The Crime Writer Page 16

  Preston had said something.

  I refocused. “Sorry?”

  “I said, ‘Yes, you found Junior…?’”

  I forged back into the story—Xena and the cop and the jail cell—but I couldn’t convey the maddening hilarity of it. Preston humored me with a faint smile and the occasional nod, but we were both distracted and aware that the surface exchange had become a charade.

  When I was finished, I said lamely, “You gotta meet this kid.” I riffled the edges of the nearest newspaper section until the noise grated. The air felt unvented, claustrophobic. I was eager to get out of there, impatient to start looking into the vehicle ID Junior had given me. Finally I said, “I gotta get over to Lloyd’s. Tell him about the Volvo. I just thought you’d get a kick out of the other stuff.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “You never disappoint, Preston.”

  He summoned a smile before rising to see me out. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  23

  Lloyd sat at the kitchen table, head bent, arms folded on a place mat dotted with crumbs. I’d informed him of my tentative vehicle ID at the door, and he’d taken a few steps back and sunk into a chair.

  “Unbelievable,” he said. “You came up with a make, color, distinguishing body damage, and the first license-plate number?”

  “Should I go to Kaden and Delveckio with it?”

  “Let’s think this over.” He stood and poured himself a rum and Coke. I noticed that the bottle of Bacardi 8 I’d brought him two days ago was nearly empty. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and the blanket on the couch was thrown back. In the background a talking head chattered mindlessly about avian flu, predicting calamity and ruin. “You don’t know for sure that the Volvo belongs to the body dumper?”

  “No. The witness split before he saw anything. It’s possible that another car could’ve come along after, but we’re talking a pretty narrow time frame here between when my witness left and when you snapped that first crime-scene photo.”

  “Either way it’d be worth talking to the Volvo driver. Either he’s our guy, or he likely saw something.” Lloyd sucked an ice cube from the glass, crunched it loudly. “How reliable is your witness?”

  I tried to imagine Kaden and Delveckio taking Junior seriously.

  Lloyd read my face. “Then we should load the deck. Let me run the info in the morning, see what I find. I can’t check for a wheel-well dent, obviously, but with everything else? You’ve given me some great search criteria. If I come up with a strong suspect, you’ll be better armed bringing it in to Kaden and Delveckio.” He aimed a forefinger at me. “But no mention of me.”

  “I haven’t implicated you in anything. And I won’t.”

  A moan, cracked with dehydration, floated down the hall, and then a faint cry that I realized was his name being called.

  Lloyd jerked to his feet and jogged back into the house, his steps sped by panic. The voice had been startling—frightening, even—and I found myself standing at the mouth of the hall peering down its length. The bedroom door was closed as usual, but through it I heard Lloyd’s voice, raised with concern, and the sound of bottles clinking. I was unsure whether I should slip out, giving them privacy. I had, after all, barged in late and unannounced on a Monday night after another unsuccessful round of calls to Lloyd’s various numbers. Persistence and self-centeredness—useful traits for a writer, but they didn’t make me the most considerate name in the Rolodex. As a penance I tidied up the kitchen, trying to make headway against the avalanche of housework that confronted Lloyd each morning.

  I stacked the dishes, wiped the counters, and gathered the loose trash—stale tacos included—into several grocery bags, all the while thinking of Caroline’s comment about trusting selfish motives. Lloyd likely wouldn’t notice, but the thought of leaving him with a clean kitchen made me feel better. I finished and resolved to go.

  I had my hand on the doorknob when I heard Lloyd’s voice behind me. “I always thought death was beautiful.”

  I turned, and there he was, holding a tray loaded with dirty teacups, bowls filled with uneaten food, and a crusted washcloth. His back was slightly stooped, as though the tray were pulling him downward, and his eyes looked sunken and weary.

  I released the doorknob, took the tray from him, and set it by the sink.

  “I don’t mean it in a creepy way,” he said. “The colors, if you detach yourself. Burnt oranges and greens and deep blues. Like an autumn bouquet. It’s beautiful, death.” He looked up, his expression blank, dazed. “But not dying. No, dying’s quite awful.”

  “She okay?”

  “Her line worked its way out. Blood spray on the sheets, her clothes, the floor. It happens.”

  He shuffled over a half step and slid into the kitchen chair.

  I said, “Do you want me to go? Maybe you want to be alone?”

  Lloyd picked at the edge of his place mat. “And the clothes that are comfortable. That provide…access.” He blew out his cheeks. “Terry cloth. Polyester. I should design elegant deathwear. I’d make a fortune.”

  I eased into the chair next to him. He stared at his place, me at mine. We were like two dinner companions with nothing to eat.

  “She’s wrapped up in the awful business of dying. Moving her car registration into my name. Signing off on the pension. I keep begging her to stop. She needed some bridgework done last month, four grand. She looked at the dentist with this…this resigned expression and asked, ‘Can it hold?’” He shook his head and covered his eyes. His face contorted into a sob, but no sound came out, and when he removed his hand, there were no tears. “‘Can it hold?’” He shook his head. “She said it’s because she doesn’t want to go through the pain in the ass of it—who wouldn’t avoid the dentist?—but she’s from New England stock way back, spends money like she’s opening a vein. I’ll be fine, money, but she’s worried. And I just…I just want her to have a new dental bridge, Drew. That’s all I want. This woman deserves that. She’s forty-two. Forty-two. Nineteen when she married me. You’d think twenty-three years was a long time, but it feels like…” He made a whisking sound through his teeth, as if shooing a cat, then shuddered off a thought. “I’m rambling. I’m rambling.”

  With a shaking hand, he poured himself another rum, upending the empty bottle into one of the trash bags, and added a splash of Coke. He pinched crumbs on the table into a stray napkin. Why? What did it matter? How did any of it matter to him? Rising when his alarm clock bleated. Picking out clothes. Filling up his gas tank. The mundane business of life. And yet he endured, he and Janice, staring into the face of it day after crushing day. What choice did he have? What choice did she?

  He noticed me watching him and crumpled up the napkin nervously, as if he’d been caught doing something shameful. I wanted to tell him that it was okay, that he could poke all he wanted at those crumbs, left behind like the ghost footprint in the Birkenstock.

  At some age it occurs to you that this aging thing is for real. That you’ve done both loop-da-loops and there’s only the corkscrew left before you have to disembark. The ride doesn’t last forever—no shit—but there’s one definable moment when the cold, hard fact of it hits you in the gut. Mine was the summer when I was thirty-three, a Sunday night after another lost weekend. I was the age of Jesus and had accomplished relatively little by comparison. Through a haze of shower steam, I’d stared at myself in the mirror and noticed a new web of wrinkles suspending each eye. I’d sat on the brim of the tub, head thick with last night’s booze and the crushing weight of the obvious. The reality had been there all along, like the key to a well-crafted mystery, but I’d averted my eyes, tuned out, drunk myself into mind-numbing stillness.

  Now’s the slot for the painful confession, though mine is as banal as those crumbs I deployed to such grand literary effect. After my mother’s third stroke, when she was teetering at the cliff edge, ravaged in mind, her face caved in on itself like that of someone two decades her elder
, when the nurse gave me that final solemn nod, Now is the time, Drew, I froze outside her door. I couldn’t go into her room. The thought suddenly, powerfully, terrified me. She likely wouldn’t have recognized me anyway—it’d been weeks since she had—but that proved scant consolation. My father, bless him, never judged me. Not a flicker of disapproval in his eyes then or in the year and a half he lived after. That day, outside my dying mother’s room, he kissed me on the forehead and left me in the corridor, gripping the silver-lever door handle as if I were going to get it together and enter the room at any instant, though I knew I wouldn’t. With my head pressed to the door, shamed beyond description by my cowardice, I heard that blipping monitor smooth out into a flatline.

  “Lloyd,” I said, “I am so goddamned sorry for what you two are going through.”

  He nodded his thanks quickly, an uncomfortable tic, and sipped his drink again. “When I was a kid, I always thought I’d learn to reconcile it. Another thing I’d pick up along the way. Maybe that’s why I…the job, you know. But then, with Janice—well, I never did. Learn. You never do. You can’t, maybe. It’s always there, and no matter how close you think you are to it, you’re never ready.”

  “Listen, when this…If there’s anything—”

  He cut off my awkward reach of affection, not ready to concede the worst-case. “We have a shot.” He spoke quickly, though his voice wobbled. “One more round. We have a shot.”

  He rose, and I followed suit, and we walked the two steps to the door that dumped out from the kitchen to the gravel driveway, the patch of venetian blind jiggling as I tugged the knob.

  “You have to understand. Hope is all you’ve got. That’s it.” He gripped the doorframe and tilted his face into shadow, so it wasn’t until he spoke that I realized he was crying. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  I stood there struck by the incredible limitation of the language I claim to have a passing knowledge of, saying, “It’s okay,” at intervals like a coach with a Little Leaguer who’d scraped a knee.

  Finally he pulled back, covering his face and apologizing still, drawing the door closed quietly behind him and leaving me to the crickets sawing through the chill night.

  24

  My cell phone tap-danced on my nightstand beside my alarm clock: 7:02 A.M. Lloyd’s words came fast, excited. “Two rapes, a molest, and an indecent exposure.”

  I sat up against the headboard, grinding my eye with the heel of my hand.

  “I got a suspect for you,” he continued. “Check your e-mail—looks like a spam piece, subject heading ‘Real Rolex Watches.’ Print the attachments only. They’ll be untraceable. Then call me back. At the lab.”

  I padded into my office, opened the attachments, and printed a few copies. Leafing through the pages, I dialed the lab on my dead home line before snapping out of it and doing a second take on my cell phone.

  Lloyd said, “Top document gives you registrant information for all hundred and fifty-three brown Volvos with a license beginning with seven that the DMV has on record for L.A. County.”

  I scanned the list eagerly, looking for names I recognized. My breathing had quickened. Had one of these people intended to put me away for a murder I didn’t commit? Had one of them sunk the knife into the soft flesh above Genevieve’s navel?

  “Flip to the next doc,” Lloyd said. “Those are photos and rap sheets for the five individuals from the first list who have a criminal record.”

  Four men and a woman, all with the pallor and frizzed hair unique to booking photos, gazed from my monitor. None I recognized.

  “Four are just penny-ante stuff,” Lloyd continued, “but one I like. I like this guy a lot.”

  I knew which one before Lloyd said the name. Morton Frankel. A low shelf of a brow shaded dark eyes. Flared nostrils, angular cheeks, cropped hair. Thin, well-tended sideburns extended past the bottoms of his ears, ending in points. He wasn’t smiling so much as baring his teeth, which seemed just slightly too long, as if his gums had receded. Ropy muscle sheathed his neck; he’d flexed as the photo was taken. His bearing and grooming seemed purposely refined to convey menace.

  Who the hell was this guy? And if he was the killer, why had he gone to such elaborate lengths to bring me down? How was he connected to Broach and Genevieve? And what the hell did he have against me?

  “This guy’s right off the movie poster,” I said.

  “Arrested in ’99 and ’03 for the rapes. Acquitted once, the other he pled down to a battery—he put a hooker in the hospital. Did some time there, his second brief stint. He was a person of interest in another rape investigation in ’05, but there wasn’t anything to hold him on. Questioned again last year on a missing girl, never held. As you can see, he’s got a lot of affection for women.”

  I thought about the unidentified hair found on Kasey Broach’s body. “No DNA on record?”

  “Just prints. He’s a machinist, drawing a salary right now from Bonsky Forge and Metalworks in Van Nuys. But look at his address. He lives downtown, not ten minutes from the Broach dump site.”

  “And the electrical tape was bought at the Van Nuys Home Depot, by his work.”

  “There you go. He’s got the diabolical gleam in the eyes, too.”

  “That he does. Rasputin himself.”

  Though I had only the thinnest of circumstantial evidence, I couldn’t help but put Morton Frankel in Genevieve’s bedroom. This was the face that she’d glimpsed through her last panic flash, approaching her in the night? That face in her peaceful bedroom with the vanilla candles and fluffy duvet? It seemed impossible, profane, even. Had he been obsessed with her? Or had he killed her to work out an obsession with me? What continued to plague me most was the thought of Genevieve’s fear in that final instant before the knife tip found her heart. A terror that Katherine Harriman, my redoubtable prosecutor, might have called unimaginable. But I could imagine it all too well. Would Morton Frankel have made it worse—Genevieve’s last moment alive—than if it had been me in that room? I prayed that she hadn’t suffered at his hands, that the struggle had been as brief and merciful as billed. The thought of him watching me while I slept made me actually shudder. This man, with pointed sideburns, crouching over my sevoflurane-slumbering form with a boning knife?

  Lloyd had been talking.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said, this is my ass on the line. I’ll deny sending you this to the bitter end.”

  “I will, too. Getting it from you, I mean.”

  “Hand it off to Kaden and Delveckio. I can’t without answering questions of how I closed in on it, which means I would implicate you, which means I would implicate myself. Get it?”

  “I get it.”

  “I’m sorry about last night—”

  “If there’s one thing you don’t have to do, Lloyd, it’s apologize.”

  There was a long silence, and then he said, “I have to go.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the booking photo. There was something unquestionably perverse about Morton. Something unreasonable about his very appearance. He made for much better cackling-villain material than Richard Collins, the Home Depot stoner. Maybe Frankel murdered women for the thrill of it. That would explain the lack of obvious connections between Genevieve and Broach. But it wouldn’t explain why a random serial killer would want to frame me.

  A scrape at the door startled me—I’d forgotten I was a proud dog owner. Xena ambled in, squatted, and urinated into a box of Hunter Pray DVDs in the corner.

  I’d let her sleep on a mound of pillows in the kitchen, figuring the flagstones to be impervious to accidents. Then again, glossy jewel cases probably held up pretty well under dog urine, too. I mopped up as best I could and went downstairs, Xena slobbering at my side. Since I didn’t have any dog food, I pan-fried some hamburger meat, adding salt, pepper, and a dash of curry as befitted a princess warrior. Xena seemed quite pleased with the results.

  Gus had been MIA for a few days. The coyotes had pro
bably caught up to him at last, poor guy. Before letting Xena out, I checked the backyard one final time, then offered my missing squirrel pal a toast with my glass of pomegranate juice. I went upstairs and showered. Preston arrived just as I finished dressing, and Xena unleashed her inner killer on him, nuzzling his crotch and licking his hands in threatening fashion.

  We made and broke eye contact, neither of us eager to acknowledge my drop-in the previous night. Were we going to discuss it? Discuss what?

  Preston brushed past me, rubbing his palms together eagerly. Business as usual. “Got more pages for me?”

  “Better. I have a suspect.”

  He detoured through the kitchen, returned with a rum on the rocks, and plunked onto the couch, oblivious to the two dirty glasses he’d left on the coffee table in his prior house calls. Xena curled at my feet, licked herself vigorously, then fell asleep. As I brought him up to speed, the gardeners arrived. Xena failed to rouse when the team of five masked men, wielding hedge trimmers and weed whackers, carved up my backyard.

  Preston thrilled at the photo of Morton Frankel. “What an antagonist! He even looks like one. But Mort? Mort! Why can’t he be Cyrus? Or Bart? Who names their kid Mort? Only Jews with a dead Mort somewhere.”

  “Like in the attic?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I got Preston my latest pages, and he set them in his lap and leaned back on the couch. I detected an underlying sadness. Or, having seen his digs—as lonely as mine—was I projecting?

  “Listen,” he said. “I, uh…” An unusual hitch. He cleared his throat and started again, more formally, “I don’t do so well when I’m…I suppose I do better when I’m out. And skip the obvious jokes. It’s a part-time condo, if that. Just for me, really. I’m not actually here that much that it makes sense to do a whole thing. I don’t even take dates back. People pawing around. It just feels too invasive.”