New Orleans Noir

to the other. There was a bruise forming on his right cheek, and his lips looked puffy and swollen. I peered back at the body. I hadn’t, in my initial shock and horror, recognized the man sprawled on the floor with a pool of blood underneath his head. “You killed Chad,” I heard myself saying, thinking, This can’t be happening, oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this isn’t happening.
    Chad was his scumbag boyfriend.
    “We can’t call the cops. I mean, we just can’t,” Phillip replied, his voice bordering on hysteria. “Please, Tony, we can’t.” His voice took on that pleading tone I’d heard so many times before, when he wanted me to do something I didn’t want to. He was always wheedling, dragging me out to bars against my will, urging me on until I finally gave in. He could always, it seemed, wear me down and make me go against my better judgment. But this was different.
    A lot different.
    This wasn’t the same thing as a 4 in the morning phone call to pick him up at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel because he’d somehow lost his pants. Or to come bail him out of Central Lockup because he’d pissed in public in a drunken stupor. Or to help him buy his car out of the impound lot where it had been towed. Or any number of the minor crises that seemed to constantly swirl around him, like planets orbiting the sun.
    Chaos.
    “What happened?” I asked. I was starting to come back into myself. I’ve always managed to remain calm and cool in a crisis. Panicking never makes any situation better. A crisis calls for a cool head, careful thought, the weighing and discarding of options. I started looking around for the phone, cursing myself for not bringing my cell with me. We had to call the cops, and soon. The longer we waited, the worse it would be for him.
    “You didn’t hear us?” Phillip stared at me. “I don’t see how—you had to have heard us, Tone. I mean, he was yelling so loud …” He shuddered. “Are you sure you didn’t hear anything? He came over in one of his moods, you know how he gets— got —and you know, just started in on me. I was making him dinner …” his voice trailed off and he made a limp gesture with his hand toward the top of the stove.
    I noticed a pot of congealing spaghetti floating in starchy water and another one with skin starting to form on what looked like red sauce. “We’ve got to call the cops, Phillip. We don’t have a choice here.”
    “He started hitting me.” He went on as if I hadn’t said a word, beginning to shake as he remembered. “Yelling and screaming. You didn’t hear? You had to have heard, Tony, you had to have heard.”
    “I was working. I had the headphones on.” I always put on headphones when I am writing so I can shut off all external distractions and focus. The littlest thing can take me away from my work, so I try to avoid all outside stimulus at all costs. The iPod had been a huge help in that regard.
    “And I just pushed him away and he slipped and hit his head on the table.” Phillip started to cry. “Oh, Tony, what are we going to do?”
    “We have to call the cops. Where’s your phone?”
    “We can’t call the cops!” His voice started rising in hysteria. He buried his face in his hands. “I can’t go to jail again. I just can’t. I’d rather die than do that.”
    I looked at him, starting to get exasperated. Even now, in a panic and terrified, he was handsome, with his mop of curly brown hair and finely chiseled face with deep dimples and round brown eyes straight out of a Renaissance painting of a saint. He was wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt that said, NOPD—Not our problem, dude . Phillip always wore T-shirts a size too small, to show off his defined arms, strong shoulders, and thickly muscled chest. I’d been attracted to him when he first moved in, and even considered trying to get him into my bed for a few days. Seeing him shirtless and sweating in the hot August sun as he moved in certainly was a delectable sight; almost like the opening sequence of one of your better gay porn movies. Yet it didn’t take long for me to realize that as sexy and lovable as he was, I just couldn’t deal with the chaos that followed him around like a dark cloud. No, I’d spent most of my adult life getting chaos out of my life, and wasn’t about to let it in again just so I could fuck the hot guy who lived next door. I didn’t mind listening to his tales of woe every morning—but that was as involved as I got. Just