The Crime Writer (2 page)

Serge finally came on the line asking how he might provide me excellent service. I explained that I’d lapsed in paying my phone bill but would do so now, and that I needed my service restored. After he finished lambasting me with outstanding penalties and reconnect charges, all of which I contritely pledged to pay, he sighed with disappointment and took down my credit-card number.

“Can I keep my phone number?” I asked, anxious to retain anything familiar.

“Your service wasn’t disconnected, just interrupted,” Serge said, “so yeah. We’ll send a guy out to reconnect the line.”

“When?”

“By next Thursday.”

“Can’t you get anyone here sooner?”

“Maybe. But next Thursday’s the first we can guarantee.”

This didn’t strike me as excellent service.

“Listen,” I said, “I can’t not have a phone right now.”

“Then maybe it was a bad idea to ignore your bill for four months?”

“Did I reach the call center in India?”

A brief pause, and then he said, “Oh,
right.
Andrew Danner. You were otherwise detained.”

But while extenuating circumstances had granted me my freedom, they were no match for the phone company. Serge remained unmoved, so I flipped my cell phone shut and powered off my computer, leaving the office in peace.

The bedroom told a story of its own, the tale of April’s departure. Door ajar. Sheets thrown back. A few of my toiletries knocked over on the bathroom counter as she’d scrambled to pack up her overnight bag. Pink razor overlooked in the shower. Maybe I’d give it a try later for old times’ sake. April had dropped one of her socks by the sink in her haste to leave.

We’d still been in the first flush of romance. An orthopedist with neat, pretty features and an even temperament I’d enviously put down to a midwestern upbringing, April had seen me after I’d snapped a collarbone playing pickup ball at Balboa Park. The firm medical touch, the caring tempered by reason, the proximity of our faces as she manipulated my arm through this test or that—I hadn’t stood a chance. We were three months new, full of imaginings that seemed youthful for a couple of hunkered-down thirty-eight-year-olds. Good-night calls. Ice cream from the carton in bed. Howard Hawks classics and Fabrocini’s pizza. The occasional sleepover, just for practice. Then a brutal killing.

That interrupted a kind of levity and hopefulness I’d doubted I would feel again after Genevieve and I had gone our separate, bemused ways half a year before. Or, according to the prosecution and the cable anchors, our bitter, vituperative ways.

I picked up April’s sock, feeling the emotion rising again before deciding I wouldn’t allow myself to get all blubbery over footwear. I set my tumor on the nightstand, made the bed, then sat on top of the sheets, wondering what kind of loneliness we were in for. Me and my tumor.

Gazing at that suspended mass of brown cells, my mind pulled again to Genevieve, the horror of her death, the greater horror of my unknown implication in it. She’d brought a tinge of the exotic to her tastes, to her pronouncements, that I’d found irresistible. Most of her I found attractive. The finality of her judgments. The sureness of her passions. She was a big woman, thick around the thighs and hips, and refreshingly comfortable—no,
confident
—in her body and in what it could do. I remembered her mostly as a collection of sensations. The smoothness of a cheek brushing my chest. Traces of Petite Cherie on the pillowcase. Beads of sweat on her alabaster back. Her sleeping face—smooth as a child’s. She had no bad angles, Genevieve, and no bad-face days. It’s much harder to resent someone when she has no bad angles. It takes a measure more of behavioral ugliness. But while I took my time getting there, she raced ahead, resenting her moods enough for us both. I was in love with her, certainly, but more in love with holding her together, and she was the only one of us perceptive enough to grasp that complexity.

The night of our breakup, she’d run her full gamut. I’d emerged from my office in the evening to find her sitting in my bedroom, watching
The Bachelor
’s rose ceremony, pint of Chunky Monkey in her lap. She’d held up the spoon in my direction to prevent me from distracting her from the TV. “Jane’s a vile cow, and she needs to go
home.
” The trace of French accent undercut the prosaic declaration, making me suppress a smile. Then later, with a devilish giggle: “Let’s grab a bite. If we stay in, we’ll just fight or fuck.” She’d held my hand across the restaurant table, face soft with ecstasy, while she named the spices in the merguez. We’d gone home and made love, sweaty in the hot breeze through the screen. That night I’d lost her into another dark mood, coming upon her sobbing in the shower. “There’s no dignity in anything anymore. It’s all so
cheap.
”

She was sitting on the tile, water pounding her chest. I’d crouched, feeling the familiar helplessness, the streams striking my sleeve. “What is?”

“All of it. TV. Nothing. I’m sorry. My head’s not right. It’s one of those…I’m sorry. This isn’t fair to you. I should go.”

Later I’d awakened somewhere in the early-morning hours to find my hand clasped between her clammy palms, her front teeth worrying a pale lower lip, her eyes seeking comfort even as she said, “It’s not going to work with us.” I didn’t have the energy to talk her around anymore. She packed up the few belongings she kept here, plugged in to opera on her i Pod so we wouldn’t argue as an excuse to lose nerve.

All the media confabulations about her made me realize how difficult she’d been to know. Despite her vague claims of managing a portion of the family real-estate portfolio, she hadn’t worked. She read a lot. She went to matinees. She knew good bakeries. She hadn’t asked a lot of life, and, in the end, it had given her less. I couldn’t help but think now of the experiences she’d never get to have. The whole world denied to her, irrevocably.

I wanted to shake off the past four months like an unsettling dream. But certain facts are like boulders. They get in your way. They’ve got sharp edges that cut you when you try to move them. For weeks after my mother died, I awoke in the morning, reduced to the most basic, childlike thoughts.
I want this not to be true. I want it not to have happened.
I just couldn’t bend my brain around it. My father’s death a year and a half later was equally painful, though by then at least I’d had some practice. But where to file Genevieve with the gash through the solar plexus?

“I didn’t do it,” I said to the tumor.

It gazed back indifferently.

I headed downstairs, opened the Jack Daniel’s, and inhaled the rich, satisfying aroma. Then I walked over to the kitchen sink and poured the smoky single-barrel down the drain. The Jews leave a glass of wine for Elijah; the Buddhists offer fruit; the gangbangers pour one out for their dead homeys. You’ve got to feed the gods. Or the gods feed on you.

Not that they won’t feed on you anyway.

A brass-plated cappuccino maker overcrowded the counter like a perched Labrador. I’d picked it up for Genevieve in the five-minute period when things were going smoothly between us, and it had put out fifteen shots of sludgelike espresso at a cost of $147 a cup. The refrigerator held three bottled waters and a dark chocolate bar, half eaten by April. Walking over to the cupboard, I removed the juice glass and white bowl that I’d just put away. I set them on the counter and stared at them as if I expected them to start talking.

Breakfast, September 23. My last memory before waking up in the recovery room.

I couldn’t stop my gaze from moving to the knives resting in the wooden block on the counter. A dark curiosity stirred in the pit of my gut. It felt like a blue-hot flame. Like a twenty-year scotch hitting the blood after a two-hour jog. I walked over to the wooden block, guessing correctly at which was the boning knife. I bounced it, feeling its heft. Stainless gleam, Japanese character on the blade. I’d used my knives maybe four or five times. Why had my hand found the boning knife so easily?

I stared at my hands for a good long time, then at my reflection in the window above the sink, some guy holding a knife, a notched line of hair over his scar. The sight made me shudder.

I visited my humidor, then went out to a deck chair, put my feet on the railing, and smoked a cigar down to the yellow speckled band. My sole remaining vice. Except writing.

If I ever actually wrote again.

The night was dark and January-sharp. People forget how cool L.A. can be in the winter—Pacific breeze, Santa Ana winds, angry spates of rain with half-assed lightning, like a constipated monsoon trying to find relief.

A view heals all woes. A view makes you feel as if you own something bigger than yourself, as if you own a place on the planet.

I watched the Valley twinkle in the heat below, like the ocean only prettier, because it was a sea of lights, because it was movement and life, because it let me be separate but connected to a thousand people in a thousand houses with a thousand stories, many sadder than my own. The mainline of Sepulveda charging north into worsening demographics. Van Nuys, beautiful only from a distance, where Mexicans play soccer workday mornings, crossing themselves before kickoff as if God cares about the outcome of a hungover pickup game. The 405, a curved waterfall of white headlights. Ventura moving east past the by-the-hour motels with glam studio names where johns bring broken street kids or vice versa. And around the Cahuenga Pass, where the city waits, an insatiable and inscrutable mistress, spread on a bed of neon with a sphinx smile, her just-pounced paws set down on punctured dreams.

I closed my eyes, cruising through Hollywood of the hipsters and wannabes, the culture consumers with brand names Roman-lettered across ass velour. Drifted behind the honk-oblivious Cutlass with Arkansas plates doing five miles per hour down the boulevard as heads inside craned on substantial southern necks, past black kids rat-a-tat-tatting on overturned white buckets, past peeling German noses, the sticky smell of suntan lotion, intoxicating smog, silver hoops piercing bronze belly buttons, Gap billboards of pop sensations in floppy hats, and up the alleys into real Hollywood, where hookers kneel over pools of vomit and junkies stumble from doorways, scratching their shoulders, mumbling their nighttime song,
Gotta get well, gotta get well.

Through the run of comedy clubs, where husbands from Wichita laugh at Jesus jokes despite sideways glances from prim-mouthed housewives, where amateurs sweat through sets and maybe, just maybe, after the heard-it-all waitresses clear the second empty glass of the two-drink minimum, that big-name sitcom actor will pop in to work out some new material. Then west to Boys Town, where gay couples come in shapes and sizes to defy the limited straight imagination, where soft-porn billboards overlook studded leather window treatments, glowing tarot cards, and tattoo parlors, where lovers sip coffee within screamshot of porn palaces with purple polystyrene, and parking signs totem-pole atop one another, impervious to comprehension. Past the Urth Café, where washed-up divorcées munch organic lettuce, faces caved from pills and swollen with collagen, a war of fleshy attrition. Down the slick snake of Sunset with its old mansions, its bright and brazen Hustler store, its Carnation lights at the holidays. Through Beverly Hills’ runs of palms oft filmed but never captured, leisure suits riding Segways to Valentino, celebutantes strolling with purse dogs, agents with their invisible cell-phone earpieces mumbling solo outside restaurants and at stop lights, the nattering dispossessed.

Come Westwood, come Brentwood, where 310 moms push symmetrical children in designer strollers through farmer’s markets and wax dreamily about Bali hotels. Onward to the Palisades, Santa Monica Canyon, and Malibu, up the sparkling coastline reeking of exhaust and covered with seagull guano, then through the runs of canyons, deep russet pleats like streaks of ore or a woman’s folds, the air startlingly crisp and tinged with salt.

My cheeks were wet with the breeze and the swell of my heart for the lights below. Los Angeles. A mirage of a town that sprang up like a cold sweat on the backs of gold diggers and railroad workers, and took form when pirate lm distributors, fleeing Edison’s patents, took a train and a gamble backed by East Coast muscle.

Los Angeles, land of endless promise. And endless failure. Los Angeles of the petty cruelties. Los Angeles of the instant hierarchy, the spray-on tan, the copped feel. L.A. of the bandaged, postoperative nose, the chai menu, the slander lawsuit. Of the hyphenated job title. The two-SUV garage. L.A. with its wide-open minds and well-formed opinions. L.A. of the high-octane sunset, the warm night air that leaves you drunk. L.A. of the prolonged adolescence, the slow-motion seduction, the ageless, replaceable blonde. L.A., where a porn star runs for governor and an action figure wins. L.A., where anything can happen at any time to some poor schmuck or lucky bastard. Where anything can happen to you.

Where anything had happened to me.

I
am in the Highlander, driving up a sharp grade, the only illumination coming from my headlights and a branch-occluded streetlight. Sweat runs down my forehead, stings my eyes. An acrid smell, like smoldering rubber, lingers in my nostrils. I am driving fast. The street is absurdly narrow, and I swerve to dodge parked cars. I know this street. I negotiate a hairpin with a screech, and there it is, drawing into view.

Genevieve’s house.

It looms darkly overhead, a wooden face staring out from the cliff wall. The stilts reach down into the earth like tentacles. Ivy crawls up the clapboards, fluttering.

The dashboard clock glows 1:21
A.M.

A spasm of fear seizes my chest. I pull over too hard, a front tire jumping the curb and snapping a sprinkler at the edge of the modest strip of lawn. I throw open my car door, run up the steep walk, concrete pavers shifting underfoot. The bitter smell grows stronger, almost unbearably so. Behind me the open car door dings, competing with the crickets.

I nearly trip over the last step and stumble up onto the porch. I hear music—something classical and majestic. In my head?

The philodendron quivers in the breeze. I lean forward, grasp the terra-cotta pot with sweaty hands as glossy leaves brush my face. The plant tilts easily but slips back through my hands, cracking the clay saucer in a lightning bolt that almost reaches the lip. I wipe my palms on my jeans, angle back the pot again, and there, glittering in the grime, lies the brass key.

My head screaming, I came awake in a tangle of sheets, lost in clammy, adrenalized panic. Heat raged along my scar, so intense that when I fingered the line I thought for a moment it was wet. It took a few moments for me to get my bearings. My bed. First night home. My window had split into two floating rectangles. I squinted hard, fighting to bring the wavering panes back into one. My tongue tasted bitter, like the rind of a hard fruit. 11:23
P.M.
stared back at me from my bedside clock.

I tried to slow my breathing, but my dream kept cycling through my head, a disorienting loop of agitation. It felt different from any nightmare I’d had. More real and more surreal at the same time. Had I recaptured a segment of time? Myself driving over to Genevieve’s the night of September 23? Earlier tonight? Or was it just Freud in overdrive, fantasies at play while the censors took a coffee break?

In the dream my car tire had snapped a sprinkler. And the terra-cotta pot had slipped through my hands, cracking the saucer beneath. The images meant nothing. But what if that sprinkler and saucer really
were
broken? At last—something concrete I could confirm with my own eyes.

I threw off the sheets and rolled out of bed, drowsy, feeling as though I were walking underwater. The air was inexplicably cold, and suddenly I had a sense of movement downstairs. I trudged onto the catwalk and peered over the railing into the living room.

Resting on the carpet downstairs was a four-foot metal rod. In my grogginess it took me a moment to identify it as the security bar that fits into the track of the sliding glass door opening to the backyard. I heard the wind suck against the frame, out of view, and became aware, again, of the cold air rising to my bare skin. The sound of traffic down on the freeway was faint but unmuted.

Standing there, I tried to unfreeze myself, to find logic. I’d probably come in from the deck, exhausted, and neglected to close up. After all, I’d just come off four months of having no control over when the doors opened or closed. But doubt nagged. The security bar maybe I would’ve overlooked, but forgetting to slide the door closed behind me? With the chill that had settled in out there?

I crept down the stairs. The sliding glass door was indeed wide open. A few leaves had blown in, great yellow husks wagging on the carpet. I stared at the black square of the deck, steeling myself, then headed for it. I collected the leaves and slipped outside. The deck was empty, as was the modest patch of lawn to the right, before the ivied slope. A noise to the side of the house drew my attention, the fence rattling in the wind perhaps, and I stepped around the corner and peered back toward the street. The walkway lights of the facing house flickered, one after another, as if a form were moving across them, though how could I be certain? I was glad I’d kept the lights off, preserving my night vision, but the moon, lost behind the Johnsons’ sycamore, gave me little aid. I jogged down the side run. The gate clinked—the sound from earlier—its latch undone. I passed through and walked down my stone-paved driveway to the middle of the street, rotating, bewildered, in my boxers. No sign of anyone, no sound of an engine turning over.

I retraced my steps, reentering the house and securing the sliding glass door behind me. On the carpet, made barely visible by the glow of distant city lights, was tracked dirt. A C-shaped repeat, stamped perhaps by the edge of a shoe.

Telephone out. Cell phone upstairs. Media-darling me in my underwear, sound of mind and beloved by local law enforcement.

I moved silently along the trail and into the kitchen. Keeping my eyes on the doorway, I grasped the ten-inch chef’s knife and slid it out of the block. My knuckles sensed an emptiness, and I glanced down. Among the protruding handles, a black slit.

The boning knife was missing.