The Laughterhouse

by Paul Cleave

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard a recording of your call for help. You sounded like you had a tennis ball jammed in your mouth.”

  “Caleb hit me pretty good.”

  “He must have. Are you sure you’re okay? You look a little unsteady.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay. Well, next time I tell you to take somebody with you, how about you listen to me?”

  Barlow reaches us. We swap how’s it goings with each other as we shake hands with him. He’s wearing a turtlenecked sweater and plaid pants. He’s looking exactly how you’d imagine a psychiatrist who’s about to head out for eighteen holes to look.

  “I’ve read Whitby’s psychiatric file,” he says, and he puts on his grave face as his voice drops an octave, “and I can assure you that a man like that would never have been let out of my custody. He was a ticking time bomb,” he says, with all the accuracy that comes with hindsight and confirming my belief that psychology is a science that has evolved from many, many mistakes. “Now, tell me, how was Melanie Stanton found?”

  Schroder spells it out. Melanie was found wrapped in a blanket and her clothes were covered in fake blood. She had been drugged. She woke up saying she was the one who’d been chosen. Across her forehead Caleb Cole had written I’m sorry. She was taken to the hospital and checked over, cleaned up, and put into a fresh change of clothes, where she woke up. Then she was brought to the station. So far she has been unresponsive to any questions.

  “You don’t have a healthier environment?” Barlow asks.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, a room with pictures and crayons and toys would be a great start. Somewhere children can feel more comfortable.”

  “This is a police station,” Schroder says.

  “But you must interview children here, right?”

  “We had a room like that,” he says, “but we had to extend the conference room. Look, the office is the best we can do,” Schroder says, and I can tell he’s trying not to sound pissed off, “and we don’t have time to mess around.”

  “Detective, we’re going to need to make time. I can’t just. .”

  “I know,” Schroder says, “but there are other lives on the line here, Doctor. That’s why I’ve called you. I have faith that you’ll do the best you can in the time we have.”

  Barlow nods. “Well said, Detective,” he says, smiling. “So, what about her mother? What’s the situation there?”

  “She’s on her way. She was out of the country with her boyfriend. Mother and father separated six months ago. She left him,” he says, and explains the situation.

  “We should wait for her,” he says. “It may help.”

  Schroder shakes his head while I do the talking. “We waited for you,” I say, “and we’re all out of waiting.”

  “If time is what you’re worried about, then I need to go in alone,” Barlow says, “and when her mother arrives, don’t send her in-let me finish first. If she walked out on her family, then her showing up now may only make Melanie more prone to shutting down.”

  “I need to go with you,” Schroder says.

  “No, absolutely not,” he says, shaking his head. “Two grown men both trying to talk to an eleven-year-old girl? It will only frighten and stress her even more, especially when one of those men is desperate for answers. She isn’t a suspect here, she’s a witness, but more than a witness she’s a young girl who’s scared and who doesn’t know where her family is. Trust me, if I go in alone there’s a chance I can bring her out of her shell, and if you come in with me, she might not talk for a week. If at all. And I know what you want me to ask, Detective. You want to know what the man who took her said. You want to know what he did to them, and you want to know if she heard where he’s going next. He left her alive, Detectives, so I very much doubt he did that with the risk she can be of any help.”

  “Or maybe whatever he has planned will be over before anything she says can be of any help,” I offer.

  Barlow nods. “Good point,” he says. “Now, gentlemen, you called me because you know I can help. How about you let me go ahead and do my job?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Barlow heads into Schroder’s office, and I head into the conference room for what I’m hoping is going to be nap time, but the knife betrays any hope of that. It’s one of those joke-shop knives, where the blade slides back into the handle. It’s sealed up in a plastic bag and sits right in the middle of the table. When I was a kid one of my friends at school used to keep stabbing himself with one of those knifes as a joke. It wasn’t funny back then, even less funny now. Dr. Stanton is out there somewhere believing his older daughter is dead, seemingly murdered by a toy that’s designed to give people a bit of a laugh.

  The case files have been stacked on the desks. Two other detectives are going through them. We’re careful to keep the Whitby and the Cole case files separate. I sit down and feel like resting my head on the desk and switching off for a few hours, but the doctor’s warning is weighing heavily on my mind and I’m worried if my head touches anything other than a pillow it might be lights out permanently. I find a photograph of Jessica Cole taken not long before she died, this beautiful little girl that reminds me of my own daughter. Jessica died out of an act of intent; my own daughter, Emily, died out of an act of stupidity. One man was evil, one man was drunk, the result was the same. However maybe things aren’t that black and white. One man was sick, one man was an addict, neither man was fully in control of himself. Does that make it any easier to deal with? No. If anything it makes it harder. It means other people could have stepped in and never did. Doctors, shrinks, family, or friends-where the hell were these people to get Whitby the medical attention he needed, or to stop Quentin James, the man who killed my daughter, from buying another drink?

  Schroder is partly right. I can feel a connection with Cole. I can understand his need for revenge-but he’s targeting the wrong people. He took care of James Whitby fifteen years ago and it should have ended there. I took care of Quentin James and it stopped with Quentin James. I blame society for letting him get behind the wheel of a car, I blame the courts for not putting him behind bars for the numerous other drunk-driving convictions he’d had, but not enough to kill the lawyer who defended him, the judge who failed to put him away, the bartender who sold him his last drink. If Cole had stuck to killing only James Whitby I wouldn’t have given him a medal, but I would certainly have understood his pain.

  I put the photo of Jessica down. Inside the cardboard box of evidence is the murder weapon. It’s heavy and the blood on it is maroon and crusty. It’s over the entire blade and handle. I remember that Whitby left it inside Jessica when he was done.

  The sketch artist comes into the room. He’s a tall guy with big forearms, the kind of forearms you get maybe from drawing with heavy pencils. We move off to the side and he sits opposite me, and sets his pad up and looks at me as if I’m the subject and he’s trying to figure out what would make a good backdrop. He has a photograph of Cole next to him, and he uses that as his base, and what I give him isn’t much of an update. Scars are added, a twisted nose is added, fifteen years are added. Cole is young in one picture, worn down in life in the new one, his face is a map of his time spent in jail.

  We’re just wrapping up when Schroder’s phone rings. He answers it and I hear his half of the conversation. Something about pizza. My stomach rumbles and I like the idea of Schroder ordering some, but the sketch artist doesn’t because he leaves to get the new image scanned and released to the media. Only it becomes apparent a moment later that Schroder isn’t ordering us dinner.

  “You rung the restaurant?” he asks. He listens to the response, his body completely motionless as he absorbs the information, except for his face, which is slowly tightening into a frown. He’s staring at something out the window a mile away. “And the phone number?”

  He keeps listening, then hangs up and turns toward me.

  “Somebody used
a prepay cell phone to call a pizza delivery,” he says. “He had it delivered to Judge Latham five minutes ago.”

  “A test to see if we were watching?”

  “Exactly. And the test worked-our guys busted the delivery boy as he was approaching. That means he’s figured out that we know what he wants. Damn it,” he says, snapping a pencil in half, “the officers on the scene, they should have known better. I should have known better and gone myself. Next time that’s what I’ll do. There’s still the mother’s house,” he says.

  I shake my head. “He’s not going to try any of the other places now. He knows they’re traps.”

  “We missed him,” Schroder says. “We messed up.”

  I know. I stare out the window at the same spot he was looking at earlier.

  “We saved the judge, though,” he says, and he’s right. We’ve saved a faceless judge I’ve never met and maybe one Schroder has never met either. We saved him from being killed in front of his family. It doesn’t seem like a big deal. Of course it is-but right now our emotions are invested with those little girls. That’s who we’re focusing on. They are the truly innocent ones in all of this. Of course all the victims are innocent-but the others didn’t help themselves. The girls-they shouldn’t be part of this. So it’s hard to be excited about the judge and easy to focus on the fact that twice today we could have caught Cole and failed.

  “We should take that as a win,” Schroder says. “Put up a tick for the good guys,” he says, but he’s wrong-we shouldn’t take it as a win-we should just take it as scoring a point.

  We’re hoping for answers from the files. From Melanie. Cops all over the city are looking for Ariel Chancellor and Dr. Stanton’s car. They’re visiting everybody on a long list that Schroder and a few other detectives came up with earlier, people involved with the cases from years ago. I keep thinking about the pizza Cole ordered and what happened to it. I start obsessing about it. More importantly my stomach starts obsessing about it. My run in with Caleb Cole made me want to eat better and start exercising, but both my stomach and brain agree that can wait until tomorrow.

  “How long do you think it’s going to take Barlow?” I ask, nodding toward the office, wondering if there’s some time to order some takeout.

  Schroder shrugs. “I wish I knew. Jesus, we have a name, we know what he wants, but going through this,” he says, looking at the table of evidence, “feels like we’re treading water.”

  We keep treading because there are no other options. We come up with more names, other people involved in the case, less likely targets but targets all the same. The police who arrested Whitby. The detectives who testified. No logical reason Cole would go after any of these people because they were on his side, but just as equally he might. We know he’s looking for Ariel Chancellor, but how does he see her? As a daughter figure, or does he blame her, thinking she left her best friend to die? I keep checking my phone, hoping Dr. Forster will call. I phone the nursing home but Nurse Hamilton has gone home for the day.

  There are other evidence boxes here. Things from the car crash where the policeman, Officer Jeffrey Dale, was killed. He was a couple of years older than I was back then. He was the first cop to die in the line of duty after I joined the force and wouldn’t be the last. I remember seeing his wife on the news, their children, a family torn apart. A man had gone looking for justice and had killed an innocent man by accident to get it. The entire thing was tragic. You understood it, you sympathized with the dead cop and his family, and you sympathized with the man who accidently killed him. The whole thing was hard to accept.

  I use the vending machine in the hall. I dump a bunch of change into it and come up with four chocolate bars, the calories totaling more than I can count. Erin Stanton, the doctor’s wife, arrives. She’s in her early forties and her makeup has streaked and her long hair is a tangled mess. She’s wearing a white dress with a leather jacket over it and carrying a motorbike helmet. I guess they went home from the airport and dumped their luggage, then came right here. She looks flustered. Her boyfriend is also holding a helmet, has a much thicker leather jacket, and looks nervous about being here. His black jeans have holes all around the knees and a few in the ass, not from fashion but from wear. His hair is just as long and just as tangled, and he’s also wearing the same amount of eyeliner as Erin, only his isn’t streaked.

  Detective Kent meets them a few feet from the lift. She asks them to be patient and they don’t want to be, Erin saying they have a right to see Melanie, and told they will as soon as the interview is over. They say that’s not good enough. Then they’re reminded why Melanie is being interviewed-in the hope the police can find her sisters and father.

  “I just want my babies safe,” she says.

  “And your husband too,” Kent says.

  “He’s a dick,” the boyfriend says. “What kind of Mickey Mouse operation is this?” he adds, trying to assert some control but falling extremely short, “when you need to rely on an eleven-year-old girl to do your job for you?”

  Detective Kent gives him a long hard stare until he looks away, then Erin tries to force her way past in a direction she’s hoping Melanie is. She calls out, and Kent grabs her by the arm and starts to lead her away.

  “I have a right to see my daughter,” she says.

  “Let her go,” the boyfriend says, and pulls Kent’s arm off her. Within five seconds two other detectives have him against the wall, while Detective Kent leads Erin back the way they came.

  “I’m sorry, I know it’s hard, but you have to trust us on this,” she tells Erin. “Just give us a few more minutes, then you can spend all the time you want with her, I promise.”

  I head back to the conference room. I keep one chocolate bar and hand out the other three. The gesture is appreciated, especially by Detective Hutton, one of the detectives who looks like he’s lived on nothing but candy for the last ten years. I feel like I’m one of the team. They ask how my leg is doing and I tell them. They tell me it’s good to have me back on the force, and they seem to mean it. Hopefully my future is with these people. Together we are going to fight bad people and help good people and we’re going to make a difference.

  We’re bonding and we’re killing time as we eat our chocolate bars. We take ten minutes for ourselves and talk about families and the weather and nothing at all to do with the city or the crime rate. It’s the best ten minutes I’ve had in a long time.

  Right on nine thirty, over an hour after Benson Barlow stepped into Schroder’s office, he steps back out of it and closes the door behind him. We rush over to him, hoping he’s going to give us something to bring us one step closer to finding Dr. Stanton and his family alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Six years ago he saw a man die in prison. Others died while he was in there, most from natural causes, many from drug overdoses, a few from beatings. People would smuggle contraband into the cells all the time. There was a big market for drugs and needles, cigarettes, food, or a hip flask of vodka or gin. They’d smuggle in cell phones, they’d bring in magazines full of pictures of naked women, and on one occasion that he remembers a magazine about landscaping. On this occasion somebody smuggled in a roofing nail.

  The roofing nail got handed off to one inmate and jammed all the way into another. Nobody knows how it came from the outside world to the inside world of this man’s head, traveling through his ear canal on its way to a home run. The attack was quick and nobody saw it, but the dying lasted long enough for the guy to scream and to thrash his legs about on the floor as they all stood around watching. Nobody tried to help. Nobody showed much emotion. It was like watching a football match where you weren’t invested in the outcome. The guards came over. By then the guy had stopped moving. They picked him up and rushed him to the infirmary and Caleb never saw him again after that and nobody really much spoke about it. He was just a guy nobody really knew and death didn’t change that about him.

  Looking at the blood on the floor, and the dea
th jitters of a man fighting for life, that was the first time Caleb accepted he would feel nothing watching others die. When he killed James Whitby, he felt something. He felt anger and relief, he felt disgust and he felt euphoria, he felt pure hatred, he felt like he could murder the world.

  Watching the man in jail, he felt nothing. It was a good thing. It was something he could use. He knew he would need it when he was released from jail, and it’s come in handy.

  But right now what he is feeling is anger. He’s going to miss out on the judge and the bitch mother and the emotion is rushing back. He isn’t sure where to go. Since seeing the pizza boy jumped on, he has spent one hour driving aimlessly, then another hour parked out near the beach where he used to live when he first met his wife. Since then he’s been driving aimlessly again, listening to the news. The reporters have dropped the Gran Reaper handle and replaced it with his real name. They say to be on the lookout for Caleb Cole, that he’s considered armed and dangerous and if you see him to call the police.

  Obsolete Octavia is asleep, a small snot bubble growing and shrinking from her left nostril as she breathes. Katy Kitten is asleep too.

  The lights ahead are red and he sits at them with his foot on the brake, listening to Octavia breathing and waiting for the bubble under her nose to pop when a purple car with neon lights and a dent in the passenger door pulls up next to him. The music is nothing more than thumping bass, and the two boys in front can’t be much more than sixteen. They look over at him, the one closer raises his eyebrows and gives one sharp nod, his head going up first and then down, his eyes fixed on Caleb the entire time, then the driver guns the engine so loudly that Cole’s car shudders and Octavia wakes up and screams. Then the driver guns it four more times before the light turns green and they take off, the passenger leaning out the window and screaming “asshole!”

  “It’s okay,” he tells Octavia, only it isn’t, because she’s crying hard now and her face is turning red and she seems to be running out of air just as quickly as the country is running out of hope for its future. Katy is murmuring from the backseat, the drugs wearing off.