Page 23 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“You should tell him to watch his back.”

“Why? That guy seems like a nut, but you don’t think he’s actually dangerous.”

“Oh, honey. Ya see a lotta shit when you’re invisible. I went out late one night to the Shamrock over on Eighth for some smokes—like over a year ago now—and I see Eddie and some other guys behind the building. There’s a guy on the ground. A bloody guy, and they dump him right in the dumpster, no shit. Couldn’t believe my eyes. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but they didn’t see me.”

“What?” I say, my heart speeding up, my chest pounding, thinking about Henry and if this unhinged man could be connected. The sky darkens, I notice, as if on cue. A few fat drops of rain fall, and I see some of the moms gathering up Ziploc bags of snacks and baby floaties and starting to shout at the kids to get out of the pool before lightning strikes it.

“Yeah, and they were saying some shit back and forth, but mostly in Spanish and my Spanish kinda stinks, but I got the gist that the guy owed them like five hundred bucks for some meth or somethin’. Can you believe that? Poor fucker in a Shamrock dumpster for five hundies. What a world we live in,” she says, and I just stare at her a moment, not knowing how seriously to take her. She could be a quack for all I know. The story is outrageous, and this place is full of nutters.

“Seems like being humiliated in front of the whole apartment community is worse than owing him five hundred bucks. I think he just pissed off the wrong guy, just sayin’.”

Rolling thunder rumbles behind the dark clouds, and the few older kids left on the pool deck cover their heads with towels and squeal as they scurry indoors. Her words feel like a punch to the head. Drugs. Is that what Henry’s death is about? Did he get into something like that? I can’t imagine it, but at least it’s a thread to pull on.

“Wait, so you actually saw this? And you never told anyone what you saw?”

“No one ever asked me,” she says matter-of-factly and then picks up a martini from the floor next to her chair that I just now noticed, never mind that it’s midmorning. She eats an olive and blinks at me.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, nobody ever asked me anything about seein’ a dead guy, so no. It never came up.”

“You saw someone get murdered,” I say, trying to keep the judgment out of my voice so she doesn’t shut down or something.

“Well, not really, I heard a guy get murdered. I only saw a guy get dumped, technically.”

“Don’t you think you should report it?” I say, trying to hide my disgust and utter shock.

“Not my problem. Why would I want to get myself in the middle of that? I think he’s like...not just part of a cartel, but like a drug lord,” she says, and now I am having a hard time taking her seriously, but I don’t know what to think.

“So nobody knows this guy is...cartel? Nobody around here knows? Did Henry know? Did you know Henry?” I add desperately at the end because it just dawns on me that she lived next door to him, and he never mentioned her.

“What a gem that guy was. So sad about what happened. You’re the wife?” she says, and I nod. “Yeah, you look like you don’t fit in here, so I figured. What is that, Gucci?” she asks, rubbing the hem of my dress between her fingers.

I pull it away. “So you knew him,” I say, sitting on Henry’s metal chair opposite her.

“He painted me once,” she says, beaming.

“Really?” I hold back tears thinking of Henry here, in his studio, everyone’s friend—making everyone feel so important the way he always did. I imagine him at dusk, a brandy and ice sweating in a lowball glass on his wood table covered in brushes, all the windows open with a breeze spilling through, his subjects sitting on the chaise longue, posing for him as he paints them into life on canvas. It was when he was at his happiest. Mostly gritty portraits, photorealism, rarely nudes, and never elegant, glossy images. Just real people—with every line on their face and fold of fat raw and present in his work. My heart soars with joy for just a brief moment thinking of him this way—happy and peaceful.

“Yeah,” she says. “We chatted about how you guys were gonna visit Roswell for the weekend, and I told him to get alien abduction insurance, and he didn’t believe there was such a thing, so we looked it up on his phone, and no shit, lots of people have insurance in case of alien abduction, and he thought that was really funny. I said he has a better chance of running into a ’foot!”

“What?” I ask, numbly.

“A bigfoot. Anyway, besides that time, it was just a wave here and there when he came and went. Small talk once or twice when he drank a beer on the balcony. I didn’t know him well, but still... I would have never thought he’d...you know. End his life. He always seemed happy to me.”

I think of that trip we took to Roswell, just like she said, months ago, and how he bought little green alien salt-and-pepper shakers for my parents because my mom would get a kick out of them. My hands tremble at the memory, so I try to change the subject to get as much information out of this woman as I can.

“People must know this guy is dangerous. I mean, don’t you think? Does his wife know what he does?” I ask.

“I don’t think so. Did you meet Rosa? She almost passed out when Jackie ripped off a toenail runnin’ across the pavers next to the building. White as a sheet. A drug lord husband who kills people for sport. Gonna have to say she doesn’t know. She knows he went to prison, of course, for drugs, but the rest?” She shakes her head and slurps down another olive from her martini. “He puts on the changed-man act—a man who has a good job as a trucker—a family guy now.”

“Prison?” I gasp and then lower my voice. Maybe she’s not crazy, and this guy is really as big a threat as she says, but nothing makes sense anymore. It’s all so surreal. “Then how is that possible the wife doesn’t know?”

“Well, I thought—I guess everyone still does think—that Eddie’s a trucker. Over the road, you know. Gone for weeks at a time. It’s been that way a long time—since he got out. Now, I think that he’s probably not a trucker.”

“Ya think!” I say, again too loudly.

But she just smiles as if having a revelation. “Hey, it’s nice to have someone to talk about this to finally.” She lights a new cigarette off the one in her mouth and then offers the package out to me. I decline. “Well,” she continues, “who the fuck knows where he goes, but it’s nowhere good. Ohhh. I wonder if he has another family somewhere, and someday they’ll catch him and make a Lifetime movie about it, and we get to play ourselves in it. What a hoot that would be! It’d be fun to be in a movie, don’t ya think?”

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