During the courtship phase, he claimed he wanted to settle down, that he’d sewn his wild oats and was ready for a relationship. For most of the time we were together, it seemed that he’d gotten exactly what he wanted. That it was all working out for him. But then, at the very end, he zapped me with his “too vanilla” comment.
I knew better than to tell Jeremy what I’d been up to, though. He’d likely enjoy hearing about my exploits, and that soured any possible revenge. Still, I was pleased with my newfound adventurous side. Except, of course, for the fact that I had to go home and face my unwanted guest.
It was nearly eight when I pulled my nearly paid for, navy blue Honda Civic into the driveway. On the drive home, I’d distracted myself from the problem of Eddie by wondering if I should buy a new car when I got my new job. The dependable economy of my Civic might not fit my personality anymore. It seemed I was changing, and maybe I needed a car that reflected the new me. Perhaps something racier.
My house was dark. A good sign. I looked up and down the street, but didn’t see Eddie’s car. I breathed a sigh of relief. I could scarcely believe my passive aggressive approach to the situation had worked. But it seemed that it had.
I hit the garage opener I kept attached to the visor on the driver’s side. The garage door opened slowly, seeming to struggle. When it was about four feet off the ground, the door stopped moving all together. Great, I thought, one more thing in my life that wasn’t working. I tried to remember how much garage openers cost. Would I have to replace the whole thing, or could I get away with replacing just the motor? Getting out of my car, I headed over and bent down to get into the garage and see if I could fix whatever was wrong with the opener, at least temporarily.
At first, I didn’t connect with what I was seeing. The light was on for some reason. As usual, there were a dozen cardboard boxes filled with the contents of my kitchen and another dozen filled with some of Jeremy’s things he’d never bothered to collect. The boxes were stacked neatly against the back wall. In front of them was a weight bench and some weights I didn’t use on the theory that I could use the ones at the gym, though I only used those on occasion. In one corner sat an artificial Christmas tree -- a bad idea when I bought it and still bad idea.
What hadn’t been there before, the thing I was having trouble understanding, was Eddie. He hung from the track to the garage door opener, a leather belt with one end tied to the track and the other buckled around his neck, one of my dining chairs tipped over at his feet, his face a terrible dark red, his tongue hanging loosely from his mouth.
Chapter Six
What happened next is a blur. After I stumbled out of the garage, I remember pulling out my cell and dialing 911. They might have answered faster if I’d gone into my house and called from the landline, but I was unable to get myself to go inside. Suddenly, I was afraid of my own home. As though Eddie killing himself in the garage had tainted the entire place. Irrationally, I was afraid it would become nothing more than a place where some guy I barely knew hung himself.
Finally, an operator came on the line. I told her my address and that a friend had hung himself in my garage. Or something to that effect. She tried to make me go back in and make sure he was dead. I practically had to scream at her to get her to understand that I’d been in there and could tell he was dead.
Then, I heard sirens coming closer and closer. I remember thinking there are sirens all the time in Los Angeles yet somehow they sound different when you know they’re coming for you. A patrol car pulled up, parking across my driveway, blocking in my Civic. The siren was off, but the lights continued to spin. Everything around me flashed red.
Two officers got out of the cruiser and walked over to where I stood on the curb. Both appeared to be in their late twenties. One was tall and white, and the other was medium height and might have been Hispanic. Their uniforms didn’t quite fit; the tall one’s was loose and oversized, while the Hispanic officer’s uniform was tight and looked as though he was squeezed into it. Each had a collection of guns, billy clubs, and cell phones clipped to their nylon utility belts. Without introducing themselves, the tall one asked me what had happened while the other walked into the garage and began to look around.
I gave a brief rundown of coming home from the gym and finding Eddie hanging in the garage. The officer nodded as I spoke. The maybe-Hispanic officer inspected Eddie’s body and took a cursory look around my garage. Then he came back down the driveway and passed us on his way back to the patrol car.
The tall, white officer asked my name and wrote it down in a small notebook. “And this is your house?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and then joined the other officer back at the patrol car. They spoke for a minute or two, then came back up the driveway. They lifted the garage door, forcing it up a few more feet and making entry easier. The move caused Eddie to swing back and forth a few times. I thought I might vomit.
The officers stretched yellow crime scene tape across the entrance to my garage. Then the tall, white officer walked down my side yard and looked over the fence into the back.
Ten minutes later a van arrived. On its side in black letters it said CORONER. Two men wearing black jackets that said Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office got out. They walked up to the garage and stood chatting with the police officers. Then one of them slipped under the crime tape and walked over to Eddie’s body, did some more looking around, and came back out.
Strangers stood in front of my garage, staring at a corpse. I began to feel peripheral, as though I was watching some bizarre television show being filmed at my house without my consent. All I wanted to do was somehow run time backward and get to a place where I felt safe and in control.
A brown Crown Vic parked at the curb in front of my house. Two plain-clothes detectives got out of the enormous car, a man and a woman. Without a word they walked by me and conferred first with the police officers and then with one of the men from the Coroner’s office. Eventually, they came back down the driveway to me.
Detective Aaron Tripp introduced himself. He was a tall, light-skinned black man in a nice suit. His partner was Detective Lucinda Hanson. She was nearly as tall as he was, with dark hair and pale skin. I blurted out a couple of things in a rush. That I’d just come home from the gym. That I’d tried to open the garage door, and when I got under the door there he was. That I hadn’t gone in there all the way.
“Slow down, okay? What’s your name?” Detective Tripp asked, as he took out a spiral notebook.
I stopped, felt silly for not telling him in the first place, and said, “Matt, Matt Latowski,” He started to write my name down, but then stopped to make me spell it.
“All right, Matt, tell me what happened.”
“Um, as I said, I was at the gym and then, when I came home, I tried to put my car in the garage, but the door wouldn’t open all the way. So, I got out of the car and I tried to lift it, but could only get it up so far… I kind of bent over and got underneath and there he was.”
“Did you go into the garage?”
“No. I mean, I would have, but he looked so dead.”
Detective Tripp studied me a moment, then pulled his partner a few feet up the driveway for some kind of conference. He leaned over to whisper something in her ear. She listened, then whispered a response. Her response was longer, obviously detailed. She rested a hand on his arm while she talked. Finally, she stopped, took a step back, and raised a questioning eyebrow. Then she walked away.
Tripp seemed to take a moment to absorb what his partner had just whispered to him. He walked back to me. This time, the detective positioned himself a few steps to the right. I realized he did this so I would face him and by facing him I’d be looking away from Eddie’s corpse -- which had been on full view since the first officers forced my garage door open. I can’t say I minded.
“Is he your boyfriend?” Tripp asked, his voice blandly neutral.
I shook my head. “We’ve had a couple dates. That’s all.”
In that instant, I decided I shouldn’t tell the police how I met Eddie. Somewhere he had a family, a mother, a dad. Some cop, maybe even this guy, was going to come to the door and tell them that their son had killed himself. It would be awful. But it would be worse if they found out he was the kind of masseuse who specialized in a full release -- an escort, really.
“But you left him alone in your house?”
In the garage, Detective Hanson had begun to take photos of Eddie. They’d set up a couple portable lights. Between the flash and the portable lights, my garage seemed to glow.
“You left him alone in your house?” Tripp repeated. “Even though you didn’t know him well.”
“We had a date last night. He stayed over. This morning when I left for work he was still sleeping. I expected he’d be gone before I got home.”
“What’s his name?”
“Eddie.”
“Last name?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“How many dates did you have? Exactly.”
“Two. Just two.” I hoped that made me sound a little less stupid for not knowing Eddie’s last name. Though it probably made me look even dumber for leaving him alone in my place.
“How did you meet him?” the detective asked.
“Online.”
He nodded, as though suicide after an Internet date was pretty common. “It’s still pretty upsetting, though,” he suggested. Up to this point, he’d been so businesslike. I appreciated the kindness in his voice.
“Yes, it is.”
“Suicide is hard thing for people to understand.”
I nodded.
“Was he angry at you?” Tripp asked.
“We didn’t know each other well enough for him to be angry.”
“He seem like a stable guy? There was no indication he might do this?”
“He called me earlier in the day. We talked about what to have for dinner.”
“You talked about having dinner? You just said you hoped he’d be gone by the time you got home.”
“I did. But it wasn’t working out that way.” Suddenly, I felt very guilty about having wanted to dump this poor guy. What if I’d come home earlier? What if I’d been more interested in spending time with him?
In the garage, an electric saw began to whir, and I jumped. I tried to take a step and look around the detective. He moved to block me. Without looking, I knew what they were doing. They were cutting Eddie down. Still, I asked, “What are they doing?”
“It’s all right. They won’t damage anything any more than they have to.” Given the sounds, I didn’t believe that possible.
“Did you reject Eddie?” he asked, getting back to business. “Ask him to leave? Freak him out in anyway?”
“I was hoping he’d get the hint, you know? I went to the gym and hoped he’d be--” I stopped, looked the detective right in the eye. “You don’t think he killed himself because I didn’t come home for dinner, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” he said, in a reassuring voice. “But I do need to figure out what did happen. Do you mind if we look in the house?”
“No, go ahead.”
He left me standing on the curb. I watched as his partner finished taking photos of Eddie then nodded at the coroners. They stepped forward to pull Eddie down, resting his body on the oily garage floor. Then they got a gurney from the van. But they didn’t immediately put him onto it. They huddled around him. Hanson took more pictures.
Tripp watched a moment then stepped over to his partner. After they huddled, he went into my back door. Hanson looked down the driveway at me and gave me a look I couldn’t read; she didn’t like me, that part was clear. But I had no idea why. She turned and followed her partner into my house.
A small knot of neighbors gathered on the far side of the street. I could have joined them, I suppose. Could have told them what was happening. Tried to make myself sound like a victim and gotten sympathy. But I wanted nothing to do with them. I didn’t want to talk any more than I had to.
Standing at the end of my driveway, I was somehow inside a circle my neighbors were afraid to penetrate. After a while, I noticed Mrs. Enders from across the street edging toward me. She was in her mid-sixties, though she dressed like a teenage pop star, hoping to deny time. She wore a tight blouse that showed her freckled midriff and pedal-pushers. On her feet were fluffy slippers, and in her hand was a vodka and soda.
She made it to the middle of the street, as close as she dared. “It’s not Jeremy, is it?”
I shook my head, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to encourage her, didn’t want to explain. Not yet. She looked relieved that it wasn’t Jeremy. He always did a good job of charming old ladies. She tried to smile encouragement at me, though I could tell from the hesitant way she did it she wasn’t sure if she should. She waddled back to her side of the street.
The coroners wheeled Eddie down the driveway. Briefly, they left him sitting a few feet from me while opening the doors of the van. He’d been wrapped in a white sheet and then placed into a body bag. They hadn’t been able to close the bag completely. They’d cut a chunk of metal off the garage opener. A belt was tied to the chunk. The other end of the belt, the buckle end, was around Eddie’s neck. The belt was no longer taut, and I could see a deep, wide rut where it had dug into his neck. It was purple and red. I couldn’t help but think about the violence involved. Had it surprised Eddie? Had he just expected a simple squeezing? Had he thought it would be like holding his breath?
I tried not to look at his face, but failed. His eyes were partly open; the blue of his irises seemed even more striking with the discoloration of his skin. I’d never seen a dead body before. Not in person. Eddie looked like something on display at a wax museum. He didn’t look real. They pushed him into the back of the van.
“Was he on FaceSpace or any place like that?” I jumped. Detective Tripp was back. I hadn’t noticed him walking up to me.
It seemed a weird question. It didn’t make much sense to buddy up with a dead guy. “I don’t know. Why?”
“It’s the new place to leave your suicide note.”