Laughing Man (21 page)

"I'm telling you this, though—I'm telling you that there are things everywhere in this world that will kill you quick as a wink, no matter who your mother is, and it will be so seductive, like the lover, so teasing and fantastic and seductive, that people will fall all over themselves just to have it, like it's a great big bottle of Mocha Frappucino.

"Well, you know, that's this guy you're talking about. This Fred. That his name? Fred? Yeah? Good. Fred. Stupid name. So many people named Fred. It sounds like a kid's name. Hey, Fred, get your ass in here and eat your goddamned macaroni and cheese and drink your Kool-Aid. Fred, ha! Anyone named Fred deserves what this Fred got. Well, not having their insides eaten. Not that. I mean, think about it. Just think about it a little. You're not really dead when your insides start getting eaten. You're still alive. And you're watching your insides get eaten. Maybe your intestines first (which you can live without for a couple of minutes), your spleen (same thing), or your stomach. Of course, it depends a lot on how fast your insides are getting eaten, I guess. Quick is good. Not so quick is not so good. I guess Fred's wasn't so damned quick, is that what you're telling me?

"But if you think I ate Fred, then you got to think again, because I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat people. I eat vegetables. Okra, especially. And greens. Celery is good. I don't much care for tomatoes, though. But they're a fruit. Do you know that? They're a fruit. Like Fred. I guess Fred was a fruit. Not that I have anything against fruits. If you want to drill someone who's got the same plumbing as you, that's your business.

"But it doesn't mean I killed him and ate him because, like I said, I eat okra, and celery, and carrots. Not the cooked kind. I hate that. Mushy crap. Or cooked cabbage either. Mushy crap.

"Do you know that Mocha Frappucino is a Starbucks product? Other manufacturers manufacture it. Some of those manufacturers are in New York State, my home state. One of those manufacturers is Upstate Farms, and they make a Frappucino that they call Cappuccino, I think because Starbucks has a trademark registered on Frappucino, which means, I think, that if you use the name in some press release regarding the killing and eating of Fred, then you have to get permission from Starbucks. You don't want to get sued.

"And speaking of which, I think I'm talking to my lawyer about suing someone here. You know, for false arrest, or harassment, maybe, or internal prejudice—wait. What is that? Internal prejudice? It just came to me out of the blue. It's nothing, right? It's something I made up, right? Okay. Sorry. I'll stick to those other things. Harassment and false arrest.

"Because, I'll tell you, someone else killed fruity Fred, and I can guarantee it. And someone else did those Chocolate Murders, too. I heard about them. I read about them. How can you live anywhere and not hear about them or read about them? You'd have to be living underground, I think. You'd have to be living in the great bacterial underbelly that breathes and moves and reproduces just a thousand feet below our feet (hmmm, rhyme?). You'd have to be expelled from the great bacterial underbelly that lives and breathes beneath our feet not to have heard about the Chocolate Murders. How calculated. How human. How perverse. Better to eat poor fruity Fred because you're hungry and there aren't any vegetables around—no okra, no broccoli, no yummy asparagus."

Erthmun flipped the interrogation sheet over, then back again, and said, "That's his whole statement?"

Peabody said, "Uh-huh. Then he clammed up tighter than beeswax in Detroit."

Erthmun gave Peabody a quick questioning look, wanted to say, "'Beeswax in Detroit'?" but didn't, because Peabody—who'd been with the force for twenty-five years—was known for talking strangely. Instead, Erthmun said, "And the confession?"

Peabody said, "Isn't worth two hams in a cracker box. I guess the guy's lawyer walked in when someone was putting a little pressure on him."

Erthmun sighed. "Well, shit, he did it."

Peabody, who was tall and bald, shrugged. "Yeah, of course he did it. That's as clear as tomorrow's orange juice. But, Christ, the guy still isn't talking. He hasn't said a goddamned word since that interrogation . . ." Peabody glanced at the date on the interrogation sheet. "Ten days ago."

W
illiamson's head felt like a jar of snails, and he desperately wanted some Mocha Frappucino. This was cruelty. Milk and bologna sandwiches on fucking white bread, and he a vegetarian. Didn't they know what all that goddamned protein could do to a body? Now if anyone knew about protein, it was him. He should have told them that. A rat couldn't live on bologna and white bread!

Pictures of Mama. Good old fat Mama singing gospel songs on the porch in the fall and strumming her banjo, all three of her teeth as white as a fish's belly, voice as clear as a mountain stream, and all that lisping and mangled chords and farting. Marvelous as dewdrops, spring leaves, frogs' tongues.

Williamson banged on the bars of his cell with his shoe. It made a dull noise that nobody beyond the closed door outside the cell would be able to hear to the point of annoyance, but the mere act of hitting the bars was gratifying. "Hey, coppers," he called, "you get that bitch in here and I'll teach her to go spilling her guts!" There was no bitch who had spilled her guts, but it sure sounded good. "Damn bitch!" he called. "Damn whore! Ludmilla! Ha!" He banged on the cell bars with his shoe. "Ludmilla is a stupid name. It's no one's name! Ludmilla! Ludmilla!"

Head felt like a jar of snails. Williamson liked that. Lots of snails in a jar, moving around real slow, leaving slimy snail trails. That's what his head sure felt like. And there were marbles in there, too. And jelly beans. Little grains of wheat. Raindrops. Pieces of dreams. All in that jar. Big jar. Bug jar. Bugaboo. Bugaboo joy juice. Bug juice. We need more bug juice, Mama. Look at that windshield! Full of dead tsetse flies. Ugly! Stop there, get the bug juice!

Williamson frowned. Awful to have a head full of snails, really. Like having a head full of mushy crap. Mama, Mama, wherefore art thou, Mama? And who knew? There was this Mama and that Mama, and that other Mama, a thousand Mamas, all different, all doing different things—swimming, knitting, cooking, hiking, laughing, crying, Mamas everywhere in his head, and Daddies, too. Daddies with rifles, briefcases, ladders, pickup trucks, limousines, Corvettes, and a thousand brothers and a thousand sisters—big ones, little ones, ugly ones, smart ones . . .

Bang the bars with the shoe. Bang, slap, bang slap! "Okay, coppers, you get that bitch in here or it's curtains for the kid!" Bang, slap, bang, slap, bang, slap!

He could keep it up all the damned long afternoon. Let them try to come in and stop him. He'd tear them ass from toenail, rip them up like they were soggy, chow down on them like they were escargot, then make clean his escape, into the dawning night, into the arms of his Gwynethe, Gwynethe waiting, Gwynethe the lithe, the lithesome, the libidinous!

He dropped the shoe.
Kerplunk!
He looked at the shoe. So who wore shoes but the shoeless? Why deprive the sole of the good earth? The green and dewy grass. The dunes!

Then there was Fred the fruit. Fred fruit. Apple Fred, Tomato Fred. Fruity Fred. Poor Fred without guts, hollowed out like a bowl of oatmeal, left to rot and stink up the place. Poor dead Fred. Eaten by the protein poor.

Bang, slap, bang, slap!

"W
hat in the hell is he doing in there?" the visiting guard asked the resident guard.

"He's banging his cell bars with his shoe. He does it all the time. Morning, noon, and night. All the time. He's crazy as a goddamned bed beg, a goddamned loon. Jesus, he
ate
someone."

The visiting guard looked wide-eyed at the resident guard. "You're kidding!"

The resident guard shook his head. "No. It's true."

"Ate who?"

"A guy named Fred. A big guy named Fred. Ate his guts."

"All of them?"

The resident guard nodded grimly. "Uh huh. Left nothing. Not even an entrail."

"What's an entrail?"

"Guts."

"Oh."

"Well, you know, it's the whole thing. All the intestines. They're entrails. That's what they're called." He gave the visiting guard a suspicious look. "You didn't know that?"

"Well," said the guard, "I did, sure. I knew that. But I just didn't know the technical term."

The resident guard gave the visiting guard another suspicious look. "Huh?"

The visiting guard said, with a glance toward Williamson's cell, "Really ate him, huh?"

"Yeah. Just his entrails. But the guy was big, so I guess that was enough."

F
or a moment,
Erthmun
couldn't remember his name. For a moment he had to think about it. For a moment, he latched onto Jack Eberling, then Jack Entwistle, then Jack Earwig, which gave him a shiver. Then he remembered. Jack
Erthmun.
This temporary loss of memory had been happening quite a lot as he woke. His sleep had been very deep lately, deeper than dreaming, so he guessed that—somehow—his brain was merely shutting off, and that when he woke, his brain took a while to click back on. It was a good explanation, he thought. And it had happened more times than he could remember during his recently ended six-month hiatus from the force, six months he had needed away from chocolate murders, dead vagrants, and homicidal bag ladies more than an old dog needed a feather bed. Besides, come to find out that no one was within two hundred miles of solving the Choc
olate Murders ("It's not just a dead end, Jack," Captain Hogarth had told him, "it's a slippery slope into a bottomless pit. The killings stopped, and suddenly we had nothing. Only some names and some suspects who just didn't pan out. Or they didn't pan out into gold."), well, no one much cared about dead vagrants, and although homicidal bag ladies were fascinating, they were few and far between.

Erthmun was sitting at his little pale green dining room table and he was drinking coffee, eating a poppy seed and sour cream muffin, and looking at photos of the fat, middle-aged man named Fred who had been eaten by the loon named Williamson.

Erthmun liked poppy seed muffins, even though his coworkers had warned him that if there were a surprise drug test, he'd flunk, because the poppy seeds would make him come up positive for cocaine. He thought this was stupid, though; "I'll just tell the guy doing the test that I've been eating poppy seed muffins," he said. "He'll understand."

His coworkers laughed. One of them said, "The guys who do these tests don't understand nothing but, 'Hey, we got a positive for coke,'" to which Erthmun merely shrugged. He wasn't going to give up his poppy seed muffins just because there were stupid people in the world.

Fred, the guy who'd been eaten, was a handsome man, Erthmun thought. He was noble-looking, like a Viking. But if you looked at the huge, empty red bowl that was Fred's stomach, it was a different story. A goddamned bloody story. A horror story.

Erthmun picked up one of Fred's autopsy photos and studied it very closely. He'd wanted to be at the actual autopsy, but had been too late getting back from the Adirondacks. So he had to settle for 8X10 glossies. Good glossies, prepared from very-high-definition digital photographs, and they showed every nuance, every white and red curve of Fred's emptied belly. They even showed the bite marks on Fred's ribs, and on his spine. Very good photography. But Erthmun missed the sounds and the smells of autopsy. The heady aroma of flesh on the verge of decomposition, the chatter of bone saws and the snap of autopsy scissors. It was quite a sensual celebration of the real meaning of death—the poking, the probing, the prodding, the ghastly invasion of privacy. It always put Erthmun in another place, in a universe where death and life intermingled as easily as coffee and cream, rainwater and earth, love and poetry. And hey, hell, he thought, death and life had always combined to produce the ultimate poetry.

He took a great chomp of the poppy-seed-and-sour-cream muffin. It was the last of three he'd bought the night before at Vittorio's Deli, on Second Avenue. He'd eaten one before bed, with a cup of hot chocolate, and it had been soothing for sleep, but now he wished he hadn't, because two muffins simply didn't comprise an acceptable breakfast, and he felt empty, as empty as Fred, he thought, then sighed, grinned, and chuckled.

Perhaps he had eggs.

"Poppy seed?" he heard, and ignored it.

He got up from the pastel green table and lumbered over to the refrigerator, way across the kitchen, pulled the door open, and peered in. Nothing much. A can of cannellini beans. A slice of bread. Half a glass of what looked like water. Some aluminum foil covering nothing. Odd stuff to keep in a refrigerator, he thought.

But no eggs.

He closed the refrigerator door, lumbered back to his table, and felt suddenly cold. Maybe it was time he put underwear on, at least. After all, who was he trying to impress—the old women across the way, who hung all their graying undies on a clothesline that sagged between their building and his?

But being naked was okay, he thought. There were probably millions of naked people in the world at that moment, and very few of them actually ashamed of it.