Collecting Cooper: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “That’s admirable. Is somebody else here responsible for everybody else besides themselves?”

  He starts picking at one of the burns on his arms, but it’s an old burn and he can’t lift any of the scar tissue. No way of telling whether he gave them to himself or had a helping hand. My cell phone starts ringing and I reach into my pocket to mute it.

  “The Preacher,” he says.

  “The Preacher?”

  “That’s not his real name, son, it’s just what we call him.”

  “Yeah? Or is that what he calls himself?”

  “Both,” he says, smiling. “But I don’t know what started first. I think he’s just always been the Preacher.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Wait here.”

  I stand on the doorstep with the sun beating down on me. I can hear sirens in the distance as an ambulance speeds by a block away, maybe it’s come to the neighborhood to hand out plague vaccinations like an ice-cream truck selling ice cream. Every few seconds a thick drop of sweat tickles my body as it rolls from my armpit. Even in the heat a couple of guys walking their dog out on the street are wearing big black leather jackets with gang patches on the back. The dog is solidly built with short black hair and doesn’t have a tail. Not only does it look like it could rip my throat out, it gives me a look like it really wants to. Long strips of saliva are dangling from its mouth and it starts to growl. The only thing holding it back is a thick leash and a dog collar with small metal spikes decorating it.

  “What fuck you staring at, muvafucker?” one of them asks, glancing over at me and slowing down.

  I turn back to the door, hoping it will be enough for them, but it’s not. I hear the dog growling from a few meters behind me. They’ve come to the fence line. I take a quick glance back. Both men look like they weigh at least a hundred kilograms each, fat and muscle compacted beneath tattoo-covered skin. I imagine they do okay with the ladies too—but not where the ladies have any say in the matter. I knock on the door again.

  “Hey, hey, fuck-knuckle,” one of them shouts.

  It’s one of those common situations that people get caught up in all the time in this city on their way to becoming a statistic. Just random shit like this, and it pisses me off, and I feel like taking the gun out of my pocket and giving Christchurch some spring-cleaning.

  “Hey, muvafucker, you got a problem with us?” the other one asks.

  “You fucking deaf?” the first one says.

  I check the door. It’s unlocked, so I step into the halfway house and close the door behind me. A glass bottle smashes against the porch and the two men keep yelling at me, but after a few seconds their yells turn to laughter, then the laughter fades as they carry on their way.

  The hallway smells of body odor and cigarette smoke so strong that the actual house needs to take a shower. It branches off to a couple of bedrooms to the left and right, the doors to all of them closed so there isn’t much light hitting the hallway. There’s a staircase heading up to the right, and ahead is a large, open-plan kitchen. There aren’t any paintings on the walls, no pictures anywhere, no plants. I head into the kitchen. The guy with the cigarette burns up his arms is talking to a guy in a pair of flared trousers with holes in the knees, and a buttoned-up black shirt with a large, pointed collar. It must be button-shirt day at the house. He looks like he picked one favorite item of clothing from each decade and chose today to test the ensemble. They both look over at me.

  “You’re the Preacher?” I ask.

  “You’re the cop?” he asks back.

  “Detective Inspector,” I say.

  “Got a badge?”

  “It’s in the car.”

  “That why you didn’t flash it to the guys with the dog?”

  “I could have flashed a sword and they wouldn’t have cared. I’m here to talk about one of the men who stays here.”

  The Preacher is in his fifties, perhaps almost as much as sixty. He has a boxer’s nose and cauliflower ears and a blink rate that’s thirty percent as often as anybody I’ve ever met, which is a little unnerving—it’s like talking to somebody who’s trying to hypnotize you. He has dark hair and a lot of it, not just on his head, but thick curly hair up his arms and sticking out from the gaps between his shirt buttons. He nods toward cigarette burn guy who then wanders off, leaving us alone in the kitchen. All of the utensils are mismatched, probably from city-mission donations over the years. The only matching things in the room are a pair of holes in one of the walls, perhaps created by somebody’s head. Otherwise nothing has a twin—different types of mugs, no matching chairs, different light fittings, random drawer handles.

  “We make do with what we have,” he says, watching me look around, his blink rate still slow. “We get very little government support, and we rely on the kindness of others, and like you know, there ain’t much kindness left to go around in this world. I’m the Preacher,” he says, holding out his hand.

  I take it, expecting it to be strong, and it is. I keep an eye on the hair on his wrist in case it’s after more real estate.

  “Coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Not a bad decision,” he says. “It’s bad for you, and I’m addicted to it, but many addictions are bad for you, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’m looking for somebody.”

  “Everybody is looking for somebody, and I can tell you where to find him.”

  “Where?”

  “In here,” he says, tapping his chest, “and in the Bible.”

  “I . . .”

  “Just kidding,” he says, and laughs softly. “I mean I’m not kidding about everybody needing to find Jesus, I’m just kidding about putting you through the pitch. I try to get all of the men staying here to find God.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  “Life is supposed to be full of challenges,” he says, “and this is no different. Do you mind?” he asks, pulling out a packet of cigarettes.

  I do mind, but I shake my head. “Go for it.”

  “These damn addictions,” he says. “Thankfully they’re the only two.”

  “You don’t count God as an addiction?”

  He smiles around the cigarette as he lights it up, draws in a lungful of smoke, then exhales.

  “That’s good,” he says. “I must remember that.” He holds the cigarette out in front of him and stares at it lovingly. “Life is full of temptations,” he says. “It’s one of God’s ironies. The things that tempt us the most are what are the most bad for us. Except for religion.”

  “I need your help,” I say. I show him the sketch. “You recognize this man?”

  He doesn’t take much of a look and shakes his head.

  “You sure? I heard from a reliable source this guy lived here. Take a longer look.”

  He takes a longer look. “Yeah, maybe. Wasn’t he in Lord of the Rings? I think he was a hobbit.”

  I put the sketch into my pocket. I may as well screw it up and toss it out.

  “I need to speak to anybody who came here from Grover Hills.”

  “Why? Somebody does something crazy and you want to blame a mentally ill person?”

  “Something like that. Somebody set fire to one of the nurses who worked there.”

  He takes a long draw on his cigarette, sucking constantly until his lungs can’t take any more air. “I heard about it on the news. You think that person had to be a patient?” he says, holding in the smoke.

  “There are other things too.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “You’re not at liberty to say. Well, I’m not at liberty to say anything either. The people here, they look up to me, I have their trust. I’m not at liberty to break that.”

  I pull a thousand dollars out of my pocket. “How liberal are you about receiving donations?” I ask. “This is your chance for some good karma. You just said there isn’t enough kindness in this world. We have to start somew
here, and this is it. You’re kind to me with some information, and I’m kind to you. This,” I say, shaking the cash, “can buy food, cigarettes, some new pots and pans.”

  He stares at the money the same way he did at the cigarette, like it’s another addiction but one he never gets to taste, then he looks around the room as if somebody is watching. There isn’t. He steps forward to take the money but I pull it away. “Names.”

  “I can’t remember them all. There were six or seven of them.”

  “Were?”

  “They’ve all moved on.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “This isn’t the kind of place where people stay in touch,” he says. “Most of the people here are straight out of prison. They get jobs flipping burgers and scraping dead animals off the street barely making minimum wage. People don’t want to make friends here.”

  “Any of the Grover Hills patients stand out?”

  “Nobody stands out here.” He reaches back out for the cash. I keep hold of it.

  “That’s not exactly worth a thousand dollars,” I tell him. “Give me something else.”

  “I guess there’s one guy you could talk to,” he says. “One of the patients. He seemed to get on well enough with most of them.”

  “What? He’s here?”

  “Yeah. He’s here.”

  “Thought you said they’d all moved on.”

  He shrugs. “I just remembered,” he says, and money does help people remember. “His name’s Ritchie Munroe.”

  “He here right now?”

  He reaches out for the cash. I hand it over. I figure if I really wanted to I could take it back off him in about five seconds. He takes another draw on his cigarette. “Upstairs. Last door on the right.”

  I head into the hallway and take the stairs. They groan with every footstep and the handrail is worn and wobbly. The windows upstairs lining the hallway are streaked with a thicker layer of dirt than their counterparts downstairs. The view outside isn’t pretty, rusting roofs of neighboring houses, gutters chock full of leaves and sludge, backyards with burned lawns and car parts scattered in the sun. I knock on the end doorway and a guy calls out for me to wait a moment before opening it half a minute later. Ritchie Munroe has a nose that’s too big for him and a mouth that’s too small, it’s like somebody gave him the wrong-sized parts in the baby factory. His eyes look too small for the sockets, as if a tap to the head would spin them around like dollar signs in a slot machine. His hair has been dyed black, and he hasn’t done a great job because there’s dye on his forehead too. He must be in his midfifties, maybe even sixty. He could be the man in the sketch but he could just as easily not be. He’s wearing only underwear and a T-shirt and the front of his underwear is bulging out. Behind him is a small TV set playing a porn movie with the sound turned down. The hot air rushing past him from the room seems happy to escape.

  “Who are you?” he asks, and he sounds nervous.

  “Detective Inspector Schroder,” I say, figuring Carl won’t mind. Well, more figuring he’ll never know. “I need to ask you some questions about Grover Hills.”

  He shakes his head. “I’ve never heard of it,” he says, and he tries to close the door.

  I put my hand on it. “That’s funny, considering you spent some time there. You mind turning that off?” I ask, nodding toward the TV.

  “Why? It embarrassing you?”

  “Guess that means you don’t want to put any pants on either.”

  “Just ask your questions and leave,” he says. “Please.”

  “Preacher says you were friends with a bunch of Grover Hills patients.”

  “Preacher tell you that?”

  “He did.”

  “You have to pay him?”

  I smile. “I did.”

  “You hold back anything for me?” he asks, not sounding so nervous now.

  I show him the remaining cash.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Somebody set fire to Nurse Deans.”

  He pulls back a little as his face tightens, but then it loosens off again as he comes to terms with the news. “Can’t say I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Any idea who would do a thing like that?”

  “None.”

  “Heard of Emma Green?”

  “Nope.”

  “Cooper Riley?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not even from the news?”

  “Why would I watch the news?”

  “Who else wouldn’t be upset at hearing Nurse Deans was dead?”

  He shrugs. “Everybody who ever stayed at the Grove. Nobody really liked anybody out there. Mental institutions are like that.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m easy to like.”

  “I meant did you want to kill her?”

  “I’m a lover not a fighter,” he says.

  “You an arsonist?”

  “What?”

  “Where were you yesterday?”

  “Why?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Here. With Melina. All day.”

  “Melina?”

  “Yeah. She’s my girl.”

  “She here?”

  “Where else would she be?”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “She doesn’t like strangers.”

  I wave the cash in front of his face and remind him why he’s talking to me. He sees it and figures talking to strangers isn’t such a bad thing. “Make it quick,” he says.

  He swings the door the rest of the way open. The light coming into the hallway through the upstairs windows makes no effort to enter his room, it’s as though the spoiled air and smell of sex is scaring it away. Melina is lying in bed facing the TV set. The curtains are closed so most of the light coming into the room is from the TV. Ritchie takes a few steps backward and his movement creates a draft, which ripens the stench. I almost gag.

  “Melina?” I say, stepping toward her, but then I don’t say anything else.

  “Ask her your questions,” Ritchie says.

  I turn back toward him. “She your alibi?”

  “Why you asking me?” he asks. “She’s the one telling you we were here.”

  I look back down at Melina, but Melina is still looking at the TV, completely ignoring me as she stares at it with glazed-over eyes made from plastic. Her entire body is made from rubber and plastic and must weigh around fifty or sixty kilograms. As far as companion dolls go, she certainly looks like a high-end model. I bet that makes her high maintenance.

  “See?” Ritchie says.

  “What?”

  “See, I told you I was here all day yesterday,” he says, looking at me. He looks down at Melina. “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry, but it isn’t my fault. He just showed up. He has money.”

  He turns back toward me. “I told you she doesn’t like strangers. You’ve got what you came for and, like the lady said, it’s time you leave.” He looks back down at her. “I know, honey, I know.”

  He leads me to the door and I’m happy to be led. “Sorry about that,” he says, in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “It’s hard to find the perfect woman,” I say. “You know, with a thousand bucks you could buy her a few nice dresses.”

  “I guess I could.”

  “But there are a few things you need to tell me.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell me about the Scream Room.”

  “Who told you about that?”

  “Another patient. You ever have to spend time down there?”

  “What, me? No, never. But I never . . . never, you know, hurt anybody. That room was for the bad people and I’m not a bad people. Money?”

  “Not yet. What about the Twins?”

  He looks down. “Why do you have to talk about them,” he whispers. “I’m a better person now. I don’t want nothing to do with them.” He sniffs loudly and starts to cry.

  “I’m sorry, I really am,” I say, and it’s true.
“Listen, are any of your friends from Grover Hills in the habit of killing cats and digging them back up?”

  “I have to go,” he says, and starts to close the door. “You can keep the money.”

  I push my hand against it. “Ritchie . . .”

  “But Melina . . .”

  “Melina can wait. Give me a name, Ritchie.”

  “I can’t. He’s my friend. My best friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody.”

  “He killed my cat,” I say. “And he killed Nurse Deans.”

  “She was a hard woman,” he says.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I can’t,” he says.

  I hold the money back up. “You can spend this on Melina,” I say. “You going to choose friendship over love? Is that it? You’re going to choose to protect a killer instead of buying your girl something she deserves?”

  He looks down and starts opening and closing his lips like a goldfish, no sound coming out.

  “Ritchie . . .”

  “His name is Adrian Loaner, but he doesn’t live here anymore. He used to, but then I taught him to drive and he left. He was young when he went to the Grove, real young, and he was there for twenty years maybe.”

  “When did he leave here?”

  “A week ago. That’s all I know,” he says, and when he looks back up there are tears running down his face.

  “You’ve done the right thing,” I tell him.

  “Melina . . . she isn’t, she isn’t . . . you know . . . and I know she isn’t, but . . . but it’s better than being alone.”

  “It’s hard being alone,” I say.

  “I’m sorry about your cat,” he says.

  “So am I.”

  “Please, please don’t kill him.”

  I show him the sketch from the newspaper. “Is this Adrian?”

  He looks at it, then tilts his head to change the angle first one way, then the other. “Kind of,” he says. “I mean, maybe.”

  “Which bedroom was his?”

  “Right opposite,” he says, pointing across the hall. “But it’s empty. He’s my best friend but I don’t know where he’s gone.”

  I hand over the cash and enter the bedroom across the hall. The curtains are open and the sun falls across floorboards thick with dust. There’s a bed with the sheets and blankets and pillow missing. The bedroom drawers are all open and each of them empty. There isn’t anything laying around the room light enough to be lifted in one hand. Adrian Loaner isn’t coming back. I do a customary check, looking under the bed, I search for loose floorboards, I check underneath and behind the drawers but nothing has been left behind.