Survivor's Guilt and Other Stories

by Greg Herren

  Chad was his scumbag boyfriend.

  “I can’t call the cops. I mean, we just can’t,” Phillip replied, his voice bordering on hysteria. “Please, Tony, we can’t.” His voice took on that pleading tone I’d heard so many times before, when he wanted me to do something I didn’t want to. He was always convincing, dragging me out to bars against my will, urging me on until I finally gave in. He could always, it seemed, wear me down and make me go against my better judgment. But this was different.

  A lot different.

  This wasn’t the same thing as a four in the morning phone call to pick him up at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel because he’d somehow lost his pants. Or to come bail him out of central lockup because he’d pissed in public in a drunken stupor. Or to help him buy his car out of the impound lot where it had been towed. Or any number of the minor crises that seemed to be constantly swirling around him like planets orbiting the sun.

  Chaos.

  “What happened?” I asked. I was starting to come back into myself. I’ve always managed to remain calm and cool in a crisis. Panicking never makes any situation better. A crisis calls for a cool head, careful thought, the weighing and discarding of options. I started looking around for the phone, cursing myself for not bringing my cell phone with me. We had to call, and soon. The longer we waited, the worse it would be for him.

  “You didn’t hear us?” Phillip stared at me. “I don’t see how—you had to have heard us, Tone. I mean, he was yelling so loud…” He shuddered. “Are you sure you didn’t hear anything? He came over, in one of his moods, you know how he gets—got—and you know, just started in on me. I was making him dinner…” His voice trailed off and he made a limp gesture with his hand toward the top of the stove.

  I noticed the pot of congealing spaghetti floating limply in starchy water and the other pot with skin starting to form on what looked like red sauce sitting forlornly on separate burners on the stove. “We’ve got to call the cops, Phillip. We don’t have a choice here.”

  “He started hitting me.” He went on as if I hadn’t said a word, starting to shake again as he remembered. “Yelling and screaming. You didn’t hear? You had to have heard, Tony, you had to have heard.”

  “I was working. I had the headphones on.” I always put on the headphones when I was working so I could shut off all external distractions and focus. The littlest thing can distract me from my work, so I try to avoid all outside stimuli at all costs. The iPod had been a huge help in that regard.

  “And I just pushed him away and he slipped and hit his head on the table.” Phillip started to cry. “Oh, Tony, what are we going to do?”

  “We have to call the cops. Where’s your phone?”

  “We can’t call the cops!” His voice started rising in hysteria again. He buried his face in his hands. “I can’t go to jail again. I just can’t. I’d rather die than do that.”

  I looked at him, starting to get exasperated. Even now, in a panic and terrified, he was handsome, with his mop of curly brown hair and finely chiseled face with deep dimples and round brown eyes straight out of a Renaissance painting of a saint. He was wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt that said NOPD—Not our problem, dude. Philip always wore T-shirts a size too small, to show off his defined arms, strong shoulders, and thickly muscled chest. I’d been attracted to him at first when he moved in and even considered trying to get him into my bed for a few days. Seeing him shirtless and sweating in the hot August sun as he moved in certainly was a delectable sight; almost like the opening sequence of one of your better gay porn movies. Yet it didn’t take long for me to realize, as sexy and lovable as he was, I just couldn’t deal with the chaos that followed him around like a dark cloud. No, I’d spent most of my adult life getting chaos out of my life, and I wasn’t about to let it in again just so I could fuck the hot guy who lived next door. I didn’t mind listening to his tales of woe every morning—but that was as far as I got involved. Just listening to him some mornings was tiring enough. “So, what do you suggest? We dump the body in the river?”

  Phillip let out a big sigh and smiled. “Oh, I knew you would understand! You’re the best! I knew I could count on you!”

  I stared at him. He could not be serious. “That was sarcasm, Phillip.” I looked down at Chad again, and my stomach lurched. I’d never liked Chad, couldn’t understand what Phillip saw in him, and every day for the month or so they’d been dating I told Phillip to dump him at least once. He was a jerk, an arrogant ass that thought because he was handsome and had a nice body he was better than other people, as though spending hours in the gym every week somehow gave him the right to treat people like something he’d stepped in. He’d been awful to Phillip almost from the very start of their relationship. He seemed to take great pleasure in tearing Phillip down in front of people, and I could only imagine what he was like in private. After a while, I gave up trying to get Phillip to wake up and see Chad for the loser he was. I just wanted to scream at Phillip, “Get some goddamned self-esteem!” After he hit Phillip the first time, I was ready to kill the son of a bitch myself—but ultimately decided he wasn’t worth it.

  And now, as I looked down at the congealing blood under his head, I realized I wasn’t sorry he was dead. The world was a better place without the arrogant son of a bitch. “I wasn’t serious.”

  “Come on, Tony, we can’t call the police.” Phillip shakily lit a Parliament. “You know what that’s like. And even if they believe me, that it was self-defense, and an accident, it’s still going to be a big mess.” He shuddered again. “That night I spent in central lockup—Tony, if I go back there, if I have to spend one night there again, I’ll kill myself. I will. And you know how the cops are. You know.”

  He had a point. I didn’t blame Phillip one bit for not having any confidence in the New Orleans Police Department. No one really did after the hurricane and all the allegations of police looting and car thefts and so forth, whether they were true or not. Their reputation hadn’t been great before the storm to begin with. And he was probably right—getting the police involved would probably only make matters worse. Phillip needed to protect himself. They’d been pretty awful when he’d been arrested that one time. And, as it later turned out, he’d spent the night in jail for something that was merely a ticketing offense. He’d been a hysterical mess when I bailed him out. I’ll never forget the look on his face when they finally let him out, and the stories he told me about that night in jail made my blood run cold. “We’ll call the police and then call a lawyer.” It sounded reasonable to me. “I won’t let you go to jail,” I said, as though I had any control over what the police would do. The more I thought about it, the less I liked it.

  “I can’t afford a lawyer.” Phillip worked at the Transco Airlines ticket counter out at the airport. He made a decent living—always paid his rent on time—but there wasn’t a lot of money left over for extras. I was loaning him a twenty now and then when he fell short. “And what if they don’t believe me? What if they arrest me? I don’t have bail money. I’d lose my job. My life would be ruined.”

  “We can’t just dump the body somewhere,” I replied, it finally beginning to dawn on me at last he was completely serious. He wants me to help him dump the body. “They’d find out, and that would just make things worse.” I shook my head. “Phillip, this isn’t something we can just cover up, get rid of the body. They always find out…and then they definitely wouldn’t believe you.”

  “You’ve said a million times anyone can get away with a murder if they’re careful.” He crossed his arms. “I mean, you write about stuff like that all the time, right?”

  I looked at him. “Murder? I thought you said it was self-defense?” I chewed on my lower lip.

  “We could dump it in the Bywater.” Phillip went on as though I hadn’t said a word. “We could make it look like it was a mugging, couldn’t we? How hard could it be?”

  “Phillip…” I sighed. I could think of at least a hundred reasons off the top of my
head, minimum, why that wouldn’t work, but there wasn’t time to go through them all. Besides, I knew Phillip. He wasn’t going to listen to any of them. “We can’t dump him in the river. We need to call the police.” I looked back down at Chad’s staring eyes and noticed the congealing blood again. “Oh my fucking God, Phillip! How long has he been dead?”

  He bit his lips. “Um, I didn’t know what to do! I freaked!”

  “How long has he been dead?” I gritted my teeth.

  “Maybe about an hour.” He shrugged. “Or two.”

  My legs buckled and I had to grab the edge of the table to keep from falling to the floor next to Chad. We couldn’t call the cops. It had been too long. I could hear the homicide detective now, see the look on his face, “And why did you wait so long to call us? Why didn’t you call 9-1-1?” It looked bad. And what if Phillip hadn’t died instantly? What if they could have saved him? What if he had bled to death?

  And once the history of physical abuse came to light—and there were any number of Phillip’s friends who’d only be too glad to tell the cops all about it, not realizing that they were sealing Phillip’s indictment, thinking they were helping by making Chad look bad, like he deserved killing.

  Phillip was going to jail.

  Jesus FUCKING Christ.

  I was going to have to help him.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked, his voice hinting at hysteria on the rise. “I’m telling you, Tony, we can’t call the police! I can’t go to jail, I can’t.” He suddenly burst into tears, covering his face with his hands, his shoulders shaking.

  “Well, the first thing is you need to calm the fuck down,” I snapped. My head was starting to ache. I definitely didn’t need this shit. I was on deadline—I couldn’t exactly call my editor and say, “Sorry, I need a few more days, I had to help my tenant dispose of a dead body and come up with a story for the cops.” I raced through possibilities in my mind; places to dispose of the body where it might not be found for a while. Almost every single one of them was flawed. Seriously flawed—but an idea was starting to form in my head. “Is Chad’s car here?”

  Phillip wiped at his nose. “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to get rid of that, too.” I refrained from adding dumbass, like I really wanted to. But there was no sense in getting him all worked up again, since he seemed to finally be calming down. And if we were going to do this—and more importantly, get away with it—I needed him calm. “Give me a cigarette.” I’d managed to finally quit a few months earlier, but I needed one now. Get a hold of yourself, look at this as an intellectual puzzle, shut off your emotions. I lit the Parliament and sucked in the bitter smoke. I took a few deep breaths and decided to try one last time. “Phillip, we really should call the cops. I mean, if this was self-defense—”

  “What do you mean, if it was?” Phillip’s brown eyes narrowed. He pointed to his cheek, which was purple. “He slugged me again, Tony. He threw me against the wall—I can’t believe you didn’t hear him screaming at me.”

  I hadn’t, though—no shouting, no crashing, no struggle. Sure, I had the headphones on, but—no, it was probably self-defense, there was no reason to doubt Phillip. Chad was an egotistical bully with no problem using his fists whenever he decided Phillip had looked at him cross-eyed. I looked down at the pale face, the sticky pool of blood under his curly brown hair. His eyes were open, staring glassily at the ceiling. He was wearing his standard uniform of Abercrombie & Fitch sleeveless T-shirt and low-rise jeans, no socks and boat shoes. “What exactly happened here, anyway?” None of this made any sense. But then, death rarely does.

  “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.” Phillip’s voice shook. “Chad called and wanted to come over. I said okay, even though I really was kind of tired. So I started making spaghetti. He came in the back way”—he gestured to the door I’d come through—“and he just started in on me. The same old bullshit, me cheating on him, me not being good enough for him, all of that horrible crap.” He hugged himself and shivered. “Then he got up and shoved me into the wall and punched me”—he touched his cheek again—“and was about to punch me again when I shoved him really hard, and he fell back and hit his head on the edge of the counter…then he just kind of gurgled and dropped to the floor.” He gagged, took some breaths, and got control of himself again. “Then I called you.”

  Two hours later—what did you do for two hours? “Well, good enough for him,” I finally said, stubbing the cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray on the counter.

  “Are you going to help me?”

  “Give me another cigarette and let me think, okay?”

  The plan was simplicity itself. Once I’d smoked two or three cigarettes, I’d worked it all out in my head. I looked at it from every angle. Sure, we’d need some luck, but every plan relies on luck to a certain degree. The lower Ninth Ward above Claiborne Street was a dead zone. Hurricane Katrina had left her mark there, with houses shifted off foundations, cars planted nose down in the ground…and bulldozing had recently begun. I’d clipped an article out of the Times-Picayune that very morning on the subject, thinking it might be useful on my next book. Out in the shed behind the house I still had the remnants of the blue tarp that had hung over our roof after the one-eyed bitch had wrecked it on her way through. I had Phillip help me get it, and we rolled up Chad into it. We carried the body out into the backyard, and then we cleaned the entire kitchen—every single inch of it with bleach. I knew from a seemingly endless interview with a forensic investigator with the NOPD for my second book the bleach would destroy any trace of DNA left behind. I made Phillip wash the pots and pans and run them through the dishwasher with bleach. When the kitchen was spotless and reeked of bleach, I checked to make sure the coast was clear.

  The lower Garden District, before Katrina, had been a busy little neighborhood. We weren’t as fabulous as the Garden District, of course; when she still lived here I liked to tell people I lived about “six blocks and six million dollars” away from Anne Rice. We didn’t have the manicured lawns and huge houses you would see above Jackson Avenue; we were the poorer section between I-90 and Jackson. Around Coliseum Square were some gigantic historic homes, but most of the houses in our neighborhood were of the double shotgun variety, like mine. Our section of St. Charles Avenue—about four blocks away from my house—was where you’d find the horror of chain stores and fast food that you wouldn’t find farther up the street. But I liked my neighborhood. There’d always been someone around—kids playing basketball in the park down the street, people out walking dogs, and so forth; the normal day-to-day outside ramblings of any city neighborhood. The floodwaters from the shattered levees hadn’t made it to our part of town—we were part of the so-called sliver by the river. When I’d come back in October, the neighborhood had been a ghost town. And even though more and more people were coming back almost every day, it was still silent and lifeless after dark for the most part.

  Tonight was no different. Other than the occasional light in a window up and down the street, it was still as a cemetery. We carried Chad out to his car and put him in the trunk. The way things were going it would be just our luck to have a patrol car come along as we were forcing the body in the blue tarp burial shroud in the trunk, and I didn’t stop holding my breath until the trunk latch caught.

  No one came along. The street remained silent.

  Then Phillip got behind the wheel of Chad’s Toyota and followed me through the city. “Make sure you use your turn signals and don’t speed,” I’d cautioned him before getting into my own car, “don’t give any cop a reason to pull you over, okay?”

  He nodded.

  I watched him in my rearview mirror as we drove through the quiet city. There were a few cars out, and every once in a while I spotted a NOPD car. The twenty-minute drive seemed to take forever, but we finally made it past the bridge over the Industrial Canal without incident. I turned left onto Caffin Avenue and headed into the dead zone past the deserted,
boarded-up remnants of a Walgreens and a KFC. It was spooky, like the set of some apocalyptic movie. We cruised around in the blighted area, my palms sweating, before I found the perfect house. There was no front door, and there were the telltale spray paint markings on the front, fresh. It had been checked again for bodies, and the three houses to its right had already been bulldozed, piles of smashed wood and debris scattered throughout the dead yards. Several dozers were also parked in the emptied yards, ready for the demolition to come the following morning.

  I pulled over in front of it and turned off my lights. I got out of the car and lit another cigarette. We wrestled the body out and lugged it into the house. The house stank of decay and mold, rotting furniture scattered about as we made our way through the dark interior. We found the curving stair to the second story and carried him up. The first bedroom at the top of the stairs had a closet full of moldy clothing.

  “Okay, let’s just put him here in the closet,” I said, panting and trying to catch my breath. Chad weighed a fucking ton. “But put him down for a minute.”

  Phillip let go and the body fell to the floor with a thud. I had the body by the shoulders, and I staggered with the sudden weight. The tarp pulled down, exposing Chad’s head, and then I couldn’t hold him anymore and he fell, dragging me down on top of him.

  “FUCK!” I screamed, looking right into Chad’s open eyes. His mouth had come open, and in the moonlight I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.

  There were bruises on his neck. Bruises—that looked like they came from fingers grasped around his neck, choking the life out of him.