Collecting Cooper

by Paul Cleave

  The light turns green and nobody moves for about ten seconds because the guy up front is arguing on his cell phone. I keep waiting for the car tires to melt. We both get lost in our own thoughts until Schroder breaks the silence. “Point is, Tate, this city is changing. We catch one bad guy and two more take his place. It’s escalating, Tate, spiraling out of control.”

  “It’s been spiraling for a while, Carl. Way before I ever left the force.”

  “Well, these days it seems worse.”

  “Why am I getting a bad feeling about this?” I ask.

  “About what?”

  “About why you came to pick me up. You want something, Carl, so just spit it out.”

  He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and gazes straight ahead, his eyes locked on the traffic. White light bounces off every smooth surface and it’s becoming harder to see a damn thing. I’m worried by the time I make it home my eyeballs will have liquefied. “In the backseat,” he says. “There’s a file you need to take a look at.”

  “I don’t need to do anything except put on some sunglasses. Got some spares?”

  “No. Just take a look.”

  “Whatever it is you want, Carl, it’s something that I don’t want.”

  “I want to get another killer off the streets. You’re telling me you don’t want that?”

  “That’s a shitty comment.”

  “See, the man I knew a year ago would have wanted that. He would have asked me how he could have helped. That man a year ago, he would have been giving me his help even if I didn’t want it. You remember that, Tate? You remember that man? Or did those four months in the slammer fog up your memory?”

  “I remember it perfectly. I remember you shutting me down when I knew more than you did.”

  “Jesus, Tate, you have a strange perception of reality. You got in the way of an investigation, you stole, you lied to me, and you were a real pain in the ass. Reality saw you kill somebody, it saw you crash your car into a teenage girl and put her in the hospital.”

  Last year I tracked down a serial killer, and people died in the process. Bad people. At the time I didn’t know one of them was bad, and killing him was an accident. That guilt, it changed me. It got me drinking. And drinking led to the car accident which led to me getting sober again.

  “You don’t need to lecture me on reality,” I say, thinking about my daughter, cold in the ground for three years and never coming back, then thinking about my wife in her care home, her body nothing more than a shell inside of which used to live the most perfect woman in the world.

  “You’re right,” he says. “You’re the last person who needs a lecture on reality.”

  “Anyway, I’m a different man now.”

  “Why, did you find God while you were locked away?”

  “God doesn’t even know that place exits,” I tell him.

  “Look, Tate, we’re losing a battle and I need your help. That man a year ago, he didn’t care about boundaries. He did what needed to be done. He didn’t care about consequences. He didn’t care about the law. I’m not asking any of that from you now. I’m only asking for your help. For your insight. How can a man who did all of that last year not want to offer that?”

  “Because that man ended up in jail with nobody to give a damn about him,” I say, the words more bitter than I intend them to be.

  “No, Tate, that man ended up in jail because he got drunk and almost killed somebody with his car. Come on, all I’m asking is for you to take a look at the file. Read it over and tell me what you think. I’m not asking you to track anybody down or get your hands dirty. Truth is we’re all losing perspective, we’re too close-and hell, no matter what you’ve done or the actions you’ve taken, this is what you’re good at. This is why you were put on this earth.”

  “You’re stretching,” I tell him. “And trying to appeal to your ego.” He takes his eyes off the road for a second to flash me a smile. “But what isn’t a stretch is the fact that you can do with the money.”

  “Money? What, the police department is going to put me back on the payroll? I seriously doubt that.”

  “That’s not what I said. Look, there’s a reward. Three months ago it was fifty thousand dollars. Now it’s two hundred thousand. It goes to whoever can offer information that leads to an arrest. What else you going to do, Tate? At least take a look at the file. Give yourself a chance to-”

  His cell phone rings. He doesn’t finish his sentence. He reaches for it and doesn’t say much, just listens, and I don’t need to hear any of the conversation to know it’s bad news. When I was a cop nobody ever rang to give me good news. Nobody ever rang to thank me for catching a criminal, to buy me some pizza and beer and say good job. Schroder slows a little as he drives, his hand tight on the wheel. He has to swerve out wide to avoid a large puddle of safety glass from a recent accident, each piece reflecting the sunlight like a diamond. I think about the money, and what I could do with it. I stare out the window and watch a pair of surveyors in yellow reflective vests measuring the street, planning on cutting it up in the near future to widen it or narrow it or just to keep the city’s roadworking budget ticking over. Schroder indicates and pulls over and somebody honks at us and gives the finger. Schroder keeps talking as he does a U-turn. I think about the man I was a year ago, but I don’t want to be him anymore. Schroder hangs up.

  “Sorry to do this to you, Tate, but something’s come up. I can’t take you home. I’ll drop you off in town. Is that okay?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You got any money for a taxi?”

  “What do you think?” I actually had fifty dollars stuffed into my pants pocket for this day, but between the time I took my clothes off four months ago and got them back, that fifty found a new home.

  We hit the edge of town. We get caught in thick traffic where a lane has been closed down so some large trees overlapping the power lines can be trimmed back, the trucks and equipment blocking the way, but the workers are all sitting in the shade too hot to work. We reach the police station in town. He pulls in through the gates. There’s a patrol car ahead of us with two cops dragging a man out from the backseat, he’s screaming at them and trying to bite them and the two cops both look like they want to put him down like a rabid dog. Schroder digs into his pocket and hands me thirty dollars. “This will get you home,” he says.

  “I’ll walk,” I say, and open up the car door.

  “Come on, Tate, take the money.”

  “Don’t worry-it’s not that I’m pissed at you. I’ve been locked up for so long I need the exercise.”

  “You try walking home in this heat and you’re a dead man.”

  I don’t want his help. Problem is the heat is already close to blistering the paintwork on the car. It blasts through the open door, passing over my skin and sucking away any moisture. Even my eyes feel like they’re being lubricated by sand. I take the money. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “You can pay me back by picking up the file.”

  “No,” I say, but I can feel it back there, pulling at me, this magnet for violence whispering to me, telling me within its covers is a map which will take me back into that world. “I can’t. I mean. . I just can’t.”

  “Come on, Tate. What the hell are you going to do? You’ve got a wife to take care of. A mortgage. You’ve had no income for four months. You’re slipping behind. You need a job. You need this job. I need you to take this job. Who the hell else is going to hire you for anything? Look, Tate, you nailed a serial killer last year, but do you think anybody is going to care about that? No matter how you justify it, or weigh up the rights and wrongs of what you did, the fact is always going to be the same-you’re an ex-con now. You can’t escape that. Your life isn’t the same life it was back then.”

  “Thanks for the ride, Carl. It was about halfway useful.”

  It isn’t until I’m on the street with the gates to the police parking lot closing behind me that I look down at the file, page
s of death crammed inside its covers, waiting for me, knowing all along I couldn’t turn it away.

  chapter two

  The thumb is inside the jar, suspended in liquid murky with age. The lid is sealed tight and the jar safely cuddled by bubble wrap. The whole thing is packed inside a cardboard box the size of a football, the corners crushed in slightly, the contents surrounded by hundreds of pieces of jelly bean-shaped polystyrene packaging, each about the same size as the very thumb they’re protecting. The box is in the hands of a courier driver with an untucked shirt with the bottom two buttons open. He looks impatient. He looks frustrated by the heat. His eagerness to leave is evident in the way he thrusts his electronic signature pad into Cooper’s hands. The pad is the size of a paperback and Cooper awkwardly scrawls his name onto it. The driver gives him the box and tells him to have a good day, and a few seconds later he’s reversing from the driveway, the wheels spinning up small pieces of tar-coated shingle from the road that plink against the undercarriage. Cooper stands there watching him, holding on to the box that feels very light. He plays his fingernail along the side of the stamps-there are a dozen of them, slapped onto the side along with a declaration form that lies. The stickers and stamps give it an exotic look, as though it has traveled from faraway places, routed through distant lands, that the contents could be anything-just not that of the severed thumb. None of the seals have been broken. If they had, it would have been the police coming to his door, not a courier driver.

  He locks his front door against the heat of the morning sun. Headlining the news all week has been the heat wave. It arrived in Christchurch six days ago and set up camp. It’s started a death toll that’s still in the single figures but expected to hit double digits by the weekend. It’s melting the tar seal in roads and burning tussock and trees and killing farm stock. Drownings and road rage are up and every day the sky somewhere in the city is clouded with smoke from a burning house or factory. He makes his way along the air-conditioned hallway to his air-conditioned study on the second floor, where diplomas line the walls, each of them perfectly level and equidistant to the next, the glass covering them clean, each of them small windows to his past achievements. He rests the package on his desk. He can only imagine what other people in his field would be saying right now.

  He runs a knife blade along the tape. He’d like to know where the other thumb was posted, whether the recipient ripped into their box like a Christmas present. The cardboard edges spring upward on their folded creases. The jelly bean polystyrene whispers against his hands as he searches inside. His fingers close around the lumpy exterior of bubble wrap.

  This is it.

  The thumb looks fresh. The reality, however, is different. The thumb hasn’t been attached to its owner for over a year. In an ideal world he’d be looking at the whole set. Thumbs and fingers all attached to the hands, but they were all separated soon after death and the thumb was all he could afford. Other parts, bigger parts, all went to higher bidders. He licks his lips, his mouth so dry he can’t swallow. He drops the bubble wrap and moves to the first of his two bookcases. He sits the jar on the top shelf into the gap he made the day he won the auction. In a world of collectors, in a world of addicts, collecting the works of serial killers or saving the weapons they use, or the words they have written and the clothes they wore, or the paper their original confession was written on or the handcuffs they were arrested in is no different from collecting stamps or bobble-head action figures. Eighty percent of his own collection is made up of books. The rest is made up of a few knives, a few articles of clothing; he has some private police reports too which he shouldn’t have. Until now the most unique piece he owned was a pillowcase that was used by a bellboy in an Australian hotel to cover the faces of three different women he killed. He turns the jar, studying the thumb, aware of how creepy it is, and also how creepy it is that he bought it. He won it online through a private auction, one he was invited to bid on through contacts he’s nurtured through previous auctions. He’s still not entirely sure why he wanted it. He didn’t, not in the beginning. He saw it and thought it was crazy to own a body part, but the more he thought about it, the more he wanted it. He must have been crazy. What was he thinking? That he could put it on display and show people the next time he threw a dinner party? The shelves of his study are full of the other memorabilia he’s won over the years, both from killers and victims. It is for others to debate whether the collecting of these items creates a market for death. His focus is purely educational. If he is to learn, if he is to teach others about methods and a killer’s drive, then he must surround himself with these objects. It isn’t a hobby, it’s a job. And the thumb is more of an. . he isn’t sure. Indulgence is the wrong word. Curiosity works better. Yet it’s more simple than that-it came down to him wanting it.

  The arrival of the package has left him running late. His criminal psychology students will soon be staring at a whiteboard and no lecturer. The thumb has pushed him enough off schedule that he’s going to have to skip breakfast and head straight into getting caught in traffic. He swallows a couple of vitamin pills and heads through to the garage and backs out the car.

  The sun is climbing steadily into the sky, shortening the shadows from the trees and making the floating strands of spiderweb glint in the light. The radio is on and he’s listening to a talk-back station, the current debate one that’s been raging in the news lately-whether or not New Zealand should bring back the death penalty. It started as a flippant remark, the prime minister making a bad joke when asked what they were going to do to try and curb the country’s growing crime rate and growing prison population, but it snowballed into other people backing the statement and asking why the government can’t really consider it. After all, if death was good enough for the victims, why not give that same courtesy to their killers?

  Cooper isn’t sure where he stands on the issue. He isn’t sure a first-world country should be practicing third-world punishments.

  He puts the gear stick in park and climbs out to close the garage door because the damn automatic opener broke about two months ago and the service agent is still waiting on parts that were supposed to arrive back then. He can feel the warmth from the ground through the soles of his shoes. He breaks into a sweat a few paces from the door. The breeze is light and feels hot enough to ignite. All week people have been walking around with short sleeves and shortened nerves. He can smell marijuana from the goddamn surfer across the road who likes to spend his mornings and evenings and the hours in between using his lotto money to get as high as a kite. His shirt dampens with each stride. He’s so distracted by the thumb and the heat that he suddenly realizes he’s picked his briefcase back up and is carrying it with him.

  “Weird,” he says, and when he turns back to the car it gets even weirder. A man he’s never seen before is standing next to it.

  “Excuse me,” the man says, and even though he’s in his midthirties there’s something about him that makes Cooper think of him as a kid, it could be the floppy hair hanging across his forehead, or it could be the corduroy pants twenty years out of date. “Have you got the time?”

  “Sure,” Cooper says, and he looks down at his watch, and when he does a sharp cramp explodes in his chest. He jerks the briefcase into his body with enough force to pop it open. The contents spill onto the driveway and a moment later he collapses next to them, every muscle and limb well beyond his control. The pain extends to his stomach and legs and groin, but mostly it’s his chest that hurts. The man lowers the gun and crouches down next to him, brushing his hair out of his eyes.

  “It’s going to be okay,” the kid says, at least that’s what Cooper thinks he says, he can’t really tell, because at the same time a chemical smell wafts over him and something is pushed into his face and he can’t do a thing to fight it. It’s at that moment the darkness rushes in and takes him from his collection.

  chapter three

  The sign says Lost puppys for sail-$5 each. It leans against t
he side of a brick wall held together by mortar and graffiti. The wall is two hundred meters closer to home than the police station. Leaning against that same brick wall in the shade it offers is a guy in a tattered blue shirt and tattered blue shorts and a hat made out of cardboard that came from a cereal packet. It doesn’t fit quite right but he doesn’t seem to mind. He hasn’t shaved in a while by the look of it and hasn’t eaten real food in about as long. I walk past him and he smiles and asks for loose change, only one side of his mouth moving when he talks, revealing teeth pointed and gray. All I have is the money Schroder gave me, and I give ten of it to him, hoping he’ll spend it on spelling lessons rather than beer. His smile widens and clean white lines appear around the corners of his eyes between all the grime, and I figure his last four months have been worse than mine.

  “That gets you two lost puppies,” he says, arithmetic his strong point. “Take your pick.”

  I don’t want a puppy, but I look anyway, turning left and right and not seeing any.

  “They’re lost,” he reminds me, and tucks the money into his pocket.

  I walk into the heart of the city, past office blocks with large glass doors and shops with large glass windows; banks and cafés scattered among them, even the occasional place of worship. Many of the buildings in the city are almost a hundred years old, some even older, the old English architecture looks fantastic when you’re in the mood for it, and it’s hard to be in any kind of mood other than a pissed-off one when the temperature is above a hundred. Most of the buildings are stained with exhaust fumes and soot from over the years, but the beauty of Christchurch isn’t in the architecture, but in the gardens. Christchurch isn’t known as the Garden City for nothing-there are trees almost on every street, the Botanical Gardens are only a few blocks away, and it breaks up the old look of the city more than the occasional modern hotel or office block being built. A couple of the shops still have Christmas decorations in the windows from a few months back, or they’re getting them up earlier this year. It’s creeping up to ten o’clock in the morning and the streets have never looked so empty. It’s as if in the time I was away the Ebola Circus came to town, but of course it’s nothing as scary as that; the heat is keeping people indoors. Those unlucky enough to be out and about are walking slowly to maintain energy, shirts and blouses damp with sweat, people carrying bottled water they’ve bought from the supermarket even though Christchurch has the best water in the world coming straight out of the tap. I cross the bridge going over the Avon River. The water level is lower than normal, and the trees lining the banks are drooping and look like they’re trying to dive in. There are a couple of ducks hidden in the shade of some flax bushes, and another duck floating along the water on his back, his head twisted backward, dark bloated flies swarming its body. I pass a four-wheel drive double-parked at a set of lights, forcing cars to swing out into the opposite lane to get past. The vehicle is coated in dirt, and somebody has written I wish my daughter was this dirty across the back window with their finger. I walk to the central bus terminal and get blasted by the air-conditioning. The terminal smells of cigarette smoke and the electronic board displaying the departure times has had a brick or something equivalent thrown through it. I wait with ten other people for the next ride, a few of them helping to give a pair of lost tourists directions. For the first time in about twenty years I catch a bus in my own city. At the back of the bus a couple of school kids are rolling cigarettes and talking about how wasted they got last weekend, how wasted they’re going to get this weekend, their drunken antics a badge of honor for them. They use fuck as a noun, a verb, an adjective, their conversation littered with the word.