The Crime Writer

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Delveckio looked peeved to be stuck with me. “Of course. He worked the first murder, didn’t he? Isn’t that why you called him? You knew him from your trial and figured you could harass your way in?”

  “I knew him before. He’s helped me on some projects.”

  “Yeah, well, I think it’s safe to say he’s not interested in helping you anymore.”

  Kaden’s voice hummed through the walls, but I couldn’t make out the words. Delveckio did his best not to make eye contact with me.

  I asked, “On the footage did you notice…did you see me move anything from the nightstand?”

  “Huh?”

  “Something in a jar?”

  “I was hoping this could get weirder.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  So my tumor had already crawled off by the time I set up the recorder. Which meant it had likely vanished around the time my foot had been cut. Another oddity to toss on the heap.

  Kaden returned. “Would’ve cleared your bloodstream by now.”

  I asked, “What would have?”

  Kaden shifted from one foot to the other, giving me the stonewall.

  “Come on. If I may have been drugged, at least tell me what I could’ve had in my system.”

  “Xanax and sevoflurane. Alprazoblah-blah—that’s Xanax—is shorter-lasting. The other, too. It’s a knockout gas. ‘Rapid elimination from the bloodstream,’ the man says.”

  “So how’d you catch it in Broach?”

  “Quick response. Patrolman radioed in the body. We heard that it looked similar to Genevieve Bertrand, called in the cavalry so no one would trample evidence. Our criminalist had dropped a trace-evidence report at Rampart, was just a few blocks away having a burrito. Hot-assed it over to the crime scene. They always draw blood right off.”

  Delveckio licked his dry lips. “Plus, Broach’s metabolism wasn’t working so fast when we found her.”

  “Why give someone Xanax if you’re gonna knock them out?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t,” Kaden said. “We’re thinking she took it before bed.”

  “So she was grabbed in her sleep?”

  “Signs of a struggle.”

  “The sevoflurane didn’t do the trick?”

  “Or was given to her later.”

  “Take her kicking and screaming and subdue her after?” I asked. Kaden shrugged, so I added, “What kind of struggle?”

  “Sheets dragged off the mattress, stuff knocked from the nightstand, alarm clock lost its battery at ten twenty-seven.”

  “How old-fashioned.”

  “A battery-operated alarm clock?”

  “The clue.”

  “You have a suspicious mind.”

  “Let’s make use of it.”

  “We’re not gonna invite a key suspect to dick around in our investigation.”

  “You don’t need to invite me anywhere. Just let me look at photos from the scene. See the body, how it was left. Maybe something’ll trip my memory.”

  “Memory of what?” Kaden eyed me, then tapped Delveckio on the knee with his file. “Let’s go.”

  “Whether you believe me or not, I don’t know what happened the night of September twenty-third. And whether you believe me or not, I want to know if I did it. You need answers. You’re professional interrogators. I assume you’re capable of getting what you want from me without giving up what you don’t want to.”

  Kaden stared at me, then chuckled and tossed the file on the table, the papers spilling out. I spread them across the surface. They were laser printouts, pretty good resolution, with multiple duplicates of each shot.

  Kasey Broach’s naked body had been dumped under a concrete freeway on-ramp. She lay on her back, chin tossed up and to the side as if she were trying to flip the hair from her face. A nasty abrasion mottled her right hip, and the skin looked split on her right cheek. Her wrists were bound with tape, her ankles with white rope. Around her, weeds pushed up from cracked asphalt. The skeleton of a fence remained in the background, chain-link sloughed from three remaining posts. A beater of a coupe sagged on slashed tires, windows smashed in, roof dented down to the headrests, hood dense with bird shit. Behind it on the sloping underbelly of the ramp, a graffiti artist had abandoned a work in progress.

  A close-up showed Broach’s arms spotted with marks where flies had started their work. For some reason they underscored her death. So helpless, incapable of swatting a bug feasting on her.

  I stared at Kaden. “‘The killer duplicated every specific’? Of Genevieve’s murder? Are you kidding me? He kidnapped a woman, drugged her, moved her body, stripped her, bound the wrists and ankles, and dumped her in a public place.”

  “There are an alarming number of similarities,” Delveckio said. “As for the differences? We usually see an upward evolution as a killer grows more experienced, learns from prior mistakes.”

  “You neglected to mention that earlier, when you were busting my door down. Why do you think she’s naked?”

  “Growing bolder,” Kaden offered, studying me closely. “Could be part of a growing fantasy.”

  “Or he stripped her for the bleach washdown,” Delveckio added, “which meant he knew we’d analyze the body for trace and foreign biologicals.”

  “And? Was she raped?”

  Delveckio shook his head.

  “What’d you find?”

  “Aside from your blood and your hair?” Kaden flipped through his notepad. He tapped his pen to the paper. “Ah, here it is: None of your fucking business.”

  “Bruising at the wrists and ankles would indicate she was bound before the fatal stabbing, no?”

  The detectives exchanged an irritated glance but didn’t respond. Crafty detective work, keeping me in the dark like this.

  “The Sevoflurane. She was kept alive. Unlike Genevieve. Points to sadistic tendencies?” I returned their stares. “Blink twice if I’m getting warm. How about the abrasions on the hip and cheek? From being thrown out of the vehicle?”

  Delveckio gave me the sour face, but Kaden just grinned his amusement. “You know, we got some experience with bodies,” he said. “Maybe even as much as you.” His cell phone chimed, and he glanced at it, then nodded at Delveckio and stood. “You’re not our partner. You’re not a cop. You’re a fucking writer. And, according to your first verdict, a killer. When we require your help, we’ll question you.”

  As they gave me their backs, blocking the mirror’s view of me, I slid a handful of printouts from the table down into my lap. The move was purely, bizarrely instinctual.

  Stealing evidence from an interrogation room in Parker Center. I was setting new standards for bad judgment.

  Kaden paused at the door, his grand exit stymied, and came back for his photos, minus a few duplicates. He stepped into the hall beside Delveckio and nodded at one of their underlings, out of sight. “Get a full statement. Then kick him loose.”

  The door slammed shut, and I was alone with my reflection and crime-scene photos stuffed down my pants.

  11

  Chic dropped me off, nodding and touching the brim of his cap. “Will that be all, Miss Daisy?”

  “You people are so well mannered.” I hopped out.

  My trash can had been upended beside the house, garbage strewn along the side run. My sneakers crackled across the bits of glass in the entry. Two nights home, two intrusions. In my head I replayed the groggy house search after I’d awakened with the cut on my foot. Had my assailant been in the house with me? Or had he already slipped away? Had he approached from the street or hiked up the slope? I examined the sliding glass door for smudges that I might have overlooked in the darkness, then walked out onto the deck and peered over the railing as if I could distinguish lightly trampled ivy from un-trampled ivy. Back inside, I followed the washed-out blood footprints upstairs. The tape was of course missing from my newly cracked digital camcorder, a disappointment since I’d wanted to preserve for posterity my oh-shit face the instant bef
ore I’d been proned out by ninety-seven SWAT members. I guess future Danners would have to content themselves with late-night reruns of Hunter Pray.

  In my office the cops had left the drawers open, files and bills crammed back out of place or tossed on the floor. My mound of unread mail had been re-sorted, and they’d helpfully opened the items I hadn’t gotten to yet.

  I took a steaming shower, the jets doing their best to blast Kasey Broach’s pallid face from my memory. Her curled hands, like fleshy claws. Her exposed arms spotted with insect bites. What would she have thought if someone had pulled her aside in third grade, or tenth, and told her that someday she’d wind up dumped under a freeway in Rampart? I thought about my so-called tough morning compared to the morning her family was still having, and it became startlingly clear that I had little to bitch about. I thought about the hot water I could still feel, the air I could still breathe. About Chic and Angela and Preston. How I had the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney and a jury that intelligently weighed my culpability. I was alive. I was free. I was healthy. What I felt was not guilt—no, not that—but, oddly, gratitude. And the inkling that from gratitude, not from anger or even guilt, could I pull myself out of where I’d landed.

  I toweled off. A Post-it note on my mirror, written in Chic’s childish scrawl, quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give. Chic had sent me home from my newcomers’ meeting with it. It had fallen off and been retaped countless times.

  Face everything. One day at a time. I could do that. I could do better than that.

  The purloined crime-scene photos, rescued from my pants, sat on the counter beside my toothpaste tube. As I’d pointed out to Preston, I had no official leverage. But I had something in place of that, beyond my peculiar skill at thinking through mayhem, beyond my friends from various bizarre walks of life, beyond my list of contacts oddly suited for…well, this.

  I had a story. Or at least the beginning of one.

  But—as I’d asked myself last night—where to go from here? I stared at those pictures of Kasey Broach, dimpled from their illicit journey, and wanted to know why her corpse had intersected with my life. I clicked through my PalmPilot’s consultants list, compiled over the course of Derek Chainer’s career—Navy SEALs, cops, deputy marshals, assistant DAs, coroners, hard-boiled PIs, soft-boiled security guards, firemen, criminalists. Grabbing a pad from my nightstand drawer, I wrote down those who could bring relevant knowledge to bear. Beneath it I made a list of all the people who hated me or might want to do me harm. The Bertrands. Genevieve’s ctional lover. Kaden and Delveckio. A thought interrupted the scribbling: I’d arrived in this unenviable position because I’d cut a corner. I’d cut plenty of other corners in my life. The question was, which ones could be catching up with me now?

  The doorbell rang. In my towel I greeted the messenger from my lawyers’ office, who bore my case files. Amazing the service a quarter mil will buy you.

  The discovery process entitled me to the murder book LAPD had assembled in preparation for my trial—full insider evidence for Genevieve’s case. I set it on the kitchen table, which wobbled its appreciation, and flipped through.

  The inserts were familiar and foreign at the same time. They seemed from another phase of my life, though my final verdict had been handed down just the day before yesterday.

  Dragging his considerable haunches across the deck, Gus paused to point his black marble eyes at me. He disappeared into the ivy an instant before a swooping hawk aborted its dive to land on the deck rail. One squirrel step ahead of the reaper.

  You impact the plot. Or the plot impacts you.

  I pulled one of my novels of suitable thickness from my vanity shelf and rammed it beneath the kitchen table to even out the legs. I dressed in sweatpants and a ripped T-shirt I’d had since college, picked up the trash that LAPD had left alongside the house, swept up the entry, taped over the shattered panes in the front door, and vacuumed up the broken glass.

  I circled my desk, sat down, shoved the armrests of my chair out a click, grabbed a Bic pen and slid it behind my left ear. My notepad I placed to my left. I set the murder book to my right, beyond the mouse pad, and removed the lab records, police reports, investigative notes, and coroner’s report and spaced them evenly across my desktop.

  Dirk Chincleft ain’t got shit on me.

  I’d done the first wave of research. I knew the characters. I had a premise. I’d unearthed a few leads. So I pulled up to my desk and did the only damn thing I’d ever done passably.

  I wrote.

  I woke up with IVs taped to my arms, a feeding tube shoved through my nose, and my tongue pushed against my teeth, dead and thick as a sock. My mouth was hot and tasted of copper, and my molars felt loose, jogged in their beds from grinding. I blinked against the harsh light and squinted into a haze of face, too close for casual—a man straddling a backward chair, strong forearms overlapped, a sheet of paper drooping from one square fist. Another guy behind him, dressed the same—rumpled sport coat, loose tie offset from open collar, glint at the hip. Downgraded to bystander, a doctor stood by the door, ignoring the electronic blips and bleeps. I was in a hospital room.

  With consciousness came pain.

  12

  I woke bright and early, with a renewed sense of purpose. My home telephone line was still dead, so I retrieved my cell from the office. I called the coroner’s office, talked to a clerk I’d paid in the past to smuggle me sample reports, and asked him if he could get me the Broach autopsy.

  He said, “You’re a murderer. Fuck off and don’t ever call me again.” Then he hung up.

  I went downstairs, made a $138 cup of espresso, and toasted Gus on the back deck. “You and me, we’re just players in this crazy game called life.”

  Gus, a discerning critic, scurried up the Mexican fan palm at the edge of the lawn.

  I called a DNA analyst I knew in the medical examiner’s office. She didn’t take my call, though I heard her stage-whispered rebuff through the admin assistant’s imperfect clasp over the mouthpiece.

  My first manuscript had received seventeen rejections before a sale. I figured the odds here to be slightly better. I returned to the murder book and rechecked all the names of cops, criminalists, coroners, and clerks, even deciphering the scrawled signatures at the bottoms of the chain-of-custody forms. The only familiar name was the one I’d started with. Aside from the detectives, Lloyd Wagner would know Genevieve’s case better than anyone, having handled everything from recovering my voice-mail messages to matching the knife with the wound. And he’d processed Kasey Broach’s body as well. Given our rapport, I hoped that if I could talk to him for a few minutes, I might convince him to give me a little of his time.

  I got his voice mail at the lab and on his cell and his answering machine at home. Given that he’d reported my last message to the detectives, I didn’t want to leave another. I closed the phone, rubbed my temples, drank another cup of espresso to wash down my Dilantin.

  If I couldn’t get someone inside the case, I could at least try for someone with an inside track to the case. Cal Unger, my main consultant when it came to matters Chainer, was a divisional detective out of the West L.A. Station. His job had none of the glamour—if such a word can be used in this context—of the cases hooked by the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown. RHD detectives pulled serial killers, bank robbers, and media-intensive cases like mine. They had citywide jurisdiction, better resources, and sharper suits. Cal—a Coors man all the way—had closed some key divisional cases and had been bucking for a promotion to RHD for a while now. It was not lost on me that of the myriad hours he’d given me over the past few years, most of them had been spent talking about Robbery-Homicide.

  Cal and I had an unspoken agreement: He wouldn’t stiff-arm my questions, and I wouldn’t write an unflattering portrait of someone closely resembling him. So he indulged me
, and I respected his talent and toughness, and nothing had yet turned up in print to make LAPD’s public-information officer put a boot up his ass. There was an undercurrent of tension, to be sure. Cal always squeezed a little too hard when demonstrating a choke hold on me, and he was certain to evince a certain veiled disdain for my job, stemming from, I guessed, the fact that we both knew that if he was really hard-core, like Bill Kaden, he wouldn’t be talking to a writer or partaking vicariously of a fictional RHD detective’s exploits. Cal fell into that camp of cop consultants who were generous with their time yet continually decried entertainment bullshit, how this dumb-ass novelist had called a revolver a pistol and this sellout TV actor had referred to his Glock .357 Magnum. They’d bust my balls in the squad room, and I’d smile and nod along, knowing that once the others weren’t around, once we were alone in the car heading to lunch or driving a patrol, they would clear their throats sheepishly and pitch me a script idea, something about burned-out cops and missing little white girls or even, sometimes, about the bad-ass power of Jesus.

  Despite all this—or perhaps because of it—I liked and respected Cal. He was handsome and well proportioned and could wear a pair of sunglasses like Eastwood wears a scowl. Some people exude coolness, and Cal was one of them. Like Lenny Kravitz or Bono, whom you could listen to with impunity anywhere, in any company. A hard-to-find quality. No matter how much you might secretly enjoy Kelly Clarkson, you still roll your windows up at the stoplight when she’s on your radio. Not Cal, though. Cal was Bono. You’d never have to roll your windows up on Cal.

  I called his desk. Voice mail. Tried his cell phone. He picked up mid-order: “And a double-double, no onions.” And then, at full volume, “Unger.”

  I hung up. He was where we often met for lunch—In-N-Out Burger in Westwood.

  I glanced at the clock: 10:32 A.M. Getting an early start on his caloric intake. His shift had probably begun at seven, taking a report from a hysterical Bel Air divorcée about a stolen tanning bed. Big black market in those, I’d heard.