MURDER
A tenant of mine was a former teen idol, a scruffy 80s/90s heartthrob. He was alive until recently, right up until I killed him. It was accidental, mostly, and I do feel bad—I don’t lose sleep, but there’s a teeny-tiny voice, darkly rasping: ‘You could have done more to prevent this.’ And that’s true—but, when you think about it, that’s true in all scenarios: There’s more you could have done to stop the mailman from letting the mail get soggy; there’s more you could have done to make yourself a healthier sandwich; there’s more you could have done to not buy discount flip-flops that separated at the heel after a month; and there’s more you could have done to not kill the Teen Idol.
How it went down: the Teen Idol was coming up the stairs from the laundry room, carrying a bottle of detergent, and I was going down the stairs, carrying several cinder blocks. There’d been leakage from outside and runoff had slightly flooded the basement / laundry room, so I needed to put a few things on these cinder blocks so they wouldn’t get ruined—old furniture, some trash barrels, etc.
“Hey,” he belched, turning sideways to pass me. I noted his mesh shorts.
“Damn it!” I said.
At this point I lost my grip on the cinder blocks, dropping one partially on his exposed thigh, gouging out a sizable chunk, and slightly checked him with my shoulder—the yowling Teen Idol tripped backwards, tumbled down the stairs, broke his neck, and lay sprawled in a shallow bath of dirty basement water.
I put two fingers to his neck, then to his wrist. I pulled up his eyelids.
Dead.
I was a little excited, a little appalled, a little energized from the straight shoot of schadenfreude—he watched his TV at top volume, was frequently late on rent, other neighbors complained about his shrieking sex partners (alleged ‘ladies of the night’), and every now and then a gaggle of giggling 30-year-old women would congregate outside the building, yelling for him to come out, and he’d swagger to meet them and sign their chests with a permanent marker he tended to carry in his breast pocket, and occasionally he invited them in for an orgy. But despite my pleasure in knocking him over, it’s too bad he had to expire in such a way.
A detective grilled me, and I lightly fudged my answers to make it sound like it was more the Teen Idol’s fault, that he was clumsy and knocked himself down the stairs and broke his own neck. The detective stepped closer to look in my eyes, hoping a minute tic would give me away, but my words were sincere and chosen carefully, and he relented, apologizing for his initial gruffness.
When you got down to it, there wasn’t a plausible motive, and he hadn’t been so abominable a tenant that I’d have felt compelled to kill him. He paid his rent, eventually, and didn’t purposely break any of the building’s appliances, as far as I knew, so I came off as not overly suspect. It was all a tragic, tragic, just tragic accident.
Several tabloids came calling, I gave a few lines about his joie de vivre, and while a few other tenants henceforth gave me restrained-pity smiles, most were sympathetic. As a token of remembrance I held a memorial screening of The Less We Say in the lobby—his breakout role, as a misunderstood rebel who can only express himself through Lindy hop dancing. A classic, some say, the iconic poster adorning the ceilings of many girls of a certain age, his beestung lips and boyish visage inspiring untold amounts of pillow humping.
I taped a note in the elevator with a few sentences about how much his personality would be missed, and the details of the screening. I rented a projector from the library, asked around for the DVD—of course, he had a shelf full of copies in his apartment, ergo I borrowed one. Four people stayed for the entire film, three of them children, with others milling around and mooching popcorn. The event wasn’t a rousing success, but it kept up my appearances as an attentive landlord.
*
Time passed, but not enough time. The elderly man living in the sole top-floor apartment died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and that stirred up more trouble. Allegedly he left the stove on after cooking an omelet, took a nap, and never woke up—a frequent enough thing, I thought, you hear about it all the time on the news. The questions revved up—why the hell weren’t there batteries in the carbon monoxide detector? Why had no one checked in on him for three days? He must have removed them, he was a coot, and he didn’t like being disturbed. I didn’t say that, but those were the answers. But a tragedy, through and through.
I set the precedent with the Teen Idol, so I also wrote a note about the elderly man and taped it in the elevator. There weren’t many facts about him about him besides he owned a yappy dog and enjoyed sitting on the stoop to puff his daily cigar. His cigars stunk and people glared, but my thinking was: ‘Let the guy enjoy his cigar; he’s in his twilight years.’ And I was right. He was found sitting relatively peacefully in his reclining chair, except he was urinated on by his own dog, who also apparently perished due to carbon monoxide poisoning, though it had the wherewithal to pee on its dozing/dead master. A put-out stogie stood at attention in a nearby ashtray.
Rumors spread throughout the building about the circumstances of his death. I did leave a bowl of peanuts on the mantel in the entrance hall, in remembrance of the elderly man, who loved peanuts, and included a sign encouraging the living tenants to help themselves. The peanuts got thrown out when a father came and asked me to remove them due to his daughter’s aggressive allergy. I obliged, because two tenants croaking seemed like enough.
*
A series of break-ins changed things again—a first-floor family came home to find their window was smashed, and crooks had made off with jewelry and (apparently these were well-heeled criminals) a Sol LeWitt print—a bit was covered by renter’s insurance but that didn’t make them feel better. In a separate incident a crook climbed up the fire escape and tried to assault a sleeping Trinidadian woman, but was run out by a roommate with a katana.
I patched the broken window, added stronger bars to the others, and held an all-building meeting in the lobby to address safety concerns. They wanted floodlights out front, a doorman, a keycard system, motion detectors, and a neighborhood watch. One person added I should rent-stabilize their one-bedroom, adding unrelated fuel to the fire, and I tried to gently steer the conversation away from general grievances.
“New refrigerators!”
“Paint my walls!"
“My Vogues are crushed in the tiny mailboxes!”
“I saw a cockroach!”
“What about bed bugs!”
I ended the conversation early and said I’d look into the floodlights. And I did—they cost a pretty penny, but were guaranteed to “Light up the building like Times Square,” so said the contractor. They were installed, top-of-the-line, energy efficient—then I got complaints it was too bright. Tenants began breaking their leases, and there was a hand-drawn picture in the elevator of me copulating with a donkey.
*
It all really took a turn for the worse at the annual Haunted House. With the help of a small and weary Haunted House-committee we transformed a vacant apartment into a pitch-black sensory-depravation room where a team of volunteers in night-vision goggles hissed and circled visitors, then flashed strobe lights while slowly lurching toward them in zombie-like fashion. An eight-year-old ran screaming and crying straight into a doorjamb, knocking herself out. The father shouted over the discordant-strings soundtrack for everyone to stop, and they did, and lights were turned on. Unfortunately, for everyone, there’d been a protruding nail in the doorjamb and the eight-year-old had pierced her cheek. A small but widening spot of blood was forming on her face.
I happened to be standing nearby at the time, and despite my best efforts I started laughing. Belly laughing—laughing for how terrible this scene was, laughing at the unending plod of horror stamping through this five-story building.
The father, unamused and red-faced, lunged at me and grabbed for my throat. From my boxing days I retained a few things, and I cuffed his ear. He grunted, and came again. One, two, I hit him with a left and a right. He stumbled, propped himself on the ground, and charged. I sidestepped and grabbed the sides of his head, and his face ended up being rammed into the nail, several times, by me. The witnesses say I did this deliberately, but really it was only an attempt at causing slight bodily harm—I didn’t mean to blind him. Allegedly, I then dragged him from the apartment and threw him over the railing, cackling as his body glanced off the resplendent white banisters.
It looked bad, I admit, and I didn’t have a leg to stand on when it came to my defense statement. Witnesses sold me out again and again, and all agreed: I was a crummy landlord.
*
Now I’m locked up for a life sentence, with a chance for parole at 10 years, but I could very well be dead by then as it is. I walk circles in the yard, I go to counseling sessions, and I do my best to make friends with the other prisoners, most of whom did much more violent and intentional crimes than me. I dream often of that Teen Idol, who started this string of bad luck, and say little prayers for him as I lightly hump my pillow, after my bunkmates have fallen asleep.
