The Laughterhouse: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “There are plenty of jobs.”

  “No, there’s not. I need this job. There isn’t anything else I can do.”

  He nods at me before stepping back into the rain, and it’s the same kind of look that we used to give junkies back in the day.

  “See a doctor,” he tells me, then he shuts the door.

  Lucy and her boyfriend are both staring ahead from the back of a patrol car at their futures and the fire engine is pulling away slowly, its lights off, the hookers looking dejected as they watch them go. I twist the key in the ignition and the car doesn’t start, not straightaway, not until the fifth attempt. The weather, the dying car, the funeral—it all feels like a bad omen as I drive through the wet streets back home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My house has the ghosts of my daughter and my cat but I live with a fully corporeal mortgage that haunts me. I used to be a cop, then a private investigator, then a criminal, and now back to being a private investigator again, one who’s hoping to return to the police force. It’s the circle of life. But it’s not enough. I need something more than following cheating husbands. Being an investigator is all I know. That, and killing people.

  I spend an hour eating lunch before putting on my only suit. It’s loose on me. At two thirty I head into traffic. The rain hasn’t eased up any and the watery surface masks the faded road markings, making them all but impossible to see. I pass ladies in big coats at bus stops and kids in uniforms carrying bags and chatting on cell phones. It takes thirty minutes to reach the cemetery where my daughter is buried and where my priest used to work until he, like Detective Landry, became another statistic. The parking lot is full of cars that show a cross section of society. I have to park two blocks away and walk back. The gutters are jammed with leaves. The red ones are fresh, the brown ones older and turning to sludge. There is a light wind that rips through my clothes. There are more leaves swirling around the parking lot, most coming to rest on the stones, others getting lodged in the bottom edge of the windscreens of the cars. And still the rain keeps coming.

  Bad funeral weather.

  Police funerals are always big affairs. There are reporter vans parked out front, the journalists being the first to have arrived. They point cameras at me for a few seconds before turning them away. I figure it’s a good thing the death of a cop is still important enough to cover. There will be an angle to it though, some kind of spin. It’s what separates reporters from monkeys. I climb the steps to the big front door, shake off my umbrella, and hang it up with my jacket. The church is over a hundred years old and made from chunky gray stone with white mortar and has stained-glass windows covered with as much dust as there is color. The inside is about half full, but there’s a steady stream of people walking in behind me, other small groups huddling outside getting through a final cigarette before the service. Schroder is talking to an attractive woman who must be in her mid-thirties. He sees me and comes over, the space he leaves filled by another guy who starts his conversation to the woman with a big smile.

  “Glad you made it,” Schroder says. “Follow me,” he adds, and I follow him toward the front of the church where he introduces me to Father Jacob, the priest who replaced Father Julian last year after Julian had his head caved in with a hammer and his tongue cut out.

  “Welcome to Christchurch,” I tell him.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Jacob says, shaking my hand. He’s in his early to mid-sixties, with hair more gray than black and a gaunt face resting on top of a body that could hide behind a lamppost. His fingernails are stained with nicotine and there are patches of red skin on his face around his nose as if he is having an allergic reaction to the cold.

  “I hope some of it was good,” I say.

  “Some of it was,” he says, and this should be where he gives the warm fatherly smile, but he comes up empty. “And some of it might be worth a visit to the confessional.”

  We have to talk loudly to be heard over the hammering rain. The church fills up, most of the people in police uniform, the others, like myself, in black. Everybody is talking in soft tones, and the snippets of conversation I can hear don’t involve Landry, they involve the weather or other friends or the game last weekend. The front row is reserved for family and for Landry’s ex-wives, of which there are three, and they seem to be getting along okay, their struggles of being married to him something in common. I walk with Schroder toward the back of the church and end up sitting next to the woman he was chatting with earlier who is now reading the funeral pamphlet with Landry on the front and some hymns inside. There’s a poster-sized picture of Landry next to the coffin, his big smiling face staring out from a memory one or two of these people may have shared with him.

  Right on three thirty Father Jacob stands up at the podium and the room goes quiet. The church could do with some heaters. It could also do with some fresh paint. People are rubbing their hands for warmth. It’s hard for a man to sum up another man when they’ve never met, but Jacob gives it a really good try, helped along by a whole bunch of clichés about love, loss, life, and God’s greater plan. Then we all have to stand up and sing one of the hymns. When it’s done Jacob opens up the podium for others to come and speak, Landry’s sister stepping up in front of us and managing only three words before being escorted away, arms around her as she breaks down and cries. Others go up and do better, some do the same, Landry lying there the whole time aware of none of it. The casket is closed because his death wasn’t as pretty as a heart attack—he got himself shot several times. Hollywood would have rebuilt him. They’d have added armor and weaponry along with a power source to keep him kicking ass and fighting crime. If Christchurch had rebuilt him, they’d have made him out of recycled plastic, paid him minimum wage, and given him a wet, wound-up towel as a weapon.

  Another detective, Detective Watts, steps up to the podium. He smiles out at the crowd, then says nothing for nearly ten seconds, and I know he’s fighting the fear of public speaking and he’s fighting back the tears, and then he begins to talk. He says he and Landry used to play practical jokes on each other. It’s something I never knew about Landry, and it’s hard to imagine him ever doing that. Watts tells us about the time they were on a stakeout, about how he had put shoe polish around the binoculars Landry was using, and how for an hour they sat in the car with Landry having black rings around his eyes. He tells us the joke works exactly like it does on TV, then tells us they were called to assist at an armed robbery a few blocks away at a Chinese restaurant, how in front of a restaurant full of patrons, Landry had stood there taking statements for three hours without anybody telling him.

  The crowd laughs. Schroder joins in, so does the woman next to me, and so do I. It’s not that funny a story, but in that moment it’s the funniest story any of us has ever heard.

  “He got me back the following night,” he says. “We’d been putting in some long nights on this stakeout, and when we got back to the office I fell asleep at my desk. He superglued my face to it.”

  The funeral lasts ninety minutes. I keep looking at the coffin, wondering how somebody’s life can fit into something so small, everything they were no longer existing. We all mingle out in the parking lot as the rain eases off and wait for the coffin to come outside. It’s placed in the back of a hearse, then driven deeper into the cemetery. We walk in the drizzle wearing our jackets and carrying umbrellas and we mingle again, this time around the patch of earth where Landry is laid to rest. The priest starts up again and I’m worried he’s going to aim for another ninety minutes, but he lasts only five—ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  The rain has eased off and umbrellas are shaken and folded back down, but the sky is starting to darken. A few people leave and the trend catches on. I get back to the car and there’s a leaflet hooked beneath the windshield wiper. An ad for a brothel in town, “Bring the voucher and entry is half price.” Traffic becomes congested as we all try to move out. The funeral procession leads us into town where we all start splitti
ng up looking for parking spots, most of us taking a nearby parking structure. Tires squeal on the ramps, and there are plenty of paint marks on the walls from cars that have taken the turns too narrowly over the years. I park near the top and take the stairs down. At the bottom is a homeless guy who tries selling me Jesus for the price of beer.

  Popular Consensus is a nightclub near The Strip, a line of bars operating as cafés and restaurants during the day, then doubling as nightclubs after nine. The club is owned by Landry’s brother, and is about five hours away from doing peak business with the thousands of alcoholic teenagers who roam this city at night. But right now the doors are open for those of us who knew Landry and the tables are full of sausage rolls and sandwiches and it’s an open bar. Nearly every flat surface has a photograph of Landry on it, and I study one from our days at the academy; him and Schroder and me side by side, hairlines further forward and Landry and Schroder’s stomachs not as round as they are now, and I guess those are things Landry doesn’t have to worry about anymore. The club has all the lights on and everybody sits around the bar and at the booths sharing stories and tears.

  “Here,” Schroder says, handing me a drink.

  “I’m fine,” I tell him.

  “It’s only orange juice,” he says, and I take it from him. I look longingly at his beer as he nurses it, remembering how beer and all of its friends got me into trouble last year. “Seems like a lifetime ago,” he says, nodding toward the picture.

  “I don’t even remember half these people,” I tell him.

  “Landry’s the first.”

  “Huh?”

  He nods toward the picture again. “First one in that photo to have gotten himself killed.”

  We sip at our drinks and take a few seconds to contemplate what he just said, wondering if he’ll be the last, wondering if the others will end up retiring in a few years or quitting now. A stereo is turned on, The Rolling Stones start playing to the bar, Landry’s favorite band—one of my favorites too.

  “What the hell was he doing working on his own?” I ask.

  He shrugs before coming up with something I wasn’t expecting. “ME says he had cancer.”

  “What?”

  “He’d have been dead before the year was out. I think he just got sick of the way things play out in this city.” He tips up his beer and drains half of it down his throat. “He tried to make a difference by himself and got killed for it.”

  We move back to the bar. Every detective is trying to drink enough to hibernate through the winter. Landry’s brother looks more upset at the tab he’s covering than at his brother getting killed. He looks like he’s wishing he’d watered down the whiskey more than he already has. Schroder gets another beer and finishes it before I’m even a third of the way through my juice. All the voices are getting louder and there are snippets of stories coming from every direction, less and less of them about Landry the more everybody drinks, more and more of them about Christchurch, about the weather and the crime rate and the boy-racers, the boy-racers who have their teeth in this city and won’t let go. They block the streets at night racing their brightly colored cars, cars lowered and modified to look cool and be loud. The conversations get darker as the first hour slips into the second, the words more slurred, theories being thrown about on how to make this city a better place, who we ought to be going around shooting to make that happen. Schroder finishes off his third beer and I start on my second juice. Other cops come over to talk to us, there’s lots of “you guys were at the academy with him, right?” and “you should come back to the force, Tate,” and “last thing the force needs is you coming back.” I sip at my drink, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of here, wondering how many of these people will resent me if I do make it back onto the team.

  “How are things going with the Melissa X case?” I ask Schroder.

  He starts on a new beer, sipping at it slowly for a few seconds before lowering it back to the bar. “It’s like we’re chasing a ghost,” he says.

  Melissa X is the woman the Christchurch Carver, a notorious serial killer now in jail, partnered up with. She is still on the loose—and still killing. When I was released from jail in February, Schroder was there to meet me in the parking lot, the Melissa X file in his car and needing all the help he could get. We found out her true identity. Her real name is Natalie Flowers—but she started calling herself Melissa when she was attacked and raped three years ago by her college professor. Since then she has tortured and killed at least half a dozen men, the last of which was seven weeks ago.

  “Nothing new?”

  “We’ve spoken to all her friends, all her family. Nothing,” he says. “We’ve followed up with surgeons and health clinics, checking to see if she’s had any cosmetic surgery, but nothing. It’s like she’s left this planet, and just when you think that might be true, she’ll kill somebody else.”

  “It does seem that way,” I say. I have the file too, and I keep looking at it every day just like Schroder, but for me looking at that file isn’t paying the bills.

  “We’ll get her,” he says. “I can promise you that.”

  The woman I sat next to at the funeral sees us and comes over. Schroder stands up and smiles at her and I do the same.

  “Theodore Tate, this is Detective Inspector Kent,” he says, introducing us.

  “Call me Rebecca,” she says, shaking my hand.

  Rebecca is a few inches shorter than me, a few pounds lighter, and probably with a few less problems in the world. Athletic and attractive. Both Schroder and myself can’t stop smiling at her. She has black hair that hangs to her shoulders that she brushes back behind her shoulder.

  “You work with Schroder?” I ask.

  “Detective Kent just transferred down here from Auckland,” he says. “She’s only been with us a week. She was one of their best so we’re lucky to have her.”

  She smiles. “I’m lucky to be back,” she says. “I’m Christchurch born and raised.”

  “Really,” I say. “When did you leave?”

  “Right after the police academy,” she says. “I got posted in Auckland ten years ago and have been trying to get back since.”

  “That reminds me,” Schroder says, turning toward me. “Emma Green has been accepted into the academy.”

  “I knew she was applying,” I say.

  “Emma Green. How do I know that name?” Rebecca asks.

  “She’s the girl who was abducted earlier this year,” he says. “Tate found her.”

  “Oh, of course,” she says. “The same girl you . . .” she says, but doesn’t finish.

  Emma Green is the same girl I ran into with my car last year when I was drunk. It’s what landed me in prison.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “That was dumb of me. I’ve had three too many gin and tonics,” she says, rattling the ice in the bottom of her empty glass.

  “Not your fault. I’m the one who was being dumb last year,” I tell her, unsure of how I feel about Emma joining the force.

  “Well, it’s all in the past now,” Schroder says.

  He takes another sip of beer, then the conversation changes. Rebecca gets another gin and tonic and comes back. We start talking about Schroder’s family. He pulls out his wallet and shows me photographs of his daughter and his six-month-old son. I’ve never seen his son before; met his daughter plenty of times but haven’t seen her in a few years. Rebecca smiles at the photographs and tells Schroder how cute his children are, before saying she doesn’t have children but she does have two cats and laughs that she understands how much work it must be for him.

  He just starts telling us about something his son managed to jam into his ear when his cell phone goes off. He has to pat down his pockets looking for it, missing it the first time through. He answers it and I can hear another one ringing. And another. Detectives across the room are patting at their pockets, then there’s a chorus of people saying their names, including Detective Kent. The room goes quiet as people start l
istening. Schroder has one hand on the bar to keep himself steady. He stares at his beer, then slowly pushes it away. Rebecca puts her new drink—still untouched—onto the bar. People start hanging up, then another round of cell phones start ringing, a new set of detectives being called. News is flooding in from somewhere. Other detectives are finishing off their drinks in final gulps and heading toward the door, others to the bathroom. Schroder hangs up. “Call us some taxis,” he says to the bartender.

  “What’s happened?” I ask him, following him to the door.

  “You’re sober, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And your car’s here, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then give me a lift and I’ll explain on the way.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Caleb Cole is excited. He doubts the old guy is going to remember him, but he’ll get there with some explaining. He wasn’t sure what to get him; he did wonder if flowers would be appropriate before deciding it would just be a little weird. Showing up empty-handed would be just as strange, so he settled on a six-pack of beer, which he decided was perfect. He wasn’t sure what Albert drank, but figured at Albert’s age it probably wouldn’t matter too much. Beer, wine, he guesses one type tastes like any other when you’re closing in on a hundred. Not that Albert is a hundred, but he’s certainly closer to a hundred than he is to fifty.

  He parks outside the retirement home. He doesn’t know if driving in will be enough to wake half of the residents even though it’s only seven thirty, or whether it’d be like waking the dead, which in a place like this would be a pretty neat trick. He carries the beer and straightens the fresh shirt he put on only half an hour ago, after taking a shower. The rain is coming and going—one moment it’s there, the next it’s gone.

  He’s never stepped foot in a retirement community before today. No reason to. His parents both went to one for almost ten years before they died, but he never visited them, and he doesn’t have any uncles or aunts that he’s kept in touch with. His grandparents—well, half of them were dead before he was born, and the other half not long after. Looking around, the retirement community feels like exactly what it is—a holding pattern for old people between this world and the next. All the homes are made from brick with aluminum windows and are well insulated. They’d stay warm in the winter and cook anything inside in the summer, but they all look the same, and he struggles for a few minutes to figure out exactly which one he’s supposed to be heading to. Once he thought it was the kind of place he and Lara would end up living in. The kids would get sick of looking after them and put them into a home. They would grow old together, dreading that day when one of them got sick, picked up pneumonia or a lung infection to complicate the matter, then say goodbye.