John Belushi Is Dead (13 page)

When Ramirez was on trial, no one knew that his father suffered from such terrifying fits of rage that one day he beat himself in the face with a hammer while a cowering young Richard looked on from the corner. The jury didn't know that Richard's cousin came back from Vietnam and showed him photographs of Vietnamese women giving head at gunpoint. They didn't know that Richard's cousin shot his own wife in front of the young boy, that he aimed the gun right at her face and pulled the trigger. Even Richard's family didn't know about that until after he was in jail.

As Benji and I drove the quiet streets, neighborhoods once shrouded in terror, doors locked and windows barred, because of the Night Stalker, I thought about all the ways to make a man a killer. I tried to imagine what was going through Ramirez's mind as he peered through windows and pried off screen doors. Was killing really the natural order of the world, as so many serial killers believed? Had the rest of us all been duped by the idea of a civilized society, where killing people just wasn't neighborly? Was that why everyone screamed at one another on the freeway? Maybe a good kill was nature's way of restoring the balance. Maybe it wasn't natural for us to suppress our rage, to shrug off every insult and disguise our pain with smiles. Maybe a good kill was enough to set us straight. Maybe a good kill would make us all feel a hell of a lot better.

If Benji knew I was still visiting Hank, he didn't let on. After he
dropped me off at home, I would walk inside, call a cab, and then walk back out to the porch to wait for it. Some days Hank and I didn't talk about much. Maybe we'd discuss the weather or the latest old movie he had watched on cable, or he'd regale me with a story from when he first arrived in Los Angeles, like the time he mowed Sinatra's lawn and accidentally cut the flowers with it. Most of the time we'd just sit, watching the television or staring into our drinks. It was as if my presence was enough, something to break up the day, a welcome relief from his solitude.

One late afternoon, when it was even hotter than usual, I suggested we sit outside on the balcony to catch some of the breeze that had started up as the sun was setting. To my surprise Hank agreed. I considered it a small victory: Hank had barely set foot outside his front door since the moment I met him. We went outside where there was an old sofa with the stuffing coming out and an overflowing ashtray; the concrete was black from where the butts had burned the ground. We watched the sun go down over the apartment building and listened to the sound of the washer and dryer churning downstairs. Hank sucked on a cigar, the end all slick and glistening. The silence was broken only when a police chopper made its way low across the sky, probably chasing a car or looking for someone on the run. The sound roared through the apartment building and was gone in an instant. I thought I saw Hank wince as the blades cut across the sky. He put the cigar back in his mouth and sighed.

“Another man running for his life,” he muttered. “This place is a goddamn war zone. Just as many casualties here as there were in Germany or Vietnam or Iraq. And refugees.”

“Sometimes I feel like I'm one of them,” I said.

“A refugee?”

I shook my head. “Casualty.”

“Ahhh, the casualties of the heart,” he said, and I noted his sarcasm. “Young love.”

“Nothing like that.”

“No? What about that goddamn kid you brought over?”

“Benji? We're just friends.”

Hank took a drink from his beer. “The boy is sick.”

“What do you mean, sick?”

He took another drink as if steeling himself. “There's a hell of a lotta darkness inside him. It's swirling around, going in circles, with no way out.”

“No way out, huh? That's very profound.”

He took another drink. “No way out. Yet.”

I picked up my tea and my hand was shaking. I knew exactly what Hank was talking about. He had seen something in Benji that most people missed or wrote off as arrogance or boyish bravado. Benji was a bending branch, ready to snap at any moment. I could see it as we drove around and when we stood outside a house where someone had died. There was an intensity about him that scared me. I put my tea down.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, although it was more that I didn't want to talk about Benji.

Hank put his bottle down. “Get me the wine from under the sink.”

I went inside and peed quickly, not wanting to be in that bathroom any longer than necessary, not with the possibility that Bernie Bernall's ghost could make an unscheduled appearance. I went to the kitchen, found the bottle, and brought it out to Hank.

“Cheers,” he said, taking it and unscrewing the cap. He took a mouthful and let the bottle rest on his leg. The sky was beginning to darken, the cool breeze settling in for a long stay.

“So tell me about war zones, Hank,” I said. “You were in Norway during the war. What was it like?”

His face crumpled. “Aw, hell, I was so young. I don't remember a goddamn thing.”

“But there were concentration camps in Norway, right?”

“Yeah, sure. I mean, there were concentration camps everywhere.”

I looked at the mark on his arm. It was hard to keep my eyes off it. “Is your family Jewish?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing. Just not Jewish.”

“So you were a Nazi?” I said, trying to provoke him.

“No!”

“Hey, I don't care,” I said, though I wasn't sure how I would've responded if he had said, Yeah, sure, I was a Nazi. I threw babies in ditches and put my bayonet through men's hearts, and here we are just having tea and wine on my balcony while the sun goes down. As right as Hank was about Benji, he didn't know that Benji also had
him
pegged. Hank was hiding something.

“What were the concentration camps in Norway called again? Bardufoss, wasn't that one?”

“How do you know so much about it?”

I didn't tell him that as soon as he mentioned he had grown up in Norway I'd done a little research on the Internet.

“Learned it at school,” I said. “The History Channel. There's
this big fight going on at the moment about whether to restore Auschwitz so people can keep visiting it or to let it fall down.”

“Fall down,” Hank said without hesitation.

“Really? You don't think that maybe it's important to keep it standing so people can go and see it? There's kids at my school who don't believe the Holocaust happened. If it's still standing, people can't deny what took place there.”

“People will find ways to deny anything.” Hank scowled, staring at the concrete, not looking at me. “Won't make a lick of difference if that building's still there or not. I say let it fall to the ground.”

The sun disappeared into the horizon and the sky went dark. The wind grew colder and the street lamps illuminated in unison. Hank stretched.

“Tell me,” he said, “what do your parents think of you spending so much time around here?”

I took a deep breath. “My parents died.”

“They did?”

I nodded. “It was an accident. Um, a car accident.”

“Oh.” Hank was thoughtful for a moment. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

“It's okay.”

“Doesn't sound okay.”

I took another deep breath. “Well, it happened about five years ago, so I'm really cool with it now.”

“Oh. Well, that's good, then.”

We sat in silence for a moment. “Hey, are you sure I can't take you anywhere?” I said finally, breaking the silence. “You spend all day cooped up in that stuffy apartment in the heat.”

“Suits me fine.”

“Hank, it's not healthy.”

“I tell you what,” he said, “you give me something worth going out for, and we'll go out.”

“Ah! A challenge.”

He stood up, opened the front door, and stepped inside. I waited a moment, enjoying the quiet of the night, then heard the sound of an old movie floating out on the breeze. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were singing “Let's Call the Whole Thing Off.” I peeked inside and saw Hank at his spot in front of the television, basking in the glow of its warmth as a tiny fan blew air across his face.

H
EY
, H
ILDA
. C
OME LOOK
at this.”

I was sitting on the floor in Benji's room flicking through magazines and drinking lemonade his mom made for us. It was ninety degrees outside and too hot to be driving around, so we had decided to hang at Benji's for the day. You wouldn't know we were in the middle of a heat wave sitting in Benji's room. His house had air-conditioning and was chilled like an icebox. Goose bumps were forming on my flesh. I worried about Hank in his stuffy old apartment, with those thick, insulating curtains and only a crappy fan to keep the heat out. Old people died in weather like this, and their bodies weren't found for days. Not until the smell coming from their apartments became too strong to ignore. I decided I would make sure to visit Hank the next day to see if he was all right. Benji and his parents were heading up to Yosemite for a weekend of rafting and hiking. They'd invited me along but I had made up
a story about Lynette having time off work (like that would ever happen) and we were going to have a “girls” weekend together. In truth I had some expeditions of my own planned.

Benji opened his closet and rustled around inside. A moment later he emerged from the darkness holding a small fishbowl. The bottom of the bowl was covered in sparkling pebbles, and in the center was a plastic castle with a hole through the drawbridge large enough for a fish to swim through. For a moment I couldn't see anything else, then a small flicker of movement caught my eye.

“Is there a fish in there?” I asked. “I can't see it.”

“Yeah. Right there. His name's Sid Vicious, but I call him Sid Fishious.”

Benji tapped the side of the bowl and again something moved. I looked closer and saw a goldfish. It was white.

“Mom put him in the cupboard when she was cleaning my room and we forgot about him. I found him yesterday when I was looking for my Buzzcocks T-shirt.”

“I thought goldfish were, you know, gold,” I said.

“He was. Without light they lose pigmentation. Cool, huh?”

“How long has he been in the cupboard for?”

“Dunno. Probably a couple of weeks.” Benji tapped the glass again and examined the fish closely. I watched as he placed the bowl back in the closet, in the darkest part, and threw a dirty T-shirt over the top of it.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Benji took a small notepad from his cupboard, wrote something down with a chewed pencil, then threw the notepad beside the bowl. “I'm going to watch him die. Every day I chart the
changes in his mood: whether he's listless, moving around a lot, or has changed color. Soon he'll be floating.”

“You can't do that, Benji! That's horrible!”

“Too late. He's half dead already.”

“He's just lost pigmentation. If you bring him out now, he might get better.”

“He might, but this is much more interesting.”

I looked into Benji's eyes and searched for a hint of madness, the tiniest glint of insanity. But there was nothing lurking in those pinprick pupils, just a chilling indifference. I remembered the cat in the Dumpster, the way Benji had thrown it over the rim like a sack of old potatoes, even though its death the previous day had reduced him to tears.

“The first step to becoming a serial killer is torturing animals,” I said. “You don't want to turn out like Jeffrey Dahmer, do you?”

“I'm not torturing anything,” Benji argued. “It's an experiment. A science experiment. It's perfectly valid to use animals as test subjects.”

“Maybe if you're finding a cure for cancer. But not this.”

Benji sat down, swiveling in his seat like an evil genius from a bad spy movie. “Let me ask you a question,” he said slowly, as if addressing a child. “Do you use antibiotics?”

I groaned, which he ignored.

“Did you know,” he continued, “that Nazi Germany was responsible for some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs mankind has ever known?”

“Like what? The sound a baby makes when it's thrown against a wall?”

“Mock me you may, Hilda, but the Holocaust was a period of great scientific discovery. The lack of medical regulations meant
doctors could finally test on humans, real people, not rats or pigs or animals that have totally different biological makeups. The Nazis were the first to discover that smoking caused cancer.”

“They also injected ink into people's eyeballs to see if they would change color.”

“Hilda, are you telling me you wouldn't be interested in whether that could actually happen?”

“So what are you saying? That Sid Fishious is being killed for the good of goldfish everywhere? How is torturing your goldfish benefiting mankind?”

“I'm just saying, don't dismiss things outright because you don't understand them. Some of mankind's greatest discoveries were made by thinking outside the box.”

Benji turned back to his computer, satisfied, and my eyes returned to the cupboard. I was sure Benji was just saying those things to shock me, because he loved to play devil's advocate. But it didn't change the fact that there was a goldfish in the cupboard, slowly dying. Looking back I saw a pattern, but at the time it was invisible to me. A dead cat had brought me and Benji together, and a dying goldfish would mark the beginning of the end. Benji's fish experiment was the first sign of a deeper problem. It was the point where I decided Benji was starting to lose it.

“I've gotta go,” I said, standing up.

“But you just got here!
Faces of Death
just arrived from Amazon. Mom's making popcorn.”

“I've got to help Lynette with a case. Do some research for her. You know how it is.”