Track Mangoes

It was in the early morning of a crisp autumn day that Miss Abbey Sinclair stopped to stretch her aching calves near the East Bank of the Mississippi and saw Lucas Bartholomew Cooper’s body, floating face down in the water, lapping up against some driftwood. She saw the body through her chubby legs as she bent over to strike a yoga pose. Shrieking, she immediately trotted back to her house to call the authorities.

The body looked very fresh when the forensic unit fished it out of the water. The boy might have been alive, for his skin was supple and still the color of an olive. An autopsy confirmed that he died by poison, though they would not say what kind.

Clio Mendelssohn had never known Cooper to be the suicidal type. So it came as a surprise to her when she found the obituary heralding his death. Seeing his face in print, she vaguely recalled the one or two classes they had had together during their four years of college. Once, at a party, she tried to seduce him, only to find out in a drunken display that he was a homosexual.
She didn’t plan on conducting a private investigation into his death, but something in her wanted to know what that poison was. It was on the day she read the obituary that she found herself standing at the front door of the house on Corsair Boulevard, rented out by one of Cooper’s ex-boyfriends, an acidic fop named Patrick Little. Patrick lived there with his boyfriend, Mason, whom everyone knew to be a manipulative sociopath. By talking to Cooper’s current boyfriend, Hitch Hickey, a painfully awkward graduate student studying math, she learned that Cooper had been at the house on Corsair Boulevard the night before his death.

Standing on the porch, facing the front door, Clio rang the doorbell. Patrick Little appeared in jamb and leaned against it. He was a tall, skinny boy with dark, floppy hair that hung down in front of his face like ivy vines hanging off a stone arch. He told Clio that he saw Cooper that night, saw him two timing with Mason. When she asked what he meant, Patrick told her to ask the culprit himself. He was upstairs sleeping.

So Clio mounted the stairs to the bedroom and found herself in a dimly lit hallway, lined with filthy carpets and old photographs hung in crooked frames. The door to Mason’s room was slightly ajar. She could hear him coughing, hacking up pieces of his lungs, and groaning, as if he was recovering from some incurable illness. She knocked quietly and Mason beckoned her inside.

Mason sat up rigidly on the mattress in his empty room with a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers. Clio stood in the doorway and asked him what he and Cooper had talked about that night. Mason told her that they had talked the night away, chain smoking on the porch. “He kept telling me about his petering romance with some nerd from the U,” Mason told Clio. “I said, I told him, I said that no man would come ‘round to his ex’s house looking for a quick one. No man would mess with somethin’ so stable. But I told him he wasn’t no man anyway. I told him he was a scared little boy looking for damaged goods ‘cause he thought they were fun. Scared college boy come ‘round here to the workin’ class homes, lookin’ for a fucked up soul. Rich bitch found was he was lookin’ for didn’t he? He told me he felt awful, and I said, fine, what are you gon’ do about it? You gon’ kill yerself? I told him that’d be the day.”

“And then he did,” Clio said sternly. A moment of silence passed between them and Mason took a long drag of cigarette.

“That he did,” he continued. “I told him he could find syringes in the bathroom, dirty ones, and that under the sink was a bottle of Drano. Straight to the neck, I said, was most effective. No man throws himself off a bridge, you know? If a man wants death in ‘em. If he wants it hard. And I saw it in him. I saw it and I don’t feel sorry I did.”

Clio left the house unsure of whether or not to contact the police. She walked down to the river and sat on the log where they had found the body. The sun was setting over the Lake Street bridge and she peered up at it. She pondered with alarming composure the scene of Cooper and Mason on the front porch.

Before she left the house on Corsair Boulevard she asked Mason why he did it.
“Why’d I say what I said?!” Mason laughed. “I didn’t say what I said because I wanted to kill no one. I didn’t say what I said because I knew Coop to be a fragile thing. I didn’t say what I said to piss off Patrick or Hitch or nobody.”

“So why’d you do it?” she asked then.

Mason grinned and chuckled. “Because he listened.”