Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“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, pages of death crammed inside its covers, waiting for me, knowing all along I couldn’t turn it away.

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.