Gregg Hurwitz - The Crime Writer

Chic buzzsawed through a plate of baby backs, shrapnel flying. He paused to belch, and Asia, chin level with the table, said, "Don't forget you can't do that when you start kindergarten."

"Okay, baby." Chic pointed at Ronnie's plate. "You gonna eat all that?"

Ronnie shielded his plate with both arms. "Uh-huh."

"All right, then. You don't finish, I gonna make you clean the toilets with your toothbrush."

"Nuh-uh."

"Just you wait and see."

Ronnie went back to picking at his plate. Finally he slid it over to his father, who crowded him in the crook of his elbow and kissed him, leaving a greasy stain on his forehead that the other kids groaned about. Angela sat the baby in her lap, biting off his fingernails and spitting them into the bougainvillea. It was cool and the air smelled of jasmine, and I looked over at Angela and said, "Thank you."

She winked at me and rose, signaling that the clearing phase had begun. The ambulatory children helped, then were dispensed to their rooms for naps or reading or setting fires.

Chic and I sat at the picnic table, drinking O'Doul's and counting the passing cars. We got to fifteen before a middle-aged guy in a construction truck bellowed, "You're a fuckin' choker, Bales!"

Chic and I waved as we'd practiced many a time, the beauty-queen hand pivot.

A one-game playoff to determine the NL West had taken place up at San Francisco a few years before I'd met Chic. The Pop-Up. I'd cursed at it live, and thousands of replays had kept it fresh in my mind ever since. Bottom of the eighth, Dodgers in the field, up by one. Runners at the corners. Tie game. Robbie Thompson hits a towering pop-up, two outs voiding the infield-fly rule. Bales is under it, waves off the second baseman. An eternity as the ball fights swirling Candlestick winds. Uribe, circling from first, is halfway down the third-base line when the ball nicks Bales's glove, strikes his thigh, and dribbles into the Dodgers' dugout. The Men in Blue go three up, three down in the top of the ninth and lose the pennant. Chic goes out drinking and doesn't come back for two years.

I said, "At least now I can keep you company in the ranks of the despised. I feel like the tuba player in high school."

Chic smiled. "High school. Worst six years of my life."

"Does it ever get to you?"

"Nope."

"Really?"

"Course it does, Drew-Drew. But then I remind myself: Everyone carries a burden. It's about how gracefully you elect to bear it. Don't you read the Good Book?" He snickered, worked something out from between his teeth. "My burden's making a fuckload of money, then becoming one of the biggest goats in the history of Major League Baseball. So I made a fool of myself in front of twenty million people. Nineteen-plus of who I don't know and never will." He shrugged. "Beats getting gang-raped in a Rwandan torture camp."

I conceded the point.

"What I did ain't no J-O-B. Yours ain't neither. There's no need for our so-called services, and no sick baby gonna get cured by a page-turner or an opposite-field line drive." He paused, his thick arms straightening in an air swing. "Pretty as it may be. What I provided can't even be construed as a luxury. Lamenting that I been marginalized? Hated? Shit, I'd rather work on my barbecue sauce. 'Cuz you know that takes a brother having his head on right."

"But I didn't just drop a pop fly," I said.

"Oh, now you know what you did or didn't do?" He flicked a kernel of corn off his knee. "James wrote a project last week about the environment. That drunk-ass Exxon Valdez captain, spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil in that sound up there. Eleven million. Killed about a kazillion birds and otters and shit. The government said and the government, in my humble GED opinion, is overly optimistic that it'd take thirty years to clean up. That puts it out till, shit, 2020. And I'm pretending to help James write this muthafucker until Angela finishes with Asia in the bath, and the whole time I'm wondering, how's that poor muthafucker get up in the morning? So after James goes to bed, I look him up. He's an insurance adjuster in Long Island. Wakes up every day, drinks his coffee, and goes to work like the rest of us sorry sacks. He got moufs to feed. And I say, good for him." He looked over at me and said, "What's wrong? This is supposed to be uplifting."

"I knew about the tumor. For months." I looked for shock or condemnation in his face but found neither. "I was too scared and too strapped to do anything about it. I kept it secret because I was worried that when I got health insurance again they wouldn't pay for the surgery if they knew it was a preexisting condition."

"So?"

"So?"

"I didn't hear no lawyer ask you if you knew you had a tumor. You didn't perjure yourself. And, far as I know, thinking about defrauding an insurance company ain't a crime. I doubt you would've had the nerve to go through with it anyway."

It was just a skip to a wicked irony, one that had contributed to my insomnia these past months. Genevieve may have died because of my brain tumor, but her dying had likely saved my life.

I said, "This makes me guilty even if I'm innocent."

"No, it don't make you guilty. It makes you feel guilty. It makes you guiltier if you actually did it. But whatever way it happened or didn't, I got your back."

"Even if I'm guilty-guilty?"

"If you're innocent, you don't need no help, do you?"

I didn't trust my voice to thank him, but he saw it in my face.

He winked and took another pull of near beer. "They say a real friend is someone who helps you move. The neighborhood I'm from, a real friend is someone who helps you move a body." He cocked his head, training his brown eyes on me. His curled lashes, vaguely feminine, didn't match the rest of him. "Now, how 'bout you fill me in on what's really going on?"

I told him about the previous night's dream and the cut on my foot and driving to Genevieve's. "I can't live with this," I said. "I wake up and I don't know where I've been. I set up a goddamned digital camera in my bedroom to watchdog myself. I'm checking my odometer to see if I left the house. The obvious explanation is that I'm insane. But I know I'm not insane."

"Or maybe you a little insane, like the rest of us."

"You think I cut my own foot?"

Chic shrugged. "First day back in the world, you up in your head like you are? I'd lay odds on yeah. Especially with all this secret tumor business should be clear why you obsessed. But I'll tell you this: If someone is messing with you? Then this is only the introduction."

"Why's that?"

"They're doing it for a rea-son. And given you're not a politician or Donald Trump, someone's doin' a lot of work to get… what?"

He ran his massive palm over his hair, shaved tight to his scalp with a silly line cut diagonally in the front like a part.

"So which do I hope for?" I finally asked. "That I am being fucked with? Or that I'm losing it?"

"What's behind Door Number Three?"

I blew out a breath. "I can't stop picking at this, but at the same time what if I don't like what I find?"

He finished his O'Doul's, musing powerfully as only Chic can. Then he said, "Face everything." He tossed the empty bottle and hit the open trash can ten yards away. "One day at a time."

We drove back to my house in silence, Chic reaching over once or twice to squeeze my neck. I was halfway up the walk when he whistled through his teeth. He was at the curb, truck running behind him. "I know it's been circled around, but no one ever says it dead on." He licked his lips, not looking away. "I'm sorry this happened to you."

As he headed back around the truck, a passing jogger flipped him off.

He waved.

That night I sat and watched commercials. Just commercials. I wasn't up to sustained drama. The usual high-stakes action ensued. Soap products busied themselves fighting grime. Closet messes overwhelmed frazzled housewives. Animated fungi rooted under toenails.