The Anonymous Man

by Vincent Scarsella

  And then, above the mantel of the fireplace across from where they had sat so many nights early in their marriage, sipping wine and having late night cheese and cracker picnics, he saw it. The urn. Containing the ashes of some poor sap who had donated his body to science and had instead become part of a thrilling scheme.

  Jerry looked away from the urn and started moving again, around a wall to his right to the staircase that led to the three bedrooms upstairs. They had bought the house with the idea of creating the model, happy two-kid family. But the other two bedrooms had remained childless, a guestroom and his den. Crouching, Jerry crept upstairs, step-by-step, and despite his deliberate exercise of care, he was unable to avoid an occasional creak. With each one he winced, and moved forward, his heart beating so fast and hard he could feel it.

  At last, he reached the landing at the top of the stairs. To the right were the guest bedroom and his den, across from a rather large bathroom. To the left was the master bedroom.

  For the past seven years, he and Holly had slept in that very room, in the wide king bed that took up a large chunk of it. Seven years. From as far back as he could remember, they hardly ever went to sleep together anymore.

  Holly always went up first, at around ten, to read one of her glamor or entertainment magazines, sometimes even some cheap tabloid she had picked up in the supermarket check-out line, occasionally a romance novel. Jerry remained downstairs clicking the remote changing channels on the TV before sneaking upstairs to his den, his man cave, where he had lately spent too much time deep into the night surfing porn on the Internet.

  Turning to the master bedroom, he could see that the door was ajar and the room dark. Holly was in there, so close, sound asleep. But at the threshold he stopped and listened for the sound of Holly sleeping. Soft, gentle breathing, whimpering, or talking in her sleep, moving, wrestling in a dream under the covers. But he heard nothing. Jerry stepped forward and pushed open the door. The bed was made, empty. Holly wasn’t home. All that worrying about the alarm going off and sneaking up the stairs was for nothing. Where the fuck was she? Out with friends? Sleeping over at her brother Ray’s because she hated being alone in a big, dark house? Jerry sighed, completely disappointed and disheartened. He had come home to an empty house.

  Chapter Eighteen

  After a few moments, Jerry heard something, a commotion, some fumbling, the front door opening and people walking in. Jerry stood his ground in the shadows of the master bedroom, a couple of steps inside the room. Voices rose up from downstairs. One of them was Holly’s. Then it occurred to him that the other was Jeff’s. What the fuck was he doing here at this hour, alone with Holly, in his house?

  Jerry heard them coming up the stairs, giggling about something. Panic gripped him as he realized that there was no escape. There was no going down; they were coming up, already near the landing. Trapped, he backed further into the darkness of the master bedroom until he found himself against the door of the deep walk-in closet. He slid open the door, stepped inside, and after closing it almost all the way, pushed back as far as he could among a thick swath of Holly’s dresses and blouses hanging in there, smelling in them her usual perfume, a musk of bitter sweetness. There were some boxes pushed against the far wall stuffed with Holly’s old sweaters and other clothes providing a ready seat for Jerry’s ass.

  An instant later, Jeff and Holly entered the dark bedroom. One of them flipped on the switch to the ceiling fan and light and Jerry held his breath for a time worrying that the simple act of breathing might give himself away. He thought of how silly it was for him to be hiding in his own house and thought of coming out and confronting them. See what the fuck was really going on. Were they lovers? As the dizzying, immobilizing shock of the thought wore off a bit after a minute or so, Jerry decided to keep his cool, stay put, and, as if it wasn’t already patently clear, learn the full extent of what was going on.

  And then Jerry heard the unmistakable sound of kissing. But after a moment, it stopped.

  “Hey,” Holly said. “The alarm didn’t go off.” More kissing.

  “What?”

  “The alarm.”

  “What about it?”

  “It didn’t go off.”

  “Well, did you arm the fucking thing?” Jeff asked.

  “I was sure I had.”

  The discussion was interrupted by the soft barely audible squishy-ness of lips touching, tongues licking, penetrating, probing, and the hushed, exciting exhalations of breath.

  “I think, anyway,” Holly said, and then a rush of air emitted from her. “I don’t know.”

  They kissed again, longer this time, and Jerry imagined Jeff’s hands caressing Holly’s ass, her back, her breasts.

  “You ever get tired of this?” Holly joked during a lull. Jeff chuckled.

  “No, my love,” he said. “I don’t. Your body endlessly excites me.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls,” she laughed.

  “Ah, I do,” he laughed back. “But for now, only you.”

  They fell silent, kissing again, long and deep in the quiet bedroom. Jerry tried desperately not to breathe. To be caught now would be the height of humiliation.

  But the kissing persisted.

  What Jeff and Holly were up to soon became obvious and real, and Jerry had to use every ounce of his resolve to remain still. Restrain his anger. He must remain anonymous, he told himself, and find out the full extent of what was going on, how bad it was. Was it only sex (and that was bad enough), or more? Was it something that threatened the plan for Holly to come down to Binghamton and become his front?

  Okay, Jeff and Holly were having an affair. That much was clear. But after a moment’s thought, Jerry wasn’t surprised. Hadn’t he seen it coming? They were a natural pair. It may have started out as a fantasy, a passionate daydream, a private admission of their respective mutual attraction. It was perhaps inevitable that it had culminated in what they were now doing.

  And why not? Jeff was much more the kind of man Holly needed and deserved. He was slim, strong, virile. He was decisive, opinionated, brave and bold. Not overweight, not weak, not insignificant, not indecisive.

  Jerry resolved to remain among the safe perfume of Holly’s dresses, sitting comfortably, though fretfully, on a crushed box of her old sweaters, and listen with kind of masochistic alarm as they continued kissing.

  The bedroom light went off, and Jerry listened as Jeff and Holly undressed, kissing all the while, their clothes landing upon the carpeted floor with a muffled plop. After several moments, Jerry slowly and carefully edged forward, off his ass and onto his knees, careful not to make a peep. He crawled gingerly forward a couple of feet in the complete darkness of the closet until he was kneeling, bent slightly forward, at the small crack of the sliding door. Looking out into the bedroom in a narrow scope of vision from that vantage point, his thighs aching, he nevertheless had a surprisingly unobstructed view of their treachery.

  By then they were naked, in bed, under the covers, kissing and groping, oblivious of Jerry's voyeurism. He watched the performance, transfixed, as their bodies writhed under the covers, moaning, churning in lustful play and evident passion.

  For the next twenty minutes Jerry observed all this in rapt silence as Jeff finally mounted Holly and thrust forward, grunting, while Holly softly growled, like some kind of small, wild animal, as she always did out of carnal delight, a sound Jerry had not coaxed out of her in months, or years perhaps. Jerry continued watching them, unable to shut his eyes, as Jeff pumped harder and harder and harder, until he finally blasted his load inside her.

  Wide-eyed, breathless, and, Jerry dreaded to admit, thrilled, he watched as Jeff rolled off Holly, let out a kind of soft laugh, and said something like, “Woo!” Holly, for her part, remained still, spent, on her back.

  “That was fucking great,” moaned Jeff.

  Holly gave no answer. Jerry was never sure if she had ever had an orgasm. Women, he knew from what others told him, and from hi
s few sexual experiences (two, to be exact) before Holly came into his life (and now a total of four, with Jade), were like that. You never knew for sure if they had an orgasm. It was the one significant advantage they held over men, that they could fake an orgasm, and often did. (Though Jerry genuinely believed that Jade had not faked her orgasm with him that night now a long ten days ago.)

  Jerry closed his eyes and slowly retreated to the recesses of the closet, careful not to rustle any of Holly’s dresses until he came to the box with the old sweaters and sat on it again. All Jerry could do was restrain his emotions, his tears, and listen. Try not to think about what he had just witnessed.

  “Did you take care of that guy?” Holly suddenly asked out of the darkness. “Pay him?”

  Jerry felt a rush seize his lungs, and a cry almost burst out of him.

  “The body guy?” Jeff asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Him.”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Jeff said.

  The “body guy” they were talking about was Willie Robinson, the “Anatomical Preparator,” a state position, Grade 13, who was employed by the University of Buffalo Medical School. Some months before they staged Jerry’s death, Jeff had Googled the term, “human cadaver,’ and found that it was not unusual for people to leave their bodies to medical schools for dissection by students. Further research had led Jeff to the occupation of “anatomical preparator,” the person who had the grisly job of accepting possession of the donated cadavers, cleaning them up for dissection, and disposing of them by cremation after there was essentially nothing left to dissect. Jeff also found that there was such an anatomical preparator working at the University of Buffalo School of Medicine making around thirty thousand dollars a year. He was a black guy in his late thirties, or early forties, named Willie Robinson. Jeff then made a deal with Robinson to provide them with a cadaver that they could substitute for Jerry’s body and burn to a crisp in the planned garage fire.

  Before approaching him, Jeff followed Robinson around for a few days and learned that he lived with a woman and a school age kid in the ghetto, and liked to stop off every Tuesday and Thursday at a seedy looking bar on Fillmore Avenue called “The Adams Lounge.” Finally, one Tuesday night, Jeff followed Robinson into the bar, sidled up to him and struck up a conversation. After three or four beers, some laughs, and finding out what the other did, Jeff finally asked Robinson what it would take to obtain an already dissected cadaver.

  “Why would someone need one?” Robinson wanted to know. “I'm just asking,” Jeff said. “If I need a body, could you get it to me and not get caught? I mean for a reasonable, well, fee?” Robinson had given him a cold, hard stare. “For ten grand,”

  He said, “maybe it's possible.”

  That was it, Robinson became the body guy. And now, the body guy wanted more of the take.

  The sheets rustled as Jeff sat up, the magic of their sex completely worn off now that she has raised this topic.

  “But I don’t think this is ever gonna stop.”

  “No?” Holly asked.

  “He sees us as an endless supply of cash, his goddamn personal ATM machine.” Jeff sighed. “He told me he’d be getting back in touch with me—next month. Cost us another couple grand.” Another sigh. “I think he’s got a heroin problem.”

  “We already paid him what, ten thousand?”

  “Yeah, ten. I think he's figured out our scam,” said Jeff. “Knows we’ll be making a lot of money, that what he gave us was worth more than he got.”

  “But what’s his leverage?” Holly asked after a time. “Why should we pay him? If he tells on us, doesn’t he give himself up, too?”

  “Can we take that chance? He’s desperate. Says he needs the money. For a gambling debt or something. Or maybe he’s got a dope problem. I don’t know. He’s an accomplice for sure, but like he told me, he did the scam, just like us, and he wants more of a take.”

  Jeff mulled it over for a time.

  “Or, maybe he figured out a way to do it without implicating himself.” He sighed. “I don’t know. It’s just so goddamned worrisome. And we are this close to pulling it off.”

  Jeff suddenly flicked off the covers and sat on the edge of the bed biting his nails, thinking. After a time, he stood, picked up his jeans from the floor and pulled them on.

  “Where you going, huns?”

  Jeff didn’t respond. He walked over to the long dresser against the side wall and, staring into the mirror on top of it, started combing his sex-tousled hair with one of Jerry’s old brushes.

  “Huns?”

  Satisfied with the way his hair looked, Jeff gave himself one last long look in the mirror before turning around and leaning against the dresser.

  “The bottom line,” Jeff said, looking at Holly stretched out under the covers, “is that the body guy is a problem that probably isn't going away.”

  “Yeah?” Holly asked. “Where you going with this?”

  “Where I'm going with this, is this. We have to do away with him.”

  “Do away?” She laughed. “As in-”

  “Yeah, that.” Jeff reached down and picked up his sweater off the floor. “Well, what else do you propose we do? Keep paying him and hope he ends up satisfied and keeps his mouth shut? Or maybe he gets arrested someday for shoplifting or robbing a convenience store, whatever, and to beat the rap, maybe he decides to become a snitch, trade us in for a plea deal. He’s no Einstein but he’s as street smart as they come,” Jeff frowned. “Like I said, he’s never going away. He’ll be a mortgage payment for us to the day we die.”

  “Jeff,” Holly said. “Jesus. Once we get the money and leave here, how’s he gonna find us?”

  “That’s the other problem,” Jeff said. “Irrespective of the blackmail, he’s a witness. He’s someone—whether he does it voluntarily, or because they figure out he lost a body from whatever audit they might do over there someday—he’s someone who can tell the authorities who he gave the body to. And they can then figure out the rest. That ole Jerry Shaw wasn’t burned alive, that he ain’t dead, and never was, just anonymous in some anonymous shit hole. The problem is, you and me, we won’t be anonymous. We can be found.”

  “So,” said Holly, turning to her side, and propping herself up on an elbow. She looked at Jeff, who was now fully dressed and looked ready to leave. “We kill him?” There was genuine alarm in Holly’s voice. “To fake a death is one thing, killing someone and getting away with it, another.”

  “Yeah, we kill him,” Jeff said. He shrugged, then turned and looked at himself in the mirror. He smoothed down his hair and sighed. “You haven’t met this other human being,” Jeff said. “We’d probably be doing society a big fucking favor. Fucking cokehead, heroin addict, degenerate gambler, whatever. Probably beats his wife, and no doubt he’ll screw up that fucking nigger kid he’s trying to get out of the ghetto.”

  “Still, Jeff,” she said, then dropping onto her back again.

  “Murder.” After another moment, she asked, “How, how would you do it? Hire someone?”

  “Hire someone? Don’t we have enough witnesses? No, I’d do it myself. I’ve been following him. He usually stops off at the bar I met him at a couple nights a week. When he does that, he gets home around nine or so. Nice and dark on his ghetto street. Nobody around. I could wait for him on one of those nights. I could bring out a knife in a flash and cut his throat before he ever had a chance to think about it. Half the lights don’t work on the street he lives. It gets so dark out there, he’ll never see me coming.”

  “Sounds like you’ve thought about this? Actually doing it?” Jeff came over and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “That, and the other problem,” he said. “The other problem?”

  “You know,” Jeff said. “The eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. Literally. Your fucking ex.”

  Jerry shuddered as he listened to himself being described like that. He began to tremble with rage. He wanted to leap out and jump on Jeff and beat
his brains out.

  “Why is Jerry a problem?” Holly asked.

  “I have my doubts that he can hack it. Don’t you? Especially if you’re not really gonna join him, be his eyes and ears while he remains in some anonymous state of being. Like his fucking stupid cartoon superhero. I had my doubts from the beginning he could hack it even waiting for you to get down there.”

  “You really think he’ll crack? Blow us in when I don’t show?”

  “Maybe not deliberately,” he said. “But left to his own devices, given time, he’s sure to slip up, give himself away, and give us away in the process. What we’re doing is committing class C felonies, hun. We get caught, we’ll spend time in jail. Maybe a lot of time. Our lives will definitely be over, fucking ruined. And the thought of jail…”

  “So, what are you going to do, kill him, too?”

  The question, stated so simply, so directly, hung in the room for a time. From the other side of the sliding doors of the walk-in closet, Jerry felt as if someone had punched him in the gut. He fought another impulse to surprise them silly by blasting out of that closet and busting Jeff, then Holly, in the chops. Instead, he pursed his lips and stiffened a moment, desperate to remain silent and still. In the ramble of those moments, Jerry let his head clear and came to the bleak conclusion that giving himself away right then was not the wise thing to do. That it was, in fact, stupid. He had the upper hand. He knew what they were planning. Why give that up?

  And anyway, though Jerry was loath to admit it to himself right then, he seriously doubted his ability to best Jeff in a physical confrontation, even with the element of surprise on his side. He had no other weapon than his fists, and he had to take into account that Jeff was certainly a better athlete than him, quicker to begin with, and worked out on a regular basis, lifting weights at some club and running in Delaware Park two, three times a week. Jeff had also mentioned somewhere along the way that he had taken tae kwon do lessons from an authentic samurai a few years back, and had attained a green belt or something, and still practiced the art.