Cemetery Lake (10 page)

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 spelt 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 cellphone 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 to not 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 you 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 it 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’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.

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 centimetre 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.

I turn around but keep my hand on the stairwell door. Landry

isn’t one of my biggest fans. There was a time when we were

rather alike, but his life became his work while I did what I could to keep a balance. He’s the same age as me, but he hasn’t aged very well in the two years since I’ve seen him. He doesn’t look good at all. He smells of cigarette smoke and coffee.

‘What did you take?’ he asks.

‘What?’

‘Off your desk. There’s 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 towards 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.

My house isn’t anything flash, 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 make-up.

“No comment,’ I say before the cameraman can settle into a

comfortable position and the reporter can push the microphone

into my face.

‘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 recognise 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.’

‘Can you tell us about your involvement today?’

‘No.’

‘You’re no longer on the force. Why were you at the

cemetery?’

“No comment.’

‘Bruce Alderman was killed four hours ago, and yet here you

are, coming home. 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.

‘How is it you still get cases?’ she asks. ‘Especially these types.

I was led to believe everybody on the force hated you.’

“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.’

‘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 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 deckchair

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 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 torn 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 any more.

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. There isn’t any point.

I take a shower and I think about Rachel Tyler, but I try hard not to think about what her final hour was like. I try to envision 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.