Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“Can you not use that term?” I ask her.

“ Serial killer ?”

“Yeah. It sounds so. . I don’t know. Something. I don’t like the label,” I say.

“You don’t like the label.”

“That’s right,” I say.

She stares at me as if she can’t really believe I just said that. As if innocent until proven guilty isn’t relevant in my case. “Whether you remember it or not,” she says, “you still killed those people. The serial-killer label is accurate.”

“Is that the label my lawyer will be using?”

She nods. “I get your point,” she says. “But let’s get back to my point, which is most people in your. . situation. . don’t have great relationships with their mother.”

“Joe isn’t most people,” I tell her, and truer words have never been spoken.

“How long did you live with her for?”

“I moved out of the house when Dad died,” I tell her.

“Why?”

“My mother became unbearable. When Dad was alive it gave her somebody to talk to all day long, but when he died that only left me.”

“She ever abuse you?”

“What?” I say, and the handcuff goes tight as I pull my arm up. “No. Never. Why would you ask something like that?”

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m fucking sure,” I tell her. “My mom’s a saint.”

“Okay, Joe. Try to stay calm.”

“I am calm.”

“You don’t sound it.”

I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I say, which are words I’m not sure I’ve heard myself address to anyone before other than my mother. “I just don’t like it when people think bad things about my mother,” I say, but I’m not sure anybody has ever had good thoughts about her either. “Plus I miss my goldfish,” I tell her.

“What?”

“My goldfish. There were two of them. Pickle and Jehovah. They were murdered.”

“We were talking about your mother,” she says.

“I thought we had moved on,” I tell her.

She jots down something on her pad. Then the pen moves back and forth as she underlines something. I’d almost give my right-and only remaining nut-to see what that is.

“You killed your goldfish?” she asks.

I try to stay calm, but I can feel the anger building up inside of me. For her to ask that means she just doesn’t get me. It seems to be a common problem. What is wrong with people? First she thinks my mom abused me, now she thinks I killed my fish. What is the world coming to? Now I’d almost certainly give my right and only remaining nut to get hold of the pen she’s using and drive it into her neck.

“No. No I didn’t,” I say forcefully. “It was a cat.”

“You look angry, Joe.”

“I’m not angry. I just hate the fact people always think the worst of me.”

“You killed a lot of people,” she says.

“I don’t remember any of them,” I say, “and I sure as hell didn’t hurt my fish.”

She writes something else down. She underlines it, then she rings a couple of circles around it. I’m pretty sure she’s doing it deliberately. I think she’s trying to throw me off guard, and that’s why her questions are all over the place. It’s not going to work. I think good things about my mom and about my fish, good things about Melissa. I think about doing good things to Ali once I get out of here. I might be a bad-thoughts kind of guy, but I’m a good-things kind of person. I’m Optimistic Joe. It’s how I roll.

“Tell me,” she says, “does the name Ronald Springer mean anything to you?”

Ronald Springer. Now she really has thrown me off guard. “No,” I say. “Should it?” I ask. The police asked me about Ronald a few months ago. Schroder did. They asked if I had known him. If I had any idea what had happened to him. I told them I never knew him, and they seemed disappointed, but had no reason not to believe me. No reason, sure, but they still spent a few hours questioning me about him.

“It means nothing?”

“It means something,” I tell her, knowing I’ve already reacted to the name, knowing she’ll have been told about my previous interviews. “Detective Carl came to see me a while ago to ask if I had known him. Ronald went to my school.”

“Did you know him?”

“No. I knew who he was, but that was only after he was murdered. I could tell Schroder wasn’t expecting any connection, he was just hoping to wrap up a cold case, only I had nothing to do with it.”

“You’re positive?”

“Of course I’m positive.”

“So how is it you can be positive when you don’t remember killing any of these other people?” she asks.

“Because killing isn’t in my nature.”

“That’s a quick response,” she says.

I shrug. I don’t really know how to respond to it.

“Killing is in your nature,” she says. “You just don’t know you’re doing it. Which means it’s possible you did hurt Ronald and just don’t remember it. Ronald went missing the same month your auntie stopped raping you.”

“Raping?”

“That’s what she was doing, Joe,” she says, but I’m shaking my head.

“That’s the wrong word,” I tell her.

“What’s the right word then? Punishing you?”

“No. She was forgiving me. Forgiving me for breaking into her house.”

“Is that really how you see it, Joe?”

“Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You say you only knew of him after he was murdered,” she says.

“That’s right.”

“The police never said he was murdered. Ronald just disappeared. How would you know he was murdered?”

“It’s just an assumption,” I tell her, and I hate her for trying to fool me. “The police thought so. Everybody thought so. That’s what normally happens when people go missing, right?”

“Sometimes,” she says.

“Well if he wasn’t murdered, what then?”

“Tell me about Ronald.”

“There’s nothing to tell. He was a kid that nobody knew until he was mur. . until he went missing, then people were figuring out who he was, then suddenly he’d been everybody’s best friend. People were going around school telling Ronald stories. There were rumors, right, that he had run away, that he had been abducted, that his parents had killed him. School was nearly over and the way people were talking, you’d think Ronald had been a hot topic since school started. It was weird. Knowing Ronald made you popular. I didn’t understand it. Ronald would have hated all of those guys. Every one of them.”

“You knew him, then?”

“No. I mean, I’d spoken to him a few times because we were in some of the same classes. But people gave him a hard time. They gave me a hard time too. We had that in common, I suppose.”

“Sounds like you knew him a little.”

“I mean we didn’t hang out. Maybe a few times at school we’d eat lunch together because neither of us really had any other friends.”

“Why did the other kids pick on him?”

“You know already,” I tell her. “If you’ve read about him.”

“Because he was gay,” she says.

I shrug. “It didn’t matter if he was gay or not, not for real,” I say, “but once people start throwing around labels like gay boy or serial killer, they stick. People need to be more careful with that kind of thing-but at that age nobody is.”

“How long had you known him?”

“For always. We started school together when we were five, so I’ve always known who he was.”

“Did you kill him, Joe?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Or you did, but can’t remember.”

“I guess that’s possible,” I say. “Why are you so interested in Ronald anyway?”

“Because your lawyer asked me to ask you about him. It seems the people prosecuting you have been looking into the case. We don’t know what their interest is, but they may introduce it at trial.”