The Silent Hour

by Michael Koryta

  I finished my beer, and we sat in silence for a while and watched the TV without really seeing it. Then I ordered another beer and asked if he wanted a second whiskey, and he shook his head. Most of his first was still in the glass.

  "I got upset the last time I talked with you," he said eventually, voice soft. "I thought you were being a bastard, to be honest. You said some very cutting things."

  "I was having a bad day."

  "That doesn't matter. The things you said were cutting, but I know that's because they were true. I screwed that situation up, Perry, I screwed it up bad, and a man died. A man was murdered, and I have that blood on my hands. Do you understand that— His blood is on my hands."

  His eyes were red, and his voice sounded thin.

  "I've got to live with that," he said, "and all I can do, the only way I know to cope with it, is by looking for atonement. Because while his blood might be on my hands, I didn't kill him—and if I can see that whoever did kill him is punished— Perry, that's the closest thing I've got to redemption."

  I'd lost my taste for the beer now.

  "I know Joshua Cantrell doesn't mean anything to you," he said, "but Ken Merriman should. So think of him, and help me. Let's see it through."

  "What Ken Merriman means to me," I said, "is that it's time for me to walk away. What you're asking for, I just cannot do. I'm tired of being in the game. Tired of having to spend my days immersed in some filthy, foolish crime, trying to determine what son of a bitch killed a good man and dumped his body in a park where children play. It's not for me anymore. I'm sorry."

  "I understand that you're tired," he said, "but I'm trying to tell you that you can't afford to be. Because there are too many people saying they're tired. The whole world is tired now, the whole damn world doesn't have the energy to set anything right. We want to wait on somebody else to do it, and yeah, maybe we believe that it should be done, but we just don't have it in us to try anymore. We're a sideline species these days, Perry. We turn the news on and see some tragedy or crisis and shake our heads and say, 'Boy, hope somebody gets to that. It is just outrageous that nobody's addressed that one yet.' Then we put on American Idol and go to bed."

  "You watch American Idol—" I said.

  "Don't be an asshole."

  It was quiet then, and he waited a while, and eventually I said, "Dunbar, good luck. Really and truly—good luck—but I'm out."

  His face fell and he looked away from me. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a bill and dropped it on the table. He got to his feet and shook my hand silently, and then he went to the door and stepped out into the wind, shoulders hunched and head down and alone.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-three

  I couldn't sleep the night after Dunbar's visit. I'd worked out for two hours that afternoon, then gone to the Hideaway and caught up with Scott Draper for a few beers while we watched the Indians game. They were on a losing streak. I knew the feeling.

  It was midnight when I got back to my apartment, and I went right to bed, hoping that the lingering effects of the alcohol would take care of the rest, put me to sleep quickly. They didn't. Two hours passed, then three, then four. I stared at the ceiling, wandered out to the couch, went back to bed, turned the TV on, turned it off, tried to read, tried to control my breathing, tried damn near everything I could think of and still couldn't find sleep.

  I gave up around five, dressed in workout clothes, and went downstairs, thinking I'd punish my body for refusing sleep by going for yet another run. Break its will before it broke mine. By the time I got outside, though, I knew I didn't have it in me. I stretched out in the parking lot in the dark, breathing in the last cool air of night, another hot and humid day ready to replace it. If not a run, maybe a drive. That seemed better. I could drive to Edgewater Park before the traffic started, watch the sun rise over the lake and the city. I hadn't done that in years. Or maybe go down to the West Side Market, hang around and watch as the vendors arrived and set up their wares before the doors opened. I used to do that when I was a patrol officer, come off a night shift and head down to the market, a place that always felt like a step back in time.

  There were plenty of possibilities, and they all sounded good. How I found myself in Old Brooklyn, then, parked across the street from Parker Harrison's apartment building, I really couldn't say.

  He left the house just before six, exactly as he had the last time I'd seen him. He walked out of the apartment, turned and locked the door carefully with his key, then tested it once to be sure before he headed to his truck. It was a Chevy S-10, at least fifteen years old, and for a second as he drove out of the lot he was facing directly toward me. Then he made the turn and pulled away and I started the Silverado and followed. I wanted to watch him. That was all. Didn't want another confrontation, didn't want to say a word to him, just wanted to watch him.

  He drove to Riverside Cemetery, and I passed the entrance when he turned in, knowing it was too early in the morning not to attract attention by following him in. I gave it fifteen minutes, then circled back around and entered the cemetery, which was one of the city's oldest and largest. It was a beautiful place, really. More than a hundred acres of rolling green valley and flowering trees and marble monuments and the dead. There were plenty of them at Riverside.

  I drove through the cemetery until I found Harrison's truck, parked in front of the maintenance building, empty. I'd missed him. I drove back up to the chapel, where I assumed my truck would be less noticeable, parked, and set out on foot. It was a huge place, and it would take a while to find him. I had the time.

  I left the road and walked through the grounds, my shoes soon soaked by the dew. After a pass along the south side without any luck, I looped around and headed toward the north, away from the maintenance building. I was not alone in the cemetery. During the walk I saw two people beside graves, paying early-morning respects. I thought that it had been a long time since I'd been to see my mother and father's stones.

  I was approaching the northeast bend of the road, ready to head west and walk back toward the entrance, when I heard the buzz of a weed trimmer. A few minutes later I found Harrison trimming the base of a monument, head bowed.

  For a moment I just stood there, unsure of what to do. He was at work, and that's all he'd be doing for the rest of the day. No need to watch him tend the grass and weeds in a graveyard. If I really wanted to begin surveillance on him, I could come back in the afternoon, wait for him to get off work, and see where he went. That was what mattered, surely. This did not.

  I couldn't leave, though. Now that I'd found him, I wanted to watch just a little bit longer. Just a few minutes. I retreated across the grounds, looking for someplace where I could sit unnoticed and keep an eye on him. Sitting was key. I was suddenly feeling the groggy, mind-numbing weariness of an entirely sleepless night.

  About a hundred yards from where Harrison was working, I found an enormous monument with a granite lion resting on top. The lion was lying down with its front paws stretched forward, its head up. The carving job was exquisite. I couldn't imagine how long something like that took. The name on the stone read simply DAYKIN. No first name, no dates. It was probably a family monument, I decided as I looked around the other stones and saw the Daykin name repeatedly. The patriarch making his claim.

  I sat in the grass beneath the lion and leaned back until my head rested against the stone. Out across the way, Harrison's weeder buzzed and his shoulders swung back and forth methodically. What a place for a murderer to work.

  That thought took me back to Harrison's apartment, to the night Ken and I had made our initial visit and Harrison first told us he worked in a cemetery, told us that it suited him. Ken's response—how unsettling.

  "How unsettling." I said it aloud and laughed. Man, what a line. How unsettling. I laughed again, softer this time, an under-the-breath chuckle, and then I laid my head back against the stone again and closed my eyes and tried to find a moment of peace. It
was there, sitting upright in a graveyard with my head on a piece of granite, that I finally fell asleep.

  I woke only minutes later, but it felt longer than that, and I came around slowly, like that moment of awakening was at the end of a long, difficult climb. When my eyes opened it took me a second to place myself, and then I realized that Harrison was out of view and I could no longer hear the sound of his machine. I pushed off the stone and looked around and saw him not ten feet away, standing with his arms folded across his chest, watching me.

  "Hello, Lincoln," he said. "I'm going to assume this is not a coincidence."

  I thought about getting to my feet, but what was the point— Instead, I just leaned forward, rested my arms on my knees, and looked up at him. "Great place to work."

  "I like it."

  I nodded up at the lion above me. "Hell of a cat, too."

  "Do you know who he was—"

  "Daykin—" I shook my head.

  "A railroad man," Harrison said. "Specifically, a conductor. He was one of the conductors on Lincoln's funeral train. John Daykin. This is one of my favorite monuments in the cemetery."

  "You know them all—"

  "More than you'd think," he said.

  "You keep the graves clean," I said, "and Mark Ruzity carves them. Can you explain that—"

  "Alexandra taught us the importance of honoring the dead. Mark took up the carving as his way of doing that. By the time I left Whisper Ridge, he'd met people out here, and got me the job. Not so sinister, really. I hate to disappoint you."

  "You know that he's talked to Sanabria—" I said. "There's a photo of it, Harrison. Ruzity and Sanabria together around the time your beloved Alexandra and Joshua disappeared. You were on the phone with Sanabria then, yourself."

  He didn't respond. I looked away from him and out across the sea of weathered stones left to mark lives long finished.

  "They haven't made an arrest in Ken's murder yet, Harrison."

  "If I could tell them who to arrest, I would."

  "Yeah—"

  "Why are you here— Why would you sit here and watch me work—"

  "I need an answer," I said, "to just one question, Harrison. There are so many questions I think you can answer, but I need just this one: Why me— Why did you have to come to me— I ignored your first letter, so you wrote me more. I ignored those, so you came to see me. Why—"

  "You've already asked me that."

  "I know it. This time I'd like you to tell me the truth."

  He sighed and lowered his weed trimmer to the ground, straightened again, and took a rag off his belt and ran it over his face and neck, soaking up the sweat from the morning's rapidly rising heat.

  "It was the truth then, and it will be the truth this time, too," he said. "I came to you because of what I'd read. Because of what I hoped you would be."

  "What was that—" I said. "Supposing I believed you, which I do not, what was it that you thought I would be, Harrison—"

  "Someone who knew how to see the guilty."

  "What—"

  "Not how to find the guilty, Lincoln. How to see them. How to… consider them. The people behind the crime. I'm a murderer. I get that. Well, Joshua Cantrell was murdered, and not by me. I wanted to know who did it—and why."

  "That's not what you asked me to do."

  "No, and that was my mistake. I held on to the truth when I shouldn't have, but I wanted to get you to the house."

  "Why was that so damn special— Why did I have to see the house—"

  He spread his hand, waved it around us. "You see all these stones— What are they—"

  I sat and stared up at him, searching his face and trying, yet again, to come to a judgment about him. I wanted to believe him.

  "What would you call them—" he said. "These stones."

  Graves.

  "That's beneath the stone. What are the—"

  "Markers, monuments."

  He nodded. "Joshua Cantrell has one. You've seen it. That house is his monument. She left it for him, Lincoln. Something to sit in his memory."

  It was the same comparison Ken Merriman had made. The sort of comparison that came easily when a house had been outfitted with an epitaph.

  "Home to dreams," I said.

  "Yes. Dreams she'd shared with her husband. It's important to remember the dead. Alexandra understood that, and so do I. It's why I work here, Lincoln—and before you ask the question, yes, I think of the man I killed. I remember him. Every single day, I think of him, and of what I took from him and those who loved him. It's important to remember."

  "You know that she left the house so Joshua would be remembered. You're sure of that."

  He nodded.

  "Do you know who killed him—"

  He shook his head. I watched for the lie and couldn't find it.

  "I wanted to know," he said. "That's why I came to you. You wish I never had, and I'm sorry about that. I picked you because I hoped you'd see past my prison sentence, see past my crime. The police can't do that. Neither could you, and that's all right. I took a chance with you. It didn't work out. Sometimes they don't."

  "It didn't work out for you— Ken's dead, Harrison."

  "That wasn't me. I'm sorry about it, more sorry than I can probably make you believe, but it was not me who killed him."

  A car passed on the road, circling slowly through the cemetery, and neither Harrison nor I spoke until it was gone.

  "Why were you talking to Dominic Sanabria—" I said.

  "When—"

  "Any of the times. You called him when Cantrell was killed, you called him when the body was found, you called him just before Ken was killed."

  He hesitated before saying, "At first I was trying to get information out of him. Trying to get in touch with Alexandra."

  "What did you tell him the day before Ken was killed—"

  "I told him that you were done with the case. He'd called me earlier to say that his sister and her memory needed to be left alone. That was when I asked you to quit. I was worried for you, and I didn't want to be the one who put you in harm's way. I didn't trust Dominic."

  "All of that might be believable, Harrison, but there's one call missing in that explanation. Why did you call him when the body was found— When it was found and before it was identified."

  He looked uncomfortable, failed to meet my eyes for the first time. "I really can't speak of that."

  "You piece of shit." I shook my head in disgust. "You know things that could help, and you won't say them. You don't really want to see anything resolved, don't give a damn about Ken or Cantrell or anybody else. It's all some sort of sick game to you."

  "It's not that at—"

  "Then tell the rest of it!" I got to my feet, shouted it at him.

  He stood in silence and watched me. I waited for him to speak, and he did not. After a few minutes of staring at him, I shook my head again.

  "I made a promise," he said, his voice very soft, "to someone who mattered more to me than anyone I've ever known. Can you understand that— I gave my word."

  "To Alexandra— She's gone, Harrison. Gone, and maybe dead. She's been gone for twelve years. You want to let your promise to her prevent justice—"

  No confirmation, no denial, no response.

  "Why do you have such loyalty to that woman—" I said, weariness in my voice.

  He didn't answer right away. I stood beside the Daykin monument, resting one hand on the lion's side, and I waited. Finally he spoke.

  "It's never really quiet in prison," he said. "People think of it as a quiet place, solitary, but it's not. Doors bang, and guards walk around, and the other prisoners talk and shout and laugh and cough. It's loud all the time. Even at night, you hear sounds of other people. You're never really alone."

  He paused, and I didn't say anything. Another car drove past.

  "You're never alone," he said again, "and it's not an easy place to be. It shouldn't be, right— It's a place where you're sent to be punished, a pl
ace that's supposed to painful. You walk around with other murderers, with rapists, drug dealers. Some violent people, some crazy people. You're one of them, and you've got a role to play. You've got to seem more violent and more crazy than them. You got to be the craziest man in the place, understand— Because otherwise you will not survive."

  He wet his lips, shifted in the grass.

  "I'd been in for four years before I decided I couldn't finish. I just gave up, knew there was no way I could make it to the other side. There was a cleaning detail, and I got assigned to that, and I started stealing Drano. They had a big bottle, I knew I'd never get that out, so I emptied toothpaste tubes and filled them with the stuff, brought them back to my cell. You have any idea how hard it is to fill a toothpaste tube with Drano— Takes dedication, I assure you. I waited until I had three of them filled. I did not want to have too little to do the job. I thought there would probably be enough in those three tubes to kill me."

  "You're still here," I said. "So it wasn't enough—"

  "I think it would have been. I didn't take it."

  "Why not—"

  "It got quiet," he said. "The night I was going to take it, the place got quiet. For one hour. I can tell you that almost exactly. I was waiting, and I was scared, and then it got quiet. I had one silent hour. I couldn't believe it. Nobody was talking, or moving, or screaming, and in that hour I remembered, for the first time in a long time, that this was not all that I was. I'd killed somebody, and it was a terrible thing, and I was in this terrible place and I would be for years to come, but that was not all I was. If I committed suicide in there, though, if I died in that place, then it would be different. That would be my identity, all the world would ever know or remember about me, that I was another murderer who died in the place where murderers belong."

  He took the rag off his belt again, ran it over his face, soaked up the fresh sweat on his forehead.