Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

“I don’t understand what you’re playing at, Joe,” Melissa says. There aren’t any background sounds. Her voice comes from somewhere to the side of the camera. The report says the angles in the footage and an examination of the apartment show the camera was hidden in the wardrobe pointing out. It means Melissa didn’t know she was being filmed. It’s possible Joe was going to try and blackmail her. The report doesn’t say.

“He’s my witness to what you really are.” They are Joe the Carver’s words, and his voice is also off to the side. The footage still only shows Calhoun, his eyes wide in panic. Every ounce of his being is seeping fear. Calhoun didn’t need to be a detective to figure out what was going to happen to him. My stomach tightens and I tighten my grip on the remote control to try and stop my hands from shaking.

“Oh? And what do you have on him?” Melissa asks.

“Enough.”

I wonder what “enough” means, and I’m sure I’m not the only one wondering. Calhoun’s fingerprints were found on a knife used to kill a prostitute only days before his death, but the scene was staged. Calhoun was innocent.

“You’re forgetting one thing, Joe.”

“And what’s that?”

“I don’t need him.”

Melissa steps into view, this tall woman brimming with sex appeal, but her eyes don’t fit with the package, her body and face transmit the kind of beauty you’d expect from a woman used to showing off the latest fashions on a runway, but her eyes tell a different story, her eyes reveal somebody you’d expect to spend her nights skinning kittens. She moves gracefully toward Calhoun and the veins stand out in her neck from the effort of plunging the knife into his chest. The camera doesn’t move. Joe doesn’t enter the frame. I want to put the TV on mute because I don’t want to hear the sounds Calhoun makes because somehow they’re worse than seeing him convulse beneath her. There’s a long gargling sound, like the last of the water draining from a bathtub. When it’s over, Melissa tucks her hair over her right ear and looks toward the camera, but not right at it. The Carver never comes into view.

“You stupid bitch. How could you do such a thing?”

She pulls the silver duct tape away from Calhoun’s mouth and blood spills out of it and down his front. “I’m surprised that you thought I wouldn’t.”

I’m surprised too.

She carries on. “I told you no tricks, Joe.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well you should have assumed it. I still want my money.”

After that the footage gets even worse. There is a coldness with this woman that I’ve never seen before, a cold beauty that remains even when she withdraws the knife and drags it across the dead detective’s throat. Not long after she walks away the footage ends. Melissa said no tricks, but filming her was a trick. I wonder what the money is she’s talking about. According to the file the question has been posed to Joe, but he hasn’t given an answer.

I switch off the TV and walk slowly down the hallway to the study with a stronger determination to help Schroder. This is why he included the DVD. The connection between Melissa and the Carver is hard to understand. She tortured him, they became lovers, and he won’t give up any information on her. It doesn’t make sense. If the Carver hadn’t been arrested, would they have stayed together until one of them killed the other?

By the end of the first hour there aren’t any spare surfaces on the desk and I’ve had to lock down the fan to keep it from blowing the papers away. By the end of the second hour parts of the floor are covered and some of the images are taped to a whiteboard I have in my study and the fan is back in the wardrobe. All the windows in the house are open. I can hear a stereo thumping from one of the neighboring houses and somebody singing along to it. I wanted to think in silence, but I turn my own stereo on preferring to listen to my own music rather than somebody else’s. I listen to a Beatles album and think things were easier back then before figuring things are never easy. In the two hours I’ve created piles of chaos with no real clear insight to who this woman is.

The security guard on the golf course was the last body found, and that was three weeks ago. I wonder what Melissa wants their uniforms for. All that wondering, though, tires me out, and by the end of the third hour I start moving through the house, putting some distance between me and the collection of evidence. I pause in the kitchen and make a sandwich. I’d planned on arriving home and somehow making my way out to see my wife, but somehow three hours have gone by and I haven’t even thought of her. I feel like getting a drink. Start with a beer and see what follows, but there’s no alcohol in the house. I end up sitting at the dining table with my lunch and a glass of milk the same way I did when I was a kid.

There is a world waiting for me back in the study, a world that I thought I had escaped. I finish my lunch and I’m halfway down the hall back toward that world when somebody knocks on my front door. My parents said they’d call first, so it isn’t them. Anyway, through the blurred glass I can see only one figure. I feel like not answering it. I just want to tell whoever is there to go away, but the knocking continues so I head toward it. I open up the door. It’s my lawyer. A year ago my lawyer wanted to kill me. He tied me up and dragged me into the woods. He threw me into the dirt and made me stare down the barrel of a gun while he considered pulling the trigger. My only thought now is that he’s come to finish off what he couldn’t finish then.

Cooper can taste carpet and dust and something metallic, along with something he can’t place, something that makes him think of decaying coffins being opened in ancient black-and-white movies, where the inside lids have claw marks and the dead men have torn and broken fingernails. His eyes are too heavy and sore to open. The darkness is connected optically to a mind that feels raw. His head is pounding and he wonders what sort of hangover this is, and quickly decides it must be the worst kind, the kind where you wake up and wish you were dead instead of drunk. There is a ringing in his ears and his chest is burning.

The first memory to return is the heat wave. A city under siege by the sun. That could be why he started drinking. Hell, it’s a good reason for anybody to start. Drink what you can then pass out someplace cool, because wherever he is at the moment, it is certainly that. He bets his wife is equally as drunk somewhere before remembering he doesn’t have a wife anymore, that they separated three years ago though he can’t quite remember why, not off the top of his head, and since his wife there haven’t been any other women, not serious ones, and there’s nobody at the moment, so probably he started drinking alone. Only he’s given up drinking, or so he’d thought. In the past the drink has gotten him into trouble. He rolls onto his side, the bed squeaking and grinding beneath him, not his bed, though, because he doesn’t recognize any of the sounds. Then he thinks hospital. He’s been in an accident, that whatever has happened has nothing to do with an indulgence of too much scotch. He listens for but can’t hear the chatter of patients, the scuffle of feet, the bing bong of the intercom shouting code blue or code red in room one-oh-something. Last time he stepped into a hospital was two years ago when his uncle was sick, his uncle being eaten alive from the inside out by cancer. He remembers another old man in the same room having to shit into a plastic container suspended beneath the seat of a chair next to the bed, the stench of it wafting through the room enough to make him leave. None of that is with him here, none of the sounds or the smells. This isn’t a hospital.