Full Release by Marshall Thornton (free novel 24 TXT) 📗

explained everything, right? Or rather, an explanation wasn’t possible. Crazy people didn’t make sense.

I looked up urine fetishes and read a whole lot more than I ever wanted to know about things people did with their piss. By the time I was finished, Eddie’s behavior stopped seeming quite so odd compared to some of the other things I’d read about. At least he hadn’t left a finger or other miscellaneous body part in my bed.

There was no way I was going to work. For one thing, I’d promised to go to Hollywood Station and make a formal statement. For another, I just couldn’t. I called the office and left a message for Sonja. I didn’t want to say too much, didn’t want to share the details of exactly what was happening, so I told her a friend had had an accident and I needed a day or two to deal with it.

Then I sent an email to Charles asking him to finish up an “acquisitions” report comparing the “actuals” to “ultimates” on a group of titles picked up by the Home Entertainment division that couldn’t wait for me to get back. Well, they probably could wait, but having Charles screw them up might help Tiffany keep her job.

It was nearly eight-thirty. I decided the best thing to do was to get my statement out of the way. I took a quick shower, threw on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. I didn’t shave or put product in my hair. I didn’t even floss. I just wanted to go. Abruptly, my cell rang. It was Jeremy.

“Oh my God, what happened?” he asked, instead of staying hello.

“How did you find out?” I asked.

“Mrs. Enders called me.”

“This guy I was sort of dating hung himself in my garage,” I told him.

“Are you okay?”

His voice was familiar and friendly, and he’d asked me that same question so many times during our almost seven years together that I actually told him the truth, “No. Not really.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

It was stupid, but I said, “Yes.”

The statement could wait. The detective hadn’t specified when I should come by. It should just be sometime today. That afternoon would be fine. Still, it felt wrong to wait, like I didn’t care that much. But I needed to talk to someone, even if it was only Jeremy.

We met about eight years ago in a West Hollywood bar called Pogo. The place had been trendy during most of the nineties, but by the time Jeremy and I ended up there, it had pretty much run its course. Which meant they had no cover and lots of drink specials. I was sipping on a Vodka Cranberry that I’d gotten for a dollar and a half when I noticed this guy on the other side of the bar staring at me. He wore a pair of dark-framed glasses that made his blue eyes seem enormous. He had light brown hair, clipped into a scraggly point on his forehead. Thin and angular, he somehow managed to look not only chic but cozy and inviting.

In some ways, many ways, Jeremy was always a Hollywood stereotype. The joke around town is that everyone in L.A. has a screenplay they’re trying to get to a producer, a movie star, or a studio head. Cab drivers, waiters, hairdressers, everyone thinks they can write a movie. I’ve been at the studio long enough to know that writing a screenplay isn’t exactly easy. Still, given what ends up on the screen, it’s not hard to see why most audience members think they could do better job.

At the time we met, Jeremy was a caterer-waiter taking an extension course in screenwriting at UCLA. Actually, he made it sound as though he was in film school, and it was only later I learned he wasn’t in an actual program and had only taken the one class. Getting to know him, he seemed like the typical artist: dreamy, hopeful, and idealistic. As we dated, he told me all about his favorite movies in such detail that I still run across films on TV I feel like I’ve seen but am sure I actually haven’t. He loved foreign films with their unexpected plot twists and mysterious downbeat endings. He even forced me to sit through some Criterion Edition DVDs of films that I could barely understand and doubted I’d have understood even if they’d been in English.

I refused to have sex with him until we’d been dating for nearly a month. He thought I was being ridiculous to wait, but he put up with it. I liked that he disagreed with me but was willing to go along anyway. I thought it meant he respected my opinions. That he’d always respect my opinions.

When we did finally have sex, it was good. Well, better than good. It was great, and I was hooked. Good sex has a way of clouding a man’s judgment, or at least mine, and Jeremy and I moved in together just a few months later. Part of me is probably still in love with that Jeremy of the first year. He was idealistic, hopeful, artistic, a young man who was sure to go places, sure to be “someone.” And I was ready to go along with him.

Seven years later he was in his thirties and still working a survival job. He wasn’t a screenwriter with several movies under his belt as he’d hoped to be. He wasn’t even a screenwriter who’d finished a decent spec script. He was disappointed in himself and desperate not to acknowledge it. Somewhere along the way, he had become superficial, an annoying name dropper of people he’d never met or, worse, only waited on, and, seemingly at least, money grubbing. The central question of my life for the last year had been, is Jeremy a good person or not? On the one hand, this shouldn’t be hard to figure out, he did take money that was only partly his. But