Gregg Hurwitz - The Crime Writer

"I'm hoping a few answers will help me sleep."

"Or they'll lead to more questions."

"Right," I said. "But at least this time they'll be the right questions." I waited as she studied the wall over my head. "Please, April. I won't bother you again."

She drew a sharp breath. I waited for the sigh, but it didn't come. Instead she said, "It's like I told you in jail. You worked that day. I came over around six. We went to dinner. Fabrocini's."

"Did we run into anyone we knew?"

"No. Then we came home. We made love."

"Where?"

"On the couch. With the view."

"Did anyone call?"

She shook her head. "And then you had another migraine come on. Bad one. Laid down, lights out, the whole thing. I read with a booklight so I could stay beside you. But there was nothing different from any other time it's gone like that. You went to bed normal…"

The unspoken part of the sentence dangled. And woke up a killer.

She uncrossed her legs, crossed them again, tugged at her knee with her laced hands. "I woke up alone in your bed at four A.M. when the cops showed up."

She was a deep sleeper, slow to wake. I imagined her confusion at the empty space beside her in the sheets. Maybe she'd called for me in the bathroom. The insistent second chime of the doorbell. Disorientation giving way to concern, concern to fear. Bare feet on the carpet as she felt her way through the darkness into the hall. The police lights shining through the frosted insets of my front door and rising through the open foyer, setting the second-story ceiling awash in blue and red. What a long walk that must have been down the curving stairs.

"You don't remember a phone ringing late at night? And I didn't talk to you after I supposedly listened to Genevieve's message?"

"I don't remember anything."

"I can empathize," I said. "Thank you, April. For everything."

The words rushed out of her, as if they'd been pent up. "If you'd been more honest with me about the brain tumor, we could have prevented this."

I tried to answer, but my throat was dry, and I had to start over. "I was scared."

"Right. You were scared. And you chose not to tell me. So that tells you what we didn't have."

I couldn't convey how badly I wanted to take it all back, so I just nodded once, slowly. She rose, and I took the hint. I thanked her I had much to thank her for and she gave me a hug at the door, squeezing me tight, then turning away quickly so I couldn't see her face. "Take care of yourself, Drew."

I said, "I'll do my best."

Desperate for sleep, I lay on my bed, willing myself to doze off into another fragment of lost time. But my internal clock had decided to wake up and pay attention to the fact that it was 11:00 A.M. I went downstairs, sat at the kitchen table with my stale almonds and a glass of pomegranate juice, and took in the view. I was still acclimating to what daytime felt like when it wasn't filtered through bars.

After April's, I'd gone on my first light-of-day outing down to Whole Foods to get groceries. I'd found people surprisingly warm. An old woman with a tennis visor gave me a surreptitious thumbs-up from Dried Fruits. The clerk, shuttling my groceries into compostable bags, leaned forward as we waited for the receipt to print and said, sotto voce, "I'm glad for you." I knew I was dealing with a skewed sample those who didn't think I was a drooling lunatic were more likely to approach but these quiet, kind exchanges more than made up for the drubbing I'd received from my favorite morning-talk-show hosts.

My cell phone rang.

Chic said, "What are you doing?"

I picked an almond from a fold in my shirt, popped it into my mouth. "Writing."

"How 'bout some bar-bee-cue? Get your mind off the human fucking condition."

"No thanks."

"I'll pick you up in twenty minutes."

"Sure," I told the dial tone, "that'd be swell."

Chic drives a cherry red Chevy pickup, so big that riding in it you feel like a Playskool figurine. I'm officially six feet tall, ever since I fudged the extra inch at the DMV when I turned sixteen, but Chic looms over me. And requires more vehicular headroom.

Onetime first baseman for the Dodgers, he'd made the All-Star Team two years running, but that was before The Pop-Up. After that, he opened a chain of rib joints, which he'd named Chics Stics. He forgot the apostrophe and went without the k, and it took off from there. Branding genius, homegrown.

On the Chevy's tailgate is an elaborate sign, CHIC'S STICS, featuring an apostrophe I added with a Magic Marker one day while he was distracted by a flat tire. That his truck still bears a Dodgers license-plate frame says more about the man than I ever could.

His driving slow and steady matches his personality. Chic has not a smugness but the relaxed, found-his-priorities demeanor of a recovering alcoholic. Someone who'd lived hard and found it not to work, who now knew what mattered and what was a waste of energy. We'd met in those rooms five years ago when I'd hit "reset" on my life, and we'd gravitated to each other immediately. Despite almost running his marriage into the ground a time or twelve, the requisite string of away-game affairs, the massive swings in fortune, he was still with his high-school sweetheart. He wasn't overwhelmingly handsome, except when he smiled. And he had a sweet, soft laugh, the kind that drove the road girls wild. At least before The Pop-Up.

He'd played as the nineties rolled in, just before athletes started making tycoon money. And though he was sure of his talents, he'd be quick to tell you that he hadn't started either All-Star Game in which he'd played, that he'd crumbled with his best years ahead of him. Aside from the infamy, he now led a peaceful life with his family in Mar Vista, a bedroom community tucked between Santa Monica and Venice. Close enough to the beach for the salt erosion but too far for a view, it had, like much Westside real estate, gone from middle class to upper in a hurry over the past decade. When his restaurants had taken off, Chic could've upgraded to a place in Brentwood or the Palisades, but instead he'd bought his neighbor's house, torn it down, and made a giant yard for his eight kids, complete with a mini baseball diamond.

Angela met us at the door, baby clasped to her side, sobbing toddler clinging to her leg, three or four various-size kids flashing in and out of view behind her as they circled the kitchen table playing chase or death tag. "Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew." She angled a cooking spoon, wet from baked beans, to the side and offered up a delightfully smooth cheek for me to kiss, which I did gladly. "Boy, we prayed for you till this here floor got tired of our knees."

A few of the Baleses spun off from the typhoon and collided with my knees, shouting my name. I rubbed their heads. "Ronnie, you grew."

"That's 'cuz I'm Jamaal."

"Where's Ronnie?"

"Over here."

"I thought you were Keyshawn."

"Ain't no Keyshawn in this house, Drew."

And so the game went.

Somehow juggling three children and a platter of fried boneless chicken thighs if this were fiction, I'd wimp out and make it something else, but chicken it was Angela hustled us through to the side door. We sat at the picnic table in the middle of what would have been the neighbor's front yard. I watched her, as I often did, with awe. To me she was the Great Mother, a beautiful woman with soft curves and a ready grin, always pregnant or nursing or laying cornbread on a just-wiped table. We ate lunch. Buckets of sweet potatoes, trays of corn, sliced sourdough off the cutting board.

Angela pressed the tops of her breasts, grimacing. "I'm engorged. I need a mouth."

I said, "Don't look at me."

Frowning her amusement, she threw a blanket over one shoulder as Jamaal handed off the baby.