Gregg Hurwitz: The Crime Writer

I didn't remember hearing Genevieve's message that night, of course. The bitterness of it clashed with where I thought she and I had left things between us, but she'd been moody and difficult at times, so the tone was hardly shocking. Under no circumstances could I imagine it making me want to harm Genevieve. But, I realized with mounting dread, the message would play nicely to a jury primed on photos of her abused body.

"This shores up motive even more," Donnie said gently. "So we need a simple version to sell to the jury. Temporary insanity's your only way out of this. It's clean. It's self-evident. It's supported by the facts. The brain tumor did it."

I returned his exasperated stare.

He pressed on. "We lay out the facts, you'll walk out of here. You can worry about the rest of it from your own bed someday." He studied my expression, finding something in it he didn't like. "We play this wrong with what we have stacked against us…"

The thought of hard time made me feint fetal, my shoulders hunching, my shoes lifting an inch or two from the floor before I stopped my knees' rise to my chest. In the movies, no matter what, prison is the same. You go in scared, and they call you "fish" and bet cigarettes as to how long it'll be until you cry. You cell with Bubba, and he breaks you in, and then you become hardened, dead inside, and you barter for candy bars and have to shiv some guy in the shop or his buddies will gang-rape you, and then you get gang-raped anyway just for good measure.

"You're a crime writer," Terry said calmly. "Allow us to help you see how this will read to a jury. Let us take you through it again."

And they did, right from the sordid beginning. I sat in my hard little chair, dry-mouthed and stunned by as they call it on TV the preponderance of evidence. I'd known the elements, of course, but hearing them edited together into a tale of my murdering Genevieve was chilling. When my nerves settled, I had room for a single lucid thought.

I'm fucked.

My righteousness about the plea would have to dissolve under the pressures and realities I was facing. I could offer a gut sense of my innocence and little more. Nothing felt more important than staying alive, than staying free. Not even announcing to the world that I was a murderer.

When they finished, I wanted to give the answer I'd been rehearsing in my head but found myself frozen. I folded my hands on the pitted wood and stared at them, and then I heard myself say, "I won't plead guilty to a murder I don't think I committed."

The attorneys' heads swiveled to face each other, their worst fear realized. They appeared as shocked as I was by my decision.

"With all due respect," Terry said, "how can you still think you didn't?"

"Because I would know in my bones if I had."

Out in the hall, the guard cleared his throat loudly. Terry scratched his hair in the back, fingernails giving off a good scraping sound. The sun inched higher in the window, making me squint against the glare.

Donnie finally punctured the swollen silence with a sigh. He bounced forward, slapped his knees, and rose.

"So what now?" I asked.

"We argue each phase like your life depends on it." He looked up from loading papers into his briefcase. "Because it does."

I hunched against the cold under the sheet, eyes on the blank wall opposite. A discoloration stained the concrete a few feet up, a splotch and then the trickling fallout. It couldn't have come from anything benign. I thought of the men who had occupied this cell before me, who'd slept their restless sleep and dreamed their lying dreams.

Wudn't me.

Some motherfucker set me up.

I'm innocent.

A guard approached, slipped an envelope through the bars. "You got a letter."

I retrieved the envelope from the floor. My name, in a feminine hand. I sat back down and opened it. A piece of paper, torn to shreds. llyour sister.

Hurwitz, Gregg

The Crime Writer (aka I See You) (2007)

Tell me if

I didn't ki

Hurwitz, Gregg

The Crime Writer (aka I See You) (2007) so sorry for

I can do. I'm there's anything your loss.

The scraps of my note to Adeline slipped from my hands, scattering across the floor. One in particular stared back at me: your loss. I didn't notice my slow-motion deterioration to the concrete until it was pressed against my cheek, my body curled around my knees. I remained more or less in that position until the next morning, when they summoned me to court.

L.A. had sweated out a whole year without a celebrity murder trial. I was neither a household name nor, as far as I knew, a killer, but the forces of the market had converged to make me both. Opening arguments had started sixty days from the second arraignment, time enough for me to lose weight, grow sallow and shaggy, and look otherwise convictable.

A few minutes into the trial, I knew that my lawyers were right and that it would end disastrously. As promised, the rising-star prosecutor sharply dressed Katherine Harriman accessorized with sensible low-heel slingbacks and a father who'd jetted in from Chicago to beam proudly from the front row Swiffered the floor with me, the jury sailing to their verdict after only an eight-day trial and an hour's deliberation.

I'd been convicted. The only question now was if I'd slide off with a not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Through the beginning of the sanity phase, the only way I could slow the quiet breakdown I was undergoing was to detach. I quickly learned that like the other players I had to devote my attention not to the ingredients of the trial but to its sugar glaze.

And I had the support of my friends, who, my lawyers were pleased to note, comprised a nice demographic skew. Chic tapped his chest with a fist whenever I caught his eyes. From time to time, Preston would glance up from whatever manuscript he was editing and offer a supportive nod. He had a stack of pages that went with him everywhere like a King Charles spaniel, under his arm, peeking out from his bag, perching on his thighs when he sat more than once when the courtroom hushed, I could make out the distinctive sound of his scribbling. And April, bless her, had shown up that morning as promised, even enduring the requisite walk of shame along an appointed stretch of public sidewalk while reporters mobbed her. It was clear we no longer had a future together, but I was deeply grateful she'd done me this final turn.

More than anyone else, though, Katherine Harriman commanded the court's attention. She played to the jury now, doing her best to ignore my brain tumor, which Donnie had ingeniously left floating in a jar on the defense table. It looked menacing in the brackish waters, an unexploded hand grenade. I'd suffered the humiliation of sitting before it for opening arguments and more. I pictured it inside my head, latched onto my brain, operating me like a subservient robot. I was, I'm embarrassed to report, scared of a wad of brown tissue.

And why not? The expert witness for the home team, a white-haired neurologist with a dignified bearing, had just identified it as a left anterior temporal ganglioglioma. There was much discussion of ventricles and glands, designed, I assumed, to cow the jurors with Medical Science. Ganglioglioma? Even the repetitive syllable seems tacked on to intimidate. Despite the malignant look of the word, gangliogliomas are okay as far as brain tumors go. After resection, patients enjoy a survival rate that approaches 100 percent, and we don't have to smell colors or taste music. The temporal lobe, the court learned, is involved in our processing of memory, thus my inconvenient blackout. Conditions like mine have been known to lead to schizophrenia-like psychosis, delusion, and episodic aggressive behavior.

"And what causes this impressive constellation of symptoms to kick in?" Harriman asked midway into the cross, angling a bright cheek toward the carefully selected men who constituted Jurors Three through Seven.