Gregg Hurwitz - The Crime Writer

Note 1: No one shall be admitted' into the theater during the riveting writer's block sequence.

Note 2: Think outside the box' Get the hair run some other way. You're a writer. With talented friends and odd experts and bizarre people youve met along the way. Bribe a criminalist in a remote lab. Call a science teacher who heads up the CSI society at Spoiled Brat High. Something.

Thoughts of Caroline dissolved my sense of isolation. I recalled the way she'd taken my hand briefly last night as I'd walked her out, as if she were practicing. Today's movies and billboards glorified unreasonably beautiful standards, but there was a thin line between perfection and blandness (3). With looks, as with personalities, I'd take striking over standard any day (4).

Note 3: Right, and the Greeks carved busts of homely Athenians.

Note 4: Jackie Collins phoned. She wants her sentence back.

Evening mist had settled through the Valley, turning the northern hills to bruises. It had darkened in a hurry, the sun already lost behind the Santa Susanas. I put my hand on the solid grip of the loaded. 22, looking for reassurance. I had promised to bring the pistol in to Parker Center, but now my black eye would raise more questions than I could answer. Plus, in light of my hallway tango with Mort, there was no way I was leaving myself unarmed. He could be belly-down on the hill right now, hidden in the ample slopes of ivy, fixing that diabolical gleam on me and awaiting an opening.

In the hall Xena snored vigilantly, working off the southwestern sausages I'd fried up for her.

My cell phone rang, a welcome distraction, and I snapped it open to hear Preston's voice. I'd left him a message encapsulating the latest.

"What's happening?" he asked eagerly?

"I don't know."

"Read ahead."

"Can you help me. I'm stuck."

"Of course. I'm coming over."

"Not sure I'm in the mood for your editorial attention."

But he'd already hung up (5). .

Note 5: "You may not be in the mood," he said, "but it sounds like you require it."

The cursor continued to wink at me, awaiting my next move (6).

Note 6: Your next move, while challenging, is not unclear: You need to get an illegally obtained hair analyzed. Here is your assignment, as doggedd protagonist How can you meet this challenge in a manner unique to you? In a way that draws upon who you are or, better, in a way that only you can?.

"Tell me about it," I said.

My gaze lifted from the pages, stained with Preston's stereotype red, to his face. "Spoiled Brat High?"

"I was going for Harvard-Westlake but blanked on the name." He drained his glass and set it down, completing his collection on my coffee table. Now that I'd felt the mood in his condo, I understood better why he dropped by at every opportunity. Stretching, he rose from the couch, not seeming to note the tufts of stuffing clinging to his pants. He turned down the volume on the evening news, which, refreshingly, didn't include me, and gathered his various stacks of papers.

He paused beside me on his way out and said archly, "I edit you hard because I care."

"I could warm my hands on your affection."

"Call if I can be of further assistance."

"Further?"

"Of course. 'Farther' is for distance."

"Never mind."

He disappeared from the room, leaving behind the bottle of Havana Club, which, down to its last drops, was no longer worth hiding. I sank into my reading chair, which alone had been spared Xena's wrath, and propped my feet on the ottoman. The news jingle gave way to a commercial for Chain of Command a coveted fifteen-second spot my publisher had refused to grant me before I'd been indicted for murder. Marketing had chosen a disturbing publicity still of my face, which looked somewhere between angry and constipated, floating eerily above the cover of my most recent novel.

Next, adhering to some bizarre karmic logic, the familiar drumbeat opening of the main title sequence of Aiden's War. Here was Johnny Ordean tackling a street hustler, there ducking a roundhouse thrown by an unappealing Arab. Looking noticeably more svelte than he had in his role as Father Derek Chainer, Johnny stopped for a zoom close-up as he did weekly, or nightly if you had a dish.

I flashed on the scene I'd caught when I was at the bar with Caroline Johnny crouching over a corpse, studying the bullet casing he'd impaled on a paper clip. HUSTLE THIS TO FORENSICS THE CASING NOT THE HOT DOG.

I shuffled through the pages, finding Preston's final note. Then I tugged my cell phone from my pocket and dialed.

Over the pulsing beat of club music, a guy with a strong Brooklyn accent: "Johnny Ordean's phone."

Ever since Aiden's Law had racked up enough episodes for a DVD box set, Johnny had assumed the affectation of unavailability, putting nine layers of entourage between himself and others.

"Surprisingly," I said, "I'm calling for Johnny. This is Drew Danner."

"Andrew Danner? The…?"

"Murderer," I said. "Sure. That's me."

Animated shouting, then Johnny's voice, hoarse and loud: "Drew? That you? Crazy days, bro. Crazy days. You kill that broad?"

"Twice."

"Drastic." Johnny partook vigorously of the bad slang that seemed to sweep through L.A. every other season like a crimson tide.

"How's it going?"

"Solid. The show's kickin'. We're doing a spin-off next year."

"Aiden's Law Omaha?"

"Very funny, bro. It's called Mary's Rule, and the sister "

"Listen, I need a favor. You still have criminalists on staff as expert consultants?"

"Yeah, a handful."

"I have a hair that I need to get run by a crime lab. It could prove me innocent." Of course, it wouldn't prove me innocent, but I was trying to feed him the kind of dialogue to which he was accustomed to responding. "I need to know who it belongs to."

"Like a clue?" Noticeable excitement in his voice.

"Yeah, Johnny. Like a clue. Can you have one of your guys do it?"

"Sure, I'll take it in to them, say I need to see how it works for an episode idea I'm developing. They love walking me through that stuff at the lab. When you need it by?"

"As soon as possible. It's hard for me to describe how important this is."

"Bring the hair by Flux. It's a closed party I'll have you put on the list. I'll call one of the consultants, have him check out the hair tonight."

"You can get that done? Tonight?"

"I'm Johnny Ordean. I can get anything done."

Flux is the Hollywood club of the minute, trending hot with wheatgrass martinis, bamboo walls, and a bump-and-grind DJ beat ideal for ecstasy humpers, film-industry underlings, and clubbies. I paid twenty bucks to park in a space fit for a lawn mower and legged it down Sunset.

Beneath every windshield wiper, a glossy postcard hawking bad theater. At every street corner, a woman stomping her boots against the cold. Even at this hour, bodies spilled from gyms, where would-be scribblers and bit players simulated honest work. Bodies so sculpted and chiseled they seem of a different species, bodies that have endless time to devote to themselves, to do that extra six sets of ten on the cable pull that defines the inner prong of the triceps or the outer slab of the quad. I used to have a body like that, a lesser model built from a matching mind-set before both grew too weary to keep up. I walked on, taking in the night, these bits of a past persona I never quite inhabited. The tangy scent of deodorant, candy-colored iPods strapped to glistening arms, steam lifting from overheated Dri-FIT shirts like cartoon sizzle.

The velvet ropes that in other, more reasonable cities are consigned to museums and musicals sprout from the sidewalk like futuristic shrubs. Massed at the imaginary walls before the bouncers are dime-store vixens and cultivated tough guys. Everyone is in costume; everyone has a getup; it's perennial Halloween. Pearl Jam plaid, skullcap chic, scruff faces and denim vests cut to show off shoulder tats. A girl, for no reason, wears a Gatsby cap and a wide tie snaking into a 1920s vest. Even the firemen shuffling through the bars are done up and done down, T-shirts announcing their stations, blond wisps grown just long enough to curl out the bottoms of their stocking caps, models in search of calendars. They are all children, and yet they are all adults. They unpack from Jettas and Navigators and the occasional Lotus. They cross streets in packs, like wolves, sipping Vitawaters and smoking American Spirits, yammering on cell phones with customized bleats and chimes, the night lit with a psychedelic rainbow of LED screens cotton-candy pink, toilet-bowl blue, horror-show green.