The Crime Writer (24 page)

F
ar from the madding crowd, I sat like a tailgater on my little rented rectangle of Hollywood asphalt and dialed my cell phone.

“I’d like to see you,” I said. “I’m in your neck of the woods.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, “I can hear the excess in the background.”

The parking-lot attendant gave me a peculiar look as I pulled out. For twenty bucks I should’ve set up camp for the night.

Caroline proved to live in a corner unit on the sixth floor of a recently renovated building on Crescent Heights. I tripped over some vestigial scaffolding on my way in, the doorman kindly pretending not to notice. I waited in the freshly carpeted hall while she undid a profusion of dead bolts. She double-checked me through a veil of security chains, and then the door closed on me again. More metallic unhooking and we were face-to-face.

She reached out, gingerly touched my right temple just beyond the stitches. “Have you iced that?”

Minutes later I was sitting on her plush sofa, she on the adjoining coffee table, the better to press a bag of frozen corn kernels to my eye. I described to her the nature of my disagreement with Mort. To my surprise she didn’t reprimand me for Junior’s role, but then, she knew him better than I and, given her profession, likely applied a stringent doctrine of accountability regardless of age.

The edge of the bag caught a stitch, and I grimaced. Leaning forward, she adjusted, and then our faces were close, the air chilled from the frozen bag. She brushed the hair off my forehead gently, and her lips parted a bit, her gaze on my mouth. I moved the bag aside, but she stood abruptly and said, “What are we doing here, Drew? I mean, why do you like being with me?”

“Your trusting nature?”

“I’m serious.”

I set the bag on my knee. “Because it’s the only time I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but instead she held up a finger and walked swiftly down the hall, and then I heard a door close and the sounds of retching. The sink ran for a while, and there was toothbrushing and gargling, and soon she returned, red-faced, reluctant to make eye contact.

I said, “If I kiss you, does your head explode?”

She said, incredulous, “You still want to kiss me?”

“I do. I also want to wake up next to you.” I held up both hands. “Today, a year from now, whenever. I’m just letting you know that I find you—”

She said, “Come here.” She was shaking. She took my hand and led me to her bedroom, and then she turned off the lights and stepped out of her sweatpants. She kissed me nervously, too hard, and said, “Get a condom. It’s in the drawer,” and as I fumbled out of my clothes, she tugged me on top of her. I moved to lift her shirt, but she grabbed my wrist, firmly, and said, “I want to keep it on,” and then guided my shoulders and set her jaw in the best spirit of let’s-get-it-over-with.

I kept thinking I had the angle or position wrong until it struck me that she had tightened up, locked down her body in panic until it was as though there were no aperture. We shifted and reshifted until she laughed and said bitterly, “Hey, you wanted to,” and rolled over, and then her shoulders shook once, and I realized she was crying.

“I’m not crying,” she said.

I lay there in the dark beside her, wanting to touch her but not sure if that was the right call.

“That moved a little fast for me,” I said. “I’d imagine it felt the same way to you.”

She kept on her stomach, angled away, her head lowered to the cross of her arms. Her voice was hoarse and unsteady, but gentle. “Just lock the front door behind you, okay?”

“What are you feeling?”

“Philosophical.”

“That’s not a feeling.”

“Oh, great. This game.”

“Knock it off,” I said.

She was silent for a long time, and then she said, “I’m sorry. That’s a reasonable question. I don’t know if I’m clear enough to answer it.”

“So make it up.”

“How do I feel…?” A car horn blared in the distance. From one of the apartments in floating proximity came Eric Clapton, an accompaniment to someone’s romantic dinner. Caroline’s shoulders seized a bit more, but she didn’t make a noise, and then she hung her head off the bed and miraculously came up with a tissue and blew her nose, all the while keeping her face from view. She settled back into position. Her voice cracked when she spoke. “That if I’m not vigilant, undisclosed awful things will happen to me. And.” A deep breath. “That I may not be brave enough to allow myself something like this.”

We breathed for a while in the semidarkness, and then eventually I said, “Do you mind if I take the rest of my clothes off?”

She turned slowly, hair hiding one eye. Sheer lavender curtains filtered the faint lights from the street below. She watched me for a long time. “No.”

She’d pulled me to her so furiously that my clothes were still clinging to me—one shoe, both socks, a tangle of boxers at my ankle. I stripped and she watched me, and then I lay flat on her bed, hands at my sides, and said, “Okay. I have no expectations. I’m just lying here naked so you can look at me.”

She pulled her shirt back into place, sat Indian style before me, and studied me clinically.

After a time I asked, “How do you feel now?”

“Anxious. I haven’t, obviously, since…”

“I figured.”

“Can I touch you?”

“Yes.”

She pressed both palms flat against my chest and leaned, as if testing my consistency. She stroked my thigh with the tips of her nails. She cupped me in her hand and said, “You’re so soft.”

“Not if you keep that up.”

She laughed, covering her mouth as if the sound had caught her off guard. She tugged out her ponytail holder, and her lank, sandalwood hair relaxed into wisps, which brushed my chest as she leaned over me. She felt my entire body, inch by inch, a blind person learning a new shape. After maybe twenty minutes of silent examination, she lifted off her own shirt.

Her torso, too, bore the marks of the abuse she’d endured, though they were less striking, inlaid against her splendid form. A short run of mottled flesh at her left shoulder, a ridge of stomach muscle, a gnarl of scar tissue at her ribs, the swell of her breasts.

“You can touch,” she said. “Me.”

I lifted my hands from my sides and explored her delightful, unpredictable body. Her breathing shifted. She tilted her head, let her hair spill across her face. Falling back, she pulled me on top of her again and clutched my back. Her breath came hot against my neck. It took time for her to unclench; we moved slowly, with patience, murmuring and kissing, one vivid moment at a time. And finally we were making love. It was not without awkwardness, but it wasn’t without grace either.

Afterward she clung to me, started crying, and didn’t stop. She wept with the abandon of a child, until she was limp, until her face was drained to a dishwater gray. Beneath the veneer of exhaustion and terror, she looked elated.

She slung a leg across my stomach and propped herself up on an elbow, her face beside mine. “Sorry I cried.”

“I don’t mind. Apologize to yourself if you want to.”

She lowered her chin to my chest. “I used to be good at this, you know.”

“I’m told I never was.”

She laughed, hit me weakly.

“They say the eyes are the windows to the soul,” I said. “I do not believe this to be true. I believe the toes are the windows to the soul.”

“Oh? How are my toes?” She wiggled them, showing off.

“Magnificent.”

We talked a bit more and then dozed off together. At 11:32 I awoke with a start.

“What?” she said sleepily. “What’s wrong?”

I sat up to try to slow my breathing.

She felt my shoulders. “Jesus, you’re drenched.”

My dream-memory streamed back in vivid detail, me in my car the night of, driving to Genevieve’s. Alone. Running up her stairs. Alone. Finding the key. Alone.

“I can’t spend the night here. The last time I spent the night with someone was when I…”

“You don’t know.”

“Exactly.”

“Either way. Whatever you did or didn’t do, you had a brain tumor.”

“I’ve done or not done plenty since then.”

Like when I’d awakened to find the slice above my little toe. With a clean bill of mental health, I’d followed my own bloody footprints around the house. Returned to find my boning knife, bearing my own prints, by the bed. Discovered the shattered jar in the sink and ganglioglioma gone spelunking down the disposal. What if I hadn’t been gassed with sevoflurane? What if Morton Frankel had never been to my house? What if this was all my writer’s mind at work on an elaborate fiction? A more convenient tale, spun for the age-old reason all escapist yarns are?

A memory hit me, fresh as a vision. Genevieve bouncing foot to foot along the cliff’s edge above Santa Monica Beach, giggling manically as I shadowed her five feet off. An ingenious blackmail—should I be scared? Indifferent? Should I approach? Tourists watching with trepidation, parents shepherding their kids away. We’d gotten into a fight over something monumental—taco stand or Korean barbecue—and it had erupted as it often did.
What’s the matter, Drew? I’m embarrassing you?
Embarrassment, sure, but also terror that she’d misjudge her footing, resentment at how my hands clutched the air every time she wobbled. At the time I hadn’t identified the sensation hiding beneath the others like a buried ember. Rage.

I believe that anyone is capable of anything.

In addition to my own unstable self, I had other nocturnal dangers to offer. Kaden and Delveckio could come calling—after all, I still owed them a gun—and drag Caroline into the investigation. Morton Frankel could be smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in the alley below, staring up at this window right now.

“I don’t trust where I am. I need to get more answers.”

“Sorry,” she said, “but there’s only room for my issues in this relationship.”

That drew a smile from me. She threw on a nightgown as I dressed. At the door we kissed. I ran my thumb along the line of one of her scars.

She asked, “What if you get to the end of this road and discover you did do it?”

“I don’t know that I could live with myself.”

“Drew,” she said, “we’re generally not given that choice.”

I
emerged from sleep calmly and knew the time before I glanced at my nightstand clock: 1:08
A.M.
A menacing rumble downstairs. An unusual chill in the air, colder than the house got at night, even in January. I rolled over, rested my hand on the loaded .22.

The noise ceased, then commenced with renewed energy.

Xena growling.

I threw back the sheets, ran to my closet, and dressed rapidly. Passing the window above the bathtub, I stopped, my breath jerking out of me.

Across the street, beneath the gloomy overhang of the neighbor’s carport, a man stood in the ribbed darkness, peering up at my house. He was little more than a black form—because of the interplay of competing shadows, it was difficult to gauge even his height.

Morton Frankel, finally come calling?

He stood motionless, the tilt of his head suggesting he was looking up at the very window before me. Could he see me in the darkness behind the glass?

I moved swiftly through my room and eased out onto the catwalk. Peering over the railing, I saw the security rod on the carpet, again dislodged from the slider’s track. The sliding door itself I couldn’t see, but Xena stood facing it, fur raised in a wolfish bristle along her neck and upper back. A gust rattled the screen door, and an instant later I felt cold air rise to my face.

I slid off the pistol’s safety and hurried down the stairs, letting my shoulder whisper along the curved wall to my right. A movement at the front door, toward the top where I’d clumsily covered the shattered inset windows. Beneath the nailed plywood, on the only sliver of exposed packing tape, a slit had been cut. It had been widened to maybe six inches before whoever cut it had realized that the plywood wouldn’t allow a hand to snake through and reach the inside lock. Pouched inward, the slit breathed with the wind, a weird sort of acrylic mouth.

I came around the base of the stairs. Xena must have smelled that it was me; she kept her focus on the two-foot gap where the sliding door had been pushed open. Leaves scratched along the back deck, nothing more. I drew even with Xena. Mort hadn’t counted on my having a guard dog. In the slider’s track, the paint was scraped where the slim jim had been slipped through to pop the security rod out of place.

I opened the screen, stepped out onto the deck, closing Xena inside so I could make silent progress. As before, the side gate clanked. Down the hill a pack of coyotes bayed, closing in on someone’s pet. Straight-arming the .22, I crept around the house, moving in and out of shadow until I reached the street.

Beneath the carport nothing but my neighbor’s familiar van and pools of shadow. Was I losing touch? Again? I ran over, checked behind and under the van, then came out and stood in my old spot in the middle of the street. No movement except bobbing branches and fluttering leaves.

And the distant purr of a motor.

I listened, but the sound neither rose nor faded.

Keeping to the sidewalk, I moved down the street, the noise growing louder. I made my way past two lots, pausing before the high stucco wall that guarded the corner house’s driveway. The wall played with the acoustics; I was unsure if the running car was just behind it or farther along on the intersecting street.

Keeping the pistol raised before me, I leaned around the wall, but the vehicle—if it was there—was too far back to draw into my line of sight. Holding an inhale, I stepped past the wall onto the dark drive-way. The outline of a facing car, maybe ten yards up the long, narrow drive, the windshield an impervious black sheet, exhaust clinging to its rear. The house was up around the bend, set back above a sharp slope. The memory of cigarette smoke tinged the air. To my right, the reliable wall, on my left, a bank of ivy.

Had the driver kept the car running for his return, or was he in there now, watching me?

Vigilant of ambush from the side or behind, I shuffled forward, aiming at the windshield, braced to run. Despite my fear and the cold, I managed to keep the gun steady, the recurrent puffs before my face an indication of how much my breathing had quickened.

A few steps revealed the car to be a Volvo. Dark paint. The license plate had been removed. Another few feet and I’d be able to make out if there was a form in the driver’s seat.

The headlights flared, blinding me. The engine roared and the tires squealed, seeking purchase. The Volvo leapt forward. I fired, the bullet punching a hole in the top right corner of the windshield. Bolting left, I got in a step and was airborne when the hood clipped me. I rolled up the edge of the windshield, the driver a passing blur, and flew off the side, landing in the ivy. The Volvo skidded onto the street, through the intersection, and was gone. I lay on my back, panting, a sprinkler head dug into the small of my back. Rats rustled around me through the damp matting. After a time the crickets resumed. The neighborhood remained silent, unimpressed that I’d just fired a shot.

Pulling twigs from my clothes and hair, I again registered that hint of cigarette smoke. Crawling on the driveway, I looked for a hand-rolled butt. To the side, caught on a broad leaf of ivy, was a matchbook. Guess what was printed on its cover?

I found a twig and used it to lift the matchbook so as to preserve any prints. The matches had been used up, but written on the back side of the flap in a familiar block print, an address.

It was an address I’d be unlikely ever to forget.