The Crime Writer Page 15

  “Some guard dog.”

  Junior shrugged. “I trained her to respect authority.”

  I turned back to the cop. “Look, if you’ll just let me call—”

  “I did call, sir. There was no answer. Please step out of the vehicle and put your hands on the roof.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Yeah, I’m in a real jokey mood.”

  I got out of the Highlander and complied. Through the window I watched the dog curl up contentedly in the backseat.

  “Down, Xena,” I said.

  The holding cell at the Rampart Station was surprisingly clean, despite a permanent olfactory overlay of vomit. I was, of course, kept separate from Junior, lest I corrupt him further.

  After an eternity Caroline Raine’s face appeared through the bars.

  I’d never seen a prettier sight.

  “You’re a bad influence,” she said.

  I peeled myself off the sticky bench. “You’re just figuring that out?”

  We dropped Junior off at Hope House, and then Caroline took me to pick up my Highlander. I let Xena out, and she trotted over to a throw of weeds, squatted, and peed.

  Caroline asked, through lips pursed with amusement, “Isn’t that Junior’s dog?”

  “She a princess warrior, homes.” I whistled Xena back into the Highlander.

  Caroline looked around, shivered in the night breeze. “There was a murder here the other night.”

  “Yep. I was framed for it. Elaborately. But I had an alibi this time.”

  She nodded slightly, a tough woman to shock. “Which was?”

  “I camcorded myself while I was sleeping.”

  “You have a lot of strange habits.”

  “It’s a longer conversation. Let me buy you dinner.”

  She laughed uncomfortably. “Like a date?”

  “Like a thank-you.”

  She looked immensely relieved. “There are some fine culinary choices in the area.” She pointed up the street. “Pepe’s House of Gastric Distress?”

  “Just my speed.”

  Caroline sipped a beer while I nursed a ginger ale. The remains of burgers and chili cheese fries lay on the table before us, weighing down grease-stained paper inside red plastic baskets. A few stragglers at the bar, an empty pool table, the Stones reminding us from the jukebox that we can’t always get what we want. We’d caravanned a few miles to a less downscale section of town. I’d left Xena dozing happily in my backseat, guarding the Guiltmobile with her vicious killer instincts.

  Caroline had brought a persistent curiosity to bear over the meal. She maintained direct eye contact, maybe a therapist habit, but it didn’t make me as uncomfortable as I would have thought. I fielded one sharp question after another about my trial, my theories, my ongoing investigation, and how it had wound up with me and Junior in the clink.

  “That is one smart kid,” I said.

  “Junior was left in an alley as a baby with the umbilical cord still attached. He’s a lifer in the system, and it’s taught him quite a few tricks.” She took another pull of Corona. “He’s very taken with you. Maybe you should see him. After tomorrow’s required court date, I mean.”

  I shrugged. “Might be good for me to do something for someone else.”

  “I don’t trust anything that doesn’t have selfish motives. Be a Big Brother to him if you want to. For you.”

  Her face had hardened. I studied it, trying to decipher the mood shifts, a skill I had honed during my years with Genevieve. I had a tough time not staring at the scars. Their lines were clean, if jagged, leading me to guess they’d been inflicted by a blade, probably the result of an attack. I ran a risk, I realized, of fetishizing Caroline’s face, of finding it fascinating in its own right. Aside from the obvious damage, her skin was smooth, well tended with lotion. I would have bet that she had taken pride in her skin once; maybe she was astute enough to still appreciate its appeal. Her body was lean, but she had curves overlaying the muscles in the right places, a variation between hard and soft that seemed to match her personality. She was a few years older than me, having already closed on forty, but her hands, wrinkled in the palms, were the only part of her that showed her age. They looked soft and forgiving, more fragile than the rest of her.

  I glanced around, mostly to stop examining her.

  On the sole overhead TV not tuned to ESPN1, 2, or 12, Johnny Ordean appeared, rerun in his usual role, Detective Aiden O’ Shannon. A stage-named Jew from Brooklyn playing an Irish Chicago cop on the backlot at Fox. Welcome to Hollywood.

  Johnny and I had one of those 310 friendships—I pretended to flutter around his flame, and he kept me programmed into his cell phone in case I accidentally wrote something else that his agents could package.

  Detective O’ Shannon crouched over a mangled corpse, eating a—get this—hot dog and holding up an ejected bullet casing with a bent paper clip. The closed-captioning read, with appropriate humorlessness, HUSTLE THIS TO FORENSICS THE CASING NOT THE HOT DOG.

  Caroline followed my gaze. “Isn’t that the guy who played whatever they turned Derek Chainer into for that crappy film?”

  “You’ve read my stuff?” I was thrilled.

  “Of course I’ve read you. Why do you think I watched the trial?”

  “Perverse curiosity?”

  “That’s why I read you, too.” When she smiled, the scars straightened, and the indentations carved through her lips aligned. The damage hardly disappeared, but it grew significantly less pronounced. The wounds had been inflicted when she was scowling, or weeping, or screaming, and somehow a smile simulated those conditions enough to bring back the original lines of the blade. “You never played into the trial. You didn’t turn into a trained seal. I bet it was difficult not to.”

  “It was a learning experience all the way around.”

  “What’d you take away from it all?”

  “I can smell auras.”

  “Really?”

  “My Spidey-senses are tingling right now, in fact. And your aura smells a little like”—I leaned over the table, sniffed her delightful head—“wet dog.”

  “Wet dog?” She wasn’t smiling.

  “Yeah. Pekingese, maybe.”

  She backhanded my shoulder.

  “I thought you liked me for my sense of humor.”

  “I don’t like you. But if I did, it would be for your vast infamy.”

  “It’ll fade. Time heals all wounds.”

  “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.” She studied the tips of her hair.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “You’re Engaging in Private Grooming Habits. If I’m to believe Men’s Health, that means you’ve lost interest in this conversation.”

  “Men’s Health?”

  “Yeah. Sorry ’ bout that.”

  “Despite prevailing scientific wisdom, it doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest. It means I’m uncomfortable.”

  “Because…”

  “I work now. I don’t go to dinner with men I don’t know.”

  Laughter over by the pool table drew our attention. At one of the bar tables, a musclehead with twinning ear pierces nuzzled his spectacular girlfriend. Blond hair, blue eyes—she was a recessive-gene showcase. They looked young, likely in on fake IDs.

  “What I’d give to have a tape of me in college,” Caroline said. “The past always seems so glamorous, once you pass it. Yet here we are, stuck in the ever-unglamorous present.” She watched the young couple kissing. “Remember that age? Everything you felt, it was the first time anyone had ever felt it. Like you’d discovered emotion.” The longing in her voice was palpable. “You can’t burn that way your whole life or you’ll burn out, but it’s still a loss when it fades away.”

  The guy stood up. His T-shirt read IT AIN’T GONNA SUCK ITSELF.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Young romance.”

  Caroline laughed, and the guy stopped and gave us his best glare.

  “Right,” I said
, “you wear that shirt and you don’t want people to look at you.”

  Scowling, he continued outside, tapping down a pack of smokes. The waitress came over, and I tried to pay, but Caroline insisted, a bit too firmly, on splitting the bill.

  After our change arrived, Caroline said, “When I first started at Hope House, we realized we weren’t getting traction with certain kids because we didn’t understand some of their reactions, their hardwiring. So I implemented home visits—for the counselors. To see where these kids came from. It gave us a better understanding of how to deal with them in other contexts.” She paused to finish her beer, leaving me unsure where she was going. “You knew Genevieve, but all you have of Kasey Broach is a body in a photograph. If you want to figure out how to fit her in, you need to see where she lived, meet her family.”

  “And say what? ‘I’m a suspect in your daughter’s murder and I’d like to ask a few questions’?”

  She shrugged. “You’re creative. Presumably.” Her eyes darted over to the pool table. “Wanna play?”

  “You hustling me?”

  Again with the beautiful smile. “I’m not very good.”

  Two and a half minutes later, I watched as she leaned over to draw a bead on the fifteen, her second-to-last ball on the table. I had six solids remaining and little of my barroom dignity. I’d discovered that Caroline Raine had a whole vocabulary of laughter—the victorious whoop, the confident chuckle, the under-the-breath snicker.

  “Is the fifteen feeling skinny? I think it’s feeling skinny.” Off her shot she threaded it, impossibly, through the one and the five and lined up for the nine. “The jeweler is in,” she pronounced before cutting it to the side pocket on a backward vector I’d seen only in Paul Newman movies.

  She circled the table, chalking her stick. Witty T-Shirt was still tied up on the pay phone, but his girlfriend’s chair blocked Caroline’s angle.

  Caroline asked, “Would you mind letting me take this shot?”

  “We were here first,” the girl said. “And I already moved once. I’m not gonna keep dancing around the table.”

  “It puts you out that much to scoot four inches to your left?”

  The girl flashed a fake smile onto her unreasonably pretty face. “Likes: water sports, long walks on the beach, kittens. Dislikes: pushy chicks with fucked-up faces.”

  Caroline colored everywhere except her scars; the contrast was severe. She set down the pool cue and turned to me. “Let’s go.” She took a few steps toward the door, then stopped and looked back at me intolerantly.

  I paused next to the girl. On the table beside her Smirnoff Ice were photo proofs of her in various cutesy poses. She or her boyfriend had circled several with a red grease pencil, selecting prospective head shots.

  “I know you,” I said quietly. “You lucked into a decent set of genes, and you think that constitutes a contribution to the world. You don’t really want to act—you’re just lazy, and you want to be looked at and get your rent paid doing it. You booked a mouthwash commercial and a print campaign for TJ Maxx, and your agent thinks you’re the next big thing. In a few years, you’ll give up on leading lady and convince yourself you’ll get cast as the wry best friend or the sitcom wife. Another excuse to do more nothing for another decade. In the long meantime, maybe you should reflect on what entitles you to be cruel and smug besides high cheekbones and the word of people paid to flatter you.”

  I didn’t see her boyfriend coming until the fist loomed over my right side. I jerked away, and the blow glanced off my jaw, and then I heard a thud and a barstool toppling, and I finished reeling to see Caroline standing over the guy, holding one twisted arm captive, foot at his jawline, applying pressure to drive his face farther into the worn carpet. His girlfriend’s mouth hung open, one hand curled over her perfect teeth. She’d turned white. Maybe she was a good actress after all.

  Caroline glanced up at me. “Ready to go?”

  I nodded. She released him. This time I followed her out to the parking lot. We paused between our cars. Xena was at my driver’s-side window, snub tail wagging.

  “You’re a second-rate writer with a first-rate mouth,” Caroline said.

  I looked for a snappy comeback—I would’ve even taken on-the-nose—but I had writer’s block and my jaw hurt. I touched it gingerly.

  Caroline sighed, annoyed by her concern. “How do you feel?”

  “Embarrassed.”

  “I meant your jaw.”

  “It’s embarrassed, too.”

  “I bet.” She crossed her arms. “What important lessons did we learn here?”

  “Don’t play pool with a woman who calls her cue Charlie?”

  “One: This girl can take care of herself. Two: Don’t start a fight you can’t finish.”

  A few cars blew by, honking, until one veered off down a side street. Condensation wafted through the screen from the barroom kitchen.

  “It wasn’t your prerogative to get pissed off in there,” she said.

  “You asked what I took away from the trial. I suppose I countenance spitefulness less well.”

  “I know that game, too. I used to go around with my big bleeding heart, attuned to human frailties. The overweight girl, no rings, who nods a little too earnestly when people talk, eager to be useful. Little old lady at the bus stop, plastic bag shielding her purse in case it rains. Middle-aged immigrant working the counter at McDonald’s. And then I realized I was riding the Projection Express and figured I needed to reserve some of that concern for myself.”

  I thought about her self-berating carrying through her office door. No, it’s not okay. I didn’t double-schedule staff, and now he’s gonna wind up in the hall because of me.

  She seemed to read my mind. “Not that I’m any good at it. But I did figure out one thing.”

  “Which was?”

  “You can’t get through life, which is this—shit—this fragile enterprise without getting damaged. You just don’t. Not if you’re a feeling person. Not if you don’t have your head buried in the sand. Everybody’s fucked up. Some of us are just in on the joke. And when you don’t want to see that in yourself, you see it in others.”

  She climbed into her car and started to back out, then rolled down her window. “That’s what you don’t understand in that pulp you churn out. Everyone’s a good guy. Everyone’s a bad guy. It just depends how hard you’re willing to look.”

  22

  I knocked again on the hemlock-wood door, then peered through one of the frosted glass panes. Though I’d picked up Preston out front many times, I’d never actually been inside his condo, a balconied two-room floating among the billboards of Sunset. It occurred to me that I’d always had an image of it—Milanese furniture, stone bathtub, faint whiff of sage hand soap.

  The door opened face width. For an instant—even from this close—I mistook Preston for someone else. His hair, usually flared so carefully over his forehead, lay limp against his head, and he was unshaven, his stubble sprinkled with gray. I could see the lapels of a bathrobe—he hadn’t left all day?

  Mortification flickered across his features.

  I tried for a joke to put him at ease. “I didn’t tell you I was picking you up for a black-tie at the Beattys’?”

  His face was tense; for once he wasn’t sure what to say. He cleared his throat, eased the door farther open. “I’ve been editing. No time to get my face on.” He said it with a defensive edge, and it occurred to me that in the years I’d known him he’d never extended an invitation for me to drop by. He always seemed so comfortable marching into my house with his own key that I’d assumed the informality ran both ways.

  “Bad time?” I asked. “I could—”

  “Well, you might as well come in now.” He stepped back, and I followed him down a brief, dark hall into the main room. The furnishings were hardly threadbare, but I was shocked by their ordinariness. A standard couch. White-tile kitchen. An antique credenza with hairline cracks, a ding or two away from a garage s
ale.

  Preston returned to the tiny table by the window, sat, and gestured to the other chair. The table, stacked with shuffled sections of the New York Times, wasn’t really sized for more than one person. Preston set aside Arts and went back to the soggy bowl of cereal I assumed was his dinner. A bare leg poked out from the fold of his bathrobe.

  The whole scene was so banal, so unfabulous, so decidedly un-Preston. I’d never seen him unshaven. I’d never seen him not nattily attired. I’d never seen him eating food bought at a grocery store. It was a perfectly ordinary scene in a perfectly nice condo, but it was also somehow a breach in my view of him and how he kept himself, and this we both sensed. Nothing had happened—nothing at all—but the awkwardness was pervasive.

  “So?” he asked. “What’s so urgent it couldn’t wait for me to barge in on you?” He didn’t lift his gaze from the bowl; his heart wasn’t in the joke.

  I pressed forward. “You’ll get a kick out of this. That kid—Junior, right? So I found him at Hope House….”

  But the surroundings continued to distract me. Sodden coffee filter on the counter. A lonesome glass in the sink, awaiting the dishwasher. Manuscript sheaves, bearing Preston’s editor-red scrawl, had colonized most of the condo’s flat surfaces. The thought of him in here alone, only these chunks of text keeping him company, seemed oddly dismal. Had I expected him to edit during cocktail parties?

  Atop the crammed bookshelf by the TV, bookended between two heavy mugs, sat a row of my hardcovers. The closest thing to a display in sight. Preston always badgered me so much about my writing that I’d forgotten that maybe he liked it. The possibility that he valued me more than he let on oddly diminished my view of him. A trust-fund editor more articulate than I was, he’d taken a gamble on me five books ago, and I hadn’t really updated my underlying view of him since. Though we’d become good friends, if not intimates, in my hidden thinking he’d always remained part of the unscalable edifice of New York publishing, and I felt a devotion to him for giving me that first hand up. I knew, of course, that I was an opportunity for him then and especially now. But perhaps I represented a more profound opportunity than I’d thought. Like the rest of us, Preston was busted in his own lovely way. But maybe he was also ordinary like the rest of us. Maybe he needed me as much as I needed him.