Cemetery Lake

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“You’ve been following him for two months,” Schroder says. I keep staring at the hammer. My hammer. My hammer and Father Julian’s blood. I have this weird thought that maybe I got so drunk I picked up that hammer, drove to the church, and beat him to death. Only there’s no amount of bourbon in the world that would make me do that. Unless I thought he was guilty of something. Is that what happened? No. Of course not. But a small part of me is scared that maybe I’m capable of more when I’m drunk than when I’m sober.

“You think he’s guilty of murder,” Schroder says, carrying on. “You were parked outside his church every day before the restraining order, and some days since. And you want us to believe you had nothing to do with his death.” He puts the murder weapon down slowly, as if carefully balancing a cup of water filled to the brim, which, suddenly, reminds me of the glass of bourbon sitting on my kitchen counter. He puts it in the center of the table so we’re all within reaching distance. Maybe he’s hoping I’m going to make a break for it. I’m sure Landry is. He’s hoping this can all end right now.

“Where did you find it?” I ask.

“Where you left it,” Landry answers.

“I want my lawyer now.”

“Yeah, guilty people always do,” Landry says to Schroder before turning back to me. “Come on, Tate, you know how it goes. You’ve seen it before and you used to hate it too.”

“Hate what?”

“When the perp keeps on denying it even after we’ve got so much evidence against him,” Landry says. “It’s pathetic. And in your case it’s downright embarrassing.”

“You’ve got nothing,” I say.

“Nothing? Are you kidding me?”

“Tell us again why you were following him,” Schroder says. “Come on, Tate. If he was guilty, then let us help you. I mean, hell, if it turns out he killed those girls, we’ll probably end up giving you a medal,” he says, which is the biggest lie anybody has said inside this room. “Just tell us what happened. We’re all on the same team here.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I say, but my teammates don’t believe me. I want a drink.

“Give us a few minutes alone,” Schroder says, and Landry looks angry, but I know it’s an act. I know they’ve cued up their conversation before coming in here and this is the point where Schroder becomes my friend. Landry shakes his head, then walks out without saying anything else. It’s part of their game.

Schroder leans forward. He gives me a sympathetic smile. An I know how you’re feeling look, but he doesn’t know how I’m feeling. He never will. “You have to give me something here, Tate, or I can’t help you.”

I figure it’s best if I play the game too. But before I do, I decide to give him something. “Father Julian knew who killed those girls.”

“What?”

“He told me he knew. And Bruce Alderman, he buried them. He told me that.”

He leans further forward. “What? Why the hell didn’t you tell us that?”

I explain to Schroder my conversations with the priest, detailing my pleas for Julian to tell me who had done it, even touching on the frustration I felt. I can see Schroder wondering how far he’d have pushed it if he’d known that Father Julian had been confessed to. I tell him about Bruce Alderman and what he said about dignity before elegantly blowing his brains out.

It takes me ten minutes to tell him, and he goes through a different range of emotions, starting with anger and ending with much deeper anger. When I’m done he sits there staring at me. He’s no longer leaning forward, as if trying to protect himself from what he would do to me if I were in range of his fists. “You should have told us,” he says, his voice low and firm. “We could have convinced Julian.”

“I doubt that.”

“We could have done something, Tate,” he says, his voice raising. “Anything! But instead you let two months slide by and now it’s too late. That’s why you were outside his church, right? You weren’t following Father Julian. You were watching to see who came to see him! You were waiting in case the killer showed up, only you didn’t know who the hell you were looking for!”

“I had to do something.”

He bangs his hand down on the table. Hard. The noise bounces around the small room. “You fucked up,” he says.

“I know.”

“And now Father Julian is dead. And you’re in a world full of shit.”

“It’s an abyss.”

“What?”

“Come on, Carl, you know me. You’ve known me for nearly twenty years.”

“Which is why this is hard for me too,” he says, but I’m pretty sure it’s harder for me. “We found the hammer in your garage.”

“And that’s why you’re going to let me leave.” It’s time to play the game.

“What?”

“You’ve got nothing to hold me here,” I tell him. He looks down at the hammer in such a way as to suggest maybe I’ve forgotten it’s there. But I haven’t. “You found it in my garage.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, well, first of all you don’t even know if it’s my hammer.”

“That’s not the. .”

“Second,” I say, and I hold up my hand and start counting off my points. “You’re going to print it and find my prints aren’t on it. You’re going to think a guy who used to be a homicide detective was dumb enough to clean off his fingerprints, but not the blood, was dumb enough to keep the weapon, was dumb enough to leave it in his garage for anybody to find.”

“Not dumb, but drunk,” he says.

“And that’s exactly my point.”

“What?”

“Three,” I say, counting off another point with my fingers. “And this one is the kicker. This is the reason I’m about to get up and walk out of here.”

Schroder slumps slightly in his chair. Not much, but enough to show he knows what’s coming.

“The time line,” I say. “See, we know the time line, Carl, but the problem is the guy who planted the hammer there didn’t.”

Schroder says nothing. He knew I’d figure it out, but was hoping it wouldn’t be this quickly. Or he was hoping to rattle me enough that I’d give him something more, maybe tell him about Sidney Alderman.

“You think he died around midnight,” I say, not because he told me, but because that’s when I saw the person leaving the church, the person who I thought was the priest. Only it wasn’t the priest, it was the man who killed him. The killer knew my car was there, but he didn’t see me because I was covered in ground fog. He probably figured I was passed out drunk in the front seat because that’s what I was used to doing. He stayed in the shadows where he thought he was out of sight.

“But I didn’t make it home. Only the killer couldn’t have known that. He drove to my house and replaced the hammer he had stolen to kill the priest. He didn’t know I was following him. What he couldn’t know was that I would be involved in an accident. Your boys came and locked me up. My car was towed away, and after you found Julian was dead, you would have had it re-towed, this time as evidence in a murder investigation. You had it brought here and every inch of it has been gone over. No blood from Father Julian and, more importantly, no hammer, right? And it’s not like it got logged along with my wallet and cell phone. I didn’t have it on me. And you would have searched the area of the crash, would have searched the roads between the graveyard and the accident. You found nothing. Until tonight. So how’d I put it there?”

“You could have dumped the hammer, picked it back up tonight. Maybe that’s why you’re covered in dirt.”

“Why would I dump the hammer? I couldn’t know I was going to crash. What would be the point of dumping it, just to come back tonight to retrieve it and hide it in my garage?”

Schroder says nothing.

“Then the whole tongue thing. Like I said earlier, why the hell would I cut it out? Because I didn’t want him talking? That’s the sort of message you want to leave when there are others who can still talk, right? A gang thing. But not in this case. This time it was designed to make me look guiltier. It would look like I was pissed at him for talking to you guys and complaining that I was following him.”

He starts tapping a pen against the table in a slow, rhythmic pace. Then he leans forward and starts packing up the photographs.

“So you know I didn’t kill him, but you haul me down here anyway,” I say.

“Come on, Tate, you know how it is.”

He’s right. I do know. There are two things that bug me. The first is, why plant the hammer in my garage and not the tongue?

“Somebody still killed him,” Schroder says.

“Uh huh.”

“You can help us out there.”

“You shouldn’t have jerked me around, Carl. You should have just asked for my help.”

“Hey, don’t go playing the victim here, Tate. You almost killed a woman last night. Hell, maybe you still did-last I heard she was stable, but that don’t mean shit and you know it. Father Julian had to file a restraining order against you and you kept breaking it. You were there the night he died. You’re involved, Tate. Julian died, and if you’d been up front two months ago maybe he’d still be alive now. Sidney Alderman is nowhere to be seen and you’re acting like he’s dead. Same goes for Quentin James. You need to start giving me some answers. Look, you know that by keeping these from us,” he says as he touches the bags with the jewelry and the articles, “you slowed down our investigation. Things would be different. We might have looked further. We might not have pinned all our beliefs on Alderman. Fuck, Tate, we needed this one. There’s been so much shit lately with the Carver case, and that’s just the tip. You’d know that if you gave a shit, or if you read a newspaper.” He pauses, takes a pencil out of his shirt pocket, rolls it across his fingers, then snaps it in half. “Look, you get the point. We needed something to work out, not just for the victims and for their families, but for us. People don’t have faith in the police anymore, Tate, and it’s hard to blame them. That could have all changed, but you held back on us.”

“Was I in the news today?” I ask.

“Did you even hear anything I just said?”

“The papers, Carl. Was I in them? The accident?”

“Not the papers, no,” he says. “The accident was too late for that. But you’ve been on the news all day.”

“Since this morning?”

“That’s what all day means.”

“Then why the hell aren’t you asking yourself the obvious question?”

“Which is?”

“Why would the guy who planted the hammer in my garage not take it back out after seeing the news? He must have known being in jail would clear me.”

I can tell from his expression that Schroder hadn’t thought of it. “Maybe he didn’t see the news,” he says.

“Come on, Carl, you know just as well as I do that these guys always read the papers and watch the news.”

He taps one half of the broken pencil against the table. “This is going to be a long night,” he says. “We’re going to get this sorted.”

“Then I’d better make myself comfortable,” I answer, and I lean back in my chair.