Low Life (24 page)

He hated what he was becoming.

She spun around, lost her balance, and fell. Her face slammed hard against the jutting brass doorknob with a force that shook the walls and rattled the windows in their frames
– her head hanging there for a moment despite her body going limp, sagging like an overloaded bookshelf – and then she collapsed to the floor. She did not move. She simply lay on her
side on the floor with her back to him.

‘Kate?’

He stood looking down at her. Then he saw a drop of blood splash against the hardwood floor. It dripped from the doorknob. The doorknob itself was covered in blood, and something meaty was
hanging from it like a wet string cut from a roast. He leaned down and reached out with his hand and grabbed her shoulder. He pulled her toward him, knowing what he was going to find even before he
found it. She rolled onto her back. She was staring at the ceiling with a single blank eye. The other eye was gone, the socket collapsed inward and expanded as the bone surrounding it shattered and
fell like the dirt surrounding a sinkhole. Blood had flowed from the hole and coated that side of her face. Her mouth was partially open, her tongue sticking out between her white teeth. Her lips
seemed exceptionally red in contrast to her colorless face, as did the blood itself. Her skin was so white. The blood was so red.

He turned and stumbled toward the kitchen and the contents of his stomach splashed into the stainless-steel basin.

Then he stood there, bent over the sink, looking at his dinner, hair hanging down in his face, beads of sweat standing out on his forehead, and a shaky moist chill still possessing him.

After a while he stood up straight and turned on the hot water and washed the mess away. Then he cupped his hands under the water, brought them to his mouth, sucked in water, gargled, and spit.
He did this twice.

If he called the police, would they believe it had been an accident? They couldn’t possibly believe he had planned to kill her by smashing her face against a doorknob. It was too absurd.
They would have to believe it had been an accident – except that he didn’t even believe that. Not completely. He knew he hadn’t planned it, but there was a satisfaction in it
which only increased his feeling of guilt. And hadn’t murder crossed his mind? Sure, it had only been for a moment, an angry urge that he would never have acted upon – except maybe he
had. Part of him believed he must have done it on purpose. And so would other people. He had recently broken things off with her, she was pregnant with his child, she had threatened to tell his
wife what had been going on: despite the absurd circumstances under which she had died, no one would believe it had been an accident. It would still be third degree murder. And even if it was an
accident, even if they believed the death itself was an accident, it was still manslaughter. Or involuntarily manslaughter. Something like that.

He walked back to the living room, where Kate lay on the floor. He looked at her there – dead. He licked his lips. If he killed her, he was going to prison. But if she killed herself in a
way that could do the kind of damage that was done to her, that was different. And if he got badly injured in the same accident, all the better.

A sane man, for instance, wouldn’t run himself off Mulholland Drive. Maybe she came here to talk to him about things. Maybe they made up. Maybe they decided to drive up to Mulholland with
a picnic basket and eat sandwiches at one of the overlooks and watch the city lights twinkling in the night like stars reflected in the sea. Maybe that’s exactly what happened, only maybe
they misjudged a turn and went over the edge.

He nodded to himself. Why not? People died in car accidents all the time, and there was no telling what kind of damage an accident could do. Accidents were unpredictable. That’s why they
called them accidents.

But if that was how it was to happen, he had to get her in the car and over the edge fast. Coroners had ways of finding out time of death – rigidity of body and such – and he needed
the car accident to be in the right time-frame.

He grabbed her by an arm and a leg and dragged her away from the closed door. Then he stepped out into the spring night, bloodying his hand in the process of opening the door. The air was cool
and fresh-smelling after recent rain. No one was around. It was late and this was a neighborhood that went to bed early. Her car was across the street. He couldn’t imagine carrying her body
all that distance in the open air; he would pull the car into the garage, load her body into it, and leave.

He went back inside and washed the blood off his hand. Then dug through her purse for her keys, found them, and pulled her car into the cave-dark garage. Then he went back to the living room.
There she was, part of her face caved in. His stomach went sour, and he had to swallow back bile, which burned in his throat.

He walked over to the body, sat on his haunches, scooped one arm under the backs of her knees – she was still warm – and the other under an armpit and her neck, and then lifted. She
was small, but a hundred pounds and change was still a lot of weight, and a muscle in his back spasmed, and he almost fell. He stumbled as he stood. Then finally he managed to gain his balance. He
carried her to the garage, struggled to get the door open and the passenger’s seat forward, and forced her body into the backseat like oversized luggage.

With that done, he went back to the living room, cleaned the blood off the floor and the doorknob – using his thumbnail to scrape between the reedings – and walked the bloody paper
towels to his neighbor’s trash bin five houses down.

Then he packed a picnic. He made turkey sandwiches with pesto and put pickles and olives into plastic bags. He sliced apples. He put a bottle of wine and a corkscrew into the basket with the
food. They’d just gone up to Mulholland to share an evening together, to sip wine and eat sandwiches and talk.

He grabbed the picnic basket and carried it out to the garage.

He got into the car and pulled it out into the street and he was on his way.

It was almost eleven by the time he reached Mulholland Drive. The gray cratered moon hung over him and as he rounded certain bends he could see the sea of the city spread out below him. On one
side a dirt wall lined with pink-flowered bougainvillea and brown rock and weeds and shrubbery, on the other a steep drop blocked occasionally by guardrails or chain-link fence, sometimes not
blocked by anything. It made you woozy to see that long drop as your car rounded a bend, to see the ground forty or fifty feet below and know your car tires were only an arm’s length from the
edge. He drove past various overlooks – dirt sections on the edge of the road lined with wood fencing, designed so you could park your car and gaze out at the city below. He drove past houses
built into the cliffside, past pink-berried trees growing on the drop, past a few parked cars.

When he got to the Universal City Overlook, he pulled the car to the side of the road, tires throwing gravel off the edge of the cliff.

He was really going to do this.

He got out of the car, fought with Kate’s corpse, put it into the driver’s seat and buckled it in. It looked surreal sitting there. It looked waxy and fake. Blood dripped from her
eye socket and onto her clothes.

A car passed while he was standing there looking at the body, but it didn’t stop; the driver didn’t even glance in his direction.

He slammed the driver’s side door shut and walked around to the passenger’s seat.

It was harder to drive a car from the passenger’s seat than you would think. Fortunately, he didn’t have very far to go. He put the car into drive and swerved jerkily out onto
Mulholland, gassing it with Kate’s dead right leg while her head lolled on her neck and blood dripped from her caved-in eye socket and onto her lap. And then he saw the guardrail illuminated
by the headlights and he realized it was actually happening. He might die. Part of him was glad of that – hoped he would die – because even if the police bought that this was an
accident, Samantha would know about the affair, and he would have to face her. He didn’t want to have to face her. If he died it was over.

The car smashed into the guardrail, which tore into two pieces and peeled back, creating an opening through which the car continued on its course. And then there was nothing beneath the car but
air and his stomach dropped like an elevator with a cut cable. The car tilted forward and he could see the trees beneath them illuminated by the headlights. A flock of birds flew from one,
frightened by the sound of the car’s engine.

And then the green of the trees rushed up at him – and then there was nothing.

He read an article about the police suspecting Jeremy of foul play, another about him being arrested, another about the inconsistencies in his story, and finally one about his
being released from custody, with no charges being filed against him, as there just wasn’t enough evidence to take to court. He was never charged with anything. He remembered Jeremy waking
after five weeks in a coma (he had slept through all of May) to a police detective standing over him – the kind of guy who wore snakeskin boots and pinky rings but sniffed his fingers to see
if his hands needed washing. He remembered an inquest. He remembered the strangeness of going back to work, how people didn’t look at him the same way, how he had to meet in front of several
groups of people and answer questions, how several of them wanted him gone despite the fact that all charges had been dropped, how he barely managed to stay on. He remembered Samantha leaving him
but coming back.

He was inextricably connected to Jeremy in some way. And now he was becoming him, becoming a man who, from the inside, he hated. He was an angry, bitter, violent man. He had a beautiful wife and
a beautiful home and he wore nice clothes but he was a monster – he was a monster because he allowed the beastly thoughts that lived beneath the surface to lash out of the deep. Everyone had
a low life. Not everyone let it control him.

He stood up from the microfilm reader and walked out of the library thinking about the man he’d seen in the corduroy sport coat – the man who had left the graffito on the corridor
wall.

He sat in the Saab smoking a cigarette, holding it between two fingers in his shaking right hand and looking through the window at Wally’s, inside which he could see
Robert and Chris and a third man eating. The third man had prematurely gray hair and was wearing a brown corduroy coat. He was eating a sandwich he had pulled from a brown paper bag.

He smoked two more cigarettes before Robert and Chris and the man in the corduroy coat left. He watched the man in the coat step out of Wally’s and light a cigarette of his own with a
Zippo lighter before disappearing around a corner with his two friends at his side. Once they were gone Simon stepped from the car and went into the diner.

He looked around till he saw Babette. She was dropping some sandwiches off at a corner booth and gnawing away on her gum. After she’d dropped off the food she turned away from the booth
and started bouncing toward the kitchen, where plates were being set out with prepared food.

Simon walked over to her and touched her arm and said, ‘Can I talk to you, Babette?’

‘Sure, Si—’ But then she stopped when she turned to look at him. Confusion gleamed in her eyes. ‘Uh.’ She licked her lips. ‘What – what is
it?’

‘Those three guys who were sitting there – ’ he nodded toward a table a busboy was clearing off – ‘who was the guy in the corduroy coat?’

He knew what she was going to say but he had to hear it anyway.

‘Simon?’ she said.

‘Wrong,’ he said.

Though he didn’t understand what was happening, a theory was forming in the back of his mind, a theory that he’d been half-ignoring for the last three days – ever since
he’d accosted Robert and asked him if he took it. This sick vertigo of repeated events had overwhelmed him again and again but he couldn’t make the events make sense – not in a
world where two plus two equaled four, not in a world where distance traveled could be measured by multiplying velocity by time – so he had kept them at the back of his mind. He had kept them
back there waiting for something that could make them make sense. And now a theory was forming, but it wasn’t whole. One thing he did know: he hated what he had become, he wanted his own life
back – and there could only be one Simon Johnson living at the Filboyd Apartments.

Parked in front of the office building, waiting for the man in the brown corduroy coat to leave for the day, Simon smoked and watched his side-view mirrors. He saw three cop
cars roll by, but none of the drivers so much as glanced in his direction.

His stomach ached. His liver hurt.

He pulled out his cigarettes and flipped open the top and counted how many he had left. Seven. He put the pack to his mouth, pinched one of the filters between his teeth, and dragged the box
away. Six. He lighted his cigarette with a match. The smoke felt heavy in his lungs. He exhaled.

Two cigarettes later he saw the gray 1987 Volvo pull away from the curb and out into the street. He started his Saab and pulled out after the other car, making sure he stayed several car lengths
back so that the man in the brown corduroy coat wouldn’t see him.

After a few turns they were on Wilshire, heading west.

Simon followed from as far back as he could while still keeping the rectangular tail lights in view. They drove right past the Filboyd Apartments, and then past the under-construction Ambassador
Hotel, which would soon no longer be the Ambassador Hotel at all. They continued on. And then the man in the brown corduroy coat turned right and parked on a side street not far past a place
fronted with a sign that read

Simon slowed down and watched the guy buzz the bell and then enter the place. Then he drove to the next light, made an illegal u-turn, and headed back toward the Filboyd Apartments. If he was
right, the guy would show up there soon.