Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“Why? Who is she?”

“Her real name is Natalie Flowers,” Schroder says.

“Oh, of course,” Raphael says. “Melissa. I didn’t recognize her. I don’t really watch a lot of news these days. It’s too depressing.”

“So you haven’t ever seen her at one of your meetings?” Schroder asks, and he hands back the picture.

“At a meeting?” Raphael laughs, then shakes his head. “Why the hell would she come to a meeting? He takes the photo and holds it closer to his face. Then he starts angling the photograph. He starts tilting the head. “This is Melissa?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“She doesn’t look. .”

When he doesn’t finish, Schroder looks for the word. “Evil?”

Raphael doesn’t respond. He keeps staring at the photograph.

“You recognize her, don’t you,” Schroder says.

Raphael shakes his head. “I guess I do, you know, like you were saying, from the news. But other than that I’ve never seen her. Certainly not at one of my meetings.”

“Are you sure about this, Raphael?”

“Well, no, I can’t be positive. She must be using disguises, right? That’s why you’ve never found her. But as far as I know, no, she’s never been. I can’t imagine any reason why she would.”

“She might come along to enjoy the pain she’s caused,” Schroder says.

Raphael nods. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Schroder takes the photo back and tucks it into his jacket. It was worth a shot. He stands back up. He has a job to get to, and this isn’t it.

“Call me if you think of anything,” he says, knowing he’ll never hear from Raphael, that if Raphael does think of anything it will be the police he calls, not Schroder. Well, he’s done what he came here to do. He shakes Raphael’s hand.

“Any time, Detective,” Raphael says, and follows Schroder to the door.

“You weren’t supposed to see any of that,” Raphael says.

Melissa turns from the wall toward him. He’s standing in the doorway, wearing the towel and the underwear beneath and nothing else. “What is this room?” she asks.

He takes a step toward her. “This used to be our daughter’s bedroom when she used to live at home with us. When she moved out, we turned it into a study and all her childhood stuff was put into storage. When she died we set the room up how she used to have it as a kid.”

“Not exactly how she had it,” Melissa says, looking at the wall with newspaper articles pinned to it. This is quite fascinating. She can imagine Raphael sitting in here on the edge of the bed staring at this wall, plotting his revenge, the day turning to evening to dark to the middle of the night. Obsession mixed in with a little bit of alcohol.

“Like I said, you weren’t supposed to be in here,” he says, taking another step toward her. He reminds her of her own father when she was being naughty. He would grab her by the arm and lead her away. Raphael looks like he wants to do just that.

“I had to go somewhere,” Melissa says, “otherwise that policeman would have seen me.”

“Would it have been a big deal if he had?”

“No, no I suppose not,” Melissa says, but yes, it would have been a very big deal. What she has found in his dead daughter’s bedroom is good. Really good.

“I suppose you want an explanation,” he says.

“I think with what we’re planning on doing together, yes.”

“Are you going to go to the police?”

“That depends on your explanation,” she says, but no, of course not.

“Give me a minute to get dressed,” he says. “And I don’t want you waiting in here. This was Angela’s room.”

Melissa heads into the lounge and takes a seat. She had waited in here earlier, listening to Raphael and Schroder until it became obvious they were coming inside. From Angela’s room she had been able to hear them clearly, and at the same time she had studied all the interesting stuff pinned to the walls that no teenage girl would ever find interesting.

Raphael comes in a minute later. He’s wearing the clothes he was wearing when they were out shooting, minus the boots. He definitely looked better topless, and definitely looked a whole lot better when he was in uniform. The casual handsomeness he usually displays has disappeared, his face lined with strain. He sits down on the couch opposite her and picks his water up from the coffee table and drinks half of it and then gets back up and goes into the kitchen and comes back out with a bottle of bourbon. He finishes his water and fills the glass back up with the good stuff. He offers some to Melissa and she shakes her head. It could hurt her fake baby.

“At least now you know I’m going to pull the trigger,” he says, then grunts a small laugh.

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“No. Not really.”

“You killed them? Both of them?” she asks.

He nods. “They were going to defend him,” he says.

She already understands why he did it. Had done from the moment she saw the articles on the wall of the first two lawyers that were going to defend Joe. On those articles Raphael had drawn red X s across their faces.

“I don’t get lawyers even at the best of times,” he says.

“And at the worst of times?” she asks.

“At the worst of times they’re putting their hand up to defend people like Joe Middleton. These two bastards were using the tragedy of my daughter to make a name for themselves, to become famous, famous in lawyering circles so they could then represent other Joes out there and become more famous and earn more money. People who are capable of that are capable of anything.”

Melissa says nothing. She knows what people are capable of. She also knows Raphael will carry on without prompting. She senses it will be good for him. Cathartic. This is something he’s kept inside. She picks up the glass she hadn’t touched earlier and takes a sip. The water has made it to room temperature.

“I went there,” he says. “I made an appointment with the first lawyer and he saw me, and I begged him not to defend Joe. Really begged him. And you know what? He said he understood where I was coming from. He said he could imagine how I felt. Can you believe that? This son of a bitch tells me he knows how I must be feeling. Then he went on to say that everybody is due a defense, that’s what the law says, and Joe was entitled to what the law says just as anybody was entitled, and that didn’t make sense to me. I mean, you have a guy disregarding the law, disregarding humanity, then suddenly he has civil rights? Fuck that,” he says, and it’s the first Melissa has heard him swear.

“So you started sending him death threats,” she says.

He shakes his head. “No. I read about that, how both lawyers got death threats in the mail, but none of that was me.”

“You just killed them,” she says.

“Yes. But not right away. That first guy, after talking to him, I gave it a month. I was sure if he thought about it more, he’d come around to my way of thinking. He’d have to, right? So a month later I thought it’d be better if I met up with him in a less formal location because I hoped that would make him less formal and more human. So I went back to his work in the evening and waited for him to finish, and I followed him to his car.”

He holds up his hand to her. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says, but he’s wrong. He has no idea what she’s thinking. “I didn’t follow him to hurt him, I just wanted to plead my case with him. I wanted to remind him of the pain he was going to cause.”

“And he didn’t listen to you?”

“No, he listened. That’s the thing,” Raphael says, becoming more animated now as he lifts his hands in the air. “He listened to everything I had to say, and even then he refused to stop defending Joe.”