The Crime Writer (16 page)

Caroline glanced up at me. “Ready to go?”

I nodded. She released him. This time I followed her out to the parking lot. We paused between our cars. Xena was at my driver’s-side window, snub tail wagging.

“You’re a second-rate writer with a first-rate mouth,” Caroline said.

I looked for a snappy comeback—I would’ve even taken on-the-nose—but I had writer’s block and my jaw hurt. I touched it gingerly.

Caroline sighed, annoyed by her concern. “How do you feel?”

“Embarrassed.”

“I meant your jaw.”

“It’s embarrassed, too.”

“I bet.” She crossed her arms. “What important lessons did we learn here?”

“Don’t play pool with a woman who calls her cue Charlie?”

“One: This girl can take care of herself. Two: Don’t start a fight you can’t finish.”

A few cars blew by, honking, until one veered off down a side street. Condensation wafted through the screen from the barroom kitchen.

“It wasn’t your prerogative to get pissed off in there,” she said.

“You asked what I took away from the trial. I suppose I countenance spitefulness less well.”

“I know that game, too. I used to go around with my big bleeding heart, attuned to human frailties. The overweight girl, no rings, who nods a little too earnestly when people talk, eager to be useful. Little old lady at the bus stop, plastic bag shielding her purse in case it rains. Middle-aged immigrant working the counter at McDonald’s. And then I realized I was riding the Projection Express and figured I needed to reserve some of that concern for myself.”

I thought about her self-berating carrying through her office door.
No, it’s
not
okay. I didn’t double-schedule staff, and now he’s gonna wind up in the hall because of me.

She seemed to read my mind. “Not that I’m any good at it. But I did figure out one thing.”

“Which was?”

“You can’t get through life, which is this—shit—this fragile enterprise without getting damaged. You just don’t. Not if you’re a feeling person. Not if you don’t have your head buried in the sand.
Everybody’s
fucked up. Some of us are just in on the joke. And when you don’t want to see that in yourself, you see it in others.”

She climbed into her car and started to back out, then rolled down her window. “That’s what you don’t understand in that pulp you churn out. Everyone’s a good guy. Everyone’s a bad guy. It just depends how hard you’re willing to look.”

I
knocked again on the hemlock-wood door, then peered through one of the frosted glass panes. Though I’d picked up Preston out front many times, I’d never actually been inside his condo, a balconied two-room floating among the billboards of Sunset. It occurred to me that I’d always had an image of it—Milanese furniture, stone bathtub, faint whiff of sage hand soap.

The door opened face width. For an instant—even from this close—I mistook Preston for someone else. His hair, usually flared so carefully over his forehead, lay limp against his head, and he was unshaven, his stubble sprinkled with gray. I could see the lapels of a bathrobe—he hadn’t left all day?

Mortification flickered across his features.

I tried for a joke to put him at ease. “I didn’t tell you I was picking you up for a black-tie at the Beattys’?”

His face was tense; for once he wasn’t sure what to say. He cleared his throat, eased the door farther open. “I’ve been editing. No time to get my face on.” He said it with a defensive edge, and it occurred to me that in the years I’d known him he’d never extended an invitation for me to drop by. He always seemed so comfortable marching into my house with his own key that I’d assumed the informality ran both ways.

“Bad time?” I asked. “I could—”

“Well, you might as well come in
now.
” He stepped back, and I followed him down a brief, dark hall into the main room. The furnishings were hardly threadbare, but I was shocked by their ordinariness. A standard couch. White-tile kitchen. An antique credenza with hairline cracks, a ding or two away from a garage sale.

Preston returned to the tiny table by the window, sat, and gestured to the other chair. The table, stacked with shuffled sections of the
New York Times,
wasn’t really sized for more than one person. Preston set aside Arts and went back to the soggy bowl of cereal I assumed was his dinner. A bare leg poked out from the fold of his bathrobe.

The whole scene was so banal, so unfabulous, so decidedly un-Preston. I’d never seen him unshaven. I’d never seen him not nattily attired. I’d never seen him eating food bought at a grocery store. It was a perfectly ordinary scene in a perfectly nice condo, but it was also somehow a breach in my view of him and how he kept himself, and this we both sensed. Nothing had happened—nothing at all—but the awkwardness was pervasive.

“So?” he asked. “What’s so urgent it couldn’t wait for me to barge in on
you
?” He didn’t lift his gaze from the bowl; his heart wasn’t in the joke.

I pressed forward. “You’ll get a kick out of this. That kid—Junior, right? So I found him at Hope House….”

But the surroundings continued to distract me. Sodden coffee filter on the counter. A lonesome glass in the sink, awaiting the dishwasher. Manuscript sheaves, bearing Preston’s editor-red scrawl, had colonized most of the condo’s flat surfaces. The thought of him in here alone, only these chunks of text keeping him company, seemed oddly dismal. Had I expected him to edit during cocktail parties?

Atop the crammed bookshelf by the TV, bookended between two heavy mugs, sat a row of my hardcovers. The closest thing to a display in sight. Preston always badgered me so much about my writing that I’d forgotten that maybe he liked it. The possibility that he valued me more than he let on oddly diminished my view of him. A trust-fund editor more articulate than I was, he’d taken a gamble on me five books ago, and I hadn’t really updated my underlying view of him since. Though we’d become good friends, if not intimates, in my hidden thinking he’d always remained part of the unscalable edifice of New York publishing, and I felt a devotion to him for giving me that first hand up. I knew, of course, that I was an opportunity for him then and especially now. But perhaps I represented a more profound opportunity than I’d thought. Like the rest of us, Preston was busted in his own lovely way. But maybe he was also ordinary like the rest of us. Maybe he needed me as much as I needed him.

Preston had said something.

I refocused. “Sorry?”

“I said, ‘Yes, you found Junior…?’”

I forged back into the story—Xena and the cop and the jail cell—but I couldn’t convey the maddening hilarity of it. Preston humored me with a faint smile and the occasional nod, but we were both distracted and aware that the surface exchange had become a charade.

When I was finished, I said lamely, “You gotta meet this kid.” I riffled the edges of the nearest newspaper section until the noise grated. The air felt unvented, claustrophobic. I was eager to get out of there, impatient to start looking into the vehicle ID Junior had given me. Finally I said, “I gotta get over to Lloyd’s. Tell him about the Volvo. I just thought you’d get a kick out of the other stuff.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“You never disappoint, Preston.”

He summoned a smile before rising to see me out. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

L
loyd sat at the kitchen table, head bent, arms folded on a place mat dotted with crumbs. I’d informed him of my tentative vehicle ID at the door, and he’d taken a few steps back and sunk into a chair.

“Unbelievable,” he said. “You came up with a make, color, distinguishing body damage,
and
the first license-plate number?”

“Should I go to Kaden and Delveckio with it?”

“Let’s think this over.” He stood and poured himself a rum and Coke. I noticed that the bottle of Bacardi 8 I’d brought him two days ago was nearly empty. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and the blanket on the couch was thrown back. In the background a talking head chattered mindlessly about avian flu, predicting calamity and ruin. “You don’t know for sure that the Volvo belongs to the body dumper?”

“No. The witness split before he saw anything. It’s possible that another car could’ve come along after, but we’re talking a pretty narrow time frame here between when my witness left and when you snapped that first crime-scene photo.”

“Either way it’d be worth talking to the Volvo driver. Either he’s our guy, or he likely saw something.” Lloyd sucked an ice cube from the glass, crunched it loudly. “How reliable is your witness?”

I tried to imagine Kaden and Delveckio taking Junior seriously.

Lloyd read my face. “Then we should load the deck. Let me run the info in the morning, see what I find. I can’t check for a wheel-well dent, obviously, but with everything else? You’ve given me some great search criteria. If I come up with a strong suspect, you’ll be better armed bringing it in to Kaden and Delveckio.” He aimed a forefinger at me. “But no mention of me.”

“I haven’t implicated you in anything. And I won’t.”

A moan, cracked with dehydration, floated down the hall, and then a faint cry that I realized was his name being called.

Lloyd jerked to his feet and jogged back into the house, his steps sped by panic. The voice had been startling—frightening, even—and I found myself standing at the mouth of the hall peering down its length. The bedroom door was closed as usual, but through it I heard Lloyd’s voice, raised with concern, and the sound of bottles clinking. I was unsure whether I should slip out, giving them privacy. I had, after all, barged in late and unannounced on a Monday night after another unsuccessful round of calls to Lloyd’s various numbers. Persistence and self-centeredness—useful traits for a writer, but they didn’t make me the most considerate name in the Rolodex. As a penance I tidied up the kitchen, trying to make headway against the avalanche of housework that confronted Lloyd each morning.

I stacked the dishes, wiped the counters, and gathered the loose trash—stale tacos included—into several grocery bags, all the while thinking of Caroline’s comment about trusting selfish motives. Lloyd likely wouldn’t notice, but the thought of leaving him with a clean kitchen made me feel better. I finished and resolved to go.

I had my hand on the doorknob when I heard Lloyd’s voice behind me. “I always thought death was beautiful.”

I turned, and there he was, holding a tray loaded with dirty teacups, bowls filled with uneaten food, and a crusted washcloth. His back was slightly stooped, as though the tray were pulling him downward, and his eyes looked sunken and weary.

I released the doorknob, took the tray from him, and set it by the sink.

“I don’t mean it in a creepy way,” he said. “The colors, if you detach yourself. Burnt oranges and greens and deep blues. Like an autumn bouquet. It’s beautiful, death.” He looked up, his expression blank, dazed. “But not dying. No, dying’s quite awful.”

“She okay?”

“Her line worked its way out. Blood spray on the sheets, her clothes, the floor. It happens.”

He shuffled over a half step and slid into the kitchen chair.

I said, “Do you want me to go? Maybe you want to be alone?”

Lloyd picked at the edge of his place mat. “And the clothes that are comfortable. That provide…access.” He blew out his cheeks. “Terry cloth. Polyester. I should design elegant deathwear. I’d make a fortune.”

I eased into the chair next to him. He stared at his place, me at mine. We were like two dinner companions with nothing to eat.

“She’s wrapped up in the awful business of dying. Moving her car registration into my name. Signing off on the pension. I keep begging her to stop. She needed some bridgework done last month, four grand. She looked at the dentist with this…this resigned expression and asked, ‘Can it hold?’” He shook his head and covered his eyes. His face contorted into a sob, but no sound came out, and when he removed his hand, there were no tears. “‘Can it hold?’” He shook his head. “She said it’s because she doesn’t want to go through the pain in the ass of it—who wouldn’t avoid the dentist?—but she’s from New England stock way back, spends money like she’s opening a vein. I’ll be fine, money, but she’s worried. And I just…I just want her to have a new dental bridge, Drew. That’s all I want. This woman deserves that. She’s forty-two. Forty-two. Nineteen when she married me. You’d think twenty-three years was a long time, but it feels like…” He made a whisking sound through his teeth, as if shooing a cat, then shuddered off a thought. “I’m rambling. I’m rambling.”

With a shaking hand, he poured himself another rum, upending the empty bottle into one of the trash bags, and added a splash of Coke. He pinched crumbs on the table into a stray napkin. Why? What did it matter? How did
any
of it matter to him? Rising when his alarm clock bleated. Picking out clothes. Filling up his gas tank. The mundane business of life. And yet he endured, he and Janice, staring into the face of it day after crushing day. What choice did he have? What choice did she?

He noticed me watching him and crumpled up the napkin nervously, as if he’d been caught doing something shameful. I wanted to tell him that it was okay, that he could poke all he wanted at those crumbs, left behind like the ghost footprint in the Birkenstock.

At some age it occurs to you that this aging thing is for real. That you’ve done both loop-da-loops and there’s only the corkscrew left before you have to disembark. The ride doesn’t last forever—no shit—but there’s one definable moment when the cold, hard fact of it hits you in the gut. Mine was the summer when I was thirty-three, a Sunday night after another lost weekend. I was the age of Jesus and had accomplished relatively little by comparison. Through a haze of shower steam, I’d stared at myself in the mirror and noticed a new web of wrinkles suspending each eye. I’d sat on the brim of the tub, head thick with last night’s booze and the crushing weight of the obvious. The reality had been there all along, like the key to a well-crafted mystery, but I’d averted my eyes, tuned out, drunk myself into mind-numbing stillness.

Now’s the slot for the painful confession, though mine is as banal as those crumbs I deployed to such grand literary effect. After my mother’s third stroke, when she was teetering at the cliff edge, ravaged in mind, her face caved in on itself like that of someone two decades her elder, when the nurse gave me that final solemn nod,
Now is the time, Drew,
I froze outside her door. I couldn’t go into her room. The thought suddenly, powerfully, terrified me. She likely wouldn’t have recognized me anyway—it’d been weeks since she had—but that proved scant consolation. My father, bless him, never judged me. Not a flicker of disapproval in his eyes then or in the year and a half he lived after. That day, outside my dying mother’s room, he kissed me on the forehead and left me in the corridor, gripping the silver-lever door handle as if I were going to get it together and enter the room at any instant, though I knew I wouldn’t. With my head pressed to the door, shamed beyond description by my cowardice, I heard that blipping monitor smooth out into a flatline.

“Lloyd,” I said, “I am so goddamned sorry for what you two are going through.”

He nodded his thanks quickly, an uncomfortable tic, and sipped his drink again. “When I was a kid, I always thought I’d learn to reconcile it. Another thing I’d pick up along the way. Maybe that’s why I…the job, you know. But then, with Janice—well, I never did. Learn. You never do. You can’t, maybe. It’s always there, and no matter how close you think you are to it, you’re never ready.”

“Listen, when this…If there’s anything—”

He cut off my awkward reach of affection, not ready to concede the worst-case. “We have a shot.” He spoke quickly, though his voice wobbled. “One more round. We have a shot.”

He rose, and I followed suit, and we walked the two steps to the door that dumped out from the kitchen to the gravel driveway, the patch of venetian blind jiggling as I tugged the knob.

“You have to understand. Hope is all you’ve got. That’s it.” He gripped the doorframe and tilted his face into shadow, so it wasn’t until he spoke that I realized he was crying. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

I stood there struck by the incredible limitation of the language I claim to have a passing knowledge of, saying, “It’s okay,” at intervals like a coach with a Little Leaguer who’d scraped a knee.

Finally he pulled back, covering his face and apologizing still, drawing the door closed quietly behind him and leaving me to the crickets sawing through the chill night.