Read Online The Laughterhouse by Paul Cleave - Free Book Online

for people to get out of the way. Both of us continually swear as we inch forward. The inside of the car is cold and the seats feel damp and the backs of my legs are itchy. A passenger plane is soaring off into the distance overhead, the people onboard all with somewhere better to be. We arrive at a cordon manned by four police officers. Schroder shows them his badge and they let us through.
    It’s quarter past ten and life feels like it’s rewound a few hours; similar buildings, similar groups of people standing around watching, similar dead guy to have died a similar death. The only differences are the names of the people and the place and the absence of police detectives running off to take a leak.The dead man’s double is Albert McFarlane. The role of Bernie is being played by a similar looking man in a similar suit, only this one doesn’t have badges stuck to it. More lighting is set up, a new group of onlookers, there are different people here but they’re thinking the same question— what in the hell is going on?
    We step out into a night that is dropping a couple of degrees every hour. The air is completely still. There are no birds anywhere. Everybody is talking in library whispers. We move past two officers who nod at us stoically. We step up onto the porch. The deck groans softly beneath our weight. The front door is painted bright blue and is wide open. The air inside isn’t any warmer than outside. The view isn’t any prettier than the last house. In fact, it’s worse. This time the blood has been thrown up onto the ceiling fan. The fan, spinning, has whipped the droplets from the blades around the room, creating a line halfway up the wall like the ring around a bath. It looks like Morse code, lots of dots and dashes, almost like a cry for help. The dead man was stabbed so many times the blade kept throwing more blood up to the fan to redistribute, the law of physics meeting up with the law of creativity.
    McFarlane looks just like Herb. Similar kind of position, similar cuts, you could string him up by his feet and he’d have the same amount of blood pour out of him. He’s been written on by the same marker across his forehead, same handwriting, only this message is different: Was it worth it?
    There are a few other differences. McFarlane managed to defend himself a little, as evidenced by the lacerations on his hands. He’s attached to an oxygen machine, or was, the tube now lying on the carpet blowing air into it. The long jagged cuts down his body are easily visible because the shirt has mostly shredded away, leaving flabby skin that was pale yesterday, but today is stained red. The cuts are deep and reveal parts of this guy nobody has seen before, except maybe his heart surgeon. He looks like he was raked over by a broken beer bottle.
    The retirement home is smaller than the other one but hasthe same feel about it, though this one isn’t really a retirement home, but a small subdivision of adjoining town houses where the youngest person looks old enough to have test-driven the wheel. The news has gotten out that it’s the second homicide of the evening, and there can be no denying the connection, and the media are spreading the story over the airwaves and the gallery of people coming down to watch the show is growing every minute. An elderly lady is walking around carrying a tray, a tea service on top of it, offering drinks of hot tea to the officers on duty.
    Police tape has been strung up and only time will tell whether or not the department has enough of it in stock to get us through to tomorrow morning. Each unit, though adjoining, has its own section, with shrubs and small flax bushes and rose plants out front. We head inside. More bloody footprints, hopefully belonging to the same killer. A serial killer is bad enough, but two madmen running around with magic markers and sharp knives is worse. Some of the forensics guys from the first scene have already shown up. They’re doing their