Blood Men Page 16

  “So somebody bought drugs from him with the stolen cash?”

  “That’s quick thinking,” Schroder says.

  “I like that,” Landry adds. “A quick thinker.”

  “But no. That’s not what we’re saying,” Schroder says. “The cash we found was from the bank. It was stained with dye and damaged.”

  “I don’t follow,” I say.

  Schroder explains to me what a dye pack is and it makes enough sense. The whole time I keep thinking there’s something he’s not telling me. Maybe they found something of mine at the scene. Could be a neighbor saw me-it doesn’t seem likely, it was too dark. And why isn’t he mentioning the rest of the money? The bricks of cash under the mattress weren’t ruined with dye.

  “How much of the money did you find?” I ask.

  “Can’t tell you that,” Schroder says.

  “Was this the man that killed Jodie?”

  “No,” Landry says.

  “He was one of the six?” I ask.

  “One of the seven,” Schroder says.

  “What?”

  “Six men came into the bank,” Schroder says, “but another man sat out in the car.”

  “A getaway driver?”

  “A wheelman,” Landry says.

  “So one of them killed him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who found him?” I ask.

  “Now, why would you ask that?” he asks.

  “If this is somebody who was in the gang that killed my wife, maybe whoever found him is part of it.”

  “They wouldn’t have phoned it in,” Schroder says. “It was his probation officer. The victim didn’t show up this morning, and his probation officer came looking for him.”

  “So what are you saying? Who killed him?”

  “We don’t know,” Landry says. “Doesn’t make sense that somebody would kill him, and leave all those drugs behind.”

  And the money.

  “Unless he was killed for a different reason,” Schroder says.

  “Something more personal,” Landry says.

  “Like revenge,” Schroder says, the two cops bouncing off each other now.

  “But you must know his accomplices, right?” I ask. “He would have worked with these men before?”

  “We’re looking into it,” Schroder says.

  “I don’t understand, why have you come here to tell me this?”

  “We thought it was important to keep you updated,” Schroder says.

  I don’t think that’s it at all. And he knows I don’t believe him.

  “You haven’t exactly told me anything, except somebody who could have been part of the robbery got killed. How do you know he was the wheelman and not one of the six in the bank?”

  “Height.”

  “What?”

  “He was a tall man. None of the six in the bank were as tall as him. The bank crew were all average, this guy was over six foot.”

  “Still doesn’t mean he drove the van,” I say.

  “He drove the van,” Schroder says. “And he was part of the robbery.”

  “So now what? It means you’ll have the others soon, right?”

  “We have some leads,” Schroder says, and the way he says it makes me think that they have some leads on who killed Kingsly, not who robbed the bank. “What happened to your hand?”

  “I dropped a glass last night,” I say, glancing over at the kitchen where I dropped the glass last night ready for this question. “I cut myself picking up the pieces. I should have gotten stitches.”

  “Uh-huh. And your daughter? Where’s Sam?”

  “At her grandparents’.”

  “So you were here alone last night?”

  “Sounds like you have something to ask me.” I say.

  Schroder’s cell phone goes off. He flips it open and walks off a few meters, keeping his voice low.

  “Yeah. We want to know how you can be in two places at once,” Landry says.

  “What?”

  “You’re going to tell us you were at home alone last night, right?”

  “I was.”

  “We got a description of you and your car seen outside our vic’s house last night. In fact we’re planning on having a lineup later on which you’ll be coming along to.”

  “I wasn’t there,” I say, doing my best not to break out in a sweat.

  “We can prove you were.”

  “No. You can’t. Because I wasn’t. My wife is killed, and you come here and treat me this way? Screw you, Detective,” I say, my heart racing. “But you know what? I’m glad he’s dead. Maybe you can find whoever’s responsible and ask him to get the other six.”

  “Interesting you’d put it that way,” Landry says. “See, when you say other six and not other five, that suggests you don’t think the killer was one of the gang.”

  I don’t answer him. Before he can start back at me, Schroder snaps his phone closed. “There’s been a development,” he says, looking uncomfortable. “I mean, an incident.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  “It’s your father,” he says, and he stares at the ground for a few seconds before looking back up at me, and without him telling me, I already know what’s happened. “You’re going to need to come with us.”

  chapter twenty-eight

  The back of the car is hot even with the air-conditioning going. The only other sound is the tires traveling over the road, neither detective seemingly in a talkative mood-not like twenty minutes ago. They probably don’t know what to say. It’s an unmarked sedan, so it doesn’t look like I’ve been arrested, but it feels that way, sitting in the backseat, only the handcuffs are missing. I watch the landscape change as we head through different neighborhoods into the city, the sun beating down hard on all of it, nice areas, not-so-nice areas, other areas you’d kill yourself to avoid. We’re delayed in the beginning, a minor car accident outside the Hagley Park golf course in town bringing cars to a crawl, a golf ball sliced out of bounds and into the windscreen of a car, sending the driver into a spiral. Other people are jogging the park circuit, cherry blossom trees lining the route. I think about the cell phone I took from Kingsly last night. It was blank. No records of any incoming or outgoing calls. No text messages. It was a new phone. A disposable phone.

  We park around the back of the building next to a patrol car, audience to a family of ducklings on a nearby grass shoulder who seem to have lost their mother. We take a rear entrance and enter a cold corridor with linoleum flooring and plaster walls, a few Christmas decorations hurriedly stuck up on the walls with bits of tape. None of us say anything. We walk in single file, one cop ahead of me, one behind.

  A nurse with bright blue eyes greets us and frowns at me before talking to Schroder. She gives him directions to the ward and I tune out the conversation. I can’t stop looking at the patients scattered about the ground floor, people hooked up to IV drips on bags going for walks, some of them heading outside to puff on a cigarette, and I can’t see a single person in this hospital that doesn’t seem bored, this day stretching out into many others. If the hospital has air-conditioning, it must be buried somewhere, maybe in the nurses’ lounge, because it’s about forty degrees in here.

  We go up a few flights, taking the elevator. The doors open into a corridor branching into different wards. Two police officers are standing outside one of the rooms. The larger of the two comes over and he must know Schroder because he nods at him and doesn’t ask who any of us are. Landry holds back and makes a phone call. I’m left to stare at my feet.

  “In the corner with the curtain drawn around him,” the officer says.

  There are six beds in the room, all spaced an equal distance apart, three on each side of the room. Christchurch Hospital isn’t exactly the hub for medical advancement, but it makes do with what it has, even if most of what it has looks like it got ordered from a 1980s “Good Guide to Living” brochure. All the beds are full, but only one of them has a curtain pulled around it. There’s a g
ap big enough between the curtain and floor to see the feet of a doctor, and as we approach, he pulls the curtain away-ta-da! — revealing my dad. For the briefest second I’m sure he’s not going to be there, but of course he is, held down in his bed by tubes and a set of handcuffs connecting his right arm to the right rail.

  Dad’s eyes are closed, all warmth and color gone from his face. His features have sunken, as if the near-death experience triggered an internal collapse in which his body began falling in on itself. This man is a cold-blooded killer, but he’s also my dad, and seeing him this way-well, I don’t know what I feel. He’s in jail because I killed a dog twenty years ago.

  “It’s not as bad as it seems at first,” the doctor says, after Schroder tells him who we are. “One wound with a sharp object into the chest from the side. Not real close to puncturing the left lung, but if the weapon had been longer, who knows? Sounds bad-and believe me, it is bad-but it could have been a whole lot worse. The operation went about as well as it could. He’s heavily sedated still, won’t be waking up till this evening.”

  “He’ll be okay?” I ask. “He’ll make a full recovery?”

  “Should do,” the doctor says, nodding toward my dad. “We’ll keep him for a couple of days, and we’ll check him every few days or so after that, but yes, your dad still has the rest of his life to look forward to. Of course we’ll know more this evening once he’s woken up. The only thing to worry about at this point is infection. We’ll keep you updated,” he says, then walks off to the next patient.

  “Who did this?” I ask, turning to Schroder.

  “Nobody knows. A fight broke out during lunch. Inmates swarmed each other, and when they were pulled apart the guards found him,” Schroder says. “He was stabbed with a toothbrush, easy to file down, effective to use,” he says, and he sounds like he’s rattling off a sales pitch, like he makes a dollar for every filed-down toothbrush jammed into a convict. “Question is, why would somebody want him dead?”

  “He killed a lot of women,” I say.

  “And people have had twenty years to try and kill him in jail. Why now? Why the day after you visit him for the second time?”

  I shrug.

  “See, the timing is pretty suggestive, Edward. Your dad knows as much as anybody that prisons are good places for bad people to meet. I think your dad figured he could do some detective work of his own. We checked criminal records and came up with names and we’re still working that angle, and the ball’s rolling now and we’ve got some real good leads, but your dad worked it quicker from the inside. Who was he working for? Does he want those names to give to you? Or to us?”

  “I have no-”

  “See, Edward, it gets me thinking. It makes me think he gave you a name. And our victim last night had a stab wound in his hand, a big dirty wound similar to the one that’s on yours.”

  “The only person who knows what my father was doing is my father,” I say. “And he stopped being my father twenty years ago.”

  “For you, maybe. Not for him.”

  “Well, maybe you can ask him when he wakes up.”

  “Don’t worry, we will. First we’ll go through his cell.”

  “Well, until then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend a minute with him. Alone.”

  The detectives step away. I draw the curtain behind me for some privacy and then face my dad. It’s the third time in three days. My wife murdered last week, my father almost killed this week-what will happen next week? People say that things happen in threes. The accountant in me has always known that’s bullshit-but what if it’s true?

  I try to imagine how I’d be feeling if the knife had gone in differently, ten millimeters deeper or to the left, hitting whatever it is that it missed-whether I’d be happy or sad or indifferent. I reach for my father’s hand but don’t quite make it there. I don’t want to touch him. This man isn’t even my father. He used to be, once. Then he became something else. I may have called him “Dad” over the last few days, but he wasn’t really that, not anymore. I don’t really know what he is. All those years-add up the sum of a man, and his total, a serial killer. A demon. There isn’t a single one of us who doesn’t think he got what he deserved. Including me.

  chapter twenty-nine

  There are two things separating my dad from the morgue. The first is two hospital floors of concrete and steel. The second is ten millimeters of good luck. Schroder and Landry take me down into the basement of the hospital and I don’t question it. I go along for the ride-which is a straight drop in an elevator that opens up into a corridor about a quarter of the temperature of the ones upstairs. We walk in the same order as before, with me in the middle. The corridor reminds me of the prison, concrete block with no Christmas fanfare, a painted line on the floor to follow. There’s an office door and then there’s a large set of double doors. We go through the double doors and the air gets even colder.

  I’ve never been to the morgue before. Never seen for real what I’ve seen in dozens of variations of crime shows and movies over the years, the stark white tiles and dull-bladed instruments, saws with archaic designs even though they’re modern, sharp edges with only one purpose in mind. Then you have to factor in the morgue guys-people sympathetic, people who seem to take each death personally, people making jokes while munching through sandwiches and pointing out the “this and that” of anatomy.

  A man in his early to mid fifties walks over, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He sighs deeply. “Been a long day,” he says, and I can’t help but glance at my watch and note that it’s not even two o’clock yet. “You here to see our newest entry?”

  “That him over there?” Schroder asks, and he nods toward a body on a gurney, naked and grey and looking nothing like I remember him looking last night.

  “That’s him. Haven’t got to him yet. I’m running behind, what with all the Christmas suicides beginning earlier every year. I swear as soon as malls put up their trees and tinsel, people start jumping from bridges.”

  “’Tis the season,” Landry says.

  “We’ll only be a few minutes,” Schroder says.

  “Take your time,” he answers, then wanders off to an office, slowly shaking his head.

  We walk over to the body. For a few moments it’s hard to believe it’s the same man. The tattoos seem diluted against his skin. His eyes are closed and the wound in his hand is open. It’s ugly and raw and runs from the center of his palm right out the side. It would have hurt a hell of a lot if he’d lived. The edges of it have blackened.

  “Is this the man you think I killed?” I ask.

  “Nobody said we think you killed him,” Landry says.

  “You can cut the bullshit,” I say. “So why are we here?”

  “We were in the neighborhood,” Schroder answers. “And I thought it would be good for you.”

  “In what way?”

  “This could as easily have been you,” he says.

  “No. It couldn’t have been. I didn’t do this to him.”

  “I thought we were cutting the bullshit,” he says. “Look, Eddie, you have to know you’re messing with the wrong people here. I don’t mean the cops, I mean these people,” he says, and he points down at Kingsly. “This man is lying here today, but tomorrow or the next day, this is going to be you. Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then it’s time you were straight and tell us what happened.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” I say.

  “You sure of that?” Schroder asks.

  They lead me back upstairs and out into the sun. We drive about two hundred meters until they turn in the opposite direction to my house. After a few more minutes it becomes pretty evident where we’re heading. I don’t complain. It’s like we’re taking a day trip, just driving around the city. The car ride to the prison is about the same as the ride to the hospital. Same amount of silent conversation, same amount of heat being thrown about by the air-conditioning. About the only thing differe
nt is the scenery. Farms with burned-off grass. Large fields full of dull animals burning in the sun, each of them with bad futures, slaughterhouses and dinner tables the only thing on their horizon. I can’t imagine driving a tractor around, plowing fields, milking cows, getting up early and going to bed early, working the land, the soil under your nails, backbreaking work-but maybe if I could have imagined it five years ago I would have lived on a farm with Jodie, away from the city, away from banks and bank robbers.

  These are the same sights convicts see if they manage to run free-but people don’t really have to escape from jail when they’re getting released so soon anyway, the big revolving-door policy kicking prisoners back into the public because there’s no room for them, or no real desire to buck the system and say enough is enough.

  We pull up further past the visitors’ entrance and walk across the hot asphalt to a back door. The pavement between us and the work crews and cranes shimmers-it looks like a layer of water has pooled across it.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” Schroder says.

  “Why? You think coming out here is good for me too?”

  We’re given an escort through the maze of concrete corridors that have to be almost ten degrees cooler than the outside world. We make our way to general population where the temperature heats back up to hospital temperatures. I can smell the sweat and the hate and the blood and the evil of the inmates as we walk past their cells. The cells mostly have concrete-block fronts with heavy metal doors in the middle, all of them ovens in this heat. There are narrow gaps at head height to look through, and at the moment many of those gaps are full of eyes staring out at me.

  From behind the doors prisoners yell at us, some ignore us, others ask for cigarettes; the lucky ones have probably passed out from the heat. We reach my father’s cell. It’s the same as any of the others we’ve passed. It’s kind of surreal to see what my dad has called his home for the last twenty years. A concrete bunker with a metal door, a single metal bed bolted to the floor with an old mattress on top, a couple of posters taped up on the wall to add color, some books piled on the floor, everything neat and tidy, a stainless-steel toilet in the corner. I stand outside with four prison guards as Schroder and Landry begin tossing it over, turning everything upside down and pulling it apart. They take their time about it even though there aren’t many places to search, letting me wait in the corridor, the inmates in my local proximity all talking to me. One of them calls me Eddie, then he tells the others who I am and they all start saying the same thing. They’re all telling me they’re going to be seeing me soon. One of them eventually gets around to wolf-whistling at me, and the others laugh. All I can see are their eyes staring out at me, and occasionally some fingers come out from the gaps too. This is why Schroder brought me here-to give me the other preview of my future. He’s telling me I’m either going to end up in the morgue or in prison. I imagine spending twenty minutes inside one of those cells and the idea isn’t pleasant. I wonder how my dad survived. I wonder what kept him alive, what kept him from tying his bedsheet into a noose.