Paul Cleave - Cemetery Lake

“It is. Is this part of a criminal investigation?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” I say, and I figure she wasn’t expecting anything less.

“I need to call my boss about the order,” she tells me.

“No problem.”

“I’ll probably need to fax it to him.”

“I don’t mind waiting.”

She checks the time again. “Give me a minute.”

“Take your time,” I say.

She leaves me in her office, and I’m not sure whether it’ll be her or the police who come back in. I keep glancing at my watch, and each time I think I should just get up and go, cut my losses before Landry or Schroder arrives.

“The account is in the name of John Paul,” she says when she returns. I figure the court order got faxed to her boss and not much further. Maybe to their law firm, but it’s probably the kind of firm that charges too much to be on retainer on the weekend, so it’s sitting in a fax tray somewhere. I’ve seen it dozens of times. She’s not giving me a lot, just a few details. She doesn’t see how it can hurt. She sits back down behind her desk. “Like the pope,” she adds.

“How long has it been active?”

She twists the computer monitor to face her. “Twenty-four years.”

“I need printouts of payments.”

“Okay,” she says. “It’ll take a few minutes.”

“No problem.”

She taps away at her keyboard, then leans back. I don’t hear a printer going anywhere.

“Did John Paul have any other accounts set up? Or was it just this one?” I ask.

“Just this one. But. .” She stops, then looks back down at the court order.

“What?”

“When he set up the account, he also set up a safe-deposit box.”

“A safe-deposit box? Here?”

“It’s even at this branch,” she says.

“Can I access it?”

“The court order doesn’t say you can.”

“Listen, Erica, this is very, very important.”

She seems unsure of what to do.

“This safe-deposit box-did John Paul gain access to it with a key?” I ask.

“Of course. That’s how everybody opens them.”

“When was the last time he accessed it?”

She looks at her monitor. “Ten weeks ago.”

“How many keys were issued?”

“Just the one.”

“Can you tell me if this is it?” I reach into my pocket and drag out my keys. I twist the one Bruce Alderman gave me off the ring and hand it over to her.

“Sure. This is for one of our boxes, though I can’t tell you if it’s specifically for John Paul’s box. We don’t label the keys for a reason, you know, in case they get lost and people try to use them.”

I stand up. “I need you to take me to it.”

“What?” She looks at her watch again, then rests the key on the desk in front of her. “I don’t know-I’ll have to check with my boss.”

“Okay, do what you need to do. But you essentially just said that whoever has the key can gain access to the box, that’s why you don’t label them. If you want, though, I can get the court order amended-that’s fine too. I can get the judge to sign it and be back here in. .” I glance at my watch, “an hour and a half. Two hours tops.”

“Two hours?”

“Yeah. That’s what it’ll take.”

She gives it only a few seconds’ thought. “Okay. Since you have the key I don’t see any problem. The room is this way.”

And she picks up the key, and I follow her out of her office.

Most of the safe-deposit boxes are a little bigger than a phone book, but there are perhaps a dozen or so that are two to three times bigger. There are three walls full of them, each numbered. Erica approaches them slowly, as if still reluctant to be doing this, but then she looks at her watch and remembers that it’s time to leave and Saturday night is waiting. She puts the key into one of the bigger boxes, twists it, opens the door, and pulls out a metal tray from within. She sits it down on the table, then points out three small rooms off to the side.

“There’s privacy in there. Take your time,” she says, sounding as if she doesn’t want me to take my time, but to get in and out of there in under a minute. I intend to help her out there.

The room doesn’t have much legroom. I can reach out and touch both walls at the same time without stretching. I put the tray on the table and open it.

Audio tapes are stacked side to side, the small microcassettes that take up less room. They are all labeled with numbers. I pull a large plastic evidence bag out of my pocket and start filling it up. There is also an accountant’s notebook, and I flick it open to see bunches of names and dates and figures before I throw that into the evidence bag as well. The box is now empty. I leave it on the table and I step out of the cubicle and find Erica is back. She looks at the evidence bag, but says nothing. I’ve closed over the seal and signed it so it all looks more official. She hands me the cardboard box she has filled with the printed bank statements.

She walks with me to the front door. The security guard is waiting for me. “I always wanted to be a cop,” he says. “Would’ve done it too, but I have a banged-up knee that stopped me.” It’s a story heard from plenty of security guards over the years. It might have been a banged-up knee, or it could have been fear or lack of motivation, or he failed the psych test.

The bank is almost empty now. The security cameras in the ceiling have captured my image from a dozen different angles and I know this is going to come back and really bite me in the ass. But that’s for another day. Maybe the same day they dig Sidney Alderman up. And today things are going well. Today my wife hugged a photo of my daughter and I hit a lead that could take me straight to Rachel’s killer. When you get those kinds of leads, you don’t slow down for anything.

As the guard unlocks the door to let me out, Erica starts to turn away.

“Just one more thing,” I ask her, and she turns back. She seems about to glance at her watch again, but pulls herself out of the movement. “The photograph behind your desk, there’s you and another guy-he looks around fifty, maybe sixty. He seems familiar.”

“He was the bank manager here for many years,” she says. “You would have seen him around if you ever came in here.”

“Was?” I ask, and I’m starting to figure out who it is.

“Henry died a couple of years ago,” she says.

“Henry Martins.”

“That’s right. You knew him?”

“I went swimming with him once.”

Outside, the rain is still thick and heavy, and so is the traffic. I pass a guy scraping chewing gum off the sidewalks and depositing his collections into a plastic bucket. He’s wearing a T-shirt that has a picture of the Easter Bunny up on a crucifix. It says Jesus had a stunt double , and I wonder how Father Julian would have reacted to seeing it. Another guy sniffing glue is leaning up against a bike rack watching the guy. I guess Saturday brings the crazies out a little earlier.

I get past them and run through the rain to my car.

I’m anxious to listen to the tapes, but I have no way of playing them. I dump the contents of the evidence bag on the passenger seat. There are perhaps forty tapes inside it. I open the accounts book and see it’s a log of some kind. The dates seem to match up with dates scrawled across the sides of the microcassettes. I start looking through the bank statements. There are over two hundred and fifty of them, one for each month. I figure Erica must have had a few printers going to get them all done in the small amount of time she had. The statements are full of random amounts and dates and names. I look in vain for Henry Martins’s name, but what seemed like a random connection between Rachel Tyler and Henry Martins suddenly seems a lot less random.