Gregg Hurwitz: The Crime Writer

Resting on the carpet downstairs was a four-foot metal rod. In my grogginess it took me a moment to identify it as the security bar that fits into the track of the sliding glass door opening to the backyard. I heard the wind suck against the frame, out of view, and became aware, again, of the cold air rising to my bare skin. The sound of traffic down on the freeway was faint but unmuted.

Standing there, I tried to unfreeze myself, to find logic. I'd probably come in from the deck, exhausted, and neglected to close up. After all, I'd just come off four months of having no control over when the doors opened or closed. But doubt nagged. The security bar maybe I would've overlooked, but forgetting to slide the door closed behind me? With the chill that had settled in out there?

I crept down the stairs. The sliding glass door was indeed wide open. A few leaves had blown in, great yellow husks wagging on the carpet. I stared at the black square of the deck, steeling myself, then headed for it. I collected the leaves and slipped outside. The deck was empty, as was the modest patch of lawn to the right, before the ivied slope. A noise to the side of the house drew my attention, the fence rattling in the wind perhaps, and I stepped around the corner and peered back toward the street. The walkway lights of the facing house flickered, one after another, as if a form were moving across them, though how could I be certain? I was glad I'd kept the lights off, preserving my night vision, but the moon, lost behind the Johnsons' sycamore, gave me little aid. I jogged down the side run. The gate clinked the sound from earlier its latch undone. I passed through and walked down my stone-paved driveway to the middle of the street, rotating, bewildered, in my boxers. No sign of anyone, no sound of an engine turning over.

I retraced my steps, reentering the house and securing the sliding glass door behind me. On the carpet, made barely visible by the glow of distant city lights, was tracked dirt. A C-shaped repeat, stamped perhaps by the edge of a shoe.

Telephone out. Cell phone upstairs. Media-darling me in my underwear, sound of mind and beloved by local law enforcement.

I moved silently along the trail and into the kitchen. Keeping my eyes on the doorway, I grasped the ten-inch chef's knife and slid it out of the block. My knuckles sensed an emptiness, and I glanced down. Among the protruding handles, a black slit.

The boning knife was missing.

A faultless member of the city's prominent French community, her life cut short by an upwardly mobile crime novelist who'd ceased moving upward. Six months after she'd dumped him, he'd broken into her house at one-thirty in the morning. Entering her kitchen, he'd seized a boning knife, the twin of the one in the matching set she'd bought for him. He crept to the bedroom where he was no longer welcome and stabbed her. He'd been discovered red-handed literally over the body. By the time the cops arrived, she was dead and he was having a seizure. He'd been rushed to the hospital, where the doctors had discovered the brain tumor and performed an emergency resection. When he'd awakened the next morning, the tumor had been removed, and with it he claimed his memory of everything after breakfast on the previous day. Convenient amnesia, that old dime-store-novel standby. The kind of defense that could work only in Los Angeles.

That's how the Enquirer told it. And the L.A. Times, Fox News, and even Vanity Fair. The story's all wrong, in detail and nuance, but they tell it with a tabloid fervor.

I can only tell it like me.

I spent the first night of my incarceration vomiting into the stainless-steel basin until my stomach lining felt as threadbare as the narrow mattress on its bolted base. After nearly forty-eight hours in the Sheriff's ward at USC Medical, I'd landed in a protective-isolation cell on the seventh floor of Twin Towers Correctional Facility. The unit was cramped and metal and had a square vent through which wafted the pristine air of downtown Los Angeles. I missed my own bed, the framed cigarette cards of Shakespeare characters hanging beside my closet. I missed my mother and father. I'd passed plenty of sleepless nights in my time, not to mention the restless small hours during both of my parents' deteriorations, my mother after a series of debilitating strokes in her early sixties, my father, eighteen months later and less cruelly, to an aneurysm. But nothing nothing that I had encountered could raise a candle against that night's utter blackness.

Night after day the guards commanded prisoners through what I assumed was a narrow alley below, and rising up the chamber of gray walls came the clinking of leg restraints and disembodied voices, strong and cracked, black and white, most of them complaining. Singing their inmate tunes.

Wudn't me.

Some motherfucker framed me.

I'm innocent. I was just minding my own bidness when…

Up in that cold box, far from the levers of power, it seemed wise not to add my voice to the chorus. But I knew I hadn't done it. I knew that I could not have murdered Genevieve, even as I grew terrified that I had.

Chic had come first, of course, as soon as they allowed it.

I was led down a harshly lit corridor that smelled of ammonia into a private interview room used for prisoners kept out of general pop for their own protection. Battle-scarred wooden chair, Plexiglas shield, obscenities finger-smudged on the metal desktop high school all over again.

The guard pronounced his name incorrectly, like the French appraisal of a hairdo, though Chic is anything but. He was dressed as he always was, as if he'd just gone shopping for the first time without his mother. Denim shorts that stretched below the knee. Oversize silk shirt, olive green, buttoned across his vast chest. A bling chain necklace matched the chunk of gold on the left-hand ring finger.

He shifted his big frame around, trying to get comfortable on a chair not designed for professional athletes. Seeing him made my eyes well at the ways in which my life had unraveled since the last time I'd seen him. A week? Eight days?

Chic placed a surprisingly white palm on the Plexiglas. I matched it with my own it felt surreal to mimic the gesture I knew only from movies.

"What do you need?" he asked.

My voice, little used, sounded as hoarse as those that floated up the walls. "I didn't do this."

He gave me a calming gesture, hands spread, head tilted and slightly lowered. "Don't you cry, Drew-Drew," he said softly. "Not in here. Don't give 'em that."

I wiped my eyes with the hem of my prison-issue shirt. "I know. I'm not."

Chic looked like he wanted to break through the glass and fight a few fights for me to make sure the bullies gave me wide berth. "What can I do?"

"Just being here."

He bridled a bit, indicating, I guessed, his desire for a task, for some better way to help. Philly born, Chic is East Coast loyal and likes to prove it. I would find out later that he'd waited downstairs for four and a half hours to get in and see me.

His powerful hands clenched. "This is like one of your books. Except worse."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

My fingers were at my head again, riding the rosary beads of the secondary suture scars. I noticed Chic watching me and lowered my hand.

He looked concerned. "How you holding up?"

I stared up at the ceiling until my vision got less watery. "Scared shitless." A rush of panic constricted my throat, reminding me why it was better not to tackle the fear head-on.

He seemed to be considering his next words. "I been in jail, but nothing like this. Your shadow must be 'fraid of its shadow."

I rubbed my eyelids until my heartbeat no longer sounded like a scaffold drumroll. Then I said, "Make sure April's okay. She hasn't visited me. Not in the hospital, not here."