali.

“You don’t remember any of it?”

“I know it sounds like a cliché. I know it’s probably what you expected to hear, and the fact you’re hearing it proves I’m making it up. Bad people always remember what they do. It’s why they do it, so they can remember. I guess. All I want is to be better,” I say, “and if I did do the things they say I did, then I want to be made to never do that kind of thing again. Maybe this is a waste of time. Maybe they should just keep me here and lock away the key.”

“Throw away the key.”

“Huh?”

“The expression is throw away the key.”