Low Life (13 page)

He turned toward Simon as he passed him.

‘Walk the mile,’ he said.

‘What?’

But Müller simply turned away, looked straight ahead, and walked past.

‘What did you say?’

The man did not respond.

Simon grabbed him by the arm and spun him around.

‘What did you say?’

Müller put his arms out to keep his balance, looking for a long moment like he might topple anyway, swaying left on one foot while his arms waved, and then finally he managed to stabilize
himself. He looked up at Simon with fear in his eyes.

‘I have no money.’

‘I don’t want money. I wanna know what you said.’

‘I – I said nothing.’

‘I heard you.’

The old man’s eyes were wide and pale and water was building up on the bottom lids.

‘I said nothing. I swear to you, sir. Please – do not – please.’

Simon grabbed his collar and shook him.

‘Just tell me what you said!’

As Simon shook Müller water fell from the edges of the man’s eyelids and rolled down his cheeks, flowing along the deep lines that were carved into his flesh, and a sob escaped his
mouth.

‘Please.’

Simon stopped.

Several people on the sidewalk were looking at him. The old man’s entire body was shaking violently.

‘I’m – I’m sorry.’ He let go of the man’s shirt.

It couldn’t have been him. He was dead. It had been in the newspaper.

Walk the mile.

Did he know that Simon was wearing another man’s shoes?

He couldn’t know anything; he was dead.

Goddamn it – what was happening?

He pushed through the glass doors and into the lobby of the Filboyd Apartments. It smelled stale and dusty after the bright sunshine of mid-afternoon. He entered the darkened
stairwell and made his way up its creaky steps.

He was three steps from the top (and seventeen steps from the bottom: he still counted every time), the light from the second-floor corridor just penetrating this far down, when he saw it on the
wall. It was right where he had seen the other graffito, and he thought it had been sprayed on by the same person. The letters were formed the same way, with the same looping strokes.

Simon stood motionless, looking at it for a long moment. His tongue felt like a dead piece of meat, dry and coarse, and it stuck to the roof of his mouth.

There was no evidence that any other writing had ever been there. The other graffito was not painted over – it just wasn’t there.

Walk the mile.

He turned around and pounded back down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the sunshine.

Cars passed by.

An old couple holding hands.

A helicopter throbbed overhead.

He glanced left, saw a homeless man sleeping on the bench in front of Captain Bligh’s. He glanced right and saw a yellow cardigan disappearing around a corner.

‘Hey!’ he shouted.

But Müller was gone, swallowed by the edge of a building.

Simon ran down the sidewalk after him. His throat still hurt when he breathed hard. It was strange that his cheek had healed but his throat still hurt. The bruising hadn’t been that
bad.

He turned the corner.

Müller was gone. The side street was empty of human life. A block north traffic flowed. Then, from an alley, a dog came trotting out onto the sidewalk with something in its mouth, perhaps a
half-eaten hamburger.

Simon recognized the dog – he recognized it by its steak-fat ear and its one white eye with its bulging vein.

He pushed his apartment’s front door closed behind him. Then he stood with his forehead pressed against the cool wood, his moist, sweaty skin sticking to the paint. His
head throbbed above his left eyebrow. His eye watered.

Calm down, he told himself.

There’s an explanation for this.

He pushed himself off the door and turned around.

You’re okay. You’re better than okay. You’re on the verge of a new life. You just need to get rid of the evidence and walk away from here. If there’s no evidence, then it
doesn’t matter what Zurasky knows or how he’s involved; he won’t be able to prove anything.

Forget Helmut Müller for now, forget the dog. You can find out what that’s about later.

Just get rid of the evidence.

He walked into the kitchen. He found the box of trash bags underneath the sink – the cardboard slightly damp from leaking pipes – but couldn’t find the other
item he needed. He dug through several drawers, coming across dead batteries, broken screwdrivers, dirt-black pennies, rusty screws, bent nails, twisted spoons, and then, finally, in the last
drawer in the kitchen, bottom right, hello, he found the electric carving knife and a brown extension cord he thought would probably be long enough. He had bought the carving knife while drunk at
one o’clock in the morning about two months ago after watching an infomercial about it and deciding that he had to have it – though he didn’t know why. Well, now he did know. He
thought it would be perfect for cutting whatever meat was left between the bones, whatever was holding them together at the joints.

With the knife in one hand and the damp box of trash bags in the other he made his way down the hallway, past his bedroom, and into the bathroom.

He put the items on the tile floor, unzipped his pants, and took a leak.

He exhaled.

‘I guess it’s time,’ he said, ‘for us to part ways, Jeremy.’

He finished urinating, the last coming out as a shiver elevatored up his spine, then shook, tucked, zipped, and flushed.

‘It’s safer this way,’ he said. ‘And anyways, it had to be done sooner or later.’

He turned to the bathtub. It was empty. Someone had taken the body.

‘Oh – oh, fuck.’

He walked to the bathtub and looked down into it. There was dirt lining the bottom of the tub and a brown ring running around the inside and black mold growing in the corners where it met the
tiled walls, but it was empty. He ran his fingers through his hair. It was oily and slick with pomade and sweat. The pain above his left eyebrow burrowed deeper into his brain. He wiped his palms
off on his trousers. He thought he might start crying.

This was not good. This was not good at all. Who would have done this? Who would have taken the body from his tub? It had to be Zurasky, didn’t it? It couldn’t be anybody but
Zurasky. He was the only one who had known –
if
he had known. But Simon wasn’t certain he had. He was involved somehow, but he might not know everything.

Simon walked in a counter-clockwise circle, mind racing.

‘Oh, God,’ he said.

He looked around frantically. There was nothing to do in here. Nothing useful.

He shook his fists, looking for something to grab, to throw, to break, and when he saw nothing and the pressure in his gut which demanded action of some kind was too much to deny any longer he
simply swung loose, throwing punches, one two three four, goddamn it, into the wall. It was an old building and the walls were lath and plaster, so he didn’t break through. He dented the
plaster and managed to crack the rotting wood beneath – dark and moist – and bruise his knuckles, but not much else.

He’d been Jeremy for less than twelve hours and already it was unraveling.

It wasn’t fair.

They had bought it. They had fucking bought it. Samantha, Professor Ullman, his students, they had all bought it, but it was unraveling anyway.

Walk the mile.

He didn’t have a choice now, did he?

He’d set his course the moment he decided to step into Shackleford’s life. And someone knew. Someone knew and had taken the body before he could take care of it, before he could
destroy all the evidence.

No – wrong. He’d had time to get rid of the body, but instead had kept it, afraid of doing what he’d known had to be done. Afraid that if he ditched the body somebody would
find it. Well, someone had found it anyway. What had they done with it?

And who else besides Zurasky might know?

He sat down on the toilet and tried to think. It was difficult to do with a heavy dread in his gut, with panic on the verge of completely taking over his mind and doing with him what it
wished.

Someone had taken the body.

Calm down. Think.

What next?

He had to do something to this situation before it did something to him. He had to calm down and think clearly. If he could only think clearly he’d be able to make a decision and then act
upon it.

What next?

And then he knew.

‘Robert,’ he said aloud to the empty room.

He sat in the Saab, watching the building’s entrance in his side-view mirror. It was about time for Robert’s late-afternoon smoke break. Despite the fact that he
could see dozens of cars driving along the streets and dozens of people walking along the sidewalks, he felt like he was in a completely different place. The car deadened the noise of the outside
world and made him feel apart from it.

A homeless man walked to the window and knocked. Simon shook his head. The guy knocked again. Simon rolled down the window.

‘Get out of here.’

The homeless man – forty, maybe, with a thick beard and no teeth – said, ‘You gonna get out? You want some time on the meter?’

‘No.’

‘No you’re not gonna get out or no you don’t want no time on the meter?’

‘Just go.’

‘I’ll give you some time, anyhow,’ the homeless man said. He walked to the meter behind which Simon was parked, pulled out what looked like a bent paperclip, slipped it into
the coin slot, jerked it up and down several times, each flip of the wrist adding fifteen minutes to the meter, stopping when the meter was at its max of two hours.

‘See?’ the homeless guy said. ‘Gimme a buck and it’s still half the price.’

‘I’m not getting out of the car.’

‘Come on, man, it’s just a buck.’

Simon gave the guy a dollar to get rid of him.

‘Now leave me alone.’

He reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, stuck one between his lips, and lighted it.

‘Are those Camels? Think I could get one? I love—’

Simon threw the pack of cigarettes at the guy. It hit him in the chest and then dropped to the sidewalk.

‘Get the fuck
out
of here.’

‘Thanks,’ the guy said, picking up the cigarettes. ‘Got a ligh— Never mind. Thanks.’

He held the cigarettes up close to his ear, like a kid with a seashell, and gave the pack a shake to see how many were inside.

Simon took a drag off his cigarette and glanced in the side-view mirror toward the building’s entrance. But it wasn’t Robert’s reflection he saw. It was the actual man. He had
already moved past the side of the car and was walking onward. He must have been out of cigarettes himself, walking to that liquor store on Fourth Street to grab a pack.

Simon pushed open the door and stepped out and slammed it shut behind him. He followed Robert down the sidewalk, and when Robert walked past an alleyway Simon rushed him, shoved him into the
stinking gray air of that narrow slice between two buildings, and slammed the man against a rusted green dumpster.

‘Was it you?’ he said as the burning cigarette bounced around in his mouth.

‘Wha—’

‘Were you the one who took it?’

‘Took what?’

‘You know what, goddamn you,’ Simon said, shaking Robert, slamming him against the dumpster a second time. ‘Did you take it or not?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talk—’

Simon grabbed him by the shirt collar and threw him left, slamming him against a red brick wall. Then he grabbed the shirt collar again and put his face inches from Robert’s face, the
cherry of the cigarette in his mouth floating a mere jostle from Robert’s waiting flesh.

‘Don’t you fucking lie to me.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You don’t what?’

‘Know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, bullshit!’

Robert fumbled for the inside pocket of his thin suit coat. ‘I have money.’

‘Do I look like I want your money?’

‘I don’t know what—’

‘Just answer the fucking question.’

‘I didn’t, okay? I didn’t fucking take it.’

Simon let go of the man and he crumpled to the dirty ground amongst a litter of paper cups, rotting food, and other refuse.

Robert wasn’t lying. One thing Simon knew was that Robert was incapable of lying convincingly. He didn’t know what Simon was talking about despite the suspect circumstances under
which he had visited Simon’s apartment. Maybe he really had simply dropped his cell phone into the toilet. Maybe his visit had been exactly what it appeared to be. It didn’t make sense
to Simon – he was the only person Simon knew had seen the body, who Simon was sure knew about it – but a lot of things didn’t make sense today.

He turned away and headed back out of the alley, taking another drag from his cigarette. It tasted bad, but he smoked it anyway.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

Maybe Robert had improved as a liar. Either way, he wasn’t going to get anything out of the man himself. Coming here had been dumb, a panic move. Had he expected Robert just to crumble?
‘Okay, you caught me. I took the body. I thought I could use it for the carpool lane.’