The Crime Writer (10 page)

I
woke bright and early, with a renewed sense of purpose. My home telephone line was still dead, so I retrieved my cell from the office. I called the coroner’s office, talked to a clerk I’d paid in the past to smuggle me sample reports, and asked him if he could get me the Broach autopsy.

He said, “You’re a murderer. Fuck off and don’t ever call me again.” Then he hung up.

I went downstairs, made a $138 cup of espresso, and toasted Gus on the back deck. “You and me, we’re just players in this crazy game called life.”

Gus, a discerning critic, scurried up the Mexican fan palm at the edge of the lawn.

I called a DNA analyst I knew in the medical examiner’s office. She didn’t take my call, though I heard her stage-whispered rebuff through the admin assistant’s imperfect clasp over the mouthpiece.

My first manuscript had received seventeen rejections before a sale. I figured the odds here to be slightly better. I returned to the murder book and rechecked all the names of cops, criminalists, coroners, and clerks, even deciphering the scrawled signatures at the bottoms of the chain-of-custody forms. The only familiar name was the one I’d started with. 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 with the wound. And he’d processed Kasey Broach’s body as well. Given our rapport, I hoped that if I could talk to him for a few minutes, I might convince him to give me a little of his time.

I got his voice mail at the lab and on his cell and his answering machine at home. Given that he’d reported my last message to the detectives, I didn’t want to leave another. I closed the phone, rubbed my temples, drank another cup of espresso to wash down my Dilantin.

If I couldn’t get someone inside the case, I could at least try for someone with an inside track to the case. Cal Unger, my main consultant when it came to matters Chainer, was a divisional detective out of the West L.A. Station. His job had none of the glamour—if such a word can be used in this context—of the cases hooked by the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown. RHD detectives pulled serial killers, bank robbers, and media-intensive cases like mine. They had citywide jurisdiction, better resources, and sharper suits. Cal—a Coors man all the way—had closed some key divisional cases and had been bucking for a promotion to RHD for a while now. It was not lost on me that of the myriad hours he’d given me over the past few years, most of them had been spent talking about Robbery-Homicide.

Cal and I had an unspoken agreement: He wouldn’t stiff-arm my questions, and I wouldn’t write an unflattering portrait of someone closely resembling him. So he indulged me, and I respected his talent and toughness, and nothing had yet turned up in print to make LAPD’s public-information officer put a boot up his ass. There was an undercurrent of tension, to be sure. Cal always squeezed a little too hard when demonstrating a choke hold on me, and he was certain to evince a certain veiled disdain for my job, stemming from, I guessed, the fact that we both knew that if he was really hard-core, like Bill Kaden, he wouldn’t be talking to a writer or partaking vicariously of a fictional RHD detective’s exploits. Cal fell into that camp of cop consultants who were generous with their time yet continually decried entertainment bullshit, how this dumb-ass novelist had called a revolver a pistol and this sellout TV actor had referred to his Glock .357 Magnum. They’d bust my balls in the squad room, and I’d smile and nod along, knowing that once the others weren’t around, once we were alone in the car heading to lunch or driving a patrol, they would clear their throats sheepishly and pitch me a script idea, something about burned-out cops and missing little white girls or even, sometimes, about the bad-ass power of Jesus.

Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—I liked and respected Cal. He was handsome and well proportioned and could wear a pair of sunglasses like Eastwood wears a scowl. Some people exude coolness, and Cal was one of them. Like Lenny Kravitz or Bono, whom you could listen to with impunity anywhere, in any company. A hard-to-find quality. No matter how much you might secretly enjoy Kelly Clarkson, you still roll your windows up at the stoplight when she’s on your radio. Not Cal, though. Cal was Bono. You’d never have to roll your windows up on Cal.

I called his desk. Voice mail. Tried his cell phone. He picked up mid-order: “And a double-double, no onions.” And then, at full volume, “Unger.”

I hung up. He was where we often met for lunch—In-N-Out Burger in Westwood.

I glanced at the clock: 10:32
A.M.
Getting an early start on his caloric intake. His shift had probably begun at seven, taking a report from a hysterical Bel Air divorcée about a stolen tanning bed. Big black market in those, I’d heard.

I shot down Roscomare into Westwood and found Cal sitting at one of the brightly colored tables. A line of palm-tree tiles decorated the wall at his back. His partner, a young cop I didn’t recognize, picked at some fries. Not In-N-Out’s strong suit, fries.

Cal’s gaze swept over me and registered nothing. I introduced myself to the new kid—Sam Pellicano—and looked over at Cal, who still had not spoken. “I’m sure you’ve heard about my case,” I said. “Things aren’t what they seem. There’s another story here, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it. I’d really appreciate your help.”

Cal wiped the space on the table in front of him, though he’d left behind no crumbs. “Here’s how it went down,” he said. “You knew the captain’s cousin because you hooked him up with an agent once. Captain put you in touch with the PIO. The call went around—who’s gonna get stuck with this one? We curse L.A. I get hosed because Captain’s pissed that his niece has a crush on me. The PIO tells me to be nice, let you swing from my ears now and then. I let you pretend you know a thing or two because you use the right forensic terminology and you’ve got a few cop buddies who hang out with you for your money and your bullshit. I take you on ride-alongs. I laugh at your jokes. You pick up the tab at lunch, take me to the occasional movie screening. You got a house in the hills with a nice deck to smoke a cigar on. That’s why I put up with you.”

Cal slid on his sunglasses in preparation for leaving. My reflections in the mirror lenses looked chagrined and foolish.

“You’re a murderer now,” Cal said. “Which means that I don’t have to pretend to like you anymore. Or help you.” He slid out of the booth, and I had to step back so he could stand. Sam looked impressed, like this was the coolest thing he’d witnessed in his whole fifteen years.

“I think guys like you are exploitive bastards,” Cal continued. “You dream up terrorist cells and serial killers, and you feed off real people’s fears and live large doing it. Doesn’t enough shit go wrong in the world without you glorifying it? You played around in the dark, and you don’t like what you came out with. No concern of mine. Not anymore.”

“Okay,” I said. “Done being morally superior in front of the new kid?”

“For the moment.”

“Then we’ll just pretend we both forgot your one-hour-drama concept you told me about. The one with the detective who works too many overtimes tracking the—wasn’t it the Red Glove Killer?—and his wife just don’t understand?”

Cal pushed past me, knocking my shoulder. Sam looked concerned, unsure whether to step up on me with some tough-guy face time or scurry after the scoutmaster.

“The boys at RHD are too busy asserting their own superiority to take a fresh look at these murders,” I said after him.

Cal pivoted, mouth jerked left in a scowl. “Kaden and Delveckio? Boy, I’d sure love to show up those fancy detectives from Homicide Special. If only I had a crazy novelist to give me an in.”

Sarcasm aside, he’d been following the case, as I’d bet he had.

I withdrew the pages I’d rolled and stuffed into my back pocket and held them out. “This is the case to date. From
my
perspective. If you were smart and ambitious, you’d realize you have an exclusive line into a major investigation.”

“I’m neither.” But he was staring at the sheaf of paper a bit too hungrily for someone who’d just eaten a double-double.

“Take it anyway. It’s only twelve chapters. You can read it in the bubble bath. I’m gonna come bother you in a while for something or something else and you’d best have done your homework so when we’re smoking cigars on my nice deck you can look sufficiently foolish about all the conclusions you jumped to.”

I swung the rolled pages so they tapped Sam in the chest, and, looking confused, he took them. I walked out before he could throw them at me.

I
leaned back in my chair and put my feet up on my desk, bleary-eyed from focusing on court transcript pages, indecipherable signatures on evidence reports, and grainy newspaper photographs of yours truly. My focus remained jumpy, half on the page, half in my head, an agitation of unfinished thoughts. It was only a few minutes past five, but already the sun had dipped below the row of palms cresting the west canyon ridge. Backlit fronds, even after my twenty years in L.A., made me pause with admiration.

Imports like the rest of us, palms had been brought to Los Angeles centuries ago by Spanish missionaries. I’d read that they were dying out here, the latest wave nearing the ends of their hundred-year life spans. Local bureaucracies had determined that broad-canopy trees better fought auto emissions. Vegas casinos had driven prices beyond municipal reach. Falling fronds bugged the yuppies, scratched up their MINI Coopers. Tree-trimmer saws spread deadly fungi. But despite it all, the palms were hanging on. With their discreet roots and flexible trunks, they’re survivors. They don’t come down in storms. They bow with the wind. They crawl along shady ground before goosenecking north into sunlight. They’re scrappy and tenacious and beautiful and useless, like most anything that survives in Los Angeles. I hoped they’d endure. Imagining L.A. without palm trees was like picturing a lion without fur.

I tried the lab for the fifth time, and miraculously Lloyd picked up. After I said hello, his voice got tight. “You can’t call me. Especially here.”

“I’ve been looking into a few things. About the Broach case. I need to talk.”

A pause indicated I’d piqued his curiosity. “Don’t come here.”

“After work?”

“Janice isn’t doing so hot.”

“I’m sorry to hear things are bad.”

I could hear him breathing into the receiver, and then he said, quietly, “Thank you.”

“I’m sure you don’t need any more on your plate, but I would really appreciate a few minutes of your time. Can I make it easier? I’ll come to you, pick up dinner, whatever.”

I heard some muttering in the background. Then Lloyd’s voice changed and he said to me, “Yeah, okay, Freddy. I’ll get on it tomorrow. I was just leaving.” Then he hung up.

I swung by Henry’s Tacos en route to Lloyd’s house in North Hollywood, then stopped at a liquor store and picked up a bottle of Bacardi 8, his favorite, and a two-liter of Coke. He lived off a dead-end street threading behind an overgrown park, in a big old Valley house with build-ons, rambling halls, and a barn gate guarding a gravel driveway. I slipped the rusty latch and headed down the unlit drive. The house was rotated away from the street, affording from within a good view of the park but making it inhospitable, offering up only the seemingly private kitchen door.

Lloyd was in the detached garage just past the house, fussing over the equipment in the rear of his van. Floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves crowded the van and a backed-in car hibernating beneath a black cover. I approached, and he started at my greeting. The van, as always, was crammed with endless equipment and oddities. Fingerprint tape lifts. Garden loppers for cutting ribs. Colored dental stone for casting impressions of shoe prints. I’d once spent a morning driving around with him while he’d collected seventeen brands of motor oil, trying to match a stain left where a getaway car had idled.

He was stuffing various vials and pill bottles into a knapsack, and he paused wearily at my approach. “She’s on more pain meds than I can keep track of,” he said, as if continuing a conversation.

“Thanks for seeing me, Lloyd. With everything you have going on.”

The van’s rear door, which rested heavily against the sleeping car, whined when he swung it shut. I followed him in. I’d been here before, picking him up, dropping off manuscripts, but this was my first time inside. The house was dark, a few lamps illuminating splotches of kitchen and family room. Dishes overrunning the sink, clean plates and bowls stacked on the counters as if no one had the energy to lift them into the cabinets. A swirl of crocheted blankets on the couch, bed pillows mixed with the cushions. The air felt humid from recent cooking. A portly woman sat in an armchair, watching a Spanish talk show and sipping a cup of tea.

“Hullo, Meester Wagner.”

“How’d she do today?”

“She do fine. She do jess fine.”

Lloyd handed her a roll of bills, and the woman rinsed out her mug in the sink, nodded warmly, and plodded out the door. There was no car out front and no bus stop for blocks.

Looking around made clear why Lloyd had blown off the first message I’d left him. With everything he was contending with, the last thing he needed was a maybe-psychotic murderer dropping by.

“I’m sorry for the mess. Janice is an only child, both parents passed. We don’t get much help.” Lloyd lowered his head, pausing as if to catch his breath. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”

He squared himself toward the hall but remained frozen for a moment, gathering his will. At the end of the long, dark corridor, a seam of light showed beneath a doorway. Lloyd shrugged the knapsack strap up into place and headed toward it.

I cleared a space on the kitchen table and unpacked the food. A fall of light as the door down the hall opened, and I heard murmuring and the soothing rush of medical equipment before the sounds were cut off by the closing door. I got a few glasses from the counter, filled mine with water. A toothbrush leaned from a cup by the dish-soap dispenser. By the door a lone Birkenstock stood out from a mound of shoes, bearing the stain of a woman’s foot, a simple image I found distressing. I thought about the second car out in the garage, unused. Lloyd probably didn’t have the heart to sell it yet.

There were several TV trays on the floor by the couch, and I cleared them to the kitchen, washed them off, loaded one with tacos. I folded the blankets on the couch, stacked the pillows, and poured Lloyd a drink. Pictures of him and Janice were everywhere—hung on the walls, magnetized to the refrigerator, framed atop bookcases. Wedding portraits with awkward Lloyd, all big ears and blond curly hair, clinging to Janice’s arm as if he still couldn’t believe he’d landed her. Janice smiling from a lime green Gremlin, her feathered hair poofing beyond the frame. The standard fifteen-year anniversary shot, arms around shoulders, before the Eiffel Tower. I’d never met Janice, but I noted with some sadness that the most recent picture of Lloyd was at least five years old. She’d been dying since I’d met him.

I turned off the TV and sat in the reading chair, listening to the house creak, imagining Lloyd’s split life, divided between the couch and the bedroom. How he probably stayed out here to breathe a little easier. How he’d shored himself up to make that walk to see his wife. How he probably spent his nights creeping from this end of the house to that seam of light.

Staring down the dark hall, I realized that I feared, greatly feared, what that bedroom might look like.

Fear of death. It’s what we share. We ward it off in ineffectual ways, practice brushing against it, swimmers in dark waters. The obsessive bodybuilder. The weekend stunt pilot. The pool-hall slut. We drink too much. We put off surgeries. We whistle past old folks’ homes. When it comes down to it, we all fear what’s behind that door at the end of the corridor. That’s why I write dark little potboilers. To pretend I’m poking at death with a stick. That’s why people read them on subway trains and airplanes and think they’re facing their deepest and darkest.

The seam in my head, the seam in Genevieve’s lovely pale skin, the seam beneath that door. All cracks in what we think we’re holding together. I’d never felt so attuned to the vulnerability around me, the chinks and fissures. They’re everywhere. You just have to pause. And look.

The hall lightened briefly, and then I heard Lloyd’s approach. I handed him his drink. He set down his knapsack, sank into the couch, took a gulp, and emitted a sigh. “Thanks, Drew. This is nice.”

“Tacos and Bacardi. Old family recipe. How’s Janice?”

He waved me off. “It’s back. Other breast now. Third time through, make or break.”

“Where’s she being seen?”

“Cedars.”

“I’ve heard they have a great onc team.” The longer my remark hung in the air, the more hollow it seemed.

The glow of the lamps blacked out the nice view from the back windows. Lloyd finished his drink and said, “Pour you one?”

“I’m still on water.”

“Oh, yeah.” He filled his glass again, unwrapped a taco, took a bite, and set it down. “I’m real sorry for what you’ve been through, Drew, but I’m not allowed to talk to you. You’re a suspect.”

“I haven’t been charged. I produced proof that I had nothing to do with—”

“I heard.”

“Look, Kaden and Delveckio already revealed a fair amount to me. I just want to talk through what I already know. We can start with Genevieve, even. I have the murder book, the trial’s over. No way for you to misstep there.”

Halfway through his second rum and Coke, Lloyd blinked heavily, suggesting a nod. “Don’t you remember it all from the trial?”

“It’s blurry. I’d like to hear it again from you.”

There was an awkward pause, and then Lloyd said, “Pretty damning, Drew.”

“You thought I was going away for it?”

“I couldn’t imagine a jury convicting you with a brain tumor in a jar, but the
evidence
…” His long fingers gripped the mouth of his glass, tilting the dark liquid beneath. He contemplated the rum mix. I knew how that silent conversation went.

I said, “Your report showed that Genevieve had no defensive wounds, no skin beneath her nails.”

“Katherine Harriman argued that’s because she knew you.”

“But Katherine Harriman, unlike me, didn’t know Genevieve. Genevieve was tough to surprise, especially if she was up out of bed with an intruder in her bedroom. She wouldn’t be one to embrace the knife. If she’d seen the blade, she’d have gone down clawing and biting.”

“It was a forceful thrust. Death would have been pretty much instantaneous.”

“Prints on the knife?”

“Besides Genevieve’s and her kid sister’s? Just yours.”

“Suspect profile?”

“You know, the usual. Left-handed male, hundred eighty-five pounds, diabolical gleam in the eyes.”

“Left-handed from the angle?”

He glanced at the watch on my right wrist. “Uh-huh. Slight slant.”

“Male?”

“Power behind the stab.”

“Body moved?”

“Yeah. A bunch.” Another awkward pause. “By you. Your seizure started as a complex partial. Not the thrashing kind, more of a break in consciousness with automatisms—lip smacking, repetitive finger movement. People can walk around, even. Complex partial seizures have been used as a defense in shoplifting cases, though that’s pushing it. But you would’ve been functional enough to manipulate Genevieve Bertrand’s body. Until your seizure generalized into a grand mal.”

“Would I have been able to stab her in that state? The complex partial?”

“Not likely. I agree with Harriman that your break probably occurred
after
the murder.” He studied my face, then said softly, “I’m sorry, Drew.”

I sat back, rubbed at the soreness in my eyes with the heels of my hands. “I had a dream my first night home. I was driving over to her house that night. In a frenzy. She kept a key under a plant pot on her porch. I cracked the clay saucer getting to it. When I woke up, I drove over to her place.” Would I tell him the rest? Could I? Lloyd’s house was so still I thought I could make out the faint sigh of hospital equipment from the other end. “The saucer was cracked. It wasn’t cracked the last time I remember seeing it. I think I dreamed a piece of memory. I think I’m starting to put together fragments of what happened that night.”

He frowned severely, taking this in. “What do you mean when you say you were in a frenzy?”

“I was sweating a lot. Feeling panicky.”

“Do you recall any unusual smell?”

The band of skin at the back of my neck went cold. My voice tangled in my throat, so I nodded.

“Bitter? Like burning rubber?” Lloyd didn’t have to wait for an answer; he could read my face. “It’s called an olfactory aura. They often occur just before seizures.”

I remembered hearing about auras, but I hadn’t put the information together with my dream. “Can I ask you about something else?”

“The question is, can I answer?”

“I want to know about sevoflurane,” I said.

Lloyd pulled on his glasses, as if they helped him think better, and said cautiously, “What about it?”

“You found traces in Kasey Broach’s bloodstream.”

“Kaden and Delveckio revealed that to you?”

I couldn’t tell if he was shocked or angry. “The night of the dream, when I woke up, I was really groggy and I had blurred vision. I also had a cut on my foot—I think someone might have knocked me out and stolen blood to frame me.”

Lloyd let out an unamused cough of a laugh. “Drew—”

“Just hear me out, Lloyd. I did some research on sevoflurane today. It’s a perfect drug for that. Easy to inhale, quickly induces anesthesia, nonpungent odor. It leaves the bloodstream quickly, so it’s hard to test for. No strong aftereffects, so I wouldn’t know I’d been drugged.”