The second segment of my next mystery novel, as yet untitled, follows. As previously noted, the novel involves a deceased friend, an abandoned apartment, a search for a safety deposit box, and the shame of long forgotten actions.

Background Recollections

He was a collection of contradictions, an aggregation of curious character traits and personality quirks that could excite most students of psychology and depress any psychiatrist with a steady clientale. He was moody and amusing at the same time, a man with the classic a chip on one shoulder and hilarity on the other. He was sentimental but cynical, charitiable but selfish. He had always wanted to be a bad guy but usually ended up a good guy. He tried to be pugnacious. He tried to be aggressive. He tried to project resolve. He venerated tough guys. He even wanted to become one himself but he turned out to be too decent. Fact was that for most of his life, despite all his efforts to the contrary, people regarded him as a good guy. He was blessed with epic dreams and tormented with epic nightmares. He eventually resigned himself to both.

He passed away on a Thursday night in the middle of the month of October, neither the day or month memorable. He was found maybe several hours after he expired, laid out in forgotten repose in a profoundly dingy apartment on the third floor of a profoundly dingy apartment building. He had been found dead early the next morning by a neighbor, a noisy guy named Danny who sometimes dropped in unannounced. Aside from Danny, who was admittedly an infrequent visitor but did live next door, Jack had two regular visitors, one a friend of almost four decades, the other a former wife of short duration, the latter having been the last known person to see him alive, although that was debatable, the prospect of an unknown evening visitor discussed by the two police detectives who briefly investigated his demise. Both detectives reasoned, however, that the man was in such poor physical condition, that if someone were to slip him any kind of street pharmaceutical for example, he could drop dead on the spot. Even a couple of drinks could do the trick. It was no surprise then that the case, if a case could actually be made of his death, was closed with a shrug of some bureaucratic shoulder, vanishing into a file with a click of a computer mouse.

The deceased man’s narrative had been predictable.The beginning was the end, not so much for the ex-wife, who had invested only a couple of years in their union, but for the two old friends, both of whom might well have anticipated that at least one of them would pass away long before either of them should have expected. The departed was virtually housebound. He was a gravely ill man with irredeemable health problems. He was in his mid-fifties but looked much older. He was painfully thin with a graying beard and a stringy ponytail hanging to the middle of his back. He had been found in his customary outfit of perpetually unwashed sweatpants, a dirty t-shirt with an unidentifiable inscription across the chest and a classically tattered dressing gown. He had been strikened for several years with an assortment of serious medical ailments, the most crucial of which were emphysema, two packs of cigarettes a day since he was barely in his teens, making that practically an inevitability, and a barely functioning liver, thirty five years of hard drinking another obvious culprit.

Mr. Quinn did not deny his fate. In fact, he celebrated it, in a strange, dark way. He had been expecting, if not planning for his own death for almost a year, a certain grim, existential flourish being a feature of his approach to his unfortunate future. In addition, for the first few months of that year, that last year during which he had been preparing for his own demise, he had started to actually take a certain perverse delight in discussing that macabre enterprise. During those months, he would mention his wretched fate pretty well every chance he got, so often that the rapidly dwindling circle of those who had any involvement in his destiny started to lose interest in it. To them, Quinn’s complaints about his evident destiny had started to seem more like melodramatic self pity than anything approaching true tragedy. Fact was that the dramatics pursued by Quinn became almost operatic in dimension, so much so that one friend sarcastically suggested that he might consider taking his act on the road, retirement and funeral homes obvious audiences for such theatrical expressions of existential angst.

Consequently, as a result of such behaviour, most of his so-called friends, mainly former co-workers or guys with whom he had played beer league hockey years before, had stopped visiting Quinn, their irritation with his act having gone past a point of exasperation. That left only one old friend, a man named Mark Purchell. He had met Quinn over fourty years ago when they both were working at an automotive parts warehouse. He had maintained a close friendship with Quinn ever since. Over the past year of that life, it was Mark Purchell who visited Quinn practically every day as he waited to pass away, his old friend’s discomfort with the latter’s dramatics fading with the latter’s physical condition. Purchell had simply gotten accustomed to his friend’s madness, variations of which had bedevilled him for years. When they first met, all it took was three or four quarts of Molson’s Export and Quinn would be suggesting that some authority figure, usually but not limited to his mother Gertrude, of conspiring with nameless confederates to ruin his chances of success in a variety of vague ambitions.

He would sometimes even claim that he was adopted, intimating that there was something darkly apocalyptic about the transaction, even suggesting at times that every unfortunate thing that had befallen him since he was ten years old could be blamed on the circumstances of his birth. Having grown depressingly familiar with his new friend’s rants of misfortune and regret, Purchell had started to invariably compare Quinn to Marlon Brando emoting in On the Waterfront. Quinn himself seemed to take a certain misguided pleasure in that observation, any reference to a moody role model, particularly one who was famous, being of definitive, almost whimsical value. He almost become an actor himself. Or so he wanted to think.

As their friendship developed, they had become best friends within months, Purchell could predict the ebb and flow of the Quinn melancholia with the precision of a meteorologist. Fact was that their relationship had evolved, like a lot of relationships, into an exchange of common interests, life’s disappointments being one if not the prevalent theme. Both of them enjoyed discussing their own misfortunes, their own depressions, their own depairs, of which they were supposedly many. They ridiculed them, they made light of them, they were sarcastic about them. For years, they had transformed their own failures, some real, some imagined, most invented, into something approaching an entertainment, histrionics that eventually grew tiresome to anyone unlucky enough to catch their act more than once. Now, after fourty years, with Quinn staggering toward the most significant dashed hope of all, Purchell was still around, sharing his friend’s feeling for failure with a sort of feigned responsibility, his interest long ceasing to be in any way sincere. Mark Purchell was there practically every day, waiting for the end with his old friend.

With Purchell covering the morning shift, it was left to his ex-wife Deborah Inkster to take up visitation duties for the late afternoon/early evening. Despite their three forgettable years together, during which time she repeatedly tried to convince her ex-husband to forego his affinity for, if not his dependence on pessimism and other addictions, Ms. Inkster, who sometimes seem to have the disposition of a nun — she was a crusader, a broad minded liberal with a tolerance for practically everything. So she felt a predictable obligation to nurse him, a compulsion that she continually defended, always denying that it was a character flaw. She habitally reminded herself, as well as reminding Purchell, with whom she discussed the Quinn case at length, of the importance of their visits, comparing it to visits to the hospital, which was not unpredictable.They exchanged tales of dreary days spent in hospital rooms with their ailing parents, desperately pretending to stay awake and staring at the various medical monitors beeping quietly above the patient’s bed. They agreed that the undeniable tedium of sitting in the hospital was the prinicipal characteristic of the obligation. Ms. Inkster regarded such a responsibility as a moral requirment while Purchell saw no high calling in such duty. He had to struggle through his daily meetings with Quinn, without benefit of such moral self-assurance. As for the good Sister Inkster, she was sypathetic enough with Purchell’s plight not to criticize the latter’s lack of empathy. Purchell sometimes but not often wondered, however, whether he should have felt guilty about not being as charitiable about his obligation toward his sick friend as the man’s ex-wife. He felt like it was just another job. To be honest, his real job, a mid-level management job with an insurance company, was a helluva better, no matter from which perspective you employed. He had grown to regard his daily meetings with his old friend as punishment, a penalty for some past and long forgotten transgression, like a plenary indulgence. e was an old friend. He had no choice.