The Crime Writer Read online

  “They say the eyes are the windows to the soul,” I said. “I do not believe this to be true. I believe the toes are the windows to the soul.”

  “Oh? How are my toes?” She wiggled them, showing off.

  “Magnificent.”

  We talked a bit more and then dozed off together. At 11:32 I awoke with a start.

  “What?” she said sleepily. “What’s wrong?”

  I sat up to try to slow my breathing.

  She felt my shoulders. “Jesus, you’re drenched.”

  My dream-memory streamed back in vivid detail, me in my car the night of, driving to Genevieve’s. Alone. Running up her stairs. Alone. Finding the key. Alone.

  “I can’t spend the night here. The last time I spent the night with someone was when I…”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Either way. Whatever you did or didn’t do, you had a brain tumor.”

  “I’ve done or not done plenty since then.”

  Like when I’d awakened to find the slice above my little toe. With a clean bill of mental health, I’d followed my own bloody footprints around the house. Returned to find my boning knife, bearing my own prints, by the bed. Discovered the shattered jar in the sink and ganglioglioma gone spelunking down the disposal. What if I hadn’t been gassed with sevoflurane? What if Morton Frankel had never been to my house? What if this was all my writer’s mind at work on an elaborate fiction? A more convenient tale, spun for the age-old reason all escapist yarns are?

  A memory hit me, fresh as a vision. Genevieve bouncing foot to foot along the cliff’s edge above Santa Monica Beach, giggling manically as I shadowed her five feet off. An ingenious blackmail—should I be scared? Indifferent? Should I approach? Tourists watching with trepidation, parents shepherding their kids away. We’d gotten into a fight over something monumental—taco stand or Korean barbecue—and it had erupted as it often did. What’s the matter, Drew? I’m embarrassing you? Embarrassment, sure, but also terror that she’d misjudge her footing, resentment at how my hands clutched the air every time she wobbled. At the time I hadn’t identified the sensation hiding beneath the others like a buried ember. Rage.

  I believe that anyone is capable of anything.

  In addition to my own unstable self, I had other nocturnal dangers to offer. Kaden and Delveckio could come calling—after all, I still owed them a gun—and drag Caroline into the investigation. Morton Frankel could be smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in the alley below, staring up at this window right now.

  “I don’t trust where I am. I need to get more answers.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “but there’s only room for my issues in this relationship.”

  That drew a smile from me. She threw on a nightgown as I dressed. At the door we kissed. I ran my thumb along the line of one of her scars.

  She asked, “What if you get to the end of this road and discover you did do it?”

  “I don’t know that I could live with myself.”

  “Drew,” she said, “we’re generally not given that choice.”

  37

  I emerged from sleep calmly and knew the time before I glanced at my nightstand clock: 1:08 A.M. A menacing rumble downstairs. An unusual chill in the air, colder than the house got at night, even in January. I rolled over, rested my hand on the loaded .22.

  The noise ceased, then commenced with renewed energy.

  Xena growling.

  I threw back the sheets, ran to my closet, and dressed rapidly. Passing the window above the bathtub, I stopped, my breath jerking out of me.

  Across the street, beneath the gloomy overhang of the neighbor’s carport, a man stood in the ribbed darkness, peering up at my house. He was little more than a black form—because of the interplay of competing shadows, it was difficult to gauge even his height.

  Morton Frankel, finally come calling?

  He stood motionless, the tilt of his head suggesting he was looking up at the very window before me. Could he see me in the darkness behind the glass?

  I moved swiftly through my room and eased out onto the catwalk. Peering over the railing, I saw the security rod on the carpet, again dislodged from the slider’s track. The sliding door itself I couldn’t see, but Xena stood facing it, fur raised in a wolfish bristle along her neck and upper back. A gust rattled the screen door, and an instant later I felt cold air rise to my face.

  I slid off the pistol’s safety and hurried down the stairs, letting my shoulder whisper along the curved wall to my right. A movement at the front door, toward the top where I’d clumsily covered the shattered inset windows. Beneath the nailed plywood, on the only sliver of exposed packing tape, a slit had been cut. It had been widened to maybe six inches before whoever cut it had realized that the plywood wouldn’t allow a hand to snake through and reach the inside lock. Pouched inward, the slit breathed with the wind, a weird sort of acrylic mouth.

  I came around the base of the stairs. Xena must have smelled that it was me; she kept her focus on the two-foot gap where the sliding door had been pushed open. Leaves scratched along the back deck, nothing more. I drew even with Xena. Mort hadn’t counted on my having a guard dog. In the slider’s track, the paint was scraped where the slim jim had been slipped through to pop the security rod out of place.

  I opened the screen, stepped out onto the deck, closing Xena inside so I could make silent progress. As before, the side gate clanked. Down the hill a pack of coyotes bayed, closing in on someone’s pet. Straight-arming the .22, I crept around the house, moving in and out of shadow until I reached the street.

  Beneath the carport nothing but my neighbor’s familiar van and pools of shadow. Was I losing touch? Again? I ran over, checked behind and under the van, then came out and stood in my old spot in the middle of the street. No movement except bobbing branches and fluttering leaves.

  And the distant purr of a motor.

  I listened, but the sound neither rose nor faded.

  Keeping to the sidewalk, I moved down the street, the noise growing louder. I made my way past two lots, pausing before the high stucco wall that guarded the corner house’s driveway. The wall played with the acoustics; I was unsure if the running car was just behind it or farther along on the intersecting street.

  Keeping the pistol raised before me, I leaned around the wall, but the vehicle—if it was there—was too far back to draw into my line of sight. Holding an inhale, I stepped past the wall onto the dark drive-way. The outline of a facing car, maybe ten yards up the long, narrow drive, the windshield an impervious black sheet, exhaust clinging to its rear. The house was up around the bend, set back above a sharp slope. The memory of cigarette smoke tinged the air. To my right, the reliable wall, on my left, a bank of ivy.

  Had the driver kept the car running for his return, or was he in there now, watching me?

  Vigilant of ambush from the side or behind, I shuffled forward, aiming at the windshield, braced to run. Despite my fear and the cold, I managed to keep the gun steady, the recurrent puffs before my face an indication of how much my breathing had quickened.

  A few steps revealed the car to be a Volvo. Dark paint. The license plate had been removed. Another few feet and I’d be able to make out if there was a form in the driver’s seat.

  The headlights flared, blinding me. The engine roared and the tires squealed, seeking purchase. The Volvo leapt forward. I fired, the bullet punching a hole in the top right corner of the windshield. Bolting left, I got in a step and was airborne when the hood clipped me. I rolled up the edge of the windshield, the driver a passing blur, and flew off the side, landing in the ivy. The Volvo skidded onto the street, through the intersection, and was gone. I lay on my back, panting, a sprinkler head dug into the small of my back. Rats rustled around me through the damp matting. After a time the crickets resumed. The neighborhood remained silent, unimpressed that I’d just fired a shot.

  Pulling twigs from my clothes and hair, I again registered that hint of cigarett
e smoke. Crawling on the driveway, I looked for a hand-rolled butt. To the side, caught on a broad leaf of ivy, was a matchbook. Guess what was printed on its cover?

  I found a twig and used it to lift the matchbook so as to preserve any prints. The matches had been used up, but written on the back side of the flap in a familiar block print, an address.

  It was an address I’d be unlikely ever to forget.

  38

  The skull and crossbones glowered at me from the matchbook, preserved benignly in a Ziploc. I paced under my kitchen lights, glaring back. Like the cigarette smoke, the matchbook struck me as a contrivance. But how was I supposed to interpret it? That Mort had written Genevieve’s address when first stalking her? I doubted that matches dating back four months had only just been used up. Had he jotted the address while planning the copycat killing? Maybe he’d been using Genevieve’s house as a workshop, taking Broach there after the kidnapping to avoid leaving evidence at his apartment. More or less unoccupied, it would make an ideal safe house. My windshield kiss raised additional questions: If Mort was framing me for the murders, why run me over now? Because he knew I was onto him? Was he trying to take me out before I could get something concrete to the police?

  I thumbed open my cell phone and dialed. Angela answered, accepted my apology, and handed off the phone to her husband.

  As always, Chic sounded alert, as if I’d caught him on a morning stroll. He listened quietly. I finished filling him in and asked, “Can you meet me at Genevieve’s?”

  “Course. Why?”

  “I don’t buy the matchbook any more than I bought the bondage rope. Someone who’s been this careful with evidence wouldn’t pull up on my street, have a smoke, and toss a matchbook with a convenient address on it out his window.”

  “Unless they thought you was gonna be too dead to find it.”

  A reasonable point.

  “I think I’m being led.”

  “And you gonna follow.”

  “Yeah. I think he planted something in that house for me to find. Something that incriminates me further. And I want to find it before the cops do and get out before the trap springs.”

  “Dangerous game.”

  “That’s why I need blackup.”

  “Then blackup gon’ be what you get.”

  I stood in the gutter, Chic and his brothers—two I knew, one I didn’t—beside me, Genevieve’s house looming over us. We’d finished checking the surrounding streets and land, and Fast Teddie had squeezed through a bathroom window with a gold-plated Colt .45 and safed the house, making sure no one was inside.

  Chic nudged me. “Ready to take a gander?”

  I was.

  We passed the strip of lawn with its broken sprinkler, made our way up the shifting pavers to the floating porch. There the philodendron, there the terra-cotta pot with the cracked saucer.

  I had been here many times in my life, in reality, in dream, in memory. This late-night visit felt like a melding of all three.

  Fast Teddie picked the front-door dead bolt in about three seconds.

  Chic pressed the door open, handed me a flashlight, and said, “We’ll be where we’re at. Keep your cell phone on.”

  I moved inside, closed the door behind me.

  Alone in Genevieve’s house.

  A memory attached to every object. Baccarat candy dish, sleek to the touch. Blank spot on the side table where a Murano paperweight used to rest. Pink-and-white striped scarf slung over the banister, bearing the faintest scent of Petite Cherie. The marble tiles of the foyer were hard underfoot. The knife block stared at me from the kitchen’s center island, five stainless handles and one empty slit. Thinking about that bleach wash given to Broach’s body, I checked the sink and the bathtubs and strayed into the dark garage. I searched the living room and the carpeted alcove that Genevieve used to refer to as a dining room, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

  Only the upstairs master remained. My legs tingled as I ascended. Adrenaline? Fear? The door had been left ajar. Even in the dim light, it was clear—a broad-ranging blob, lighter than the surrounding carpet, where industrial cleaners had bleached the beige fibers.

  The bed had been made, a detail that drove my emotion to the surface. Who had pulled it together during the aftermath? Genevieve’s mother? Had a thoughtful criminalist turned up the sheets before withdrawing?

  I blinked myself back to usefulness and checked the closet, the sink, the luxurious pink bathtub with its inflatable headrest, touched now with mold.

  I returned to the spot on the carpet and sat cross-legged.

  Here Genevieve had met the curved boning knife.

  Here her life had been extinguished.

  Here I had sat with her body, dipped my hands into the bloody well, tumbled into seizure and blackout.

  Somewhere the memory lurked, lost in the coralline whorls of my frontal lobe.

  I wanted answers. I wanted a sudden flash of recognition, the thunderbolt of epiphany. Instead it was just me and the stainless quiet of a deserted bedroom.

  After a few moments, I picked up on the faintest hiss. I stood, spinning to source it, wound up with my ear pressed to the built-in speaker beside the headboard.

  I moved downstairs to the edge of the dining room, where a wall of fine-wood cabinets arced toward the kitchen. A picture window, the largest in the house, showed off a view of the hillside and intervals of the street below as it twisted down to Coldwater. The leftmost cabinet, where through some flight of bizarre Gallic logic Genevieve hid the stereo components, opened readily under my touch, releasing a wave of electronic warmth. Glowing from the dark stack of hardware, a green pinpoint. The CD player had been left on. Playing something the night of her death? Maybe that music I’d heard in my dream-memory as I’d stumbled up onto the porch hadn’t been merely in my head, like the sharp scent of smoldering rubber. The digital counter showed that the CD had run its course. I clicked “eject,” the tray sliding out to offer an unlabeled disc, something Genevieve had burned from her i Tunes library.

  I was about to thumb the tray back in to play the CD when my cell phone chimed, breaking the tense silence. My gaze rose to the window.

  Down the hill two dark SUVs with tinted windows and no running lights turned off Coldwater onto Genevieve’s street, starting up the hill.

  Chic’s voice came rushing through my cell phone—“Get outta there.”

  I flew from the house, the pavers rocking violently in my aftermath. Leaping into my car, I slid Genevieve’s unmarked CD beneath my floor mat. As I zoomed away from the curb, I popped in my headset, watching Chic’s taillights blink on the stretch of road visible down the hillside to my left.

  “Where are they?”

  “A block down from me,” Chic said. “Teddie just executed the world’s slowest three-point turn to hang ’em up. Can’t see who through the tint. You got your piece?”

  I set the .22 on the passenger seat. “Yep.”

  “Nice and easy. You drive right past ’em heading down. The road’s narrow—they’ll need time to turn around. We hit the bottom of the hill, we go in five different directions.”

  My grip tightened on the steering wheel. I wedged the .22 in the gap in the seat break; if chaos ensued, I didn’t want it sliding out of reach.

  Blind turn followed blind turn, and then finally, a sweep of headlights illuminated a thicket of chaparral on the left shoulder. I slowed, hugged the wall of the canyon, and two black Tahoes flew by, rocking my car. No time to see a license plate. The windows looked uniformly black.

  I was almost around the curve when, in my rearview, I saw the back Tahoe’s brake lights flare. My stomach surged.

  Accelerating down the dangerous road, I said to Chic, “They spotted me.”

  “Okay. Keep me in your ear. Tell me where you are.”

  I skidded onto Coldwater, sending a spray of rocks and gravel across the opposing lane, and rocketed up the hill, blowing the light to veer left onto Mulholland. “I’m heading for
home.”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  The lead Tahoe nosed into my mirror, but I lost it around a turn. The light at Benedict Canyon was yellow; I saw another dark SUV waiting at the intersection and hit the gas, squeezing through as it pulled forward to block me. Three cars in pursuit? The FBI? Gangsters? The mob? Maintaining a dangerously heavy foot, swerving into opposite lanes to shave turns, I kept my pursuers one bend of the road behind me.

  Chic said, “What’s your cross street?”

  Approaching Beverly Glen, Mulholland added a few more lanes, opening up for the intersection.

  The wind brought me wisps of sound from a bullhorn: “Your vehicle over now—” Hitting the brakes, I careened around the turn and saw the blockade ahead—six police units parked nose to nose, lights strobing, doors open, firepower aimed at yours truly. A few confused drivers cluttered the intersection behind them, starting to reverse away from whatever was coming.

  When the screech of my tires faded, I heard the sirens harmonizing behind me.

  I said, “It’s the cops.”

  Chic said, “I’m gonna go home now.”

  In my rearview I watched the distinctive cherry red pickup veer right and ease calmly down a side street. I turned on my dome light, placed both my hands on top of the steering wheel. One of the Tahoes pulled up next to me, the dark window sliding down.

  I said, “There’s a loaded .22 on the passenger seat.”

  Over the aimed sights of his Glock, Bill Kaden said, “Yes, I believe I’m familiar with it.”

  39

  Resting my cuffed hands atop the interrogation table, I gazed around at the familiar yellowed walls, the one-way mirror flecked with rust. It was morning, but you wouldn’t have known it.

  Kaden and Delveckio had had me delivered by two gruff cops who smelled of cigarette smoke and refused to acknowledge me until they yanked me out of the backseat. A few reporters had been hanging around Parker Center on a rumor an indicted gangbanger was being moved downtown for a trial. In his absence they’d been happy to capture me doing the perp walk. Upstairs I’d been left to entertain myself for a few hours. Despite the cuffs, I tried to make hand-shadow animals on the far wall. Whoever said oppression breeds creativity was full of shit.