Loss Read Online Free Page B

the moment. He dared her to frisk him. I watched his last couple of novels bullet up the bestseller lists.
    My agent kept calling trying to get me to ride his coattails, or more appropriately the murderer’s coattails. He said I should be doing whatever I could to get my last few titles out to the reporters. I should carry my novels around with me, stick them in front of the cameras. I asked him if he knew how stupid that might make me feel. He asked me if I knew how stupid he felt representing an author who still couldn’t garner more than a five grand chump change advance after publishing a dozen books. It put things into perspective but I still didn’t go around clotheslining the reporters and shoving my novels under their noses. My agent quit calling.
    My sleep filled with mad laughter and shouting. Some of it was my own. I occasionally startled myself awake making noises. I started smoking more. I wrote more and deleted more. I painted the foyer and caught up on all the minor fix-it stuff that I’d let slide the last several days. I got a closer look at some of my neighbors.
    I finally met the lady who had an affair with a famous televangelist’s wife and was now something of a lesbian icon. She mildly flirted with me and prompted me to tell her how pretty she was. She seemed insecure and irritable. She told me she wasn’t a lesbian at all but had just been fooling around with the wife for the fun of it, but she couldn’t admit it in public anymore because of all the money she was making lecturing to various lesbian organizations. She had the televangelist’s show playing on a high definition TV screen with the surround sound turned away up. He seemed to be preaching from every corner of the apartment. It was spooky. I fixed her broken toilet handle and blew out of there.
    The toxic waste guy said the old-fashioned elevator didn’t accommodate his wheelchair. He was right. The chair was old and wide and well-lived in. He’d been in the building the entire time I’d been there. He was proud of his tumors and tried to show them to me as often as he could, turning his melted, half-eaten face this way and that so it would catch the light from the corridor lamps. He was so pale I could see the blood pulsing underneath his skin. I wondered how long it had been since he’d been outside in the sun. I removed one of the side rails in the elevator and it was a tight fit but his chair squeezed in. We tested it together. His oxygen tube hissed into the hole that used to be his nose. The tank clanked loudly whenever the chair went over a bump. I could just imagine it breaching and the explosion taking out the whole floor. He said thank you and rolled back to his apartment and shut the door.
    The former child actor turned gay porno star turned sex therapist daytime talk show host canceled after three months now retired after writing his autobiography wherein he named names, was sued, countersued and won big cash off a couple of closeted politicians outed and forced to resign needed a couple of his electrical outlets rewired. He interviewed me like I was a guest on his show, asking me a lot of pointed questions about the murder. He wanted to know how finding a corpse had transformed me. I told him I hadn’t found a corpse, that the man was still alive when I got there. He wanted to know how I’d been transformed by the discovery of a dying man with an ice pick in his forebrain. He wanted to know what I heard, what I smelled, if there had been any aftertaste to the incident. He licked his lips when he said it. He kept looking to one side like he saw an audience there staring at him. I knew he was working on more of his memoirs. When he got to this chapter he’d say that he’d found the aluminum foil liar and the dying man had spoken profound and wondrous lessons of good will.
    A couple more days drifted past. I felt eyes on me and found myself constantly looking over my shoulder and checking down the ends of dark