The Crime Writer Page 5

  As Donnie continued, vehement and passionate, I felt a surge of affection, something even like love, for this man who had, for a fee, taken on my cause and argued it as his own. When he finished forty-five rousing minutes later, he sat, practically panting adrenaline, and marshaled his papers into the stretched maw of his briefcase.

  After the jury filed out, I reached over, squeezed his neck, and said to him and Terry, “Regardless of how this thing goes, I want you to know I appreciate what you did for me here.”

  We clasped hands for a moment, all three of us.

  The second verdict came back three hours and nineteen minutes later.

  4

  The kitchen floor beneath my bare feet felt as cool as the stainless-steel handle of the chef’s knife. Through the dark I stared at the blank slit in the knife block where the boning knife should have been. I’d closed the sliding glass door—had I locked someone in with me? My heart revving, I looked through the doorway at the trail of marks I’d figured for footprints. The last few were visible on the carpet before it gave over to the flagstone entry.

  Not dirt, as I’d thought.

  Blood.

  I had a moment’s lapse into terror, genuine kid-in-the-dark terror, before I recalled that I was an adult and had no options except to outgrow my mood and handle business. Firming my grip on the chef’s knife, I eased through the doorway into the entry. No one peering down at me from the upstairs railing that lined the catwalk from stairs to study to bedroom.

  The footprints hadn’t ceased at the foyer flagstone, though they were harder to make out against slate. But there, two steps up on the carpeted stairs, another bloody C. I gazed up, the staircase fading into the dark.

  Tamping down my fear, I followed. Every other step bore the mark.

  I reached the top of the stairs. The footprints continued straight into my bedroom. I moved forward, knife held upside down along my forearm, blade out, as I’d learned from an expert knife fighter while broadening Derek Chainer’s repertoire. I reached the threshold. Bracing myself, I swept inside.

  No one was there. But on the carpet at the foot of my bed, the boning knife gleamed. I moved forward, crouched over it. The skin of my right foot was smudged, just above the little toe and extending down my outstep. I reached down, noticing that the pads of my fingers also bore dark stains. Smears on the boning-knife handle. And on the blade’s edge at the tip. My head swam a bit.

  I raised my foot, noting the distinctive, if now faint, C mark left behind on the carpet.

  My own blood. My own footprints.

  I turned on the lights, set down the chef’s knife, and returned to the boning knife on the floor. A jagged print of blood on my left thumb matched a mark left on the stainless handle. The blood on my fingers from, I assumed, touching the cut on my foot, also left predictable marks matching my grip.

  My fingerprints. On my boning knife.

  I washed my foot in the tub. For all the blood, it was a humble cut. A clean incision, no more than an inch long, about a thumb’s width back from the base of the little toe. A Band-Aid took care of it.

  My head still felt unusually foggy—ganglioglioma, back for a holiday sequel? I tried to tease apart which concerns were reasonable and which weren’t but found my perspective momentarily shot. Was someone running me through a rat maze? Either I was driving myself insane or someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that I would. I sat on the tub’s edge, hugging my stomach and shuddering, until compulsion drove me around the house, flicking on light switches, searching for a body, an intruder, Allen Funt and his Candid Camera crew.

  Checking for signs of a break-in, I examined the security rod for dings and the track in which it sat for scrapes in the paint, but both were unmarred. I’d sleepwalked downstairs and opened it myself? Why would I have gone outside?

  I returned upstairs and stared at my bed, dumbfounded. A few smears of blood on the sheets, the same sheets in which I’d just dreamed of Genevieve’s house. A bizarrely vivid dream. During which I’d sleepwalked downstairs, retrieved the boning knife, returned to bed, and cut my foot? Why? Couldn’t I find a more productive way to punish myself?

  The dream flooded back, in all its significance, and I felt a jolt of excitement. I couldn’t know if I’d gone temporarily insane, but I could verify something I might actually know. If Genevieve’s sprinkler was in fact snapped and the saucer broken, then I wasn’t completely hallucinating. At least I could determine whether I’d retrieved a fragment of the night Genevieve had been killed.

  I got dressed and went downstairs. In my hybrid Guiltmobile, I checked the odometer, as if it could answer any of the riddles I was failing to work out. I started a mileage column on a pad in the glove box, so I’d know if I took my addled brain for a spin in the future.

  Driving along Mulholland on a sliver of moonlight, I felt I was doing something illegal. I probably was.

  I slalomed down Coldwater, slowing for the sharp turn past the bent street sign. And then there I was, in my dream, driving up the sharp grade. The streetlight, filtered through a wayward branch. The too-narrow street, laid out in the days before three-car households slopped spare SUVs to the curb. Sweat rose on my forehead, as if complying with the script. Maybe I was dreaming now. Maybe I’d created—and was now re-creating—this whole thing.

  The hairpin came up fast, my tires giving their mandatory screech, and Genevieve’s house looked down at me. From atop its perch, the house seemed daunting—backed snugly to the hillside, stilts shoved disapprovingly into the earth as if my car were a rat, it a Great Dane sizing up the situation.

  I climbed out, my door dinging. At the edge of the lawn, the crushed sprinkler stopped me short.

  I want this not to be true. I want it not to have happened.

  I had not known the sprinkler to be broken, except in my dream when my Highlander jumped the curb. Which meant that it had not been a dream.

  God, oh, God, I was alone in that Highlander. I came up this walk alone. I found the key alone. There was me and only me.

  I headed up the slope, the pavers loose under my shoes, rocking in their beds and freeing up trickles of dirt. I knew what I’d find, but I had to confirm it.

  The boards creaked when I stepped onto the porch. The house was quiet and, I hoped, empty. What possible excuse could I stammer out if sister Adeline appeared at the door?

  The split-leaf philodendron waved at me from its terra-cotta pot. I wiped my palms on my jeans and crouched, pushing back the spouts of leaves to peer under.

  A zigzag crack marred the clay saucer, a lightning bolt almost reaching the lip.

  Not a dream.

  A piece of my missing past.

  5

  Driving home in a stupor, I tried to process the ramifications of what I’d just discovered. If my dream was right, as the sprinkler and saucer seemed to indicate, then I’d arrived alone at Genevieve’s house. That didn’t look good for me. But the same questions remained. Why had I gone over there that night? Had watching someone else kill Genevieve tripped my brain-tumor blackout? The old frustration simmered below the surface. Why hadn’t anyone—the cops, the prosecutors, my own lawyers—looked with serious doubt at anything except my sanity? Hadn’t we all jumped in late in the plot?

  I’d pored over the murder book that Homicide had turned over during discovery, but nothing in the investigative notes or police report pointed elsewhere—none of the dead ends or dropped leads that compose the frayed edges around every reconstructed picture of a crime. It was too tidy an account, an investigation that had its mind made up from the outset. I also had my mind made up from the outset, though my argument had the advantage of no evidence and greater implausibility—as I’d come to think of it, Occam’s Hacksaw.

  A glimmer of hope cut through my exhaustion. If I had recovered one memory from the night of Genevieve’s death, then I could recover others. Which meant I could get at the truth, no matter how ugly it was shaping up to be.

  My cell
phone rang, startling me, and I screwed in the earpiece, wondering who would be calling at midnight.

  Donnie’s voice greeted me. “Where’ve you been? We’ve been trying you all night. Terry finally tracked down your cell-phone number.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Just went for a drive.”

  “Sometimes the first night home can be tough.”

  I regarded my hands gripping the steering wheel. “Can’t imagine why.”

  He picked up my tone and laughed. “Need some company? Terry and I could swing by.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’m okay.”

  “Well, if there’s anything you need.”

  “Actually…” The idea sprang up, surprising me, though it had been lurking just beneath awareness all along. “I was wondering if I could get my hands on the case files.”

  “We won the case, Andrew. You’re free of all that now.” There was a pause, and then he said, “You’re writing a book?”

  “Just trying to work through what happened.”

  “What do you say you take a night off? Even Katherine Harriman is out having a drink. One of our paralegals just spotted her crying into her martini on the Promenade.”

  “Katherine Harriman doesn’t cry. And certainly not in public.”

  “And neither should you. Not tonight anyway. Listen, Terry and I have encountered this a lot with our acquitted clients. They rework the trial like worrying a loose tooth, trying to find…I don’t know, absolution. They don’t find it there. Let me give you some advice: Let it go. Get back to your life.”

  I reached my turn. Right to my house, left to the freeway. I veered left. “I’d like those files, Donnie.”

  His breath blew across the receiver. “Well, they’re yours, Andrew. We’re certainly not gonna keep them from you. We’ll need a day or two to make copies.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Which bar did your paralegal see Katherine Harriman in?”

  Coyly set a half block back from Santa Monica’s heavily trod Third Street Promenade, Voda serves a hundred-plus labels of vodka and the one grade of caviar that counts. With its black-suited doormen and reserved seating, it likes to believe it’s exclusive, but the management isn’t above siphoning in tourists when the upholstered booths aren’t filling up. Past the bouncer, who hesitated, recognizing but not placing me, were imported bottles, protruding on stone ledges from the wall, and plenty of glossy men and women, also available for consumption. Candles, Hawaiian protea blossoms, and flagstone waterfalls completed the confused tropical-gulag motif.

  Harriman was at the black lacquer bar, slender legs crossed. Tapping an impaled pickled onion on the rim of her Gibson, she watched me approach without so much as a lifted eyebrow.

  I dropped into the swivel chair next to her and ordered a Brilliant vodka on the rocks, which I sniffed and left on the cocktail napkin. She ignored me as if ignoring men were something she’d spent a lifetime perfecting, and so we sat and watched the water trickle down the flagstone as I worked up my nerve.

  “I knew about my brain tumor.” The words, finally spoken, continued to resonate in my head. “My health insurance had lapsed. I was waiting on another script deal to get my Writers Guild coverage back. I’d had migraines for six months, then a short blackout. I went to a private provider in Ventura so if the tests did reveal something, it wouldn’t go on record as a preexisting condition. That’s why nothing showed up in any of the medical records you subpoenaed.”

  I didn’t add that my failure to act hadn’t been just about the money—though the money had played a considerable role. I’d stalled because I’d had a book deadline and an upcoming tour and a new relationship. And, like anyone else, I was terrified. When a surgery is elective, when do you make that firm decision to let a team of people carve around inside your brain? How do you choose the day? What if you don’t wake up? Or worse, what if they make a mistake and then you do?

  A few days after I’d blacked out over the washing machine, I’d seen a neurologist, who’d given me the unhappy diagnosis. The doctor had urged me to get the surgery, but I’d told him, protected under the veil of confidentiality, that I was willing to take the gamble and wait. The trial had provided me ample time to relive his answer. Are you willing to gamble the lives of the family in the minivan you crash into when you black out behind the wheel?

  Harriman lifted the onion off the plastic spike with her teeth, and as she crunched, I wondered whether she’d respond. Finally she said, “How much was the operation going to cost?”

  “Sixty-two grand.”

  “And how much was your legal retainer?”

  “Two-fifty.”

  She snickered—she couldn’t help it—and it took me a moment to realize she was laughing at us both.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m sure you’ll get plenty of screenwriting deals now.”

  “Yeah, I figured this would be an effective career strategy.”

  “There is something compellingly naïve about you. Even earnest.” She made a face, then signaled the bartender for another drink. Not her second.

  “How so?”

  “What you just confirmed is no thunderbolt from on high. We’d considered it, of course, did some investigating.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me when you had me on the stand?”

  “Because we weren’t sure, and even if we were right, you would have lied.”

  “Why do you assume that?”

  “You wouldn’t go to a doctor off record to cheat an insurance company if you were an honest guy.”

  “Fair enough. But I also wouldn’t have lied under oath.”

  “Well, you’ll have to forgive my skepticism for not wanting to stake my case on your integrity.” She took a healthy sip. “The prosecutor can’t just accuse a witness of lying. It’s not recess at elementary school. Putting out the kinds of books you type, you ought to know that. I would need to present evidence or testimony that refutes. And your lawyers never gave me a target. They’re overpriced, by the way. But hey, what do I know? You won. Sort of.” She gave me a big congratulatory smile. “Of course, if your honest-guy conscience had piped up, say, yesterday…who knows if we’d both be sitting here?” She flicked the rim of her glass with a polished nail. “Why today, Danner? And why find me? You looking for forgiveness?”

  Her tone made clear what her position on that would be.

  “No.”

  “Then why are you on about this? You got off.”

  “The verdict is irrelevant.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is. ‘Not guilty by reason of insanity’ sure as shit doesn’t mean ‘didn’t do it.’”

  “But here’s where we are. You didn’t convict me. Maybe you should have.”

  “Well, I’m sure any self-respecting second-rate crime novelist knows you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.”

  “I…” My hands itched to grip my drink, but I kept them still. “I remembered something. From the night of Genevieve’s death. I checked it, and it was right.”

  “Lemme guess—it exonerates you.”

  “No,” I said. “The opposite. I remembered driving over there. I was alone in the car.”

  She touched her fingertips to her open mouth, feigning immense surprise.

  “I think I can help get to what happened that night,” I said. “I still want to know if I plunged that knife into Genevieve’s stomach. And you can help me find out.”

  She laughed. “Do you know why I tried you, Danner? Market pressure. If you were a nobody, you would’ve pled your way down to a traffic ticket and walked before trial. But because, for whatever reason, this city decided to cast you as a celebrity defendant, we had to do something about our celebrity trial record, which—you may have noticed—is less than spectacular.”

  “So getting convictions is all you care about? Aren’t there some cases where you actually want to know the truth?”

  “The truth? The truth? W
hen you’re a trial lawyer, you learn something in a hurry. You’re supposedly questioning potential witnesses, but you’re rehearsing them and you know it. Once a witness has told you the version of the story that you’ve helped them arrive at, you get them to retell it over and over. And eventually that story—the story you’ve all shaped—it becomes the truth. And if you’re not careful or if you’re careful enough, the truth will include things that weren’t there to begin with. And that’s what you’re gonna have happening here, only worse. You might want to retell the story of the night of September twenty-third in your head a thousand times, but it was being interpreted before you supposedly woke up. You can never arrive at the truth.” She finished off her drink. “You know why? The facts are the raw material, not the finished product. And if you go looking for truth, you’re just gonna wind up chasing your tail. You’d do better to search for absolution.” A quick wave of her hand. “But not here.”

  I threw down a twenty and slid off the barstool. “Thanks for your time.”

  She didn’t bother looking up from her glass. “I’ll bill you.”

  It was past one by the time I reluctantly returned home. I wished there were something else I could do, somewhere else I could go. It struck me as I entered the darkness of my kitchen that I didn’t want to be alone with myself. During those chill jailhouse nights, I’d imagined plenty, but I hadn’t imagined that being labeled not guilty only by reason of insanity would leave me feeling like I’d rather die than live inside my own skin. I had to live with a lot more, too. Despite my neurologist’s warning, I’d chosen to take the risk—for myself, for that family of four in the minivan, for Genevieve. The cost of my selfishness sickened me.

  I scrubbed the blood from the carpet as best I could and washed off the boning knife. Then I went back upstairs and lay in bed. 2:13 A.M. Only four more hours until daybreak. Then what? What life would I live?