She looked at me blankly, then said, “Oh, I see what you mean. He wouldn’t have had time to come back and…would he? I suppose I was just thinking about how he seemed. He seemed unhappy. Unhappy people hurt themselves.”
I said an awkward goodbye and left. The minute I got back into my own living room, I found the landline and called Jeremy’s cell. What time had they been there? I wondered as it rang. Would it make any difference to the police? For instance, Jeremy and Skye could testify that my car wasn’t there at, say, seven o’clock. That would prove I got there after seven, but would that leave enough time for me to accidentally strangle Eddie and fake his suicide. Probably not. Of course, if Jeremy and Skye were there at six fifteen it didn’t do me a bit of good.
“Jeremy, it’s me,” I said when he picked up.
“It’s not a good time, Matt. Can I call you tomorrow?” The connection was crap; it sounded like he was in a bar or restaurant. The phone picked up the background noise stronger than Jeremy’s voice.
“I talked to Mrs. Enders. She said you and Jeremy came by the night my friend died. What time were you here?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We didn’t come by.” He was lying.
“She said you were sitting in the car outside. What time?”
“She’s confused. Maybe she’s thinking about a different day.”
“Okay. What other day is she thinking about when you and Skye were sitting in your car in front of the house?”
“She says we were just sitting in front of the house? That’s stupid. Why would we do that?”
“Look, I don’t care why you were there. I just need you to call the police and tell them what time you were there and that I wasn’t home yet.”
“Matt, I told you. We weren’t there.”
“Someone killed Eddie. The police think it was me. You have to tell them I wasn’t here.”
He didn’t answer. I heard him talking to someone in the background.
“Matt, I’ll call you tomorrow. We’re being let into the VIP room. I have to go.” He hung up on me. Wherever they were, it had to be a pretty slow night if they were letting Skye and Jeremy into the VIP room.
Not surprisingly, I had a tough time sleeping that night. I’d done my best to make the couch comfortable, making it up with sheets and a blanket like a real bed. I tried a number of positions: on my side, face-down, curled up like a kitten. None of them worked. I was wide-awake. The whole Eddie thing kept spinning around in my head, which I suppose is where my real discomfort came from.
Around two, I got up and took another Norco. That zonked me out for about three hours. I was awake when the Sunday paper was thrown from a passing car onto my front yard. I heard it land in the damp grass with a thwack. Dragging myself off the sofa, I went out to get it. Only half the lawn was damp. The sprinklers for the other half had failed to go off. I’d have to come out with a hose later. Of course, eventually I’d have to get it fixed. Which would cost a lot of money, but if I didn’t, I’d end up having to re-seed the lawn. Unfortunately, I had bigger problems just then, so I pushed those thoughts aside. I grabbed the thick Sunday paper and ran back into the house.
I pulled the paper apart and flipped through it quickly. There weren’t any stories about Eddie’s death. But there was an obituary. Next to his high school graduation portrait, the piece read:
Javier Eduardo Hernandez born May 25, 1985 in Van Nuys, California passed away on November 10, 2009. He is survived by his fiancée Sylvia Navarez, his mother, three brothers and many aunts, uncles and cousins. He’ll be remembered for his kindness, his bright smile and his generous nature. He planned to go back to college soon. God has taken him instead.
It ended with the time and location of services. I ripped the obituary out of the newspaper and set it by my phone and keys. The funeral was Monday; maybe I should go.
Of course, I couldn’t help but be a little surprised by the existence of a fiancée. I suppose that meant Eddie was bisexual. It had only ever been guys for me, even before puberty I’d had some idea I was gay, so I didn’t quite get bisexuality. I didn’t have anything against bisexuals. Logically, I knew there were all sorts of people in the middle between straight and gay. It just hadn’t occurred to me that Eddie was one of them.
In both of my experiences with him, he’d seemed pretty gay to me. But then, I was having sex with him at the time, so I suppose he would. There wasn’t a bit of difference between having sex with a gay guy or a bi-guy, right? I wondered if his fiancée knew what he did for a living? Or was he doing it for a living? Maybe he was doing it as a way to justify having sex with guys. He might not have been bisexual at all; he might just have been repressed.
Before I went to bed, I’d plugged in my new smart phone to charge. I pulled it off the charger and turned it on. The features were pretty intuitive, and I was on the Internet in just a few minutes Googling: erotic asphyxiation. The first entry I found read:
Erotic-asphyxiation is the practice of interrupting blood supply to the brain via oxygen deprivation at the height of orgasm. Often accomplished with a scarf or belt, the lack of blood flow is believed to intensify the orgasmic experience. Erotic-asphyxiation is a paraphilia -- an attraction to life-threatening sexual activities. The element of danger may in itself heighten orgasm.
Well, they didn’t make it sound especially sexy. But that probably wasn’t the point. The thing I found odd about the entry was that it didn’t discuss the individuals who applied the asphyxia. I sort of had a handle on what people who liked this done to them might be like -- given my experience with Jeremy, who looked like he enjoyed it. But what about the people who liked to be, well, on top? Why did they like it? And how did you find them?
I had a queasy thought. If I couldn’t find an alibi, then I’d have to find the killer. But who was I kidding? I couldn’t find a killer. I wasn’t some action star; I was an accountant. I’d end up dead. My choices, however, were limited. If I did nothing, I’d end up in prison. If I found the killer, I could end up dead. Neither was an appealing choice.
I wanted to lock all my doors, stay inside all day, and look up things on the Internet. I sincerely wished I could just Google Eddie’s killer and email the information to the police. That wasn’t very realistic. I had to act. I had to somehow figure this out, and sitting on my sofa playing with my smart phone wasn’t going to cut it.
In the bottom drawer of my dresser was a pair of gloves I’d bought for a ski weekend Jeremy and I went on to Tahoe a few years back. I went in and grabbed them. Then, on my way out of the house, I grabbed Eddie’s keys from the bowl by the door. When I’d come home Thursday night, I remembered thinking that Eddie was gone because I didn’t see his car. But it had to be nearby, didn’t it?
It was a beautiful morning, cool and quiet, birds chirping. Anyone would think you were in a distant suburb, which was the whole charm of living in the Hollywood Hills -- even when you lived at the bottom of one of the canyons between two hills. Some pretty major streets were nearby, but I had to strain to hear them.
I flipped a mental coin and headed west. At the end of the block, Mariposa turned upward and began to climb out of the canyon. There were no sidewalks, just a macadam road that regularly broke apart at the edges. I turned a corner, nothing. Hiking up another block, I wondered why Eddie had hidden his car. Did he not want me to see it when I came home? Or was he hiding it from the person who killed him?
When I reached Harvey Lane, I saw the Lincoln sagging under a eucalyptus, but something was wrong. The rear passenger door on the driver’s side was partly open, as was the trunk. Someone had broken into Eddie’s car.
I walked around the car, peeking into the windows; the inside was messy. I slipped the gloves on, then tried the driver’s door. It opened. The car smelled like a cheap hotel room: stale cigarette smoke and caustic cleansers. I checked the ashtray, but it was empty of butts.
The smell was likely the ghost of some previous owner. The front seat was a split bench with tufted, tan leather. On the dash was a glued-on portable GPS, which would have made Eddie’s outcalls easier to find. Next to that was a family of rubber ducks. A mama duck and three baby ducks “swimming” behind her; the last of the baby ducks coming loose and held to the dashboard by a piece of double-sided tape. Rubber ducks must be Eddie’s “thing”.
My first thought was that the car had been burgled. It happened often enough in L.A., and the car had been sitting there for a couple of days. Some drug addicts probably noticed it and broke in. I glanced into the backseat: empty water bottles, bags from drive-through restaurants, a Dodgers baseball cap, the ragged Thomas Guide that had been replaced by the GPS. Wait. The GPS was still there. Thieving drug addicts would not have left it stuck to the dashboard. They would have stolen it. So why break into Eddie’s car?
I slid over on the seat and opened the glove compartment. Inside was an ancient owner’s manual, receipts for repairs, two unpaid parking tickets. The corner of his car registration stuck out from the bottom of the heap. I eased it out from under and glanced at his address. He lived on DeLongpre in the Hollywood flats. On top of all this was a neatly folded piece of laser-printed paper. I took it out and unfolded it. Illogically, it was a suicide note. A suicide note for a man who’d been murdered.
It said, “I’m so ashamed of myself. I can’t go on any longer. I know I’ve brought sadness and shame to my family and those who love me. And for that I am truly sorry. -- Javier.”
Was this why the car had been broken into? Had someone deliberately planted the note? And why hadn’t the police searched the car? Had they just not gotten around to it yet? The note had come out of a laser printer. Possibly mine. It was an obvious fake. More than a fake, it looked like someone trying to fake a suicide and doing a bad job of it. Someone was deliberately trying to frame me, I thought again.
I folded the note up and tried to decide what to do with it. If I turned the note in to the police, it will just look like a further attempt on my part to cover everything up. If I destroyed it and the police figured that out, I’d look even guiltier. I could destroy it, but what if it had the killer’s fingerprints on it? I doubted it did, but I couldn’t be sure. I put the note back into the glove compartment. For now.
I got out of the car and walked around to the trunk. I eased the lid up and found nothing there but a couple boxes of old clothes. Either Eddie had left them there after the last time he moved, or he was planning to donate them to Goodwill. Some of the clothes had been pulled out of the boxes. Someone was looking for something, something they thought Eddie had. But what?
As I closed the trunk, I wondered what the suicide note could tell me about the person who wrote it. He used the words “ashamed” and “shame.” He assumed Eddie was ashamed of being a masseur. But in his time with me, Eddie hadn’t seemed ashamed at all. He’d almost been brazen about it. He said he liked men and that was the reason he gave erotic massages. So the shame is likely on the part of the killer. The killer was ashamed of his association with Eddie.
Another thing about the note, it used the phrase “my family and those who love me.” This person doesn’t know Eddie well. If he did, he’d use specific names. He would have added those details to make the note more convincing.
For a few moments I was pleased with myself. I knew three things about the killer. He was ashamed of himself, probably sexually. He didn’t know Eddie well. And Eddie had something he wanted back. I decided I was so good at profiling that I should maybe have my own TV show after I was cleared of murder. But then something occurred to me.
My parents were “good” church people, and ever since I came out in college, we’d had a strained relationship. A prosecutor could whip this up for a jury and convince them that I carried deep shame. On top of that, I’d already admitted to the police that I didn’t know Eddie well. And if I was the killer, I’d be trying to find Eddie’s phone to destroy it. Everything I’d just learned about the killer could be turned back on me.
Taking the gloves off, I began walking back to my house. My mind was racing. The police thought I killed Eddie, and they thought that because someone was trying to make them think that. What chance did I stand? I didn’t have the money for a lawyer or a private detective. I didn’t have an alibi. They could prove that someone killed Eddie, and I couldn’t prove it wasn’t me.
What was up with Jeremy? I couldn’t help but think about the sex we’d had on Friday and what he’d had me do to him. Had he known something? How could he, though? And now finding out the he and Skye were in the neighborhood around the time that Eddie was killed. Did that mean something? And if it did, what? What did it mean?
Jeremy did not kill Eddie. I knew that for certain. Didn’t I? If he and Skye had gone into the house, what would have happened? The three of them fell into some kind of kinky three-way that ended with Eddie being choked to death? No, that didn’t happen. Jeremy would never have come to the house the next day and had sex with me. Not if he or Skye had killed Eddie there the day before. It was dumb, and even though Jeremy had done some pretty dumb things in the past, it was too dumb.
Even for Jeremy.
Chapter Thirteen
When I got back to my house, I impulsively jumped into my car. I needed to check something out. Ten minutes later, I was on DeLongpre cruising for a parking space. I found one on Seward and walked back to DeLongpre. I hadn’t written down Eddie’s address, but I remembered the first two numbers were 66. Lucky for me, there was a park on one side of the street. The other side of the street was small homes from the thirties and forties. They’d once been affordable, but these days, even with the real estate collapse, they were out of reach for someone like Eddie.
In the center of the block there were two apartment buildings. I didn’t see Eddie’s name on the mailbox at the first place, so I went on to the second. It took only a second or so to find his name. Hernandez. He was in apartment G. The building was from the fifties, a stucco box painted pastel green with dirty gray accents. There was no security system, so I walked around the pool, which occupied the center of the square building, following the letters until I got to G.
The door stood open a few inches. At first, I thought whoever had been in Eddie’s car had been here, too. But then I realized I could hear a TV playing inside. And I could smell that someone was frying something in a lot of oil. I tapped on the door and said, “Hello?”
A few seconds later, a short, chubby little woman in her early forties came to the door. She had dyed black hair and caramel skin; she’d probably been a real beauty when she was young.
“Yes? What do you want?” she asked, in a thick Spanish accent.
I stood there stupidly. This was obviously Eddie’s mother, and I had no idea what to say to her. “I knew your son,” I said, because there wasn’t much else to say.
Her faced turned sour. “Did you owe him money?”
“No, why would you--I came to say how sorry I am.”
She gave a little shrug. “If you owe him money, I will take it.”
“But I didn’t owe him money. I just said that.” I realized I didn’t know whether or not she still thought Eddie was a suicide. “Is this Eddie’s apartment? Did you live here with him?”
“Why do you care? Is not your business.”
“I’m just, I’m trying to figure out what happened to Eddie.”
“Some maricon killed him.” Then she narrowed her eyes as though she thought I might be that maricon. That’s when I realized she knew what Eddie did for a living. Had Tripp told her? Or had she known before?
“Why do you think that? Why do you think a gay person killed him?”
“Who are you?” she asked.
I didn’t want to explain who I was, so I repeated, “I was friend of Javier’s.”
“A funeral is expensive. A fr
iend would pay.”
My God, what kind of friend did she think I was? Did she think I was Eddie’s boyfriend? Or was she just the kind of woman who asked everyone to pay for her son’s funeral until someone did? She wasn’t going to be any help. That was clear. Well, unless I offered to pay, that is. I looked her up and down and said, “I’m sorry I bothered you.” Then I walked away.
When I got back to my house, I sat in the car for a good five minutes. Just sat there. I could barely think, but I forced myself to decide what to do next. I knew I needed to talk to more of my neighbors, but it seemed futile. One of the odd things about Los Angeles is that people seldom live near where they work. Several of my neighbors worked on the far side of the valley, a couple worked on the Westside, and one even worked down in Orange County. That meant it took them ages to get home. They might not have gotten home until, say, seven-thirty. And would probably have been too frazzled from traffic to notice whether I was home.
Two doors down from me lived Simon Willow. He worked nearby. He was always home by six thirty, walking his dog. I got out of the car and walked down to his house. It was mid-century and similar to mine, except bigger and excessively decorated. The front yard was over-landscaped, with an asymmetrical stone path leading from the street to the front door and exotic grass that grew in mounds everywhere. The house itself had been painted a designer blue that was probably called something like Midnight in Aruba.
I walked up his driveway, bracing myself to knock on his door. Simon Willow and I were not what you’d call friends. He was the kind of queer who based his entire life on the advertisements in GQ, The Advocate, and Details. Even though he was past forty, he was still into clothes, circuit parties, and designer drugs. He spent enough time at the gym that he could unashamedly strip off whatever expensive outfit he wore and drop it on the floor at a moment’s notice. And, from the way he talked, often did.
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