Gregg Hurwitz - The Crime Writer

My hand grasped for the knife among the folds of plastic drop cloth, finding the cold handle. As Lloyd stumbled down over me, jamming the mask again to my face, I brought the knife up and felt it press against his belly as he fell, then break surface tension with a pop. He collapsed on top of me, his gas mask knocked askew so it rode up in his thick curls. My bucking legs struck the Pyrex jar the tinkle of breaking glass and then the schoolroom reek of formaldehyde. Lloyd was weeping with horror, his face twisted. Both of my hands, gripping the shaft of the knife, were trapped beneath his dying weight. His white fingertips, straining around the plastic, dug into my cheeks, keeping the face mask rammed unevenly against my nose and mouth.

He sputtered and collapsed, drooling blood onto my chest.

Burning rubber.

The acrid odor washes through my head, lining my nasal cavities, enveloping my brain. I cannot breathe it away.

I am driving. My dashboard clock reads 1:21 a.m.

Genevieve's house comes into view, and I jerk the steering wheel, banging over the curb, snapping the sprinkler at the fringe of the decorative lawn.

The dinging of the open car door behind me, I am running up the walk to the house, my thigh muscles burning. My flesh is clammy, pulsing with some unknown terror. I stumble onto the porch. Music swells from within.

I seize the terra-cotta pot, lose my grip, crack the saucer. Leaning the pot back again, I grasp the brass key in the grime. My hands fumble at the dead bolt. I drop the key. It bounces knee high but avoids the cracks between the decking.

My head fogged with the stench, I jam the key home, twist, and shove. Stumbling in, I bang the side table. The Murano paperweight slides like a hockey puck and shatters, millefiori segments rattling on the marble tile.

Flights of strings, thundering horns, the wrenching wail of a soprano.

Perche tu possa andar… di la dal mare…

I seem to float up the stairs, my shoes barely touching carpet.

Genevieve lies collapsed on her face and chest, knees jammed beneath her as if she'd been kneeling.

Already dead.

Blood has soaked into the white carpet around her. Her window is open, and her cream silk gown, blown back from one pale shoulder, flutters about her.

Something lets loose in my chest, and I utter a cry, running forward. I grasp her lightly at the shoulders and turn her. One arm swings stiffly on a locked elbow, striking me in the face.

The music crescendos, unrelenting.

Amore, addio! Addio! Piccolo amor!

She lolls in my arms, delicate hand curled, forefinger pointing like Michelangelo's Adam, except without a mate. A knife is sunk into her to the shaft. Sobbing, frantic, I grip the stainless tip with both hands and tug it free. She tumbles from my lap.

Blackness encroached on the dream-memory, starting at the fringes and blotting out my vision.

Through the sevoflurane haze, I heard sirens.

It was so late it was early, but the sky wasn't admitting it yet. A Los Angeles Times graced my doorstep, the first since I'd restored service after jail. Covered with Lloyd Wagner's blood, I stooped and picked it up. Maybe things were finally getting back to normal.

Above a picture of me looking pallid and displeased, the headline, behind on gossip as usual, read danner taken back into custody.

Maybe things weren't getting back to normal.

I stepped inside, Xena bulling into me in greeting. I tugged off the stained shirt and threw it in the trash, then wandered into the family room and sat in my venerable reading chair. The TV chatterheads buzzed with the news of Lloyd's death and, of course, my involvement. They didn't announce that I hadn't killed Genevieve Bertrand, that she'd already been dead when I'd found her. The evidence for that particular lay locked in my unreliable frontal lobe, and, try as they might, Fox News couldn't plug in to that.

But now I could.

To a strobe-light effect of flashbulbs, Cal commanded a podium outside the North Hollywood house, detailing how they'd stormed the place to find me and Sissy Ballantine regaining consciousness in the makeshift medical suite. In the background two stalwart paramedics steered Janice out on a gurney, and we viewers were given a zoom to follow her rolling entry into an awaiting ambulance.

Her close-up was appropriate; she was the unwitting star of the story. I hadn't been the protagonist after all, but like Kasey Broach, like Sissy Ballantine a bit player. Morton Frankel, fellow fall guy, had played his role as well as I, two expendable L.A. walk-ons hitting the marks and saying the lines. I'd responded to Lloyd's preparations with a promptness and an ardor that could scarcely be improved on, calling him within hours of my release from jail, scratching at the imagined scab of my guilt until I'd raised blood. Book after book, I'd reinforced Lloyd's increasingly imaginative involvement in what had previously been dry scientific work. Some of the most diabolical killings in my novels wouldn't have been nearly as inventive were it not for Lloyd. And perhaps his crime wouldn't have been nearly as well plotted were it not for me. Or as far-fetched.

An improbable fiction? Certainly. But then, we don't want to construct the story that's most likely to be told. We want to tell the one that finds its way to the pit of the gut, like a curved boning knife.

I never would have guessed it, but Lloyd had proven a better crime writer than I was.

I turned off the tube and petted Xena's oversize head, enjoying a few minutes of blissful silence.

The telephone rang. Not my cell but the glorious, hearty ring of the landline, harmonized on a faint delay with the phones upstairs. The noise filled the rooms. It made it seem as though my house worked again.

I strode over to the cordless mounted on the living-room wall and answered.

Caroline said, "Done showing off?"

"I hope so."

"You're all right?" Something in her delivery connoted great care.

I considered for a moment, then answered, truthfully, "Yes. I am."

"You weren't answering your cell," she said. It was only then that I realized the phone had been on mute since Lloyd's house. "So I got your home line from your Big Brother form. I have something to cheer you up."

"What?"

"Me?"

"Do you deliver?"

"I do."

She hung up. Xena garishly stuck her muzzle between my legs. Jealous, no doubt.

I went to my car to retrieve the half-written book and the unlabeled CD from Genevieve's that I'd shoved beneath my floor mat.

Back upstairs I sat at my desk, placed the pages beside my mouse pad, and slid the disc into my computer, bringing up iTunes on the monitor. My screen asked if I wanted to retrieve track and album information, identifying the burned music from the online library.

I did.

While iTunes searched, showing me a horizontal barber pole to solicit my patience, I picked up my office phone to call Chic. The line bleated, indicating messages.

I dialed voice mail. A synthetic voice said, "Greetings. You have forty-nine saved messages."

My lawyers and I had reviewed digital copies of all the messages while preparing my case. My messages had been preserved in the actual system, too, it seemed, from when LAPD froze me out of my voice mail right up until the day SBC interrupted my service. I bleeped through them now, deleting the first several from September 22 and the day of the twenty-third. Preston, nagging me about deadlines, a missing jacket, and an anthology he'd wanted me to contribute to. April asking what time she should come over for dinner that night.

The synthetic voice spoke the chillingly familiar time stamp: "Fifth message. Sent September 23,1:08 a. M."

Genevieve's damning message. I cocked back in my chair.