Stealing From the Dead

It's the night my best friend hangs herself at the Howard Johnson's. I'm a shepherd boy singing a love song to Mary Magdalene. Really.

My friend Pam is in Los Angeles, still alive for only a few more hours, though I don't know this yet. I'm acting in a terrible musical in a small dumpy dinner theater, where I play a shepherd boy who falls in love with a non-reciprocating Mary Magdalene, performed by an actress whose main claim to fame is her decade-old Miss West Virginia title.

The wig the actor playing Jesus is forced to wear makes him look like Marlo Thomas in "That Girl." Often when he turns his head too quickly, the wig goes a bit askew. Keeping a straight face while he sings at me is hard work - the kind of thing they never prepare you to do when you're in acting school. It's my first job in La La Land. Hooray for Hollywood.

When I get back to Pam's hotel after the show there is no answer at the door. Pam is supposed to be having dinner with a mutual friend and I figure they are out at a bar or something, which pisses me off, since Pam knows I'm coming back to the hotel after my show.

The thing is, I'm stuck. A crazy older lady cousin of mine has rented a room to me near Toluca Lake. I've already told her I'll be staying with Pam tonight. The cousin is nutty and prone to fits of rage. If I go back there it means waking her up, since she will have put the chain on the door. Waking her up is a bad idea. Plus I'm embarrassed. I don't want to admit that Pam has forgotten me.

It's cold. I wait in the car. My shepherd boy costume has this cavernous cloak/cape thing, so I use it as a blanket, and I fall asleep, waiting in the parking lot. Even as I sleep I grow angrier with Pam. How could she do this to me? I'm ashamed; ashamed that I'm stupid, unloved, and disposable. After I've taken such care, shown such concern for Pam, how can she forget me like this? I grow furious.

After a fitful night I knock on her hotel room door again. Still no answer. I make the maid let me in the room. My anger with Pam evaporates as I'm filled with a surreal sense of absolute disconnectedness. Time stops. The bathroom door is ajar. I peek though and see Pam's fingers, ruddy and dirty looking at the fingertips, hanging over the side of the bathtub.

After the maid screams in Spanish and her supervisor pronounces Pam dead, over and over, her southern accent searing itself in my brain, we find a hand-written will leaving most everything to me. The suicide note says nothing really; just that she's sorry; that everything hurts too much; that this is the only way.

Before the police arrive I grab Pam's purse and hide it in my backpack. The cops get there and tell me to go wait in the hotel restaurant. I call a friend who calls my cousins - the nice ones, not the crazy lady I live with, and they come and stay with me. I go into the men's room and look through Pam's purse. She has five hundred dollars in cash. I put it in my pocket.

The police seem to suspect me for a while. The handwritten will can be construed as suspicious. Maybe I'm her killer. I sit in the restaurant drinking scotch on the rocks, waiting to be questioned. I'm the star of this episode of "Law and Order." When they finally get to me, several hours later, I can see it in their eyes, that just a few questions is all it takes for whatever interest they have in me to disappear. I am skinny, effeminate, and bewildered. Not a killer's profile, I guess.

The cops are patient and nice. They tell me how she hangs herself on the shower rod, how the weight of her body pulls it down after a while, which is why I find her crumpled and broken looking in the tub. Her fingertips are discolored, they say, because that happens with dead bodies. I let them know I have her purse; that it isn't missing or anything. I explain that I was afraid someone might steal it, so I picked it up almost instinctively. They search it and find no money, but they don't accuse me of taking it.

I have five hundred dollars in my pocket, stolen from a dead woman, but I am innocent.

I insist on acting with Mary Magdalene that night, ridiculously proud of how I know the show must go on. I don't know what I feel yet, and the rest of the cast are very careful with me. I want to play to their sympathies. I want to try on the role of tragic widow. Very "Valley of the Dolls." But something brittle inside me snaps. Her death feels real, and I don't like it.

She had to know I would be the one to find her. That goes around my head. She had to know. I sing my shepherd boy song and go home.

Comments? Questions? Email me.