Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  And it rang at my elbow.

  She was more than worried; she was afraid, and the way her voice was breaking up, it wasn’t just for Lenny.

  “I don’t want to go over there by myself,” she said.

  “Pick me up,” I said. “No car. Remember?”

  “I’m leaving right now,” she said.

  I wrote “3:45 A.M.” on a pad next to the computer. I printed the instant-messaging exchange I’d had with GothicRage86, which was still on my screen, folded it, stuffed it in my jeans, and went down to meet her.

  WE BUZZED LENNY from his entryway, but he wasn’t answering. Miranda stabbed the touch pad with her thumb and pleaded with him under her breath, “C’mon, Lenny.” I wanted to think that Lenny had a bankroll stashed somewhere and had gone back across the river to wager it all on a comeback, but I knew he didn’t have a crying dime to his name, and we both knew something was wrong.

  “Maybe I should call his sister?” I said. “She has a key.”

  Miranda opened her purse and yanked out a chain of keys and smart cards. She grabbed a key rimmed in red plastic, stabbed it in the lock, and cranked the dead bolt open with a fluency plainly acquired by practice. Before I could ask her about it, she was banging her clogs on the metal stairs, running up to Lenny’s place, cursing him through her clenched teeth, leaving me behind to wonder why she had a key and, more important, why she didn’t want me to know she had a key.

  I took the stairs two at a time and caught up with her at the door to Lenny’s loft, where she used a second key, this one rimmed in green, to unlock another dead bolt. The steel door groaned when it swung open, sounding just like those squawky doors in a game of Delta-Strike.

  Sometimes, you enter a room, and life starts over in an alien place where all the old rules, habits, and assumptions are useless—a place that makes you agree with the philosophers who say that the pleasures of this world are nothing more than the torments of hell seen backward in a mirror. Or worse, that this world is just another planet’s hell. You step off a plane in a Third World country run by an authoritarian junta, or you ride a transit beam to another galaxy, where the hatch of the excursion module opens and you are disgorged onto the blasted heath of hell, a place so evil the temperatures approach absolute zero and superconductivity kicks in: your dead best friend’s condo, where you find him in his boxers, frozen in a half crouch over the keyboard, his head tilted against the computer monitor, chin settled on the back of his crumpled right fist, a travesty of Rodin’s The Thinker (with Monitor and Keyboard), a tableau done in cooling white meat.

  Miranda stifled a gag reflex and sketched a sign of the cross, then dry-heaved and coughed into Lenny’s wastebasket. Movies condition us to expect that evil is usually accompanied by a maelstrom of clamor and bloodshed, but Lenny’s place was a cone of silence, with evil inscaped an inch thick until it deadened the acoustics like tapestries, and all we could hear was the blood thrumming in our ears like cryogenic locusts.

  The only dead bodies I’d seen were in institutions where the liberal use of narcotics and sedatives had gentled my grandparents into perpetual night. Lenny’s was the first corpse I’d encountered in the wild, as it were, but when I saw the bloodless, marmoreal pallor of his profile, I knew just what to do. Nothing.

  His lips were colorless, eyes flat and lusterless, fingernails white as bones. His complexion was almost translucent, like mother-of-pearl, where I could peer inside his purpling interiors and almost see myself lying next to him on the bier, derogate, stone deaf to all elegies, blind to bosoms heaving with grief and tendresse for us, the dead guys.

  Miranda covered her face with her hands, but her eyes were transfixed, staring through the webwork of her fingers, unable to look away.

  “Lenny!” I yelled, and moved toward him, as if maybe I’d think of something to do on the way.

  He’d been dead long enough for his blood to settle, and somewhere midway down his torso, the waxy whiteness of his head and neck shaded to blue and purple, like the bleeding edge of a bruise darkening all the way down below his knees where the gravity of oxygen-poor blood had turned his naked feet the color of hell’s violets.

  It was past horrible, but I tried not to be too concerned. He couldn’t be dead. Six hours ago he was doubling down with thousand-dollar chips, leering at beautiful women, and puckering up to a single malt. If anybody could take you to school, give you a facial, pull a sick gimmick, like making you think he was dead, it was Lenny. He was clever enough to pull off just about anything, but not dead. He couldn’t be. I was expecting a big giggle, a sound clip, or a note on his chair asking us how we liked his new wax dummy. Some explanation other than death would appear any second. It was just a matter of being patient and not panicking. While I waited, I admired Lenny’s new high-end gaming mouse: a Razer Boomslang 3000, looking like a small sleek Batmobile idling, ready to roar away on the fiber-optic freeway.

  When there’s nothing to be done, people often do something anyway, because nature and human nature alike abhor vacuums, and nothing sucks the air right out of a room like death. I had the useless idea that Lenny’s body should be lowered to the floor, and Miranda decided this was an emergency, so she called 911. I lifted Lenny by the shoulders and saw that his nose had bled on his hands and the keyboard—not a lot of blood, just the kind of thing you might get after—

  Then I saw the hand mirror on his computer desk piled with tiny snowbanks of purple powder, a razor blade, a rolled-up diskette label (he’d left all of his dollar bills at the casino), pill vials, some with pills and labels, some with neither. They reminded me of the one time I said to him, “I hope somebody besides you is keeping track of all those pills.” And Lenny had blown me off. “I was born with scrambled neurochemistry,” he said. “A hundred years ago I would have been Lizzie Borden or Jack the Ripper, but thanks to lithium and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, I’m just a slack-master named Lenny Stillmach. Guys like me need a friendly doctor, somebody who keeps up with neuropharmacology and better living through chemistry.”

  Miranda was behind me giving the 911 operator the address and answering questions I couldn’t hear. “What do you mean, how do we know?” she said. “He’s not breathing, he’s not moving—he’s dead.”

  I put one of my hands under the nape of his neck and the other under his right thigh, lifted him out of the office chair, and lowered him to the floor. I arranged him in the supine position, aligned his tattooed arms and his plum-colored legs.

  “Fuck, Lenny,” I said. So far, it was indeed a sick joke, and it just kept going, with no punch line. My face burned and tears drabbled onto his naked chest.

  When I moved to center his head and close the eyelids over his unnerving stare, I heard Miranda gasp and stop talking on the phone. I looked up at her; she had covered the phone with her hand.

  “Don’t touch his blood,” she said, horror and grief raveling her face. She held her hand out to stop me. “Don’t touch his blood. He—” And then she talked again into the phone to the 911 operator. “We don’t know how long. He was dead when we got here.”

  The word blood was like she had yanked the chain on a bare lightbulb in a dark cellar and the luciform glare of revelation fell on Lenny’s carcass. His remains looked like something left by Satan the predator, who had ambushed Lenny, had fallen upon him in the dead of night and stripped him of the magic pelt of life. Nothing left but a body bag of skin and bones forlorn in fallen flesh. He’d always been skinny—not sickly, just too thin—and six months ago he went through a phase where he looked certifiably anorexic, but we both attributed his weight loss to his cravings for what he called “S&M,” substances and medications, which he was more fond of than nutrition.

  “Lenny has AIDS,” said Miranda; she was looking at me but talking into the phone. “Yes. HIV positive.”

  Now Miranda was off the phone, shuddering next to me, the two of us looking down at dead Lenny.

  “He didn’t tell anybody,” she said, “un
less he had to. He wasn’t sick with it yet, but he was HIV-positive.”

  “How’d he—” I began.

  She pulled strands of her hair away from her chin where they’d stuck in flecks of saliva; she wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her leather jacket.

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t that long ago that he found out he was positive,” she said. “I don’t think he knew for sure how he got it.”

  I scanned the pill vials again: lithium, Celexa, Ritalin, Percocet, OxyContin, blah blah, on down the line, no names I didn’t recognize, no Crixivan or Viracept, nothing that looked like the stuff you’d take if you had AIDS. I’d seen stray pill vials aplenty around his place over the years, but I’d never seen so many together in one place, never noticed the doctor’s name before, either—the same on every vial: Raymond Guttman, M.D.

  My ears rang with silence and burned with shame as I took a moment to consider whether I might have accidentally swapped blood with him on the basketball court, passing a joint, sharing a razor. What about the time he sliced open his hand when we were splitting firewood at his mom’s? He was a mess of blood, and I’d helped him clean the wound with peroxide.

  We heard sirens, and Miranda shook harder, on her way to a full-blown grand mal of grief and terror.

  I heard a beep and looked up at Lenny’s monitor, which must have come out of sleep mode when I moved his hands on the keyboard. His screen slowly brightened like dawn breaking on the frozen plains of a new world naked, where Lenny’s browser had several sessions open: The window on top was an XXX site churning out animated GIFs and JPGs of porn stars in daisy chains of blow jobs and cluster fucks being dished up by a server off in some infernal cyberspace basement. And behind it, the map still loaded from the Delta-Strike game we played. Only half of the man-machine hybrid named Lenny Stillmach was dead; the other half was still up and running.

  AIDS? Lenny? He’d never acted gay, and the porn on the screen was plainly hetero. So maybe he was bi, or gay—a double agent and master of deception. Or maybe those needles he’d played with in college weren’t really sterile. Or his number came up, like the time he’d won twelve grand at the tables over at Harrah’s and had celebrated by saying yes to a hooker. She’d been flirting with him forever, or at least since she’d seen those black-and-gold thousand-dollar chips stacked in front of him. He couldn’t say no, and next morning he swore it was all safe sex, and that he’d paid her double for superior skillful service. And then he tested positive, and now he’s dead. But HIV positive doesn’t jump up and kill you at the keyboard. Something else happened.

  Window number three was a chat session open on his desktop, with the Attila-at-Home Web Cam Commander running for a Net meeting. The incoming video window was dark and blank. If someone had had a camera going on the other side, that someone was gone now. Then I glanced up and saw Lenny’s Intel Pro PC camera mounted on the top rim of his monitor, it’s glass eye staring right back at me, a tiny red light under the lens on the base blinking red. The Attila-at-Home Web cam was on and transmitting.

  “Turn it off!” Miranda cried.

  I wasn’t sure if she meant turn off the porn, or if she was tracking with me: namely, maybe somebody was on the other side of the Attila-at-Home camera…watching. Maybe they’d been watching when Lenny had—

  “Turn it off!” she yelled. She reached under his computer desk, grabbed the power strip, and started yanking out the plugs to the backup power supply, the web cam, the monitor, the machine.

  “Miranda,” I said. “Don’t—”

  “You want somebody seeing him like this? You want that human garbage on the screen when the ambulance gets here?”

  I looked up again at the dark monitor and listened to the hard disk and the cooling fans spin down, realizing that if somebody had been there watching when Lenny died, any trace of the onlooker was probably evaporating from volatile memory, unless one of Lenny’s programs had kept a visitor’s log.

  I heard Miranda sobbing and calling Lenny’s name, but the stillness of his body seemed to soak up words before I could hear them.

  “Carver, the ambulance is coming. The cops, the EMTs. What do we tell them?”

  I looked at Lenny and the pill vials and the tidy little rows of powder on the mirror. It didn’t occur to me there was much to tell. It was just a beautiful idea named Lenny being desecrated and mutilated by gangs of ugly facts.

  “Are we just going to let them find all of this that he was taking? Tell them what he was doing?” She glanced in horror again at the monitor. “What about his mom? The newspaper?”

  “It’s over,” I said. “We can’t make it look any different than it is.”

  I heard voices and footfalls on the metal stairs.

  7

  THE REGIONAL INVESTIGATOR

  THE SPECTER OF LENNY’S corpse temporarily obliterated our considerable theoretical knowledge about dead bodies and the medical and legal procedures for determining the cause, mechanism, and manner of death. For years Miranda and I had seen folder after virtual folder of court files, autopsy reports, medical-examiner and coroner affidavits, emergency-room records, police reports, and death certificates, all containing the statements of witnesses—expert, official, unofficial. But we didn’t think of ourselves as witnesses about to give statements; we were just two fashionably dissolute slackers who’d found one of our own slumped against the terminal, dead. Official statements never occurred to us, even after the first Omaha police officer arrived.

  She was thirtyish and slight in two-tone blues and a black leather utility belt festooned with the tools of her trade. She took our names and addresses, asking for identification and our relationship to the deceased, but she pointedly did not ask us for any details about Lenny or how we’d found him dead in his condo.

  When Miranda started telling her how we’d found him slumped over the keyboard, the officer asked her to please wait until the regional investigator arrived to tell her story. Then she took Miranda by the hand and helped her over to Lenny’s couch on the far side of the room.

  Two EMTs arrived wearing double plastic gowns, hairnets, double surgical gloves and masks, as if Lenny’s place were the hot zone of an Ebola virus outbreak. They had a high-tech gurney and life-support equipment in tow, but one look at the body and the hurry left them.

  I made a move to join Miranda and console her, but the officer met me halfway and motioned me onto a stool at the breakfast bar of Lenny’s trendy loft kitchen.

  “Mr. Hartnett, sir, it would be better if you sat here and waited for the regional investigator.”

  Miranda covered her face and sobbed. I started to get up again.

  “It would be better if you stayed there until the regional investigator gets here. He’s on his way and should be here any minute.”

  Her tone of voice and the glint in her eye came with a subtext: Just obey, she seemed to be saying, then I won’t have to give you any painful lessons.

  If I didn’t obey, I sensed I’d be the latest proof that she never missed a chance to be as ruthless as the next male prick.

  She went back to confer with the EMTs, who were calling in on radios about needing an autopsy, notifying the Douglas County coroner; it looked to be a drug overdose, accidental or otherwise, but no one had examined the body.

  How many times had I seen in print the words “witnesses were sequestered and interviewed separately,” but the sectors of my brain containing occupational data were inaccessible; system resources were being consumed by a painful urge to hold Miranda and commingle our sorrows.

  The regional investigator was a burly, late-middle-aged plainclothesman named Charlie Becker with eyes as black and lustery as obsidian. His face seemed to have settled long ago into a single, impassive expression that gave no clue to his feelings or thoughts. He looked like he’d gone to bed drunk watching late-night TV, until his phone woke him up an hour ago. But here he was, showered, shaved, and dressed like a middle manager, in a sport coat and tie. He had to be sixty a
t least, with thin hair past gray and on the way to white, but he looked like he could still knock me down if he had to. He seemed agreeable enough, accustomed to the routine: the cause of death appeared self-evident, and he’d soon be back home in bed.

  He went first to the body, listening to the EMTs and the policewoman, who handed him a clipboard and briefed him on details. He fished his reading glasses out, grunted, and stooped to squint at the pill vials and the rows of powder on the mirror. Again, I heard them on the radio describing Lenny’s death as an “apparent drug overdose” and “no apparent indication of foul play.” Afterward, Becker came over and introduced himself.

  While we spoke, the uniformed officer was taking more name, rank, and serial-number information from Miranda at the door, and Becker saw me noticing.

  “Officer McAllister will take Ms. Pryor to the station—it’s just down the street—and you can ride over with me. We’ll take your statements there, and then I’ll have an officer bring you back here to collect your vehicle.”

  By now a photographer had arrived, and Becker went over to discuss some of the shots he wanted of Lenny and of the pill vials and paraphernalia scattered on the computer table.

  I saw him stop and look at the web cam, first from the front, then from each side.

  “Is that a camera?” he asked, fishing out his glasses again and squinting at it.

  I nodded. “It feeds video into his computer, and out to the Internet if he wants to connect with somebody else. It’s called Attila-at-Home cam.”

  Becker made a face but then said, “I like cameras. So it’s like a video camera, but that small?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They used to be herky-jerky, but they’re better quality now.”

  “So he was slumped over the keyboard. Was the computer on?”

  “No,” Miranda blurted. “No, it wasn’t on.”