The Crime Writer Page 27

  Tire iron swinging at my side, I squared off with the dark hall and the seam of light under the bedroom door at the end. Beneath the nervous ticking of the kitchen clock and the grandfather’s stately tocking from the living room, I could make out the wheeze of medical equipment. I started back, the photos of Lloyd and Janice hung at intervals providing a journey through their married lives. The wedding picture, the two of them beaming and clutching like prom dates. The bumper of their Gremlin, trailing toilet paper and tin cans, Best of Luck! frosted in cursive on the rear window. Poolside in Hawaii, paperbacks splayed on lounge chairs, fruit-bedecked cocktails raised. I was aware of my footfall on the slightly warped floorboards, my breath firing in my chest, that strip of light growing ever closer. Threads of gray had crept into Janice’s hair by the time they were snapped before El Capitan in Yosemite. Jovial smile lines textured their faces as they held hands across a wrought-iron patio table in a Venetian piazza. Most of the pictures had caught them looking at each other rather than at the lens, as if they couldn’t help themselves, as if they had a secret from the rest of the lonely world.

  I reached the bedroom door and set my hand on the bulbous antique knob, the white-noise hum of the medical equipment beyond drowning out the clocks, my thoughts. In hackneyed narrative tradition, I couldn’t help but recall standing outside another door, fearful of entering.

  Before I lost my nerve, I pushed through into the room.

  The bed was across the wide space, raised unreasonably on a box spring and penned in by metal guardrails. It had been angled toward the window so Janice could take in the downward-sloping stretch of trees. The room smelled of sitting food, sweat-laced linen, and residual human waste, not quite scoured from bedpans and fabric. The overlay of antiseptic cleaner and the various monitors and IV poles sprouting up like electronic growth brought me back to the room in which I’d awakened four months earlier to discover Genevieve’s blood beneath my nails.

  Janice looked soft and fleshy, her baldness making her head appear unusually round. She had no eyelashes or eyebrows, her blue eyes pronounced and burning from the depths to which they’d sunk. A terry gown had fallen open at the chest, revealing bone ridges above her breasts. Her lips were moist, slack cheeks folded in on them like an infant’s. A bag of crimson, frothed lightly at the top, dangled from a metal pole, transfusing what I imagined was fresh bone marrow into her veins. Syringes, pill bottles, and vials overloaded one of the metal trays pushed to the wall. From the labels, potent names jumped out at me in officious pharmaceutical print. CYTOXIN. BUSULFAN. CYCLOSPORIN. To the right, a draft sucked at a closed door.

  She raised a wasted arm, dripping a sheet of loose skin, as if to fend me off, her mouth opening slowly, repetitively, shaping a word. Her voice was depleted and her lips stiff with the great effort, hiding her teeth, turning her mouth into a wavering black hole, a parody of yelling. Passing her by ignored was unthinkable. I approached, owing some respect to the deathbed. To my great horror, I realized she was trying to call her husband’s name. I became suddenly, horrifically aware of the tire iron hanging by my knee.

  “No,” I whispered, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  A rasp, so dry as to be nearly inaudible. “Make…him…stop.”

  I left her there straining on the bed. The far door opened to a brief hall, which led to another door, left partially ajar. Listening for creaks in the old house that would broadcast Lloyd’s return, I moved forward on tingling legs, the dim room drawing into view. It was, I saw by degrees, an in-law suite, a narrow bedroom complete with kitchenette and bathroom. Like some condemned construction site, it had been veiled in plastic and fabric. Hunter green bedsheets were tacked over the windows and over a sliding glass door that led to the backyard. His wife, I guessed, knew nothing of the comings and goings through that rear entrance, though clearly she knew that something was not as it should be. A plastic painter’s drop cloth, meticulously laid down, slipped beneath my shoes and made it feel like I was moving across ice. It had caught drops of blood, many long dried. I stepped over coils of clear medical tubing, a gas canister lying on its side. A sleek box of a machine, the size of an old heater, purred. A processor of sorts, I assumed from its labels and dials. It was at work. Jumbled on the Formica counter, cartons of medical gloves, a collection of fat syringes, coils of white cotton rope, crusty transfusion bags. There, on a floating metal tray, a curved Shun boning knife, the Japanese character standing out starkly, black against stainless steel. And just behind it on a cot, almost disguised as another inanimate object, lay a young woman on her side.

  Her eyes were closed peacefully, and Lloyd, sensitive soul, had propped her head on a pillow. I watched her raised shoulder sway gently with her breaths. The skin at her left hip was peppered where a big-bore needle had been thrust through to extract marrow from her pelvic bone. The marks were fewer and more tightly clustered than I’d have thought; Lloyd must have gone in repeatedly through the same perforations, sliding the skin to reach new bone.

  She lay, depleted and unconscious, awaiting the boning knife. I imagined that Lloyd, feeder of Xanax, didn’t like that part and so had left it for after he’d prepped his van for her body’s transport. He couldn’t let her live any more than he could’ve released Kasey Broach after taking from her what his wife required. The soreness and resultant medical treatment would have revealed that bone marrow had been extracted, and from there it would’ve been a short hop to matching wait-listed patients, and to Janice. Leaving a corpse also made it significantly less likely that the marrow theft would be uncovered. I’d learned from Lloyd himself that during an autopsy medical examiners generally extract and weigh organs, examine visible wounds, and take fluid and tissue samples. They’d have little call to look for perforations in the bone beneath a divot of carefully scraped flesh. And of course there’d be no patient around to complain of deeper soreness.

  Behind the processor, restored to a Pyrex jar and left on the floor like a kicked-off shoe, was my ganglioglioma. My tumor had found the killer before I had. It took me an instant to tear my eyes from the familiar cluster of cells that Lloyd, during his Gaslight campaign, had kidnapped and led me to believe I’d destroyed. He was probably planning to leave it at a crime scene, adding to my confusion or culpability.

  I moved toward the girl. Sissy Ballantine? I set the tire iron down on the thin mattress at her side and reached for her. The girl’s eyelids rose lazily.

  She said calmly, “Behind you.”

  I spun around, nearly tripping on the flared end of a medical tube.

  Lloyd filled the doorway. “Damn it,” he said sadly. “Damn it, Drew.”

  I took a half step to my right, hoping to block the tire iron from view. If I didn’t set him off, this wouldn’t have to get violent. Would it? The floating metal tray pressed into the small of my back. Sissy murmured something behind me, and then her voice trailed off.

  Lloyd said, “I couldn’t just let her die, Drew. I couldn’t. Not when I was in a position to do something about it.”

  My voice was hoarse. “But why…why did you pick me?”

  He looked at the floor, my shoes, but not at me. “For the past two years, I’ve tapped in to that transplant registry every day. Every single day. And stared at those two women whose marrow matched Janice. One who’d removed herself from reach, the other whose marrow was already spoken for. Nothing I could do. By day I processed bodies, by night I watched my wife die.” He rested a hand on the half-open door, swinging it slightly on its hinges. “But one night I got called out of bed. And there was Genevieve lying in her bedroom. I was stunned. The paramedics told me that you’d been taken away. That you’d been seizing. Dazed. That you were now in surgery. I went back and looked at Genevieve, that run of unblemished flesh at her hip. And it struck me how I could do this.”

  “So you didn’t kill her?”

  “I didn’t kill her.” His lips pressed together in a sad grin. “She was no good to me. To Janice. But there she was. A
n inspiration. And there you were. Scared. Paranoid. Tangling with detectives who already thought you were the killer. All I had to do was add an abrasion to the next one’s hip. And then keep paying you out rope. You brought me the next twist and the next. A felon who worked at Home Depot. A hundred and fifty-three owners of brown Volvo wagons to choose a candidate from. You were so imaginative, you see.” Lost in thought, he toed the tubing that snaked from behind him into the room. Finally he lifted his gaze to my face. “For this to work, I needed a Drew. And you were the perfect Drew.”

  Made strangely drowsy by the weight of the discovery and the soporific hum of the filter, I focused on his words. It was oddly difficult.

  “I helped you write all those books,” Lloyd said. “I figured you could help me with this one.”

  “I know I owed you,” I said. “Did I owe you this much?”

  He stared at me, and I stared at him. He’d set his weight forward so the door squeezed him against the jamb. I couldn’t see his hands, which made me nervous, so I clasped my own behind my back, gripping the metal tray. The tire iron was out of reach, back on the bed.

  “So,” I said.

  “So.” He frowned, and his mouth twitched a little, as if on the verge of a sob, but then calm reasserted itself over his features. “What are we gonna do now?”

  “Call an ambulance for Sissy. And for Janice. Some cops we probably know will come get you. We’ll go in. And we’ll straighten this out.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No. Here’s how it’s gonna go. I’m going to kill you. And I’m going to kill Sissy. And then I’m going to get her marrow into Janice.”

  A sudden heat rose to the line of my surgical scar, making it tingle and seethe. The tips of my fingers brushed the handle of the stainless boning knife behind my back.

  “How are you gonna do that?” I asked.

  Lloyd leaned over, reaching for something behind the door.

  A wave of light-headedness washed through me. I sensed not an odor but a change in the consistency of the air. I staggered a half step, then firmed my legs beneath me. When I looked up, a gas mask stared back at me from the doorway, cylindrical filters shoved out from the jaw like insect mandibles. The door was wide open now, and I could see the canister he’d hidden behind it. His fingers rested on the metal valve atop the canister. In his other hand, he held a plastic face mask, shaped for the nose and mouth, its tube trailing back to the nozzle. I glanced dumbly at the end of the tubing at my feet, only now noticing the slight hiss it had been giving off all this time, virtually hidden beneath the hum of the filter.

  Lloyd wrenched the valve, rerouting the escaping gas through the mask, and lunged. Reaching blindly for the knife, I blocked with one arm, but he managed to shove the mask over my face, and I jerked in a pure inhale, feeling my knees buckle. I flailed, striking the tray, and went down amid the metallic rattle.

  My hand grasped for the knife among the folds of plastic drop cloth, finding the cold handle. As Lloyd stumbled down over me, jamming the mask again to my face, I brought the knife up and felt it press against his belly as he fell, then break surface tension with a pop. He collapsed on top of me, his gas mask knocked askew so it rode up in his thick curls. My bucking legs struck the Pyrex jar—the tinkle of breaking glass and then the schoolroom reek of formaldehyde. Lloyd was weeping with horror, his face twisted. Both of my hands, gripping the shaft of the knife, were trapped beneath his dying weight. His white fingertips, straining around the plastic, dug into my cheeks, keeping the face mask rammed unevenly against my nose and mouth.

  He sputtered and collapsed, drooling blood onto my chest.

  Burning rubber.

  The acrid odor washes through my head, lining my nasal cavities, enveloping my brain. I cannot breathe it away.

  I am driving. My dashboard clock reads 1:21 A.M.

  Genevieve’s house comes into view, and I jerk the steering wheel, banging over the curb, snapping the sprinkler at the fringe of the decorative lawn.

  The dinging of the open car door behind me, I am running up the walk to the house, my thigh muscles burning. My flesh is clammy, pulsing with some unknown terror. I stumble onto the porch. Music swells from within.

  I seize the terra-cotta pot, lose my grip, crack the saucer. Leaning the pot back again, I grasp the brass key in the grime. My hands fumble at the dead bolt. I drop the key. It bounces knee high but avoids the cracks between the decking.

  My head fogged with the stench, I jam the key home, twist, and shove. Stumbling in, I bang the side table. The Murano paperweight slides like a hockey puck and shatters, millefiori segments rattling on the marble tile.

  Flights of strings, thundering horns, the wrenching wail of a soprano.

  Perché tu possa andar…di là dal mare…

  I seem to float up the stairs, my shoes barely touching carpet.

  Genevieve lies collapsed on her face and chest, knees jammed beneath her as if she’d been kneeling.

  Already dead.

  Blood has soaked into the white carpet around her. Her window is open, and her cream silk gown, blown back from one pale shoulder, flutters about her.

  Something lets loose in my chest, and I utter a cry, running forward. I grasp her lightly at the shoulders and turn her. One arm swings stiffly on a locked elbow, striking me in the face.

  The music crescendos, unrelenting.

  Amore, addio! Addio! Piccolo amor!

  She lolls in my arms, delicate hand curled, forefinger pointing like Michelangelo’s Adam, except without a mate. A knife is sunk into her to the shaft. Sobbing, frantic, I grip the stainless tip with both hands and tug it free. She tumbles from my lap.

  Blackness encroached on the dream-memory, starting at the fringes and blotting out my vision.

  Through the sevoflurane haze, I heard sirens.

  44

  It was so late it was early, but the sky wasn’t admitting it yet. A Los Angeles Times graced my doorstep, the first since I’d restored service after jail. Covered with Lloyd Wagner’s blood, I stooped and picked it up. Maybe things were finally getting back to normal.

  Above a picture of me looking pallid and displeased, the headline, behind on gossip as usual, read DANNER TAKEN BACK INTO CUSTODY.

  Maybe things weren’t getting back to normal.

  I stepped inside, Xena bulling into me in greeting. I tugged off the stained shirt and threw it in the trash, then wandered into the family room and sat in my venerable reading chair. The TV chatterheads buzzed with the news of Lloyd’s death and, of course, my involvement. They didn’t announce that I hadn’t killed Genevieve Bertrand, that she’d already been dead when I’d found her. The evidence for that particular lay locked in my unreliable frontal lobe, and, try as they might, Fox News couldn’t plug in to that.

  But now I could.

  To a strobe-light effect of flashbulbs, Cal commanded a podium outside the North Hollywood house, detailing how they’d stormed the place to find me and Sissy Ballantine regaining consciousness in the makeshift medical suite. In the background two stalwart paramedics steered Janice out on a gurney, and we viewers were given a zoom to follow her rolling entry into an awaiting ambulance.

  Her close-up was appropriate; she was the unwitting star of the story. I hadn’t been the protagonist after all, but—like Kasey Broach, like Sissy Ballantine—a bit player. Morton Frankel, fellow fall guy, had played his role as well as I, two expendable L.A. walk-ons hitting the marks and saying the lines. I’d responded to Lloyd’s preparations with a promptness and an ardor that could scarcely be improved on, calling him within hours of my release from jail, scratching at the imagined scab of my guilt until I’d raised blood. Book after book, I’d reinforced Lloyd’s increasingly imaginative involvement in what had previously been dry scientific work. Some of the most diabolical killings in my novels wouldn’t have been nearly as inventive were it not for Lloyd. And perhaps his crime wouldn’t have been nearly as well plotted were it not for me. Or as far-fetched.


  An improbable fiction? Certainly. But then, we don’t want to construct the story that’s most likely to be told. We want to tell the one that finds its way to the pit of the gut, like a curved boning knife.

  I never would have guessed it, but Lloyd had proven a better crime writer than I was.

  I turned off the tube and petted Xena’s oversize head, enjoying a few minutes of blissful silence.

  The telephone rang. Not my cell but the glorious, hearty ring of the landline, harmonized on a faint delay with the phones upstairs. The noise filled the rooms. It made it seem as though my house worked again.

  I strode over to the cordless mounted on the living-room wall and answered.

  Caroline said, “Done showing off?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You’re all right?” Something in her delivery connoted great care.

  I considered for a moment, then answered, truthfully, “Yes. I am.”

  “You weren’t answering your cell,” she said. It was only then that I realized the phone had been on mute since Lloyd’s house. “So I got your home line from your Big Brother form. I have something to cheer you up.”

  “What?”

  “Me?”

  “Do you deliver?”

  “I do.”

  She hung up. Xena garishly stuck her muzzle between my legs. Jealous, no doubt.

  I went to my car to retrieve the half-written book and the unlabeled CD from Genevieve’s that I’d shoved beneath my floor mat.

  Back upstairs I sat at my desk, placed the pages beside my mouse pad, and slid the disc into my computer, bringing up i Tunes on the monitor. My screen asked if I wanted to retrieve track and album information, identifying the burned music from the online library.

  I did.

  While i Tunes searched, showing me a horizontal barber pole to solicit my patience, I picked up my office phone to call Chic. The line bleated, indicating messages.

  I dialed voice mail. A synthetic voice said, “Greetings. You have forty-nine saved messages.”