Quiet Desperation Read online

  He’d turned it down, of course.

  Lester wouldn’t remember it, not after twenty years.

  After about a week of non-stop work, I was nearly finished. And I got another email from Lester.

  Hi!

  Any luck finding more pieces of the manuscript? I’ve put out some feelers, and I think we might get over seven figures for this. There’s a LOT of interest. We might even have to take it to auction.

  Thanks,

  Lester

  PS. You’ll be hearing from a writer named Jack Sapirstein. He’s an associate professor of Literature, and he’s interested in writing a critical biography of Hunter, isn’t that great? But he’ll need access to Hunter’s papers.

  That scared me into almost stopping. If I let someone have access to Hunter’s papers…then I’d have to admit…yes, that was when I should have pulled the plug.

  But I was committed to it, wanted to see what Lester would say.

  I could always admit it was mine if he liked it.

  The next morning, I emailed him the revised manuscript. I sat there, my cursor over the send button for a long time. I remembered Hunter, saying over and over you’re just as talented as I am, you should be even more successful than me, you can write anything, any style, any voice, which is both your blessing and your curse.

  I got up and walked into the living room and looked at the bookcase with copies of all the books I’ve written. The three trade paperback novels under my own name, published by a small press for a couple of thousand dollars up front, ignored by reviewers, selling just enough copies to earn the advance back but little more than that, falling out of print quickly. The shelves and shelves of ghostwritten books, mass market paperback thrillers and cozies and space operas and romances, using house names or pseudonyms, the slutty private school girl books, the hypnotic eye of a Real Housewife staring at me from another spine.

  I walked back to the computer and hit send.

  I could have told Lester the truth when he called the manuscript “Hunter’s crowning achievement.” I could have stopped Lester from taking it to auction. I could have admitted the truth before it was bought for seven figures. Even then I could have not signed the contract as Hunter’s literary heir… but it was an awful lot of money and my own agent wasn’t having any luck finding ghostwriting gigs for me and I didn’t know what else I could do. The money I had set aside was running out so much faster than I’d thought.

  I was going to run out of money for the rent in about three months.

  Seven figures.

  Just because it had Hunter’s name on it.

  I’d never have to worry about money again.

  I signed the contract, telling myself that was the end of it. It’s not like I could find another manuscript. It was a one-off, my revenge on the publishing industry and all the snubs thrown my way all those years, being told I wasn’t good enough.

  I was just as good as Hunter. I was. And now I’d finally proved it, even if I was the only one who knew.

  Jack Sapirstein was the only fly in the ointment.

  He kept emailing and calling. I was running out of excuses for not giving him access to Hunter’s papers. He was persistent. And I was beginning to think he didn’t believe that Hunter wrote Fireflies.

  That made him dangerous.

  The first part of the advance was already in my bank account.

  I thought about moving out of the country and just disappearing. Lester could just have the money wired into my account whenever royalties or other payments were due. I started planning.

  Jack Sapirstein wasn’t going to go away.

  The only reason I answered the door was because I was expecting a package of advance reading copies.

  “Jack Sapirstein.” The man standing there said, sticking out his hand. He was very short, no more than five feet four at most, with a thick head of long hair parted in the center and falling to his shoulders. His teeth winked at me through a forest of facial hair, and his brown eyes were shrewd, intelligent, piercing. “I took a chance on just showing up.” He pushed past me into my apartment.

  “I’m sorry to be so pushy,” he flashed his teeth at me again as he sat down on my battered old sofa, which I was donating to Goodwill. “But I’m impulsive and was getting frustrated with our email exchanges and I thought, hey, what the hell, I haven’t been down there in years so why not?”

  He was younger than I’d thought he’d be, maybe in his early thirties. I’d checked him out on-line, of course, but couldn’t find any pictures. He’d published a lot of pieces on Hunter and other gay writers of the late twentieth century in academic journals, considered himself an expert—wrote with the kind of arrogance that set my teeth on edge.

  “This really isn’t a good time--”

  He cut me off before I could finish. “I’m not a beat around the bush kind of person,” another flash of teeth, “But I have to see his papers. I have to.”

  “They’re really in no condition for an academic to look at—“

  “He wanted to leave his papers to Columbia,” he cut me off again.

  “He never said anything about that to me.” How did he know what Hunter wanted to do with his papers?

  “And he never wrote any book called Fireflies.” That flash of teeth again as he crossed his short jean-clad legs and leaned back into my sofa. “You know it, I know it, and the whole world is going to know it soon.”

  I felt sick to my stomach, could barely breathe. I heard myself saying, “I was his best friend, you’re being ridiculous, I certainly knew him better than you did,” even as I wondered if Jack was—I don’t know—maybe, one of Hunter’s boys? Hunter had always liked his men to be young, preferred them to be for hire. Hunter wasn’t interested in having a relationship, it was only about sex for him. He usually liked his young men to have an Eastern European, almost Slavic look to them, bright blonde hair and pale skin and blue eyes and tall.

  Jack was totally the wrong type for Hunter.

  So, how could he know?

  “I should think Lester would have noticed,” he was saying, “But all Lester sees is dollar signs. Did you write it? Is that where the manuscript came from?” And he started telling me things he noticed in the manuscript that weren’t Hunter-like, and about how he wasn’t really interested in writing a biography of Hunter but he’d wanted to see Hunter’s papers and Lester, whose daughter he’d dated in college, told him about the new manuscript and he knew it had to be a fake so he wanted to see the papers because he knew Hunter kept a diary and if there was no mention of the manuscript in the diary—

  The diary.

  My palms were sweating.

  I didn’t think anyone else knew about the diary.

  I interrupted him. “How—how do you know so much about Hunter?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he brushed the long hair out of his face with his fingers again. “Because I don’t look like a Jan or a Stefan or an Alexi?” He laughed. “Yeah, I knew Hunter. And I also know he didn’t have a manuscript stashed away somewhere.” He shook his head. “Did you really think you’d get away with this?”

  “What do you want? Money?”

  He got right in my chest, tilting his head to look up at me. “I don’t want anything from you. I just wanted to see for myself the kind of a person would try to profit off a dead man. You were supposed to be Hunter’s best friend.” His voice was dripping with contempt. “Yeah, Hunter told me all about you, the best friend, the only person he could really trust, the guy with all the talent who was so unappreciated and unrecognized and what a crime it was that you didn’t get the glory you so deserved—“

  As he spat each word at me my mind disappeared back within itself, my skin crawled and the hair on the nape of my neck rose.

  I don’t remember hitting him.

  I don’t, and I’ve tried in the hours since I did it. I don’t remember knocking him down and sitting on his chest with my hands around his neck.

  I don’t remember.
>
  When I came back to myself, I was sitting on his chest. His face was reddish-purple, eyes bulging. His hands fell limply away from my wrists. Drool was running from one side of his open mouth. There was blood beneath his head, his hair smeared into it.

  I don’t remember killing him.

  I also don’t remember the next hour or so. I was in a panic, of course, that much I do remember, as I tried to figure out what to do, ideas rushing through my mind, coming and going so quickly I couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t decide which was the right one.

  None of them involved calling the police.

  Who knew he was coming here? Did he take a cab or an Uber? Was there a rental car parked out on the street that could be traced here? Did Lester know? Was there a lover, friend, family member who knew he was coming to New Orleans to confront me?

  Someone had to know.

  I couldn’t get away with it that easily, could I?

  I found the car key in his jeans pocket, and when I clicked the key fob there was a corresponding chirp from the street. I slipped out the front door. It was a Honda Accord, with a rental license plate. In the trunk was a suitcase. A shoulder bag in the passenger seat contained a folder, with a print-out of a reservation at a French Quarter hotel (idiot, you never rent a car in New Orleans if you’re staying in the Quarter), a laptop and phone charger. I grabbed the shoulder bag, locked the car and went back inside.

  I had to get rid of the body.

  I had to get rid of the car.

  How? Where?

  There was an old rug in my storage attic I’d been meaning to throw away. I sealed his head inside of a garbage bag, using duct tape to close it around his neck. I rolled him into the rug, tied it with twine and dragged it over to a corner of the living room. I got out my bleach and my bucket and cleaned the floor where he’d bled, making sure to pour the bloody water down the sink and scrubbed out the sink with bleach.

  I sat at my computer and cleared my mind.

  The city was surrounded by water, swamps. The swamps had alligators. I could take the car out there, dump the body…but how would I get back home? It’s not like I could summon an Uber out to the Manchac Swamp, or to Lake Borgne. I couldn’t leave a record behind, something the police could find. Getting rid of his rental car would be easy. I could park it somewhere in the Quarter and it would get towed.

  That would take days to sort out—the city’s inefficiency would work to my advantage there.

  So I drove the rental to the Quarter. I found an open spot on Dauphine Street between St. Philip and Ursulines. I parked, wiped everything down, casually walked to Canal Street and caught the streetcar home.

  Getting rid of the body wouldn’t be that easy.

  I waited until dark to put down the back seat of my Honda CR-V. After midnight, I slung the rug over my shoulder, staggering beneath his dead weight, carried him down the front steps, and putt him into the back of the car. At two thirty I drove out of my neighborhood and took I-10 and got off at Chef Menteur Highway, heading to New Orleans East. I knew exactly where to go. I’d researched the area for a ghost-written book years ago. There were fishing camps out on Lake Catherine, where Chef Menteur was bounded by the lake on one side and Bayou de Lesaire on the other, with Lake Pontchartrain just a little farther away. Bayou de Lesaire emptied into Lake Pontchartrain right before the Rigolets pass to Lake Borgne. The receding tide, with luck, would sweep the body out to the Gulf.

  I set the carpet down and cut the ties.

  I could see the glowing red eyes of alligators floating in the water as I rolled the body out. I removed the garbage bag from his head. I gave him a shove. He tumbled down the slope into the water. As I stood there panting, two of the gators started gliding across the top of the water in the moonlight, toward where his body floated.

  There was some splashing and I turned my head away.

  I left the garbage bag there, and rolled up the rug.

  I went over the back of the car with bleach and water, just to be sure.

  When I was finished, there was no sign of the body in the water, and the alligators were gone like they’d never been there.

  As I drove back, car windows down to get rid of the bleach smell, I worried,

  I wasn’t going to get away with this.

  I’d been crazy to think I would.

  The fraud was bad enough, and now I’d killed to cover it up.

  But it was….it was a lot of money.

  And once all the money was in my account, I would leave the country.

  If anyone asked, he never showed up at my house.

  If I was lucky, he’d never be found, just another tourist who came to New Orleans and vanished, his rental car towed from the Quarter, suitcase still in the trunk, his shoulder bag missing.

  And I would be rich.

  It was just a joke, you know, when the whole thing started.

  Now it was criminal fraud for several million dollars, and someone was dead.

  When I got back home, I again checked on countries without an extradition treaty with the United States.

  Switzerland first, to open a bank account, and then Andorra.

  Andorra sounded lovely.

  Kind of like home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Greg Herren is an award-winning New Orleans author and editor. He writes two mystery series—the Chanse MacLeod and Scotty Bradley novels—and also writes young adult fiction. Former editor of Lambda Book Report, he is also a co-founder of the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, which takes place in New Orleans every May. He is the author of ten novels, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning Murder in the Rue Chartres, called by the New Orleans Times-Picayune “the most honest depiction of life in post-Katrina New Orleans published thus far.” He co-edited Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections on New Orleans, which also won the Lambda Literary Award and edited Blood on the Bayou, which won the Anthony Award. He has published more than fifty short stories in markets as varied as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to the critically acclaimed anthology New Orleans Noir to various websites, literary magazines, and anthologies.

  Click here to explore Greg’s stories.