by Chris Kenry
“Jack?” he cried.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Oh, God, oh, God, you gotta come here quick; I’m scared,” he whispered urgently.
“All right, calm down. Are you all right? What happened?”
“Ohhh, I don’t know, I don’t know. He just started grabbing his chest and—oh, God—then he fell over and I, I think he’s dead.”
“What! Who’s dead?” I asked, my heart racing.
“Just come here quick!”
“All right, all right, just sit tight, I’ll be right there. Wait a minute, James, James! Where are you?”
“I’m at my apartment,” he said, and quickly spit out the address, telling me again to please hurry.
I hung up and dialed Ray’s cell phone number. No answer. I dialed his pager and left my cell phone number followed by a frantic series of 911s. I then grabbed my bag from my locker and headed back out to the weight room.
“I’m afraid something’s come up,” I said to Noah and Marvin, who were both dangling upside down. “A family emergency.”
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” Noah said, a look of concern on his purple face.
“Oh, my God! Their plane didn’t crash!” Marvin asked anxiously, ever one to jump to the most dramatic of conclusions.
“No, no, nothing like that, but I’ve got to go,” I said calmly, moving toward the door.
“Maybe we can finish up later!” he called out.
“Yes!” I said, feigning my enthusiasm. “On the phone or something.”
Ray called while I was driving. I told him what I knew, gave him the address, and he said he’d be there as soon as he could, but in the meantime we were not to touch anything. There was not much traffic at that time of the morning, so I arrived at James’s apartment in about ten minutes. It was a three-story U-shaped building with all of the units facing onto a central courtyard/parking lot. I pulled in, shut off the engine, and got out, realizing I’d forgotten to get the apartment number.
“Up here!” James called, and beckoned me to the second floor, where he stood peering over the railing anxiously. He was wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe embroidered with the logo of the Adam’s Mark Hotel and his long brown hair stood out in all directions.
I ran up the stairs, and as I reached the top I saw the red hearse pull into the lot and park next to my car. Ray got out and both James and I called to him. We waited for him to come up the stairs and then silently followed James into his apartment. We passed through the living room, sparsely furnished with plastic chairs and chaise longues that had evidently been stolen from the pool area of some motel, and into the bedroom. There, lying on the floor next to the bed, eyes wide open, was a tall, heavyset man who looked to be about forty-five years old. Ray knelt down next to him and checked his pulse.
“He’s toast,” he said, and gently lowered the man’s eyelids with his fingers.
“What happened?” I asked, looking over at James, who stood back in the doorway, reluctant to get too close to the body.
“I don’t know,” he said, pushing his temples and shaking his head. “I don’t know! Everything was going along fine. We were having sex, he was on top, and I could tell he was about to come, and then he just, like, grabbed his chest and just collapsed. I couldn’t get him off of me and, and ... eeeww, gross!” he cried, shaking his hands in the air as if to rid them of some sticky substance. “He was still inside of me! Oh, gross, gross, gross!” he cried, and ran quickly past us into the bathroom, where shortly we heard the sound of the shower.
Ray and I sat on the edge of the bed and stared down at the body. He was big and hairy and was wearing nothing but his wedding ring and a shriveled-up condom.
“At least he died happy,” Ray said. I went over to the floor, where the man had neatly folded and stacked his clothes the night before, and took his wallet from the back pocket of his pants. I opened it and removed his driver’s license.
David L. Bain, 14672 S. Mountain Lion Dr., D.O.B.: 11-03-1955, Sex: M, Ht.: 6’4”, Wt.: 230, Hair: Bro., Eyes: Grn. Organ Donor: No.
Ray leaned in and together we examined the remaining contents of the wallet. ATM receipts, credit cards, an old fortune from a Chinese restaurant, about two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, and a small plastic portfolio of family pictures, which, in retrospect, we should never have looked at. Not because they were private and did not belong to us—I had no qualms about that, especially since he was dead. No, we should never have looked at them because if we hadn’t then we might have just called the police and been done with it instead of getting all stupid and sentimental. But look at them we did: there was Junior, probably aged twelve or thirteen—a skinny, awkward adolescent posing with a baseball bat; and Sister, dressed in a bunny outfit and tutu. A dance recital or Halloween costume, I thought to myself; then the littlest one, all cowlicks and eyeglasses that were much too big for his tiny head, a disgusted expression on his face (not unlike the one James had made on his way to the shower) as he examined the dead trout he held on the end of his finger. Wifey was there, too. Three pictures of her. One, a faded high school yearbook photo; another of her and the deceased in happier times, sitting on a beach together, chubby and pasty-looking, sipping tropical drinks from coconut shells; then another photo, probably the most recent, the toll of three children evident on her body, but still smiling, apparently happy.
I closed the wallet and we both looked back down at the man. Ray lit a cigarette and we shared it in silence. James emerged a few moments later in a fresh bathrobe (this one from the Oxford), refreshed and much calmer, although he seemed surprised that we had not disposed of the body during his absence and winced when he saw that it was still where he’d left it. We moved into the living room and sat down.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“You should know,” James said, snottily. “You scheduled him.”
“Then I scheduled him at the office,” I replied in a scolding tone. Since Johnny’s attack, I’d been adamant about knowing where the clients and subs were meeting and tried to schedule all meetings at the office with at least one other sub on the premises.
“Oh, I know,” James whined. “And we did meet there, but his wife’s out of town and he wanted to spend the night, so we came back here.”
Ray looked at his watch.
“We don’t have much time,” he said, and got up and grabbed the phone from the kitchen wall. He held it out to James.
“You need to call the police,” he said. “Make it sound like an emergency, like you woke up and found him that way.” James and I looked at each other and then back at Ray.
“What am I going to tell them?” he asked, rising and moving behind his chair, beyond the reach of the phone’s cord.
“The truth,” Ray said. “That you picked him up at a bar, came back here, and he had a heart attack.”
“That’s not the truth,” James whined.
“It is now,” Ray said, thrusting the phone at him again, more urgently this time.
James looked at me imploringly. I shrugged my shoulders.
“I wish there were something else we could do,” James said wistfully. “He was such a nice guy, and now I guess the wife and kids will have to find out.”
I remembered the pictures.
“That’s not our problem,” Ray said, shaking the phone. “That’s the risk he took when he went out in search of dick. Now make the call; we need to get out of here.”
“But that’s not her fault,” I said.
“Her who?” asked Ray, confused and impatient.
“The wife.”
“Yeah!” James agreed, nodding.
“Just look at him,” I said, gesturing to the bedroom, through the door of which the soles of the dead man’s large, bare feet were visible. “He’s not going to be hurt by any of this. The wife and kids are the ones who’ll suffer. It hardly seems fair.”
“Yeah!” said James, warming to my argument. “It’s not fair!”
�
�Oh, Christ,” Ray said, wagging the phone at James, clearly tired of what he perceived to be nonsense. “Just call the fucking cops.”
James hesitated a moment, looking at the phone, but then crossed his arms indignantly on his chest and shook his head. Ray looked over at me, exasperated. I looked back at the feet.
“Fine,” he said. “Okay. If that’s the way you want to play, that’s the way we’ll play.” And with his index finger he calmly pushed the numbers 911. James gasped in horror, quickly crossed the room, and yanked the cord from the wall.
“Goddamnit!” Ray cried. “You stupid little fag!” And he raised his arms as if he meant to strike James with the receiver. Then, veins bulging in his neck and jaw twitching, he slowly lowered his arm. Gently, ever so exaggeratedly gently, he returned the receiver to its cradle. He took a deep breath, looked up at James, and in a restrained but sarcastic voice asked, “And what would you like to do?”
We all stood silent, James looking embarrassed, Ray looking angry and frustrated, and me ... well, I’m not sure how I looked—pensive maybe, or gaseous, because a moment later another of my less brilliant ideas bubbled to the surface. The kind of idea that is born of sentiment and emotion, and has no ancestry in rational thought or common sense. The kind of “heart thinking” that Sister Melanie routinely rails against on her radio show and in her newspaper column, because “the heart was never meant to think.”
I turned to James.
“You said his wife’s out of town, right?” He nodded.
“Yeah, she took the kids to Disney World.”
“Disney World,” I said in a childlike voice, and gave Ray a little nudge. “Did you hear that? They’re going to come back in their little mouse ears, all stuffed with cotton candy and happy memories, only to have all that obliterated by bad news. Isn’t it bad enough that Daddy’s dead? Do we really have to compound that sadness by letting them know all the seedy details of his death?”
It was Ray’s turn to stand with his arms indignantly crossed.
“That’s not our problem,” he said resolutely, but I was not ready to give up.
“Look here,” I said, and again took the man’s license from his wallet. “We have his address and his car keys. All we need to do is get him back to his house and drop him off and it will look like it happened there. It’s clear that he died of natural causes, so no one will ever know the difference.”
An idea occurred to Ray and me simultaneously, and we both looked up and over at James.
“He did die of natural causes?” Ray asked. James looked confused.
“You weren’t ... doing any drugs?” I added apprehensively.
“Oh, God, no! Look around you.” He laughed, gesturing to the patio furniture. “You think I can afford drugs? We had a few beers over dinner last night, that’s all.” Ray and I relaxed again. I continued my argument.
“Then it would be easy,” I said. “We’ll just put him in his own bed and it will look like nothing out of the ordinary.”
“And just how would we get him in the house?” Ray asked. We puzzled for a minute, but then James snapped his fingers.
“He lives in the suburbs,” he said. “I bet he’s got one of those garage-door openers; in fact I’m pretty sure I saw the little button thingy hooked on the sun visor. I remember it fell off every time I lowered it to look in the mirror. We’ll just open the door and haul him in.” I nodded eagerly. Ray pursed his lips.
“If he’s got one of those openers,” said Ray, “then he’s probably got an alarm system too.”
It was an undeniable possibility, but one for which I saw a weak solution.
“Well, if that’s the case,” I said brightly, “we’ll just leave him in the garage. Make it seem like he’d just locked up the house to go out and died on his way from the house to the car.”
James nodded eagerly.
“I don’t like it . . .” Ray said, shaking his head, but I detected a slight upturn at the ends of his mouth, a tiny glimmer in his eye, and I suspected that he would not be able to pass up this combination of morbidity and adventure. My suspicions proved correct.
Once committed to our vague plan of action, we faced the more immediate problem of how to get the body out of James’s apartment, down the all too visible stairs, and into his minivan. Wrapping him in a sheet seemed too flagrant, and James did not possess any boxes or luggage that could possibly contain his massive body. We thought and thought, and in the end decided to dress him, cover his head with a hat and sunglasses, and then, with one of his arms over Ray’s shoulder and the other arm over my shoulder, we would “walk” him down the steps to the parking lot.
His feet were useless, so it was really more of a “drag” than a “walk,” but our method worked well and gave the impression of three friends escorting their poor, alcoholic friend back down to his car. Then we reached the stairs and things got messy. His head lolled from side to side, causing the hat to fall backward, and he began drooling (if a dead man can be said to drool). The glasses then slid off his nose, fell through a gap between the steps to the concrete below, and dislodged one of the lenses, which shattered noisily. James hurriedly collected all of these accessories, reapplied them as we “walked,” and somehow we managed to get him down to the minivan and installed in the passenger seat, more or less unnoticed by any of the other apartment dwellers.
Who would drive which vehicle was the next hurdle. My car was a stick, so James could not drive it. That left him with either the minivan (which he refused to drive) or the hearse (which Ray was reluctant to let him drive, so shocked was he by the fact of James’s ignorance of the rudimentary workings of the manual transmission). We argued about this in the parking lot until the sound of our cargo’s head thudding against the side window pulled us away from our petty squabbles and back to the matter at hand. Reluctantly Ray acquiesced and gave James the keys to his car. Ray drove the minivan, I drove my own car, and together the three of us made the procession to the office, where we intended to get a map book and finalize our plan of action.
When we arrived, Marvin was sitting cross-legged on the couch in the office eating a custard-filled chocolate Bismarck, engrossed in an episode of All My Children on TV. On seeing that it was me, as opposed to, say, the pizza delivery man, he quickly switched the channel, uncrossed his legs, and spread both arms over the back of the sofa, effectively concealing the Bismarck.
“You have chocolate on your lip,” I said, and went straight to the filing cabinet, from which I retrieved one of the map books. Ray read me the address from the driver’s license and I looked it up in the index. Our destination lay in a sprawling, densely populated subdivision known as Harmony Ranch, and was located on the ominous-sounding Mountain Lion Drive. I went to the page indicated, but Mountain Lion Drive was surprisingly hard to find, seeing as it was in close proximity to Mountain Lion Way, Mountain Lion Court, Mountain Lion Lane, and Mountain Lion Circle.
“Either the area is infested with mountain lions,” I said wearily, following the small red lines on the map with my finger, “or the developer had a criminal lack of imagination.”
Eventually, with the aid of a magnifying glass, I did find the street, marked it with a fluorescent pink highlighter, and bent down the corner of the page, so I’d easily be able to find it again.
Next, I set to work with Josh the receptionist, canceling or reassigning all of my and Ray’s afternoon clients, something I was doing far too often. I knew the damage it was doing to customer relations, not to mention the income I was missing, which, with a new mortgage hanging over my head, I was suddenly highly conscious of. Nevertheless, I made apologetic calls and Ray made apologetic calls and Josh made apologetic calls, and in little less than an hour we had everything settled. We were just on our way out the door when I turned and casually inquired of Marvin how the workout had gone.
“Fine,” he said. “We did some leg and ab work, sat in the steam room a while, and then I brought him back here and gave him a copy of the
video.”
“What . . . video?” I asked, turning back into the room.
“Missionary Positions, he said absently, his eyes back on All My Children. There was a commercial break and he turned to look at me. Something in my expression clearly made him nervous.
“He told me you said you’d give him a copy of your video, the one you and Salvatore worked on, so I brought him back here and gave him one. It’s not like there aren’t enough of them.” And he gestured to the mountain of boxes against the wall. My knees buckled and I nearly fell. When I’d steadied myself I gasped for breath, unable to verbalize my horror.
“What?” Marvin asked, alarmed. He inched his large frame to the far end of the sofa. “What’s the big deal?”
My response was low and measured. “I’m ... going ... to kill you,” I said, and without warning I vaulted at him, swinging the map book wildly at his big, empty head, while Ray and James struggled to pull me off.
“What’d I do? What’d I do?” Marvin cried, his big, hairy forearms blocking his face.
“You stupid fuck! You stupid, stupid fuck!” I cried, as James and Ray succeeded in pulling me back. “That was a reporter! Not a client! A fucking reporter!”
“Ohhh,” Marvin groaned, and buried his face in his hands. I felt somewhat ashamed by my outburst, as I realized that it wasn’t entirely his fault. He had not known who Bernstein was because, as I thought back on that morning, I had neglected to tell him. Then we were all silent, while the meaning of what had happened and its potential consequences sank in. Suddenly the body in the minivan seemed stupid and merely bothersome, and I wished that we had just left it at James’s house and called the police. I went back to the desk and opened my Day-Timer, trying to remember what I’d done with Bernstein’s business card. I couldn’t find it, so I called information and got the number for the Denver Business Daily. Before dialing I hesitated, trying to mentally compose what I would say. All eyes were on me. I dialed. A cheerful, feminine voice answered.