by Paul Cleave
“For dignity,” he says, “they deserved the dignity.”
The gunshot rings in my ears. I smell cordite and burning flesh long after the pink mist settles, long after pieces of bone and brain are buried into the ceiling above him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It’s a life moment. One of those snapshots of time that never leave you, never seem to fade away. In fact it’s the exact opposite—the colors, the imagery, the detail, they don’t dilute, they grow stronger, clearer; the moment becomes more powerful over the years while others slowly disappear. The smell—the smell of cooking flesh, the coppery smell of blood, the gunpowder, the stench as his bowels let go, the sweat. The air tastes hot, it dries out my mouth and makes my tongue stick to its roof. All I hear is a ringing sound that seems as though it will never diminish, as if it too will only grow more powerful.
It’s a life moment. I sit still, I stare ahead, I take it all in. I don’t know if there are others in the building. Don’t know if the gunshot has already been reported. Blood has formed thick splotches on the ceiling. They seem to hang there, motionless, unaffected by gravity. Bruce Alderman’s body also seems to hang there, the hand still on the gun, the gun still pressed into his neck. The front of his shirt is clean, not a speck of blood on it. His hair is messed up, the bullet forming a volcano shape in the roof of his skull. And still he sits there, as I sit there, motionless, staring at each other, a life moment for me, a death moment for him. Time has paused, as if in a snapshot.
Then it begins again. His hand, still gripping the gun, falls away. It hits the top of his thigh, slides into the arm of the chair; the gun clicks against it and falls onto the carpet. His head drops down, his chin hits his chest; the gunshot hole in his skull is like an eye staring at me, the blood falling through it, giving the impression it’s winking at me. Blood-matted hair falls into place and blocks the view. Blood pools on his shirt. It starts to pull away from the ceiling, droplets that form stalactites before breaking away and raining down. They pad softly into the carpet, make small thudding noises on the fronts of his legs, the back of his neck, the top of his head. It drops onto my shoulders, onto my arms, onto my hands that are still on the desk for him to see. He stays slumped there, this dead weight in my office chair, then slowly he tips forward, he gains momentum, then his forehead cracks heavily into the edge of the desk, jarring his head upright as his body falls, keeping him balanced for a moment longer, the back of his head almost touching his shoulders, his face exposed and his empty eyes staring at me, before he continues down to the ground where he lies in a clump that five seconds ago was a person but is a person no more. He lies on the gun, and still I sit here, watching, waiting: perhaps someone will come along and tell me that this is what I get for following up a line of questioning into an investigation that isn’t even mine.
The pink mist slowly settles; the smell of the gunshot starts to fade, replaced by urine and shit; and the ringing in my ears slowly dulls to a shrilling noise.
I stand up slowly, as if any sudden movement might cause him to pick the gun back up and try prefixing his suicide with the word murder. I move around my desk to the body, careful not to step in any blood. I think of his last words. They deserved the dignity. He wanted me to take him seriously, and he succeeded. Only problem is I still don’t believe he’s innocent. Shooting himself in my office isn’t the action required to prove innocence over guilt; if anything, it helps suggest insanity over sanity. I’d have told him this if I’d been given the chance.
I crouch down and put a hand on his shoulder. Without rolling him, barely without touching him, I go through his pockets.
There is a small envelope that has my name written on it, only he’s spelled it wrong. In the bottom of the envelope is a small key. I’m about to sit it up on my desk when I see the blood mist has coated the surface. I fold the envelope in half and tuck it into my pocket. I go through the rest of his pockets. I find car keys and a wallet; I find tissues, two packets of antacids, a broken pencil, and one of my business cards. I leave them where they are.
I use my cell phone to call the police because my office phone is covered in blood. I ask for Detective Schroder, but get transferred through to Detective Inspector Landry. I’d rather not talk to him, but I’m not running high on options. I tell him the situation as if giving just any old police report. Before I finish I ask him to bring coffee.
“Jesus, Tate, this isn’t my first homicide,” he says.
“You mean suicide.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” He hangs up.
I sit on the ground out in the corridor, putting a cushion between me and the wall so as not to stain it with the blood splatter on my jacket, and lean back. I think of what Bruce told me. Why kill yourself if you’re not admitting any guilt? How could anybody possibly believe he buried those girls, but had nothing to do with their deaths?
I pull the envelope out of my pocket. The key looks a little different from others I’ve seen, and I can’t identify it. There are no marks on it, no numbers, no letters. It could be for a house, a lockbox, a safe, a boat—could be anything. It’s just one more item that I’ve taken from somebody today. The ring is still in my pocket, and the wristwatch is still on my desk. I head back into my office and slip the watch into a plastic bag before dropping it into my pocket. This whole area is a crime scene now and I don’t need awkward questions. I take out the key and put it onto my key ring so it looks like one of mine.
I’m still in my office when I hear them arriving. The elevator pings, the doors open, and half a dozen police, including Landry, spill into the corridor. Soon there will be others as they come to question and photograph and document and study. The cemetery crime scene was taken away from me, but this one is mine.
I stand by the doorway and watch. I have worked with most of these men and women in the past, but they look at me as if I’m a stranger. Their greetings are curt, and I am told to step into the corridor and wait.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The night drags on. My office is quarantined from me, and from the rest of the world, by yellow boundary tape with black lettering. Forensic guys dressed in white nylon overalls move slowly around inside, searching every square centimeter in case the vital clue is a microscopic one. Nobody asks to search me, but my hands are tested for gunshot residue and my jacket is taken from me because of the blood dust that has settled on it. I’m not concerned at all, because the evidence will show that the shooting happened exactly as I said it did. It can’t go any other way. They can’t come back to me tomorrow and say they’ve weighed it all up and their conclusion is I put the gun into his chin and pulled the trigger.
Still, it’s a clear-cut case of suicide that can’t be that clear because of the time they’re taking to studying the angles and blood patterns. At least that’s how it feels. They’re taking this long to deal with it because they’re dealing with me. They don’t trust me the same way they trusted me when I was one of them. As an outsider I fall within the scope of their suspicions, and for this I only have myself to blame. I was a different man two years ago. A very different man.
Their questions begin to repeat after a while. The phrasing alters somewhat, but they’re only variations of the same theme—one that fast gets tiring, and one which seems to suggest there is a degree of blame here that is mine. Only there isn’t. I didn’t force the caretaker into my car. Didn’t force him to come back here. Didn’t force him to shed brain and bone matter across my furniture.
In the end I’m told to go home. I’m not sure how happy I am to do that, but I’m not sure what the alternative is either. Hang around and watch, I guess, though there isn’t much to watch. Just a bunch of guys doing the kind of tedious work that guys like me don’t have the patience for. If it was daytime there’d be a crowd of onlookers tripping over each other to sneak a peek at the corpse, but I’ve already sneaked a peek, and more—I stole from it.
“One last thing,” Landry calls out as I make my way to the stairwell.
“What did you take?” he asks.
“What?”
“Off your desk. There are three clear spots. All that misted blood, except for three places. Two are from your hands. Which is a good thing, because it shows where you were when he pulled the trigger. But there’s something else. A much smaller patch.”
“My keys.”
“Doesn’t look like you took keys.”
“There was so much going on. I don’t know. Maybe it was my phone.”
“Didn’t look like a phone. If I was to search you, I wouldn’t find anything else?”
“What’s your point, Landry?”
“No point. Just curious as to what would be important enough for you to steal from a crime scene.”
“I’m not stealing anything, and anyway it’s my office. Everything in there belongs to me.”
“Not everything,” he says, and he looks back toward my office where the body of Bruce Alderman is being carried out in a dark canvas bag.
Outside, it’s drizzling again. It’s almost two in the morning. My car is still damp inside, but at least there’s no one in the back holding a gun. I drape one of the ambulance blankets over the driver’s seat to protect it from any blood still on my clothes, then begin the drive home. The hookers and the homeless stare at me as I pass. I could be their salvation, their next meal, their next drink, their next score.
It’s only a ten-minute drive home, but I’m almost falling asleep by the time I get there. My house isn’t anything flashy, merely one of many placed slap-bang in the middle of suburbia. People live here, they spend their lives here, they make little people and pay big mortgages, and supposedly, supposedly, if they play by the rules then nothing bad happens to them. The problem is that tonight there is a van parked outside blocking the entranceway, so I can’t just drive into the garage and walk into the house and ignore it. I pull up behind it and climb out, way too tired for any kind of confrontation. Immediately the doors to the van open. A spotlight comes on, a man with a camera resting on his shoulder circles around from my right, and a woman with shoulder-length hair appears on my left. The bright light accentuates her heavy makeup.
“No comment,” I say before the cameraman can settle into a comfortable position and the reporter can push the microphone into my face. I’m way too tired for this bullshit.
“Casey Horwell,” she says, “TVNZ news, just a few quick questions.”
“No comment,” I say, “and can you move your van? You’re blocking my driveway.”
“We have a report that Bruce Alderman, the suspect in the Burial Murders case, was killed tonight in your office.”
I wonder how long it took them to come up with a name for the case—the Burial Murders?—or whether tomorrow somebody will have come up with a better one. Casey Horwell pushes the microphone closer to my face. I recognize her from the news. Her career took a slide a year ago when she released information she should never have had, along with her own spin on what it meant, and ultimately compromised an investigation. It resulted in an innocent man being found guilty in the court of public opinion for the rape of a young child. The night the segment aired, the man’s house was burned down with him inside it. He survived with third-degree burns, but his girlfriend didn’t. I guess tonight Horwell is trying to pick her career back up.
“No comment,” I say.
“That’s not going to get you far,” she says.
“You need to move your van,” I tell her, and I’m starting to get pissed off.
“Can you tell us about your involvement today?”
“No.”
“You’re no longer on the force,” she says. “Why were you at the cemetery?”
My hands are in my pockets and I ball them into fists. “No comment.”
“Bruce Alderman was killed four hours ago, and yet here you are, coming home,” she says. “Why is that?”
I almost tell her that he wasn’t killed, that he killed himself and there’s a difference, a very big difference. Instead I say nothing.
“How is it you still get cases?” she asks. “Especially these types. I was led to believe everybody on the force hated you.”
“Not everybody hates me,” I tell her. “I’m sure they all hate you a whole lot more after you got that woman killed. At least I still have a few friends in the department,” I say. “They do what they can to help.”
She smiles and I’m not sure why. “Is there anything else you would like to add?”
“No.”
“It’s been a long day, I imagine,” she says.
I relax the tension in my fists. “It has been.”
“It’s been a long day for everybody. I guess it must have been hard on you.”
“Can you move your van now?”
“Of course. Thank you for your time, Detect . . . I mean, Mr. Tate.”
The light on the camera switches off. Casey Horwell looks at me for a few more seconds, that same smile still on her face, then she turns away and climbs into the van. A few seconds later it pulls away. I get back into my car and park it in the driveway, too tired to put it in the garage.
My house has three bedrooms, but only one of them gets used. My daughter’s bedroom is still set up as if one day she’s going to return home, and I’m not exactly sure how healthy that is and I’m not exactly sure I care to know. If my wife were here maybe she’d have made a decision to change that, but she isn’t. It’s just like Patricia Tyler keeping a room for her daughter. Snapshots of time. It seems to be what life is about.
I jump in the shower to wash the blood and the confetti-sized pieces of the caretaker’s skull off me. I climb out feeling more awake.
I put a CD on the stereo, grab a beer, and go out onto the deck, pushing play on my answering machine on the way. It’s my mother. She’s calling to see how the rest of my day went, and to ask about what happened. I make a mental note to call her tomorrow.
The night has warmed up a little, and I sit on the deck chair in the misty rain and stare up at the night, listening to the music as the beer helps calm my nerves. I’d sit out here sometimes with Bridget after Emily was asleep. It’s sheltered from the wind when it’s cold, but when the wind is warm it sweeps in from the opposite direction and onto the deck. I’d slowly drink a beer and she’d slowly drink a glass of wine and we’d talk about our day. I always felt as though I could tell her anything, but there were cases I couldn’t bring home. They would stay in my mind, but I didn’t want them in hers. They were a part of my life and I didn’t want them to intrude on hers. We’d talk about our pasts and about our future; we had plans to move into a bigger house, we were debating whether to have more children. We would sit out here and laugh, we would make plans, we would argue.
The rain drifts away and the sky clears a little; a gap appears in the cloud cover, and for a moment there’s a quarter moon up there; it throws around enough pale light so that when I look at my watch I can see the night is slipping further away. Emily’s cat, a ginger tom named Daxter, comes through the sliding door and jumps up on my lap. He starts purring while I scratch him under his chin. He was only six months old when Emily died, and any question as to whether cats can remember people has been answered by the fact that the only place he ever sleeps is on her bed, and that sometimes he has the same look in his eyes my wife has—as if he’s looking for something that isn’t there anymore.
I finish the beer and head back inside. I refill Daxter’s bowls with food and water, and he seems grateful enough. I walk past my daughter’s bedroom, but don’t go in. I think about Rachel Tyler, but I try hard not to think about what her final hour was like. I try to envi
sion a scenario in which Bruce the dead caretaker is innocent, but can’t seem to come up with much. Then I think about Casey Horwell, and can’t help but wonder if there is any truth in what she said about everybody hating me.
Daxter is asleep on Emily’s bed when I finally hit the sack. I lie in the darkness, thinking about my dead family and the man who made them that way. I wish that in this average house in this average street nothing bad had ever happened, but it’s already too late.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I end up sleeping in, which isn’t a good start to the case. When I flip open my cell phone I find that it has given up. The trip into the lake was worse for it than I thought. I shake it a bit and flex the casing, and I slip the battery in and out and try plugging it in, but nothing happens. I have no idea how many calls I’ve missed.
I drive through the city thinking that Christchurch and technology go together like drinking and driving: they don’t mix well, but some still think it’s a good idea. Everything here looks old, and for the most part it is. People living in the past have set historical values on buildings dating back over a hundred years, and have had them protected from the future. Investors can’t come along and replace them with high-rises and apartment complexes. It’s a cold-looking city made to look even colder in the dreary weather. Everything looks so damn archaic. Even the hookers look fifty years old. A glue sniffer on a mountain bike has a cardboard tube running from his mouth down to the plastic bag by the handlebars. He’s multi-tasking. He’s sniffing glue and riding on the sidewalk, and he can keep doing both without the distraction of lifting the bag to his face.
It’s only eleven in the morning, yet I struggle to find a parking space at the shopping mall. I squeeze in next to a boy-racer Skyline that looks expensive and suggests the guy driving it has a job, though if he’s here at the same time as me on a weekday then he probably doesn’t, unless he’s a private investigator. I head into a phone store and deal with a guy who seems more interested in staring across the mall at the hairdressers than he does at the phone I’m showing him. I look over at the hairdressers and can’t blame him.