Gregg Hurwitz: The Crime Writer

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.

Driving home in a stupor, I tried to process the ramifications of what I'd just discovered. If my dream was right, as the sprinkler and saucer seemed to indicate, then I'd arrived alone at Genevieve's house. That didn't look good for me. But the same questions remained. Why had I gone over there that night? Had watching someone else kill Genevieve tripped my brain-tumor blackout? The old frustration simmered below the surface. Why hadn't anyone the cops, the prosecutors, my own lawyers looked with serious doubt at anything except my sanity? Hadn't we all jumped in late in the plot?

I'd pored over the murder book that Homicide had turned over during discovery, but nothing in the investigative notes or police report pointed elsewhere none of the dead ends or dropped leads that compose the frayed edges around every reconstructed picture of a crime. It was too tidy an account, an investigation that had its mind made up from the outset. I also had my mind made up from the outset, though my argument had the advantage of no evidence and greater implausibility as I'd come to think of it, Occam's Hacksaw.

A glimmer of hope cut through my exhaustion. If I had recovered one memory from the night of Genevieve's death, then I could recover others. Which meant I could get at the truth, no matter how ugly it was shaping up to be.

My cell phone rang, startling me, and I screwed in the earpiece, wondering who would be calling at midnight.

Donnie's voice greeted me. "Where've you been? We've been trying you all night. Terry finally tracked down your cell-phone number."

"I'm okay," I said. "Just went for a drive."

"Sometimes the first night home can be tough."

I regarded my hands gripping the steering wheel. "Can't imagine why."

He picked up my tone and laughed. "Need some company? Terry and I could swing by."

"Thanks, but I think I'm okay."

"Well, if there's anything you need."

"Actually…" The idea sprang up, surprising me, though it had been lurking just beneath awareness all along. "I was wondering if I could get my hands on the case files."

"We won the case, Andrew. You're free of all that now." There was a pause, and then he said, "You're writing a book?"

"Just trying to work through what happened."

"What do you say you take a night off? Even Katherine Harriman is out having a drink. One of our paralegals just spotted her crying into her martini on the Promenade."

"Katherine Harriman doesn't cry. And certainly not in public."

"And neither should you. Not tonight anyway. Listen, Terry and I have encountered this a lot with our acquitted clients. They rework the trial like worrying a loose tooth, trying to find… I don't know, absolution. They don't find it there. Let me give you some advice: Let it go. Get back to your life."

I reached my turn. Right to my house, left to the freeway. I veered left. "I'd like those files, Donnie."

His breath blew across the receiver. "Well, they're yours, Andrew. We're certainly not gonna keep them from you. We'll need a day or two to make copies."

"Thank you."

"Anything else?"

"Yeah," I said. "Which bar did your paralegal see Katherine Harriman in?"

Coyly set a half block back from Santa Monica's heavily trod Third Street Promenade, Voda serves a hundred-plus labels of vodka and the one grade of caviar that counts. With its black-suited doormen and reserved seating, it likes to believe it's exclusive, but the management isn't above siphoning in tourists when the upholstered booths aren't filling up. Past the bouncer, who hesitated, recognizing but not placing me, were imported bottles, protruding on stone ledges from the wall, and plenty of glossy men and women, also available for consumption. Candles, Hawaiian protea blossoms, and flagstone waterfalls completed the confused tropical-gulag motif.

Harriman was at the black lacquer bar, slender legs crossed. Tapping an impaled pickled onion on the rim of her Gibson, she watched me approach without so much as a lifted eyebrow.

I dropped into the swivel chair next to her and ordered a Brilliant vodka on the rocks, which I sniffed and left on the cocktail napkin. She ignored me as if ignoring men were something she'd spent a lifetime perfecting, and so we sat and watched the water trickle down the flagstone as I worked up my nerve.