The Crime Writer (23 page)

L
loyd blocked the gap in his doorway with his body as if nervous I’d muscle my way inside. A lab drone had told me he’d gone home early today, so I’d raced over after leaving an excited Junior at the curb outside Hope House. Xena, snoozing in the Guiltmobile’s backseat, would live another day in Casa de Danner. Lloyd had listened to my account impassively, not budging from his post.

“I can’t help you anymore, Drew.”

“This is
it,
Lloyd. It all hinges on this.” I lifted the plastic Baggie so he could see the six of Morton Frankel’s hairs pressed inside. Four had nice follicular tags, white dots of flesh, attached to the roots. DNA treasure troves.

“We took a gamble on you coming into the lab last night, but now word of your visit’s gotten around. Henderson himself was waiting at my bench this morning. I can’t lose my job, our health insurance.” His voice trailed off. “Things aren’t good here, Drew. That’s why I’m home.”

“I’m sorry.”

He stared at me. “I’m sorry, too. But I can’t help. I’m barely staying afloat here.”

“Where else can I go?”

“Go through official channels.”

“You and I both know I can’t do that without landing in jail.”

“Have someone take a look at that eye.”

“That’s not gonna get these hairs run for DNA.”

“You obtained them unlawfully. You broke in to his apartment. That’s illegal
and
unethical. You crossed a line, Drew. It’s not my fault that you can’t get anyone else to cross it with you.”

“This guy framed me. He knows who I am. Where I live. Which means he’ll come after me. I’m in a jam here, Lloyd.”

“And I’m not? I raced home today because Janice got a nosebleed that wouldn’t quit. Forty-five minutes before we could get the platelets in to stop it.” He dropped his gaze, unwilling to look me in the face. “I’m sorry, Drew, but Janice and I have to look out for ourselves.”

The door rasped closed. I stood holding the six hairs, listening to his retreating footsteps.

“Know what happens when someone punches you in the face? It hurts. That’s it. No white bursts before the eyes. No blinding flashes. It just fucking hurts.”

Patiently waiting for me to finish, Chic dabbed at my swollen eye with a Q-tip dipped in alcohol. “And unlike Derek Chainer’s bullet grazes along his shoulder and them pretty shiners he come down with, it gonna hurt for more than one chapter.”

“Yeah, I was full of shit about that, too.” My right eye throbbed as if someone were pressing a stove coil against it. The image my bathroom mirror threw back at me was not a pretty one. The skin around the eye had gone parchment yellow and had a papery look to match. Broken vessels squirmed from the lids like the locks of Medusa. A half-moon at the temple, where the flesh had split, glittered darkly.

We felt Big Brontell’s approach through the floor; he’d gone down to get his gear. “What’s Newt Gingrich doin’ in there?” he called out.

“Moaning, mostly,” Chic said.

Big Brontell entered, the first-aid box like a travel sewing kit in his massive hands. The most professionally successful of the multitude of Chic’s brothers, he was a charge nurse at Cedars-Sinai Hospital and spent much of his time repairing his brethren after motocross crashes, electrical shocks, or enigmatic altercations. He looked like Chic, only Supersized.

Chic and Big Brontell’s arrival had interrupted a bout of furious writing, the words flying out of me as if I were taking dictation rather than making them up. I’d almost forgotten I’d called on my way back from Lloyd’s to enlist their help; when the doorbell had rung, I’d started, anticipating Mortie bearing a boning knife and a horsey grin. I’d answered the door, gun in hand, and Big Brontell had chuckled and said, “How you like
that
for racial profiling?”

The strands of Frankel’s hair, preserved in the Baggie, rested on the counter by the sink. They’d been hard-won, and I wasn’t going to let them out of my sight—my own paranoid evidentiary chain of custody. Chic’s deadbeat-mom-and-pop tracker had uncovered nothing new linking any element of the case to Delveckio or Cal Unger—or to Bill Kaden, whom he’d tossed in for free. And he’d yet to come up with anything salient on Frankel, so those hairs, for now, were all I had.

As Big Brontell began stitching me with surprising grace and care, I kept my gaze on those six brown hairs, grasping for solutions, options, new avenues. “Why can’t you have any brothers who are criminalists?”

Big Brontell said, “We got plenty who are crimi
nals.
”

He finished, and I thanked him and walked them down. At the door Chic set his hands on my shoulders and leaned forward so our foreheads almost touched. “You keep that gun near and call if you need me, hear?”

“I hear.”

“You’re splashing through dangerous waters, Drew-Drew. Might want to slow down for a time, drift with the currents.”

“If I can just get one of those hairs run for DNA, I’m thinking I can close this whole thing up.”

Chic smiled knowingly; I rarely said anything that surprised him. He jerked his head, indicating the sunset that was now my right eye. “Juss remember,” he said, “your best thinking got you here.”

My gaze lifted from the pages, stained with Preston’s stereotype red, to his face. “Spoiled Brat High?”

“I was going for Harvard-Westlake but blanked on the name.” He drained his glass and set it down, completing his collection on my coffee table. Now that I’d felt the mood in his condo, I understood better why he dropped by at every opportunity. Stretching, he rose from the couch, not seeming to note the tufts of stuffing clinging to his pants. He turned down the volume on the evening news, which, refreshingly, didn’t include me, and gathered his various stacks of papers.

He paused beside me on his way out and said archly, “I edit you hard because I care.”

“I could warm my hands on your affection.”

“Call if I can be of further assistance.”

“Further?”

“Of course. ‘Farther’ is for distance.”

“Never mind.”

He disappeared from the room, leaving behind the bottle of Havana Club, which, down to its last drops, was no longer worth hiding. I sank into my reading chair, which alone had been spared Xena’s wrath, and propped my feet on the ottoman. The news jingle gave way to a commercial for
Chain of Command
—a coveted fifteen-second spot my publisher had refused to grant me before I’d been indicted for murder. Marketing had chosen a disturbing publicity still of my face, which looked somewhere between angry and constipated, floating eerily above the cover of my most recent novel.

Next, adhering to some bizarre karmic logic, the familiar drumbeat opening of the main title sequence of
Aiden’s War.
Here was Johnny Ordean tackling a street hustler, there ducking a roundhouse Your next move, while challenging, is not unclear: You need to get an illegally obtained hair analyzed. Here is your assignment, as dogged protagonist: How can you meet this challenge in a manner unique to you? In a way that draws upon who you are or, better, in a way that only you can? thrown by an unappealing Arab. Looking noticeably more svelte than he had in his role as Father Derek Chainer, Johnny stopped for a zoom close-up as he did weekly, or nightly if you had a dish.

I flashed on the scene I’d caught when I was at the bar with Caroline—Johnny crouching over a corpse, studying the bullet casing he’d impaled on a paper clip.
HUSTLE THIS TO FORENSICS THE CASING NOT THE HOT DOG.

I shuffled through the pages, finding Preston’s final note. Then I tugged my cell phone from my pocket and dialed.

Over the pulsing beat of club music, a guy with a strong Brooklyn accent: “Johnny Ordean’s phone.”

Ever since
Aiden’s Law
had racked up enough episodes for a DVD box set, Johnny had assumed the affectation of unavailability, putting nine layers of entourage between himself and others.

“Surprisingly,” I said, “I’m calling for Johnny. This is Drew Danner.”

“
Andrew
Danner? The…?”

“Murderer,” I said. “Sure. That’s me.”

Animated shouting, then Johnny’s voice, hoarse and loud: “Drew? That you? Crazy days, bro. Crazy days. You kill that broad?”

“Twice.”

“Drastic.” Johnny partook vigorously of the bad slang that seemed to sweep through L.A. every other season like a crimson tide.

“How’s it going?”

“Solid. The show’s kickin’. We’re doing a spin-off next year.”

“Aiden’s Law Omaha?”

“Very funny, bro. It’s called
Mary’s Rule,
and the sister—”

“Listen, I need a favor. You still have criminalists on staff as expert consultants?”

“Yeah, a handful.”

“I have a hair that I need to get run by a crime lab. It could prove me innocent.” Of course, it
wouldn’t
prove me innocent, but I was trying to feed him the kind of dialogue to which he was accustomed to responding. “I need to know who it belongs to.”

“Like a clue?” Noticeable excitement in his voice.

“Yeah, Johnny. Like a clue. Can you have one of your guys do it?”

“Sure, I’ll take it in to them, say I need to see how it works for an episode idea I’m developing. They love walking me through that stuff at the lab. When you need it by?”

“As soon as possible. It’s hard for me to describe how important this is.”

“Bring the hair by Flux. It’s a closed party—I’ll have you put on the list. I’ll call one of the consultants, have him check out the hair tonight.”

“You can get that done? Tonight?”

“I’m Johnny Ordean. I can get anything done.”

F
lux is the Hollywood club of the minute, trending hot with wheatgrass martinis, bamboo walls, and a bump-and-grind DJ beat ideal for ecstasy humpers, film-industry underlings, and clubbies. I paid twenty bucks to park in a space fit for a lawn mower and legged it down Sunset.

Beneath every windshield wiper, a glossy postcard hawking bad theater. At every street corner, a woman stomping her boots against the cold. Even at this hour, bodies spilled from gyms, where would-be scribblers and bit players simulated honest work. Bodies so sculpted and chiseled they seem of a different species, bodies that have endless time to devote to themselves, to do that extra six sets of ten on the cable pull that defines the inner prong of the triceps or the outer slab of the quad. I used to have a body like that, a lesser model built from a matching mind-set before both grew too weary to keep up. I walked on, taking in the night, these bits of a past persona I never quite inhabited. The tangy scent of deodorant, candy-colored i Pods strapped to glistening arms, steam lifting from overheated Dri-FIT shirts like cartoon sizzle.

The velvet ropes that in other, more reasonable cities are consigned to museums and musicals sprout from the sidewalk like futuristic shrubs. Massed at the imaginary walls before the bouncers are dime-store vixens and cultivated tough guys. Everyone is in costume; everyone has a getup; it’s perennial Halloween. Pearl Jam plaid, skullcap chic, scruff faces and denim vests cut to show off shoulder tats. A girl, for no reason, wears a Gatsby cap and a wide tie snaking into a 1920s vest. Even the firemen shuffling through the bars are done up and done down, T-shirts announcing their stations, blond wisps grown just long enough to curl out the bottoms of their stocking caps, models in search of calendars. They are all children, and yet they are all adults. They unpack from Jettas and Navigators and the occasional Lotus. They cross streets in packs, like wolves, sipping Vitawaters and smoking American Spirits, yammering on cell phones with customized bleats and chimes, the night lit with a psychedelic rainbow of LED screens—cotton-candy pink, toilet-bowl blue, horror-show green.

L.A. is a city of memorable faces. Even the unattractive character actors have that certain something, that exemplification of type. The others, too, lodge in the mind. The near misses. All lacking that extra
it
that would catapult them, that would mean they’re not here at this place with these people, with you and me. Perky girl in a White Sox cap, nose-job-enhanced but not quite there. The wrestler who won best smile at Wichita High. The cheerleading captain who gave great backseat head in Short Hills. They come like pioneers, bringing abdominal six-packs and twenty-two waists and little else, seekers of prepackaged glory without the talent for Broadway or the balls for the service. L.A. is the edge of the American dream, the farthest your hopes can carry you before you topple into the Pacific, Icarus without water wings. And yet still they come. They come out and crowd the cliff edges, penguins above dangerous waters.

L.A. will devour them. It will crush them into inconsequentiality, grind them into a paste and smear them through the city’s forgotten alleys. They will clip coupons and pre-party to save money on bar tabs. They will inhabit dojos and Coffee Beans during working hours—sunny L.A.’s businesses thrive with patronage from the idle keeping their empty audition hours open—and they’ll scour online job sites for graveyard shifts that don’t exist. They will get gigs as trainers and waiters and Cuervo girls, and their friends will mumble,
That’s cool, that’s cool.
They’ll turn into third-rate entrepreneurs, making bamboo purses, designing jewelry in Reseda, marketing a blue-colored vodka in college bars. Their days
must
be open for auditions that come less and less frequently, but just when they’re about to lose hope, they’ll land Laura in a small-theater production of
The Glass Menagerie
and the rush and promise will fuel ungainful employment for another few years. And then, if they haven’t wised up and beat a retreat to Billings or Sioux City, someone will offer them a pinch of escapism or a skin flick—not porn but tasteful erotica—and so the next downward spiral will begin. And new meat arrives by the busload. It pours out of LAX and off the freeways, chattel for the abattoir, oxen groomed for the altar.

I reached Flux, fighting through a mosh pit of wannabes mobbing the unmarked double doors. No one has a name here. They are all “dawg” and “baby doll.” They gain position in the scrum by working in concert, like raptors, with the friends they’ll be only too eager to drop once they book their first pilot. They call out to the bouncer using his first name, which they’ve researched. Their boss’s brother knows the bartender, or their brother’s boss knows the owner. They swell and shove politely, and a chirpy girl with a clipboard feigns exasperation through her ecstasy of purpose and rank, chiding them and distributing wristbands as if feeding chimps at a zoo. A few older women, indistinguishable from prostitutes by garb and makeup, have ceded bitchiness with their age; they can no longer compete directly. Instead they switch strategies, cooing support at the czarina working the door.
That poor girl. Look, she’s all alone managing the line. You
go,
honey. You tell them.
Still, they do not curry enough goodwill to pass Go. The girl with the clipboard knows their type, knows that in a different life they’ve blown smoke in her face at a cattle call or discarded her head shot while working nights filing in a casting office.

Consigned to club-line purgatory, the crowdlings bicker and pop pills and talk loudly of embellished career developments and pretend not to be where they are, waiting outside in the bitter Hollywood night. That is where they will wait, night after night. And then one day Fame will pluck one of these poor unfortunate souls and elevate her like a priestess to the top of the ziggurat, and thenceforth, she will never know cordon ropes and lines and bouncers named Ricky, and it will make it worth it for everyone else who still does.

Chic’s voice, like warning bells in my head:
Always easier to take somebody else’s inventory.

What made me any different? About how I got here? Where I’d wound up?

A shorter bus ride and a longer stain.

Then what? Envy? I thought I’d sworn off that with the single-barrel bourbon. Envy for what? The exuberance? The hopefulness? The youth? As Chic had said, life leaves you behind. By Hollywood standards I was long in the tooth, like Morton Frankel. I had a few successes under my belt and access to rooms behind some of the city’s locked doors—as a writer, as an alleged murderer—in a way that others might envy, but I’d have traded it in a stockbroker’s minute to be back on the other side, out in the unforgiving night, with all my solutions lying inside. I’d have traded it all to believe in the myth once again.

But instead I am here to deliver a hair.

I cut through the crowd, and it yielded to my apathy. Inside, over an ungodly remix beat, some kid covered Bob Seger without the grit or gravitas.

“Drew Danner,” I told the girl at the door. “I’m with Johnny Ordean.”

At both names the frontmost constituents of the throng stilled and the girl dropped the clipboard against her thigh, revealing it for the prop that it was, and wordlessly unhooked the maroon rope.

Sliced-and-diced Seger had given way to pump-and-hump rhythm. Threesomes were freaking under seizure-inducing lights.
I find me bitches left and right. I find me bitches every night.
Production-development girls in Chanel grooved in a circle, their oblivious movement an inadvertently droll endorsement of the lyrics. The club had a kind of magnetic energy that pointed to the rear corner, where indeed I found Johnny Ordean and his franchise face. Fulfilling the no-neck contingency of the entourage, his cousin sat deep in the booth, hammering cigarettes into his face one after another.

He slid out and I slid in. Johnny wrapped an arm around my shoulders, raised his brows at my vibrant eye, and gave my neck a squeeze like an old-school mobster. Playing the part, I reached inside my jacket pocket, removed the envelope, and dropped it on the table like a payoff. The envelope held a Ziploc containing a single specimen of Morton Frankel’s hair. The others I was saving for a rainy day.

Johnny wound his finger in the air, a let’s-get-moving gesture, and his cousin shifted the cig from one end of his mouth to the other and pressed a cell phone to his sweaty cheek.

“Fast and quiet,” I said.

Johnny squeezed my neck again.

“And thank you.”

“Of course, bro. What good is celebrity if you can’t put it to work?”

It was, I thought, an excellent question.