Eddie’s gardener found your body in the garage under a tarp. I know you weren’t in pieces but, goddammit, I instantly imagined you like the old pullout couch that’s still out back in your yard. According to the coroner’s report, you’d been dead for two days. Until the report was released, there were rampant rumors in the press about you having OD’d or died by carbon dioxide poisoning or autoerotic asphyxiation—h a! Sorry, I’m joking on that one—a joke I know would’ve made you mortified. Fuck, I miss you.

For a few weeks people freaked the fuck out and you became Beverly’s new bogeyman, especially after the cops found your car and searched it and in the trunk was some of the stuff we’d bought on my move-in day: rope, the hacksaw, and the hammer. Not a good look for you and your Eddie-intentions. Sorry, my bad? As a gag, I stuck that stuff in your trunk the day after we were done using them thinking you’d find it and you would’ve been like what the fuck, but I guess you don’t open your trunk, like, ever, and I totally forgot about it. Why didn’t you ever open your trunk, Art? I tried telling the cops that it was just stuff we used during my move-in and bedroom remodel. I didn’t tell them I’d dumped it there as a joke because things would’ve become way more complicated than they needed to be. As it was, they searched the house and confiscated your phone and iPad, which they still haven’t returned. I made sure they didn’t get their grubby fascist hands on your laptop or this manuscript though. I had to protect you and protect our book. I did that for you, at least. And I will do one more thing for you/us too. Besides making sure the book gets published.

Man, if you could’ve seen snivelly old Eddie at the press conference he ran from his front yard. He was shit-scared and raving about having been poisoned and that you were part of a larger commie/anarchist/antifa conspiracy against him. He did look like shit on camera, but purposeful, exaggerated shit. Like someone painted purple eye bags under his eyes and powdered his face. He had a nasty cough, though. A frog throat, in that when he coughed, you could imagine literal frogs spewing out. The day after the presser he checked into a hospital and reportedly he had a drug-resistant strain of pneumonia. Again, apparently, it got dicey for him. But, eh, he’s home from the hospital now. So I’m told. I have a nagging feeling he might have a relapse.