The Laughterhouse (17 page)

The clouds from the south creep over the top of the café and start to cover the city. Somebody toots at another car and there’s an exchange of hand gestures and obscenities. A teenager in a hoodie walks past the window and sees me looking out. He takes the time to inhale a big wad of snot and spits it at me. It hits the window and slides down slowly, mostly green but with a bit of blood in there too, and he carries on looking angry at the footpath ahead of him. A man in the café behind me calls the waitress a whore and tells her coffee should be cheaper before storming out, and Christchurch is back.

I finish my coffee and drive to Ariel Chancellor’s house. It’s the kind of neighborhood I’d certainly never want to live in, with houses looking near collapse and gardens that have been eaten alive by bacteria. The street has potholes every thirty feet. The sidewalks are cracked and broken from pushed up tree roots. I park outside Ariel’s house safe in the knowledge nobody will think I’m a cop because of my car, safe in the knowledge my car isn’t worth stealing. The house is in rough condition, with a tarpaulin over part of the roof. I walk up the pathway to the front door, where paint is peeling off the walls and resting in flaky puddles on the porch. I knock, half expecting my hand to disappear, that the door will be full of rot and held together only by termites.

A woman answers, squinting at the bright light and holding her hand up to her face. Her skin is pale and there are cold sores around the sides of her mouth. It takes me a few seconds to come to the conclusion that it’s Ariel because this version is different from the photograph. She’s older and thinner and looks as though six hours ago she may have been strung out on whatever it is that made those needle holes in her arm. She’s holding onto a glass half full of golden fluid and ice cubes. She has dyed her hair black and it’s about half the length it was before, coming down to the top of her neck.

I hold up my badge. “Ariel Chancellor?”

I can see in her features that once, before life crushed her, Ariel Chancellor was an extremely attractive girl.

Her voice sounds like a cigarette butt is jammed down her throat. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m Detective Inspector Tate,” I say, introducing myself, and it’s good to say those words again and not be lying about it.

Her eyes snap into focus. “You don’t look like a cop,” she says, hooking her hair over her ears.

“No?”

“No. Cops wear cheap suits. Your suit is worse than cheap.”

“You recognize this man?” I ask, holding up a photo of Brad Hayward.

“No,” she answers, without even looking at it. She starts to close the door, and I put my hand out and stop her.

“You want to reconsider?”

“Not really, no. You want to get the hell off my porch?”

“Your fingerprints were found in his car.”

“My fingerprints have a way of getting found in lots of cars,” she says. “He say I took something from him? If so, he’s a liar. You can’t trust men who pay for sex.”

“So he was one of your clients.”

“If that’s the label you want to give them, sure.”

“He was murdered last night.”

“And what, I’m supposed to care? You think your buddy there would give a shit if I showed up dead in an alleyway?”

“He had a wife and two kids.”

“And they’re better off without him.” She lets go of the door, conceding she’s going to have to talk to me. She reaches into her pocket for a packet of cigarettes.

“You’re wrong about that,” I tell her.

“Am I? You have a crystal ball? He could have turned into a bad father, a drunk, somebody who’d hit his kids.”

“Please. He was killed in front of his children,” I tell her, which is close enough to the truth.

She lights one of the cigarettes. She holds the packet in my direction and I shake my head. “They’re better off without him,” she says. “They just don’t know it.”

“You may be right,” I say, doubting that she is.

“I am right. I’m good at reading men, Detective, it’s what I do.”

“At least help them get some closure and talk to me.”

She looks up at the sky and squints against the glary light, staring up for about five seconds as if that’s where the answers are. “It’s going to rain,” she says. “Business is always slow when it rains.” She looks back at me. “Fifty bucks,” she says. “Give me fifty bucks and I’ll talk to you.”

“I don’t have fifty bucks,” remembering the guy at the hotel yesterday morning with his baseball bat.

She looks out at my car. “No, I don’t suppose you do,” she says.

“But if you like, I can arrest you, throw you in a cell for a few hours, and let you sober up a bit. Now that I can do for free.”

“I suppose you could,” she says, and takes a sip at her drink. “Fine, you may as well come in.” She rattles the ice in her glass and holds it up to eye level. “Fix you a drink?”

“It’s too early.”

“No, it’s not that, I can tell,” she says, smirking at me. “Remember what I said about reading men? I can see it in your eyes. You’re battling a demon.”

“Maybe it’s too early for you too,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “It’s always happy hour somewhere,” she says, and I can’t imagine the last time she spent an hour being truly happy.

Caleb Cole can barely move. His chest aches when he lifts his arms, the joints in his elbows and shoulders feel like they’re on fire. He massages his fingers deep into his neck just so he can start looking around. He might have been better off sleeping in the car, but he didn’t want to be away from Stanton in case he tried something. He’s had—he looks at his watch—shit, ninety minutes’ sleep. He can’t believe that’s all. Ninety minutes and the baby is crying. Somehow she has managed to pull the tape off her mouth and it’s dangling on her chin.

He’s cold. The slaughterhouse is the kind of building that would only get above fifty degrees if on fire. He hates it here. He has to wait until tonight to finish what he had wanted to finish last night, but he can’t face spending the entire day here.

He puts his hands on his hips and stretches out his back. He limps for the first few paces until the feeling comes back into his legs. This was supposed to be over by now.

“Quiet down,” he says to Octavia, but she doesn’t—instead she just gets louder. He unclips her from her seat and picks her
up in both hands and holds her out. He could shake her, he supposes. It’d probably work. And how the fuck are the other two kids still asleep? He guesses they must be used to the noise like people living near airports. He bounces Octavia up and down a little and pulls the rest of the tape away and her crying quiets a little, but not enough to stop annoying him.

“Hungry?”

Her crying turns into a series of hiccups, and then she stares blankly at him before nodding. “Yes,” she says, her mouth holding on to the
y
much longer before snapping out the other letters like a gunshot, so it sounds like
yyyyyyyyyyyyyes.

“I’ll get you some food.”

“Yyyyyyyyyes.”

“You don’t talk much, do you?”

“Yyyyyyyyyes.”

“Do you know any other words?”

“Cat,” she says.

“Cat,” he repeats. “That’s really useful.”

The doctor is watching him. He’s straining against the plastic ties, but stops struggling when he sees Caleb watching him. Caleb opens up the bag of supplies and finds another jar of baby food. Both of the other girls are awake. He frees Katy and gives the food to her.

“Feed her,” he says, nodding toward the baby.

Instead of feeding her, Katy runs over to her father and wraps her arms around him. She starts to cry, and Stanton starts to cry too. Stanton muffles something around the duct tape. The words are indistinguishable but the tone makes the message clear. He’s telling her everything is going to be okay. He’s telling her not to worry. Caleb takes a step toward them, ready to grab the girl by the collar and drag her away but decides to give them their moment. After all, the amount of nice moments in these people’s futures is very limited. He lets them have this one—but after thirty seconds, when it looks like they may never part, he changes his mind.

“Come on,” he says, and Katy doesn’t let go. “Come on,” he repeats, “or you’re all going to go hungry.”

Katy lets go. She sniffs back some tears and wipes her jacket sleeve over her face. “Okay,” she says, and she puts out her hand for the food.

She takes Octavia out of the seat and sets her between her legs and wraps her arms around her the same way she did her father, then puts her back into the seat and opens the jar. Spoonful after spoonful Octavia races it down. While she’s eating, Caleb tears open a packet of cereal. He eats a handful, looking at the container of milk and wondering if he should add some to his mouthful. He moves on to the loaf of bread instead. Katy finishes up, then hands Octavia a plastic cup of water. She drinks from it while staring at her sister. There is baby food all over her face and she’s probably filled her diaper back up and he can’t face doing anything about it either.

Octavia drops her mug and it rolls across the floor, she reaches out for it but can’t reach and starts to cry. This is what a turtle must feel like, he imagines, when it’s lying on its back. Katy picks it up and hands it to her. Her crying stops.

“There you go,” Katy says.

“Cat,” Octavia says.

Katy rubs Octavia’s arms as she drinks. Caleb washes down the cereal with an orange juice.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Katy says.

“Okay,” he says, because he needs it too. She puts Octavia back into the seat then he leads her outside. “Same tree,” he says, and she goes over and disappears behind it. He moves to the car and pisses on the hood.

In the full morning light the slaughterhouse has lost none of its creepy feel. It should be nothing more than an abandoned building, harmless, just a bunch of walls being climbed over by nature, but it’s not. This is the building where his baby girl died, and inside there are ghosts. There are dark rooms with
large meat hooks. There are nightmares. The slaughterhouse is a home to all the misery in the world.

He stands with the sun on his face. His clothes feel a little damp, but fifteen minutes out here and that won’t be a problem anymore. There are no clouds, just blue skies. A beautiful day that could stay the way it started, or just as easily shower the city with rain. He closes his eyes and there’s a moment, a brief moment, when he asks himself whether he can walk away from all of this. He doesn’t have to go back into the slaughterhouse, doesn’t have to deal with the doctor and the children, and nobody has to die. He can walk away, find a beach somewhere and sit in the autumn sun, soak up the atmosphere, and things can end differently. He can swim. Just pick a direction and go for it. See how far he can get before the tiredness sucks him under. He used to be a pretty good swimmer. There was a time he could go length after length without fatigue, his breathing would stay calm, his arms slicing through the water effortlessly. Before he got married he used to swim three times a week, normally for an hour at a time. It was the only exercise he got. He’d go before work started, when the only people at the pool were keen swimmers like himself. When he got married life got busier, then his daughter arrived, then swimming became one of those things you cut adrift as you get older and responsibilities change.

Only he can’t do that. His family is dead because of the doctor, because of these other people. He hasn’t finished getting justice for his family.

He finishes up. So does Katy. Back inside he looks through the bag and opens a tin of tuna. The smell hits him like a bullet and he almost gags, he throws the can through the doorway into another room, it lands on its side and rolls out of sight. If the rats can stomach the smell, then good luck to them. Katy picks Octavia back out of the seat and walks over to Melanie, her arms around Octavia’s chest from behind. It’s like watching a large princess doll carrying a smaller princess doll. She settles down beside her older sister with the baby between them.

“Are you hungry?” he asks the doctor.

The doctor mumbles something else from behind the gag that he can’t make out, but the tone suggests it isn’t about being hungry. The tone suggests a whole lot of
fuck you
s mixed in with a good ol’ fashioned
go to hell
.

Octavia is staring at him again while she sucks at her drink, a line of drool hanging from the bottom of it that creeps him out. Katy reaches up and removes the tape from Melanie.

“I need to use a bathroom,” Melanie says.

“Okay,” he says, and cuts through the plastic ties. “Don’t stop holding her,” he says to Katy, and nods toward Octavia.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“And don’t try to free your dad. You’ve got nothing you can free him with, and if you try, I’m going to be mad. If I get mad, then bad things are going to happen, and I’m going to have to punish you, and Melanie, and Octavia. Okay?”

She nods, her mouth turning down at the edges. “Okay,” she says.

He takes Melanie outside. She keeps scowling at him. “You don’t have any idea how to look after a baby, do you.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m never wrong.”

“You are this time. I used to have a daughter.”

“Where is she? You tie her up too and bring her out here?”

“No, but somebody else did. And he killed her.”

“Oh,” she says, and she opens up her mouth to say something else, and he waits for it, knowing she won’t know what to say, and that’s exactly what happens. “Oh,” she says again, then looks down.

“Toilet’s over there,” he says, and points at the trees. “Don’t try to run away. I’m not going to hurt any of you, I promise,” he says, “as long as you do what I say. You just have to trust me. But, if you try to run away,” he says, then inhales sharply and scrunches up his face, “well, do I need to tell you what will happen?”

She shakes her head.

“Good. Now hurry up,” he says.

He stands next to the building drinking orange juice as she runs into the trees for a few minutes before coming back. Most of the trees are skeletons now, a few of them still clutching on to handfuls of leaves, and the sun coming through them looks cold. The ground is soft from yesterday’s rain, there is a trail of muddy footprints leading back and forth from the car, and a set of handprints too where Stanton fell over. The car has at least a dozen wet leaves stuck to the body, and the windshield and windows are clouded over with moisture.