Gregg Hurwitz: The Crime Writer

From the beginning, the tight time frame had left Lloyd desperate. Once Janice's bones had been ravished, he'd had to move swiftly on Broach thus the gun and the at-home neighbors and he'd rushed Sissy Bal lantine even more. One of the doctors treating Janice had later said that Lloyd seemed to have worked out the kinks, that his chemo cocktails had put her leukemia into temporary remission, so the second transplant could very well have taken. But, of course, the rest of Sissy Ballantine's marrow prudently taken from both sides of her pelvic bone hadn't made it from the filter to Janice's veins. Instead it had been removed from the machine and put on ice for Sissy's brother, for whom it had originally been intended.

Janice had been sufficiently impaired to withhold and withstand keen questioning, and she'd pushed off from the dock without anyone ascertaining how much she knew about what Lloyd was up to in that suite down the hall. I believe I heard that she never even found out that her husband had died just one room away from her.

The day after her death, Cal showed me an entry from Lloyd's journal, full of tortured remorse and pleading apology, with a clarity about grief and loss that gave me a pang of empathy.

A pang.

I suppose Lloyd will draw some comfort during his long drift across the river Styx from the fact that his wife never had to find out his full story.

What was his story? As Chic would say, that's no groundballer. Lloyd was a guy like any other, I suppose, subjected to the right pressures and passions. A guy whose wife was dying in sluggish, wrenching increments. Day after day he hacked into that transplant registry and stared at those two stubborn owners of matching marrow, his brain redlining to come up with an angle any angle that could get him and Janice to their twenty-fifth anniversary. Unlike any other guy, Lloyd had an extraordinary skill set to counter those pressures. I'll still be out in my yard, or lined up at the In-N-Out drive-through, and remember some other wrinkle Lloyd had forensically smoothed from the fabric of his plan. I'd never considered the ramifications of the first time he'd called me excited about a murder scene years ago, a bizarre hot-tub death in Manhattan Beach. My greed as a writer brought me into this. I had volunteered to be his subject when I drew Lloyd into devising my stories. I always wanted my plots to be realer than I could make them myself. And I needed someone who lived it. I needed someone who'd smelled that stench. And I got it.

A story, after all, doesn't have to be true. Just convincing.

Spring is slow in coming, though you can't tell by the weather. I have a vicious killer of a dog, who attacks pillows and shoes and hardcover novels like nobody's business. I have a Little Brother who can spray-paint and pick locks well beyond his years. He takes me to Dodgers games and batting cages and, most frequently, to court when he violates probation. I still see Genevieve at times through the steam in the shower, humming a melody, as I'm driving some stretch of road but less often now.

This morning, at the end of breakfast, guess who reappeared out on the deck? Gus. Big grin, pouched cheeks, and buck teeth, like a smug third-grader back from some mysterious adventure and privy to secrets we'll never know. He wobbled across the deck and began assiduously chewing a hole through the garden hose. I rose and pulled back the sliding glass door. Caroline followed me out and tossed Gus a scrap of toast. He looked up at us indifferently, then scampered off through his path in the ivy.

Like the rest of us, trying to stay one squirrel step ahead of the coyotes.