The Laughterhouse (6 page)

“I have a key. It was locked.”

“And the lights and TV, they were already on?”

“Yeah, Herb always watches the news, you know? He hated reporters, God, there ain’t a single journalist he’d spit on if they were on fire, except for a couple of the girls on the news at night, you know, the ones who can deliver the worst news and still look sexy doing it. Jesus,” he says, and he starts to cry, “tonight they’re going to be talking about Herb. They’re going
to look just as sexy and . . . and . . . Christ,” he says, and he tips the rest of his tea into the garden. “I feel so old and . . . and . . .” he shakes his head. “And so useless.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to catch the guy who did this.”

He’s still looking down at the tea he just threw away, and at the contact of my hand he looks back up. “I’ve seen a lot, Detective,” Bernard says. “I’ve fought for this country. I’ve seen men die, good, loyal men have exploded in front of me, their goddamn guts and limbs flying everywhere. One second they’re there, the next they’re just soup on the ground.” He shakes his head. “Let me tell you this, Detective—I sure as shit felt safer in that world than I do in Christchurch.”

“When did you last see him?”

His face has gone red and he wipes at the tears. “I see him pretty much every day. It’s not like there’s much to do around here by yourself except be lonely or die,” he says, and then he smiles at the bleakness of the world before his face tightens as the loss of his friend comes crashing down around him. “Shit,” he says. “I . . . I . . . ah, shit.”

“You saw him today?”

“Huh? What? Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. He came over about four and we watched some horse racing on TV.” He smiles. “We like to gamble a little, not that it does us any good. I mean, sometimes we’ll place . . .”

“What time did he leave?” I ask.

“What time? I don’t know. Probably around five, I guess. He had to get back for dinner. It’s an option for us, we can either have our meals provided or we can cook them ourselves. Herb was pretty stubborn that way. He felt a man should always be able to put his own food on the table. But he was getting old and he knew his limitations. He’d let them bring him dinner, but he was adamant on making his own breakfast and lunch. So he had to be back in time for his dinner.”

Herb had eaten most of his dinner, which means the person
who delivered it would have been and gone, but they’re still going to be somebody we need to talk to.

“You walk with him when he left?”

“Walk with him? Why would I walk with him?”

“So he left around five and that’s it.”

“That was it, until . . . you know, until I found him at seven.”

“You see anybody hanging around yesterday or today?”

“What, like somebody suspicious? People don’t tend to hang around here, son. If anything people like to stay away. Herb’s kids sure as hell liked to, just like my own do. You give them everything and this is how they repay you, by sticking you into . . .”

“Herb have a run in with anybody? Any arguments?”

“Jesus, what kind of argument would you need to have to end up like that? Anyway, everybody liked Herb. Everybody.”

“Not everybody,” I point out, and Bernie slowly nods.

“I’ll think about it long and hard,” he says, “I really will, but for the life of me there’s nothing. I don’t know why anybody would want to hurt Herb, not like that. There was so much blood in there at first I couldn’t even tell it was Herb, but the toupee was his. You see it?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “It was hanging from his scalp, like it had been unhinged. I used to give him hell over that toupee—it looked stupid, and everybody knew what it was. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was him. Had to be. No chance two people in this small world could have the exact awful taste in toupees,” he says, and forces himself to smile.

“And you haven’t seen anybody hanging around?”

He shakes his head. “It’s like I said, nobody wants to hang around us old folks.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“What? Well, he did nothing. None of us do.”

“I mean before he retired.”

“Oh, yeah, of course you did,” he says, and he offers a sad smile. “He was a lawyer.”

“What kind of lawyer?”

“I don’t know, really. He doesn’t talk too much about it. Nothing exciting from what I’ve always gathered, you know, contract law, dealing with properties being bought and sold, the mundane stuff we get billed about four hundred bucks an hour for.”

“When did he retire?”

He shrugs, then starts doing the mental addition. The rest of his body seems to shut down as he thinks about it and he becomes a statue for five seconds. Either he’s still got a psychic link to Herb’s wife, or he’s just gotten one to the man himself because when he starts back up he has an answer.

“A few years before his wife died,” he says. “He didn’t want to retire, but he got sick. Used to smoke, you know. It’s what ruined his lungs. He gave up smoking around the same time he gave up work. Back then the doctors told him he had about two years to live, only it was his wife that died first. Five years ago they told him he’d be dead within six months. Since then they’ve been telling him three or four times a year that he’s only got two months to live, and they’ll keep telling him too for another few years yet . . .”

He realizes his mistake and stops mid-sentence. He raises a hand up to his face and wipes at a couple of tears starting to flow, his hands shaking enough to be a danger to his eyes.

“You’re going to get the guy who did this, right?”

“Right.”

“What will happen to him?”

“He’ll go to jail.”

He slowly nods, but I can see he’s desperate to ask for more. “In the war, we had a way of dealing with things ourselves,” he says. “There was one guy, we don’t talk about it because . . .” he says, then remembers there’s a reason nobody talks about it. “It wasn’t good for him,” he says. “I wish—Christ, I wish I could have five minutes alone with the man who did this to Herb.”

Five minutes alone with Herb’s killer isn’t going to be a fun
five minutes for Bernard Walsh. Forty years ago it might have been, but not now.

“You saw what was written on his forehead?” I ask.

He nods.

“You make anything of it?”

“Herb was a caring person,” he says. “Doesn’t make sense.”

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, but I don’t go down that path with him. I thank him for his time, and he wanders off and joins an expanding group of elderly people who are all absorbing the bad news, people who are used to seeing their friends driven out of here in a horizontal position. Tomorrow some of them won’t even remember this happened—maybe Alzheimer’s isn’t a disease, but the body’s natural coping mechanism. Witness statements will be full of descriptions of long-dead husbands and wives they haven’t seen in twenty years.

Schroder has a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand and is looking steadier as he talks to the other man who was on the porch when we arrived. The man is using his hands a lot as he talks, as if drawing pictures in the air, and Schroder has to keep moving his coffee so it doesn’t get knocked. I walk over, interested in the conversation, when Schroder’s cell phone starts to ring.

Schroder nods as he listens, and when he hangs up he’s looking pale.

The man he was talking to has wandered to the edge of the porch to chat to a younger woman, perhaps his assistant. I get the bad feeling Schroder has just been fired.

“I can drive you home,” I tell Schroder. “Forensics can still do their job, and the officers can take statements.”

“What? Oh, it’s not that.”

“No?”

He reaches down and picks up his shoes. “We’ve got another body,” he tells me, and two minutes later we’re back on the road.

Caleb Cole isn’t thinking straight—either that, or he’s thinking clearer than he has in a long time. The thing he is certain of is the part of his mind that should be making this distinction died a long time ago, died around the time the rest of him started to decay. He’s been a dead man for so long he no longer knows exactly what he is. He knows what he wants—what he wants is the only thing keeping him alive. Dead. Alive. His mind would make that distinction too if he had much of a mind left.

He’s tired and covered in blood and he misses his family. It’s wrong a dead man should feel so tired. He wants all of this to be over and he hasn’t even begun. He has a long night ahead of him, and he has slowed over the years, any youth in him beaten away, stripped down and stomped on, his joints twisted, bones broken, teeth knocked out, every form of punishment rained down on him. He endured it because there was no alternative; he died and kept on enduring, the man he was back then long gone, and the new man he has become—well, sometimes he
doesn’t even know if he’s still human. In the beginning that thought used to haunt him. Not anymore. When he thinks about the reasons he’s still alive, he doubts there is any humanity left in him. There couldn’t be. The things he’s done, the things he’s been through, the things he’s going to start doing—no, there’s no humanity left.

The apartment is small and all he can afford. It smells like rubber from the tire factory a few blocks away where he’s worked for the last six weeks, saving up his money so he could buy his car, his phone, using the time to do his homework and rebuild his strength. The phone he bought a week ago. The car he has owned for two days. It was the last thing he needed to get the ball rolling.

Sometimes he’d come home at night and crouch over the toilet, shuddering as he threw up into it, the smell of rubber cooked into his skin. The apartment is on a bendy road made narrow by cars parked along the sides of it, but the narrowness saves the apartment from collapsing—all it would take is one large truck to drive past and his home would be rattled from its foundations. He lives on the second storey, the complex an old state house converted into apartments, each of them small, the walls so thin you can hear your neighbor taking a leak. It’s still a castle compared to his last home, and listening to somebody take a leak is sure a hell of a lot better than having to watch. Compared to prison, where he’s been for fifteen years, this place is like a dream.

The bed shares the same room with the kitchen and the living room. The only separate room is the bathroom, which is off to the side. He has a window, the view is of a common backyard between several flats, all of it is littered with junked-out automobile parts.

He steps into the shower and washes the old man’s blood away. It’s the second time he’s had to do this. The last shower he took was at the first old man’s home, he had to clean up before driving to the second. He couldn’t exactly show up on
Albert’s doorstep covered in blood and holding a six-pack of beer. He even wore one of the old man’s shirts afterward. From the second house he’s come straight home, covered in blood again but it’s too dark for anybody to notice. He soaps up, the blood is in his hair, he shampoos it out, the lather turning red.

Fifteen years ago becoming a killer felt good. Tonight he felt nothing. There was the excitement and the nerves driving there, but then—nothing. For years he’s been dreaming about these moments, thinking all that blood would help bring back some of what he’s lost, but it turns out he was wrong. He stood in that first old man’s house and felt dead inside, even after the blade had done its work. The second house was the same. This wasn’t about revenge, it wasn’t about emotion, it was about punishment.

Yet he’d done so much cutting. In those moments he had lost himself, the rage and pain of fifteen years had emerged, taking control of him, and he can remember the first stab but not the others. It wasn’t until he found himself staring down at the bodies, blood dripping from his face, that he tried to recall, just how long had he been there? How many times had his arm swung up and down? The dead man in front of him told him it was a lot. He thought then the humanity would arrive, that it would be late to the party and it would come along and cripple him. It stayed away. It didn’t even knock on the door.

These people all must pay for their mistakes, just as he has paid for his. The two tonight, it took some memory jogging on their parts to remember him. The others will remember better. The others are all younger. The police, of course, will make the connection. But he’s chosen the order carefully, and by the time they make it the night will be over and it will be too late.

He steps out of the shower. The bathroom mirror is fogged over, and that’s fine—he doesn’t want to see himself. His reflection is too painful to look at. He dries himself down and heads into the bedroom and gets dressed. Then he plays with his cell
phone. He uses it to open a news website, and so far there is no mention of the two dead men.

The phone switches off to a lock screen, and he has to slide his finger across it to bring it back to life. He’d never held a phone like this before. Years ago they were much bigger, a lot heavier, and if you didn’t look at the screen from the right angle you couldn’t see a damn thing. Now they’re as thin as his finger and about the same weight, and you can do anything with them. The human race seems to be only a few years away from living like Captain Kirk.

It’s creeping up toward quarter to ten. He grabs his keys, his jacket, his knife, and the flowers he bought earlier. He pauses in the doorway and glances at the apartment for only a few seconds. It’s the last time he will ever see it. It was never a home. He won’t miss it.

The City of Christchurch even at night looks the same after all these years, but it feels different. He read the news when he could—he knew the crime rate was escalating—but now he can feel it. The people in this city have changed. There are more people with shaved heads and tattoos, and people spit as they walk and bump into other and start arguments. Many drive fast cars with loud engines. It’s been a long time, but back when he was a member of this world the cars were different but the status they stood for was the same, all men with big egos and small dicks, and he suspects it’s the same now. The teenagers are the worst. Fifteen years ago you had guys driving up and down the two main streets in town, big cars that looked one step removed from a junkyard. Now the cars are louder, the colors even louder still, boys cruising all the streets of the city with fluffy dice in their windows and neon lights along the edges of the bodywork, and he doesn’t get it, he just doesn’t get it. It feels like he’s living in some kind of cartoon world with brighter colors where teenagers with shiny cars have gone completely mad.