The Crime Writer (6 page)

D
riving home in a stupor, I tried to process the ramifications of what I’d just discovered. If my dream was right, as the sprinkler and saucer seemed to indicate, then I’d arrived alone at Genevieve’s house. That didn’t look good for me. But the same questions remained. Why
had
I gone over there that night? Had watching someone
else
kill Genevieve tripped my brain-tumor blackout? The old frustration simmered below the surface. Why hadn’t
anyone
—the cops, the prosecutors, my own lawyers—looked with serious doubt at anything except my sanity? Hadn’t we all jumped in late in the plot?

I’d pored over the murder book that Homicide had turned over during discovery, but nothing in the investigative notes or police report pointed elsewhere—none of the dead ends or dropped leads that compose the frayed edges around every reconstructed picture of a crime. It was too tidy an account, an investigation that had its mind made up from the outset. I also had my mind made up from the outset, though my argument had the advantage of no evidence and greater implausibility—as I’d come to think of it, Occam’s Hacksaw.

A glimmer of hope cut through my exhaustion. If I had recovered one memory from the night of Genevieve’s death, then I could recover others. Which meant I could get at the truth, no matter how ugly it was shaping up to be.

My cell phone rang, startling me, and I screwed in the earpiece, wondering who would be calling at midnight.

Donnie’s voice greeted me. “Where’ve you been? We’ve been trying you all night. Terry finally tracked down your cell-phone number.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Just went for a drive.”

“Sometimes the first night home can be tough.”

I regarded my hands gripping the steering wheel. “Can’t imagine why.”

He picked up my tone and laughed. “Need some company? Terry and I could swing by.”

“Thanks, but I think I’m okay.”

“Well, if there’s anything you need.”

“Actually…” The idea sprang up, surprising me, though it had been lurking just beneath awareness all along. “I was wondering if I could get my hands on the case files.”

“We won the case, Andrew. You’re free of all that now.” There was a pause, and then he said, “You’re writing a book?”

“Just trying to work through what happened.”

“What do you say you take a night off? Even Katherine Harriman is out having a drink. One of our paralegals just spotted her crying into her martini on the Promenade.”

“Katherine Harriman doesn’t cry. And certainly not in public.”

“And neither should you. Not tonight anyway. Listen, Terry and I have encountered this a lot with our acquitted clients. They rework the trial like worrying a loose tooth, trying to find…I don’t know, absolution. They don’t find it there. Let me give you some advice: Let it go. Get back to your life.”

I reached my turn. Right to my house, left to the freeway. I veered left. “I’d like those files, Donnie.”

His breath blew across the receiver. “Well, they’re yours, Andrew. We’re certainly not gonna keep them from you. We’ll need a day or two to make copies.”

“Thank you.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Which bar did your paralegal see Katherine Harriman in?”

Coyly set a half block back from Santa Monica’s heavily trod Third Street Promenade, Voda serves a hundred-plus labels of vodka and the one grade of caviar that counts. With its black-suited doormen and reserved seating, it likes to believe it’s exclusive, but the management isn’t above siphoning in tourists when the upholstered booths aren’t filling up. Past the bouncer, who hesitated, recognizing but not placing me, were imported bottles, protruding on stone ledges from the wall, and plenty of glossy men and women, also available for consumption. Candles, Hawaiian protea blossoms, and flagstone waterfalls completed the confused tropical-gulag motif.

Harriman was at the black lacquer bar, slender legs crossed. Tapping an impaled pickled onion on the rim of her Gibson, she watched me approach without so much as a lifted eyebrow.

I dropped into the swivel chair next to her and ordered a Brilliant vodka on the rocks, which I sniffed and left on the cocktail napkin. She ignored me as if ignoring men were something she’d spent a lifetime perfecting, and so we sat and watched the water trickle down the flagstone as I worked up my nerve.

“I knew about my brain tumor.” The words, finally spoken, continued to resonate in my head. “My health insurance had lapsed. I was waiting on another script deal to get my Writers Guild coverage back. I’d had migraines for six months, then a short blackout. I went to a private provider in Ventura so if the tests
did
reveal something, it wouldn’t go on record as a preexisting condition. That’s why nothing showed up in any of the medical records you subpoenaed.”

I didn’t add that my failure to act hadn’t been just about the money—though the money had played a considerable role. I’d stalled because I’d had a book deadline and an upcoming tour and a new relationship. And, like anyone else, I was terrified. When a surgery is elective, when do you make that firm decision to let a team of people carve around inside your brain? How do you choose the day? What if you don’t wake up? Or worse, what if they make a mistake and then you
do
?

A few days after I’d blacked out over the washing machine, I’d seen a neurologist, who’d given me the unhappy diagnosis. The doctor had urged me to get the surgery, but I’d told him, protected under the veil of confidentiality, that I was willing to take the gamble and wait. The trial had provided me ample time to relive his answer.
Are you willing to gamble the lives of the family in the minivan you crash into when you black out behind the wheel?

Harriman lifted the onion off the plastic spike with her teeth, and as she crunched, I wondered whether she’d respond. Finally she said, “How much was the operation going to cost?”

“Sixty-two grand.”

“And how much was your legal retainer?”

“Two-fifty.”

She snickered—she couldn’t help it—and it took me a moment to realize she was laughing at us both.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sure you’ll get plenty of screenwriting deals now.”

“Yeah, I figured this would be an effective career strategy.”

“There is something compellingly naïve about you. Even earnest.” She made a face, then signaled the bartender for another drink. Not her second.

“How so?”

“What you just confirmed is no thunderbolt from on high. We’d considered it, of course, did some investigating.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me when you had me on the stand?”

“Because we weren’t sure, and even if we
were
right, you would have lied.”

“Why do you assume that?”

“You wouldn’t go to a doctor off record to cheat an insurance company if you were an honest guy.”

“Fair enough. But I also wouldn’t have lied under oath.”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive my skepticism for not wanting to stake my case on your integrity.” She took a healthy sip. “The prosecutor can’t just accuse a witness of lying. It’s not recess at elementary school. Putting out the kinds of books you type, you ought to know that. I would need to present evidence or testimony that
refutes.
And your lawyers never gave me a target. They’re overpriced, by the way. But hey, what do I know? You won. Sort of.” She gave me a big congratulatory smile. “Of course, if your honest-guy conscience had piped up, say, yesterday…who knows if we’d both be sitting here?” She flicked the rim of her glass with a polished nail. “Why today, Danner? And why find
me
? You looking for forgiveness?”

Her tone made clear what her position on that would be.

“No.”

“Then why are you on about this? You got off.”

“The verdict is irrelevant.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is. ‘Not guilty by reason of insanity’ sure as shit doesn’t mean ‘didn’t do it.’”

“But here’s where we are. You didn’t convict me. Maybe you should have.”

“Well, I’m sure any self-respecting second-rate crime novelist knows you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.”

“I…” My hands itched to grip my drink, but I kept them still. “I remembered something. From the night of Genevieve’s death. I checked it, and it was right.”

“Lemme guess—it exonerates you.”

“No,” I said. “The opposite. I remembered driving over there. I was alone in the car.”

She touched her fingertips to her open mouth, feigning immense surprise.

“I think I can help get to what happened that night,” I said. “I still want to know if I plunged that knife into Genevieve’s stomach. And you can help me find out.”

She laughed. “Do you know why I tried you, Danner? Market pressure. If you were a nobody, you would’ve pled your way down to a traffic ticket and walked before trial. But because, for whatever reason, this city decided to cast you as a celebrity defendant, we had to do something about our celebrity trial record, which—you may have noticed—is less than spectacular.”

“So getting convictions is all you care about? Aren’t there some cases where you actually want to know the truth?”

“The truth? The
truth
? When you’re a trial lawyer, you learn something in a hurry. You’re supposedly questioning potential witnesses, but you’re rehearsing them and you know it. Once a witness has told you the version of the story that you’ve helped them arrive at, you get them to retell it over and over. And eventually that story—the story you’ve all shaped—it
becomes
the truth. And if you’re not careful or if you’re careful enough, the truth will include things that weren’t there to begin with. And that’s what you’re gonna have happening here, only worse. You might want to retell the story of the night of September twenty-third in your head a thousand times, but it was being interpreted before you supposedly woke up. You can never arrive at the truth.” She finished off her drink. “You know why? The facts are the raw material, not the finished product. And if you go looking for truth, you’re just gonna wind up chasing your tail. You’d do better to search for absolution.” A quick wave of her hand. “But not here.”

I threw down a twenty and slid off the barstool. “Thanks for your time.”

She didn’t bother looking up from her glass. “I’ll bill you.”

It was past one by the time I reluctantly returned home. I wished there were something else I could do, somewhere else I could go. It struck me as I entered the darkness of my kitchen that I didn’t want to be alone with myself. During those chill jailhouse nights, I’d imagined plenty, but I hadn’t imagined that being labeled not guilty
only
by reason of insanity would leave me feeling like I’d rather die than live inside my own skin. I had to live with a lot more, too. Despite my neurologist’s warning, I’d chosen to take the risk—for myself, for that family of four in the minivan, for Genevieve. The cost of my selfishness sickened me.

I scrubbed the blood from the carpet as best I could and washed off the boning knife. Then I went back upstairs and lay in bed. 2:13
A.M.
Only four more hours until daybreak. Then what? What life would I live?

I studied the ceiling, listening for sounds in the house. I tried to sleep, but every time I drifted off, I snapped to, worried what might happen. Or, perhaps, worried about what I might do.

A little past three, I got a digital camcorder from my office and a tripod from the garage and set them up in the far corner of my room, pointing at the bed. I hit “record” and climbed back under the sheets. Now if I turned into the Incredible Hulk, I’d have documentation. Or if the Hillside Foot Cutter broke in and went for the other pinkie toe. Maybe I should wear galoshes prophylactically. Maybe I should check myself in somewhere. Maybe I should ask Katherine Harriman for a date.

I stared at the watching lens.

Where do you hide when you scare yourself?

E
xhausted, I sat at the wobbly kitchen table early the next morning, eating stale Smokehouse Almonds and picking through my mail. I’d failed to sleep, finally dragging out of bed to come downstairs. I’d been unable to shake off last night—the dream memory or the nonintruder. The implications of both continued to haunt me.

A hospital bill stuck out from the mound of mail, catching my eye, and I opened it to find a twelve-thousand-dollar anesthesia charge. The memo at the bottom informed me that, since I had no insurance, I should have requested a county hospital for my surgery. During my next amnesic psychotic break, I’d be sure to ask for a detour to the ER at Wilshire and Crack Central. Or—here’s an idea—maybe I’d make a decision next crisis go-round before it constituted a calamity for me and a fatality for someone else.

Through the north-facing bank of windows, the sky looked bruised and wet, the smog dampening twilight. Gus, my fat, arthritic squirrel, hobbled across the back deck. It was a miracle the coyotes hadn’t gotten him yet. He cocked his head, regarding me with something like sympathy, then raised his little paws as if in Jewish complaint.

“You and me both, bud,” I said.

I continued flipping through the mail. From my agency a handful of surprisingly robust royalty payments. Three marriage proposals, photos enclosed, one from an attractive housewife in Idaho. Bank statements and medical claims and flyers from tree trimmers.

The return to the banalities of life was jarring. My reality—crumbs on the kitchen table, mortgage-refinance mailers—was not how I’d imagined it would be. What
had
I expected? Me with my scarlet
M,
slinking around colonial New England, disgraced and outcast, subsisting on forest grubs?

What I wanted was an unromantic drunk, a liquid haze, an alcoholic salve, a wake-up-in-your-own-vomit-beside-the-Jack-in-the-Box-drive-through bender. I was familiar with it, the sublime indulgence of self-destruction. When you’ve got nothing to lose, you’ve got something to gain. Thus the fuck-the-world fix. Thus the meek classmate who surprises you at your ten-year with newfound confidence and fifteen pierces crowding his pale features. Thus my and Charlie Manson’s marriage proposals. Given that the prospect of marrying Mrs. Sue Ann Miller of Coeur d’ Alene was, for the time being, unpalatable, I wondered at my next move.

I had a pretty significant choice to make. Lie down and die. Or don’t.

I removed the cell phone from my pocket and dialed. As I waited for Lloyd Wagner to answer, I recalled that little nod he’d given me in court before he’d ripped into the dummy with my boning knife. He’d felt bad, but he’d had a job to do. I didn’t begrudge him that. I’d tagged along with Lloyd at the forensics lab, even to a crime scene or two. He and I had shared a few meals as he’d helped me work through various plot points. He had an elongated face, wavy blond hair, and a kooky grin that he showed rarely. A rum-and-Coke guy. Early riser. He was a little cold, as befits a criminalist, though I’d always thought we had decent chemistry. Most important, he’d bagged Genevieve’s hands and feet, dusted for prints, analyzed the DNA. I got his voice mail on his cell, so I tried him at home. His wife was ill, some kind of late-stage cancer, if she hadn’t already died.

Answering machine. How old-fashioned.

After the beep I said, “Hi, Lloyd. Andrew Danner here. I know it probably seems pretty weird, me calling you, but I’m, I guess, free. I’m wondering how I might reconstruct the night I…drove over to Genevieve’s. I figured you’d be the person to ask. We never got to talk, of course, about the evidence, but I’d like to get your unfiltered opinion. I think—I hope…I think I was framed. Unless I’m still temporarily insane, which I might be. I…well, I could use your advice. Please give me a call.”

I hung up and paced a tight circle around the kitchen. I withdrew the boning knife from the block and studied it as if it had something new to tell me. Then I dialed again.

The line rang three times before the familiar voice said, “Hello?”

I said, “I’d like to see you. Just for a few minutes before you leave for work. Can you do that?”

The pause was so long I thought April had hung up. Then she said, “I can do a few minutes.”

I realized I was still gripping the knife, so I slotted it home. Then I thanked her and headed out.

I threaded through the Encino hills. The Ike-’n’-Mamie houses, set behind oval lawns, flashed one after another in my headlights before fading back into the early-morning gloom. Idling across the street from April’s house, I called again. Aside from the dim glow behind her bedroom curtains, the house looked dead.

When she picked up, I said, “I’m here.”

The lights clicked on, broadcasting her path as she made her way to the front of the house, then the entry blinds swiveled. “So why don’t you come ring the doorbell?” she said through the phone.

“I didn’t want to startle you.”

“Okay. Well, come on.”

As I stepped onto the porch, the door jerked against the security chain. She laughed self-consciously, freed the chain, and beckoned for me to enter. We sat on opposing plush white couches straight out of a tampon commercial.

She appraised the scar on my head. “Any rashes from the Dilantin?”

“Meds have been fine.” I shifted on the cushions, unable to get comfortable. “I wanted to thank you for coming to court for me. I think it made a difference, and even if it didn’t, thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad you got acquitted, and I’m sorry you went through what you went through.”

Despite her impassive expression, she sat rigidly. She was wearing a linen skirt wrinkled at midthigh and a halter with straps that tied at her nape, accenting her throat, splotched red from a nervous blush that refused to fade. She stayed awkwardly on the edge of the cushion as if ready to flee, her eyes darting, uncomfortable. And why not? What was she supposed to say?

“I miss you,” I said.

Her gaze dropped to her lap, and I felt suddenly cold, exposed, aware of the notch in my hair. Was she afraid of being alone with me? Or was I projecting?

It had been hard on her. Press camped on her lawn, helicopters at night. The cops had tossed her house, emptied trash cans on the floor, even come by her office with a warrant. She’d waited five days to visit me in jail, which pretty much told me where things were headed. She’d been concerned for me, apologetic, but that had only made her leaving worse. She’d reminded me that we were just starting out, not even engaged yet. It was a lot to overcome three months into a romance.

I thought about those bluish gray morning hours when I’d stir and she’d be there beside me, how I’d curl around her form and drift back to sleep. When the road is smooth, how easily we forget that we need people. That we actually
require
them. I hadn’t touched April since before the murder. I’d viewed her through ballistic glass under the watchful gaze of an armed correctional officer and, now, across a stretch of dated white carpet. All I could think about was the warmth of her body while she slept and how I could no longer take for granted that I’d feel it again. Of course, I couldn’t take it for granted then either. I just did.

Her stress was palpable, and it struck me hard that I’d brought this to her life.

“I’m sorry how this has affected you,” I said.

She wound the hem of her shirt around her finger, then unwound it. “Listen, Drew, I’m—” Her voice wavered, and she stopped.

“Don’t worry. I understand that you don’t need to have anything more to do with this.”

She glanced at her watch. “Then you just came by to thank me?”

“Yes, and…” I realized I was fussing with my hands and set them in my lap. “Can I ask something of you? One thing?”

She couldn’t hide a touch of wariness.

“Take me through that night again?”

“What…why?”

“Because you’re the only one who can. Coming home, I’m trying to piece together those missing hours, but all I’ve got is this breakfast bowl and a cracked saucer—”

“Drew, what are you talking about? The trial is over. You’re free. You should see someone, start putting this behind you. At least get some sleep. If you don’t mind me saying so, you looked better in jail.”

“I’m hoping a few answers will help me sleep.”

“Or they’ll lead to more questions.”

“Right,” I said. “But at least this time they’ll be the
right
questions.” I waited as she studied the wall over my head. “Please, April. I won’t bother you again.”

She drew a sharp breath. I waited for the sigh, but it didn’t come. Instead she said, “It’s like I told you in jail. You worked that day. I came over around six. We went to dinner. Fabrocini’s.”

“Did we run into anyone we knew?”

“No. Then we came home. We made love.”

“Where?”

“On the couch. With the view.”

“Did anyone call?”

She shook her head. “And then you had another migraine come on. Bad one. Laid down, lights out, the whole thing. I read with a booklight so I could stay beside you. But there was nothing different from any other time it’s gone like that. You went to bed normal…”

The unspoken part of the sentence dangled.
And woke up a killer.

She uncrossed her legs, crossed them again, tugged at her knee with her laced hands. “I woke up alone in your bed at four
A.M.
when the cops showed up.”

She was a deep sleeper, slow to wake. I imagined her confusion at the empty space beside her in the sheets. Maybe she’d called for me in the bathroom. The insistent second chime of the doorbell. Disorientation giving way to concern, concern to fear. Bare feet on the carpet as she felt her way through the darkness into the hall. The police lights shining through the frosted insets of my front door and rising through the open foyer, setting the second-story ceiling awash in blue and red. What a long walk that must have been down the curving stairs.

“You don’t remember a phone ringing late at night? And I didn’t talk to you after I supposedly listened to Genevieve’s message?”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“I can empathize,” I said. “Thank you, April. For everything.”

The words rushed out of her, as if they’d been pent up. “If you’d been more honest with me about the brain tumor, we could have prevented this.”

I tried to answer, but my throat was dry, and I had to start over. “I was scared.”

“Right. You were scared. And you chose not to tell me. So that tells you what we didn’t have.”

I couldn’t convey how badly I wanted to take it all back, so I just nodded once, slowly. She rose, and I took the hint. I thanked her—I had much to thank her for—and she gave me a hug at the door, squeezing me tight, then turning away quickly so I couldn’t see her face. “Take care of yourself, Drew.”

I said, “I’ll do my best.”