The Crime Writer (4 page)

“I was told that already.”

Donnie removed a sealed LAPD evidence bag from his briefcase. It contained a CD. “And she left you a message.”

“Is it bad?” I asked. No answer. Agitated, I stood, walked a tight circle, sat back down again. “That’s why they changed my voice mail access.”

Donnie popped the CD into his laptop and clicked a few buttons.

The familiar voice, back from the dead, was haunting. “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.”

It took me a few moments to recover from hearing Genevieve. I sat there with my heartbeat pounding in my ears and my lawyers staring at me with calm concern. Her voice, the accent, those nuanced pronunciations. But the invasiveness of the message’s presentation also unnerved me. The cops had heard Genevieve’s last words to me before I had. The message—like the rest of my life, frozen by the prosecution and available to me only secondhand—hammered the final nail into the coffin of my rights and privacy.

I didn’t remember hearing Genevieve’s message that night, of course. The bitterness of it clashed with where I thought she and I had left things between us, but she’d been moody and difficult at times, so the tone was hardly shocking. Under no circumstances could I imagine it making me want to harm Genevieve. But, I realized with mounting dread, the message would play nicely to a jury primed on photos of her abused body.

“This shores up motive even more,” Donnie said gently. “So we need a simple version to sell to the jury. Temporary insanity’s your only way out of this. It’s clean. It’s self-evident. It’s supported by the facts.
The brain tumor did it.
”

I returned his exasperated stare.

He pressed on. “We lay out the facts, you’ll walk out of here. You can worry about the rest of it from your own bed someday.” He studied my expression, finding something in it he didn’t like. “We play this wrong with what we have stacked against us…”

The thought of hard time made me feint fetal, my shoulders hunching, my shoes lifting an inch or two from the floor before I stopped my knees’ rise to my chest. In the movies, no matter what, prison is the same. You go in scared, and they call you “fish” and bet cigarettes as to how long it’ll be until you cry. You cell with Bubba, and he breaks you in, and then you become hardened, dead inside, and you barter for candy bars and have to shiv some guy in the shop or his buddies will gang-rape you, and then you get gang-raped anyway just for good measure.

“You’re a crime writer,” Terry said calmly. “Allow us to help you see how this will read to a jury. Let us take you through it again.”

And they did, right from the sordid beginning. I sat in my hard little chair, dry-mouthed and stunned by—as they call it on TV—the preponderance of evidence. I’d known the elements, of course, but hearing them edited together into a tale of my murdering Genevieve was chilling. When my nerves settled, I had room for a single lucid thought.

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.