Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

I look at the bedroom door, then at my watch. There are three minutes left. The front door opens. Schroder comes in. I can see my car out on the curb. I have his, and he must have ended up getting a lift back to the station and taking mine. He’s wearing shorts and his pajama top and he’s in bare feet. He’s puffing. Both his hands are shaking, but not like he’s scared or cold, but like an electrical charge is going through him. He’s chewing another tablet. He’s also carrying a gun.

“We’re alone?” he asks, his eyes darting left and right.

“Except for Mrs. Whitby. What’s the gun for, Carl? Cole isn’t here.”

“She’s in there?” he asks, nodding toward the bedroom door.

“Yep. The gun?”

“The girl,” he says, still ignoring my question. “Is Cole really going to kill her?”

“I don’t know. At the very least he’ll take her fingers. I really believe that.”

“So do I,” he says. “If he can cut off one he can probably cut off ten. She’s a bitch,” he says, nodding toward the bedroom door again. “Mrs. Whitby. I remember her. I remember talking to her. She’s as bad as they get,” he says. “You saw the case file.”

“She’s a monster,” I say.

“One of the worst,” he says, and he’s staring at me and I can almost feel the charge coming off him. The hairs are standing on his arms and he’s still chewing at the tablet. His eyes are wide and jittery.

“She put her son into a coma,” I say.

“She hit him with an iron.”

“Could have killed him,” I say.

“I wish she had.”

I nod. I wish she had too.

“You know she only did a few months in jail, right?” he asks.

“I know,” I tell him.

“Not much of a punishment,” he says.

“Not much at all.”

“More should have happened to her.”

“She should never have been let out,” I say.

“All of this, it all began with her. Doesn’t seem right she should get away with it.”

“Not right at all,” I agree.

“The world needs balancing, Theo.” A cell phone rings. I look down at it. It’s the doctor’s. “This job,” he says, “we see the shittiest things.”

“I know.”

“Jesus,” he says, and he tilts his head up and stares at the ceiling for a few seconds, and when he looks back at me I think he’s trying hard not to cry. “I don’t. .” he says, then shakes his head, “I can’t. I can’t deal with any more children dying. Last Christmas I promised myself no more kids were going to die on my watch,” he says, and I can tell he’s back in that moment where he last had to deal with the horror of a child being killed. “That day in the bathtub, drowning like that, I should have left the force then. I should have left.”

“Carl. .”

“No more dead children,” he says. “No more.”

The phone is still ringing. I look at my watch. It’s been thirty minutes. I’m shaking my head and Schroder is nodding his. He smiles. A sad, sad smile, and now the tears are there, just a few of them. “No more on my watch,” he says, and his smile grows. “Give me the phone,” he says.

“Why?”

“Because the world is about balance, Theo. That’s why. Give me the phone.”

I hand it over. He looks at it for a few seconds as if he’s forgotten how to use one. The display is lit up with the number the call is coming from. “Four minutes I was dead,” he says. “Four minutes and nothing, just nothing. These kids, when they die they’re not moving on to a better place. We want to think so, but they’re not. The only thing waiting for us is a whole lot of nothing.” He presses the answer button. “This is Detective Inspector Carl Schroder,” he says, talking into the phone, straightening himself up and wiping at his eyes. He changes his grip on the gun so he can spare a few fingers to tug at his pajama top and get it sitting right, as if he were about to go into a meeting.

I can hear Cole’s voice coming through the speaker. “Where’s Theodore Tate?”

“He’s right next to me.”

“Put him on,” Cole says.

“No. You’re dealing with me now.”

“If you don’t put him on I’m going to-”

“Shut up, Caleb. Just shut up and watch,” Schroder says, and he fiddles with the functions on the phone and puts it on mute, and a moment later the display shows what the phone is pointing at. It shows my feet, then Schroder’s, then the door frame. It shows Schroder’s hand reaching out to the handle. It’s blurry and dizzying. People must throw up watching his home movies.

“Carl,” I say.

He shakes his head, the smile still there, and then he shrugs. “Sometimes good men have to do bad things.”

“Carl-”

“Theo, shut up. This isn’t your decision. This isn’t for you to live with,” he says, and I don’t try to stop him, I just stand back and watch as he opens the bedroom door and steps through. The light is on inside. I can see Mrs. Whitby sitting up in bed, an empty vodka bottle on the nightstand next to her, her mouth hanging open and her eyes shut. The room smells of alcohol and cigarettes and cat piss. She’s wearing a robe, the front of it patchy with old stains.

He turns back toward me. “It was me,” he says.

“What?”

“The prison records. I was the one who skipped past Cole’s. I mean, I looked at it, but. . but fuck, I was still balancing a line between being drunk and being hungover, and of course the baby comes with a whole lot of sleep deprivation. You were right-I should never have been part of this case. I looked at that case file and I was too fucked to even notice it meant anything, and now. . well, now I have to do what it takes to save that little girl.”

“Carl. .”

“It’s true, and you know it. If I’d made that connection, most of this could have been avoided. We could have caught him when he was going for Victoria Brown, or when he took the doctor.”

“You don’t know that.”

He sighs. “Yeah, yeah I do. We both do,” he says.

“Carl. .”

“I’m tired, Theo. Tired and I just want this to be over,” he says, and he takes the phone off mute and closes the door.

I stand in the corridor and I close my eyes and I wait for the gunshot.

It doesn’t take long. Five seconds. It echoes and rolls around inside my head like a bowling ball for much longer.

Caleb watches the display on the phone and says nothing as he looks at the dead woman on the bed, just the one gunshot, right through the heart. Her eyes opened when it happened, she looked right at the phone, her mouth seemed to cave in on itself, and she didn’t even have the time to raise an arm to her chest. Instead her head dropped back down to where it was when she was sleeping, her neck slumped against her massive breasts. She’s in pretty much the same position she was a minute ago. He doesn’t doubt she’s dead. Still-he knows they can be faked.

“There’s an empty bottle on the nightstand,” he says.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“I said there’s an empty bottle on the nightstand.”

“I still can’t hear you,” Schroder says. “You’ll have to give me a minute.”

“You’re kidding.”

“What?”

“I said you’re kidding,” he says, almost shouting it at the phone.

“Missing? What’s missing?”

Cole doesn’t answer. He keeps watching the dead woman on the screen, and then there is fast movement as the phone is lifted higher. He watches the wall swaying up and down, and he realizes the detective has his finger in his ear, twisting it back and forth. It’s the gunshot. It must be. The gunshot has deafened the detective so he can’t hear him. He has to wait a minute. It’s a long minute, but he’s excited. He’s missed out on the judge. He could try the same trick and convince somebody to kill the judge for him, but he doesn’t see it working, not again, not against a man who the world thinks is good.