Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  A chill went down my spine. What the fuck—

  I looked back up at Phillip. I heard him saying again, You’ve always said anyone can get away with murder…

  No wonder he hadn’t wanted to call the cops.

  It hadn’t been an accident. It hadn’t been self-defense.

  It was murder.

  And I’d helped him cover it up. I was an accessory after the fact.

  And even if I cooperated, testified against him, I’d have to serve time myself.

  Does he know? I thought, my heart racing. Can he tell that I saw? It’s awful dark, and I only saw because my face was right there by Chad’s.

  “Are you okay? Jesus, I’m sorry!”

  He doesn’t know I know.

  Thank you, God.

  Phillip grabbed me under the arms and lifted me up to my feet without effort. He started dusting me off. “Are you okay?” In the gloom I could see the concern on his face.

  “Didn’t know you were so strong,” I said. I forced a smile on my face. “I’m okay.”

  “Don’t you want to put him in the closet?” he asked. “Or can we just leave him here?”

  “No, he needs to go into the closet, just in case. Let’s do this and get out of here.” I said, managing to keep my voice steady. I can’t let him do this, I can’t let him get away with this, but I’ve got to get out of here, think, Tony, think, there must be something I can do…I’ve helped him commit the perfect crime…

  We shoved him in, standing up, and wedged the door shut.

  “All right,” he said, “now we have to get rid of his car, right?” He gave me a smile. “This means so much to me, Tony, you have no idea.” He gave me a hug, almost squeezing the breath out of me.

  Oh, I bet I could hazard a guess or two, but damn, he’s strong. Why have I never noticed that before now? Aloud, I said, “Well, maybe we could just leave it here after all.” I shrugged. “I mean, they probably wouldn’t think anything about it, really.”

  Phillip raised an eyebrow. “But you said—”

  “No, no, I know, we can’t leave it here.” I gave him a ghost of a smile and tried to keep my voice even, even as I thought, I am alone in an abandoned house in an empty neighborhood with a killer. “I’m just a little—this is a bit much, you know.” I tried to make a joke. “This isn’t exactly my normal Tuesday night routine.” I gave a hollow laugh. “No, we can’t leave the car parked out in front.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll leave the car in the Bywater.” I went on, my mind racing, trying to think of something, some clue, to leave behind. If they didn’t find the body, he’d get away with it, but how to tip them off and leave myself out of it? “With any luck, within a few days the tires and everything will be stripped. And if and when the cops finally find it, the body will be gone, and Chad will have just disappeared from the face of the earth.”

  “Won’t they check the house for bodies before they bulldoze?”

  “They already checked this house—they marked the house as clear.” I’d picked the house just for that very reason. I felt sick to my stomach. Oh, yes, the plan was clever. I’d outsmarted myself, that’s for damned sure. Tomorrow morning the bulldozers would level the place into a pile of rubble, and when the backhoe cleared the rubble into a dumpster, if no telltale body parts fell out, that was the end of it. Nope, Chad would be off to the dump, hopefully to be incinerated, and all Phillip would have to do was pretend he’d never seen or spoken to Chad again. Sure, they’d check his phone records and see that Chad had called, but all Phillip had to do was say they’d argued and Chad said he was going out in the Quarter. Besides, it would probably be days before anyone even noticed Chad was missing—and it wasn’t like the post-Katrina police force wasn’t already spread thin. Even before the storm, they weren’t a ball of fire.

  And Phillip was obviously a lot smarter than I’d ever given him credit for.

  We left the car on Spain Street on a dark block on the lakeside of St. Claude. I’d told Phillip to leave the windows down and the keys in the ignition. Someone would surely take that invitation to a free car. The police wouldn’t be looking for the car for days, maybe even weeks—if ever. Maybe I could report the car stolen?

  But that wouldn’t lead them back to Phillip.

  Phillip got into my car and we pulled away from the curb. “Some adventure, huh?” Phillip said, rolling down his window and lighting another cigarette. “Thanks, man.” He put his free hand on my inner thigh and stroked it, giving me the smile I’d seen him use a million times in bars. I knew exactly what that smile meant, and my blood ran cold. “Do you really think we’ll get away with it?”

  “As long as you stick to your story and don’t freak when the police come by to interview you—if they ever do,” I replied, knowing that he wouldn’t freak. Oh, no, he was much too clever for that. If the body disposal went as planned, it could be days, even weeks, before anyone even notified the police. Chad worked as a waiter in a Quarter restaurant, and from all appearances, never seemed to have any friends. Who would miss him? He wouldn’t show up for work, they’d write him off—people tend to come and go quickly in New Orleans, especially now—and that would be the end of it. Unless a family member missed him, filed a missing persons report, and really pressed the cops—which wouldn’t do much good, unless they were wealthy and powerful.

  You have to hate New Orleans sometimes.

  As we drove down Claiborne, the one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was those bruises on Chad’s throat, and the two hours Phillip had waited before he called me. His story was a lie. No one freaks out and stays alone with a dead body for two hours. And I hadn’t heard anything. Sure, I’d had the iPod on pretty loudly, but I’d heard their fights before. As for the bruise on his cheek, the cut lips—maybe he’d done that to himself somehow as he tried to figure out a way to get me to help him. Chad had come over—there was no way I would ever know what had finally pushed Phillip over the edge, why he’d decided that Chad had to die rather than just breaking things off with him. Or maybe the story he’d told me was partially true—maybe Chad had hit him, he’d fought back, knocked him down and Chad had hit his head on the table on the way down. But Phillip had definitely finished him off by choking him—that was obvious.

  And like an idiot I fell for his story, worried as always about poor dumb Phillip in a jam, and now I am an accessory after the fact.

  As I turned the car onto Calliope, I reviewed several past experiences with Phillip dealing with stress and pressure.

  No, that was the other Phillip. The cute guy who always needed help, who always seemed to be in the middle of some chaotic mess.

  Not the cunning stranger sitting next to me in the car who’d conned me into helping him cover up a murder.

  I parked in front of the Annunciation shotgun I’d called home for the last five years.

  Phillip gave me that look again. “Thanks, Tony. You really are a good friend.” He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Whew. Some night, huh?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  He got out of the car and stretched, the muscles flexing. “Man, I’m beat.” He gave me that smile again, and this time it curdled my blood. “Mind if I come in for a while? You have any pot? I could use some.”

  The last thing in the world I wanted was more quality time with him, but my mind failed me. I couldn’t come up with any valid reason not to let him in. So I just nodded and climbed the steps to my side of the house. I unlocked the door and walked into my living room. The lights were still on; I hadn’t turned them off when I’d rushed over there. My computer screen glowed, the pipe and my bag of weed still sitting there on my writing table where I’d left them.

  “I’m really sorry, Tony,” Phillip said as I walked over to the table and picked up the pipe. “You’re such a good friend. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve you.”

  That makes two of us, I thought as I loaded the pipe, my back to him. Just smoke some pot and get the fuck ou
t of my house.

  That’s when his arms came around my waist, and I felt his lips on my neck.

  I stiffened, my entire body rigid. “What are you doing?”

  “Just showing my appreciation for everything you’ve done.” He started kissing the back of my neck.

  “Phillip, don’t!” Adrenaline coursed through my body as I remembered how strong he was, much stronger than me. I turned around, planted my hands on his chest, and shoved with every ounce of strength in my body…

  He stumbled backward, opened his mouth, his face shocked, and said, “Hey!” just as the back of his legs hit the coffee table.

  I watched. It seemed as though time had slowed down, as though the entire world had somehow moved into slow motion.

  He fell, his arms pinwheeling as he tried to catch himself, but he kept falling.

  The back of his head hit the edge of the mantelpiece with a sickening crunch.

  And then he was sprawled on my floor, his head leaking.

  He let out a sigh and his entire body went limp, his eyes staring at the ceiling.

  “Oh. My. God,” I breathed, as I stepped forward and knelt down, putting my fingers on his carotid artery.

  No heartbeat.

  He was dead.

  “I swear, I didn’t mean to kill him!”

  I sank down onto the floor in a stupor.

  Who was I going to call?

  Quiet Desperation

  The fishing camps on Lake Catherine were deserted. I’d hoped they would be. That was why I was driving my three-year-old Honda CR-V east along Chef Menteur Highway at almost three o’clock in the morning. This old highway wasn’t used much since I-10 was built less than a mile to the west. I could see the twin spins out the driver’s window, the lights of cars and trucks heading to the north shore glowing like lightning bugs in the darkness. When I was finished, I’d head north across the Rigolets bridge and catch I-10 west back into New Orleans without being seen out here.

  That was the plan, at any rate.

  I pulled over onto the shoulder opposite Lake Catherine just before the road curved slightly to the left. Two fishing camps about two hundred yards ahead of me sat dark and silent on their stilts on the lake. I turned off the headlights and killed the engine. Bayou de Lesaire was just on the other side of the underbrush. I didn’t know if there were alligators in Bayou de Lesaire. It would be great if there were, but it wasn’t important. It wouldn’t be optimal if someone found the body in a few hours, but even so, I figured I’d still have a day or two.

  And then I would be home free.

  I clicked the key fob to unlock the hatch.

  “You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” I said to the rolled-up rug as I started pulling it out. “You couldn’t just take no for an answer.”

  Would I have started all of this had I known it would end this way?

  Maybe.

  The whole thing had started as a joke.

  And now someone was dead.

  The great irony is Hunter would have enjoyed the joke most of all.

  Hunter had now been dead nearly two years, found in a suite in a mid-city Manhattan hotel by the maid. Ruled an accidental overdose by the coroner, the wonder was he’d lasted as long as he had. He’d always drunk too much, done too many drugs, had too much sex. He was always, as he slurred to me once over the phone at three in the morning, “up to his elbows in drugs and booze and boys.”

  He was one of those people who came out of the womb in a glitter shower, wrapped in a rainbow, riding on the back of a unicorn. There was money on both sides, his mother the sole heiress to a fortune made from something to do with the working parts of flush toilets, his father the last of a cadet branch of a tobacco family. His parents also drank a lot—his taste for liquor was genetic. He was from Savannah and never lost that soft drawl despite growing up in some of the most exclusive and expensive boarding schools in New England. He followed his father to Princeton and from there to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Money was never an issue, and he’d been blessed with a talent for stringing sentences together into complicated paragraphs expressing complex thoughts. He left Iowa for New York already signed to a top agent based on one hundred pages of a novel that had everyone in the industry talking, soon signed to a contract with the publisher where I’d managed to get a low-paid job in PR after graduating from a nothing college in the middle of nowhere.

  I was assigned to him when the book was being prepared for publication. Everyone thought Shadow People was going to break big. The higher-ups were talking National Book Awards, Pulitzers, and movie deals worth a high six figures. I wasn’t sure why the vice president of publicity—a workaholic from Long Island who thought the three main food groups were nicotine, caffeine, and martinis—assigned him to me. Shadow People was a big novel set in the gay community with an openly gay writer—and the kind of advance Hunter got was rare for that combination. Gay novels were usually published by a house like ours as an attempt to show how hip and diverse we were—they’d throw some money at it, a couple of thousand copies would sell, it would get remaindered, and in a couple of years no one would remember it existed.

  I was spellbound when I read the galley proofs. It was set in a world I didn’t know—one of anonymous hook-ups, and parties and drugs and being fabulous, of gyms and bathhouses and clubs and Fire Island houses in the summer and Palm Springs condos in the winter, of bored, wealthy, talented gay men who talked about art and beauty and love and life and thought Great Thoughts, who’d never give a low-paid PR person the time of day.

  It was a great book. Not the kind I would write, but a great book.

  Of course, he insisted on meeting for the first time in a bar, rather than at the office. Given the choice, Hunter always wanted to meet somewhere alcohol was available. When he arrived, I stood up nervously from my table where I was sipping soda water and going over my notes and waved.

  Hunter was almost ridiculously good looking, in that WASP-y white-bread-went-to-private-school kind of way. His white-blond bangs flopped perfectly on his forehead. It was all effortless; the flawless skin, the chin, the dimples, the icy-blue eyes, the proportioned frame…of course, he went to the gym regularly, but he never watched what he ate, never cared about fat grams and carbs and everything everyone else has to worry about. I’ve always suspected some of his enormous success as an author was because he was ridiculously good-looking. His author photos were works of art. Photographers lined up to shoot him. He could have supported himself easily as a model…over the years I’ve lost track of how many features in magazines like GQ and Vanity Fair and Street Talk there were, all shot by some major photographer.

  But Hunter didn’t want to talk about himself or his book or anything business-related that day. He focused those ice-blue eyes on me and wanted to know about me. About my life, my past, my dreams, why I was working in such a crappy job in publishing, finally getting me to admit for the first time I dreamed of being a writer. He was actually interested…for a brief moment I thought, flattered myself, his interest was something more than what it was, but I wasn’t his type.

  We became friends, and he helped me, pushed me to write, gave my books blurbs, introduced me to people who could help my career. I never would have made a living doing this were it not for Hunter. “You’re just as good, if not better, than I am,” Hunter said once when we were stoned and drunk, celebrating me landing an agent, “but you don’t have the back story, which just goes to show how bullshit this whole business really is.”

  And when he died in the arms of an Eastern European hustler named Yuri, he left me everything. His copyrights, his papers, his money, his Greenwich Village apartment—everything he could legally leave to me, he did. The trusts and things from his family reverted back to the family, of course, which is how old money stays rich. His family never cared about his writing. To them it was an eccentricity, like being gay, something talked about over cocktails in a hushed voice.

  I put the crates of his paper
s in my spare bedroom, meaning to get to them eventually. I honestly meant to. They were important, Hunter was important. I intended to find the right college to donate his papers to—they really belonged to scholars and history—but I just never could find the time to go through them.

  And when I tried to make the time, I would look at the pile of boxes and give up without trying.

  You see, I knew without even having to open one that there would be chaos inside. Hunter just shoved things into boxes and then wrote on them with a Sharpie, things like “first drafts” and “contracts” and “articles” and other vague things like that—sometimes more than one—so there was no telling what was where and what was even there.

  I just couldn’t deal with it.

  And there was a small part of me that refused to believe he was gone. If I started working on his papers, that would be it. I’d have to admit he was dead, not just off on a colossal bender somewhere to resurface and regale me with tales of his wild adventures.

  I loved him, and I missed him. He was my best friend.

  And then one night I had a random thought that struck me as funny. I may even have laughed. I was sitting there in my easy chair streaming some lame television show someone with little to no talent was getting a fortune for writing and yes, feeling sorry for myself. I don’t mind admitting that when you’re a writer, shitty day after shitty day can lead to drinking too much wine and smoking too much pot and wondering why you even bother and maybe it was time to just give it all up because it’s never going to happen and you’ve wasted way too many years of your life chasing this elusive dream, that after years of working hard and pushing yourself and doing everything your agent and your editor and your publisher ask you to do, no matter how humiliating, you still find yourself not making the kind of money where you won’t have to worry every month about paying your bills, taking gigs you don’t want to but you need to pay the bills.

  That particular day I’d lost a ghost-writing gig. I’d written ten of the twenty or so books in a series for “tweens” about a bunch of slutty, privileged girls at a private school over the last three years and was hoping to write at least another three this year until I woke up that morning to an email from my agent telling me the publisher had decided to “go in another direction with the series,” whatever the hell that meant, and so they were going to hire a fresh batch of ghost writers.