The Crime Writer (5 page)

After Lloyd’s performance the voice mail Genevieve had left for me the night of her death was given yet another airing, issuing from Katherine Harriman’s laptop.

A respectful silence for the voice of the dead. “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.”

Of course, Genevieve
hadn’t
been with someone new, at least no one she’d told her friends or family about. Her not-so-deft manipulation wasn’t devastating to me from where I sat now, though the prosecution asserted that it had been on the night of September 23. The defense asserted privately that the message made Genevieve less sympathetic and publicly that it had provided the final jolt of head pressure to initiate my ganglioglioma’s interference. Given my lack of criminal history, Donnie argued, the tumor was the
only
logical explanation for my behavior.

On day five of sanity, cutting through any calluses I thought I had built up, Genevieve’s family made their eagerly awaited entrance. Her mother, long of bone and broad of bosom, requisite Hermès scarf draped across her clay-court shoulders, rode the arm of her husband, ever dapper in a bespoke suit. Though they carried themselves with characteristic elegance, there was a hollowing in their cheeks, a nearly imperceptible erosion in posture, that betrayed their crushing loss. At Luc’s other side strode Adeline, her fair face flushed to overtake her freckles. Though they stared at me with unmitigated hatred, the reality of their diminished presence, Luc’s quavering hand touching the hard wood before he sat, undid whatever self-protective remove I’d managed. Their appearance, timed just before I was to take the stand, had precisely the effect on me Harriman wanted. My throat tightened, my lips jumped, and I leaned forward on the table and pressed both palms to my face as if to hold it together. My reaction was likely taken by the jury as shame, but it was worse than shame. It was the final roosting of Genevieve’s loss, a woman whom I had loved, perhaps not wisely, but had loved nonetheless.

Donnie asked for a recess so I could get myself together to take the stand, but the judge denied the request. My heart still pounding, I climbed those three short steps to the birch witness stand and raised my right hand, finally able to take in the faces of the gallery without peeking furtively over a shoulder. There was a heightened intensity to it all, yet also an apologetic ordinariness. Reporters in their good suits, cameramen with their digital gear, the court stenographer pretending not to chew gum.

Donnie questioned me gently and with great empathy. When her time came, Harriman strolled toward me, relaxed, a text open in one hand like a psalmbook. She’d removed the dust jacket, so I didn’t know what was coming until she read, “‘We all have an ex-lover we want to kill. If we’re lucky, we’ve got two or three.’”

The book snapped shut like a turtle’s jaws, startling the jurors in their seats. “Do you believe that?”

“No,” I said.

“You wrote that, did you not?”

I acknowledged that I had.

“So you don’t expect us to believe what you write?”

“Of course not,” I said. Terry gave me the patting-down hands, so I proceeded, more obligingly. “The protagonist, Derek Chainer, says that. An author doesn’t necessarily endorse the views voiced by his characters. I create characters who are not me and—on a good day—breathe life into them.”

“So you write things you don’t believe?”

“I try to let the characters express their own opinions.”

“Just a way to sell more trashy novels in supermarkets?”

“And airports.”

She smiled. Just two friends bantering. “How about this line? ‘I believe, in my darkest heart of hearts, that when fate and passion align, every last one of us, from the pulpit crier to the bus-stop blue-hair, is capable of murder.’” She circled closer to me. “Is that your belief, or merely the expressed view of a character?”

There was a gallows silence, an electric sense in the air that, as they say, it all came down to this.

I said, “I believe that anyone is capable of anything.”

My attorneys crumpled in a fashion that might have been amusing under different circumstances, and Harriman’s eyes got bright and excited.

“So you believe right now, when you’re allegedly sound of mind, that you could very well be capable of committing the unspeakable act for which you’ve been found guilty.”

“
Capable,
yes,”—and here I had to raise my voice to speak over her cutting me off—“just like you.”

“Except, last I checked, Genevieve Bertrand didn’t break off an engagement to
me.
” Harriman nodded away the judge’s reprimand, one hand raised in a mea culpa.

Stories, no matter how bad, are L.A.’s lifeblood. I’d bet that Ms. Harriman, like every prosecutor I’d met within Dolby distance of the film studios, had been asked at one time to be a consultant for a one-hour drama. Or she’d had a writer like me tag along for a trial to pester her with questions. A cousin’s husband, perhaps, who needed a few minutes on the phone so he could make that third act of his script sing. Many a time I’d been that guy, that sheepish eavesdropper to the hue and cry of the Angeleno justice system. I’d dealt with cops who watched too much TV about cops, so they acted like the cops they watched on TV who were imitating real-life cop advisers. Narrative and crime—a twirling snake with its tale in its mouth.
Wudn’t me. I was just minding my own bidness when…

A few hours later as I listened, rapt, to Katherine Harriman’s closing argument, it dawned on me just how skilled a storyteller she was. And this, she claimed, was my story.

On the night of September 23 at 1:08
A.M.,
roused by a ringing phone, I’d slid from my bed, leaving April there, asleep. As I’d listened to the voice-mail message left by Genevieve Bertrand, all my resentment and bitterness had congealed into a plan. I’d driven over to her house, a hobbler stuck in a canyon fold off Coldwater. I’d retrieved the key from under the potted philodendron on the porch and entered, turning left to the kitchen, where I’d taken the boning knife from its oak block. I’d drifted up the flight of stairs to Genevieve’s bedroom. Awakened by my prowlings, she’d met me halfway across her white carpet, where I’d thrust the blade through her solar plexus on the rise, evading her ribs and piercing her heart. She’d died more or less instantly. Afterward I’d held and rolled her body around in its fluttery silk gown, like a cat batting a wounded mouse. For the finale, panic-stricken by the crime I’d just perpetrated, I’d had a mental break, a complex partial seizure that, when the cops and paramedics arrived, secondarily generalized into a grand mal. I’d fallen on top of the body and seized almost continuously until I’d reached the Cedars-Sinai ER, where they’d run IV Ativan to calm my thrashing. A CT had revealed the stowaway nestled into the anterior reaches of my temporal lobe, as well as some hemorrhaging, and I’d been whisked into surgery, awakening at breakfast time with a stunningly opportune justification.

Katherine Harriman thanked the jury for their time and attention, smiled disarmingly, and sat down, immersing herself in paperwork so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge Donnie as he began his closing.

“Our
clever
killer, our plotter of murder most foul, could come up with no scheme better than this? He snuck over to Genevieve Bertrand’s house and then…
what?
Decided to leave the front door wide open? So both Westec
and
the neighbors would call the police, you see. Because he
also
planned precisely
when
he was going to have a seizure. He held back until just the right moment, you see. This man, this clever man, thought it would be beneficial for his ganglioglioma to swell that extra millimeter right there in Ms. Bertrand’s bedroom, sending him into a
grand mal seizure
so the police could find him in his compromised state, establishing evidence for the insanity plea he knew he’d require during the trial he knew he’d have. Certainly the most logical approach for a clearheaded individual, don’t you think? Well, happily, his elaborate plan paid off. Because he definitely fooled
me.
I’ve had the duty of trying over thirty murder cases in my career, and never—and I mean
never
—have I been more certain of a client’s compromised sanity at the time of an incident than I am today.”

As Donnie continued, vehement and passionate, I felt a surge of affection, something even like love, for this man who had, for a fee, taken on my cause and argued it as his own. When he finished forty-five rousing minutes later, he sat, practically panting adrenaline, and marshaled his papers into the stretched maw of his briefcase.

After the jury filed out, I reached over, squeezed his neck, and said to him and Terry, “Regardless of how this thing goes, I want you to know I appreciate what you did for me here.”

We clasped hands for a moment, all three of us.

The second verdict came back three hours and nineteen minutes later.

T
he kitchen floor beneath my bare feet felt as cool as the stainless-steel handle of the chef’s knife. Through the dark I stared at the blank slit in the knife block where the boning knife should have been. I’d closed the sliding glass door—had I locked someone in with me? My heart revving, I looked through the doorway at the trail of marks I’d figured for footprints. The last few were visible on the carpet before it gave over to the flagstone entry.

Not dirt, as I’d thought.

Blood.

I had a moment’s lapse into terror, genuine kid-in-the-dark terror, before I recalled that I was an adult and had no options except to outgrow my mood and handle business. Firming my grip on the chef’s knife, I eased through the doorway into the entry. No one peering down at me from the upstairs railing that lined the catwalk from stairs to study to bedroom.

The footprints hadn’t ceased at the foyer flagstone, though they were harder to make out against slate. But there, two steps up on the carpeted stairs, another bloody C. I gazed up, the staircase fading into the dark.

Tamping down my fear, I followed. Every other step bore the mark.

I reached the top of the stairs. The footprints continued straight into my bedroom. I moved forward, knife held upside down along my forearm, blade out, as I’d learned from an expert knife fighter while broadening Derek Chainer’s repertoire. I reached the threshold. Bracing myself, I swept inside.

No one was there. But on the carpet at the foot of my bed, the boning knife gleamed. I moved forward, crouched over it. The skin of my right foot was smudged, just above the little toe and extending down my outstep. I reached down, noticing that the pads of my fingers also bore dark stains. Smears on the boning-knife handle. And on the blade’s edge at the tip. My head swam a bit.

I raised my foot, noting the distinctive, if now faint, C mark left behind on the carpet.

My own blood. My own footprints.

I turned on the lights, set down the chef’s knife, and returned to the boning knife on the floor. A jagged print of blood on my left thumb matched a mark left on the stainless handle. The blood on my fingers from, I assumed, touching the cut on my foot, also left predictable marks matching my grip.

My fingerprints. On my boning knife.

I washed my foot in the tub. For all the blood, it was a humble cut. A clean incision, no more than an inch long, about a thumb’s width back from the base of the little toe. A Band-Aid took care of it.

My head still felt unusually foggy—ganglioglioma, back for a holiday sequel? I tried to tease apart which concerns were reasonable and which weren’t but found my perspective momentarily shot. Was someone running me through a rat maze? Either I was driving myself insane or someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that I would. I sat on the tub’s edge, hugging my stomach and shuddering, until compulsion drove me around the house, flicking on light switches, searching for a body, an intruder, Allen Funt and his
Candid Camera
crew.

Checking for signs of a break-in, I examined the security rod for dings and the track in which it sat for scrapes in the paint, but both were unmarred. I’d sleepwalked downstairs and opened it myself? Why would I have gone outside?

I returned upstairs and stared at my bed, dumbfounded. A few smears of blood on the sheets, the same sheets in which I’d just dreamed of Genevieve’s house. A bizarrely vivid dream. During which I’d sleepwalked downstairs, retrieved the boning knife, returned to bed, and cut my foot? Why? Couldn’t I find a more productive way to punish myself?

The dream flooded back, in all its significance, and I felt a jolt of excitement. I couldn’t know if I’d gone temporarily insane, but I could verify something I might actually know. If Genevieve’s sprinkler was in fact snapped and the saucer broken, then I wasn’t completely hallucinating. At least I could determine whether I’d retrieved a fragment of the night Genevieve had been killed.

I got dressed and went downstairs. In my hybrid Guiltmobile, I checked the odometer, as if it could answer any of the riddles I was failing to work out. I started a mileage column on a pad in the glove box, so I’d know if I took my addled brain for a spin in the future.

Driving along Mulholland on a sliver of moonlight, I felt I was doing something illegal. I probably was.

I slalomed down Coldwater, slowing for the sharp turn past the bent street sign. And then there I was, in my dream, driving up the sharp grade. The streetlight, filtered through a wayward branch. The too-narrow street, laid out in the days before three-car households slopped spare SUVs to the curb. Sweat rose on my forehead, as if complying with the script. Maybe I was dreaming now. Maybe I’d created—and was now re-creating—this whole thing.

The hairpin came up fast, my tires giving their mandatory screech, and Genevieve’s house looked down at me. From atop its perch, the house seemed daunting—backed snugly to the hillside, stilts shoved disapprovingly into the earth as if my car were a rat, it a Great Dane sizing up the situation.

I climbed out, my door dinging. At the edge of the lawn, the crushed sprinkler stopped me short.

I want this not to be true. I want it not to have happened.

I had not known the sprinkler to be broken, except in my dream when my Highlander jumped the curb. Which meant that it had not been a dream.

God, oh, God, I was alone in that Highlander. I came up this walk alone. I found the key alone. There was me and only me.

I headed up the slope, the pavers loose under my shoes, rocking in their beds and freeing up trickles of dirt. I knew what I’d find, but I had to confirm it.

The boards creaked when I stepped onto the porch. The house was quiet and, I hoped, empty. What possible excuse could I stammer out if sister Adeline appeared at the door?

The split-leaf philodendron waved at me from its terra-cotta pot. I wiped my palms on my jeans and crouched, pushing back the spouts of leaves to peer under.

A zigzag crack marred the clay saucer, a lightning bolt almost reaching the lip.

Not a dream.

A piece of my missing past.