Dead Weight

Albert Tucher

“You,” said Breitwieser. “I knew it.”

He glared at Diana across the bed in the hot-pillow room. She replied with her own heartless hooker look, which helped her avoid looking down at her client. No living body could match his surrender to gravity. 

Her nostrils twitched as she tried to tune out the smell of bowels and urine, and a furtive odor that must represent death itself.

A uniformed EMT pushed the door open.

“Can we take him?”

“I’ll tell you when,” said Breitwieser. “Prop that door with something.”

The young man positioned a chair and went to wait in the fresher air of the parking lot. Breitwieser turned back to Diana.

“Any time I have a dead body,” he said, “the first thing I do is look around for you.”

She had been involved in more of his cases than either liked to recall.

“Yeah, well, this time I actually had something to do with it,” she said.

“Is that a confession?”

“I’ll admit to being too good at my job.”

“Keep talking. Maybe I can at least get a hooker bust out of this.”

“You wish.”

For the moment they had run out of trash to talk. Breitwieser looked down at the body. 

“What’s that the commercials say? Ask your doctor if you’re healthy enough for sexual activity? I guess he wasn’t.”

If anything, her client was younger than the detective, whose forty-six regular polyester suit looked tighter than the last time Diana had traded barbs with him. After this he might even get his blood pressure checked.

For a while neither spoke. The silence made an opportunity for Diana’s memory to act up. Again the client paused his manly exertions on top of her, and again he became dead weight, suffocating her. 

Dead weight. Some expressions were too apt, and sometimes this job demanded too much.

She welcomed the commotion in the parking lot, even if she needed a moment to make out the words among the shrieks.

“Get your hands off! That’s my husband in there!”

A fifty-ish brunette lurched though the doorway. Two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, grabbed for limbs or clothing or anything they could get, but the woman evaded them. She gave her husband’s body a glance and turned her fury on Diana.

“Whore. You have my money.”

“I earned it,” said Diana.

“By killing him?”

“I’m thinking you might have had something to do with that.”

Diana turned to Breitwieser.

“He must have gained fifty pounds since he started coming to me. You wouldn’t believe what it took to get out from under him. Nobody let him get that way but her.”

The detective had something else on his mind.

“She paid you? What for?”

Diana wasted a moment on gaping.

“What, you think I’m a contract killer all of a sudden?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“He told me it was her money. But you can relax, because she was buying my usual services.”

That stopped him for a moment.

“She’s not even the only wife who contracts the sex stuff out to me. A lot of them can’t be bothered.”

Breitwieser turned to the woman.

“Is that true?”

The woman shrugged. 

“If she can’t give me my husband back, I’ll take my money.”

“It’s evidence,” said Breitwieser.

“Of what?”

“Prostitution is illegal.”

“Oh for god’s sake.”

The woman fumed, but Breitwieser didn’t flinch.

“When can I have him?”

“We’ll let you know.”

The woman turned and flounced out. Diana turned back to Breitwieser for more of his default glare. She could see it all coming. He would threaten her with arrest for showering the client’s various fluids off and getting dressed before she called 911. Then he would demand the envelope holding her money. And there was no way she could hold out on the cops.

As she opened her bag, she looked away from Breitwieser and contemplated the client. Did he have the best of the deal? He didn’t have to care if he got paid for a dirty job, or which of the thousands of ways to die had gotten him in the end. 

She looked away. She couldn’t afford to think like that, not with forty or fifty years of this life ahead of her.

For a moment the stillness weighed her down like the biggest client of all.

“You can go,” said Breitwieser.

With her hand grasping the envelope inside her bag, she froze.

“Go. Unless you really want a trip downtown.”

Diana relaxed her grip on the envelope. For a moment she teetered on the edge of thanking him, but he would never forgive her. 

“Let’s not do this again,” she said instead.

AUTHOR BIO