The Laughterhouse (2 page)

“Room for two with a double bed is—”

He stops talking when I put the photo down on the counter. “You seen her?” I ask.

“Listen, buddy, we get a lot of cops and fathers and pimps through here, all of them looking for somebody, and I always tell them the same thing—nothing comes for free.”

“That’s mighty big of you,” I say. “A real humanitarian.”

“Being a humanitarian doesn’t pay the bills,” he says.

“Or get you a new shirt. I’m not giving you twenty bucks just to have you tell me she isn’t here.”

“And I’m not asking for twenty. I’m asking for fifty and you’re going to give it to me.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, because I’ve seen her,” he says, reaching under his shirt and scratching at one of his nipples in a way that would turn the gayest man straight. “Always with the same guy too. That info’s for free, like a goodwill gesture, you know? Fifty bucks will get you more.”

“If you’ve seen her that means she’s here or just been here,” I say. “I could just start kicking down doors and taking a look.”

“Good point,” he says, and he reaches down and puts his hand on a baseball bat. Somebody has written
Persuader
across it in marker. “But let me counter your point with this. See, if you were a cop you’d have told me already and shown me ID. A cop would have pulled up in a car worth more than the petrol in its tank, and between me and my buddy here,” he says, lifting more of the bat into view, “I’m thinking you’d get through one door at the most. So what’s it going to be?”

I look out the window into the parking lot. There are a dozen rooms all side by side forming an
L
shape, six rooms from north to south, six rooms east to west. Four of them have cars parked outside.

“I don’t have fifty bucks,” I tell him. “You’ve seen my car.”

“Then I don’t have any idea who the girl is.”

“Thanks for your time.”

I step outside. The fresh air is a relief after the office. It’s almost lunchtime and my stomach is overreacting, trying to convince me I’m going to die if I don’t eat soon. If I had a spare
fifty bucks I’d spend it on food before handing it over to hairy nipple guy. What I have, though, is a spare five seconds on the way back to my car, and I use them to pull the fire alarm.

Curtains are drawn back from the rooms and faces press at windows, and in the second room from the end of the east-to-west wing is the face of Lucy Saunders. I pull the cell phone out of my pocket and make the call. Nobody in any of the rooms comes running out at the alarm, only the manager, who looks over at me with an angry look. He’s holding hands with the
Persuader.
He’s weighing up whether or not he wants to try using it on my car, deciding in the end the impact would devalue his bat more than it would my ride. Then he weighs up whether he should try using it on me. I stay in the car and stare out at him, willing him to go back inside, and thankfully he does just that.

Two minutes later a fire engine arrives, the siren loud and wailing and starting up the beginnings of a headache. It pulls into the parking lot and the sirens shut down and nothing much seems to happen then. It’s still there a few minutes later, a bunch of firemen standing out in the rain, when Schroder shows up, along with two patrol cars. I watch from behind my windshield, where only the driver’s side window wiper works, as Schroder’s team approaches the hotel room. He knocks on the door. Within a minute Lucy and her boyfriend are cuffed and on their way to the back of a patrol car, then it’s talks with the motel manager, the fire department, and then Schroder slips into the passenger seat of my car, getting water all over the seat. We both stare out at the firemen who are being spoken to by the local hookers.

“Good job,” Schroder says. “You managed to only piss off the motel clerk and the entire fire department, which, I have to say, is pretty good for you.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

“Hell, I just appreciate you didn’t have to kill anybody.”

“Life’s a learning curve,” I tell him.

“You still coming this afternoon?”

“I said I would.”

“You don’t have to, you know. It’s not like you liked him, and he certainly didn’t have anything nice to say about you.”

“I know,” I tell him. “It’s a shitty thing,” I say, remembering the last time I saw Bill Landry. It was last year. He was accusing me of murdering two people. He was only half right. A week ago Landry followed some bad leads. He drew some wrong conclusions and the price he paid was the ultimate one. Now he’s one more cop to have died in the line of duty, one more statistic in a growing world of bad statistics.

“You okay?” he asks.

“What?”

“You’re rubbing your head.”

I pull my hand away from the side of my head, where there is a small dent beneath the hair and a scar too. I hadn’t realized I was rubbing it. Six weeks ago a glass jar containing a severed thumb was smashed into the side of my skull by a man trying to kill me. Ever since then I’ve been getting some pretty rough headaches. Thankfully this one is already in the tail end of leaving.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

“You should see a doctor.”

“How’s my application coming along?” I ask.

“It was never going to be an easy process, Tate, too many bad things in your past for that.”

“And people are jumping ship every day,” I tell him. “In a year’s time there aren’t going to be any cops left. I don’t see why I can’t just step in and take over Landry’s place.”

“Really? You don’t see how that wouldn’t work?”

“It was just an example,” I say, knowing that no cop who dies can be replaced. “But the force is short of good cops, and no matter what, Carl, I was a good cop.”

He sighs. “You were, and then you screwed things up and became a bad one. Look, I’m rooting for you, okay? I’m doing
what I can. I do think the force would be better off with you on its side than against it. What’s more is I think the city will be better off, but the application takes time, and if it’s accepted there are still going to be plenty of stipulations. One of which will be a fitness test, and Jesus, Tate, you’re not exactly instilling me with any confidence there. Have you even eaten this week?”

“I need the job, Carl.”

“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.

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 splitting 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.