“I wasn’t following him.’
‘We know you weren’t following him at that point,’ Landry adds. ‘He was already dead by then.’
‘We need to show him a few things,’ Schroder says, then he stands up and walks out of the room. Landry doesn’t fill the empty seat. He pushes his hands against the top of it and leans forward.
‘You used to be one of us,’ he says. ‘What in the hell
happened?’
‘What do you think?’
Before he can answer, Schroder steps back in. He has a cardboard box full of plastic bags. I can’t tell how many there are as they all blend into one. He starts laying them out on the table.
‘The watch,’ he says, ‘used to belong to Gerald Weiss. He was buried with it two years ago. So how is it you’ve come to own it?’
“I found it.’
‘There are two ways you could have got it,’ Landry says.
‘Either you stole it off a dead man when you were in the water, or you stole it off a dead man when you were pulling him out of his coffin.’
‘Even you’re doing a shitty job of trying to believe that,’ I say, and Landry looks pissed off. ‘You’re trying too hard here. And one day that’s going to come back and kick you in the arse. You’re going to try too damn hard, and people are going to suffer for it.’
‘You’re either a thief or a killer,’ Landry says firmly, as if they are one in the same. “I think that’s why you were so damn keen to help out with the exhumation of Henry Martins. You knew who was going to be in there. You wanted to try and control the situation. But the problem was the corpses, right? They floated up. If they hadn’t, we’d never have known about the others.’
‘Look, cut the routine or I’m gonna change my mind and ask for my lawyer.’
Schroder slides over another bag. It has the newspaper articles I found in Alderman’s bedroom. ‘You’ve been holding back on us,’ he says, adding the printouts I made when sketching out the timelines of obituaries and the missing girls. ‘You knew long before us who was in the ground.’
‘That’s because I used to do this too,’ I say, and it’s true. I used to do this, and between the times I did and the times I haven’t nothing really has changed. Violent acts are still a huge part of this city, as are the grey skies and the rain waiting at the threshold of every cooling hour. Bad things happening to good people.
There are kids in this city being born, being loved, growing up into the choices that make them good or bad. There are kids out there without any chance at all. Some will become good, some will become evil, some are born and tossed into dumpsters. I was part of the world that tried to correct all of that, the world that tried to keep some of it in check. But somewhere along the way I lost track of it all. I fell into the abyss.
‘Nobody seems to have forgotten that as much as you, Tate,’
Schroder says. ‘You’re nothing like the man you used to be. You used to be a real stand-up guy. And now you’ve got a DUI hanging over your head; we’ve got you for theft, for stalking, and you’re looking real good for murder.’
‘ Without any evidence you can’t hold me here without charging me. That means I’m here on my own merits. That means I’m free
to get up and leave.’
“No, you’re not free until I say you’re free,’ Schroder says.
‘We’ve got a techie going through your computer files. You’ve been following Father Julian since the day Sidney Alderman went missing. And these newspaper articles. How is it some of them are originals? To me, that suggests they were cut out as the girls went missing. How’d you get them?’
Bruce Alderman gave them to me. He left them in my car when we drove to my office.’
Schroder slides another plastic bag over. It has a small envelope inside with my name written across it. There are bloody smudges across it. For a brief moment I’m back in my office, the smell of burning metal and blood in the air, a pink mist creating a cloud over the caretaker’s head that has just been distended by a bullet.
‘What was in here?’ Schroder asks. ‘The articles? See, the articles aren’t folded up, and they’d need to have been folded to fit in this envelope.’
“I can’t remember.’
‘We found writing samples at the church. This is Bruce Alderman’s handwriting.’
‘So?’
‘So what else have you stolen?’ Landry asks.
“I haven’t stolen anything. That envelope has my name on it, so whatever was in there was mine.’
“He wrote you a letter? A confession? A suicide note?’ Schroder asks.
‘No.’
‘Thought you couldn’t remember what was in there?’
“I can’t.’
‘But you can remember what wasn’t in there.’
‘Memory is a funny thing.’
‘Cut the crap, Tate,’ Landry says.
‘It was the watch, okay?’ I say, and it sounds believable enough.
‘Alderman had the watch. I don’t know how he got it, and when he gave it to me I didn’t know who it belonged to.’