Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 07

"Were there fingerprints?" Carmen asked.

"Yes, on the ladder, but what you'd expect. Shane, Jenny's, Tina's. Nothing from Niki, so she wore gloves. We'll ask her that."

"There's one thing we're losing focus on," Carmen said.

"What's that?

"The jacket and letter. Shane isn't all that interested in clothes. It wasn't the jacket being hidden up there that pissed her off. It was Mollie's letter in the jacket pocket."

"Okay, good point. The jacket is secondary to the letter."

Lauren reached up, turned off the light and climbed down the ladder, and put it back up in place in the ceiling.

***

"I can see the wheels turning in your brain. What are you thinking?" Lauren asked as they drove downtown.

"Am I that transparent?" Carmen asked.

"Transparent? Um ... no, wrong word. You aren't transparent. But you are pretty open and up front, and you don't try to hide things or pretend. So in a way, yes, that makes you easy to read. In my opinion, that's a good thing about you, not a bad thing. Now, someone like Capt. Duffy ... you don't know how fucking hard I have to work to figure out what's on her devious, clever, suspicious little mind behind that stony façade. No, I'll take transparent over unreadable every time."

"So ... that was a compliment?"

"Absolutely. Sorry if it came out ass backwards."

"Okay, then."

"So what were the wheels turning about?"

"You know a lot of about murderers, right? The psychology and all that?"

"Well, some, not much. I've worked homicide, sure, and most of them are pretty simple. Somebody gets pissed and kills somebody else. There isn't a whole lot of complexity about it, most of the time. A drug deal goes bad, so some asshole pulls a gun. The wife hates the husband, the husband hates the wife, somebody snaps. Some crack addict goes into a Korean market looking to rob the register. Then you have your serial psychos. There, I've just covered about ninety-eight percent of all homicides."

"Okay, I'm talking about the other two percent, then. Maybe one percent of the two percent."

"Got it. The answer is, I don't know too much more than anybody else. What did you have in mind?"

"Is it possible ... have there ever been cases ... where the person kills somebody else, and then completely blanks out on it, actually forgets they did it almost instantly, and actually believes they didn't do it?"

Lauren mulled it over. "Who we talking about?"

Carmen hesitated. "Shane."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. You were the major cheerleader for the idea that Shane couldn't possibly have done it, because she'd have fallen apart afterward, and could never have hidden it from everybody, most especially within minutes of it happening."

"Yeah, I was. That was me. But now I'm asking, could she have killed Jenny, by accident. Pushed her or something, didn't mean to kill her, but Jenny fell down and hit her head and slid into the pool, and Shane went into this kind of, I don't what you call it. Denial, or shock, or something. A blackout. Amnesia, I don't know if that's the right word. What I mean is, could Shane have done it and then blacked out on it so completely that she truly believes she didn't do it? Could she sincerely believe she's innocent, even if she isn't?"

"Things like that have been known to happen, yes. It's rare, but it happens."

They rode for several blocks in silence.

"I have another question," Lauren said, "but it doesn't have anything to do with the case. It's another 'Go to Hell' question, if you want it to be."

"Okay, fire away," Carmen said. "After everything else we've talked about, how bad could it be?"

Lauren glanced at her and glanced back at the street. "I think maybe it would be the hardest question there is."

"Wow. Trying to scare me, huh?"

"Back to the wedding," Lauren said. "Not the day itself. Before. Why'd you say yes? You had doubts. You knew her issues with monogamy, with staying faithful. Yet you never blinked, to hear you tell it. You were in it 100 percent right to the final moment."

"Yes," Carmen said. "Yes, that's true. And you want to know why?"

"Yes."

"Because that's how you are supposed to enter a marriage. And if I am anything, I'm a one-hundred-and-ten-percent gal. When I commit, I commit. Full speed ahead. Pedal to the metal. Thelma and Louise, right over the cliff. That's me."

"Except it was just you, Thelma. Louise bailed on you."

"Maybe I'm Louise and it was Thelma who bailed on me."

"Whatever."

"Okay, I'm deflecting. So here's what should have happened. I'm talking days before, and maybe even weeks. It doesn't matter. But yes, long before we got to Whistler and I put on my beautiful wedding dress. One of the two of us should have known this was a bad mistake. One of us should have known Shane was a bad risk, and an unlikely spouse. Likely to be unfaithful, like you said. Likely to cheat. Likely, at some point, to break my heart. Likely to get bored and Seven-Year-Itchy somewhere around Year Two or maybe Year Three, at the most. Uncomfortable with monogamy. One of us should have said to herself, look, kid, this started while grieving over Dana when everybody was super vulnerable. It started when you looked ahead at all the long, lonely years, and didn't want that future. One of us should have known that although Shane meant well, and had the very best of intentions, but that she wasn't going to be able to go through with it. Hell, everybody else in Greater Lesbian LA knew it, so why not Shane and me? Well, the answer is, one of us did know it. And one of us did act on it. The one that knew, and realized it was a bad idea, and who figured out what was going on ... was Shane. She knew. She realized. But she took too long to process it, because things like this always take her forever to figure out. But give her credit, she did it, she processed all of it just in the nick of time. Not only that, she processed it with all these side distractions going on, meeting her father for the first time ever, learning about his scam and the theft of the money, me losing my family -- or at least losing my mom, when I came out to her -- and then regaining her when we got to Whistler. All this tremendous stuff going on, all these pressures and distractions, and still Shane processed it all and got to a solution. In a perverse sort of way, I'm proud of her. She figured it all out, and acted on it. Just not very well, that's all."

"But I don't get it. You said you'll never forgive her. Why not, if you say she processed everything and acted on it?"

"Because she came to the right conclusion but made the wrong decision about what to do about it. She had options, and characteristically that's when she fucked up. She panicked. She ran. That's what she does, who she is. First off, the minute she learned about her father's scam, she should have come to Helena, and to me, too, and told us what was happening. I was supposed to be her partner, her future spouse. That's the person you're supposed to confide in, to trust above all others, right? To seek help from, if necessary. Not only didn't she come to me or Helena, she didn't go to Alice, or anybody else. Theoretically, the groom isn't supposed to have contact with the bride on the wedding day, but God knows, Shane is about the last human on the face of the earth who would care about some old hoary tradition like that. No, she panicked, and tried to deal with it herself, which she was incapable of doing. Sure, the scam would have been a major blight on our wedding, and maybe we might have postponed it for a day, or a week, or whatever it might have taken. But the scam had nothing to do with our relationship, with whether I loved her or she loved me. Her old man is a crook and an asshole; so what? What's that got to do with me? What's that got to do with her? With us? Nothing. She barely even knew the bastard, but she let him get inside her head and convince her she's worthless just like he is. See, she's always thought that about herself, anyway, so it didn't take much to reinforce that idea. And who knows, maybe he sensed that in her, or maybe it was just a mean, lucky shot. But he hit his bull's eye, and walked away. And what's worse, he did it for a relatively paltry sum of money, only ten thousand bucks, and he knew he was hurting a lot of people. Not just Shane and me, but Carla, too, and his own son."

"That's not just a cold-hearted prick," Lauren said. "That's a sociopath."

"Yep. But for me, here's the final thing. The deal-breaker."

"What's that?"

"I hate to use this word, but I don't have any choice."

"Yes?"

"The word is 'coward.' Shane is a coward."

[The story of Shane, Harvey, and Lauren is told in chapters 3, 4, and 5 of "Shane and Carmen: The Novelization," beginning at https://www.literotica.com/s/shane-and-carmen-the-novelization-ch-03]