Full Release (7 page)

“Oh my God.” I thought about it for a moment and asked, “He didn’t leave a note inside?”

“We didn’t find one.” After a pause, he said, “We did find your friend’s wallet. His name was Javier Hernandez.”

I was shocked, though I shouldn’t have been. The little sex game we’d played should have clued me in. “He told me his name was Eddie.”

Tripp looked at me. I could tell he thought I was holding something back. His eyes were kind. I wanted to tell him everything I’d left out. But it seemed harmless enough. Eddie being a masseur didn’t have anything to do with him killing himself -- people with nicer jobs kill themselves all the time. I kept quiet.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Hanson coming out of my house and into the garage. She had a cell phone glued to her ear.

“We noticed some bruising around his neck. Looks to be a few days old. You know anything about that?”

“He said he tripped. I didn’t believe him.”

“He might have tried a few days ago. Sometimes it takes people a few times to get it right.”

“There’s an overnight bag in the bedroom. Is that Javier’s?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “What else did he have with him?”

“That was pretty much it,” I said, not mentioning the massage table. It would bring up too many embarrassing questions.

He took a cell phone out of his pocket, one of the older flip phones that didn’t do a whole lot. “Is this Javier’s phone?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. He never used it in front of me.”

Detective Tripp flipped it open and scrolled around. After a minute or so, he looked up at me. “You said he called you. I’m not seeing a call.”

“I--I don’t understand. He called me.” I stood there dumb, then pulled my own phone out of my pocket. I turned it on and hit icons until I got to Recent Calls. I found the calls I got from Eddie. I showed the phone to the detective. He was staring at it when Hanson came over.

“We almost done?” she asked.

“You got a big date?” Tripp came back at her.

“Gang shooting. Truman High. I figured you’d want in, so I said we’d go.”

Tripp’s face got hard. “Kids?”

“Two.”

He turned to me and said, “Can you come to the station tomorrow and make an official statement?” When I nodded, he asked for my phone numbers. I gave him all three. Home, work, cell. Hurrying, he gave me a business card.

The detectives left shortly after that, but it was nearly eleven before the other officers finally finished. I was exhausted and starving. I wished I had the money to go to a hotel and order room service. I didn’t, though, so I had to go back inside. Even though they’d taken the tape down from the garage, I didn’t bother to put my car inside. I didn’t want to go in there.

With my remote, I tried to close the garage door. The door moved down its track a foot or so and then, with a grinding thump, stopped. I walked up to the door, bent down and looked up at the garage ceiling. A chunk was missing from the opener’s track. Stupidly, I hadn’t actually put that together with the piece of metal attached to the belt Eddie had hung himself with. The track would have to be replaced.

I stepped into the garage. Hanging from the track was a cord used to manually pull the door down. When I pulled it, the door slid down all too quickly, shutting with a bang. The garage became very quiet. It was the last place in the world I wanted to be right then. I hurried through, past the spot where Eddie had died, and into my kitchen.

I began looking around my house, afraid of what I’d see, my imagination running wild. Everything was exactly as I’d left it that morning. Except I had the feeling that things had been moved and put back in almost but not quite the right place. Of course, that was easily explained. Tripp and his partner had been wandering around, looking at my things, assessing their possible involvement in Eddie’s suicide. It was an eerie feeling.

As hungry as I was, I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t sure I could sleep, but there wasn’t much more I could do other than go to bed. I could have a drink, I supposed, but on my empty stomach it would likely make me sick.

I found my phone and called Peter. It didn’t even ring. Instead, it went right to voicemail. Apparently things were going well with the guy he’d met in the parking garage. I left a brief message. “Can you call me? Something bad happened.” A few minutes later, I called his voicemail back. “I’m okay. Something bad happened. But not to me. Well, sort of to me. I’m okay. Just call me.”

Of course, I had other friends, but none I could call so late at night. Well, none that I could call when I was in trouble. Before Jeremy, I’d been good at friends. I’d had a nice circle of four close friends and at least a dozen solid acquaintances. There were a couple of bars over in Silver Lake that I went to on weekends and I’d always find someone I knew. But then, after Jeremy and I got together, I’d let the relationships slip away until I wasn’t sure if I even had anyone’s correct phone number anymore.

One friend had even called me in a tiff around my first anniversary with Jeremy and said, “You know, he’s a boyfriend. Not a Siamese twin. It’s entirely possible for the two of you to be in different places at the same time.”

But Jeremy was jealous of my friends and did his best to make seeing them difficult. And I have to admit I liked Jeremy’s jealousy. Not because I didn’t care about my friends, but because it meant Jeremy loved me. And the idea that his love was sometimes irrational, somehow made it seem better, more likely to last. I guess we know how that turned out.

I could have called my family, I suppose. But I couldn’t think of one person in my family who’d be helpful or even remotely supportive in this situation. If I called my father and told him that a guy I’d dated killed himself in my garage, he’d say something like, “Your people do that kind of thing a lot, don’t they?”

He said that when talking about homosexuality. “Your people.” As though his oldest son came from some foreign country he’d never been to. My mother didn’t treat me like a foreign national; she treated me like a drug addict. If I looked to her for sympathy, she’d probably send a brochure for a reparative therapy group based on the twelve steps.

I could call my sister. She was easier to deal with. But she had a husband and two children. She’d likely refer me to one of my parents. Not because she thought they’d help, but because she was hoping that eventually they’d cut me out of will in favor of her kids. Any opportunity to make me look bad in their eyes aided her cause.

I decided to take an over-the-counter sleeping pill and try to forget everything. Walking from the bathroom to the bedroom, I stripped off my clothes and dropped them on the floor as I walked. I was naked by the time I got to my bed. I threw back the comforter and slipped in between the sheets.

Immediately, I jumped back out. The sheets were wet. Cold and wet. I turned on the lights and could see there was a large wet spot about chest level. Both the top sheet and the bottom sheet were wet, as was the blanket. The comforter was dry. Someone had pulled the comforter back and peed on my bed. I ran my hand across the stain and lifted my fingers to my nose. The smell was faint, but it was the smell of urine.

Eddie had pissed in my bed.

Chapter Seven

I slept on the couch. Or rather I lay down for a few uncomfortable hours with my eyes closed -- too much going on in my head for sleep. Eddie had killed himself in my garage. Well, not Eddie, someone named Javier. No, that wasn’t going to work for me. I couldn’t think of him as anything but Eddie. Maybe if he hadn’t killed himself I might have been able to switch to his real name, provided he ever gave it to me. But he’d done what he did, so to me he’d always be Eddie -- Eddie who killed himself in my garage.

Why? Why had he done it? Was he that messed up? Well, I told myself, just the fact of him killing himself in my garage said, “Yes, he was that messed up.” Should I have seen it coming? I mean, it was weird that he wouldn’t leave my place even though I dropped a ton of hints. And the way he made his living wasn’t exactly mainstream, and I guess was the kind of thing that could attract someone who wasn’t stable. But, no, I shouldn’t have seen it coming. That was expecting too much. And why did he urinate in my bed? Was he angry with me? Did I have more to do with his suicide than I’d thought? I’d only met the guy twice, though. Was he crazy? Was he
that
crazy? Was I some kind of stand-in for all his clients? Had he developed residual anger over all the men he massaged and masturbated, and decided to take it out on me?

Around six o’clock, I got up and drug myself into the bedroom. I had to do something about the bed. The mattress was obviously ruined. I stripped off the sheets and threw them into the washing machine. Now what? I had no idea what to do with myself.

On a normal morning, I would set up the coffee maker, do a few sit-ups while it brewed, microwave some oatmeal, then I’d sit down at my laptop. Check my email. Read a bit about what was going on in the world. I’d shower, dress and head off to work. Doing any of that seemed wrong. It would be a betrayal of sorts. Nothing about Eddie’s morning would be normal. In fact, he wasn’t even having a morning.

My laptop spent most of its time on the coffee table in front of the sofa. I grabbed it and made a little nest with pillows and a throw on my sofa. I Googled suicide. I learned that women committed suicide more often in China and men more often in the west. In America, most suicides are white men. Statistically, it should have been me hanging in the garage, not Eddie. Suicide is a symptom of depression. That struck me as odd. I think of a sore throat as a symptom, or a headache, but death? Death as a symptom is too final. You’re obviously not going to recover -- the symptom is bigger than the disease. Still, that was interesting. If Eddie was mentally ill, that explained everything, right? Or rather, an explanation wasn’t possible. Crazy people didn’t make sense.

I looked up urine fetishes and read a whole lot more than I ever wanted to know about things people did with their piss. By the time I was finished, Eddie’s behavior stopped seeming quite so odd compared to some of the other things I’d read about. At least he hadn’t left a finger or other miscellaneous body part in my bed.

There was no way I was going to work. For one thing, I’d promised to go to Hollywood Station and make a formal statement. For another, I just couldn’t. I called the office and left a message for Sonja. I didn’t want to say too much, didn’t want to share the details of exactly what was happening, so I told her a friend had had an accident and I needed a day or two to deal with it.

Then I sent an email to Charles asking him to finish up an “acquisitions” report comparing the “actuals” to “ultimates” on a group of titles picked up by the Home Entertainment division that couldn’t wait for me to get back. Well, they probably could wait, but having Charles screw them up might help Tiffany keep her job.

It was nearly eight-thirty. I decided the best thing to do was to get my statement out of the way. I took a quick shower, threw on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. I didn’t shave or put product in my hair. I didn’t even floss. I just wanted to go. Abruptly, my cell rang. It was Jeremy.

“Oh my God, what happened?” he asked, instead of staying hello.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“Mrs. Enders called me.”

“This guy I was sort of dating hung himself in my garage,” I told him.

“Are you okay?”

His voice was familiar and friendly, and he’d asked me that same question so many times during our almost seven years together that I actually told him the truth, “No. Not really.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

It was stupid, but I said, “Yes.”

The statement could wait. The detective hadn’t specified when I should come by. It should just be sometime today. That afternoon would be fine. Still, it felt wrong to wait, like I didn’t care that much. But I needed to talk to someone, even if it was only Jeremy.

We met about eight years ago in a West Hollywood bar called Pogo. The place had been trendy during most of the nineties, but by the time Jeremy and I ended up there, it had pretty much run its course. Which meant they had no cover and lots of drink specials. I was sipping on a Vodka Cranberry that I’d gotten for a dollar and a half when I noticed this guy on the other side of the bar staring at me. He wore a pair of dark-framed glasses that made his blue eyes seem enormous. He had light brown hair, clipped into a scraggly point on his forehead. Thin and angular, he somehow managed to look not only chic but cozy and inviting.

In some ways, many ways, Jeremy was always a Hollywood stereotype. The joke around town is that everyone in L.A. has a screenplay they’re trying to get to a producer, a movie star, or a studio head. Cab drivers, waiters, hairdressers, everyone thinks they can write a movie. I’ve been at the studio long enough to know that writing a screenplay isn’t exactly easy. Still, given what ends up on the screen, it’s not hard to see why most audience members think they could do better job.

At the time we met, Jeremy was a caterer-waiter taking an extension course in screenwriting at UCLA. Actually, he made it sound as though he was in film school, and it was only later I learned he wasn’t in an actual program and had only taken the one class. Getting to know him, he seemed like the typical artist: dreamy, hopeful, and idealistic. As we dated, he told me all about his favorite movies in such detail that I still run across films on TV I feel like I’ve seen but am sure I actually haven’t. He loved foreign films with their unexpected plot twists and mysterious downbeat endings. He even forced me to sit through some Criterion Edition DVDs of films that I could barely understand and doubted I’d have understood even if they’d been in English.

I refused to have sex with him until we’d been dating for nearly a month. He thought I was being ridiculous to wait, but he put up with it. I liked that he disagreed with me but was willing to go along anyway. I thought it meant he respected my opinions. That he’d always respect my opinions.

When we did finally have sex, it was good. Well, better than good. It was great, and I was hooked. Good sex has a way of clouding a man’s judgment, or at least mine, and Jeremy and I moved in together just a few months later. Part of me is probably still in love with that Jeremy of the first year. He was idealistic, hopeful, artistic, a young man who was sure to go places, sure to be “someone.” And I was ready to go along with him.

Seven years later he was in his thirties and still working a survival job. He wasn’t a screenwriter with several movies under his belt as he’d hoped to be. He wasn’t even a screenwriter who’d finished a decent spec script. He was disappointed in himself and desperate not to acknowledge it. Somewhere along the way, he had become superficial, an annoying name dropper of people he’d never met or, worse, only waited on, and, seemingly at least, money grubbing. The central question of my life for the last year had been, is Jeremy a good person or not? On the one hand, this shouldn’t be hard to figure out, he
did
take money that was only partly his. But then I can’t forget the person he was when we met, hopeful, optimistic, somehow innocent.

I suppose I should be fair and mention that the house was my idea. We’d been living in an apartment that was pretty cheap. But, at the time, it seemed if we didn’t buy a house soon we’d never be able to. So I pushed for it. Then I pushed for the second mortgage to rehab the kitchen and the bathroom. That doesn’t make his taking the money okay, but it does indicate it wasn’t a plot from the start. To be honest, I like to think of him as the bad guy. Which is easy enough to do when he’s a couple miles away with his pathetic loser boyfriend. It becomes a lot harder when he’s standing right in front of me.

When he arrived that morning, I could tell he’d gone to some trouble with his appearance. He wore a shirt I’d bought him a couple years before and cologne that I’d originally bought for myself but allowed him to co-opt when I liked it better on him. He held two large paper cups full of coffee. I took mine gratefully.

“Where did it happen?” he asked.

“In the garage.”

Without asking permission, he marched through the torn-up kitchen to the back door, which opened into the garage. I followed him tentatively. When we got to the garage he looked around. He took in the now destroyed track Eddie had hung himself from. Jeremy looked at it a moment, then checked out the rest of the garage. Things had been moved. There were footprints in the dust that had drifted in from the street. A few pieces of crime scene tape were stuck inside the garage door. But other than that, it didn’t look like much had happened.

“Do you think it was a sex thing?” Jeremy asked, while studying the cement floor -- as though he might come across a semen stain that would answer his question.

“He was wearing his clothes.”

“How’d you meet him?”

I hesitated. Part of me knew I should just go ahead and lie to Jeremy. But I’d never been able to lie to him. I knew if I tried I’d just bungle it. “I ordered up a massage to celebrate the anniversary of our breakup.”

Jeremy frowned a little. He always frowned when he was thinking hard, and out of character actions on my part always made him think hard. “So he was a hustler?”

I shrugged. I didn’t feel like making a distinction between guys who threw in a little sex after a massage and guys who skipped the massage all together.

“I thought you were broke,” Jeremy said. “How were paying for a hustler?”

“I only paid him once. And I had to skip the electric bill to do it.”

“So you hired him once and afterwards he wanted to date you?” The way he said it made me feel like something wasn’t right about my relationship with Eddie -- and not just the fact that he’d never given me his right name. I might have given it more thought right then and there if Jeremy hadn’t said, “I’m impressed.”

He looked me up and down, re-assessing me. It made me uncomfortable, so I walked back into the house. Jeremy trailed behind me. I regretted not lying about the situation.

“So how was it?” he asked.

“Awful. Someone killing themselves in your garage isn’t all that fun.”

“No, I meant the massage.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“It is so my business. According to the state of California we’re still partnered.”

I could have countered by asking about his sex life with Skye, but I was afraid he’d tell me. I kept my mouth shut. Jeremy put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Look, I’m just trying to keep it light. I know this must have been terrible for you.”

He seemed sincere when he said it, and without thinking I stepped forward and put my arms around him. I buried my head into his neck, and I nearly started crying. I managed not to by biting down on my lip and taking a few deep breaths. It’s too humiliating to cry in front of your ex. When I caught my breath, I tried to pull away, but Jeremy pulled me closer. He kissed my neck, then turned my chin with a finger and began to kiss me. Kissing Jeremy was like sliding into a warm bath. It was familiar and comfortable and incredibly sexy all at once. His tongue was in my mouth, and we were pushing ourselves together so hard I was afraid we’d each walk away with bruised lips. My hands roamed his body. He wasn’t as angular as he’d been when we first met, but he was still tall and lean. Almost immediately, I could feel his erection straining against the waistband of his jeans.

I pulled away from him and walked into the living room. I sat down on the sofa, a bit uncomfortably because my jeans grabbed at my hard on. Jeremy sat next to me. He was close enough that I knew what he was thinking.

“This is a bad idea,” I said.

“Yeah. It is,” he agreed. Then he leaned over and kissed me again. His lips were so hot I wondered if he was running a fever. I pulled away and ran a hand over his face, feeling the familiar shape of him. Looking into each other’s eyes, it felt like some kind of deep communication, though I couldn’t tell you what we were communicating. Other than I’m here. You’re here.

Jeremy pulled my T-shirt over my head. He ran the ends of his fingers down my shoulders, across my ribs, over my nipples. Pulling me closer, he wrapped his arms around me and slid one hand into my shorts. He slipped his other hand into my hair and kissed me again.

“God, you smell incredible,” he said.

I slipped my hand into his jeans and took hold of his stiff prick. There’s something to be said for the excitement of a new conquest, the variety of many lovers, but when it comes down to it there’s nothing as sexy as knowing someone and fucking them over the course of years. I liked knowing that when I hooked a finger beneath the head of his penis and flicked it that he’d gasp a little, then lose patience and pull off his jeans so I had better access to his cock.

After he slipped off his jeans, Jeremy got down on his knees. He eased himself between my legs and unzipped my shorts. I’d been so lazy, I hadn’t bothered with underwear. He pulled out my dick, smiling as he said, “Long time, no see.”

Before I could come up with a snappy rejoinder, he had me halfway down his throat and I couldn’t think about anything except how amazing it felt. While he sucked me, I flicked his cock with one of my feet. His prick was short, thick and flared dramatically at the head. It got hard really fast and stayed that way even after he came. Sometimes I wondered if he was ever truly flaccid.