Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

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 centimeter 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 are 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 toward 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.

It’s only a ten-minute drive home, but I’m almost falling asleep by the time I get there. My house isn’t anything flashy, 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 makeup.

“No comment,” I say before the cameraman can settle into a comfortable position and the reporter can push the microphone into my face. I’m way too tired for this bullshit.

“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 recognize 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,” I tell her, and I’m starting to get pissed off.

“Can you tell us about your involvement today?”

“No.”

“You’re no longer on the force,” she says. “Why were you at the cemetery?”

My hands are in my pockets and I ball them into fists. “No comment.”

“Bruce Alderman was killed four hours ago, and yet here you are, coming home,” she says. “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. Instead I say nothing.

“How is it you still get cases?” she asks. “Especially these types. I was led to believe everybody on the force hated you.”

“Not everybody hates me,” I tell her. “I’m sure they all hate you a whole lot more after you got that woman killed. At least 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,” she says.

I relax the tension in my fists. “It has been.”

“It’s been a long day for everybody. I guess it must have been hard on you.”