Violence (8 page)

Anderson stared down at his daughter’s angelic face. Tristan’s skin looked like veined marble. He ran one of his fingers over the area of her hair where a large bluish-purple bruise was visible on the back of her scalp and let his finger light on her delicate eyebrow.

He then turned, looked down the length of Karen’s body. He could see dark bruising under her forearms, on her wrists and on her shins. She must have struggled, kicked them. An even more vicious torrent of guilt racked him.

They would now go back to God as unified, as whole as he could keep them. They left this Earth a long time ago. He was truly alone and the weight of this reality caused him to involuntarily sink to his knees. He was saying his good-bye now. His arms outstretched on the gurneys was all that kept him from toppling. He wouldn’t look at them again.

“’Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God, also have faith in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?’… Dear friends, we now commit the bodies of our beloved Karen and Tristan to the grave, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, as we entrust the souls of the departed to our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.” The priest finished the final blessing as he stood in the blazing sunshine outside the burial crypt that would hold Karen and Tristan’s remains.

Anderson placed the first roses on their caskets and stepped away so the other mourners could set down their roses and pay their last respects. Many nodded sympathetically in his direction as they filed past and headed back to their cars.

He didn’t have a reception luncheon after the services, which no doubt was a relief to many of these people and to Anderson because he didn’t know any of them and it would have been strained. The priest was a bit surprised that Anderson didn’t ask him to say grace over the food at some banquet hall but Anderson didn’t know him either, even though the priest kept calling him by his first name Noel with unnerving familiarity. The church service was enough and was well attended like the visitation the night before and the brief service at the gravesite today.

There were many friends of Karen’s and Tristan’s that showed up to the wake, including a few neighbors, and of course Roman, Joyce and the rest of his employees and their families. There were also some genuine tears shed and Anderson appreciated that. Tristan’s friends wept constantly and openly, their little faces red from the steady sobbing. The girls brought photos they had of themselves with Tristan, some wrote notes. They tacked them all to poster boards. It took several easels to accommodate all the remembrances.

The adults in attendance at the visitation told Anderson that they had met him previously at the community pool or some school function, a Children’s Concert, a Parents’ Night: events that he sleepwalked through and now longed for so much it felt like it was literally tearing his heart apart. Still, if there was a highlight of this whole process it was that they came at all. It wasn’t easy for them, Anderson knew that, and he acted like he recalled their initial encounter and thanked them for coming.

Anderson’s most odd moment came when he felt the plush lushness of carpeting at the funeral home was somehow profane, although it should have had the opposite effect. He thought everything should have taken place on hard cement because every step he took felt like a pounding march as the days wore on, no matter what surface he treaded.

Anyway, it was time to go. The committal service was complete. Anderson needed the heat of the sun because his soul felt as cold as the crypt in which Karen and Tristan would be entombed. He had heard “sorry for your loss” hundreds of times in the last few days, and didn’t want to feel the weight of those words anymore. Karen and Tristan, they had made some real friends and were genuinely a part of this community, he was proud of that, but now he had to wander off and give the mourners a chance to leave.

Anderson weaved his way through the lawn vases, headstones and memorial slabs and stepped into a chapel. He had been told it was customary for the remains to be entombed after all the mourners had left the area. Still, Anderson wanted to be there until the bitter end and could see a couple of the cemetery staff waiting patiently down an access road.

It was only a few minutes after the last mourner’s car had receded from sight that the two staffers motored up on their golf-cart utility truck and set about their task of interment. Anderson watched the two men reverently and efficiently place the caskets in the side-by-side garden crypts. They sealed it off as they had done many times before and put the marble shutters in place.

Anderson experienced a surge of gratitude for the honorable work he felt they did. They didn’t treat the chore ignobly. They did it silently and with respect.

When Anderson moved up and thanked the two men he had to insist they take the hundred dollar bills he offered them to go get a beer later, on him. The older of the two eventually sheepishly took the money, shook Anderson’s hand, as did the other man, and both said thank you, before they added “sorry for your loss.”

CHAPTER 9

         I
t was a week later when Anderson returned to work. Joyce he had sent on vacation. She was an emotional wreck anyway and needed the time off. Roman was filling in for her, doing paperwork, answering the phones and returning calls when he wasn’t needed at an actual job site.

Anderson was sitting at his desk in his office going over specs. He was trying to focus on what were mundane matters, but he was also happy to be busy at something that would take his mind off things. This is when Roman entered and placed a cancelled work order on his desk.

“Another cancellation. That’s the third one now this week. Maybe these people think we have bad karma or something.” Roman regretted that last statement as soon as he said it, but it was uttered more out of the strain of having to continually make conversation and tread cautiously around his boss, in order to not recognize the corpses that were still in the room.

Anderson stared stoically at Roman which Roman read as disappointment with his faux pas but it was really detachment. Anderson hardly heard anything anyone said lately.

Roman quickly added to fill the void, “Between the economy and…” he was going to say “and this,” but instead just said, “…everything. It’s gonna be tough keepin’ everybody on if things keep goin’ this way.” This statement was still insensitive but at least addressed his pragmatic concerns.

Anderson simply gazed mutely at him without emotion.

“We’ll figure it out.” Roman muttered anxiously, angry again at himself for his blatant self-interest. Roman remembered something, dug into his pocket and handed a set of keys to Anderson. “I locked up the house.” Roman was going to add “it looks good” but kept silent, knowing right away that wouldn’t sound right, and he was tired of having to learn the hard way.

Anderson couldn’t be mad at Roman in any event. Not a bit. Roman had always been an exemplary employee, a first-rate human being, and had really stepped-up for him throughout this ordeal. The “house” Roman was referring to was Anderson’s home. Roman was the first to enter it after the police finished with their investigation of the premises. It wasn’t pretty, even without the bodies.

Roman helped get the crime-scene cleanup crew started and coordinated payment. These crews were the private firms that victim’s families had to hire to clean and decontaminate a location where a homicide, suicide or other traumatic event took place. Roman had gotten the company off a list that was faxed over from the police station where Crotty worked. It wasn’t that long ago where there weren’t any real companies that did that sort of work (or they were really hard to find) and families would have to clean up scenes where loved ones perished, all by themselves. So the news that there was someone to do this dirty job was greeted with relief by Roman because he would have offered his services.

As it was, Roman’s significant contribution to the clean up was to act as a go-between in the days right after the murders. He didn’t know how his boss would want things handled and was thankful when Anderson finally returned one of his calls to address what to do with the furniture and carpeting in the family room.

The cleaning crew had already dealt with the bulk of the blood, including the cerebral fluid which is particularly slippery and hard to clean up. The brain matter itself was simpler to remove, it dries to a thick mortar-like consistency which usually only requires a stiff blade putty knife to remove.

Roman mused it looked like a government toxic waste site clean-up operation with all the equipment that was brought in at first: hazmat suits, high-pressure sprayers, wet vacuums, steam machines, solvents, bio-hazard bags and even foggers which are used to send disinfectants and deodorizers into a home’s air ducts to not only clean but to help rid the air passages of any lasting smells of decomposition. Clean-up crews, he learned, also had to assume they could be dealing with deadly pathogens such as HIV or Hepatitis C at any given location, hence the large-scale precautionary measures were not excessive.

Anderson knew broadly, from his Army days, what the clean-up would entail so when he heard Roman talking on the phone earlier that morning with some relative about the horrifying aspects of the experience he didn’t hold it against him. He knew Roman was just trying to blow off the details on somebody else. It’s hard to carry around the dirty laundry of life without getting someone to share in its burden once in awhile. Roman was speaking in hushed tones anyway and certainly didn’t think Anderson could hear him through the crack in the office door, but since the murders, while Anderson’s soul may have been deadened, his other senses were all heightened. Anderson contemplated that this magnification of his sensory faculties might be yet another self-preservation adaptation to safeguard against further attacks by predators.

Roman remembered Anderson’s voice sounded like a whole other person when Anderson did finally call him back and he took it on faith that it was his boss because the caller ID showed it was him:

“You called.” The preternatural Anderson had asked.

“Yeah, Boss. Just a couple of things.” Roman croaked, tremulously clearing his throat, hand shaking as he held his cell phone. Roman had to find a way to talk about these somewhat pressing matters concerning how to proceed and no amount of rehearsing prepared him for the actual duty. The fatal bullet (which was collected as evidence) from the .38 had found its way into the ceiling drywall along with bits of Karen’s skin tissue, hair, scalp and skull fragments, but there was still the issue of what to do with the remaining pockmarked ceiling surface, the cleaned but cut up carpeting (fragments were removed for evidence), and the steamed but still-stained sofa. “At the house, the cleaning people are done, but in the family room they said there’s stuff in the ceiling. And all the carpeting and furniture-”

Anderson cut Roman off before he could finish the gory inventory and said, “Just get rid of everything. In the family room take it down to the studs.”

“You want me to tear everything out?” Roman asked wanting to make sure he heard him correctly.

“Yes.” Anderson answered. Then silence.

“Okay.” Roman confirmed.

“Thank you. I’ll talk to you later.” That was it. Anderson disconnected.

That last statement, “I’ll talk to you later,” panicked Roman because the thought suddenly crossed his mind that there might not be a “later.” He feared Anderson might kill himself because Roman had imagined himself in the same position as his boss, and it was so instantly horrifying, that suicide seemed to be the only option.

Needless to say, Roman was happy when Anderson returned to work and angry at himself for even thinking his boss would contemplate taking his own life.

Anderson tucked the house keys into his pocket and returned his attention to the specs.

Roman promptly left his office but then, feeling this was as good a time as any, he grabbed a manila envelope off Joyce’s desk where it was sitting and stepped back quickly into Anderson’s office.

Embarrassed, Roman brought out some papers from the envelope that had sticky note arrows attached to various pages which show a person where to put a signature. He held the documents out in front of Anderson.

“Oh, and can you sign these for my nephew’s work visa?” Roman asked uncomfortably.

Anderson took the papers, picked up a pen and signed in the appropriate places.

Anderson hoped to get in quickly and leave. Sneak in. Sneak out. He would have left everything except it seemed wasteful and he had just bought the golf clubs.

Anderson was sitting on a low-slung flat bench emptying his locker at the country club when he overheard two members talking in the next aisle.

“I’d kill those fuckers. Get the mafia, whatever it took.” One wheezy member boldly croaked.

“What the hell was he doing leaving them alone like that?” A second member bellowed as a rejoinder.

Anderson knew they were talking about him because he heard his name seconds after a locker room attendant turned off a shoe polishing machine, which was right before he could hear the two men talking together.

Anderson let the injury of their comments go without acknowledgment, and was very near getting away without physically running into anyone he knew when Alan Murphy rounded a corner, fresh off the golf course. Murphy was the man who directly sponsored Anderson for membership and he pulled up abruptly, surprised to find Anderson in the row of lockers.

“Oh Noel, there you are. It’s good to see you. It’s terrible what happened.” Murphy spewed all this with a rat-a-tat jumpiness as he tore off his golf glove. He stepped up and shook Anderson’s hand which Anderson felt was flabby and clammy. “I’m speaking for everyone when I say we’re sorry. It’s unfathomable what you must be going through.”

In Murphy’s defense, he did show up to the visitation wake and did send a card of condolences, although it looked like it was in Murphy’s wife’s handwriting. The note started with textbook off the rack syrupy sympathies but ended with what seemed like a not so subtle request for Anderson to resign.