Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“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.