No Hope for Gomez! Read Online Free PDF

dehydrated.”
    “Really?” John shot me an incredulous look. “I can’t believe it. Joe? Are you sure?”
    “Quite sure. Any idea what might have caused it?”
    He shook his head. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Joe’s dead?”
    “Yes. Is there anything around here he might have come into contact with that would make him pass out?”
    John shrugged and shook his head. “All we have here are monkeys,” he said. “Monkeys, monkey feed, monkey poo, monkey pee. That’s it.”
    “No chemicals?”
    “Not really, no. We don’t even use delousing powders; the monkeys do it all themselves.”
    “Could Joe have been allergic to the monkeys?”
    “I guess,” John said. “But I don’t see how that would make him pass out.”
    “If his throat swelled up, caused him to suffocate?”
    John scratched his five o’clock shadow. “That’s a pretty severe reaction,” he said. “If Joe were that sensitive to anything around here, he wouldn’t have made back to his apartment.”
    I was down to grasping at straws. “What if someone knew he was allergic to something, put it in his pocket, and Joe didn’t come into contact with it until he changed his clothes at home?”
    John frowned. “You’re grasping at straws now, aren’t you?”
    I could only shrug.
    “What you’re suggesting is that Joe’s death wasn’t an accident.” John gave me a hard look. “If that’s the case, then maybe you should be looking at people who wanted him dead, not people who needed him to scoop up monkey poo.” He arched his brows.
    “Well,” I said, and left it at that.

8.
     
     
     
    Blog entry: Returned home tired and headachy. Decided to take the elevator instead of the stairs.
     
    Blog entry: Made a mental note to stop using the elevator, even on tiring, headachy days. Resolved to make a little project out of determining which was more painful: (1.) Climbing eight flights of stairs, (2.) Running into Warren in the elevator.
    Also realized I needed to examine the chances of running into Warren so often. I’d yet to run into any of my other neighbors.
    I had to be extremely unlucky: No Hope for Gomez!
     
    Blog entry: Reason the elevator run-in was so uncomfortable: Warren tried to hand me another manuscript.
    He just happened to have it on him, he said, and thought I might want to take a look. It was roughly the same size as the previous script (very thick!), and I immediately understood this to be a huge indicator of its quality. Especially as Warren implied he’d written the whole thing since our previous encounter, several days earlier.
    Warren said, “You’re like my only fan at the moment.” He grinned as if this was an obvious understatement. As if droves of fans were already resenting my position as the first person to glean his brilliantly ordered words.
    “I’m sure that description is inaccurate on many levels.” I smiled.
    The elevator stopped on my floor and I got off. I told Warren there was no chance in hell I was reading another one of his damn manuscripts and left him gaping at my receding back.
     
    Blog entry: Prepared a quick dinner; fried eggs, slices of onion and tomato, potato chips. Found some time to cast my mind back over the events of the day. Next to Joseph’s unexpected death, I now had another pressing question about him; how had he managed to sink so low before he died? What had happened to the man who’d so vehemently described meatpacking? Had in fact likened it to the noble art of T-shirt folding? The man who’d written pearls of urban poetry like the ever elusive; ‘Ode to This Feeling of Having Forgotten Something’, and the surprising; ‘It Wasn’t My Keys This Time, I’m Sure’. What had this lost soul been reduced to? Not even a relief cashier, not even a Thursday morning litter collector. No, Joseph Miller had allowed the Universe to reduce him to being someone’s Tuesday afternoon monkey-poop scooper.
    Oh, the humanity!
     
    Blog entry: Burned my eggs, threw them