The Crime Writer Read online

  For the drive across town, I twisted and turned the evidence, trying to make a pretty picture. I got a few variations on the picture, none of them pretty.

  Though the four o’ clock sun was strong, the lights shone at the window of Frankel’s apartment, a reminder of the detectives’ late-night visit. I drifted up the street past the hot-dog stand, past the fabric store with the creepy mannequins tilting in the window, and parked by the car-rental lot. Frankel’s mechanic was across the way, locking up the garage. I caught him as he fastened the security screen.

  “Hi, I’m Drew. I was referred to you by one of my neighbors. Mort?” I offered a hand, and he held his up in apology, grease etching the lines in the rough skin.

  He had wonderfully elaborate tattoos, dragons and busty nymphs, sheathing either arm. The ink stopped in neat cuffs at his wrists. “Oh, yeah. Mortie. Sure.”

  “He said you do great work.”

  “Dings to wrecks.”

  “You must be good. Mortie doesn’t exactly lavish praise, does he?”

  “No, he don’t.”

  “You banged out that dent for him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I got one myself. Came out to my car in the morning and there it was. Wheel well.” I shook my head, galled by the imaginary scofflaw. “Just like Mort’s. No note, no nothing.”

  “He figured some asshole smacked it with a bike.”

  “We park side by side. I think the guy hit mine at the same time. A week ago Wednesday.”

  The mechanic shook his head. “Not Mort’s. His got hit just a couple nights ago. You know Mort—he brought it to me the next morning.”

  “You sure?”

  “Course I’m sure. He dropped the car first thing Tuesday, I had it back to him by the time he got off work.”

  The very night I’d gotten the vehicle ID from Junior, a ding had appeared in Mort’s wheel well. And there was only one person other than Junior who could’ve known to put it there.

  Acutely aware of the breeze across my suddenly hot face, I said, “You work fast.”

  “He’s funny about that car. You’d do better to punch him in the nose than ding it. Though I wouldn’t want to punch him in the nose.”

  “No,” I said, “neither would I.”

  I sat in my car, elbows on the steering wheel, face tilted into my hands. My eyes ached, especially when I rubbed them.

  I needed to proceed carefully and consider every possibility. Two reasonable options remained to explain Mort’s wheel-well dent. Since the first was so incredible, I focused on the other. If Junior had embellished his story about the Volvo, that would have sent me scrambling off down the wrong clue trail, narrowing the field to felons and crooks and picking one of my liking. The ding in the right front wheel well—a considerable coincidence in this scenario—made this unlikely. But I had to be certain.

  I called Hope House and explained to Caroline how I’d spent the time since I’d seen her last.

  She said, “When the time is right, you’ll have a nice lawsuit to press against LAPD.”

  “Right now I need you to make sure Junior is absolutely certain about everything he told me about the brown Volvo. Put him on the rack or whatever you shrinks use.”

  “Thumbscrews.”

  I thanked her, then stopped for a Coke and a refill at the gas station where I’d solidii ed Junior’s love of smoking. The sky was starting to take on orange at the fringe, outlining the buildings and trees. My phone rang.

  Caroline said, “Junior’s positive about the Volvo. He said he’s offended you’re questioning his memory.”

  “Of course he is. Tell him I’ll make it up to him at the Big Brother soiree next month.” I climbed back into the Highlander, turned over the motor, and peeled out.

  Fifteen minutes later I was across from the killer’s house in North Hollywood.

  41

  I parked in the shadows about a half block down, beneath the waterfall foliage of a pepper tree. Shadows scalloped the windshield, and dry leaves scraped the roof. From my vantage only the garage and edge of the house were visible.

  The scene demanded a noirish cast—dramatic lighting, gloomy sky, pessimistic clouds. But Los Angeles can be an uncooperative place. The evening had darkened a few degrees, sure, but there was a pleasing uniformity to the remaining sunshine, a suburban flatness. Leftover warmth lingered, trapped in the stifling stillness of the Valley air. It smelled of mulch and frying meat. Overhead a jet droned lazily toward Burbank.

  The garage door was raised, the rear of the van laid open—apparently he was midtask, though from my limited perspective I could spot no movement around the house. The van was now the vehicle of choice; he wouldn’t risk taking the other car out, not again.

  I didn’t want to believe it—I almost couldn’t believe it—but who else made sense? Who could’ve broken in to my house, taken my blood, and put it on Broach’s corpse? Who could taint the crime scene with a hair that wouldn’t raise suspicion? Who had been helpful as long as I was running down the wrong trail? Who had samples from which to simulate my handwriting in the matchbook? Who’d shown me Richard Collins’s fingerprint match only once he’d confirmed that the lifted print wasn’t his own? Who had handpicked Mort from the pool of brown-Volvo owners I’d closed in on, selected him as the felon most plausible for a murder upgrade? Who had carte blanche access to equipment and databases and throwaway pistols? Who would know precisely how to angle the blade into an unconscious body to make the killer appear left-handed? Who’d been in convenient proximity to the site where Broach’s body had been dumped, in fact, because he’d done the dumping?

  Caroline had said it well: 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.

  I knew I’d have to approach that garage and see with my own eyes. His house, the evening, the quiet neighborhood block I was parked on—they all felt surreal, hallucinatory stand-ins for reality.

  Part of my manuscript had slid off the passenger seat. I stared at the top page beside me. We got along well, and I had found him alarmingly adept at helping me massage plot elements, so much so that on occasion I’d brought him whole scenes to put his skills to work on.

  I got out, eased the door shut, and crept along the mossy wooden fence at the front of the property line, the rambling house drawing into view. I slipped through the barn gate, my shoes crunching on the gravel driveway. I passed the blind side of the house, the kitchen door Lloyd had sagged against, sobbing, as I’d left Monday night.

  Pausing, I pressed my ear to the door. The grumble of movement deep within the house. A chair screeching back on its legs?

  The sun was far enough gone now that when I ducked into the garage, I had to squint to make out the far corners. The car beside the van, hidden beneath a black cover, looked like a shapeless blob. It was backed in as before, the swung-open rear door of the van leaning against it. At the right front wheel well.

  I had visited this very scene before. I remembered the van’s rear door, how it rested heavily against the covered car, how it complained when Lloyd swung it shut.

  The complaint came again, a dream echo, as I rotated the weighty door a foot or so, letting it rest against my shoulder blade as I faced the neighboring vehicle. Janice’s disused car. Gathering a handful of cover, I tugged the soft fabric up to reveal the nose of a brown Volvo. A dent in the right front wheel well. Where the metal had crumpled inward, a white seam, jagged at the edges with flakes of paint. The original coat was in view around the mouth of the indentation. Harvest Gold.

  What had Kaden told me? Brown is the second most common Volvo color behind that shit yellow.

  I tented out the cover until I saw the jagged eye of the bullet hole in the upper-right corner of the windshield. The shot I’d fired last night in my neighbor’s driveway.

  I stepped away, the fabric slipping silently back into place, the van’s door creakin
g open and finding the groove it had knocked in the Volvo’s frame.

  Lloyd had repainted his wife’s Volvo so if anyone—like Junior—spotted it at one of the crime scenes, Janice wouldn’t pop up on the DMV databases. There were 153 brown-Volvo owners in L.A. County. Only problem was, Janice’s car was in the system as a yellow Volvo.

  My cell phone rang, strident in the garage’s confines, scaring the hell out of me. Caller ID flashed CDRS HOSPTL. Glancing around, I thumbed the volume down to “mute,” whispered, “Just a sec,” into the mouthpiece, and moved swiftly up the gravel drive, casting a nervous eye on the house and trying to keep my footsteps quiet.

  Safely back in the Highlander beneath the protective cover of the pepper tree, I let out a deep breath, raised the phone, and said, “Sorry.”

  Big Brontell’s bass vibrated the receiver against my head. “Help you, Drew-Drew?”

  I asked, “Can you check for me if Janice Wagner is being treated in the oncology center there?”

  “No. But I will.” I heard him tapping away, wondered how the keys could accommodate his giant fingers. “We had her four months ago, but not now. She was discharged for home hospice September sixteenth.”

  September 16. A week before Genevieve’s death.

  I gathered the manuscript into my lap, wanting to be sure I remembered it right. Lloyd’s words stared out at me from the page: “It’s back. Other breast now. Third time through, make or break.”

  I said, “She wasn’t seen for breast cancer, was she?”

  “Breast? No. For—”

  “Leukemia,” I said.

  My head humming, I flipped through my manuscript. I didn’t want to believe it, but there it was, in plain type. Motive. “I’m sorry for the mess. Janice is an only child, both parents passed. We don’t get much help.”

  Janice had no family to act as donors. Which meant that blind luck would have to intervene to stop her from wasting away. And when it hadn’t, her husband had.

  Lloyd could’ve just killed Kasey Broach and taken the marrow from her corpse. So why risk using sevoflurane?

  I asked, “You have to be alive for a bone-marrow extraction, right?”

  Over the sounds of continued typing, Big Brontell said, “That’s right.”

  Please, please, let him have killed Genevieve also. Let him have killed her and then learned afterward that he needed to keep the next one alive for the marrow to be successfully extracted. Let him have evolved as a killer so both murders could be hung on his conscience and none on mine.

  Doubt tugged at me. Why would Genevieve have been on the bone-marrow registry? To my knowledge she had no ill relatives, and she was hardly one for invasive charity. Also, if Lloyd had killed her, my brain tumor seemed something of a convenient fluke.

  “What are the odds for a bone-marrow match?” I asked.

  Big Brontell said, “One in twenty thousand. Give or take. Of course, your pool is limited to people who submit to testing.”

  “Are there any matches for Janice’s type in the registry?” I asked. “People who live in Los Angeles?”

  “Lemme check.” The phone shifted noisily against Brontell’s cheek, and then I could hear him breathing as he typed.

  I dug through the manuscript furiously, checking my memory against twelve-point font: “None of us matched.” Mrs. Broach waved a hand to encompass the three of them on the couch. “But Kasey did. She was Tommy’s angel. She went in time after time, shots in the hip, needle this thick, never complained, not once.”

  I picture Kasey Broach’s blue-tinted corpse, sprawled on the cracked asphalt beneath the freeway ramp: A nasty abrasion mottled her right hip. I racked my brain to recall if a similar scrape had been left on Genevieve in the same location. Wouldn’t take much to skim away puncture marks from a cluster of needle perforations, to hide traces of the extractions under a glistening wound. Had I checked? Had anyone?

  What had he said at our last good-bye? “I’m sorry, Drew, but Janice and I have to look out for ourselves.”

  Sorry, indeed.

  He was no sadist, though he’d introduced a bondage rope to throw us off course. Sevoflurane to keep them alive and pliant. Xanax so they’d feel relatively calm should they breach consciousness—a humane facet of an inhumane act. He wouldn’t have wanted the victims to suffer any more than he wanted me to. He just wanted his wife to live, no matter the cost. Had he apologized to his victims as he had to me? Had he wept as he pressed the gas mask over their faces to still their thrashing? As he’d positioned the boning knife for the final plunge?

  Big Brontell said, “There are two matches in L.A.”

  A held breath burned in my chest. I prayed silently. Let Genevieve’s name be one of those two, making me innocent.

  “Let’s see,” Big Brontell said, with a deliberateness that made me want to scream. “Kasey Broach, but she took her name off the active list.”

  But it would’ve been a snap for Lloyd to get clearance to tap the bone-marrow database, to find matches present and past.

  My voice sounded strangled. “And the other?”

  “Sissy Ballantine.”

  I tilted my forehead into my hand, felt it slick and hot.

  “She’s listed as a sibling donor,” Big Brontell said. “Transplant pending.”

  So her marrow was being reserved for a brother or sister, which meant it wouldn’t be made available for Janice. Which in turn meant Lloyd had to take the marrow forcibly from one of the two matches and kill her to cover his tracks. Kasey Broach, long inactive on the donor list and thus further afield of the clue trail, had been the wiser choice.

  “Thank you very much, Brontell. I can’t tell you—”

  “Hang on.” Then he shouted across the phone. “Get the four-points and the Haldol!” Back to me: “Gotta run, Drew-Drew. My girth is required on the psych unit.”

  He disconnected, and I folded the phone and set it on the passenger seat.

  When I looked up, Lloyd was at my window.

  42

  Lloyd signaled me with one hand to roll down the window. His other arm was out of view, since he was standing half on the curb, bent beneath a wayward bough of the pepper tree. As I hit the switch, I kept my eyes on that hidden hand. From the flex of his arm, he was holding something. The cell phone was sleek and hard in my fist.

  “Hey, Lloyd.”

  A dated weave belt pinched his tan Dockers at the waist. His brickred Polo shirt he wore tucked in, though it had tugged free at one side from recent exertion. His wavy blond hair sparkled with sweat where it met his forehead and temples. “Hello. What do you need?”

  I gestured at the manuscript pages in my lap, giving myself an extra beat so my voice wouldn’t reveal the adrenaline pounding through my veins. “I came by to give it one more shot, see if you’d take a look at some pages for me. I was just reviewing—”

  He shifted, his arm moving, and I came within an instant of smashing his face with a Motorola-fortified fist. What swung into view, though, was not a weapon but a roll of silver electrical tape, which he spun absentmindedly around a finger.

  “Drew, I’m just too overwhelmed right now. I can’t help you. Or see you. This is a really bad time. An impossible time.”

  For all the heinousness of his actions, he was speaking the truth. He certainly looked overwhelmed, worn down by grief and dismay. As if his panic bell had been rung so often so he no longer registered the clangor inside his head. Like me he’d arrived here by desperation, choosing the less awful of two scenarios. From his face I’d say he’d had his share of second thoughts.

  “Right. Okay. Sorry to bug you.” I tugged the gearshift into drive. “See you later.”

  “See you, Drew,” he said softly.

  I pulled away, watching him in the rearview. He stood on the curb, staring after me, then started for the house, his shoulders stooped as though his thoughts were pulling him downward.

  I turned the corner, pulled over, and dialed. “Detective Unger, please.”


  A few moments later, Cal picked up.

  “It’s Drew. I’m around the corner from Lloyd Wagner’s house. I need you to get here now and bring the guns. Lloyd’s got a Volvo with the right dent, repainted in brown. His wife has leukemia. There are only two matches for her marrow type in Los Angeles. One of them was Kasey Broach.”

  I heard wood creak as Cal sat down. “Was the other match Genevieve?”

  “No,” I said. “Some girl named Sissy Ballantine.”

  “Did you say Sissy Ballantine?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  Cal’s voice got tight. “An Amber Alert just hit my desk. Ballantine was snatched outside her house in Culver City a few hours ago. Neighbor saw a guy wrestle her into a white van.”

  I threw the Highlander into park, turned off the engine.

  Cal said, “Stay put. Do not approach that house. We’re on our way.”

  “Get over here.”

  “Stay out of the house. Promise me, Drew.”

  I snapped the phone shut, grabbed the tire iron from the trunk, and headed back down the street.

  43

  As silently as possible, I approached through the neighboring hedges. The garage door had been lowered, and I could hear from behind it the screech of tape being stripped from a roll. Slowing my breathing, I eased up on the window at the side of the garage, wading through a scented hedge of juniper. A dusty set of venetians guarded the glass, but where the stiff blinds had been tweaked down, I could see into the dim interior.

  Lloyd’s waist and legs protruded from the back of the van. At his feet a heap of plastic drop cloth. He emerged, roll of tape in his mouth, X-acto knife in his hand. Judging from the unused material, he was on the tail end of the job.

  I withdrew, peering over my shoulder at intervals. He’d left the kitchen door unlocked, and I slipped inside. Dirty dishes, crumbs, and empty jars had overtaken the counters I’d cleaned just days before, a half-eaten burrito resting atop the rubber guard of the garbage disposal—Lloyd doing his best to keep doing.