Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

48

It was a hot day for late October, close to eighty degrees, and the sky was cloudless, a deep, hurtful blue.

It was the pomp and circumstance, Halloran thought, that made cop funerals so goddamned sad. Milwaukee had sent the bagpipes, and they were wailing now for all the men and women in uniform who couldn’t, because it wouldn’t be seemly.

God, there were hundreds of them. So many figures in brown and blue, sparkles of polished brass winking in the sunlight, decorating the autumn-dried, gentle slopes where tombstones sprouted.

He’d seen plates from a dozen states besides Wisconsin in the somber motorcade that had crawled the two miles from St Luke’s Catholic Church to the Calumet Cemetery.

He searched the faces closest to the grave and saw his own people standing at rigid attention. A lot of them were crying, unashamed. The bagpipes hadn’t done it for them.

Halloran’s own eyes were dry, as if the tears he had shed in that warehouse in Minneapolis were all that his body contained.

It was almost over now. The flag had been folded and presented, the salute had been fired, startling a flock of blackbirds up from the adjacent field, and now the bugle was crying, sending the familiar notes of Taps into the awful stillness of this perfect autumn day. He heard Bonar beside him, softly clearing his throat.

It took over half an hour for all the mourners to leave. Halloran and Bonar were sitting on a concrete bench under a big cottonwood. A few leaves clung stubbornly to the crown, gold against blue.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Mike,’ Bonar said after a long silence. ‘You get to be sad, but not guilty. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Don’t, Bonar.’

‘Okay.’

Father Newberry seemed to float down the slope toward them, his black vestments sweeping the dried grass. He was wearing one of those beatific smiles priests always wear when they put someone into the ground, as if they were seeing them off on a grand journey instead of into the nothingness Halloran believed in. Sadistic bastards.

‘Mikey,’ the sadistic bastard said gently.

‘Hello, Father.’ Halloran showed the priest his eyes for a moment, then looked down at the ground, found an ant at his feet, climbing a blade of grass.

‘Mikey,’ Father Newberry said again, even more gently, but Halloran wouldn’t look up. He would not be comforted. He refused.

Bonar gave Father Newberry a helpless shrug, and the priest nodded his understanding.

‘Mikey, I thought you’d want to know. The keys you left at the station the day Danny was killed . . .’

Halloran winced.

‘ . . . they didn’t fit the Kleinfeldts’ front door.’

Halloran remained still for a moment, taking it in, then he raised his head slowly. ‘What do you mean?’

The priest’s smile was faint, elusive. ‘Well, I think I told you they left everything to the church, so yesterday I picked up the keys from your office and went out there to see to some things’ – his fingers fumbled at his chest, then closed around the ornate crucifix hanging there – ‘and it was the strangest thing. None of them fit, Mikey. I tried them again and again, but none of them fit the front door. I called your office. A couple of your deputies are going to go back out there with me tomorrow, but it won’t make any difference. The key simply isn’t there.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Father Newberry sighed. ‘The Kleinfeldts were frightened people. Perhaps they never carried a key to the house with them. Probably they kept it hidden on the property, although I did look in the obvious places and couldn’t find it. I suppose it will turn up eventually. But the point is that even if you had remembered the keys, Mikey, you wouldn’t have been able to open the front door. Danny would still have gone around to the back. Do you understand?’

Halloran stared at the priest for a long time, then dropped his eyes and found the ant again, stupid ant, still wasting the moments of his brief life climbing up and down the same damned blade of grass.

Goddamnit, he’d made so many mistakes. The list of ‘what ifs’ seemed endless, and damning. What if he’d refused to let Sharon go to the warehouse? What if he’d let her go, but refused to stay outside? What if he’d gone to the back door instead of Danny? What if he’d broken one of those goddamned windows and they’d both just gone in the front?

But at least with Danny, the biggest ‘what if’ was crossed off the list. What if I’d just remembered the keys? Well, Halloran, it wouldn’t have changed a goddamned thing. There was a little salvation in that knowledge. Halloran grabbed it and held on tight, and when he could finally trust his voice, he said, ‘Thank you, Father. Thank you for telling me that.’

The old priest breathed out a sigh of relief.

Bonar stood up and arched his back, big belly thrusting forward like the prow of a ship. ‘I’ll walk you up to your car, Father.’

‘Thank you, Bonar.’ And when they were up the slope a bit, out of Halloran’s hearing, he whispered, ‘Will you tell me what happened in Minneapolis? I’ve only been getting bits and pieces.’

‘If you promise not to proselytize.’

Bonar talked nonstop as they climbed, then dipped down into a little hollow, then up the last hill to where Father Newberry’s car was parked near the entrance. He told him everything, refusing to insult the man with a whitewashed version, and then he opened the car door and watched as the priest settled solemnly in his seat, put his hands on the wheel, then sighed heavily.

‘So much sadness,’ Father Newberry said. ‘So much more than I imagined.’ He touched the crucifix again, then looked up at Bonar. ‘Are you going back to Minneapolis with Mikey?’

‘Later this afternoon.’

‘Will you tell Deputy Mueller I’ve been praying for her?’

‘She was talking pretty good yesterday. Doc says it’ll take some time, but she’s going to be fine.’

‘Of course she is. As I said, I’ve been praying for her.’

Bonar smiled. ‘I’ll tell her she owes it all to a Catholic priest. That’ll frost her nuggets.’ He sighed and looked down the hill, where Halloran was just getting up from the concrete bench. ‘It was a nice Mass, Father. Really nice. You saw Danny out in style.’

‘Thank you, Bonar.’ Father Newberry reached for the handle to close the door, but Bonar held it open.

‘Father?’

‘Yes, Bonar?’

‘Well, I was just wondering . . . when we check things into evidence we’re pretty precise. Like take a ring of keys, for example. We don’t just write down “a key ring,” we record how many keys, whether they’re house keys, padlock keys, car keys, like that.’

‘Really.’

‘Yes, really. So what I was thinking was that when the deputies go back out there with you tomorrow, they’ll be checking the log against the keys on that ring, you know, to make sure one didn’t get lost or something.’

‘Oh.’ The priest was staring straight ahead through the windshield. His face was absolutely expressionless. ‘That’s very interesting, Bonar. Thank you very much for telling me. I never realized police procedure was so . . .’

‘Precise.’

‘Yes.’

Bonar straightened and closed the car door, then bent at the waist to smile through the open window. ‘Keys are tough things to keep track of. I bet I got a million keys in my junk drawer at home. Don’t know what half of ’em are for.’

Father Newberry turned his head and looked Bonar right in the eye. ‘I have a drawer just like that at the rectory.’

‘I thought you might.’

Bonar stood in the road and watched the car pull away, veering a little from side to side, as if the driver were a bit unsteady under the burden he’d chosen to carry. He was thinking that in all his life the old priest had probably never committed so great a sin, or so great a good.

‘Hey, Bonar.’ Halloran came up beside him.

‘Hey. How’re you doing?’

Halloran took a breath and looked back down the hill toward Danny Peltier’s grave. ‘Better. A lot better.’