Thomas Adcock - New Orleans Noir

I noticed a pot of congealing spaghetti floating in starchy water and another one with skin starting to form on what looked like red sauce. “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, beginning to shake 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 headphones when I am writing so I can shut off all external distractions and focus. The littlest thing can take me away from my work, so I try to avoid all outside stimulus 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. 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 . Phillip 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 when he first 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 that 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 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 involved as I got. 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 who 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 Chad 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 pool of 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. 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 exactly been great before the storm either. Phillip might be right — getting the police involved would probably only make matters worse. He 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 go, 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 always loaning him a twenty when he fell short. “And what if they don’t believe me? What if they arrest me? I don’t have bail money. I’ll lose my job. My life will be ruined.”

“We can’t just dump the body somewhere,” I replied, it finally beginning to dawn on me that 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. They always find out... and then they definitely wouldn’t believe you.”

“You’ve said a million times that anyone can get away with 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 him in the Bywater. 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 911? It looked bad. What if Chad hadn’t died instantly? What if they could have saved him? What if he’d 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’d be sealing Phillip’s indictment, thinking they were helping by making Chad look bad, like he deserved killing.