Low Life (7 page)

What’s your name? Simon wondered.

The woman muted the television and looked around.

‘Jeremy?’

Had he said it aloud? He didn’t think he had. She couldn’t have heard him.

Maybe he had.

‘You’re going crazy, Samantha,’ she said to herself. She turned the television’s volume back on, watched the news for a moment or two longer, and then set the remote back
down on the arm of the couch and walked away. She disappeared into a hallway.

Her name was Samantha.

Simon wondered what it was like to live with her. He wondered what it would be like to look into the eyes of a woman like that and have her tell you she loves you; he wondered what it would be
like to tell her you love her, too.

He pushed open the closet door and stepped out into the living room. He closed the closet door behind him.

He walked softly across the hardwood floor and once he’d nearly reached the hallway he stopped. He leaned forward and looked around the corner. At the end of the hallway was an open door,
and on the other side was Samantha. She was sitting on a toilet, her skirt bunched up around her waist and panties stretched like a rubber band between her knees. She was reading a magazine with an
actress on its glossy cover.

‘Samantha,’ he said in a low whisper. ‘Your name is Samantha.’

He walked to the front door, grabbed the doorknob. He turned it carefully and pulled the door open – pausing momentarily when it squeaked, glancing back over his shoulder, seeing nothing,
and continuing – and then he stepped out into the early-evening sunlight.

He walked toward the street, looking around, feeling paranoia flowing cold through his veins, throbbing at his temples like a headache.

Samantha’s car was in the driveway now, parked on the right side, a dark blue Mercedes, perhaps the same year as Simon’s Volvo, but in much better shape, paint new, well-oiled
leather interior uncracked by the sun.

He walked past it, reached the street, slid onto his torn-up driver’s seat, and tried to slam the door shut behind him, but it banged against the metal seatbelt clip and bounced open
again. He grabbed the clip and pulled the belt over his chest and waist and latched it, then tried the door a second time. This time it stayed closed. He started his car, turned it around, and
drove down the street the same way he had come.

The two blonde girls in the flower-print dresses with red ribbons in their hair were still in their yard. Simon glanced at them as he drove, and though he might have been mistaken, he
would’ve sworn they were taking turns poking a dead cat with a stick.

He pushed through the smudged glass doors and into the lobby of the Filboyd Apartments carrying a plastic bag from the hardware store he’d stopped at on the way home. He
headed up the dark stairwell toward his apartment, smelling stale urine as he went. At the top of the stairs, he saw his landlord hadn’t yet gotten someone to clean up the graffito painted
there.

it still said, somewhat impatiently.

When he turned left at the head of the stairs, he saw Robert standing in the corridor by his front door. His arms were crossed and he was leaning against the wall.

Simon’s stomach clenched as if squeezed by a fist. Why was he here?

After a moment: ‘Hi.’

‘I got a flat tire. Hoping to use your phone.’

‘Flat tire?’

‘Yeah, over on Normandie.’

‘Normandie? Don’t you live off Western?’

‘You can’t choose where to get a flat.’

‘You don’t have a cell phone?’

Although Simon himself didn’t have one, it seemed odd to him; everybody had a cell phone these days.

‘I do,’ Robert said, pulling it from his pocket and holding it up, ‘but I dropped it in the toilet at work when I was pulling up my pants. Fried it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is it a problem?’

Simon tried to smile but it felt like a grimace. All he could think of was the corpse in his bathtub.

‘Of course not,’ he said.

He walked to the front door and unhooked the shoelace from the nail in the wall. The front door swung open on its own. It occurred to him now how dumb it had been to leave his apartment
unsecured like that. He should have done something to keep the apartment closed off this morning. Well, what was done was done. There was no point in worrying over—

‘Come on in.’

They stepped over the splinters of wood still on the floor.

Simon pushed the door shut behind them, and then shoved the back of a chair under the doorknob to keep it closed.

‘Go ahead and call whoever you need to. Want a drink?’

‘Sure.’

Simon nodded, then headed into the kitchen.

The two men sat on the couch with their whiskeys. Someone from the auto club would be arriving within thirty minutes. Simon watched Francine pull fish food from the neuston at
the water’s surface and into her black mouth. He wanted Robert out of his apartment.

He had done Robert a favor a few months ago, a big one – it was how they’d become friends – but it wasn’t the kind of favor that would allow Simon to show the man the
corpse in his tub. Robert might have been beaten to a pulp and/or spent a few months in a Tijuana jail cell without Simon’s help – but months were not years.

He wanted Robert out of his apartment.

Robert took a swallow of his whiskey.

‘You never said what happened last night.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. It was all he could think to say.

‘So?’

‘It’s not even worth discussing, really.’

‘What else are we gonna talk about? Politics?’ He said this last word with disgust.

Simon exhaled in a sigh, took a sip of his whiskey.

‘This guy broke into my apartment. I heard the noise and came out to the living room. I’d been in bed. He was digging through my record collection. I have a lot of old records. Maybe
he followed me home from the record shop on La Brea on Saturday. I don’t know. Anyways, when he saw me, he attacked. I fought back, but . . . he must have brained me or something.’ He
shook his head to demonstrate his confusion. ‘When I woke up he was gone.’

Robert looked at the record collection.

‘It doesn’t look like he took anything.’

‘He must have panicked after the confrontation.’

‘Maybe,’ Robert said.

Simon reached into the inside pocket of his corduroy sport coat and pulled out his Camel Filters and his Zippo lighter. He lighted a cigarette. Usually he didn’t smoke inside. He hated the
stale smell of cigarettes lingering in a room. Usually he climbed through the bathroom window and smoked on his fire escape if he didn’t want to trudge all the way downstairs. But he was
nervous and he needed to be doing something, and the bathroom was not available. He inhaled deeply.

‘You all right?’ Robert asked.

Simon glanced at him. Was there a look of suspicion in Robert’s eyes? Simon thought perhaps there was. Something about the way his eyebrows were cocked, the way his head was tilted, like a
cat about to pounce on a mouse, a twitch at the corner of his mouth.

‘Yeah,’ Simon said. ‘I guess I’m more upset by the break-in than I realized.’

Robert nodded. Then he drained the rest of the whiskey from his glass, set it on the coffee table, and got to his feet. He twisted his neck around, sending out several pops from between the
vertebrae.

‘I’m gonna take a leak.’

He started for the bathroom.

‘No, wait!’

Robert paused at the head of the hallway.

‘What?’

‘The toilet’s broken. It doesn’t flush.’

‘It’s probably just the chain. I’ll reach into the tank and pull the stopper manually. If I can fix it, I will.’

Then he continued down the hallway.

Simon got to his feet. He took two steps toward the hallway and then stopped. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t attack his friend. He could, but that might be as bad as him
finding the body. No, it wouldn’t. He had to stop him from going into the bathroom.

‘Robert, no,’ he said as he rushed into the hallway. ‘It’s not the—’

But it was too late.

‘What the fuck?’ Robert said from the bathroom.

Simon stopped mid-stride. He looked at Robert, who was standing in the open doorway, facing the bathtub.

He pulled a lungful from his cigarette. He swallowed.

‘Robert,’ he said.

Robert looked at him.

‘What the fuck?’

‘What?’ he said, as he walked into the bathroom.

‘There’s a fucking dead guy in your bathtub, man.’

‘I know – I put him there.’

‘Why?’
Robert said.

‘He broke into my apartment.’

‘I don’t care if he raped your goldfish. You don’t store a corpse in your apartment. You have to call the police.’

Simon felt as if someone was slowly drilling a wood screw into his forehead, just above his left eye, and his left eye was leaking water as a result of this. It ran down his cheek and he wiped
it away with the back of one hand.

‘You have to call the police,’ Robert said again.

Simon took off his glasses, pulled his shirts out of his waistband, used the T-shirt to wipe off the lenses, wiped at his eye again, and replaced the glasses.

‘I can’t,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t call the police.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because there’s a dead guy in my bathtub, Robert. A dead guy who’s been on ice for almost a full day. The police won’t just let that go.’

‘Well, why the fuck did you put him on ice?’

‘I didn’t want to call the police. I wanted to buy myself some time.’

‘For what?’

Simon closed his eyes, head throbbing. He let out a sigh and tried to ignore what his mind was telling him was the easiest way to solve this problem – which was to kill Robert. Robert was
his friend, his only close friend – as close a friend as he’d ever had, anyway – and he couldn’t just kill him. He couldn’t simply steal forty or fifty years of breath
from him because he had become a problem, especially since it was Simon’s own fault. He could have found a reason to keep Robert out. And yet a disturbing voice in his head – the voice
that narrated his low life – kept insisting that murder was the simple solution: Just kill him, Simon. You’ve already killed once. It wasn’t so bad, was it? You didn’t even
lose an entire night’s sleep. So do it. Do it and get it done with. Sure, it’s your fault. You fucked up. So fix your mistake. You pay or Robert does. Kill him. Kill him and be done
with it. It’ll only take a few minutes and then it’ll be over.

Simon opened his eyes.

‘What?’ he said.

‘You needed to buy time for what?’

‘He broke into my apartment to kill me,’ he said. ‘I need to find out why.’

‘You said yourself he attacked you because you caught him going through your record collection.’

‘Well, I didn’t catch him doing anything. He broke in and he tried to murder me and that’s all he tried to do. I need to know why. And look.’

Simon reached down and started pulling the duct tape away from the corpse’s neck.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Robert said. ‘I don’t want to see this.’

‘Just hold on. Maybe it’ll help you understand.’

‘I already understand. You killed a man and now—’

Simon pulled the plastic bag away and Robert went silent. Blood dripped from the bag, and Simon thought of times he had purchased a hamburger and the packaging had leaked.

‘Jesus,’ Robert said. ‘You didn’t say—’ He put his hand over his open mouth. ‘I – who is he?’

‘Jeremy Shackleford. He taught math at the Pasadena College of the Arts.’

‘Why did he break into your place?’

‘I told you,’ Simon said. ‘To kill me. He broke in because he wanted me dead.’

‘Why?’

Simon shook his head.

‘I don’t know.’

He reached down and put the bag back over the corpse’s head.

Both men simply stood silent for a long moment.

Finally, Robert said, ‘I’ve – I’ve seen him before.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know,’ Robert said. ‘Monday maybe. Is today Thursday?’

‘I don’t know. What happened?’

‘Remember when I told you a guy accosted me on the street?’

Simon nodded. He remembered. Robert had even mentioned that the guy looked a bit like him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that till now.

‘This is him. I was walking to that liquor store on Fourth Street to get a pack of smokes and he grabbed me by the shirt and slammed me against a wall and asked me if I was the one who
took it.’

‘Took what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I told him I didn’t.’

‘What are you gonna do now?’

‘I don’t know,’ Simon said. ‘Now that you know, I was – I was hoping you could help me figure that out.’

Robert was shaking his head before Simon even got the sentence out.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No way. I don’t – I never. No. No.’

Simon and Robert had been sitting on the couch, but now Robert got to his feet.

‘I’m gonna wait for the auto club outside.’

‘You don’t want another drink?’

Robert shook his head.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah,’ Robert said. ‘I’m – ’ he licked his lips and swallowed – ‘yeah, I’m okay. I have to drive. I’m gonna go.’