Five Minutes Alone (41 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

He leaves Naomi McDonald sitting on the pathway and heads back to his car, limping slightly from the knee to his balls, limping slightly because the world is on a slight angle, it’s fractional, barely noticeable, but different somehow. The bullet has shifted. He’s sure of it.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he tells Tate, only right now talking to Tate is just like talking to Warren. “All these years—I can’t think of one person who wouldn’t want to put a bullet into the brain of the man who killed their wife or husband. Not one person.”

That’s the spidering way,
Tate says, but of course Tate doesn’t say that, not really. All Tate does is stay slumped against the door, his head tilting forward now, breathing in the clean Christchurch air and replacing it with alcohol fumes.

“So where to now?”

I think you know,
Tate doesn’t say, but would if he weren’t counting spiders. He would say,
Just because Naomi McDonald let you off the hook doesn’t mean that others will.

He reaches up to his eye and his fingers come away with a dab of blood. He starts the car and starts driving. After ten minutes he’s in the same neighborhood he was in on Saturday afternoon, and now he starts taking the same streets. There are a few things that are different—the temperature, the fact that Peter Crowley is dead, having Tate asleep in the passenger seat. But there are things that are the same—not much traffic, a need to do something good. He reaches Peter Crowley’s house and there are a couple of other cars here, probably grieving family members, hopefully no police. There’s a bottle of water in the backseat and some painkillers in the glove compartment. He introduces the two things to each other
and swallows the pills and hopes the headache that feels like a toothache is going to fade.

He knocks on the door, and Monica, the daughter, dressed the way Death would dress if Death were a fifteen-year-old girl, answers.

“You,” she says.

“Is your mother here?”

She reaches up and wraps her hands around the back of her neck, then tugs gently at the hair back there. “You got my father killed, and she’s not my mother.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She reaches up and slaps him, and the colors come back, the bright lights and fireworks and these are a warning from his new best friend. It’s saying
Don’t let people keep hitting you,
because that’s what the doctor told him.

“I wish I could kill you,” she says.

“I know you do,” he says, but he’s not here to let her have that responsibility. If she was twenty, maybe, but not fifteen. Otherwise he’d let her hit him over and over until the bullet inside did its work.

Then another woman comes to the doorway. Her photograph was in the paper. This is Peter Crowley’s wife. Charlotte. She reminds him of his wife. Same haircut, same build, but sadder. Of course she’s sadder. He can hear other voices from inside the house. “What’s going on out here?” Charlotte asks, and then she sees Schroder, and then she says “Oh,” as if everything in the world suddenly makes sense. “You’re him, aren’t you.”

“Yes. My name is Carl Schroder,” he says.

“What do you want with us, Mr. Schroder?”

“He killed my dad,” Monica says.

“Please, Monica,” Charlotte says, “let him speak.”

“Fine,” Monica says, “but I’m calling the police.”

“Don’t,” Schroder says, and he puts his palm into the air and points it at them. “Not yet. Please, I just need five minutes of your time, and then you can call anybody you want, okay?”

“Five minutes?” Charlotte says.

“That’s all.”

“Don’t give it to him,” Monica says. “Let’s just kick his ass.”

“Please, Monica, let’s hear what he has to say. Come inside,” she says.

Monica complains, but only for a few seconds, and then he follows them inside and through to the kitchen. He can hear voices coming from another part of the house. Probably the lounge. “Can I get you a drink?” Charlotte asks.

“A water would be good, thank you.” He looks at Monica who is glaring at him, then he looks back at Charlotte. “Can we talk alone?”

Charlotte gives it a few moments of thought, then nods. “Monica, go and talk to your grandparents, okay? I’ll be through soon.”

“I don’t—”

“Please, please, Monica, please do this for me, okay? Please don’t tell me I’m not your mother and you don’t have to do what I tell you, because I know, okay? I know it because you’ve said it a hundred times already today.”

Monica says nothing and turns from the kitchen. From the doorway she looks back at them. “But I’m calling the police.”

“Monica—”

“That’s fine,” Schroder says. “Let her call them. We’ll be done by the time they arrive.”

Charlotte pours a water and hands him the glass. He pulls out the gun that he used to shoot four men in the head and one man in the stomach. Her eyes widen when she sees it, but go back to normal when he puts it on the kitchen counter and steps back.

“What do you want?” she asks.

“I want to give you your five minutes. That’s what I was trying to do with Peter. I was trying to help him, but things got out of control.”

She shakes her head a little, and then she must get it because she goes still. Her face changes a little. She gets it, but it’s still confusing her. “You want me to shoot you?”

“Yes.”

She nods. She looks at the gun and keeps on nodding.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” she says. “I’ve had a few days to think about it. You know that saying about people who die doing what they loved? I never got it. Car racers crash and people say they died doing what they loved, but I always kept thinking it didn’t make sense because they might have loved driving, they might have loved speeding around a track, but it wasn’t the driving that killed them, it was the crashing, and how can you love crashing? Or like a rock climber falling to his death. He loved climbing rocks, but he didn’t die climbing rocks—he died after a terrifying, long fall. He died when he splattered across the ground. He didn’t love the falling. But now I get it. I loved my husband, I really did, but there was a part of him missing. I didn’t know him before he lost his wife, so I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that part of him died right along with her. He tried his best. He was a good man, and he loved his daughter, and he loved me and my stepson as best he could, and he was always going to do right by us. But I wasn’t Linda. Nobody was Linda. The biggest thing he loved in this world was the idea of something bad happening to those men who hurt her.” She smiles, then she wipes some tears away from her face. “You’ve come to tell me you got my husband killed, and right now I’m clinging to that stupid saying, and I know I’ll cling to it for years to come. My husband died doing what he loved. He died happy, and he died with you killing the men that broke him, and of all the ways to leave this world I think that’s as good as any. I think Peter would have accepted that. Peter traded his own life for revenge, and in that he made sure those men couldn’t ruin any other lives, and I will miss him, and I will always love him, but he died doing what he loved and who doesn’t want to go out that way? Who?” she asks, and the silence falls around them, a few seconds turn into five, then into ten, and Schroder doesn’t know how to answer her. He realizes the others in the house have gone quiet too. They’re listening.

“Was Peter still alive when you killed those other men? Did he know?”

“Yes. Yes, he was, and he knew.”

She crosses her arms, uses one hand to hold her elbow and the other to hold her chin. Her hands are starting to shake and the tears are close now, and this is his doing. The pain in this house, an empty space that can’t be filled, this is because of him. “Were you by his side when he died?”

“I was.”

“If you came here because you think I want vengeance, then you’re wrong. You think getting my husband killed entitles me to the same five minutes you gave him, but it doesn’t work that way. Not for me. Not in this house. Take that gun of yours and bury it, or turn yourself in to the police, because you’re only going to get more good people killed if you’re out there trying to make a difference. You are foolish and arrogant and you got Peter killed, but Peter was foolish and arrogant for going along with you. I’m angry about what happened, yes, but I forgive you Carl Schroder. So now I want you to leave and never come back, and I want you to take my forgiveness for getting my husband killed with you.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

“Have I been misinterpreting the world?” he asks Tate. Tate is still asleep. The long hours of the case, a fresh injection of alcohol after a year without it—Tate might sleep for the rest of the day. “Two mixed messages from two different women, neither wanting to see me dead. This last week—hell, the whole twenty years . . . I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He remembers everything about the Kelly Summers case, including where she used to live, and also where her parents used to live. It’s to her parents’ place he now drives. The last time he came here, Kelly Summers was just out of hospital and he came to say they had caught the man who had done this bad thing to her. She had identified him, of course. It was her neighbor. Dwight Smith had not returned home, though. Instead he had run. He had headed north. The problem with New Zealand, or as was the good thing in this case, is that north cannot take you far. North, south, west or east all get you to an ocean in just a matter of hours. Any further you need a plane or a boat or a great set of lungs, and Smith had none of those. He had drained his bank accounts and made it as far as Nelson and then he had gotten into a fight with a pimp after he couldn’t afford to pay the prostitute he had just spent fifteen minutes with. He had been found unconscious and admitted to hospital, and then the dots were connected.

The house is a small cottage in a big yard, a ten-foot hedge hiding it from the street, behind that hedge a thousand roses and dozens of lavender bushes and a whole heap of everything else that grows bright and strong, as if this family is using those colors to keep the darkness away. It’s a gravel driveway that winds its way up to the house and there are four cars already parked here. One of
them has writing along the side of it—it belongs to a funeral director. There’s a wooden porch and Schroder steps up onto it, and he can see into the lounge where the chairs are full of people. He sees Kelly’s dad look up, notice him, then the quizzical look as he tries to place the face. He gets up and comes to the front door.

“It’s Detective Schroder, right?” he asks, and Roger Summers is in his late fifties, but looks fifteen years older, and of course he does—this is what a man like Dwight Smith will do to a family.

“Right,” Schroder says.

“I’m touched that you’ve come to pay your respects,” he says, “but this isn’t the best time. The funeral is on Thursday and we would all appreciate it if you could come along.”

“I need to talk to you and your wife. Please, it’s important.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“No,” Schroder says. “It really can’t. It’s about Kelly. Please.”

Roger Summers nods. “There’s an outdoor table around the back of the house. Head around and we’ll see you there in a couple of minutes.”

Schroder steps down from the porch and walks around the side of the house, more flowers and trees and bushes, more lavender being visited by dozens of bees, then a big backyard with a small pond that has a black cat sitting next to it, watching the fish. There’s an outdoor table that would sit a dozen people, long and wooden and well made, and on a summer night where your daughter was still alive this would be a beautiful setting.

He sits and faces the sun and lets it burn his skin. One day that sun will burn out, life on this planet will disappear, and this—all of this will have been for nothing.

Roger appears then. He’s carrying a pitcher of juice, the ice inside it rattling, condensation runs down the side of the glass, and his wife—and suddenly Schroder can’t remember her name—follows, three glasses in her hand. They put them down and Schroder stands so they can all shake hands and the wife fills the three glasses.

“I’m sorry about Kelly,” Schroder says.

“I know,” the wife says. “We’re all sorry.”

They sit down. He takes a sip of the juice and it’s like putting ice on the toothache in his head.

“Are you okay?” the woman asks.

“Yes,” he says, and he’s okay because this will be over soon, one way or the other. One way is with these people. The other involves the man asleep in his car.

“I liked her,” he says.

“Everybody liked her,” Roger says.

“She was one of those cases that always stayed with me. It’s because of Kelly things have gone the way they have gone.”

“What do you mean?” the wife asks.

“What kind of things?” Roger asks.

So he talks. And talks. And talks. The pressure in his head is building up, and if he can keep talking, if he can make room by getting rid of all these words, then the headache will go away. He goes back to the beginning. He says “I always wanted to be a cop, and earlier this year that was taken away from me.”
He tells them of the decision he was forced to make where he killed a woman, and about what kind of woman she was. “I shot her in cold blood, and if I hadn’t done that, then the girl, the young girl would have died. I had to choose one life over another.”
He tells them how he lost his job over it, how the crime was covered up, he tells them of working for Jonas Jones, the psychic. “He’s a slimy son of a bitch who’s about as psychic as a weatherman.”
Then he talks about Joe Middleton, hunting him down, a hunt that ended with Schroder getting a bullet in the head. “When I came out of the coma I was lost. I wasn’t who I used to be, and I didn’t care.”

Then he tells them about the referendum. The conversation. The
Why should.
He tells them how he learned Dwight Smith was free. He tells them how angry he was people came out of jail and got second chances. “Where’s my second chance? Where?” As he tells them they sip their drinks and he can tell they are wondering where he is going with this, but they can also tell he is unloading, he is a man carrying a weight, and they are going to allow him to
finish. They are good people. Which might very well go against him here. And as he talks, the sky—nothing but blue for the last few days—now has company in the form of several clouds on the horizon. Dark clouds. They are gathering out there.

He tells them about wanting to kill Dwight Smith. About following him from the service station. Breaking into Kelly’s house. Kelly wanting her five minutes.

“We both knew,” the woman says, “that our daughter couldn’t have done it by herself. It was too much.”

“Did she kill him? Did she at least do that much?” Roger asks.

“What do you want to hear?” Schroder says. “That she did?”

“Yes,” he says. “I want her to have gotten revenge on that bastard.”

“No,” the woman says. “The idea that Kelly could kill somebody . . . No, that doesn’t sit well with me at all.”

“He deserved what he got,” Roger says.

“I know,” the woman says. “But Kelly . . . did she kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask you, Detective,” she says. “What kind of world do we live in when a young woman like Kelly has to kill a man?”

“My world,” Schroder says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help her.”

“Sorry?” the woman asks. “In what way?”

“She’s dead because of me.”

“I don’t understand,” the woman says.

So Schroder points it out for her. If he had called the police, then Kelly could still be alive. There would be no hiding the dead body. Cops would have gotten involved. People would have known all about it.

The parents sit in silence and they think about that, and they sip their juice, and he can hear the bees flying around the lavender and can feel beads of sweat running from his armpits down the side of his body and can feel the bullet inside his head, throbbing from the earlier blows, expanding in the heat, contracting from the cold juice, the bullet getting ready to do something.

“Is calling the police what she wanted?” Roger asks.

“No,” he says, “but that doesn’t matter. Your daughter died because of what I did, and you have the right to take your anger out on me.”

Roger shakes his head. “We’re not angry at you,” he says.

“If it hadn’t been for you,” the woman says, “Kelly would have died on the bathroom floor. You didn’t kill our daughter. Kelly didn’t kill herself. Dwight Smith murdered her five years ago.”

“It doesn’t bring her back, but it does give us some kind of closure. Better she killed him than him hurting her again. Much better.”

“I—”

Roger puts his hand up to stop him. “You’re in pain,” he says. “Any fool can see that. You’re blaming yourself for what happened, but the way I see it, the world needs more people like you. It needs people to feel bad about the injustice, and it needs people to make a stand.”

Schroder shakes his head and instantly regrets it. He’s going to have to keep head movements to a minimum now until the bullet settles back down. “What I’ve been doing, it’s a mistake. A huge mistake, and your daughter is dead and somebody has to pay for that.”

“And somebody has paid for it,” the woman says.

“I have to pay for it too.”

They go quiet again, then Roger finishes his juice, picks up the pitcher, then puts it back down without pouring any more. “The way it sounds to me is you want somebody to punish you. You’re feeling bad, and you think the solution is what?”

“The solution is you have the same five minutes with me that Kelly had with Dwight Smith.”

“Is that really what you think?” Roger asks. “That we blame you? That we want to hurt you? That we want to kill you?”

“You should.”

“No, we shouldn’t,” the woman says. “We owe you. Yes, our daughter is dead, and yes, right now we can function, but in a few days we won’t be able to. In a few days they will have to carry us to
the funeral because we won’t be able to walk, but we don’t blame you, Detective. Not at all. If blame is what you’ve come here to find, then you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“You saved our daughter,” Roger says, “and then she left this world and we will never recover from that, but we know she left on her own terms. We can’t hate you for that, and we sure as hell can’t punish you for it either. You took away from our daughter what would have been the last night of her life, a night that would have been the worst night of her life, and you gave her something she wanted—and that was to make that bastard pay. You gave our daughter a gift that I wish I could have given her, and if I had been a better man, a stronger man, I would have had the balls to do what you did. Even if I’d known he was out of jail, I’d have done nothing. So no, we don’t blame you, Detective. How can I blame you for doing something that was my job to do? If anything I envy you. To me you are a hero. To me what this city needs is a lot more people like you.”