With a vigorous kick the lieutenant cracked the bedroom door and barged in, Smith&Wesson in his right hand, saying: “you’re under arrest”, when his voice came to a sudden halt. Behind him, the detective, still a rookie, couldn’t help shouting: “Jesus, Joseph and Mary! He’s killed himself!” In the bed, quite dead, was the body of the man they had come for, John Smith, wanted on suspicion of murder. He had slit his left wrist and bled to death. There was no blood on the bed but on the floor there was a small pool.
The lieutenant turned to the detective and said:
“Go to car and radio the office. Tell them to get the coroner and a photographer here.”
“Will do, boss.”
The detective left and the lieutenant got to work. First he checked the drawers in the desk and then looked under the bed. There was no more furniture in the bedroom. Then, in a cool mechanical way, went through the dead man’s clothes. There was a thick envelope in the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket. He took it out. The envelope read: “Who that finds this take it to the Police!”
The lieutenant transferred the envelope to the inside pocket of his own jacket, and waited. Five minutes later the detective was back.
“Are they on their way?”
“Yeah lieutenant, they said they’ll be here in half and hour.”
“Ok. I’m going to that shop for coffee. You stay here and watch over him.”
Evidently, the detective was not very keen on being left behind all alone with the stiff; but even if he was a rookie, in his first weeks as a detective, he’d already learned one valuable lesson: never contradict the lieutenant. The latter walked outside of the house to the next corner were there was a cosy snack bar. We went in, asked for coffee and sat in the corner table, his back against the wall. From there he had a good view of whoever happened to come in or out. Old habits die hard. He took out the envelope, removed the contents, and put the envelope back in the pocket.
It contained a letter. He started to read:
If you’re reading this, then I’m dead. This is my confession, it is the truth and all my hopes rely on you believing a dead man’s word.
I can’t remember when it all started, but I’d say that somehow I knew that something like this would happen ever since I was eighteen – when my father committed suicide.
My father, Jonathan Smith, a civil servant of the most boring kind there is. Always extremely reserved, even with my mother and me; a man of rigid habits. Another of his main features was an obsessive craving for hygiene that, in his final years, had grown more and more repulsive. To give you the ultimate example, when he finally took the wise choice of shooting his brain off, he barricaded in the study and covered the desk, walls and floor with newspapers, like house decorators do. You see, he didn’t want blood stains sprayed all over the studio - not even after he was dead. He also took the precaution of wrapping some plastic around his collar so that his clothes would be immaculate after he’d finished his bloody business. It made a gruesome picture I can tell you, since I was the one who found his corpse. It was in that moment that I realized that something like what has just came to pass would happen. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.
Oddly enough, my father’s horrid death didn’t make such a difference in my life. I wasn’t sad to see him go, after all not only he was a hygiene maniac but also a fanatic enforcer of what he called “following procedure”. Among other things it meant that my daily life was strictly regulated and that penalty would follow swiftly whenever I failed to comply. My mother was not much better than him but when he died she lost authority over me, and so my father’s death was actually a good thing.
When he left us I was already at university and continued my studies to graduate three years latter, in Marketing. Afterwards, in an amazing stroke of luck, I almost immediately landed a very well paid job as a sales rep for a big pharmaceutical company. Come to think of it, maybe I wasn’t that lucky. The pay was excellent and so were all the extra-benefits, such as a nice company car, a state of the art lap top and a cell phone. In contrast the job was a shit. On the whole my function in the company was to go and see doctors, nurses, hospital bureaucrats alas, all and any who had a say in acquiring the medical stuff my company whished to get rid of.
This job lasted for five years and even now, facing the ordeal I’m facing, I can’t help laughing at how it took so much time for my bosses to realize what a complete waste of company money and time I truly and deliberately was. What a bunch of idiots they were. Let me give you an example: Every Monday morning I had to file in a plan of what I would be doing during the week; which hospitals I would be going to, which people I would be talking to. On Friday evening I was required to produce a written report of the things I had done. Of course, the report had to match the plan.
After the first three months or so I realized that they had stopped checking if my reports were true. From this I soon draw a not that much elaborate method of successively and successfully forging report after report.
How I laughed at the morons in the main office! “Well done, John, you have increased your visit rate by 15 per cent this month!” Honestly, it must be said that my working area almost run itself; our products had been in the hospitals that I covered for years and our reputation was solid whilst our competitors’ wasn’t; besides, the overall economic boom that the country experienced also helped to keep my sale record afloat. It couldn’t last long, I guess, but, after three years I was still on top of the game. Probably this is not important al all. But somehow I think I must say it all, or you won’t believe me in the end.
While still in the Firm I met Judy, a girl who worked in the company’s cafeteria and by my second year with the company we were married. I never really loved Judy. She was a bit dumb, actually. She’s dead too. There’s a death that some of you might now feel tempted to pin on me. Don’t go that way; check it if you will but in the end I think facts will corroborate this: No, I didn’t kill Judy, she killed herself. Maybe I helped her, with my behaviour, to make the suicide choice, but I had no part in the actual process itself.
Judy was an easy-going gal, a simple mind that saw marrying one of the sales reps as the ultimate goal, the greatest achievement in her dull, uninteresting life. After I had bedded her on and off for six months she proposed. I wasn’t in love with her but I was living alone in a small silent flat in an even duller neighbourhood and my life seemed as meaningful as that of an insect; besides, I couldn’t cook nor iron my shirts and she was more than willing to oblige. In a discrete civil ceremony we were married; she resigned her job and fully devoted herself to the role of a young, ambitious and bright sales rep’s housewife.
She was soon disappointed, however. As you’ve probably noticed I was never bright nor ambitious. To that you can add that, if not lazy, I’m at least indifferent to what happens around me. And Judy was far much stupid for me to care about her needs. She would want this or that, she would complain about this and that, she endlessly nagged and nagged like the obtuse cow she indeed was. I couldn’t care less. Whenever I was at home, and I spent most of my time there, I would sat down on the living-room sofa and completely ignore her peskiness; just watched TV or played with my lap-top. Sometimes she would turn the TV off and would bark back: “Answer me! Answer me!” Of course, I wouldn’t and instead would light and smoke a cigarette because I knew how much she disliked smoking indoors. After a while she finally grasped the connection between the smoke and the TV and stopped putting it off. She would nag herself into a trance and that would make me smile and she would cry and eventually, although not often, I would go and comfort her – you see, I didn’t want her to rebel; from time to time I had to throw her a bone or two.
Then she started drinking, and that I really enjoyed. I just loved to confuse her and taunt her when she was drunk. She would start crying and sobbing that “I didn’t love her”, to which my usual response would be in the line of: “for once you’re saying something intelligent Mrs Smith, how did you manage?” Or, “love you? I couldn’t love such a putrid piece of foul animal meet as yourself”. These clarifications would invariably bring more crying and sobbing to which I would respond by feeding her extra alcohol, until she would collapse to sleep.
Sometimes I also enjoyed slapping her around or fucking her hard and deeply humiliating her in the procedure, abusing her with the filthiest language I might possible came up with, mortifying her as much as I could.
Now, sitting here all alone, remembering Judy and probing those long gone days, I realize what a terrible son of a bitch I was to her. She was completely in my power, she was mad about me and all I could do was to destroy her. In my absolute selfishness all that I could see was that she was a brainless bitch, my brainless bitch, over whom I had absolute power - or at least that was what I believed until she took that fatal cocktail of whisky and sleeping pills and left me hanging to dry. Then I got to know better. Come to think of it, I suppose it’s only befitting that presently I’m faced with such an ordeal and that so many of my current tribulations are so similar to what Judy was facing back then.
Judy’s death affected me more than you would imagine. You see, she was mine and had no right to take the liberty of dying. I was left completely alone. Although my mother had never approved of my marriage there was still a bond between the two of us, but that was gone for good because she blamed me for her death. I hated her for it. Thank God you disagreed and the whole affair was set aside under the label of “accidental death, due to excessive consumption of alcohol and narcotics”. Despite my mother’s small talk you couldn’t pinch the blame on me because at the time of Judy’s death I was at a convention miles away. Fair enough, I’d been drugging her booze regularly, that’s true, but merely in small amounts and just in order to get her to sleep when her constant moaning bored me. I could never imagine the bitch would go and drug herself as well. Does that make me a killer? Go over your files and check everything I say, and said then, and draw your own conclusions.
I kept with my job (that’s a laugh) but going back to the lonesome flat, being there all by my self, day after day, soon took its toll. And then I made another crucial mistake: smoking heroin. I soon found that what had started as a rather innocuous diversion on Monday and Thursday night couldn’t be tamed and my addiction grew stronger and stronger. My path was in no way different from that of thousands and thousands of other junkies across the globe. After two years the job was the first casualty. I got sloppy with my previously well balanced forgery system and eventually got an invitation to leave. Then went my car, and finally the flat. In three years I was reduced to a skinny, bony, poor excuse for a man with yellow complexion and permanently glazed eyes; running errands for drug dealers, parking cars for nickels and occasionally mugging old ladies. I don’t deny that. But again, does that make me a killer?
One day, when I had just managed to get my fix, I was beaten up and robbed of it by other junkies. It was the end of the line. Oblivion. For the first time in my life I felt real fear. I thought that my days were numbered. It was a summer morning and somehow I hitch-hiked my way to the coast. If I was going to die at least I wanted to die by the sea. I crawled to a desert beach and lay under the hot sun, shaking with convulsions and nausea. As it turned out I was saved by another of those fantastic strokes of luck that had gotten me out of the hook so many times in the past. I felt a shadow over me, opened my eyes and saw a guy in his mid-thirties looking down. “No fix for you today, hum, pal?” he asked. Charlie was a former drug addict and took pity of me. He lived in a cabin near the beach, brought me in, nursed and helped me through the appalling motions of kicking heroin out of your system. Three weeks latter he gave me hundred bucks and bade me farewell. I didn’t want to leave but Charlie insisted: “John, if you’re gonna make it you have to do it on your own and for yourself.” And so I did. Six months latter I had rented a room, was working as a waiter and, more important, keeping clean.
Then something really good happened: my mother died. She left me her house, car and some money in the bank. I quit my job and started to enjoy a bit of the good life again. But I was still alone. Maybe more than ever. Soon, most of the money was gone and I couldn’t decide on going back to work. So I resorted to my PhD in drug addiction: I run small scale scams, like a minor participation in a passport falsification network, moving drugs from one house to the other, even operating an informal taxi service for junkies who couldn’t wait to get home to have their fix and would be tripping in the back seat while I droved them home. I would try some more legit scams as well. It was in one of these that I got to meet her and that’s why I’m writing this now.
Monday Morning. Had drunk too much the day before and found myself broke. Got a newspaper, went straight to the add section, browsed and came up with this one: “Four Kittens to give away - must be well taken care - $75 reward”. Brilliant, I thought, phoned this man who had placed the add, drove to his home and in less than 45 minutes I was driving away with four little pests in the trunk and $75 in my pocket.
I considered drowning them in my back garden but dismissed it because with would most likely get messy, and also because despite all my apparent cynicism in fact I’m soft, and could not even kill a cat. The trash bin was my next option. I came upon one, stopped the car, opened the trunk; as I was taking the cats out, a woman, walking by, stopped and said: “Oh, they’re so beautiful, could they possibly be for sale?” She was a knock-out. The foxiest woman I had ever come across. And she had that rare perfume of money too. I gazed at Lorraine the whole time while she took two of the cats with her and my phone number just in case some of her friends would take the remaining two. In three days we were having sex. In three weeks I was completely in love as I had never been before in my life. It was too good to be true, literally, and now I’ll pay the price. Lorraine was married to a rich man whom you know; she despised him and gradually we decided to send him to a worse place. I was the one in charge of the killing. Nobody new about me, Lorraine had taken good care about that. There was no connexion between us and we wanted to play it as a burglary gone too far. And so yesterday evening there I was, furtively making my way through the darkened garden; to the rear door of the big house; cutting the window glass, into the kitchen, up the stairs, pistol in my hand; suddenly there he was, just like in the photo. I raised the gun as he started coming for me. He stopped and shouted “Don’t, I’ll give you money, I’ll give you whatever you want!” I aimed the gun at his head and immediately he covered his face with his arms; he emitted an animal scream and I just cracked: I couldn’t do it! I threw the gun way, run for the car and drove home as a mad man possessed. Finally, I parked the car and stayed inside it for at least two hours. I had done the right thing in not killing this man. Then, just when I was starting to feel a bit relaxed, out of nowhere there was a knock in the car window. I rolled the window down and from a dark face came a sharp voice:
“John Smith, I presume?”
“Yes, it’s me, who are you?”
“You don’t need to know. I just wanted to tell you that we knew all along you wouldn’t be up to the job. But don’t worry, the job’s been done alright and we planted enough evidence as to provide you with a nice long stay upstate.”
“What?”
“That’s it pal, you going down for murder. And before you even contemplate taking Lorraine down with you, remember, not only there is no connection between you two, but she also has a full proof alibi. If you go telling stories who’s going to believe a junkie with strange suicide incidents in his past? Sayonara mother fucker you truly lived up to your name!”
And with that he was gone. This was five hours ago. It’s true. There’s no connection between me and Lorraine, we always met in remote areas and had sex in her car. But was it her car? She has no birth marks that I can remember to make a defence case. Come to think of it, I know almost nothing about Lorraine! She’s seemed such a sympathetic listener, always keen to hear what I had to say, she never mentioned much about herself! I don’t even know if she has a job. All I knew was that she was married to this older guy who she said was a bastard to her but a very rich one.
And who would a jury believe? Her, probably a decent member of society, or me, a former drug addict? Still, she must be stopped. I’m going to kill myself now. It’s the only way I can think to make you believe my word and my story.
This is the final appeal from a dead man: investigate her, go through all the details of her life, and don’t let her get away with it! Goodbye.
The lieutenant turned to the detective and said:
“Go to car and radio the office. Tell them to get the coroner and a photographer here.”
“Will do, boss.”
The detective left and the lieutenant got to work. First he checked the drawers in the desk and then looked under the bed. There was no more furniture in the bedroom. Then, in a cool mechanical way, went through the dead man’s clothes. There was a thick envelope in the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket. He took it out. The envelope read: “Who that finds this take it to the Police!”
The lieutenant transferred the envelope to the inside pocket of his own jacket, and waited. Five minutes later the detective was back.
“Are they on their way?”
“Yeah lieutenant, they said they’ll be here in half and hour.”
“Ok. I’m going to that shop for coffee. You stay here and watch over him.”
Evidently, the detective was not very keen on being left behind all alone with the stiff; but even if he was a rookie, in his first weeks as a detective, he’d already learned one valuable lesson: never contradict the lieutenant. The latter walked outside of the house to the next corner were there was a cosy snack bar. We went in, asked for coffee and sat in the corner table, his back against the wall. From there he had a good view of whoever happened to come in or out. Old habits die hard. He took out the envelope, removed the contents, and put the envelope back in the pocket.
It contained a letter. He started to read:
If you’re reading this, then I’m dead. This is my confession, it is the truth and all my hopes rely on you believing a dead man’s word.
I can’t remember when it all started, but I’d say that somehow I knew that something like this would happen ever since I was eighteen – when my father committed suicide.
My father, Jonathan Smith, a civil servant of the most boring kind there is. Always extremely reserved, even with my mother and me; a man of rigid habits. Another of his main features was an obsessive craving for hygiene that, in his final years, had grown more and more repulsive. To give you the ultimate example, when he finally took the wise choice of shooting his brain off, he barricaded in the study and covered the desk, walls and floor with newspapers, like house decorators do. You see, he didn’t want blood stains sprayed all over the studio - not even after he was dead. He also took the precaution of wrapping some plastic around his collar so that his clothes would be immaculate after he’d finished his bloody business. It made a gruesome picture I can tell you, since I was the one who found his corpse. It was in that moment that I realized that something like what has just came to pass would happen. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.
Oddly enough, my father’s horrid death didn’t make such a difference in my life. I wasn’t sad to see him go, after all not only he was a hygiene maniac but also a fanatic enforcer of what he called “following procedure”. Among other things it meant that my daily life was strictly regulated and that penalty would follow swiftly whenever I failed to comply. My mother was not much better than him but when he died she lost authority over me, and so my father’s death was actually a good thing.
When he left us I was already at university and continued my studies to graduate three years latter, in Marketing. Afterwards, in an amazing stroke of luck, I almost immediately landed a very well paid job as a sales rep for a big pharmaceutical company. Come to think of it, maybe I wasn’t that lucky. The pay was excellent and so were all the extra-benefits, such as a nice company car, a state of the art lap top and a cell phone. In contrast the job was a shit. On the whole my function in the company was to go and see doctors, nurses, hospital bureaucrats alas, all and any who had a say in acquiring the medical stuff my company whished to get rid of.
This job lasted for five years and even now, facing the ordeal I’m facing, I can’t help laughing at how it took so much time for my bosses to realize what a complete waste of company money and time I truly and deliberately was. What a bunch of idiots they were. Let me give you an example: Every Monday morning I had to file in a plan of what I would be doing during the week; which hospitals I would be going to, which people I would be talking to. On Friday evening I was required to produce a written report of the things I had done. Of course, the report had to match the plan.
After the first three months or so I realized that they had stopped checking if my reports were true. From this I soon draw a not that much elaborate method of successively and successfully forging report after report.
How I laughed at the morons in the main office! “Well done, John, you have increased your visit rate by 15 per cent this month!” Honestly, it must be said that my working area almost run itself; our products had been in the hospitals that I covered for years and our reputation was solid whilst our competitors’ wasn’t; besides, the overall economic boom that the country experienced also helped to keep my sale record afloat. It couldn’t last long, I guess, but, after three years I was still on top of the game. Probably this is not important al all. But somehow I think I must say it all, or you won’t believe me in the end.
While still in the Firm I met Judy, a girl who worked in the company’s cafeteria and by my second year with the company we were married. I never really loved Judy. She was a bit dumb, actually. She’s dead too. There’s a death that some of you might now feel tempted to pin on me. Don’t go that way; check it if you will but in the end I think facts will corroborate this: No, I didn’t kill Judy, she killed herself. Maybe I helped her, with my behaviour, to make the suicide choice, but I had no part in the actual process itself.
Judy was an easy-going gal, a simple mind that saw marrying one of the sales reps as the ultimate goal, the greatest achievement in her dull, uninteresting life. After I had bedded her on and off for six months she proposed. I wasn’t in love with her but I was living alone in a small silent flat in an even duller neighbourhood and my life seemed as meaningful as that of an insect; besides, I couldn’t cook nor iron my shirts and she was more than willing to oblige. In a discrete civil ceremony we were married; she resigned her job and fully devoted herself to the role of a young, ambitious and bright sales rep’s housewife.
She was soon disappointed, however. As you’ve probably noticed I was never bright nor ambitious. To that you can add that, if not lazy, I’m at least indifferent to what happens around me. And Judy was far much stupid for me to care about her needs. She would want this or that, she would complain about this and that, she endlessly nagged and nagged like the obtuse cow she indeed was. I couldn’t care less. Whenever I was at home, and I spent most of my time there, I would sat down on the living-room sofa and completely ignore her peskiness; just watched TV or played with my lap-top. Sometimes she would turn the TV off and would bark back: “Answer me! Answer me!” Of course, I wouldn’t and instead would light and smoke a cigarette because I knew how much she disliked smoking indoors. After a while she finally grasped the connection between the smoke and the TV and stopped putting it off. She would nag herself into a trance and that would make me smile and she would cry and eventually, although not often, I would go and comfort her – you see, I didn’t want her to rebel; from time to time I had to throw her a bone or two.
Then she started drinking, and that I really enjoyed. I just loved to confuse her and taunt her when she was drunk. She would start crying and sobbing that “I didn’t love her”, to which my usual response would be in the line of: “for once you’re saying something intelligent Mrs Smith, how did you manage?” Or, “love you? I couldn’t love such a putrid piece of foul animal meet as yourself”. These clarifications would invariably bring more crying and sobbing to which I would respond by feeding her extra alcohol, until she would collapse to sleep.
Sometimes I also enjoyed slapping her around or fucking her hard and deeply humiliating her in the procedure, abusing her with the filthiest language I might possible came up with, mortifying her as much as I could.
Now, sitting here all alone, remembering Judy and probing those long gone days, I realize what a terrible son of a bitch I was to her. She was completely in my power, she was mad about me and all I could do was to destroy her. In my absolute selfishness all that I could see was that she was a brainless bitch, my brainless bitch, over whom I had absolute power - or at least that was what I believed until she took that fatal cocktail of whisky and sleeping pills and left me hanging to dry. Then I got to know better. Come to think of it, I suppose it’s only befitting that presently I’m faced with such an ordeal and that so many of my current tribulations are so similar to what Judy was facing back then.
Judy’s death affected me more than you would imagine. You see, she was mine and had no right to take the liberty of dying. I was left completely alone. Although my mother had never approved of my marriage there was still a bond between the two of us, but that was gone for good because she blamed me for her death. I hated her for it. Thank God you disagreed and the whole affair was set aside under the label of “accidental death, due to excessive consumption of alcohol and narcotics”. Despite my mother’s small talk you couldn’t pinch the blame on me because at the time of Judy’s death I was at a convention miles away. Fair enough, I’d been drugging her booze regularly, that’s true, but merely in small amounts and just in order to get her to sleep when her constant moaning bored me. I could never imagine the bitch would go and drug herself as well. Does that make me a killer? Go over your files and check everything I say, and said then, and draw your own conclusions.
I kept with my job (that’s a laugh) but going back to the lonesome flat, being there all by my self, day after day, soon took its toll. And then I made another crucial mistake: smoking heroin. I soon found that what had started as a rather innocuous diversion on Monday and Thursday night couldn’t be tamed and my addiction grew stronger and stronger. My path was in no way different from that of thousands and thousands of other junkies across the globe. After two years the job was the first casualty. I got sloppy with my previously well balanced forgery system and eventually got an invitation to leave. Then went my car, and finally the flat. In three years I was reduced to a skinny, bony, poor excuse for a man with yellow complexion and permanently glazed eyes; running errands for drug dealers, parking cars for nickels and occasionally mugging old ladies. I don’t deny that. But again, does that make me a killer?
One day, when I had just managed to get my fix, I was beaten up and robbed of it by other junkies. It was the end of the line. Oblivion. For the first time in my life I felt real fear. I thought that my days were numbered. It was a summer morning and somehow I hitch-hiked my way to the coast. If I was going to die at least I wanted to die by the sea. I crawled to a desert beach and lay under the hot sun, shaking with convulsions and nausea. As it turned out I was saved by another of those fantastic strokes of luck that had gotten me out of the hook so many times in the past. I felt a shadow over me, opened my eyes and saw a guy in his mid-thirties looking down. “No fix for you today, hum, pal?” he asked. Charlie was a former drug addict and took pity of me. He lived in a cabin near the beach, brought me in, nursed and helped me through the appalling motions of kicking heroin out of your system. Three weeks latter he gave me hundred bucks and bade me farewell. I didn’t want to leave but Charlie insisted: “John, if you’re gonna make it you have to do it on your own and for yourself.” And so I did. Six months latter I had rented a room, was working as a waiter and, more important, keeping clean.
Then something really good happened: my mother died. She left me her house, car and some money in the bank. I quit my job and started to enjoy a bit of the good life again. But I was still alone. Maybe more than ever. Soon, most of the money was gone and I couldn’t decide on going back to work. So I resorted to my PhD in drug addiction: I run small scale scams, like a minor participation in a passport falsification network, moving drugs from one house to the other, even operating an informal taxi service for junkies who couldn’t wait to get home to have their fix and would be tripping in the back seat while I droved them home. I would try some more legit scams as well. It was in one of these that I got to meet her and that’s why I’m writing this now.
Monday Morning. Had drunk too much the day before and found myself broke. Got a newspaper, went straight to the add section, browsed and came up with this one: “Four Kittens to give away - must be well taken care - $75 reward”. Brilliant, I thought, phoned this man who had placed the add, drove to his home and in less than 45 minutes I was driving away with four little pests in the trunk and $75 in my pocket.
I considered drowning them in my back garden but dismissed it because with would most likely get messy, and also because despite all my apparent cynicism in fact I’m soft, and could not even kill a cat. The trash bin was my next option. I came upon one, stopped the car, opened the trunk; as I was taking the cats out, a woman, walking by, stopped and said: “Oh, they’re so beautiful, could they possibly be for sale?” She was a knock-out. The foxiest woman I had ever come across. And she had that rare perfume of money too. I gazed at Lorraine the whole time while she took two of the cats with her and my phone number just in case some of her friends would take the remaining two. In three days we were having sex. In three weeks I was completely in love as I had never been before in my life. It was too good to be true, literally, and now I’ll pay the price. Lorraine was married to a rich man whom you know; she despised him and gradually we decided to send him to a worse place. I was the one in charge of the killing. Nobody new about me, Lorraine had taken good care about that. There was no connexion between us and we wanted to play it as a burglary gone too far. And so yesterday evening there I was, furtively making my way through the darkened garden; to the rear door of the big house; cutting the window glass, into the kitchen, up the stairs, pistol in my hand; suddenly there he was, just like in the photo. I raised the gun as he started coming for me. He stopped and shouted “Don’t, I’ll give you money, I’ll give you whatever you want!” I aimed the gun at his head and immediately he covered his face with his arms; he emitted an animal scream and I just cracked: I couldn’t do it! I threw the gun way, run for the car and drove home as a mad man possessed. Finally, I parked the car and stayed inside it for at least two hours. I had done the right thing in not killing this man. Then, just when I was starting to feel a bit relaxed, out of nowhere there was a knock in the car window. I rolled the window down and from a dark face came a sharp voice:
“John Smith, I presume?”
“Yes, it’s me, who are you?”
“You don’t need to know. I just wanted to tell you that we knew all along you wouldn’t be up to the job. But don’t worry, the job’s been done alright and we planted enough evidence as to provide you with a nice long stay upstate.”
“What?”
“That’s it pal, you going down for murder. And before you even contemplate taking Lorraine down with you, remember, not only there is no connection between you two, but she also has a full proof alibi. If you go telling stories who’s going to believe a junkie with strange suicide incidents in his past? Sayonara mother fucker you truly lived up to your name!”
And with that he was gone. This was five hours ago. It’s true. There’s no connection between me and Lorraine, we always met in remote areas and had sex in her car. But was it her car? She has no birth marks that I can remember to make a defence case. Come to think of it, I know almost nothing about Lorraine! She’s seemed such a sympathetic listener, always keen to hear what I had to say, she never mentioned much about herself! I don’t even know if she has a job. All I knew was that she was married to this older guy who she said was a bastard to her but a very rich one.
And who would a jury believe? Her, probably a decent member of society, or me, a former drug addict? Still, she must be stopped. I’m going to kill myself now. It’s the only way I can think to make you believe my word and my story.
This is the final appeal from a dead man: investigate her, go through all the details of her life, and don’t let her get away with it! Goodbye.
John Smith
The lieutenant finished his reading and for a moment seemed almost pleased. He got up and put the letter in his envelope and back in his jacket pocket. He went to the counter and paid for his coffee. Walking outside to a crisp morning he reached for his mobile phone and dialled a number. Ring, ring.
A voice answered:
“Yes?”“It’s done, the idiot made it even easier for us! He killed himself, Lorraine!”
The lieutenant finished his reading and for a moment seemed almost pleased. He got up and put the letter in his envelope and back in his jacket pocket. He went to the counter and paid for his coffee. Walking outside to a crisp morning he reached for his mobile phone and dialled a number. Ring, ring.
A voice answered:
“Yes?”“It’s done, the idiot made it even easier for us! He killed himself, Lorraine!”
