My girlfriend Lizzie was stabbed by my drug dealer the same night John Lennon died. She and I lived together in a small Westwood apartment most of our Junior year and through the first semester of our Senior year. I’m not sure we were going to get married, but we were good together. A couple of UCLA students on our way to something bigger. We thought.
We’d fought earlier that night. I wanted to watch my beloved Dolphins on Monday Night Football, she wanted to study for finals. I said something stupid, not a stretch for me back then, and stormed out. I grabbed the twenty dollar bill on the counter, “I’m taking this,” I announced, “and I’m buying everyone a beer.”
“Fine,” she hollered back, “I guess we can fucking buy food next week.”
I slammed the door and headed to the bar around the corner to watch the game with a couple of buddies. I had a beer and was still steaming about the fight when Howard Cosell broke in with the news about Lennon. Right near the end of the football game. We weren’t sure we’d heard it right, the noise from the crowd in the bar drowning out most of the telecast. One of the guys with me hollered at the bartender to hit the volume and shouted at the crowd to shut up. It went quiet, followed by a ripple of disbelief through the place, then some girl in the corner let loose with a wail. A guy stood up and yelled, “No fuckin’ way.” He pointed at the bartender, “Somebody shot Lennon? Is that what they said?”
I ran home. Lizzie loved the Beatles more than just about anything. She didn’t watch much T.V. when I wasn’t home, but she always had the radio on. Usually listening to KMET. And if Howard Cosell knew about Lennon, the rest of the world would know about it soon enough and it was only matter of time before some DJ stopped playing records and broke the news to half of Southern California. Fights don’t mean so much when a Beatle gets shot.
I took the stairs three at a time to our fourth floor apartment and didn’t realize that the front door was unlocked and partially open until after I’d pushed through it. “Hey,” I called. “Why’d you leave the door open, what the…”
It was a small place. Kitchen and living room crowded together into one space and a short hallway. Our bedroom on one side and the bathroom on the other. She was lying in a pool of blood, her legs in the hallway, her torso extended into the living room. Her dark hair mixing with the black shag throw rug we’d picked up a few weeks earlier.
“Lizzie?” I yelled. Or whispered. I don’t remember. Everything a blur. Lennon and the Dolphins and Howard Cosell gone from my thoughts. I ran to her and she was still breathing. I think she was breathing. When I knelt next to her, she said my name and another word that could have been “help.” I leaned back on my heels and began pressing on her body, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to figure out where it was coming from. I rocked back and forth and believed that if I could find the wound, I’d be able to stop it and plug it and then everything would be alright. It could have been two minutes, it could have been thirty I sat there trying to stop the bleeding. But I do remember she blinked. Just once, kind of a slow motion. Like she might have been going to sleep. Her eyes were staring at me, hopefully, they drifted closed, and when they reopened, she was gone. There was no more Lizzie. Just a body on the floor of a small apartment.
That may have been what did it, convinced me that I needed to call for help, seeing her eyes staring up at the ceiling with no life left in them. I crawled to the phone and dialed the operator.
“She’s dead,” I said. “She’s dead.” The operator didn’t say anything, I heard a few clicks and then a deep voice said, “West L.A.P.D.”
In between the time I hung up and the cops and ambulances screamed up to our apartment, I flushed every drug and baggie I could find in that little apartment. Mostly acid, it was my favorite and I’d gotten Lizzie into it. There was also a couple ounces of grass and vial of coke which we’d tried a couple of times. Neither of us liked it much, I just hadn’t bothered to get rid of it.
That was probably the shittiest thing I’ve ever done, worry about my self-preservation waiting for the cops to arrive. But I knew what was coming and it wasn’t going to be good. I was covered with her blood and when the cops came through that door they were going to have plenty of reasons to beat the shit out of me without finding an apartment full of drugs on top of a dead girl.
I sat next to her, took her hand, and waited.
The cops were mercifully quick, hit me once, knelt on my back and cuffed me. They ignored me for a bit, let me lay there on the floor next to Lizzie, before the one in charge dragged me to a chair and peppered me with questions, He talked to me as if another cop wasn’t drawing a chalk outline around Lizzie on the other side of the room. He kept talking as they zipped her body into one of those black bags. They had to unzip and retry several times as Lizzie’s hair kept getting caught.
“You listening to me, son?”
I snapped my eyes back to the cop in front of me. The expression on his face no different than if he’d pulled me over on a Friday night driving too fast on Wilshire. I slumped awkwardly in the chair Lizzie and I picked out together form the Goodwill last summer, my wrists in cuffs behind my back.
“Linc, huh?” the cop said as he sorted through my wallet. The compassion in his voice as thin as what remained of his hair. “Like the Mod Squad?”
“No, sir. Short for Lincoln. Like the president.”
He smirked with his shoulders. “That’s pretty good, son.” He stared at me like he didn’t think that was pretty good at all. “If it’s any consolation, the boys believe your story.”
“If that’s the case, is there any chance you can take these handcuffs off, sir?”
“You know how it goes, we’ve got rules, I’ve gotta wait until McKittrick gets here. He’s the homicide detective. If he says uncuff you, we’ll uncuff you. He takes his sweet time some nights.” He glanced around the apartment, as if appraising it for the first time. “She pay for the whole place? That’s not too bad. Not too bad at all, son. You must be something special for her to help you out like that.”
I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but I couldn’t help myself. “We split the rent, sir. It was my place before she moved in.”
He studied me, to see if I was telling the truth. I thought for a minute he might let it go. “Huh. Your place? You play ball for the Bruins or something?”
I knew better than to say anything other than, “No, sir.”
Before he could continue, another cop pushed through the doorway past the ambulance drivers taking Lizzie’s body out. He was tall. Almost freakishly so. He curved his neck downward like a vulture so his head dropped toward the black body bag on the cart with her inside. If I didn’t know better I thought he sniffed, more like inhaled, as if he might get a clue about the crime from her scent. Without taking his eyes off the bag he said, “Couldn’t wait ten more minutes?”
The cop that had been questioning me curled his lip. “Sorry, Detective McKittrick. The M.E.’s boys were in a hurry, I tried to hold them as long as I could. We got pictures. Halloran did a quick outline for you…” He swung his head in the direction of the chalk outline and the congealed blood.
The detective stood in the doorway and surveyed the scene. His eyes finally met mine.
“This the guy?” He looked at me, but his words were directed to the other cop.
“No, Detective. He claims to be the boyfriend. As best we can tell, he called it in.”
The detective took one step forward, raised his face toward the ceiling and twisted his head toward his shoulder until some of the bones in his neck cracked. “So what do we got?”
The cop said, “When the boys arrived on scene, we detained Mr. Jefferson here. In the hallway and stairwell we found some bloody footprints that appeared to be going back down the stairs. The markings did not appear to match the tread on Mr. Jefferson’s shoes. The blood led to a first floor apartment. Halloran knocked. Guy inside was lying on his couch, needle still in his arm.” He paused, gave me a quick side-eyed once over, then continued. “There was a knife, covered in blood. The guy’s hands were covered in blood. Heroin in his veins. Dealer by the look of things. He said…um, he said…”
The detective folded his arms across his chest. “He said what, Officer?”
The cop looked at the floor. “He said, ‘He owed me twenty dollars.’”
“You got him in custody?”
“He’s already down at the station, Detective.”
McKittrick nodded in my direction, “So why’s the kid still in cuffs?”
“You never know, Detective. The guy downstairs was flying. Enough heroin to kill a horse, we had no idea if he was telling the truth or if he even knows what fucking planet he’s on.” He took one more look at me before turning back to the detective, his earlier full body smirk long gone. “We didn’t know if this kid lived here or not, lots of blood, we were just trying to make sure we did everything by the book.”
“Any drugs in here?”
“No, Detective,” the cop answered. “But we didn’t search too hard.”
McKittrick, whose face was long and lean like the rest of him, smiled at me then. “You should know better than living this close to your dealer.” He paused and narrowed his eyes. “You flush everything before you called the cops? Or after?”
I didn’t answer.
“Smart kid. Uncuff him.” He unfolded his arms and rubbed his forehead. “You’re going to need to find a place to stay for a few days. Someone will let you know when you can come back in.”
A half an hour later I was standing on the street corner, my friend James on his way to pick me up. The last of the cop cars switched off its lights and drove away and the street looked like it did every other night. My knees shook. Like they didn’t belong to me anymore. And I managed to sit on the curb before they gave out, dropped my head into my hands, and let the sobs come out. Big nasty sounding wails that I’d kept silent through the whole ordeal. “Oh my god, Lizzie.” I choked out over and over again. I cried until James pulled up, slid me into the passenger seat of his Omni, and took me to his place.
It was another four days before I could go back to our…my…apartment. I’m not sure who cleaned the place up, the cops or if the landlord hired someone, either way, the place was spotless, like nothing happened. Somehow her blood hadn’t reached the rug we’d purchased. No evidence of anything.
That night I had my first dream.
Her voice echoed through the apartment. Hollow, like she could only speak the outline of words. “Linc?” it said. “Lincoln?”
I was tied to my bed, some leather straps or harnesses with big brass buckles around my legs and across my torso. My eyes screamed around the bedroom, except it wasn’t exactly my bedroom, everything was black. A flat, dull black that didn’t reflect or gleam in the darkness, didn’t cast shadows. “Lizzie?” I called back.
“Linc, you did this to me. It’s your fault.”
“Lizzie?” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I struggled against my restraints.
“Your fault…” wafted down the hallway from where here dead body might still be laying. “You could have saved me instead of yourself. Your fault…” repeated and her voice evaporated like dust.
And then I heard something shuffle in the hallway, unsteady feet coming toward the bedroom, scraping against the wood floor. One shambling step, then another. “Fault,” she whispered and a hand, white and flaky, came around the edge of the door.
I squeezed my eyes closed. I did not want to see what was walking into my bedroom. I did not want to see her. The scraping sound from the hallway transitioned to the bedroom that wasn’t my bedroom. My body paralyzed in the bed that wasn’t my bed. “Go away,” I said through teeth clenched as tightly as my eyes.
For a moment there was nothing. Then the scraping sound returned, right along side me and something dry touched my face…
…I jolted awake, certain that I screamed. The bedding wrapped tightly around me, my bedroom once again my bedroom. Old paint on the walls, the colors of real life muted by the nighttime shadows. Nothing else in the apartment with me.
I reached for on the nightstand lamp, half convinced that her dry white hand would reach up from under the bed and grab hold of me. But nothing did. I checked the clock, a little after three, and I pulled my hand back under the sheets with me. To safety.
It was a dream I reminded myself, guilt, fear, sadness all normal feelings manifesting in a nightmare. Anyone going through something so horrible would be expected to have dreams I told myself. I flexed my toes and tried to relax them, as a guide to the other muscles throughout my body tied up in knots. The dream wasn’t real, even if what happened to Lizzie was. The dream nothing more than my brain trying to reconcile my shame.
Something about the dream refused to fade, some part of it I couldn’t shake. I scrunched the pillow, tried to make myself comfortable, and rewound the dream. It was the sound of her coming down the hallway that stuck with me. A sound that reminded me of childhood. I couldn’t place it, but I knew I’d heard it before. My mind sorted through memories, looking for something to attach to, until sleep snuck up on me. […]
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Jay likes to write, so he does. Recent short stories have appeared in Penumbric, Crystal Lake, and Uncharted. His debut novel, The Great American Coward, is available from Golden Storyline Books. He can be found on-line at www.JayBechtol.com or on Twitter @BechtolJay. He can be found in person in Homer, Alaska.