The Crime Writer Page 7

  Chic and I sat at the picnic table, drinking O’ Doul’s and counting the passing cars. We got to fifteen before a middle-aged guy in a construction truck bellowed, “You’re a fuckin’ choker, Bales!”

  Chic and I waved as we’d practiced many a time, the beauty-queen hand pivot.

  A one-game playoff to determine the NL West had taken place up at San Francisco a few years before I’d met Chic. The Pop-Up. I’d cursed at it live, and thousands of replays had kept it fresh in my mind ever since. Bottom of the eighth, Dodgers in the field, up by one. Runners at the corners. Tie game. Robbie Thompson hits a towering pop-up, two outs voiding the infield-fly rule. Bales is under it, waves off the second baseman. An eternity as the ball fights swirling Candlestick winds. Uribe, circling from first, is halfway down the third-base line when the ball nicks Bales’s glove, strikes his thigh, and dribbles into the Dodgers’ dugout. The Men in Blue go three up, three down in the top of the ninth and lose the pennant. Chic goes out drinking and doesn’t come back for two years.

  I said, “At least now I can keep you company in the ranks of the despised. I feel like the tuba player in high school.”

  Chic smiled. “High school. Worst six years of my life.”

  “Does it ever get to you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Really?”

  “Course it does, Drew-Drew. But then I remind myself: Everyone carries a burden. It’s about how gracefully you elect to bear it. Don’t you read the Good Book?” He snickered, worked something out from between his teeth. “My burden’s making a fuckload of money, then becoming one of the biggest goats in the history of Major League Baseball. So I made a fool of myself in front of twenty million people. Nineteen-plus of who I don’t know and never will.” He shrugged. “Beats getting gang-raped in a Rwandan torture camp.”

  I conceded the point.

  “What I did ain’t no J-O-B. Yours ain’t neither. There’s no need for our so-called services, and no sick baby gonna get cured by a page-turner or an opposite-field line drive.” He paused, his thick arms straightening in an air swing. “Pretty as it may be. What I provided can’t even be construed as a luxury. Lamenting that I been marginalized? Hated? Shit, I’d rather work on my barbecue sauce. ’ Cuz you know that takes a brother having his head on right.”

  “But I didn’t just drop a pop fly,” I said.

  “Oh, now you know what you did or didn’t do?” He flicked a kernel of corn off his knee. “James wrote a project last week about the environment. That drunk-ass Exxon Valdez captain, spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil in that sound up there. Eleven million. Killed about a kazillion birds and otters and shit. The government said—and the government, in my humble GED opinion, is overly optimistic—that it’d take thirty years to clean up. That puts it out till, shit, 20 20. And I’m pretending to help James write this muthafucker until Angela finishes with Asia in the bath, and the whole time I’m wondering, how’s that poor muthafucker get up in the morning? So after James goes to bed, I look him up. He’s an insurance adjuster in Long Island. Wakes up every day, drinks his coffee, and goes to work like the rest of us sorry sacks. He got moufs to feed. And I say, good for him.” He looked over at me and said, “What’s wrong? This is supposed to be uplifting.”

  “I knew about the tumor. For months.” I looked for shock or condemnation in his face but found neither. “I was too scared and too strapped to do anything about it. I kept it secret because I was worried that when I got health insurance again they wouldn’t pay for the surgery if they knew it was a preexisting condition.”

  “So?”

  “So?”

  “I didn’t hear no lawyer ask you if you knew you had a tumor. You didn’t perjure yourself. And, far as I know, thinking about defrauding an insurance company ain’t a crime. I doubt you would’ve had the nerve to go through with it anyway.”

  It was just a skip to a wicked irony, one that had contributed to my insomnia these past months. Genevieve may have died because of my brain tumor, but her dying had likely saved my life.

  I said, “This makes me guilty even if I’m innocent.”

  “No, it don’t make you guilty. It makes you feel guilty. It makes you guiltier if you actually did it. But whatever way it happened or didn’t, I got your back.”

  “Even if I’m guilty-guilty?”

  “If you’re innocent, you don’t need no help, do you?”

  I didn’t trust my voice to thank him, but he saw it in my face.

  He winked and took another pull of near beer. “They say a real friend is someone who helps you move. The neighborhood I’m from, a real friend is someone who helps you move a body.” He cocked his head, training his brown eyes on me. His curled lashes, vaguely feminine, didn’t match the rest of him. “Now, how ’ bout you fill me in on what’s really going on?”

  I told him about the previous night’s dream and the cut on my foot and driving to Genevieve’s. “I can’t live with this,” I said. “I wake up and I don’t know where I’ve been. I set up a goddamned digital camera in my bedroom to watchdog myself. I’m checking my odometer to see if I left the house. The obvious explanation is that I’m insane. But I know I’m not insane.”

  “Or maybe you a little insane, like the rest of us.”

  “You think I cut my own foot?”

  Chic shrugged. “First day back in the world, you up in your head like you are? I’d lay odds on yeah. Especially with all this secret tumor business—should be clear why you obsessed. But I’ll tell you this: If someone is messing with you? Then this is only the intro duction.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They’re doing it for a rea-son. And given you’re not a politician or Donald Trump, someone’s doin’ a lot of work to get…what?”

  He ran his massive palm over his hair, shaved tight to his scalp with a silly line cut diagonally in the front like a part.

  “So which do I hope for?” I finally asked. “That I am being fucked with? Or that I’m losing it?”

  “What’s behind Door Number Three?”

  I blew out a breath. “I can’t stop picking at this, but at the same time what if I don’t like what I find?”

  He finished his O’ Doul’s, musing powerfully as only Chic can. Then he said, “Face everything.” He tossed the empty bottle and hit the open trash can ten yards away. “One day at a time.”

  We drove back to my house in silence, Chic reaching over once or twice to squeeze my neck. I was halfway up the walk when he whistled through his teeth. He was at the curb, truck running behind him. “I know it’s been circled around, but no one ever says it dead on.” He licked his lips, not looking away. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  As he headed back around the truck, a passing jogger flipped him off.

  He waved.

  8

  That night I sat and watched commercials. Just commercials. I wasn’t up to sustained drama. The usual high-stakes action ensued. Soap products busied themselves fighting grime. Closet messes overwhelmed frazzled housewives. Animated fungi rooted under toenails.

  My cell phone vibrated pleasingly in my pocket, and I dug it out.

  Preston asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Lying around listlessly. Bemoaning an unjust universe.”

  “I’m in the neighborhood. Drop by?”

  “No?”

  “See you in ten.”

  Forty-five minutes later, the doorbell rang. I yelled, “You have a key!”

  Preston came in, glanced around the family room. “The drawn curtains. The dirty dishes. The ragged clothing. How about we rewrite this scene?”

  Preston is a better friend than he seems. He’d come to see me in jail second, after Chic, browbeating the rookie guard into extending visitor hours. Though he wasn’t a smoker, he’d lit up behind the Plexiglas, I’d assumed, out of regard for the ambience. Trying to repress a cough, he’d shot smoke past the crest of his bangs and remarked, “They don’t really make a Hallmark card for this o
ne, do they?”

  In his interior forties, Preston has intense blue eyes and a square jaw that flexes out at the corners when he’s working to a point, which is often. He’d been my editor for all five of my books, and I’d yet to find him wanting for an opinion on any matter trivial or life-threatening. Infuriatingly resolute, unusually hands-on, overly involved, he seems to live through the books he publishes. He loves make-believe, but the set of his features showed a heightened thrill at now being in the real-life-of-it-all.

  His head-tilted appraisal of me continued. “How do you feel getting out?” He seemed to have shape-shifted already—into the street-wise confederate with a hard-boiled mouth.

  “Off balance.” I shrugged. “My horoscope says it’s because Jupiter’s in my twelfth house.”

  “That is bad,” he mused. “Once, growing up, we had a possum in our outhouse.” Preston grew up in an academic family in Charlottesville, and now and then he lets a yokelism slip into his conversation. Owning apartments in Manhattan and West Hollywood on an editor’s salary doesn’t square with outhouse and possum references, but if you took away Preston’s affectations, there’d be no one left to argue with.

  He looked around, folding his arms, helpless against the mess of my house. “I suppose you seem to be holding together, given the circumstances,” he conceded.

  “My suffering has ennobled me.”

  He pursed his lips and regarded me as if perhaps that weren’t true.

  I said, “Thanks for getting my mail. Not to mention cosigning the mortgage refinance.”

  Preston waved me off—no time for niceties—then nodded at the Band-Aid on my foot. “What happened there?”

  “I cut myself with a boning knife.”

  “Naturally. Why?”

  “Because I’m a nutcase.”

  “Why don’t you give me the backstory?”

  He feigned patience as I filled him in on the bizarre events of last night. When I was done, he said, “Let me make a cup of tea.” He disappeared into the kitchen, then called out, “Do you have a lime?”

  “Try the fridge.”

  He returned a few minutes later with a glass of ice and the bottle of Havana Club he’d smuggled back from an ostensible research trip to Cuba and given, also ostensibly, to me as an oh-look-it’s-contraband souvenir. He kept it hidden in my kitchen so other guests wouldn’t access it. Sitting on the long arm of my sectional’s L, he sipped his rum. I noted, with some irritation, he hadn’t offered to bring me anything.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?” I asked.

  “I extended my office leave.” A sly grin. “I’m editing out here for the next few months so I can be supportive.” He tapped his manicured nails together. “Look, Drew, I’m not gonna lie to you. I don’t know if you did it or not. But I do know one thing: If I were you, and if I had a modicum of doubt as to my guilt, I wouldn’t be sitting around.”

  “You’d do what?”

  “Investigate.”

  “Get me forensics, a blood panel, and sat footage of the canyon.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. You can’t afford it. You may be free, but the public views you as a murderer. You’re tarred with that brush, and, unlike O.J., you can’t just retire to a golf course and live off your bloated retirement accounts. If you accept the verdict as delivered, fine. Start not drinking again. But if you don’t accept that verdict, you have to get away from that tumor, dig down into what happened, and exonerate yourself.” He crunched ice thoughtfully. “The story you should be working on is the one that’s working on you.”

  He took another swig, cubes clinking musically against the glass. Unable to manage his own life at all, he was happy to micromanage mine. Would he micromanage me right into a padded room? I settled back in my chair, studied the smooth white ceiling.

  He continued, “Harriman effectively painted you as the killer. But this insanity nonsense might not be the real version of events. And if not, you have to find your story. The real story.” His eyes gleamed. He was Excited By The Possibilities. “Maybe you didn’t do it. Maybe someone did break into your house. Maybe there is a furtive Gaslight plot to mess with your head. We don’t read the books about the nine hundred ninety-nine times something goes as expected. We read those about the one time it goes wrong. Or strangely. Or extraordinarily. And there are enough oddities here that this”—he pointed at me—“could be the case.” He stared at me, but before I could respond, he was going again. “This is your life. What have you done to explore this since you’ve been home?”

  “I looked around the house, checked my e-mail and PalmPilot to see if I could piece anything together, talked to—”

  “Oh, well, I’m riveted. Did you do lots of tortured sulking, too? Play the saxophone in the dark?”

  My face was burning. “I tried to keep sulking to a minimum, but yes, I may have sulked some. Moderate darkness. But no moody wind instruments.”

  “What did you do today?”

  “Opened the mail. And I ate yams.”

  “You ate yams?”

  “At Chic’s house.”

  He threw up his hands as if that said it all. “Do you want to make progress or do you want to be angry?”

  I thought for a moment. “I want to be angry.”

  “What would Dirk Chincleft do?”

  Preston has various unflattering nicknames for Derek Chainer. That’s the good thing about editors. Wit.

  “Dirk Chincleft is a homicide detective,” I said. “He has official leverage. I don’t have leverage.”

  “Come on! You’re stuck in the first act, and you’re not driving your narrative. You know better. You impact the plot. Or the plot impacts you.”

  “This isn’t a fucking story.”

  He leaned forward, jabbing a finger at the floor. “Everything’s a fucking story. And you’re letting this one languish. What you need is something to kick down the front door, come barreling into the plot, crashing into the story. Make you react. Make you act. But in the likely event that that isn’t gonna happen, you need to uncover what happened. If you’re not afraid to.” His gaze zeroed in on me; he’d sensed perhaps that he’d flicked a vulnerability. “A writer’s job, perhaps more than any other, is not to be afraid of possibilities.”

  “But I am.” I hadn’t realized it until I heard it out loud, even from my own mouth. I was afraid of what I’d discover, and that fear had stalled me out.

  We’d veered into The Writer’s Feelings, uncomfortable territory for Preston. He broke eye contact, gathering the strap of his bag, his intensity suddenly dissipated. He stood and dusted his pants. “I hate to sound L.A.-loathsome, but I’ve got bikram yoga.”

  “Yoga with the Muppets?”

  “Hot room. Hundred and five degrees.” Master of the last word, Preston paused at the threshold to the living room. For once his expression was sincere. “Dirk Chincleft wouldn’t take it lying down.”

  The front door closed neatly behind him, and the dead bolt set with a smug click.

  I’d never imagined that freedom would feel so constraining. If I’d been convicted, I’d have had the benefit of lurid prison tales, stoic last words as they strapped me into the chair. Preston was right about one thing: I was at a narrative dead end. I contemplated my options. None seemed appealing, so I stomped upstairs, echoes of Preston’s oppressing me more with each step. Where do you go when the case is closed and the courts, the cops, the press, the public, and maybe even you believe you’re the killer? In real life? Fucking nowhere, that’s where.

  Or maybe, if you’re lucky, you go to sleep. Which is what I was finally going to do.

  I took two steps into my bedroom and froze.

  My brain tumor was gone. Save my clock radio and bedside lamp the nightstand was empty. No glass jar, not even a lingering drop of formaldehyde.

  My skin tingled with electricity.

  The last time I could remember seeing it was just after I’d come in from smoking a cigar on the deck. Had I hidde
n or disposed of it while in my foot-cutting trance? Panic congealed at the back of my throat, constricting my breathing. I ran my hands through my hair, hard, feeling the ridge of scar tissue against my left palm.

  I threw back the comforter and looked under the bed. The nightstand drawers held only their usual contents. I searched the cabinets of my bathroom next, flinging bottles and cold-medicine boxes onto the counter. I tore apart my office, tugging and slamming drawers, digging through the trash can. The guest room downstairs was next, then the living room. Charging into the kitchen, I caught sight of a gleam in the sink.

  A curved wedge of thick glass.

  I drew near. The familiar screw lid, a collection of shards. No ganglioglioma.

  I’d been in the kitchen today only to grab the can of almonds. Had I glanced in the sink? Probably not. How about last night, after I’d followed my own bloody footprints around? Had I looked? Not closely.

  I picked out the glass debris and set it on the counter. After staring at the rubber mouth of the disposal for a moment, I shoved up my sweatshirt sleeve and pushed my hand gently through. Keeping a nervous eye on the light switch that could set the chopping blades in motion, I groped around, dreading what my tumor might feel like. Slick and firm? Moist? Kernels of glass pinched my fingers. I explored thoroughly but found the disposal empty. Had I run it last night, flushing the tumor for once and for all? Or had my stalker kidnapped it to drive me further into the state of paranoia in which I’d taken up residence?

  From its latched wooden box, I took a twenty-year Warre’s, resting in its place the remains of the shattered jar. Then I gave last rites, pouring the full bottle of port into the maw of the garbage disposal to which the tumor may have been committed.

  Exhausted and mystified, I trudged back upstairs, crawled into bed, and finally dozed off.

  At 4:00 A.M. my house imploded.

  9

  The boom jerked me upright with a cry, and then I heard a screech of heavy objects, the shriek of broken glass. A deluge of manpower rushing inside. Pounding boots up the stairs. In my post-slumber haze, the intruders seemed like rising devils, I like a dumbstruck Faust. For a moment I was back in my cell, phantom voices drifting up to me.