Laughing Man (3 page)

He whispered, his lips close to the man's nose, "It was a stupid thing you did, my friend."

E
rthmun did not believe that the dead actually spoke to him. He did not believe that the corpse in the bright blue parka and orange mittens had told him in so many words about the balloons filled with cocaine that he'd swallowed. Erthmun did not, in fact, believe in an afterlife—in heaven, hell, or in the talking dead. He believed that the corpse in the bright blue parka was eloquent in the way that the earth itself was eloquent. Because that, after all, was what the corpse was becoming—the earth. The earth had created the man, the man had died—because one of the cocaine-filled balloons in his stomach had broken open—and now the corpse, which had once been a man, was becoming one with the earth again. This was a fact as obvious to Erthmun as the fact of gravity, but he had never tried to share it with anyone. He wasn't sure why. He thought it may have been because most of the people he knew—the people he worked with; his social life was nonexistent—seemed to have their own strongly held beliefs, and those beliefs were not much in tune with his own. And he could see no need to convince others that his beliefs were more valid than theirs, even though he knew, of course, that they were.

I
n winter, Erthmun kept his apartment very hot. He had received complaints about this from the tenant above him, a young and overweight man named Henry.

"Why do you keep your apartment so fucking hot?" Henry asked once.

"I need to," Erthmun answered. He was not a man who engaged in long explanations of his eccentric behavior because, simply enough, he did not view it as eccentric.

"Well maybe you want to pay my fucking air-conditioning bill, then!" Henry said.

"Why would I want to do that?" Erthmun said.

Henry sputtered something incoherent and went away. He did not speak to Erthmun again because he thought Erthmun was crazy. "He's got a maniacal glint in his eye," Henry told his friends.

E
rthmun slept naked under several blankets and quilts, even when his apartment was hot. He slept naked because he did not believe there was any other way to sleep. In sleep, he maintained, he was drawn closer to the earth, and because he had sprung naked from the earth, that was the way the earth wanted him to sleep. He slept deeply, and long, and was very difficult to awaken. He claimed also that he never dreamed. People told him that he indeed did dream, but that he simply did not remember his dreams. His sister Lila explained, "We dream once every fourteen minutes, Jack. This is empirical fact. If we did not dream, then we would drive ourselves into insanity. I believe that all mammals dream, in fact. It's nature's safety valve."

"No," Erthmun maintained. "I don't dream. I never dream." But this was not entirely true. He did dream. He dreamed variously that he was a clump of earth, a root, a worm, a rock. And because such things have no real intelligence or memory, when he woke, he had no recollection of these dreams.

He tired completely, to the point of exhaustion. This happened once a day, and it happened very quickly. He ate voraciously—rare meat (beef, lamb, poultry), green vegetables, carrots, potatoes, berries, fruit—read his evening paper, and then stripped, turned up the heat, and went to bed. Sleep usually overtook him within seconds.

He always woke with an erection. He was a very sexual man. He got an erection when he looked at an attractive woman. He got an erection when men he worked with talked about a previous evening's conquest. He got an erection when Patricia David walked away from him to go back to her desk, or walked in front of him on the way to the car. It was her rear end that he liked most.

He wasn't a virgin, but he had never had a sexual encounter that he felt was socially satisfying because he was prone to premature ejaculation. Often, he ejaculated before intercourse began. Ejaculation was a great joy for him, premature or not, but he had learned to understand and appreciate the needs of his partner, too. So, after apologies were made, he often helped his partner to achieve orgasm as well. This made him feel that his premature ejaculation was not as much of a problem as others apparently thought it was. Besides, wasn't it true that humans were the only species who carried on with intercourse for more than a couple of seconds? Look at dogs, cats, squirrels, rhinos, lions. Didn't they get the whole thing finished as quickly as possible? Many of these creatures did indeed engage in extended foreplay, it was true, but foreplay wasn't intercourse, and foreplay wasn't ejaculation.

This night, the night that the man in the bright blue parka was being autopsied, Erthmun's phone rang while he slept. He did not sleep through a ringing telephone, but he did not awaken at once either. Those who knew him understood that if they called him while he was sleeping, they would have to let his phone ring a couple of dozen times, and that, even after he answered it, he might not be completely available for rational conversation for several minutes.

"Erthmun," he said when he at last answered the telephone.

"Jack, this is Patricia. Are you awake?"

"Awake? No."

"When will you
be awake
?"

"How can I answer that?"

"Jack, wake up."

"I'm awake.

"No, you're not."

"I'm talking to you. I'm awake."

She sighed. This kind of somnolent logic was hard to counter. She said, "What are you doing now?"

"Now? Nothing."

"You're
talking
to me, Jack. I called you and you're talking to me. Now wake up. This is important."

"I am awake."

Another sigh. "Jack, we've got work to do."

"I am working."

"You're
sleeping
,
for Christ's sake!"

"For Christ's sake! That can't be. How can that be?" More somnolent logic.

"Jack, get up, get a drink of water, look out the window—"

"Get up, get a drink of water, look out the window. Who can do all that?"

And so it went. It took another fifteen minutes before Erthmun was actually awake and responding lucidly.

TEXT OF A REPORT WRITTEN BY OFFICER GORDON LOW SUBMITTED TO NEW YORK COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT ON THE INVESTIGATION OF A MURDER AT EAST 9TH STREET AND AVENUE B IN 1992

Detective Erthmun arrived on the crime scene at approximately 10:30 p.m. on the night of August 12. He did not appear to be drunk or under the influence of drugs. He said hello to this officer and to the other officers then on the scene, and did not look at the body immediately, but looked through the apartment very briefly. After he had done this, he went out on the balcony and stood on it for approximately fifteen minutes. This officer doesn't know what Detective Erthmun was doing on the balcony because the light was low there. Then Detective Erthmun came into the apartment but still did not look directly at the body, but asked this officer if there was anyone else in the apartment. I told the detective that there was no one else in the apartment, and then he shook my hand. He appeared to be trying to avoid looking at the body, and this officer asked the detective if something was wrong. Detective Erthmun said that everything was okay. Then he went and talked to the other uniformed officers who were on the scene. There were three other uniformed officers. They were officers Grady, Bord, and Winde. There was also another detective, but she was there in an unofficial capacity as a homicide trainee, and her name was Patricia David. She was standing in the dining area of the apartment.

This officer overheard Detective Erthmun ask one of the officers if the coroner had been called, and the other officer told Detective Erthmun that he was not empowered to do that but Detective Erthmun was empowered to do that. Detective Erthmun nodded his head, and this officer overheard him say that he knew that he was empowered to call the coroner and then he apologized for his confusion.

Detective Erthmun then turned his head so he could look at the victim's body. The victim's body was behind the detective at this point in time. The detective looked at the victim for approximately five minutes. The detective did not appear to move his body during this time. The detective's facial expression appeared to change during this time. It became an expression of anger. That is, his eyes narrowed and his lips grew tight. His hands became fists during this time, as well. This officer came forward and asked the detective if there was a problem, but the detective did not answer except to the extent that the detective repeated verbatim what this officer had said to him.

Then the detective bent over the murder victim so the detective's face was very close to the victim's face, who was on her back. The victim's eyes were open.

Then the detective appeared to this officer to look into the victim's eyes. Then the detective's mouth moved, as if he was talking, but this officer did not hear any words.

The detective's mouth movement continued for several minutes, and then the detective bent over further so that his ear was close to the victim's mouth, which was open. Then the detective stood up and he motioned to Detective David to come over, which she did.

At this point in time, Detective Erthmun said to Homicide Trainee David that the victim had told him that it was "unfortunate about failed relationships" and that the investigation of the crime should center on the victim's most recent boyfriend. Detective David seemed incredulous about this, although she said nothing directly to Detective Erthmun within this officer's hearing.

A
thousand deaths happened that day. Most of the deaths went unnoticed, except by those that killed and those that died. The city survived because of the dead; the dead made room for the living, and the children and grandchildren of the living.

Near the edge of the city, at the perimeter of a landfill, in a place where they would not be seen, two brothers laboriously dug a deep hole and then dumped the body of a middle-aged hooker into it.

In Harlem, a man barely in his twenties leaped from the top floor of his tenement house and died instantly when he hit the pavement, fifteen stories below.

On East Houston Street, near the Bowery, a sanitation engineer standing too far out in the street, waiting for his coworker to return with a load of garbage, was clipped by a passing taxi and sent sprawling headfirst into a street sign. He broke his neck.

In the Holland Tunnel, a woman on her way out of Manhattan to visit her daughter in New Jersey began swiping furiously at a spider on the inside of her windshield and hit another car head-on. A gasoline tanker, just behind her, jackknifed into the wreckage and exploded within seconds. The resulting inferno killed a dozen people, and sent another dozen to various hospitals in Manhattan.

In Greenwich Village, a four-year-old boy playing with his father's .38 pointed the weapon at his mother, said
"Bang!"
and pulled the trigger. The bullet lodged in his mother's lung; she died on the operating table four hours later.

These were the kinds of deaths that happened regularly in the city. And those who paid attention to them would merely shake their heads and cluck that accidents happened all the time, there was really nothing anybody could do about it, or they'd whisper that the Mafia had its hands into everything, or proclaim that they'd never have a gun in
their
house.

These were the kinds of deaths that people could deal with. In a sense, they were a form of entertainment.

T
he stairwell where the woman's body lay smelled of shit, urine, blood, hairspray, and chocolate. The combination of odors was wrenchingly odd, and Patricia David gave the body a cursory glance, made her apologies, and said she had to leave the building for a moment.

Erthmun said, "Sure, I understand," though in his heart he didn't, and bent over the body. He did not find the odors here as off-putting as Patricia did. He liked chocolate—he was all but addicted to it, in fact. And here, in the stairwell, the overpowering smell of the stuff came from the victim's open mouth, which had had a good half pound of dark chocolate jammed into it. Some of the chocolate had melted around the woman's lips, but most of it was still chunky.

Erthmun stood close to the body and stared at the chocolate. There were several uniformed cops nearby; he glanced at one of them and said, "What do you think this is? Hershey's?"

The cop shrugged. "Who knows?"

Erthmun turned back to the victim. "It's cheap chocolate," he said. "It's too sweet—you can smell that it's too sweet. It isn't Perugina or Godiva."

Patricia David reappeared. He glanced at her. "This is cheap chocolate," he said.

She nodded grimly.

Erthmun straightened a little, though he was still bent over the body. It was naked and it had been hacked up so completely that blood covered it like a body stocking. Even the long hair was covered with blood. Its natural color may have been blonde, Erthmun thought, but it was covered with blood, and he couldn't be sure. The pretty, oval face, however, looked as if it had been meticulously cleaned off, and the very pale skin there, contrasted with the nearly total covering of blood on the body and hair, was jarring.