by Paul Cleave
I stop it with my foot.
“What happened?” he asks. “You get sick of the doughnuts?” He starts to laugh, then scratches at his belly as if he has just come up with a real humdinger. “No, they fired you, right? Why was that again?”
He keeps grinning at me. His teeth look like they haven’t seen fluoride in years.
“Sure is a nice place you got here,” I say—and hell, maybe the day isn’t long enough after all, because here comes that personality clash. “You in the middle of renovating?”
“Yeah. It’s a real palace,” he answers, but his laughter doesn’t have an ounce of humor in it. It’s as though he’s heard other people do it, maybe on TV or on the radio, and he’s trying to imitate it. “Somebody died, right? Isn’t that why they fired you?”
“Where’s your son?” I ask him.
“Nobody knows,” he says. “The police have been here all afternoon, right? They’ve gone through this place and asked me the same damn things over and over, and my answer didn’t change for them and it ain’t changing for you.”
“Your boy is guilty of something. Things will go easier for him if he starts helping himself here,” I say. “Tell me where he is and I can start to help him.”
“You’re a joke,” he says, sneering for a few seconds and then grinning like the madman he’s turning out to be. I feel sick knowing this is the man who covered my little girl’s coffin with dirt. Sick he was anywhere near her.
“You can’t hide him forever,” I tell him.
“You finished?”
I think about Bruce Alderman and how he was behaving while we dug up the coffin, and I think about him driving away in the stolen truck with the coffin sliding off the back and hitting the ground. I think about how he has perhaps behaved his entire life. This man was his role model. Maybe the world should be thankful there were only four corpses found in the lake and not a hundred.
“You know, I am going to find him,” I say, “only now it’s going to be the hard way.”
“I don’t care about making your life easy.”
“I’m not talking about hard for me,” I say. “You should have given him up, Alderman.”
Instead of getting angry Alderman starts to laugh again. “You’re a cliché,” he says. “And on top of that, you have no authority here.” He composes himself immediately, as if the laugh was as fake as the concern he’s displayed over the years filling in and digging out holes. “They never found him, did they?”
“What?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
I slip my business card back into my pocket. I’m glad he didn’t take it. I don’t want this guy touching my card; I don’t like the idea that my name could be in print anywhere inside this house of the damned—worse, I don’t like the idea of his fingers brushing against mine.
“I’ll find your son,” I promise.
“Ya think so?”
“I know so.”
He shrugs, as if it doesn’t bother him either way. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe he really doesn’t care, and that’s always been the problem for his son. Already I can see Bruce Alderman being found not guilty on a plea of insanity. With this man as his father, there isn’t a jury in the world who would be unsympathetic.
“It’s been a pleasure,” I say, and I back away from the door, keeping my eyes on him. He stares at me as if he is trying to unlock some great mystery. The only mystery here is how somebody so antisocial can have worked these grounds for so many years. He closes the door.
I’m ashamed at myself, angry with him. I came here to interview the bastard yet the only thing I achieved was to let him crawl under my skin. And I can’t take it out on either of us.
I reach the sidewalk, unlock the car, and swing the door open. And that’s when it happens. I sense it immediately. It’s a sprinkling of goose bumps that covers my arms and the back of my neck, and at first I think it’s just a residual feeling that anybody leaving that house would get, but then something touches my back. I know it’s a gun even though I’ve never felt one pushed there before.
“S-s-slowly,” he says, “just move s-s-low-ly.”
“Where?”
“Driver’s s-seat. Climb in.”
I do as Bruce Alderman says, trying to stay as calm as possible as he climbs into the seat behind me.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Too much training and not enough experience. That’s my problem. Plus the training never detailed anything like this. It was more a general thing, like a commonsense warning. If a gun is pointed at you in close proximity, stay calm. Try to talk your way out of it. It’s advice I would’ve figured out even if I’d never learned it.
“D-d-don’t try anything,” Bruce says, so I don’t. I don’t fight for the gun. I don’t open the door and try to run. Don’t do any of this because it’d be pointless, unless the point was to get shot.
Instead I slowly adjust my body so I can turn my head and face him. The gun looks huge, but only because of the viewing angle and I’m not the one holding it. I wonder where he got it from. There are two hands on the handle. Both are shaking. A finger is wrapped around the trigger.
It strains my eyes to keep the barrel in focus, but I keep them strained. If Bruce Alderman wanted me dead, he’d have done it already, but I feel as though if I take my eyes off the barrel I’m going to die.
“What do you want?”
“I d-d-don’t know,” he says, and his answer is a problem. If he doesn’t know, that means he has no plan, and that makes him far more dangerous, and it means maybe he is planning on shooting me. Maybe that’s where his plan is taking him.
His hands keep shaking, the gun rising and falling with minute motions.
“You must want me for something,” I say. “Probably to tell me something. Right? To tell me you had nothing to do with the dead girl we found?”
“Why were you t-talking to my f-f-father?” he asks.
“I was looking for you.”
“You s-started this,” Bruce says. “If it hadn’t been for you, everything w-w-would be okay. It would be okay.”
No, it wouldn’t be okay. Hasn’t been okay for Rachel Tyler for some time now. “Why is that?” I ask.
“What did my father say?”
“Your dad’s a real affable guy. He had plenty to say.”
He pushes himself back into the seat, but keeps the gun leveled at my head. “You think I k-k-killed those girls?”
I don’t answer. I look at Sidney Alderman’s house and wonder what he’s doing right now. Could be Sidney knew his son was out here waiting for me and was putting on a show, his own little performance of misdirection. Could be he didn’t know. It’s not like they could have anticipated my coming here. Bruce must have been here all along, or he followed me from the church.
“Please, I-I . . . I need you to drive away from here.”
I turn back toward him and stare at the gun barrel. “Drive? Where to?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”
“I’m not a taxi service. I’m not going to take you somewhere where you can kill me in private. You want to do that, you do it here, and maybe your old man can help you dispose of my body. Or you might luck out and the cops will hear the gunshot. They’re not that far away.”
“Is that w-what you want?” he asks, pushing the gun forward a few more inches. “You think I w-won’t do it? You think I’ve got something to lose by doing it?”
“I don’t think that’s your plan,” I say, trying to sound calm, “and I don’t think you’re going to pull that trigger. You’d have done it already. You want to tell me something. Maybe you want to confess. Maybe you want to tell me all about it before putting a bullet in my chest.” His hands start to shake a little more. I figure I’m only a few shakes away from getting the back of my head splashed on the windshield. “But you don’t want that to happen here.”
“Maybe you’re wrong.”
I think about my wife. If I’m wrong, I won’t be seeing he
r again. If I’m wrong—and if I’m lucky—maybe I’ll be seeing my daughter. Only problem is I don’t believe in an afterlife. I think of Bridget, already alone and about to become even more so. Except that she’d stare out the window as my death made the newspapers and TV and she’d never feel the loss.
“So where do you want to go?” I ask him.
“Away from here. N-now.”
I manage to shift my eyes from the barrel to his pale face. His features have sunken since the afternoon, as if the bubble of paranoia holding them in place is slowly deflating. His eyes dart nervously back and forth, unable to fix on any one thing for more than a fraction of a second, like he’s hyped up on drugs. There are beads of sweat dangerously close to rolling into his reddened eyes. Behind him, further up the road, dead people are being found in other dead people’s places. I look back at the gun, then at his eyes. Back and forth, back and forth, his eyes are looking for something—whether for help or for the demons that have chased him his entire life, who knows? Could be he’s looking for his caretaker father to take care of this.
“Please,” he repeats, more begging than demanding.
I turn around, and it’s hard to keep looking ahead with the weight of the gun trying to pull my eyes back. I swing the car around, wondering if the old man is watching any of this from his filth-covered windows, or even if he can see through them. In the rearview mirror the house in the glow of my brake lights looks like it’s set on Mars. I head past the cemetery, past the dozen or so people helping the dead and ignoring, for the time being, the living. I pass the large iron gates that look like they were sculpted two thousand years ago to guard some Greek mythological fortress. I pass the church parked back from the road. I’m not sure what Bruce Alderman’s plans are, and I hope at least he knows. I pick a direction and stick to it.
We stop at the first intersection behind a beat-up pickup with a sun-faded bumper sticker on the back saying Oral Me. I look at him in the mirror. He looks scared. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”
The caretaker doesn’t answer.
“I can help you.”
“Help me?”
“You must want something,” I tell him.
“Nobody can give me what I want.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“I know,” he says. “It’s impossible. Unless you can turn back time. Can you? Can you make the last ten years disappear?”
His stutter has gone and I suspect that’s because we’re away from the cemetery. Or, more accurately, away from his dad. He sounds like he did this afternoon when I spoke to him briefly before the digger came along and unearthed all these questions. He also sounds as if his question is genuine, as if he’s holding out hope that maybe I can make the impossible happen. I hope it’s not part of his plan.
“You’re not the only one who wishes they could turn back time,” I tell him. “All I can do is listen to what you have to say. And then I can give you some options. You want to tell me why you killed Rachel Tyler?”
“You know her name?” he says, instead of denying it like an innocent man would.
“I’m a quick learner.”
“That’s why you’re looking for me,” he says. “You think I killed those girls.”
“You want me to think otherwise?”
He shakes his head. “I never killed anybody,” he says.
“Uh huh. Is that why you were in such a hurry to leave this afternoon that you stole the truck? Is that why you’ve got a gun to my head? Doesn’t seem like the path an innocent man would be taking.”
“You don’t know that,” he says. “Can’t know that. You’d be doing the same thing.”
“I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be.”
The intersection clears and we carry on, getting hooked into the flow of other traffic. We drive along in silence for a few seconds. I need him to stay calm.
“You have an office, right?” he asks.
“Why?”
“You must do. All PIs have offices.”
“I don’t know all the PIs in this world,” I tell him. “Half of them could be working out of their cars for all I know. Or their houses.”
He pushes the barrel into my neck. He seems to be getting more and more confident. Only it’s a sliding-scale type of confidence. He’s more confident, perhaps, than a six-year-old girl walking through a cemetery on a dare. Not as confident as a guy holding up a bank.
“Will we be alone there?” he asks.
“Yes.” I change lanes and start altering my course. “But the coffee isn’t anything to write home about.”
He doesn’t offer any further conversation as we drive, and I decide against asking for any. I let him sit in silence, allowing him time to figure something out.
I turn into the parking lot behind my building, and I take my spot, which in the past I’ve had people towed out of. I look at him again in the mirror. “Now what?”
“Is there a security guard on duty?”
“This isn’t a bank.”
He stays out of reach as we walk to the back entrance, but comes in close when we get there. There’s a swipe pad mounted on the wall—it’s all very low-tech—and I slip a card through the reader. There’s a mechanical sound of metal disengaging from metal, then I push the door open. He follows closely behind me, and my first opportunity of getting rid of him by slamming the door on his face is lost.
“How many floors?” he asks.
“How many floors what?”
“What floor are you on?”
“The eighth,” I tell him.
“Let’s take the stairs.”
I’ve already pushed the button on the elevator and the doors have opened. “This is much quicker.”
“Too confined,” he says.
“You claustrophobic?”
“Where are they?”
“This way.”
I lead him into the stairwell. It’s cold and our footfalls echo as we take the stairs two at a time for the first four floors, then one at a time for the remainder. When we reach the eighth floor, we’re both breathing heavily. We see nobody as we move down the corridor. There are potted plants full of crisp green leaves and no brown ones, oil paintings that don’t represent anything, just colors and shapes thrown together in appealing ways.
We reach my office. I step in. Bruce reaches behind him and shuts the door.
“Sit down and keep your hands on the desk,” he says.
I do as he asks, resting my palms on either side of the watch I took earlier. Bruce sits on the other side of the desk as if he were a client. He stares at the watch.
“You recognize it?” I ask him.
“How much do you know?” he asks.
“About what?”
“Don’t be like this,” he says, slapping one hand on the side of his chair while keeping the other on the gun. Steady now, as if all the nerves are gone. As if being away from the cemetery has cured him. As if over the last fifteen minutes all the confusion, all the fear, all the guilt have somehow lined up, found a way to get along, and formed a brilliant idea about what to do next.
“Okay, here’s what I know,” I say. “From the moment you found out we were digging up Henry Martins, you were nervous. You hung around despite that, but as soon as the bodies started coming up to the surface of the lake you bolted. Things were inevitable then. We were all on the same train ride. In the car a while ago you were surprised I’d identified the girl. Rachel Tyler. You asked if I thought you’d killed the girls. Not people, but girls. That means you already know that when the other bodies are identified, and the matching coffins dug up, there are going to be women in there. The only way you could know that is if you put them there.”
He doesn’t answer. Just stares at me, his hand shaking a little, his options racing behind his jittery eyes. I hope he’s not coming back time and time again to the one where he pulls the trigger. Maybe that was his plan all along, and he’s had it from the moment he climbed into my car. He partners up
his free hand with the other one to steady the gun.
“What do you want from me, Bruce?” I lean back, keeping my arms out so my hands don’t leave the table. “Just tell me.”
“I need a cigarette,” he says, and reaches into his pocket.
“I have a no-smoking rule in here,” I say, and when he pulls his hand back from his pocket it’s empty. He doesn’t complain.
“I’ve never killed anybody,” he says, after a few seconds of staring down at his shaking hands, one of which is wrapped tightly around the gun. “I know you think different, but it’s the truth. I have proof. It’s underneath my bed. I could take you there. You could talk to my father. He knows the truth.”
“Uh huh.”
“But you wouldn’t let me take you there, would you?”
“No.”
“You don’t believe me at all, do you?”
I fight the temptation to shake my head. “Why don’t you give me a few more details first?”
“There’s no point. You’ll never believe me. And I knew you wouldn’t.”
“Then why bring me back here? Why go through all of this?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with them dying. Nothing. But I buried them—I had to. The girls, they deserved that. And now,” he says, “now their ghosts will leave me alone, and you, you will take me seriously.” My heart races as he twists the gun and jams the barrel beneath his chin. It’s almost as frightening as having it pointed at me.
“Wait, wait,” I say, and my instinct is to reach out to stop him, but I keep my hands flat on the table. “Listen to me, listen, Bruce.”
He relaxes the gun for a moment, looking at me as if I must be an idiot not to understand him, but it’s just enough of a moment to make me believe there’s a chance neither of us has to die here. Not much of a chance, not long enough of a moment.
“Why did you take the bodies out of the graves? What did these girls deserve?”
For a moment he looks confused, as if he can’t find the right words, then suddenly his face becomes calm and relaxed as some perfect clarity washes over him, and I know it’s the clarity of a man who has made peace with his decision, and that there is nothing I can say or do to avoid his next step.