The Crime Writer Page 3

  Resting on the carpet downstairs was a four-foot metal rod. In my grogginess it took me a moment to identify it as the security bar that fits into the track of the sliding glass door opening to the backyard. I heard the wind suck against the frame, out of view, and became aware, again, of the cold air rising to my bare skin. The sound of traffic down on the freeway was faint but unmuted.

  Standing there, I tried to unfreeze myself, to find logic. I’d probably come in from the deck, exhausted, and neglected to close up. After all, I’d just come off four months of having no control over when the doors opened or closed. But doubt nagged. The security bar maybe I would’ve overlooked, but forgetting to slide the door closed behind me? With the chill that had settled in out there?

  I crept down the stairs. The sliding glass door was indeed wide open. A few leaves had blown in, great yellow husks wagging on the carpet. I stared at the black square of the deck, steeling myself, then headed for it. I collected the leaves and slipped outside. The deck was empty, as was the modest patch of lawn to the right, before the ivied slope. A noise to the side of the house drew my attention, the fence rattling in the wind perhaps, and I stepped around the corner and peered back toward the street. The walkway lights of the facing house flickered, one after another, as if a form were moving across them, though how could I be certain? I was glad I’d kept the lights off, preserving my night vision, but the moon, lost behind the Johnsons’ sycamore, gave me little aid. I jogged down the side run. The gate clinked—the sound from earlier—its latch undone. I passed through and walked down my stone-paved driveway to the middle of the street, rotating, bewildered, in my boxers. No sign of anyone, no sound of an engine turning over.

  I retraced my steps, reentering the house and securing the sliding glass door behind me. On the carpet, made barely visible by the glow of distant city lights, was tracked dirt. A C-shaped repeat, stamped perhaps by the edge of a shoe.

  Telephone out. Cell phone upstairs. Media-darling me in my underwear, sound of mind and beloved by local law enforcement.

  I moved silently along the trail and into the kitchen. Keeping my eyes on the doorway, I grasped the ten-inch chef’s knife and slid it out of the block. My knuckles sensed an emptiness, and I glanced down. Among the protruding handles, a black slit.

  The boning knife was missing.

  3

  A faultless member of the city’s prominent French community, her life cut short by an upwardly mobile crime novelist who’d ceased moving upward. Six months after she’d dumped him, he’d broken into her house at one-thirty in the morning. Entering her kitchen, he’d seized a boning knife, the twin of the one in the matching set she’d bought for him. He crept to the bedroom where he was no longer welcome and stabbed her. He’d been discovered red-handed—literally—over the body. By the time the cops arrived, she was dead and he was having a seizure. He’d been rushed to the hospital, where the doctors had discovered the brain tumor and performed an emergency resection. When he’d awakened the next morning, the tumor had been removed, and with it—he claimed—his memory of everything after breakfast on the previous day. Convenient amnesia, that old dime-store-novel standby. The kind of defense that could work only in Los Angeles.

  That’s how the Enquirer told it. And the L.A. Times, Fox News, and even Vanity Fair. The story’s all wrong, in detail and nuance, but they tell it with a tabloid fervor.

  I can only tell it like me.

  I spent the first night of my incarceration vomiting into the stainless-steel basin until my stomach lining felt as threadbare as the narrow mattress on its bolted base. After nearly forty-eight hours in the Sheriff’s ward at USC Medical, I’d landed in a protective-isolation cell on the seventh floor of Twin Towers Correctional Facility. The unit was cramped and metal and had a square vent through which wafted the pristine air of downtown Los Angeles. I missed my own bed, the framed cigarette cards of Shakespeare characters hanging beside my closet. I missed my mother and father. I’d passed plenty of sleepless nights in my time, not to mention the restless small hours during both of my parents’ deteriorations, my mother after a series of debilitating strokes in her early sixties, my father, eighteen months later and less cruelly, to an aneurysm. But nothing—nothing—that I had encountered could raise a candle against that night’s utter blackness.

  Night after day the guards commanded prisoners through what I assumed was a narrow alley below, and rising up the chamber of gray walls came the clinking of leg restraints and disembodied voices, strong and cracked, black and white, most of them complaining. Singing their inmate tunes.

  Wudn’t me.

  Some motherfucker framed me.

  I’m innocent. I was just minding my own bidness when…

  Up in that cold box, far from the levers of power, it seemed wise not to add my voice to the chorus. But I knew I hadn’t done it. I knew that I could not have murdered Genevieve, even as I grew terrified that I had.

  Chic had come first, of course, as soon as they allowed it.

  I was led down a harshly lit corridor that smelled of ammonia into a private interview room used for prisoners kept out of general pop for their own protection. Battle-scarred wooden chair, Plexiglas shield, obscenities finger-smudged on the metal desktop—high school all over again.

  The guard pronounced his name incorrectly, like the French appraisal of a hairdo, though Chic is anything but. He was dressed as he always was, as if he’d just gone shopping for the first time without his mother. Denim shorts that stretched below the knee. Oversize silk shirt, olive green, buttoned across his vast chest. A bling chain necklace matched the chunk of gold on the left-hand ring finger.

  He shifted his big frame around, trying to get comfortable on a chair not designed for professional athletes. Seeing him made my eyes well at the ways in which my life had unraveled since the last time I’d seen him. A week? Eight days?

  Chic placed a surprisingly white palm on the Plexiglas. I matched it with my own—it felt surreal to mimic the gesture I knew only from movies.

  “What do you need?” he asked.

  My voice, little used, sounded as hoarse as those that floated up the walls. “I didn’t do this.”

  He gave me a calming gesture, hands spread, head tilted and slightly lowered. “Don’t you cry, Drew-Drew,” he said softly. “Not in here. Don’t give ’em that.”

  I wiped my eyes with the hem of my prison-issue shirt. “I know. I’m not.”

  Chic looked like he wanted to break through the glass and fight a few fights for me to make sure the bullies gave me wide berth. “What can I do?”

  “Just being here.”

  He bridled a bit, indicating, I guessed, his desire for a task, for some better way to help. Philly born, Chic is East Coast loyal and likes to prove it. I would find out later that he’d waited downstairs for four and a half hours to get in and see me.

  His powerful hands clenched. “This is like one of your books. Except worse.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  My fingers were at my head again, riding the rosary beads of the secondary suture scars. I noticed Chic watching me and lowered my hand.

  He looked concerned. “How you holding up?”

  I stared up at the ceiling until my vision got less watery. “Scared shitless.” A rush of panic constricted my throat, reminding me why it was better not to tackle the fear head-on.

  He seemed to be considering his next words. “I been in jail, but nothing like this. Your shadow must be’ fraid of its shadow.”

  I rubbed my eyelids until my heartbeat no longer sounded like a scaffold drumroll. Then I said, “Make sure April’s okay. She hasn’t visited me. Not in the hospital, not here.”

  “You haven’t been together so long.”

  “I suppose it is a lot to handle.”

  Chic raised his eyebrows as if to say, Ya think?

  I couldn’t talk about losing April while maintaining a stiff upper lip, so I asked, “What news from the front?”
<
br />   “Usual shit. CourtTV, three-minute segments on Five, five-minute segments on Three. Reporters feeling good ’ bout themselves because they remember to say ‘allegedly.’”

  I already knew that the prosecutor’s version had infected the media’s take, and vice versa. The victim had been photogenic, and the public had hooked into her the way it liked and into me the way it required. The story had taken on a life of its own, and I’d been cast in the nastiest role.

  He squinted at me. “You getting any sleep?”

  “Sure.”

  But I wasn’t getting much. Last night I’d stayed up like Lady Macbeth, staring at my hands, staggered by their secret history. A fleck of dried blood remained wedged under my right thumbnail, and I dug at it and dug at it until frustration gave way to something like horror and I tore off the tip of the nail with my teeth. Later I dreamed about Genevieve—her pale Parisian skin, her inviting cushiony hips, lounging on my deck chair and spooning avocado curls from the dark shell, edging them with mayonnaise from the dollop she’d dropped where the pit had been. She looked at me and smiled forgivingly, and I awoke having sweated through one end of the slim pad of a pillow. The polyester sheet was thin, and I knew I was a sorry sight there in the darkness, trembling and terrified by something I couldn’t put a name to.

  “Can you get my condolences to Genevieve’s family?” I said quietly. “Tell them I didn’t do this.”

  “All due respect, they prob’ly don’t much want to hear from you right now.” He held up a hand when I started to protest. “How are those lawyers who your overeager editor found for you?”

  “They seem to know what they’re doing.”

  “Let’s hope so.” He withdrew a stapled document and put it in the pass-through box.

  The guard rushed forward, blurting, “Let me take a look at that, sir.”

  Chic waited impatiently while the guard flipped through the document, searching for the blowtorch concealed in the pages. He justified himself by removing the staple from the corner.

  Scrap Plan B. No flying out of here on a magic staple.

  Once the document cleared security, Chic slid it through to me. A power of attorney that designated Chic Bales with broad powers over my finances and legal affairs.

  “Broad powers,” I said. “That include X-ray vision or just shape-shifting?”

  He half smiled, but I could see his concern in the lines that pouched his eyes. “Law firm needs a two-fifty retainer. You’ll have to take a second on the house.”

  “A third.” Just contemplating the state of my finances made my temples throb. There was some bureaucratic fuss until the guard produced a notary’s seal, required to validate any power of attorney. Another reality tidbit overlooked in the pages of my—I now realized woefully unrealistic—novels.

  I signed and sent the document back through. Chic’s eyes caught on the note I’d included. “What’s this?”

  “For Adeline.”

  “Genevieve’s sister? You really think she wants to hear from you?” He unfolded the paper without asking and regarded my adolescent script.

  I didn’t kill your sister.

  Tell me if there’s anything I can do.

  I’m so sorry for your loss.

  He refolded the note, and it disappeared into a pocket. His look said it all.

  “You get accused and you’re no longer allowed to have a human reaction?” I said.

  “You are, but no one’s gonna believe it. If you’re sincere now, you’ll get chewed up. Everyone’ll think you playin’ to the jury pool. You’re in a game. The sooner you figure that out, the better.”

  “So what can I do?”

  “Look innocent.”

  “I am innocent.”

  “Look it.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments, staring at each other. The guard strode over. “Time’s up.”

  Chic’s stare didn’t so much as tic over to pick up the guard’s reflection in the glass. “I just got here.”

  “You’ll exit to the right. Got it?”

  Chic sucked his teeth and screwed his mouth to the side. “Why, sho’.” And then, to me, “Hang tough. I’m here for whatever and all of it.” He pushed back with a screech, and then his footfall echoed off the cold concrete walls.

  The next morning I was summoned by my lawyers back down that ammonia-reeking hall to the Plexiglas Pavilion. They waited in their chairs, outlines bleached by strong morning light, one leaning forward, elbows resting on knees, lips pouched against the weight of the decisions to come, the other canted back in his chair, thumb dimpling a cheek, forefinger riding his upper lip. Both of their heads were bowed as if in prayer. Before their features resolved, I had a strong sense I was walking into the famous picture of JFK and Bobby taken when Khrushchev’s freighters were steaming toward Cuba.

  I understood their concern. I’d already proven less than pliable as a client. Despite their advice, I’d elected not to waive my right to a speedy trial. Bail had been denied, a cover-yer-ass move by the down-the-middle judge we’d drawn, cowed by mounting media fanfare. The prospect of spending maybe years locked up awaiting trial was terrifying enough to compromise my judgment on the matter. My lawyers and I had also gone a few rounds over the plea. My choices were guilty or not guilty. The temporary-insanity issue would be visited—in a second trial phase—only if I were found guilty.

  Donnie Smith, hair tamped down from his post-gym shower, picked up right where we’d left off. “Your pleading not guilty will antagonize the judge, the public, the press, and the court. And it’s that group that decides your fate. Not just those twelve people. You have to plead guilty to help you gain credibility on the question of impaired sanity. Given the media, Harriman’s gonna try the case, and you can bet she’ll mop the floor with us in the guilt phase, leave you stained. We need to get to sanity quickly, with a clean slate, and without dragging you through a trial that you are unlikely to win.”

  My heart felt like it was fluttering my shirt. “But I didn’t do it. And not a single fucking person believes me.”

  Not the first time they’d encountered such a claim. Blank eyes. Patience, edging to impatience.

  “So your position is you don’t remember that you didn’t kill her?” Donnie spoke slowly, as if to a developmentally delayed child.

  I didn’t answer. It sounded stupid to me, too. As before, each minute with them contributed to my growing fear that I had no defense. And that if I didn’t want to die in a prison cell, I’d have to admit to something I did not remember.

  My frustration bubbled to the surface. “Is anyone trying to find out who really did this? Or are they all too busy playing trial games like us?”

  Donnie and Terry glanced at each other uneasily.

  “What?” I said, worried. “What’s that look?”

  “LAPD turned over something troubling yesterday in discovery,” Donnie said. “Genevieve called you the night of the murder at 1:08 A.M., approximately twenty minutes before her murder.”

  “I was told that already.”

  Donnie removed a sealed LAPD evidence bag from his briefcase. It contained a CD. “And she left you a message.”

  “Is it bad?” I asked. No answer. Agitated, I stood, walked a tight circle, sat back down again. “That’s why they changed my voice mail access.”

  Donnie popped the CD into his laptop and clicked a few buttons.

  The familiar voice, back from the dead, was haunting. “I wanted to tell you I’m with someone new. I hope I hurt you. I hope you feel this pain. I hope you feel so alone. Good-bye.”

  It took me a few moments to recover from hearing Genevieve. I sat there with my heartbeat pounding in my ears and my lawyers staring at me with calm concern. Her voice, the accent, those nuanced pronunciations. But the invasiveness of the message’s presentation also unnerved me. The cops had heard Genevieve’s last words to me before I had. The message—like the rest of my life, frozen by the prosecution and available to me only secondhand—hammered
the final nail into the coffin of my rights and privacy.

  I didn’t remember hearing Genevieve’s message that night, of course. The bitterness of it clashed with where I thought she and I had left things between us, but she’d been moody and difficult at times, so the tone was hardly shocking. Under no circumstances could I imagine it making me want to harm Genevieve. But, I realized with mounting dread, the message would play nicely to a jury primed on photos of her abused body.

  “This shores up motive even more,” Donnie said gently. “So we need a simple version to sell to the jury. Temporary insanity’s your only way out of this. It’s clean. It’s self-evident. It’s supported by the facts. The brain tumor did it.”

  I returned his exasperated stare.

  He pressed on. “We lay out the facts, you’ll walk out of here. You can worry about the rest of it from your own bed someday.” He studied my expression, finding something in it he didn’t like. “We play this wrong with what we have stacked against us…”

  The thought of hard time made me feint fetal, my shoulders hunching, my shoes lifting an inch or two from the floor before I stopped my knees’ rise to my chest. In the movies, no matter what, prison is the same. You go in scared, and they call you “fish” and bet cigarettes as to how long it’ll be until you cry. You cell with Bubba, and he breaks you in, and then you become hardened, dead inside, and you barter for candy bars and have to shiv some guy in the shop or his buddies will gang-rape you, and then you get gang-raped anyway just for good measure.

  “You’re a crime writer,” Terry said calmly. “Allow us to help you see how this will read to a jury. Let us take you through it again.”

  And they did, right from the sordid beginning. I sat in my hard little chair, dry-mouthed and stunned by—as they call it on TV—the preponderance of evidence. I’d known the elements, of course, but hearing them edited together into a tale of my murdering Genevieve was chilling. When my nerves settled, I had room for a single lucid thought.