I’ve never been to the morgue before. Never seen for real what I’ve seen in dozens of variations of crime shows and movies over the years, the stark white tiles and dull-bladed instruments, saws with archaic designs even though they’re modern, sharp edges with only one purpose in mind. Then you have to factor in the morgue guys—people sympathetic, people who seem to take each death personally, people making jokes while munching through sandwiches and pointing out the “this and that” of anatomy.
A man in his early to mid fifties walks over, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He sighs deeply. “Been a long day,” he says, and I can’t help but glance at my watch and note that it’s not even two o’clock yet. “You here to see our newest entry?”
“That him over there?” Schroder asks, and he nods toward a body on a gurney, naked and grey and looking nothing like I remember him looking last night.
“That’s him. Haven’t got to him yet. I’m running behind, what with all the Christmas suicides beginning earlier every year. I swear as soon as malls put up their trees and tinsel, people start jumping from bridges.”
“’Tis the season,” Landry says.
“We’ll only be a few minutes,” Schroder says.
“Take your time,” he answers, then wanders off to an office, slowly shaking his head.
We walk over to the body. For a few moments it’s hard to believe it’s the same man. The tattoos seem diluted against his skin. His eyes are closed and the wound in his hand is open. It’s ugly and raw and runs from the center of his palm right out the side. It would have hurt a hell of a lot if he’d lived. The edges of it have blackened.
“Is this the man you think I killed?” I ask.
“Nobody said we think you killed him,” Landry says.
“You can cut the bullshit,” I say. “So why are we here?”
“We were in the neighborhood,” Schroder answers. “And I thought it would be good for you.”
“In what way?”
“This could as easily have been you,” he says.
“No. It couldn’t have been. I didn’t do this to him.”
“I thought we were cutting the bullshit,” he says. “Look, Eddie, you have to know you’re messing with the wrong people here. I don’t mean the cops, I mean these people,” he says, and he points down at Kingsly. “This man is lying here today, but tomorrow or the next day, this is going to be you. Is that what you want?”
“Of course not.”
“Then it’s time you were straight and tell us what happened.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I say.
“You sure of that?” Schroder asks.
They lead me back upstairs and out into the sun. We drive about two hundred meters until they turn in the opposite direction to my house. After a few more minutes it becomes pretty evident where we’re heading. I don’t complain. It’s like we’re taking a day trip, just driving around the city. The car ride to the prison is about the same
as the ride to the hospital. Same amount of silent conversation, same amount of heat being thrown about by the air-conditioning. About the only thing different is the scenery. Farms with burned-off grass. Large fields full of dull animals burning in the sun, each of them with bad futures, slaughterhouses and dinner tables the only thing on their horizon. I can’t imagine driving a tractor around, plowing fields, milking cows, getting up early and going to bed early, working the land, the soil under your nails, backbreaking work—but maybe if I could have imagined it five years ago I would have lived on a farm with Jodie, away from the city, away from banks and bank robbers.
These are the same sights convicts see if they manage to run free—but people don’t really have to escape from jail when they’re getting released so soon anyway, the big revolving-door policy kicking prisoners back into the public because there’s no room for them, or no real desire to buck the system and say enough is enough.
We pull up further past the visitors’ entrance and walk across the hot asphalt to a back door. The pavement between us and the work crews and cranes shimmers—it looks like a layer of water has pooled across it.
“Hope you don’t mind,” Schroder says.
“Why? You think coming out here is good for me too?”
We’re given an escort through the maze of concrete corridors that have to be almost ten degrees cooler than the outside world. We make our way to general population where the temperature heats back up to hospital temperatures. I can smell the sweat and the hate and the blood and the evil of the inmates as we walk past their cells. The cells mostly have concrete-block fronts with heavy metal doors in the middle, all of them ovens in this heat. There are narrow gaps at head height to look through, and at the moment many of those gaps are full of eyes staring out at me.
From behind the doors prisoners yell at us, some ignore us, others ask for cigarettes; the lucky ones have probably passed out from the heat. We reach my father’s cell. It’s the same as any of the others we’ve passed. It’s kind of surreal to see what my dad has called his home for the last twenty years. A concrete bunker with a metal door, a single metal bed bolted to the floor with an old mattress on top, a couple of posters taped up on the wall to add color, some books piled on the floor, everything neat and tidy, a stainless-steel toilet in the corner. I stand outside with four prison guards as Schroder and Landry begin tossing it over, turning everything upside down and pulling it apart. They take their time about it even though there aren’t many places to search, letting me wait in the corridor, the inmates in my local proximity all talking to me. One of them calls me Eddie, then he tells the others who I am and they all start saying the same thing. They’re all telling me they’re going to be seeing me soon. One of them eventually gets around to wolf-whistling at me, and the others laugh. All I can see are their eyes staring out at me, and occasionally some fingers come out from the gaps too. This is why Schroder brought me here—to give me the other preview of my future. He’s telling me I’m either going to end up in the morgue or in prison. I imagine spending twenty minutes inside one of those cells and the idea isn’t pleasant. I wonder how my dad survived. I wonder what kept him alive, what kept him from tying his bedsheet into a noose.
The warden shows up. He’s in a suit that probably cost all of a hundred bucks, and he has a neutral sick-of-the-same-shit look about him—like my dad almost getting murdered can’t muster up a single ounce of excitement in him. He’s in his midfifties and uses the facial expressions he’s learned over all those years to look at me with complete contempt. Without saying a word to me, he heads into the cell and directs his wrath at Schroder.
“Who the hell said you could bring a civilian in here?” he asks, loud enough for most of the prisoners in the wing to hear. “Are you insane? This is an absolute breach of policy and will cost you your badge.”
I don’t hear Schroder’s response—his voice is low and forceful, and when the warden responds his voice is low and forceful too. I try my best to listen in to what they’re saying, but can’t pick up much except a couple of names, one of which I’ve heard before. Their quiet argument goes on for a few minutes, and when the warden reemerges from the cell, he’s no happier as he storms past me, followed by the two prison guards he brought with him, cheered along the way by some of the prisoners.
The two detectives keep searching my father’s cell as if there could be a dozen hidden compartments, and after thirty minutes they come up with nothing. In the end they walk out dejected, like they were hoping for a reason to arrest my dad all over again. We’re escorted back out the same way we came in.
In the car Schroder lays out the facts. There are no suspects in my father’s case—except for the fifty men who piled on top of him. It seems unlikely that figure will be narrowed down, and even more unlikely they’ll try to narrow it down. When my dad wakes up he may be able to help—but until then there’s not much they can do.
I remember what my dad said yesterday when he gave me that name. He knew he was putting himself in danger. I think after twenty years he’d had enough of this place, he’d seen his son again, he’d seen an opportunity to be a father, and that was the best he was ever going to get.
We pass a couple of media vans going the other way, racing out toward the prison; news of my dad has already hit the city. It’ll be on the news tonight, the prison as a backdrop, and I’ll be on the news tonight and in the papers tomorrow too. They’ll probably accuse me again of killing my wife. Of course that’s just journalists being journalists, not caring if they turn my life upside down for the chance of a story. Each year the competition gets edgier and edgier, compelling them to give up their ethics—and tonight they’ll be
speculating on how far the apple really fell from the serial-killer family tree.
We reach my street and there are no media vans parked anywhere. They’ll arrive though, with their cameras and lights and makeup kits. Landry is driving. He pulls up outside of the house and I climb out.
“Hang on a sec, Bill,” Schroder says to Landry, then follows me out. “You can make our lives a lot easier, Edward, if you tell me what you and your father discussed. You probably don’t see it, but it could go a long way toward catching the people who killed your wife.”
“What makes you think that’s what we were talking about?”
“Far as I can figure, there’s plenty for you two to talk about—but with the timing the way it is, it’s pretty obvious he was putting together a list of names. Look, Edward, you better think long and hard about what you want to do next,” he says. “See, it doesn’t look good for you. You go and see your father yesterday, and today one of the men who robbed that bank is dead. Then today your father gets a hit put out on him.”
“I can’t help that.”
“I know you can’t, Edward. But you’re not seeing the big picture,” he says.
“And what’s that?”
“I’m not saying you killed our victim last night. We’ll know soon—there was enough blood at the scene that somebody thought they could clean up with bleach, but they didn’t get it all. We’ll run it against your father’s, check for DNA markers—that way we don’t need a warrant for your DNA. So we’ll know about you for sure, soon enough. The problem you’ve got is that I’m not the only one who thinks you were there. They tried to shut your dad up before he got more names. That means they’re going to want to shut you up too. You’re going to drown in the mess, Edward, unless you start helping us.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, thinking about the small concrete cells, the other men inside them, and spending the next ten years there. “There’s another alternative.”
“Oh?”
“These people killed their own man for whatever reasons. Drugs, money, some weird gang-loyalty thing, whatever. They killed him, and that means they have no reason to come after me. They know I’m innocent.”
“I certainly hope for your sake that’s what happened,” he says.
I open my mouth to answer, but am not sure how. I think about Sam and I think about the cells, and I think the best solution for everybody is if I take my daughter and leave. Today. Get the hell out of this city. Out of this country.
“The blood will tell us if you were there last night. You can save yourself a lot of pain by telling me the truth. You sure you want to
play it this way?”
I don’t answer him.
“Then you better watch your back,” he says, then turns and heads to the car.
I head inside. It’s a beautiful day but I close the door on it. Nat and Diana were going to take Sam to the park today, so right now they’re probably pushing her on a swing or making sure she doesn’t fall off a slide. They don’t have a cell phone. Well, they do, but they use it differently from the rest of the world—they only switch it on when they need to make a call, the rest of the time saving power, a habit I think most people in the retirement generation have. I try the cell phone now but it’s switched off.
I try their home number on the chance they’re home, but nobody answers and they don’t have a machine. They’re at the park or the pool or the mall. When she comes home, what do I do then? Tell Schroder the truth and live the next ten years of my life the way Dad has lived the last twenty? I can’t do that, but I also can’t take the chance of Sam becoming a target. I hate the idea of leaving my wife behind, but she’ll understand. She’ll want what’s best for Sam—and what’s best for Sam is somewhere like Australia or Europe. Last
night was an accident, but Schroder will never believe that. There will be no more accidents, though. The police have a name, they have a starting place now, and they’ll find the rest of the men who killed Jodie. Those men will be put away for eight or ten years and that’s the best I can hope for. There will be future robberies, future victims, but there’s nothing I can do about that.
Making the decision to leave is hard in some ways, easy in others—but once it’s made there’s no reason to delay. I know how guilty that’s going to make me look. Damn it, I should’ve taken the money from Kingsly’s house, to make this move a whole lot easier. I move around the living room but don’t dwell on the fact that soon I’ll never see this house again, my in-laws, this festering city that took my wife. With this in mind, my neighborhood is different—darker, everything gritty, it’s now the kind of place where only one bad day separates it between suburbia and a war zone. I walk to the sidewalk and search up and down the road for the sedan I figure will be there. It’s about fifty meters away, dark grey, two shapes behind the window, too far away to see their faces. They’re going to babysit me, they’re going to report every move I make to Schroder—which means I might make it to the airport but not on board a plane.
I drive up the street, watching the sedan in my mirror. It doesn’t move, not until I reach the intersection, then it pulls out from the curb. I go around the corner. Twenty seconds later the car comes around the corner too. I’ve never been tailed before, and I don’t know whether the driver is doing a good job or a bad one. Then I realize it all comes down to whether or not he cares about being seen. Schroder probably figures if I know the tail is there I’ll be less of a problem for them. Fewer people will die.