The Crime Writer (28 page)

I seize the terra-cotta pot, lose my grip, crack the saucer. Leaning the pot back again, I grasp the brass key in the grime. My hands fumble at the dead bolt. I drop the key. It bounces knee high but avoids the cracks between the decking.

My head fogged with the stench, I jam the key home, twist, and shove. Stumbling in, I bang the side table. The Murano paperweight slides like a hockey puck and shatters, millefiori segments rattling on the marble tile.

Flights of strings, thundering horns, the wrenching wail of a soprano.

Perché tu possa andar…di là dal mare…

I seem to float up the stairs, my shoes barely touching carpet.

Genevieve lies collapsed on her face and chest, knees jammed beneath her as if she’d been kneeling.

Already dead.

Blood has soaked into the white carpet around her. Her window is open, and her cream silk gown, blown back from one pale shoulder, flutters about her.

Something lets loose in my chest, and I utter a cry, running forward. I grasp her lightly at the shoulders and turn her. One arm swings stiffly on a locked elbow, striking me in the face.

The music crescendos, unrelenting.

Amore, addio! Addio! Piccolo amor!

She lolls in my arms, delicate hand curled, forefinger pointing like Michelangelo’s Adam, except without a mate. A knife is sunk into her to the shaft. Sobbing, frantic, I grip the stainless tip with both hands and tug it free. She tumbles from my lap.

Blackness encroached on the dream-memory, starting at the fringes and blotting out my vision.

Through the sevoflurane haze, I heard sirens.

I
t was so late it was early, but the sky wasn’t admitting it yet. A
Los Angeles Times
graced my doorstep, the first since I’d restored service after jail. Covered with Lloyd Wagner’s blood, I stooped and picked it up. Maybe things were finally getting back to normal.

Above a picture of me looking pallid and displeased, the headline, behind on gossip as usual, read
DANNER TAKEN BACK INTO CUSTODY.

Maybe things weren’t getting back to normal.

I stepped inside, Xena bulling into me in greeting. I tugged off the stained shirt and threw it in the trash, then wandered into the family room and sat in my venerable reading chair. The TV chatterheads buzzed with the news of Lloyd’s death and, of course, my involvement. They
didn’t
announce that I hadn’t killed Genevieve Bertrand, that she’d already been dead when I’d found her. The evidence for that particular lay locked in my unreliable frontal lobe, and, try as they might, Fox News couldn’t plug in to that.

But now I could.

To a strobe-light effect of flashbulbs, Cal commanded a podium outside the North Hollywood house, detailing how they’d stormed the place to find me and Sissy Ballantine regaining consciousness in the makeshift medical suite. In the background two stalwart paramedics steered Janice out on a gurney, and we viewers were given a zoom to follow her rolling entry into an awaiting ambulance.

Her close-up was appropriate; she
was
the unwitting star of the story. I hadn’t been the protagonist after all, but—like Kasey Broach, like Sissy Ballantine—a bit player. Morton Frankel, fellow fall guy, had played his role as well as I, two expendable L.A. walk-ons hitting the marks and saying the lines. I’d responded to Lloyd’s preparations with a promptness and an ardor that could scarcely be improved on, calling him within hours of my release from jail, scratching at the imagined scab of my guilt until I’d raised blood. Book after book, I’d reinforced Lloyd’s increasingly imaginative involvement in what had previously been dry scientific work. Some of the most diabolical killings in my novels wouldn’t have been nearly as inventive were it not for Lloyd. And perhaps his crime wouldn’t have been nearly as well plotted were it not for me. Or as far-fetched.

An improbable fiction? Certainly. But then, we don’t want to construct the story that’s most likely to be told. We want to tell the one that finds its way to the pit of the gut, like a curved boning knife.

I never would have guessed it, but Lloyd had proven a better crime writer than I was.

I turned off the tube and petted Xena’s oversize head, enjoying a few minutes of blissful silence.

The telephone rang. Not my cell but the glorious, hearty ring of the landline, harmonized on a faint delay with the phones upstairs. The noise filled the rooms. It made it seem as though my house worked again.

I strode over to the cordless mounted on the living-room wall and answered.

Caroline said, “Done showing off?”

“I hope so.”

“You’re all right?” Something in her delivery connoted great care.

I considered for a moment, then answered, truthfully, “Yes. I am.”

“You weren’t answering your cell,” she said. It was only then that I realized the phone had been on mute since Lloyd’s house. “So I got your home line from your Big Brother form. I have something to cheer you up.”

“What?”

“Me?”

“Do you deliver?”

“I do.”

She hung up. Xena garishly stuck her muzzle between my legs. Jealous, no doubt.

I went to my car to retrieve the half-written book and the unlabeled CD from Genevieve’s that I’d shoved beneath my floor mat.

Back upstairs I sat at my desk, placed the pages beside my mouse pad, and slid the disc into my computer, bringing up i Tunes on the monitor. My screen asked if I wanted to retrieve track and album information, identifying the burned music from the online library.

I did.

While i Tunes searched, showing me a horizontal barber pole to solicit my patience, I picked up my office phone to call Chic. The line bleated, indicating messages.

I dialed voice mail. A synthetic voice said,
“Greetings. You have forty-nine saved messages.”

My lawyers and I had reviewed digital copies of all the messages while preparing my case. My messages had been preserved in the actual system, too, it seemed, from when LAPD froze me out of my voice mail right up until the day SBC interrupted my service. I bleeped through them now, deleting the first several from September 22 and the day of the twenty-third. Preston, nagging me about deadlines, a missing jacket, and an anthology he’d wanted me to contribute to. April asking what time she should come over for dinner that night.

The synthetic voice spoke the chillingly familiar time stamp:
“Fifth message. Sent September 23, 1:08
A.M.
”

Genevieve’s damning message. I cocked back in my chair.

The softly accented voice whispered in my ear, “It’s me.”

A wave of heat passed through my face, setting my scar on fire. I’d heard the message countless times during my incarceration and trial. That wasn’t how it started.

The computer search completed, i Tunes confirming what I already knew.
Madame Butterfly—Disc 3.

The first track began to play from my tinny computer speakers, an accompaniment to Genevieve’s message.

“I wanted to tell you I’m peaceful. I’m okay, I feel okay now. I’ve heard you’re with someone new, and I’m…I’m glad for you.” A moist inhale. “I’m sorry. For how I hurt you, for how I hurt everyone.” How fragile her voice, how delicate that French inflection. “Maybe this can be one of your stories one day. Maybe you’ll understand.”

From my computer Madama Butterfly wailed,
Verrà, verrà, vedrai.

“Maybe you’ll forgive me. For that and for this. I ask of you only one thing. My last request. Don’t judge me. I hope you can walk around in my skin for a while. Isn’t that what you do? Feel this pain. Write about it so maybe other people don’t have to feel so alone.”

Salite a riposare, affranta siete…al suo venire vi chiamerò.

“Good-bye, my love.”

The click of the hang-up.

Tu se con Dio ed io col mio dolor…

Gently, I replaced the phone in its cradle. Her real message, so different from the altered version played ad nauseam in court. As Preston reminds me every chance he gets, it’s all in the editing. Slowly, I reached over and thumbed through the ragged manuscript:
Aside from the detectives, Lloyd Wagner would know Genevieve’s case better than anyone, having handled everything from recovering my voice-mail messages to matching the knife to the wound.

The original message would have exonerated me, causing the prosecution to drop the case. If no one believed I’d killed Genevieve, Lloyd would have lost his ideal fall guy. A guy whom everyone—the cops, the media, the prospective jury pool—believed guilty of murder. A guy the detectives would be eager to rush to judgment about. A guy who already half believed he was losing his mind. Lloyd knew he couldn’t delete phone and caller ID records, but he could digitally reorganize the voice-mail recording, making it as ambiguous as the rest of the case, before turning it over during discovery. He’d told me himself he couldn’t imagine my getting convicted, given the brain tumor. I’d be free yet tainted, available for the frame-up. A story-perfect investigation where no one would dig beneath the skin and find the hidden holes. To be sure, it was a risk, but with his wife’s life hanging in the balance, he’d proven all too willing to take gambles.

I played Genevieve’s message again, imagining its impact on me the night of September 23. A suicide warning, not a snotty rebuke.

What were the good doctor’s words?

“Because the temporal lobe is intricately tied to emotional 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.”

An emotionally intense event. A message from an ex announcing her intention to kill herself would likely qualify.

April, contented midwestern soul, was a deep sleeper. Unlike me, she wouldn’t have been roused by the ringing phone. In the darkness of that night, I’d padded into my office, sat, and played Genevieve’s message. Startled, I’d risen, my office chair toppling over.

And then, altered and frenzied, I’d hot-assed it over to Genevieve’s to find her, in typical dramatic fashion, robed in her best approximation of a geisha, slumped over the blade she’d thrust into her own belly, operatic death song blasting from the walls.

Her prints had been lifted from the handle. That was to be expected—her knife, her house. My prints, from removing the knife, had been more eyebrow-raising.

She’d been right-handed, the reverse stab angling the blade as if the thrust had come from a left-handed attacker. As she’d keeled forward, the butt of the knife had struck floor, driving the blade deep enough to suggest that a 185-pound male had been behind the handle.

Straightforward enough to untangle, had I not arrived to fuck up the crime scene.

As a show of gratitude for the revelations the past hours had afforded me, I retrieved an ’82 Bordeaux I’d been saving for years and drained it down the kitchen sink. I let Xena lick the neck when I was done. No need to waste it.

I wandered onto my back deck, put my feet on the rail, and stared out at the lights. All those people, all those stories.

Xena chased her stub and rolled in the brittle leaves.

I’d started out innocent and wanting to clear my conscience. I’d discovered I was not a murderer. And I’d wound up a killer.

I could live with that; as someone once told me, generally, we’re not given the choice anyway. What a piece of work is man, and all that.

The doorbell rang, a deep chime causing Xena to lift her square head from the union of her paws.

I rose and walked inside.

I’m a free citizen, at least until my next brain tumor. Cal leaked Genevieve’s voice-mail message to the press, which, on the crest of the sensationalist coverage of Lloyd’s machinations, restored my name to whatever dubious standing it had achieved before the trial. My sales continue to increase.

A deputy corroborated my account of the jail recroom incident, but before I could formally file a complaint against Kaden and Delveckio, all pending charges against me were dropped. Morton Frankel awaits trial, but I have been informed that he is—as they say in the hallowed halls of Parker Center—fucked.

Sometimes Cal drops by and we smoke cigars on the back deck, overlooking the city. He’s not promoted yet, but his captain’s got his ear to the ground and says any day now. We talked about the case a lot, me and Cal, and then all of a sudden we didn’t.

I’ve still heard nothing from the Bertrands, and doubt I ever will. My association with the ugliness surrounding their daughter has branded me guilty, even if I am not, and I don’t begrudge them their construal of events.

Sissy Ballantine completed a swift recovery and eventually made the marrow donation to her brother. I got to meet him, a brunch that was a better idea in
theory than awkward reality. His wasted shoulders poked at his vintage bowling shirt, he had the first wisps of a beard coming in, and he looked baffled and humbled by all the commotion that had happened around him. When I shook his hand, I could feel his bones clearly through the skin. Sissy followed me out and gave me a quick hug. “Thank you,” she said, smiling the wide smile of the healthy, and damned if I didn’t feel, for a brief moment, up to snuff with Derek Chainer.

The Broaches had lost one child, in effect, because they’d lost another years before. Think about that the next time you’re feeling secure about your place in the divine order.

The home-administered chemo had emptied Janice Wagner’s bones of marrow in preparation for the second transplant that never came, and there’d been nothing to replace it. About a week after Lloyd’s death, she died. It’s hardly justice, but not quite karma.

I guess it’s life.

The Broaches granted the exhumation order, and when the coroner peeled back the abraded flesh on Kasey’s hip, he’d found the bone beneath marred with barely premortem needle punctures. The photos found their way to the tabloids.

Kasey’s marrow, as you may have guessed, hadn’t been taking in Janice’s bones. It’s not a complicated business, I’ve been told, but complicated enough that they don’t sell home kits. Lloyd hadn’t gotten enough marrow from Broach’s right hip alone; he’d needed to extract it also from her left, but the detectives surmised that he’d been concerned that dueling hip abrasions on the corpse would have been hard to sell.

From the beginning, the tight time frame had left
Lloyd desperate. Once Janice’s bones had been ravished, he’d had to move swiftly on Broach—thus the gun and the at-home neighbors—and he’d rushed Sissy Ballantine even more. One of the doctors treating Janice had later said that Lloyd seemed to have worked out the kinks, that his chemo cocktails had put her leukemia into temporary remission, so the second transplant could very well have taken. But, of course, the rest of Sissy Ballantine’s marrow—prudently taken from both sides of her pelvic bone—hadn’t made it from the filter to Janice’s veins. Instead it had been removed from the machine and put on ice for Sissy’s brother, for whom it had originally been intended.

Janice had been sufficiently impaired to withhold and withstand keen questioning, and she’d pushed off from the dock without anyone ascertaining how much she knew about what Lloyd was up to in that suite down the hall. I believe I heard that she never even found out that her husband had died just one room away from her.

The day after her death, Cal showed me an entry from Lloyd’s journal, full of tortured remorse and pleading apology, with a clarity about grief and loss that gave me a pang of empathy.

A pang.

I suppose Lloyd will draw some comfort during his long drift across the river Styx from the fact that his wife never had to find out his full story.

What
was
his story? As Chic would say, that’s no groundballer. Lloyd was a guy like any other, I suppose, subjected to the right pressures and passions. A guy whose wife was dying in sluggish, wrenching increments. Day after day he hacked into that transplant registry and stared at those two stubborn owners of matching marrow, his brain redlining to come up with an angle—any angle—that could get him and Janice to their twenty-fifth anniversary.
Unlike
any other guy, Lloyd had an extraordinary skill set to counter those pressures. I’ll still be out in my yard, or lined up at the In-N-Out drive-through, and remember some other wrinkle Lloyd had forensically smoothed from the fabric of his plan. I’d never considered the ramifications of the first time he’d called me excited about a murder scene years ago, a bizarre hot-tub death in Manhattan Beach. My greed as a writer brought me into this. I had volunteered to be his subject when I drew Lloyd into devising my stories. I always wanted my plots to be realer than I could make them myself. And I needed someone who lived it. I needed someone who’d smelled that stench. And I got it.

A story, after all, doesn’t have to be true. Just convincing.

Spring is slow in coming, though you can’t tell by the weather. I have a vicious killer of a dog, who attacks pillows and shoes and hardcover novels like nobody’s business. I have a Little Brother who can spray-paint and pick locks well beyond his years. He takes me to Dodgers games and batting cages and, most frequently, to court when he violates probation. I still see Genevieve at times—through the steam in the shower, humming a melody, as I’m driving some stretch of road—but less often now.

This morning, at the end of breakfast, guess who reappeared out on the deck? Gus. Big grin, pouched cheeks, and buck teeth, like a smug third-grader back from some mysterious adventure and privy to secrets we’ll never know. He wobbled across the deck and began
assiduously chewing a hole through the garden hose. I rose and pulled back the sliding glass door. Caroline followed me out and tossed Gus a scrap of toast. He looked up at us indifferently, then scampered off through his path in the ivy.

Like the rest of us, trying to stay one squirrel step ahead of the coyotes.