Was this why the car had been broken into? Had someone deliberately planted the note? And why hadn’t the police searched the car? Had they just not gotten around to it yet? The note had come out of a laser printer. Possibly mine. It was an obvious fake. More than a fake, it looked like someone trying to fake a suicide and doing a bad job of it. Someone was deliberately trying to frame me, I thought again.
I folded the note up and tried to decide what to do with it. If I turned the note in to the police, it will just look like a further attempt on my part to cover everything up. If I destroyed it and the police figured that out, I’d look even guiltier. I could destroy it, but what if it had the killer’s fingerprints on it? I doubted it did, but I couldn’t be sure. I put the note back into the glove compartment. For now.
I got out of the car and walked around to the trunk. I eased the lid up and found nothing there but a couple boxes of old clothes. Either Eddie had left them there after the last time he moved, or he was planning to donate them to Goodwill. Some of the clothes had been pulled out of the boxes. Someone was looking for something, something they thought Eddie had. But what?
As I closed the trunk, I wondered what the suicide note could tell me about the person who wrote it. He used the words “ashamed” and “shame.” He assumed Eddie was ashamed of being a masseur. But in his time with me, Eddie hadn’t seemed ashamed at all. He’d almost been brazen about it. He said he liked men and that was the reason he gave erotic massages. So the shame is likely on the part of the killer. The killer was ashamed of his association with Eddie.
Another thing about the note, it used the phrase “my family and those who love me.” This person doesn’t know Eddie well. If he did, he’d use specific names. He would have added those details to make the note more convincing.
For a few moments I was pleased with myself. I knew three things about the killer. He was ashamed of himself, probably sexually. He didn’t know Eddie well. And Eddie had something he wanted back. I decided I was so good at profiling that I should maybe have my own TV show after I was cleared of murder. But then something occurred to me.
My parents were “good” church people, and ever since I came out in college, we’d had a strained relationship. A prosecutor could whip this up for a jury and convince them that I carried deep shame. On top of that, I’d already admitted to the police that I didn’t know Eddie well. And if I was the killer, I’d be trying to find Eddie’s phone to destroy it. Everything I’d just learned about the killer could be turned back on me.
Taking the gloves off, I began walking back to my house. My mind was racing. The police thought I killed Eddie, and they thought that because someone was trying to make them think that. What chance did I stand? I didn’t have the money for a lawyer or a private detective. I didn’t have an alibi. They could prove that someone killed Eddie, and I couldn’t prove it wasn’t me.
What was up with Jeremy? I couldn’t help but think about the sex we’d had on Friday and what he’d had me do to him. Had he known something? How could he, though? And now finding out the he and Skye were in the neighborhood around the time that Eddie was killed. Did that mean something? And if it did, what? What did it mean?
Jeremy did not kill Eddie. I knew that for certain. Didn’t I? If he and Skye had gone into the house, what would have happened? The three of them fell into some kind of kinky three-way that ended with Eddie being choked to death? No, that didn’t happen. Jeremy would never have come to the house the next day and had sex with me. Not if he or Skye had killed Eddie there the day before. It was dumb, and even though Jeremy had done some pretty dumb things in the past, it was too dumb.
Even for Jeremy.
Chapter Thirteen
When I got back to my house, I impulsively jumped into my car. I needed to check something out. Ten minutes later, I was on DeLongpre cruising for a parking space. I found one on Seward and walked back to DeLongpre. I hadn’t written down Eddie’s address, but I remembered the first two numbers were 66. Lucky for me, there was a park on one side of the street. The other side of the street was small homes from the thirties and forties. They’d once been affordable, but these days, even with the real estate collapse, they were out of reach for someone like Eddie.
In the center of the block there were two apartment buildings. I didn’t see Eddie’s name on the mailbox at the first place, so I went on to the second. It took only a second or so to find his name. Hernandez. He was in apartment G. The building was from the fifties, a stucco box painted pastel green with dirty gray accents. There was no security system, so I walked around the pool, which occupied the center of the square building, following the letters until I got to G.
The door stood open a few inches. At first, I thought whoever had been in Eddie’s car had been here, too. But then I realized I could hear a TV playing inside. And I could smell that someone was frying something in a lot of oil. I tapped on the door and said, “Hello?”
A few seconds
