The Murderer’s Friend By Amanda Anderson

My friend Janice was friends with a murderer named James. I met Janice at fifteen—a lot of years ago now—she was a friend of a friend who went to private school. We became very close for some inexplicable reason. Janice always said she was an old soul whose current life was the equivalent of a very bad day. I would roll my eyes and she would tell me I was cruel and had aggressive tendencies. She’s very good about staying in touch, so we have throughout the years. 

She met James midway through college. He was a leading figure in a scene I described with air quotes and a sneer as “Party Arts:” rich kids who liked to get fucked up and profess some kind of human insight. After two years of Janice’s persistent requests, I attended one Party Arts event. It was held late at night in a large, echoing warehouse that smelled like weed and motor oil, the air thick and dumb with black lights. More than one person wore overalls and a floppy patchwork hat. I did not enjoy the repetitive thumping music that shook the fillings in my molars and rattled the bones in my chest. 

 In the middle of the concrete “dance floor” was a swing hanging by two ropes wrapped in strands of plastic sunflowers with yellow smiley faces. A naked, headless babydoll was strapped to the plywood seat with silver duct tape around its chubby legs, an anarchy symbol scribbled in pen on the round belly. I was staring at the baby when Janice came up beside me and yelled into my ear. “Isn’t that amazing?” 

She was not pleased when I burst out laughing. 

Janice told me in one of our long phone calls that James had acted in self-defense. That he too was an old soul, and as such, had found himself addicted to drugs. “You have to understand,” she said in her dramatic voice like she was gasping for breath, “He really, really lost his mind.” I rolled my eyes but made a compassionate grunt for her to hear. I didn’t mention the obvious fact that neither she (old soul), nor I (now three years sober), had killed anyone. 

Not that it was any of my business, but I was curious about what Janice told herself as she packed her homemade sushi, then loaded herself and her bento box onto a bus for the two hour trip to James’s prison, where he was serving twenty years.

“Are you scared of him?” I asked over the phone a few days after her visit. 

“PAULA,” she said. Paula is my name. 

“I’m sincerely curious,” I said. “Not judging you at all.” 

“Paula,” she said again. “You must understand. James was an extraordinarily important figure in my formative years.” She was more proper than usual when in a fit of rage. 

James was released from prison for good behavior after sixteen years. Janice called to tell me she was going to a dinner party celebrating James and his release—a rather transparent attempt to bait me into objecting. “Hey,” I said, interrupting her mid-sentence. “The next time you see him, invite me.” 

“PAULA,” she said. 

But she did. It was a cocktail party at her place. Right before I left my house I made the mistake of looking up the murder. Not that I didn’t trust my own judgement, but I thought it would be useful to be armed with the facts. 

James did have a drug problem—he wanted meth but didn’t want to pay for it. So James summoned his dealer (and friend), a man named Sal Lopez, to his apartment and hit him in the back of the head with a hammer. But home improvement wasn’t James’s area of expertise. So James tied still-alive Sal to a chair with a rope wrapped in smiling plastic sunflowers. Sal spent the next three days as a bleeding knick-knack along the wall of the living room while James did Sal’s drugs and danced to thumping music wearing Sal’s white Adidas. 

When the drugs ran out, James poured a glass of Drano and told Sal it was water. When that didn’t work James drank a few bottles of cherry Robitussin and, after much trial-and-error, stabbed Sal to death with a small knife from his kitchen. He borrowed a saw from one of his neighbors, cut the body into pieces, and packed the resulting chunks into the cardboard box his self-published autobiographies had been delivered in. Sitting with the bleeding box on his lap at a bus stop, Sal’s shoes on his feet, James was apprehended. 

I turned to my cat and told him to call the police if I wasn’t back three hours. 

James was holding court in Janice’s living room. I didn’t know it was him at first, only heard a single voice, saw a glimpse of a brand-new white Adidas sneaker through a tight half-circle party guests. The low-volume electronica thumped gently in the background. 

I gripped my cold, perspiring tonic water with both hands and inched toward the center. His cozy voice wove around the room, like a self-assured spider. A narrow crevice opened between two listeners. James stopped talking when he saw me. I, too, was speechless. He was a mirror of some unreachable part of myself. A steadfast tether was tied between us. 

James rose slowly, like the sun, a warm light heralding a bright future, and reached out to me with an open hand. “Paula,” he said. 

Janice stood behind him, erect, unsurprised, her hands on the back of his chair. 

I don’t remember taking those last few steps toward him, only that I was euphoric to find I was, at last, just like everyone else. 

Amanda Anderson is a former librarian working on her first novel. Her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Rejection Letters, Expat Lit Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two old dogs. She can be ignored on twitter at @magic_etc.

23 December 2022