The Crime Writer (8 page)

He finished his O’ Doul’s, musing powerfully as only Chic can. Then he said, “Face everything.” He tossed the empty bottle and hit the open trash can ten yards away. “One day at a time.”

We drove back to my house in silence, Chic reaching over once or twice to squeeze my neck. I was halfway up the walk when he whistled through his teeth. He was at the curb, truck running behind him. “I know it’s been circled around, but no one ever says it dead on.” He licked his lips, not looking away. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

As he headed back around the truck, a passing jogger flipped him off.

He waved.

T
hat night I sat and watched commercials. Just commercials. I wasn’t up to sustained drama. The usual high-stakes action ensued. Soap products busied themselves fighting grime. Closet messes overwhelmed frazzled housewives. Animated fungi rooted under toenails.

My cell phone vibrated pleasingly in my pocket, and I dug it out.

Preston asked, “What are you doing?”

“Lying around listlessly. Bemoaning an unjust universe.”

“I’m in the neighborhood. Drop by?”

“No?”

“See you in ten.”

Forty-five minutes later, the doorbell rang. I yelled, “You have a key!”

Preston came in, glanced around the family room. “The drawn curtains. The dirty dishes. The ragged clothing. How about we rewrite this scene?”

Preston is a better friend than he seems. He’d come to see me in jail second, after Chic, browbeating the rookie guard into extending visitor hours. Though he wasn’t a smoker, he’d lit up behind the Plexiglas, I’d assumed, out of regard for the ambience. Trying to repress a cough, he’d shot smoke past the crest of his bangs and remarked, “They don’t really make a Hallmark card for this one, do they?”

In his interior forties, Preston has intense blue eyes and a square jaw that flexes out at the corners when he’s working to a point, which is often. He’d been my editor for all five of my books, and I’d yet to find him wanting for an opinion on any matter trivial or life-threatening. Infuriatingly resolute, unusually hands-on, overly involved, he seems to live through the books he publishes. He loves make-believe, but the set of his features showed a heightened thrill at now being in the real-life-of-it-all.

His head-tilted appraisal of me continued. “How do you feel getting out?” He seemed to have shape-shifted already—into the street-wise confederate with a hard-boiled mouth.

“Off balance.” I shrugged. “My horoscope says it’s because Jupiter’s in my twelfth house.”

“That
is
bad,” he mused. “Once, growing up, we had a possum in our outhouse.” Preston grew up in an academic family in Charlottesville, and now and then he lets a yokelism slip into his conversation. Owning apartments in Manhattan and West Hollywood on an editor’s salary doesn’t square with outhouse and possum references, but if you took away Preston’s affectations, there’d be no one left to argue with.

He looked around, folding his arms, helpless against the mess of my house. “I suppose you seem to be holding together, given the circumstances,” he conceded.

“My suffering has ennobled me.”

He pursed his lips and regarded me as if perhaps that weren’t true.

I said, “Thanks for getting my mail. Not to mention cosigning the mortgage refinance.”

Preston waved me off—no time for niceties—then nodded at the Band-Aid on my foot. “What happened there?”

“I cut myself with a boning knife.”

“Naturally.
Why?
”

“Because I’m a nutcase.”

“Why don’t you give me the backstory?”

He feigned patience as I filled him in on the bizarre events of last night. When I was done, he said, “Let me make a cup of tea.” He disappeared into the kitchen, then called out, “Do you have a lime?”

“Try the fridge.”

He returned a few minutes later with a glass of ice and the bottle of Havana Club he’d smuggled back from an ostensible research trip to Cuba and given, also ostensibly, to me as an oh-look-it’s-contraband souvenir. He kept it hidden in my kitchen so other guests wouldn’t access it. Sitting on the long arm of my sectional’s L, he sipped his rum. I noted, with some irritation, he hadn’t offered to bring me anything.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?” I asked.

“I extended my office leave.” A sly grin. “I’m editing out here for the next few months so I can be supportive.” He tapped his manicured nails together. “Look, Drew, I’m not gonna lie to you. I don’t know if you did it or not. But I do know one thing: If I were you, and if I had a
modicum
of doubt as to my guilt, I wouldn’t be sitting around.”

“You’d do what?”

“In
ves
tigate.”

“Get me forensics, a blood panel, and sat footage of the canyon.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. You can’t afford it. You may be free, but the public views you as a murderer. You’re tarred with that brush, and, unlike O.J., you can’t just retire to a golf course and live off your bloated retirement accounts. If you accept the verdict as delivered, fine. Start not drinking again. But if you
don’t
accept that verdict, you have to get away from that tumor, dig down into what happened, and exonerate yourself.” He crunched ice thoughtfully. “The story you should be working on is the one that’s working on
you.
”

He took another swig, cubes clinking musically against the glass. Unable to manage his own life at all, he was happy to micromanage mine. Would he micromanage me right into a padded room? I settled back in my chair, studied the smooth white ceiling.

He continued, “Harriman effectively painted you as
the killer.
But this insanity nonsense
might not
be the real version of events. And if not, you have to find
your
story. The
real
story.” His eyes gleamed. He was Excited By The Possibilities. “Maybe you
didn’t
do it. Maybe someone
did
break into your house. Maybe there
is
a furtive
Gaslight
plot to mess with your head. We don’t read the books about the nine hundred ninety-nine times something goes as expected. We read those about the one time it goes wrong. Or strangely. Or extraordinarily. And there are enough oddities here that this”—he pointed at me—“could be the case.” He stared at me, but before I could respond, he was going again. “This is your
life.
What have you done to explore this since you’ve been home?”

“I looked around the house, checked my e-mail and PalmPilot to see if I could piece anything together, talked to—”

“Oh, well, I’m
riveted.
Did you do lots of tortured sulking, too? Play the saxophone in the dark?”

My face was burning. “I tried to keep sulking to a minimum, but yes, I may have sulked some. Moderate darkness. But no moody wind instruments.”

“What did you do today?”

“Opened the mail. And I ate yams.”

“You ate yams?”

“At Chic’s house.”

He threw up his hands as if that said it all. “Do you want to make progress or do you want to be angry?”

I thought for a moment. “I want to be angry.”

“What would Dirk Chincleft do?”

Preston has various unflattering nicknames for Derek Chainer. That’s the good thing about editors. Wit.

“Dirk Chincleft is a homicide detective,” I said. “He has official leverage. I don’t have leverage.”

“Come on! You’re stuck in the first act, and you’re not driving your narrative. You know better. You impact the plot. Or the plot impacts you.”

“This isn’t a fucking story.”

He leaned forward, jabbing a finger at the floor. “
Everything’s
a fucking story. And you’re letting this one languish. What you need is something to kick down the front door, come barreling into the plot, crashing into the story. Make you
react.
Make you
act.
But in the likely event that that
isn’t
gonna happen, you need to uncover what happened. If you’re not afraid to.” His gaze zeroed in on me; he’d sensed perhaps that he’d flicked a vulnerability. “A writer’s job, perhaps more than any other, is not to be afraid of possibilities.”

“But I
am.
” I hadn’t realized it until I heard it out loud, even from my own mouth. I was afraid of what I’d discover, and that fear had stalled me out.

We’d veered into The Writer’s Feelings, uncomfortable territory for Preston. He broke eye contact, gathering the strap of his bag, his intensity suddenly dissipated. He stood and dusted his pants. “I hate to sound L.A.-loathsome, but I’ve got bikram yoga.”

“Yoga with the Muppets?”

“Hot room. Hundred and five degrees.” Master of the last word, Preston paused at the threshold to the living room. For once his expression was sincere. “Dirk Chincleft wouldn’t take it lying down.”

The front door closed neatly behind him, and the dead bolt set with a smug click.

I’d never imagined that freedom would feel so constraining. If I’d been convicted, I’d have had the benefit of lurid prison tales, stoic last words as they strapped me into the chair. Preston was right about one thing: I was at a narrative dead end. I contemplated my options. None seemed appealing, so I stomped upstairs, echoes of Preston’s oppressing me more with each step. Where do you go when the case is closed and the courts, the cops, the press, the public, and maybe even you believe you’re the killer? In real life? Fucking nowhere, that’s where.

Or maybe, if you’re lucky, you go to sleep. Which is what I was finally going to do.

I took two steps into my bedroom and froze.

My brain tumor was gone. Save my clock radio and bedside lamp the nightstand was empty. No glass jar, not even a lingering drop of formaldehyde.

My skin tingled with electricity.

The last time I could remember seeing it was just after I’d come in from smoking a cigar on the deck. Had I hidden or disposed of it while in my foot-cutting trance? Panic congealed at the back of my throat, constricting my breathing. I ran my hands through my hair, hard, feeling the ridge of scar tissue against my left palm.

I threw back the comforter and looked under the bed. The nightstand drawers held only their usual contents. I searched the cabinets of my bathroom next, flinging bottles and cold-medicine boxes onto the counter. I tore apart my office, tugging and slamming drawers, digging through the trash can. The guest room downstairs was next, then the living room. Charging into the kitchen, I caught sight of a gleam in the sink.

A curved wedge of thick glass.

I drew near. The familiar screw lid, a collection of shards. No ganglioglioma.

I’d been in the kitchen today only to grab the can of almonds. Had I glanced in the sink? Probably not. How about last night, after I’d followed my own bloody footprints around? Had I looked? Not closely.

I picked out the glass debris and set it on the counter. After staring at the rubber mouth of the disposal for a moment, I shoved up my sweatshirt sleeve and pushed my hand gently through. Keeping a nervous eye on the light switch that could set the chopping blades in motion, I groped around, dreading what my tumor might feel like. Slick and firm? Moist? Kernels of glass pinched my fingers. I explored thoroughly but found the disposal empty. Had I run it last night, flushing the tumor for once and for all? Or had my stalker kidnapped it to drive me further into the state of paranoia in which I’d taken up residence?

From its latched wooden box, I took a twenty-year Warre’s, resting in its place the remains of the shattered jar. Then I gave last rites, pouring the full bottle of port into the maw of the garbage disposal to which the tumor may have been committed.

Exhausted and mystified, I trudged back upstairs, crawled into bed, and finally dozed off.

At 4:00
A.M.
my house imploded.

T
he boom jerked me upright with a cry, and then I heard a screech of heavy objects, the shriek of broken glass. A deluge of manpower rushing inside. Pounding boots up the stairs. In my post-slumber haze, the intruders seemed like rising devils, I like a dumbstruck Faust. For a moment I was back in my cell, phantom voices drifting up to me.

Stupefied, I stared at the door, which flung violently open, admitting a stream of figures decked in black and armored with goggles, vests, and assault weapons of some kind. Dark gloves seized my right wrist and ankle and ripped me from bed.

“Stay the fuck down!”

“See the hands, see the hands!”

My limbs spread as if by their own volition, and hands frisked me, not hard to do since I was wearing only boxers. A ghost imprint of white block lettering floated in front of my eyes, though my face was mashed to the carpet.
LAPD SWAT.

I jerked my head to the side so I could breathe. Detective Three Bill Kaden appeared offset, Ed Delveckio peering over his shoulder. Kaden pushed a finger into my cheek until it ground against my teeth.

“You’re fucked now,” he said.

As Kaden led me, cuffed and hastily dressed, past the cops already rifling through my possessions, down the stairs, over the scattered shards in the entryway from the front-door glass insets, I registered a certain foolishness, a retroactive shame about how screwed I’d been before I’d even known it. While I’d drooled obliviously on my pillow, scenarios had been drawn up, positions chosen, a battering ram readied. My heart was still jerking in my chest. Being on the wrong side of a raid? Not as much fun as you might think.

I saw newspapers spinning in to fill the screen, headlines shouting
NEW EVIDENCE IN BERTRAND SLAYING.
But wasn’t I protected under double jeopardy?

I said, “I assume you have a warrant.”

Bunched beneath Kaden’s fist, the document appeared before my face. I was being arrested for murder, though the warrant didn’t name names. That would be, I assumed, my job.

Kaden threw me in the back of an unmarked sedan and climbed into the driver’s seat. Delveckio sat in the passenger seat. My neighbors were on their front steps or at the windows.

“You could have just called,” I said. “I would’ve driven in. I’ve always cooperated.” A few more blocks in silence. My alarm was finally ebbing, giving way to outrage. I cleared my throat. “I say, ‘What’s this about?’ and you say, ‘I think you know, punk.’ Then I say, ‘I want to talk to my lawyer,’ and you say, ‘As soon as you’re booked.’”

The backs of their heads did not respond.

We were on the freeway now, flying toward downtown. The first time I’d ever been on the 101 without traffic. The freeway, usually bumper to bumper, was deserted, postapocalyptic.

I was not surprised, some fifteen minutes later, to see the Parker Center through the windshield. Home to Derek Chainer. And to LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division. A glass-and-concrete testament to fifties architectural cost-effectiveness, Parker’s rectangular rise blocked out the emerging sun.

I was steered upstairs to an interrogation room. They kept the door open, cops coming and going with papers and whispered updates. Once again I felt disoriented, nervous, shoved out of my rightful place. I knew these halls. I knew this building. I’d researched men like these and written about them in flattering fashion. After my first book came out, I’d taken the buddy-buddy tour with the public-information officer, watched a real-live interview from the other side of the one-way mirror. What a distance between that side of the glass and this.

“Why am I here?” I said.

Kaden said, “Take your clothes off.”

“Okay, but it’s fifty bucks up front, and I don’t kiss on the mouth.”

“Off.”

I glowered at him. “Not until I talk to my lawyer.”

“After we search you.”

“In case I’m secreting a bazooka up my ass?”

“You can keep your boxers on.”

I kicked off my shoes, and Kaden stared at my bare feet and said, “Stop. Band-Aid off, please.”

I complied. He snapped his fingers at the door, and a guy came in with an oversize Polaroid and took a picture of the slice in my flesh while I stood on one foot.

I finished pulling off my clothes, and they made sure I had no other scrapes or slashes. As I dressed, the photographer withdrew and closed the door, leaving me with Kaden, Delveckio, a table and chair, and a shiny mirror on the wall. The lights were hot, and someone had brought me coffee. My job was to drink it and get jittery and have to take a leak and spill all my secrets so I could get to the can. I could’ve been more compliant if I knew what my secrets were.

Delveckio nodded at my foot. “Looks to be a fresh knife cut, wouldn’t you say?”

“You talk, too?”

“Answer the fucking question,” Kaden said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It looks like a fresh cut. Now, what the hell’s this about?”

“Got a little careless?”

“Doing what?”

“You tell me.”

I palmed sweat off my brow. The hot overheads were working. “I might have had an intruder two nights ago. I think someone broke in when I was sleeping, cut my foot.”

“Sure thing,” said Delveckio. “Easter Bunny maybe?”

I glared at him. “Not in January. I was thinking tardy elf.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?” Kaden asked.

“You guys haven’t exactly been sympathetic.”

“And this…mystery assailant cut you and you slept through it?”

“I was really out of it. My first night home. I woke up just after, I think. Guy might’ve even still been in the house, but then I wasn’t sure—”

Kaden placed a thick hand on my chest and shoved me so I fell back into the chair. He kicked the table so it slid over and stopped right in front of me. I was now seated at the interrogation table. Neat trick.

“Where were you last night between ten-thirty and two
A.M.
?”

Last
night?

“Okay,” I said, struggling to keep up and failing. “Okay.”

Delveckio handed me my coffee, an oddly civil gesture, despite his motivation.

“Getting smarter, aren’t you?” Kaden said. “Moved the body this time. Washed it down with a bleach solution.”

I believe that anyone is capable of anything.

I felt a flutter-beat of panic. “Is it April? Is she all right?”

They stared at me, arms crossed, spread stances, Delveckio a skinnier version of the big guy.

“Tell me she’s okay,” I said. “You already dragged me here. No need to add insult to injury.”

Delveckio reached over and cuffed my head. Openhanded but hard. “You’re a piece of shit,” he said. “
That’s
insult to injury.”

My chest felt tight. I couldn’t move enough air through it. “Just tell me this isn’t about April.”

Kaden set down a crime-scene photo on the table in front of me. I shuddered so hard that coffee spilled over the Styrofoam lip and scalded my knuckles. Woman on a coroner’s slab, familiar deep gash in the pit of the stomach. But not April.

A great hope fell over me like a blanket of light. Two bodies, same MO. If I hadn’t killed this woman, I likely hadn’t killed Genevieve. My name could be cleared. My relieved exhale was cut short by a renewed understanding of my situation. Interrogation room. Parker Center. Logically, the prime suspect.

“I didn’t do this. No
way.
You think I…what? Slipped while stabbing her in the stomach and cut my bare foot?”

“You undressed to make sure you didn’t get any spatter on your clothes,” Delveckio said. “Manipulating the body, holding the knife, mistakes happen.”

“Come on. That’s hardly concrete evidence.”

“Oh, you want evidence?” Kaden asked.

Here we go again. Déjà fucking vu.

“We found a plastic drop cloth in your trash can. Like for, say, the trunk of your car.”

My breath left me in a silent cough. I didn’t know anything except to keep fighting. Blindly. And take it on faith that I wasn’t a murderer, let alone twice over.

“Why would I leave it in my own trash can?” I said.

“You wouldn’t,” Delveckio said, “You burned it first. But you missed an edge. And it’s sporting residue matching the adhesive from the electrical tape binding her wrists.”

I couldn’t manage a response.

Kaden laughed at my stunned expression, though there was no amusement in his eyes. “Framed again, huh? One-armed man on the grassy knoll?”

“I didn’t do this,” I said quietly.

“That’s odd, because the killer duplicated every specific. The precise angle of the stab wound. The positioning of the body. The way the head was turned, hair down over the right eye. Not exactly the level of detail we put out for the six o’ clock news.”

My thoughts bled one into the next.

“Here’s the kicker,” Kaden continued. “That little piece of un-burnt plastic drop cloth we found in your trash can? It had some more surprises for us. The victim’s blood. Your blood. And as for your bleach bath? Missed a few spots. Your hair under a fingernail. Traces of your blood on the pad of her foot.”

I cannot have done this. It’s impossible that I did this last night.

“As far as we can determine, there is only one connection between the victims,” Kaden said. “And that’s you.”

I pointed at the body in the photo. “I don’t know who that woman is. Why would I kill her?”

“You’re trying to tell us you didn’t do this, and you’ve spent the thirty-six hours since your release digging around in the mud of the case you were just acquitted for? Stalking Katherine Harriman. Trying to get ahold of the key criminalist from the investigation. You’re giving new meaning to returning to the scene of the crime.”

He nodded at Delveckio, who walked to the corner, reached up, and unplugged the security camera pointing down at us. Kaden set both hands on the lip of the table, leaning over so his face was a few feet from mine. He shoved until the ledge of wood struck my lower ribs and sent me and my chair skidding back with it. The table hit the walls on either side of me, trapping me in the corner. “Decent-sized fella like yourself might be feeling a touch cramped right about now. Get used to it. Because that’s your cell size
for the rest of your life.
”

Kaden stepped back. Pacing, he cuffed his sleeves up past his wide forearms. “Let’s pretend I’m playing bad cop. But see, this game is different. There
is
no good cop. This is bad cop-bad cop. Delveckio and I, there’s no one we hate more than killers of women. We watched you slip off once. We’re not gonna do it again.”

I glanced at Delveckio. Considerate of Kaden to make room for him under the macho umbrella. With his thin frame and watery eyes, Delveckio was not the most threatening figure. Kaden, on the other hand, looked ready to jam his fingers through my face and use my head as a bowling ball.

He continued, “We’re willing to rough you up. We’re willing to snap fingers. We’re willing to crack ribs. And we’re willing to testify how we had to because you were belligerent and violent. We’d rather not, but we will. You can go through it or you can skip it, but either way you’re talking, and you don’t have a brain tumor to save your murdering ass this go-round.”

The crime-scene photo had skidded off the table into my lap. Upside down, it looked even more grotesque. Blood and severed flesh, without orientation.

The familiar sickness started in my stomach, dampening my skin. The sweat-stained hospital sheets. The voices echoing off my cell walls. The scabs had lifted to reveal the same horrible scene. Where was I? What had I done? I felt a sudden caving-in of my resolve. The utter demoralization of long-awaited defeat, of laying down arms and giving in to the inevitable. Maybe I
had
done it. I could not exactly claim to remember the last time I’d encountered a body under similar circumstances. The evidence, Genevieve, my mental lapses—it was too much.

Where were you last night between ten-thirty and two
A.M.
?

Home alone. Out cold. Yeah, right.

Bill Kaden, looking none too affable, advanced on the table, and I opened my mouth to offer a shaky admission of I-knew-not-what when like a thunderbolt a realization rocketed down, straightening my spine, jerking my fists against the pitted wood.

“The camcorder!” I cried. “I recorded myself sleeping!”