The Crime Writer Page 21

  As I was lighting the candles on the table, my phone rang.

  Junior said, “Look, homes, you wanted to know about Ms. Caroline. I tell you about Ms. Caroline.”

  “What about her?”

  “Her face. I heard my probation officer tell the story. I was in the hallway, but he leave the door open. Ms. Caroline used to work in a prison. Assessments, all that. I guess she was on the rapist ward when a riot broke out in another wing. Guards took off to help. They did a lockdown but forgot she was in there. Trapped in with a buncha rapers. For days, homes. They pulled a train on her, cut up her face good. You know what a train is?”

  My throat was dry, so the words stuck at first. “I do.”

  “She was barely alive when they found her. But she lived. That’s how tough Ms. Caroline is.” His tone changed—back to the cheery fourteen-year-old. “Now will you keep Xena?”

  “Good-bye, Junior.” I stood over the table, the match burning down to my fingers. I shook it out and sat, watching the smoke curl and dissipate. The doorbell rang.

  I took a moment, smoothed my shirtsleeves, and answered.

  Caroline stood at the edge of the porch, gazing up at the house’s exterior. She wore jeans and a black button-up with cuffs, the pashmina thrown across her shoulders matching her eyes as if the designer had pulled the color from them.

  She looked at me, her smile vanishing. “You found out what happened to me.” She leaned in close. “There’s a change around the eyes. Like pity, but worse.” She turned and started walking away.

  I caught her at the curb, already in her car, about to swing her door closed.

  “Let’s make a deal,” I said.

  She stopped but kept her grip on the handle.

  “Let’s for one night suspend all awkwardness and nervousness between us. Let’s just put it on hold and eat and talk and see what that feels like.”

  “Easy enough for you.”

  “Let’s not be arrogant.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk.”

  She closed the door. I knocked on the window.

  “If you drive away, you’re gonna feel bad,” I said. “It’s just a familiar brand of bad.”

  “I like my brand of bad.”

  “So it’s gotta go this way, huh?”

  She seemed to collapse into anger. “You want to play Prince Charming and rescue me from my tragic predicament? Well, I would say get in line, but I’ve scared away the rest of the line. And I’ll scare you away, too. So why don’t we just skip it and save ourselves some time?”

  “Hey,” I said, sharply enough that she jerked back to face me. “I know what it’s like to have people afraid of you. So drive off, fine, but don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re the only person drawing the wrong kind of stares in public.”

  She squealed out from the curb, and I had to step back to keep my foot from getting run over.

  I walked inside. Xena cocked her head, regarding me quizzically.

  “Sometimes grown-ups fight,” I told her.

  I blew out the candles. Recorked the wine. Started to clear the dishes when the doorbell rang. She was holding her hands clasped at her stomach, as if it hurt, and her face was flushed except at the scars.

  “Do you mind if I come in?”

  “I’d love you to.”

  She came, not bothering to take in the view, and sat at the table. I took the chair opposite her.

  “The facts are always less scary,” she said. “More containable.”

  “When you can find them.”

  “What did you discover? About me?”

  I told her.

  She said, “It was a correctional institute, not a prison. An interview room with a door that didn’t lock. There were three of them. Men. They were territorial toward the others, kept them out. It wasn’t days. It lasted two hours and forty-two minutes.” She kept her gaze unflinchingly on mine, reading my face. I did my best not to show any reaction but probably failed. She leaned forward so I could feel her faint breath across my cheeks. “Hey,” she said, “at least I got syphilis out of it.”

  I studied her for a long time, thinking how she’d like to have me go running around my living room with my arms waving over my head.

  Instead I said, “How about a drink?”

  “I’m not going to talk about it with you. Not details. Not broad strokes. So don’t think we’ll get cozy and I’ll get all cathartic. Off-limits. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have that drink now.”

  I worked the cork free, poured two glasses, and handed her one. “In case you’re more pretentious than you look, I should tell you it’s a flinty, soil-driven sauvignon with a rich finish.” I buried my nose in the glass, inhaled the fumes.

  “This is delicious.” She looked around, as if for the first time. “Spectacular view.”

  “You’re not allowed to be gracious. I won’t recognize you.”

  She bared her teeth at me. I retrieved the plates from the kitchen counter, and we dug in. We both had some trouble with the designer utensils, food dropping back to our plates before it reached our mouths. Finally she held up a MOMA fork, one tine separated by a gap. “I’m not adept at using this.”

  “But isn’t it pretty?”

  “It’s a fork. It exists to convey food to the mouth.”

  “In our case clearly not.” I spun my fork around, regarding the design. “These really do suck, don’t they?”

  She was smiling now, broadly. “You have something easier? Garden trowel, perhaps?”

  “Chopsticks?”

  “How about Ethiopian bread?”

  “I’ll check the Mirte stove. In the meantime…” I took our forks and tossed them into the trash compactor. I found some plastic utensils, still bagged from my last round of takeout, and we reapproached our plates more successfully.

  “This is amazing,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Israeli salad. Watch out—it just launched a counteroffensive against the Wiener schnitzel.”

  “I’ll send in the couscous.”

  “Keep it up and I’ll drop a Big Mac on your ass.”

  “Aren’t you going to taste the wine?”

  A flash of memory, six years new—Mustang slant-parked in the bed of hydrangeas off my front step, radio blaring, me standing on the steaming hood hoarsely shouting Morrison’s voice-over on “The End” with a blonde wearing butterfly barrettes.

  I said, “My name is Andrew Danner, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Then aren’t you supposed to keep all booze away from you?”

  “I need to keep an eye on it so it doesn’t sneak up on me.”

  “Like the Israeli salad.”

  “Precisely.”

  “How’s sobriety?”

  “Ruins my drinking.”

  “What kind of alcoholic were you?”

  “I was one of those guys who never knew when the party stopped, or that it had. As long as there was booze and anyone else still drinking, I kept going. Pig at a trough. Sorority binger confronting Twinkies. I wasn’t one of those drown-the-pain lushes. I just loved alcohol.” I shuttled more couscous onto my incredibly effective plastic fork. “If you believe that, my former shrink would be unimpressed with you.”

  “Last one to leave a party,” she said. “You didn’t like being alone with yourself?”

  “And a writer. The irony thickens.” I swirled my wineglass, watched the maroon legs streak the crystal. “I guess if life was easy, it wouldn’t be as much fun.”

  “Sure it would.”

  “The Cliché Buster claims another victim. I guess I’ve been regurgitating that dandy since my childhood.”

  “Good childhood?”

  “Am I on the clock, Doctor?”

  “Yeah, but you bought dinner, so I’ll only charge half.”

  “I was a replacement child. My parents lost a daughter a year before I was born.”

  “That’s supposed to be difficult.”

  “M
y folks must’ve skipped that chapter.”

  “Not bad?”

  “I was cherished. My feet didn’t hit the ground until I was five.”

  “Passing you back and forth.”

  “Exactly. And you?”

  “I lost my mom recently.” She took a sip of wine. “We were very close. My dad’s great—lives in Vermont. Gonna be remarried in the fall.”

  “Two stable childhoods. How refreshing. And here we are, fortyish and single.”

  Despite my flippancy, the remark cut her deep. Loudmouth moi of the thoughtless aside. I stood to clear, imploring her to sit. She watched as I dumped my glass of wine down the sink.

  “Why buy expensive wine if you’re just going to pour it out?”

  “I said I was an alcoholic, not that I had bad taste.” I scrubbed and loaded while Caroline sipped and looked at the view. We engaged in some small talk, which was surprisingly enjoyable. She lived in West Hollywood, on Crescent Heights. Hated cats and shopping. Brown belt in judo, reached it in just three years. I’d forgotten how warming it was to have company.

  The rest of the objet d’ art forks joined their mates in the compactor, drawing a laugh from her.

  I asked, “Would you mind handing me that equally affected trivet?”

  “Do I have to do everything?” Smiling, she set down her glass and brought the trivet over to me.

  “Why don’t you sit on the mauled couch in the family room? I’ll join you in a minute.”

  “Junior’s dog?” She waited for my reluctant nod. “Where is she?”

  “I put her in a decompression chamber upstairs.”

  She started for the other room, and I said, “Hang on.”

  She turned back. The pashmina she’d draped over her chair, and her black shirt had loosed another button, revealing a dagger of smooth flesh. Delicate clavicles, lovely, slender neck. The notched-down lighting demoted her scars to impressions—pronounced, to be sure, but there was a kind of beauty to them as well. They accented the composition of her features like war paint, bringing to them a hyperdefinition, added force, added grace.

  “You look spectacular.”

  She tried to repress her smile, a shyness I hadn’t thought she possessed. “This from a tumor-addled alcoholic suffering from temporary insanity.”

  “Nothing wrong with my eyes.”

  As she turned away, I caught a smile in her profile. When I finished, I found her in the family room, facing the bookshelf filled with my titles.

  She turned at my approach. “Where’s Chain Gang?”

  “Propping up the kitchen table.”

  “Are you working on a new book?”

  237 “You’re living an investigation?”

  “A story. We all are, but this segment of my life has a pleasing structure to it.”

  “Maybe that’s why it happened to you.”

  “I don’t believe in intelligent design.”

  “Sure you do.” She waved a hand at the book spines in all their eye-catching glory.

  It took a moment for me to catch her meaning. “I believe in narrative. But I don’t believe there’s a reason for everything and that matters work themselves out for the better.”

  Tell it to Lloyd and the wedding picture hanging in that dark hall.

  Tell it to the Broaches, sorting through Kasey’s half-used toiletries and frozen dinners and white barrettes.

  Tell it to me, waking up in that goddamned hospital bed with Genevieve’s blood dried under my nails.

  Caroline was looking at me, studying my face, so I continued. “I don’t deny design, no, but I believe you have to craft your own and it’s hard work and there are no guardrails.”

  “So what happens when you veer off course?”

  “You wind up with wasted years or a shitty first draft. Neither of which is particularly consequential.”

  “It’s not the randomness of life that holds meaning, Drew. It’s our response to it. Say your wife gets hit by a bus. You could spend the rest of your life bewailing an unfair world, or you could decide to start an orphanage.”

  “Or a home for people paralyzed by incompetent bus drivers.”

  “If you choose to start your merry home for impaired and guilt-crippled bus drivers, then you’ve given a senseless event meaning. You’ve given it its place in a story. No merry home, no story. No story, no meaning.”

  “No meaning, no growth.”

  “People don’t change much, not as adults, but this thing, maybe it gave you a shot.” She licked her lips. “I was forced to change.”

  “For the better?”

  “I don’t know. I’m smarter, I think, but also maybe worse off.”

  “According to you, it depends on where you go from here.”

  “Exactly. But am I up to it?”

  “Inquiring minds want to know.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m up to it.” She was trembling, arms crossed, fingers nervously working a thread that had come loose in the stitching of her shirt. For a moment I thought she might be cold, but then she said, “You drew back the first time you saw me. On the playground at Hope House. I disgusted you. It’s the only pure response you’ll have. You don’t get another true reaction to my face.”

  “I wasn’t disgusted. I was surprised.”

  “Great. Romantic.”

  I reached gently for her shoulders, and she let me take them, and then I pulled her to me. The indented scar split her lips at the edge, the flesh soft and warm. I drew back, and for an instant she kept her eyes closed, her head tilted, mouth slightly ajar.

  She opened her eyes, pale green flecked with rust.

  “Surprised?” I asked.

  “Surprised.”

  “Disgusted?”

  She shook her head. A few lines raised on her forehead. “I can’t stay with you. I’d like to, but I can’t.”

  “Can I walk you to your car?”

  As we crossed the front step, she took my hand in a bird bite of a grip. A tentative hold, didn’t last three strides. The air was wet, sweet with night-blooming jasmine. We were awkward at her car—which side the head goes on for the embrace, me holding the door for her, not sure if I should lean in to kiss her again. I tried, but she pulled the door closed and I stepped back quickly. Her face had darkened with concern, and she fiddled with the stick shift, then said, “That was the nicest time I’ve had in a while,” as if that were something extremely troubling.

  “Me, too.”

  “See you around, Drew.”

  She pulled out. On cue, the neighbor kid started his brass serenade.

  Out OF the TREE of LIFE, I just picked me a PLUM.

  Whistling along, I went upstairs and freed Xena from the master bathroom. There was no upholstery for her to masticate, but she’d gotten into the bath mat pretty good and, for good measure, overturned her bowl of water.

  She followed me to my office. I pulled my notepad from my back pocket and set it on the desk to the left of my keyboard. The loaded .22 I placed beside it. Tools of the trade.

  How times had changed.

  I fell into my chair, elbowed out the armrests, slid a Bic behind my left ear. Eighty pounds of Doberman-rottweiler curled on my feet. The house was quiet, the windows black rectangles pinpricked by the lights of the Valley below. A small plane blinked its way from Van Nuys Airport off into the night. My fingertips found the raised bump of my surgical scar and then the shallow indentations of the keyboard letters.

  Right now Kaden and Delveckio could have Morton Frankel under the hot light. Maybe answers were being spilled—what had been done to Genevieve, to Kasey Broach.

  To all of us.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t be so easy. Maybe the interrogation would yield more questions, more vagaries, more dead ends and broken trails. Maybe Morton Frankel was really just a nice guy with a dented Volvo who didn’t appreciate being treated like a plot device.

  I faced the blank page. Waiting, like me, for chaos to be forced into order.

/>   32

  The voice came at an inappropriate volume through my cell-phone headset. “We’re at your house. Where the hell are you?”

  “Kaden?”

  “And what’s wrong with your home line?”

  “I’m waiting for Pac Bell to deliver excellent service.”

  In the backseat Xena belched. Junior giggled—yet another break in the glumness he’d been attempting to convey since I’d picked him up to bring his dog to the new home he claimed to have lined up. He was way too talkative to sulk effectively.

  “Where’s the gun?” Kaden asked.

  “Upstairs on my desk.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Returning a dog.”

  “Smart, dipshit.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t want me to leave a .22 in a manila envelope on my porch.”

  “We want you to be home to give us the damn gun.”

  “It’s noon. You told me you were coming by in the morning.”

  It had been hard for me to shake a sense of dread at dawn. I’d been out of jail a week to the day and still woke up panicked that I was encased by cinder blocks. In hopes of lightening my mood, I’d set out a breakfast bowl of pistachios on the deck for Gus, but he hadn’t shown, tied up, no doubt, in a coyote’s digestive tract. Stranded like a tramp in a Beckett play, I’d returned to my computer and pounded wrathfully on my loud keyboard, a clackety holdover I’d preserved for precisely such moods.

  Chic had called before I’d left, saying word had come back from the cheap seats that Morton Frankel wasn’t known as a thug-for-hire. Merely as a vicious criminal. I felt better about talking openly with Kaden and Delveckio and worse about being me.

  “We were busy,” Kaden said.

  “With Frankel?”

  “No—interviewing the kid who found the gun. We questioned Frankel last night.”

  “And?”

  “You’ll be shocked to hear he said he didn’t do it.”

  “He alibied?”

  “Sleeping alone. Which, if he wasn’t carving up Kasey Broach, is reasonably what he’d be doing.”

  “Can’t you take a DNA sample? Just one hair?”

  “Sure, right after the covert CIA chopper drops him off at Guantanamo Bay. It doesn’t work that way, clown. You need what we here in nonfiction refer to as ‘probable cause.’ And a brown Volvo ain’t enough to make a judge sign on the dotted. Now we need that gun.”