“You live near here, right?”
He sighed. “Yes. But you’re not coming over, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Would you rather we talked about Tommy’s death right here on the street?” An old woman passed us—very conveniently—at just that moment. She turned to look at us, and I was sure Karl also caught her stare. She continued on down the street, dragging her shopping cart behind her.
“I’d rather not talk about Tommy’s death at all.”
And then I felt bad because I could see the raw pain on his face. His skin went a few shades lighter, and it was as though someone had extinguished the light in his gray eyes. I think we both realized he had said “Tommy’s death” and what that meant.
“I know you wouldn’t. But I have been having these dreams.”
“I know,” Karl whispered. “I think I’ve been having the same ones.”
“And they just started this week?”
Karl nodded.
“Tommy’s still around.” I forced Karl to meet my gaze. “Something needs to get settled.”
“I live over on Damen.”
And he turned and started walking rapidly. He knew I’d keep up with him.
His apartment was a little studio on the third floor of a red brick building at the corner of Damen and Eastwood, across from a gas station. The apartment was almost obsessively tidy, with the bed made up, the kitchen sink and counters empty and wiped clean, and not so much as a magazine or coffee cup out of place. There were no pictures on the walls, no framed photos graced the top of a bookshelf or a desk. The only decoration in the place was an orchid in a pot that was doing quite well and a sampler above Karl’s computer desk. The cross-stitched words were the time-honored words: one day at a time.
Karl sat down on the edge of his bed and did not invite me to join him. He grabbed a throw pillow to his chest and stared out the window. Other than a pure blue sky and the very tip the gas station’s sign, I could not imagine there was much to see.
I surprised him and sat on the bed next to him. I did not, though, try to touch him.
It crossed my mind then that I could be sitting next to a killer, a killer with a secret he wanted to keep hidden. Often, at least in the psychological suspense and true crime novels I devoured on my el train rides to and from work, that alone was enough motivation to kill again.
I took a nervous swallow and said something that might have seemed strange, but I thought it would at least let him know we were not as alone as he might think. “Paula may be right behind us, so we should make this quick.”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“How about the truth?”
Karl didn’t say anything for a long time. Long enough that I was beginning to think he was stonewalling me, and silence would be his escape. If he didn’t say anything, simply didn’t open his mouth, what could I do? It wasn’t as though I could pry a confession out of him with my fingers.
“Karl?” I said softly.
It was as though he had been waiting for this moment. I couldn’t have dreamed that his release would come this easily. But I suppose when you’ve kept something pent up as long as he had, maybe there was some relief mixed in with the anguish.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
I jumped when Karl let out a long, anguished sob and began crying, his face in his hands. Not knowing what to do, I patted his back and let him cry.
Another series of long moments passed when I began to wonder if this would go anywhere other than a grief session.
He pulled himself together and lay back on the bed, which was positioned next to the window. He stared outside and said, “Tell me about your dreams.”
I slid to the floor, so that I was leaning against the bed with my legs stretched out in front of me. I had an instinctive sense that this conversation would be easier if we were not looking at one another. We were, after all, only strangers brought together by extraordinary, maybe even otherworldly, experience.
I told him about the dreams, about seeing Tommy with his pipe, his desperate call to his dealer. I let Karl know I had seen him standing near the bed, racked with grief. His anguish had been apparent to me even in the dark, even from the distance of viewing it from a train car for only a moment or two.
Karl sobbed in the background, softly, sniffling.
I paused then, debating whether I should tell him about the quick vision I had had of him dragging the sheet-wrapped bundle. This had come to me when he shook hands in Starbucks. If I told him that, it would let him know that I thought there was a good chance he was a murderer, and I honestly didn’t know how safe I would be.
Again, we were strangers in a quiet room, discussing the most intimate of stories.
Why would he have done it? I mean, why does anyone kill the person he or she professes to love? Had it been in a fit of jealous rage? Was he trying to get away from the drugs and Tommy refused to accompany him on the journey? Was it the other way around?
I wouldn’t know anything unless I spoke up. I would have to trust that this big, furry man on the bed beside me was as gentle as he seemed.
“You dream funny.” I heard Karl sit up behind me.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like you plucked the memories right out of my head. Or out of Tommy’s.” And then he said something that further confirmed everything. And even though I had suspected it, his next words chilled me to the core. “God rest his soul.”
“So.” I had to summon up the courage and the strength to ask what I wanted to know, the question, really, that had been with me all along.
“So Tommy is dead, then?”
Like Paula—and in spite of my dreams and the odd case of the washed plate—I had held out some hope that this was a weird misunderstanding and that Tommy was still alive, working out his problems in some rehab facility in Florida, or living in a halfway house with other addicts. Or, even, worse, that he was still caught up in the throes of his addiction and perhaps was even nearby, but was too ashamed and too enmeshed in his own personal nightmare to be in touch with the people he loved.
Karl wiped all of that out. “Yes. Tommy’s dead.”
Silence fell upon the room once more, again for so long that I wondered if anyone would ever speak again. But Karl finally said, “There’s no doubt about that.” The words tumbled out haltingly, with a catch in his breath. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew the man was struggling mightily to hold it together.
The question slipped from between my lips like a pent-up thing, like something with a mind of its own. “Did you kill him?”
Karl didn’t answer right away. I began to think a guilty person would pause; an innocent one would denounce his culpability immediately. “In a way, I guess I did. But not how you think.”
I turned to look at him. He was lying on his side on the bed, facing me. There wasn’t much expression on his face; I suppose I would describe him as a man about to jump off a cliff.
“Tell me.”
He did.
Chapter 8
“It’s not like you think. I didn’t lay a hand on him. I didn’t strangle him. Or shoot him. Or stab him. Or put a pillow over his face.
“I didn’t kill him directly. But I might as well have.
“See, I was the one who introduced Tommy to a lady known as Tina. You know who she is. You can’t be gay in this town without coming across her. She’s fun at first, then she goes quickly from being the life of the party—once she has her claws in you—to being a demanding bitch, stripping everything out of your life but her.
“I brought her home to Tommy. At first, we snorted a forty-dollar bag, which now wouldn’t even be enough to raise my heart rate, but for us, it was magic. This was about two years ago.
“It’s amazing how fast things can go downhill!
“We just did it on the weekends to start. And it was doable, we’d get high, watch some porn, have mind-blowing sex that lasted for hours, as long a
s we had a little Viagra in the house. Miss Tina is murder on an erection, you know? She gives you this insatiable desire, and then takes away the means to do anything about it. Yeah, we found out quickly enough how a bit of Tina and one of those little blue pills went hand in hand. A match made in heaven.
“Or hell.
“Like I said, it was just on the weekends at first and just us. Then we started toying with the idea of having another guy over. We’d go online on Manhunt or something like that and look at the pictures of other guys and talk dirty about what we’d do with them. It was like the porn; it got us revved up even more and we’d end up in bed, or on the floor, but always behind our little screen. You know the one? You still have it.
“But soon the porn, talking dirty, and looking at sex ads online wasn’t enough. We had somebody over, then somebody else, and somewhere along the way one of those guys introduced us to smoking the stuff, even left behind his little glass pipe, and that just escalated things for some reason.
“Pretty soon we were having guys over all the time. Safe sex flew out the window. Sex with each other flew out the window. We just wanted more and more dick, and it seemed like no matter how much we got, it was never enough.
“We both came up poz. It didn’t stop us. We got herpes, the clap, MRSA…it didn’t stop us. It didn’t stop us because too much was never enough.
“And we started needing more and more Tina to just feel normal. It didn’t really make us high like it used to, but when we were without, it was hell. We’d fight, hurt each other.
“I think, deep down, we both knew we still loved each other and it was the drugs that was making us act as we did.
“Oh and doing it only on the weekends? That went by the wayside real fast. It started out with doing little maintenance bumps in the morning, then taking some to work with us, then finally when we were getting up—if we’d even slept the night before—smoking up and calling in sick.
“Then we’d party and play all day.
“We both got real skinny, and looking back, I know we both looked so sad and sickly it was a wonder anyone would have anything to do with us, but they did.
“They were just like us, and if we had favors to share, I suspect we could have been six-eyed monsters and they wouldn’t have cared.
“Pretty soon, Tommy lost his job and I was just barely holding on to mine. We got behind in everything—rent, utilities. We spent money that should have gone for food on drugs, but that was easy because we never wanted to eat.
“I hit bottom one night when I was sitting on the toilet, bleeding from my ass, while the fucker who made me bleed was giving the same deal to Tommy.
“That was ugly. I felt sick. Worried. And the guy I loved was in the other room, getting banged by some stranger we’d probably never see again.
“I wanted to stop, but Tommy didn’t. He just became consumed.
“Finally, it did consume him…completely. One night, when I came home from work, I found him dead on our bed. Just like you saw us. I’m sure Miss Tina simply squeezed too hard on his overworked heart. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t over the top. It was just sad. He had turned white, his ribs stuck out, and vomit coated his chin and lips.
“And I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I thought I’d get blamed. Charged with murder. We were notorious druggies.
“There wasn’t anything I could do to bring him back, you know? So I made him disappear. I wrapped him up and waited until about 4:00 a.m., then I took our sad little Ford Fiesta, pulled it up to the front of the building, and put Tommy in the back. Even at dead weight, he felt like nothing.
“I took him out to a forest preserve off Golf Road and went into the woods with my Tommy and a shovel. I dug for hours. It was muddy, wet, and the hole kept filling with water, but I got it good and deep—I didn’t want some animal digging my Tommy up—and I put him in.
“I covered him up, and I knelt down by his grave and scattered a pile of old leaves and twigs over the top of it.
“I was sure the whole time I’d be caught.
“But I never was, as you know.
“I said a little prayer for him. And I promised him I would never do that shit again. And I haven’t.
“So you see, I did kill Tommy in my own way. And not giving his family or people who loved him, like Paula, any closure, I know, was a very bad thing to do.
“But the question is—what do we do now? And what do I do with you? Now that you know…”
Chapter 9
Karl had told his story with a curious lack of passion. And his last question, the one directed at me, chilled me to the bone. I turned to look at him once more, and he simply stared at me, with little expression. The room had grown darker as he spoke, and it added to the dread I felt.
Should I try to stand and walk quickly to the door? Did I have anything on my person with which I could defend myself if he tried to, um, silence me? Phrases such as “leave no witnesses” and “dead men tell no tales” ran through my head, almost making me erupt in giddy, near-hysterical laughter.
He must have noticed my fear. Or maybe he smelled it seeping from my pores. He gave me a sad smile.
“I’m not going to hurt you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I couldn’t hurt a bug, let alone a full-grown human being. It’s not in my nature.” He sighed. “I know I said I killed Tommy, but I didn’t do it directly. I couldn’t have. I loved that man with all my heart.” Tears stood poised in the corners of his eyes.
Part of me wanted to reach out and hold him, or at least lay a comforting hand on his shoulder. But another part held back. I didn’t think he had actually killed Tommy, even if he had introduced him to the drug that eventually did. Tommy was a grown man; he bore some responsibility for his own death.
But something else rankled me, ate away at me. I thought of my own family, my mom and dad, my brother Greg, his wife. They’d be sick if I just disappeared. Their grief and sleepless nights invaded me in a way that surprised me. I shook my head, trying to clear it of an image of my mother in a dark room waiting by the phone.
And then I thought of what I would be like if Ernie simply didn’t come home from work tonight—and didn’t come home the next day, and the next, until I simply never saw him again. What kind of life would that be? Would not knowing be worse than knowing he was dead? I didn’t know, but I would think, in order for me to move on, it would be better if I knew something, no matter how bad.
“We have to tell people.” I said the words softly. I was afraid to put the conviction I felt in my heart behind them. I didn’t know this man sitting behind me on his bed. I didn’t know what kind of argument I was in for.
The room continued to darken. Not only was dusk not far off, but also the sunshine that had shone in the morning had vanished, replaced by gray, low-hanging clouds that promised some kind of precipitation before too long.
Karl finally spoke. “We can’t do that. I’ll go to jail.”
I turned to look at him. “Is that all you can think about? Yourself?”
His features contorted into anguish. “It’s not that. I mean, telling isn’t going to bring him back, not really. And I will go to jail, no doubt about it. And it might be easy for you to minimize, since you’re not the one who would be put behind bars, but it is a consideration.” He sighed. “I don’t know that I’m ready to martyr myself that way.”
I didn’t know what the penalty was for covering up a death, or worse, for burying a body in a public forest preserve. I began to think I should just walk quietly out of here and, once I got a few paces away from the building, call the police on my cell. But I didn’t have enough to tell them. Sure, I could accuse Karl, but he could just deny what I said; what proof was there? My dreams? It would be a simple case of my word against his. And I bet he realized that.
I had to convince Karl, somehow, to do the right thing. “No, no, of course it won’t bring him back. He’s gone and nothing can change that. You seem like you’ve tried to make
some sort of decent life for yourself, like you’ve managed to get yourself clean.”
He snorted, but it was a bitter laugh. “When you hit the bottom I did, it’s easier than you might think.”
I went on. “You know Tommy’s family. You know Paula. You must realize that if they had some idea of what happened to him, it might give them closure. It would hurt them, sure, and they would grieve. But that’s the thing—they haven’t been permitted to grieve. Not when they’re in this sort of ignorant limbo. You could release them. Don’t you want to do that?”
“Of course I do!” Karl wailed, his voice shrill. “But is it really so selfish of me to not want to compound everything that happened with me being put behind bars? Yes, I know how selfish that sounds, but I just can’t see what good it would do.” He circled around to his original argument again. “It wouldn’t bring him back.”
Then I thought of something. “But maybe it would make him go away.”
“What?”
“I told you about my dreams. And you know better than anyone those aren’t just dreams. Hell, they don’t even come from my own mind. They’re Tommy. And Tommy is not at peace. He latched on to me like some kind of psychic savior and not only made me see what I saw, but compelled me here to be with you in this room. I’m sure of it.”
Karl took a long time before he said, “I am too.”
“Do you have a picture of him?”
Karl got up from the bed and went to his dresser. He opened the top drawer and rummaged around in it, finally pulling out a greeting card. I could see it was a Valentine, a big kitschy Hallmark affair with a huge red heart and glitter. A snapshot dropped out of it. Karl held it out to me.
“Here, this is all I have now.”
I took it and looked down. It was a picture of Tommy in bed. Not a provocative pose, though. This must have been taken on Christmas morning. Tommy was sitting up, shirtless, with one of those stick-on bows on his head. Whatever gift he had just gotten was hidden in a box on his lap, amidst the detritus of bright red and green wrapping paper. He smiled at the person taking the picture, who I had a strong suspicion was Karl.
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