The Crime Writer Read online

  I’m fucked.

  My righteousness about the plea would have to dissolve under the pressures—and realities—I was facing. I could offer a gut sense of my innocence and little more. Nothing felt more important than staying alive, than staying free. Not even announcing to the world that I was a murderer.

  When they finished, I wanted to give the answer I’d been rehearsing in my head but found myself frozen. I folded my hands on the pitted wood and stared at them, and then I heard myself say, “I won’t plead guilty to a murder I don’t think I committed.”

  The attorneys’ heads swiveled to face each other, their worst fear realized. They appeared as shocked as I was by my decision.

  “With all due respect,” Terry said, “how can you still think you didn’t?”

  “Because I would know in my bones if I had.”

  Out in the hall, the guard cleared his throat loudly. Terry scratched his hair in the back, fingernails giving off a good scraping sound. The sun inched higher in the window, making me squint against the glare.

  Donnie finally punctured the swollen silence with a sigh. He bounced forward, slapped his knees, and rose.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “We argue each phase like your life depends on it.” He looked up from loading papers into his briefcase. “Because it does.”

  I hunched against the cold under the sheet, eyes on the blank wall opposite. A discoloration stained the concrete a few feet up, a splotch and then the trickling fallout. It couldn’t have come from anything benign. I thought of the men who had occupied this cell before me, who’d slept their restless sleep and dreamed their lying dreams.

  Wudn’t me.

  Some motherfucker set me up.

  I’m innocent.

  A guard approached, slipped an envelope through the bars. “You got a letter.”

  I retrieved the envelope from the floor. My name, in a feminine hand. I sat back down and opened it. A piece of paper, torn to shreds. ll your sister.

  Tell me if

  I didn’t ki so sorry for

  I can do. I’m there’s anything your loss.

  The scraps of my note to Adeline slipped from my hands, scattering across the floor. One in particular stared back at me: your loss. I didn’t notice my slow-motion deterioration to the concrete until it was pressed against my cheek, my body curled around my knees. I remained more or less in that position until the next morning, when they summoned me to court.

  L.A. had sweated out a whole year without a celebrity murder trial. I was neither a household name nor, as far as I knew, a killer, but the forces of the market had converged to make me both. Opening arguments had started sixty days from the second arraignment, time enough for me to lose weight, grow sallow and shaggy, and look otherwise convictable.

  A few minutes into the trial, I knew that my lawyers were right and that it would end disastrously. As promised, the rising-star prosecutor—sharply dressed Katherine Harriman accessorized with sensible low-heel slingbacks and a father who’d jetted in from Chicago to beam proudly from the front row—Swiffered the floor with me, the jury sailing to their verdict after only an eight-day trial and an hour’s deliberation.

  I’d been convicted. The only question now was if I’d slide off with a not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Through the beginning of the sanity phase, the only way I could slow the quiet breakdown I was undergoing was to detach. I quickly learned that—like the other players—I had to devote my attention not to the ingredients of the trial but to its sugar glaze.

  And I had the support of my friends, who, my lawyers were pleased to note, comprised a nice demographic skew. Chic tapped his chest with a fist whenever I caught his eyes. From time to time, Preston would glance up from whatever manuscript he was editing and offer a supportive nod. He had a stack of pages that went with him everywhere like a King Charles spaniel, under his arm, peeking out from his bag, perching on his thighs when he sat—more than once when the courtroom hushed, I could make out the distinctive sound of his scribbling. And April, bless her, had shown up that morning as promised, even enduring the requisite walk of shame along an appointed stretch of public sidewalk while reporters mobbed her. It was clear we no longer had a future together, but I was deeply grateful she’d done me this final turn.

  More than anyone else, though, Katherine Harriman commanded the court’s attention. She played to the jury now, doing her best to ignore my brain tumor, which Donnie had ingeniously left floating in a jar on the defense table. It looked menacing in the brackish waters, an unexploded hand grenade. I’d suffered the humiliation of sitting before it for opening arguments and more. I pictured it inside my head, latched onto my brain, operating me like a subservient robot. I was, I’m embarrassed to report, scared of a wad of brown tissue.

  And why not? The expert witness for the home team, a white-haired neurologist with a dignified bearing, had just identified it as a left anterior temporal ganglioglioma. There was much discussion of ventricles and glands, designed, I assumed, to cow the jurors with Medical Science. Ganglioglioma? Even the repetitive syllable seems tacked on to intimidate. Despite the malignant look of the word, gangliogliomas are okay as far as brain tumors go. After resection, patients enjoy a survival rate that approaches 100 percent, and we don’t have to smell colors or taste music. The temporal lobe, the court learned, is involved in our processing of memory, thus my inconvenient blackout. Conditions like mine have been known to lead to schizophrenia-like psychosis, delusion, and episodic aggressive behavior.

  “And what causes this impressive constellation of symptoms to kick in?” Harriman asked midway into the cross, angling a bright cheek toward the carefully selected men who constituted Jurors Three through Seven.

  “Of course the tumor must reach a—if you’ll pardon the expression—critical mass, where it’s begun encroaching on essential structures,” our neurologist said. “But as for the tipping point? The addition of a few more cells. A constriction of blood vessels. Because the temporal lobe is intricately tied to emotional response and arousal, there is plentiful evidence that once a patient has reached such a fragile state, the final mental break can be triggered by an emotionally intense event.” The doctor polished his glasses on a monogrammed handkerchief. “While there’s much that we know about the brain—”

  “There’s so much more that we don’t know,” Harriman finished with an accommodating grin.

  During the six months before my surgery, I’d been no stranger to migraines, certainly, even a few that had blotted my vision. At first I’d presumed the usual suspects—stress, computer monitor, dehydration—but then I’d blacked out over the washing machine, coming to after fifteen lost minutes feeling little more than a rise in my stomach and liquid detergent dripping across my knuckles.

  “But isn’t it true that most people with this type of tumor don’t cross the line into psychosis at all?”

  The neurologist replied, “Erratic, violent behavior is not uncommon, espe—”

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear my question. I asked if it was true that most people with this type of tumor never cross the line into psychosis.”

  “Statistically speaking.”

  “Is there another manner of speaking that better answers a medical question like the one I posed?”

  There was not.

  “Is there a single medical precedent that you can cite for a person”—she’d shrewdly dropped “patient”—“with a left anterior temporal ganglioglioma committing murder?”

  The doctor rolled his lips, his face bunching. “No.”

  In quiet concert, Donnie, Terry, and I exhaled. Katherine Harriman did not. “Do most individuals with a left anterior temporal ganglioglioma experience postoperative retrograde amnesia?”

  “Most do not, but when paired with acute stress, more than thirty percent—”

  “So it is possible that an individual with a tumor such as the defendant’s could be perfectly rational right up until surgery?”


  “A lot is possible. The body is amazing, and constantly defies our expectations. The brain, more yet. The mind, even more than that.”

  “So that’s a yes?”

  “It is.”

  “And is it also possible,” Harriman continued, wheeling on me and piercing me with a top-shelf stare, “that a very clever individual, someone much like our defendant, might use all these conditions that you’ve so generously laid out as smoke cover for a premeditated plan?”

  As my lawyers leapt to their feet with objections, Harriman remained perfectly still, a slight smile tensing her lips, her eyes never leaving mine. She was articulate and sharp, attuned to the inherent ridiculousness of matters. Her calm unnerved me. There was much murmuring and disorder in the court, and the judge nodded to the bailiff, who called for recess.

  After we returned, the onslaught continued. Our witnesses. Their witnesses. Detective Three Bill Kaden assumed the stand, every bit as sturdy as he’d been in that moment when I’d returned to consciousness. Bristly mustache, thick wrists, golf shirt under a blazer. Scrappy, chinless Ed Delveckio watched from the gallery and nodded along with Kaden’s testimony, twenty courtroom feet and one rank separating him from his senior partner. The boning knife made an appearance, stained nearly to the end of the handle, swinging crudely in an evidence bag. I did my best not to break down or react with anger.

  Next up was Lloyd Wagner, a criminalist who’d lent me his time on several occasions to process fictitious bodies and who’d responded with the lab team to Genevieve’s house. Yet another disturbing spillover from my prior life. 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. Dressed in his dated court suit and holding a duplicate knife taken from my very own kitchen, Lloyd offered me an apologetic little nod before displaying on a dummy the forcefulness of the plunge that had yielded the stab wound. I found myself, along with the jury and audience, wincing at the viciousness.

  After Lloyd’s performance the voice mail Genevieve had left for me the night of her death was given yet another airing, issuing from Katherine Harriman’s laptop.

  A respectful silence for the voice of the dead. “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.”

  Of course, Genevieve hadn’t been with someone new, at least no one she’d told her friends or family about. Her not-so-deft manipulation wasn’t devastating to me from where I sat now, though the prosecution asserted that it had been on the night of September 23. The defense asserted privately that the message made Genevieve less sympathetic and publicly that it had provided the final jolt of head pressure to initiate my ganglioglioma’s interference. Given my lack of criminal history, Donnie argued, the tumor was the only logical explanation for my behavior.

  On day five of sanity, cutting through any calluses I thought I had built up, Genevieve’s family made their eagerly awaited entrance. Her mother, long of bone and broad of bosom, requisite Hermès scarf draped across her clay-court shoulders, rode the arm of her husband, ever dapper in a bespoke suit. Though they carried themselves with characteristic elegance, there was a hollowing in their cheeks, a nearly imperceptible erosion in posture, that betrayed their crushing loss. At Luc’s other side strode Adeline, her fair face flushed to overtake her freckles. Though they stared at me with unmitigated hatred, the reality of their diminished presence, Luc’s quavering hand touching the hard wood before he sat, undid whatever self-protective remove I’d managed. Their appearance, timed just before I was to take the stand, had precisely the effect on me Harriman wanted. My throat tightened, my lips jumped, and I leaned forward on the table and pressed both palms to my face as if to hold it together. My reaction was likely taken by the jury as shame, but it was worse than shame. It was the final roosting of Genevieve’s loss, a woman whom I had loved, perhaps not wisely, but had loved nonetheless.

  Donnie asked for a recess so I could get myself together to take the stand, but the judge denied the request. My heart still pounding, I climbed those three short steps to the birch witness stand and raised my right hand, finally able to take in the faces of the gallery without peeking furtively over a shoulder. There was a heightened intensity to it all, yet also an apologetic ordinariness. Reporters in their good suits, cameramen with their digital gear, the court stenographer pretending not to chew gum.

  Donnie questioned me gently and with great empathy. When her time came, Harriman strolled toward me, relaxed, a text open in one hand like a psalmbook. She’d removed the dust jacket, so I didn’t know what was coming until she read, “‘We all have an ex-lover we want to kill. If we’re lucky, we’ve got two or three.’”

  The book snapped shut like a turtle’s jaws, startling the jurors in their seats. “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You wrote that, did you not?”

  I acknowledged that I had.

  “So you don’t expect us to believe what you write?”

  “Of course not,” I said. Terry gave me the patting-down hands, so I proceeded, more obligingly. “The protagonist, Derek Chainer, says that. An author doesn’t necessarily endorse the views voiced by his characters. I create characters who are not me and—on a good day—breathe life into them.”

  “So you write things you don’t believe?”

  “I try to let the characters express their own opinions.”

  “Just a way to sell more trashy novels in supermarkets?”

  “And airports.”

  She smiled. Just two friends bantering. “How about this line? ‘I believe, in my darkest heart of hearts, that when fate and passion align, every last one of us, from the pulpit crier to the bus-stop blue-hair, is capable of murder.’” She circled closer to me. “Is that your belief, or merely the expressed view of a character?”

  There was a gallows silence, an electric sense in the air that, as they say, it all came down to this.

  I said, “I believe that anyone is capable of anything.”

  My attorneys crumpled in a fashion that might have been amusing under different circumstances, and Harriman’s eyes got bright and excited.

  “So you believe right now, when you’re allegedly sound of mind, that you could very well be capable of committing the unspeakable act for which you’ve been found guilty.”

  “Capable, yes,”—and here I had to raise my voice to speak over her cutting me off—“just like you.”

  “Except, last I checked, Genevieve Bertrand didn’t break off an engagement to me.” Harriman nodded away the judge’s reprimand, one hand raised in a mea culpa.

  Stories, no matter how bad, are L.A.’s lifeblood. I’d bet that Ms. Harriman, like every prosecutor I’d met within Dolby distance of the film studios, had been asked at one time to be a consultant for a one-hour drama. Or she’d had a writer like me tag along for a trial to pester her with questions. A cousin’s husband, perhaps, who needed a few minutes on the phone so he could make that third act of his script sing. Many a time I’d been that guy, that sheepish eavesdropper to the hue and cry of the Angeleno justice system. I’d dealt with cops who watched too much TV about cops, so they acted like the cops they watched on TV who were imitating real-life cop advisers. Narrative and crime—a twirling snake with its tale in its mouth. Wudn’t me. I was just minding my own bidness when…

  A few hours later as I listened, rapt, to Katherine Harriman’s closing argument, it dawned on me just how skilled a storyteller she was. And this, she claimed, was my story.

  On the night of September 23 at 1:08 A.M., roused by a ringing phone, I’d slid from my bed, leaving April there, asleep. As I’d listened to the voice-mail message left by Genevieve Bertrand, all my resentment and bitterness had congealed into a plan. I’d driven over to her house, a hobbler stuck in a canyon fold off Coldwater. I’d retrieved the key from under the potted philodendron on the porch and entere
d, turning left to the kitchen, where I’d taken the boning knife from its oak block. I’d drifted up the flight of stairs to Genevieve’s bedroom. Awakened by my prowlings, she’d met me halfway across her white carpet, where I’d thrust the blade through her solar plexus on the rise, evading her ribs and piercing her heart. She’d died more or less instantly. Afterward I’d held and rolled her body around in its fluttery silk gown, like a cat batting a wounded mouse. For the finale, panic-stricken by the crime I’d just perpetrated, I’d had a mental break, a complex partial seizure that, when the cops and paramedics arrived, secondarily generalized into a grand mal. I’d fallen on top of the body and seized almost continuously until I’d reached the Cedars-Sinai ER, where they’d run IV Ativan to calm my thrashing. A CT had revealed the stowaway nestled into the anterior reaches of my temporal lobe, as well as some hemorrhaging, and I’d been whisked into surgery, awakening at breakfast time with a stunningly opportune justification.

  Katherine Harriman thanked the jury for their time and attention, smiled disarmingly, and sat down, immersing herself in paperwork so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge Donnie as he began his closing.

  “Our clever killer, our plotter of murder most foul, could come up with no scheme better than this? He snuck over to Genevieve Bertrand’s house and then…what? Decided to leave the front door wide open? So both Westec and the neighbors would call the police, you see. Because he also planned precisely when he was going to have a seizure. He held back until just the right moment, you see. This man, this clever man, thought it would be beneficial for his ganglioglioma to swell that extra millimeter right there in Ms. Bertrand’s bedroom, sending him into a grand mal seizure so the police could find him in his compromised state, establishing evidence for the insanity plea he knew he’d require during the trial he knew he’d have. Certainly the most logical approach for a clearheaded individual, don’t you think? Well, happily, his elaborate plan paid off. Because he definitely fooled me. I’ve had the duty of trying over thirty murder cases in my career, and never—and I mean never—have I been more certain of a client’s compromised sanity at the time of an incident than I am today.”