The Crime Writer

Chapter 13

I leaned back in my chair and put my feet up on my desk, bleary-eyed from focusing on court transcript pages, indecipherable signatures on evidence reports, and grainy newspaper photographs of yours truly. My focus remained jumpy, half on the page, half in my head, an agitation of unfinished thoughts. It was only a few minutes past five, but already the sun had dipped below the row of palms cresting the west canyon ridge. Backlit fronds, even after my twenty years in L.A., made me pause with admiration.

Imports like the rest of us, palms had been brought to Los Angeles centuries ago by Spanish missionaries. I'd read that they were dying out here, the latest wave nearing the ends of their hundred-year life spans. Local bureaucracies had determined that broad-canopy trees better fought auto emissions. Vegas casinos had driven prices beyond municipal reach. Falling fronds bugged the yuppies, scratched up their MINI Coopers. Tree-trimmer saws spread deadly fungi. But despite it all, the palms were hanging on. With their discreet roots and flexible trunks, they're survivors. They don't come down in storms. They bow with the wind. They crawl along shady ground before goosenecking north into sunlight. They're scrappy and tenacious and beautiful and useless, like most anything that survives in Los Angeles. I hoped they'd endure. Imagining L.A. without palm trees was like picturing a lion without fur.

I tried the lab for the fifth time, and miraculously Lloyd picked up. After I said hello, his voice got tight. "You can't call me. Especially here."

"I've been looking into a few things. About the Broach case. I need to talk."

A pause indicated I'd piqued his curiosity. "Don't come here."

"After work?"

"Janice isn't doing so hot."

"I'm sorry to hear things are bad."

I could hear him breathing into the receiver, and then he said, quietly, "Thank you."

"I'm sure you don't need any more on your plate, but I would really appreciate a few minutes of your time. Can I make it easier? I'll come to you, pick up dinner, whatever."

I heard some muttering in the background. Then Lloyd's voice changed and he said to me, "Yeah, okay, Freddy. I'll get on it tomorrow. I was just leaving." Then he hung up.

I swung by Henry's Tacos en route to Lloyd's house in North Hollywood, then stopped at a liquor store and picked up a bottle of Bacardi 8, his favorite, and a two-liter of Coke. He lived off a deadend street threading behind an overgrown park, in a big old Valley house with build-ons, rambling halls, and a barn gate guarding a gravel driveway. I slipped the rusty latch and headed down the unlit drive. The house was rotated away from the street, affording from within a good view of the park but making it inhospitable, offering up only the seemingly private kitchen door.

Lloyd was in the detached garage just past the house, fussing over the equipment in the rear of his van. Floor-to-ceiling industrial shelves crowded the van and a backed-in car hibernating beneath a black cover. I approached, and he started at my greeting. The van, as always, was crammed with endless equipment and oddities. Fingerprint tape lifts. Garden loppers for cutting ribs. Colored dental stone for casting impressions of shoe prints. I'd once spent a morning driving around with him while he'd collected seventeen brands of motor oil, trying to match a stain left where a getaway car had idled.

He was stuffing various vials and pill bottles into a knapsack, and he paused wearily at my approach. "She's on more pain meds than I can keep track of," he said, as if continuing a conversation.

"Thanks for seeing me, Lloyd. With everything you have going on."

The van's rear door, which rested heavily against the sleeping car, whined when he swung it shut. I followed him in. I'd been here before, picking him up, dropping off manuscripts, but this was my first time inside. The house was dark, a few lamps illuminating splotches of kitchen and family room. Dishes overrunning the sink, clean plates and bowls stacked on the counters as if no one had the energy to lift them into the cabinets. A swirl of crocheted blankets on the couch, bed pillows mixed with the cushions. The air felt humid from recent cooking. A portly woman sat in an armchair, watching a Spanish talk show and sipping a cup of tea.

"Hullo, Meester Wagner."

"How'd she do today?"

"She do fine. She do jess fine."

Lloyd handed her a roll of bills, and the woman rinsed out her mug in the sink, nodded warmly, and plodded out the door. There was no car out front and no bus stop for blocks.

Looking around made clear why Lloyd had blown off the first message I'd left him. With everything he was contending with, the last thing he needed was a maybe-psychotic murderer dropping by.

"I'm sorry for the mess. Janice is an only child, both parents passed. We don't get much help." Lloyd lowered his head, pausing as if to catch his breath. "Make yourself at home. I'll be right back."

He squared himself toward the hall but remained frozen for a moment, gathering his will. At the end of the long, dark corridor, a seam of light showed beneath a doorway. Lloyd shrugged the knapsack strap up into place and headed toward it.

I cleared a space on the kitchen table and unpacked the food. A fall of light as the door down the hall opened, and I heard murmuring and the soothing rush of medical equipment before the sounds were cut off by the closing door. I got a few glasses from the counter, filled mine with water. A toothbrush leaned from a cup by the dish-soap dispenser. By the door a lone Birkenstock stood out from a mound of shoes, bearing the stain of a woman's foot, a simple image I found distressing. I thought about the second car out in the garage, unused. Lloyd probably didn't have the heart to sell it yet.

There were several TV trays on the floor by the couch, and I cleared them to the kitchen, washed them off, loaded one with tacos. I folded the blankets on the couch, stacked the pillows, and poured Lloyd a drink. Pictures of him and Janice were everywhere hung on the walls, magnetized to the refrigerator, framed atop bookcases. Wedding portraits with awkward Lloyd, all big ears and blond curly hair, clinging to Janice's arm as if he still couldn't believe he'd landed her. Janice smiling from a lime green Gremlin, her feathered hair poofing beyond the frame. The standard fifteen-year anniversary shot, arms around shoulders, before the Eiffel Tower. I'd never met Janice, but I noted with some sadness that the most recent picture of Lloyd was at least five years old. She'd been dying since I'd met him.

I turned off the TV and sat in the reading chair, listening to the house creak, imagining Lloyd's split life, divided between the couch and the bedroom. How he probably stayed out here to breathe a little easier. How he'd shored himself up to make that walk to see his wife. How he probably spent his nights creeping from this end of the house to that seam of light.

Staring down the dark hall, I realized that I feared, greatly feared, what that bedroom might look like.

Fear of death. It's what we share. We ward it off in ineffectual ways, practice brushing against it, swimmers in dark waters. The obsessive bodybuilder. The weekend stunt pilot. The pool-hall slut. We drink too much. We put off surgeries. We whistle past old folks' homes. When it comes down to it, we all fear what's behind that door at the end of the corridor. That's why I write dark little potboilers. To pretend I'm poking at death with a stick. That's why people read them on subway trains and airplanes and think they're facing their deepest and darkest.

The seam in my head, the seam in Genevieve's lovely pale skin, the seam beneath that door. All cracks in what we think we're holding together. I'd never felt so attuned to the vulnerability around me, the chinks and fissures. They're everywhere. You just have to pause. And look.

The hall lightened briefly, and then I heard Lloyd's approach. I handed him his drink. He set down his knapsack, sank into the couch, took a gulp, and emitted a sigh. "Thanks, Drew. This is nice."

"Tacos and Bacardi. Old family recipe. How's Janice?"

He waved me off. "It's back. Other breast now. Third time through, make or break."

"Where's she being seen?"

"Cedars."

"I've heard they have a great onc team." The longer my remark hung in the air, the more hollow it seemed.

The glow of the lamps blacked out the nice view from the back windows. Lloyd finished his drink and said, "Pour you one?"

"I'm still on water."

"Oh, yeah." He filled his glass again, unwrapped a taco, took a bite, and set it down. "I'm real sorry for what you've been through, Drew, but I'm not allowed to talk to you. You're a suspect."

"I haven't been charged. I produced proof that I had nothing to do with "

"I heard."

"Look, Kaden and Delveckio already revealed a fair amount to me. I just want to talk through what I already know. We can start with Genevieve, even. I have the murder book, the trial's over. No way for you to misstep there."

Halfway through his second rum and Coke, Lloyd blinked heavily, suggesting a nod. "Don't you remember it all from the trial?"

"It's blurry. I'd like to hear it again from you."

There was an awkward pause, and then Lloyd said, "Pretty damning, Drew."

"You thought I was going away for it?"

"I couldn't imagine a jury convicting you with a brain tumor in a jar, but the evidence…" His long fingers gripped the mouth of his glass, tilting the dark liquid beneath. He contemplated the rum mix. I knew how that silent conversation went.

I said, "Your report showed that Genevieve had no defensive wounds, no skin beneath her nails."

"Katherine Harriman argued that's because she knew you."

"But Katherine Harriman, unlike me, didn't know Genevieve. Genevieve was tough to surprise, especially if she was up out of bed with an intruder in her bedroom. She wouldn't be one to embrace the knife. If she'd seen the blade, she'd have gone down clawing and biting."

"It was a forceful thrust. Death would have been pretty much instantaneous."

"Prints on the knife?"

"Besides Genevieve's and her kid sister's? Just yours."

"Suspect profile?"

"You know, the usual. Left-handed male, hundred eighty-five pounds, diabolical gleam in the eyes."

"Left-handed from the angle?"

He glanced at the watch on my right wrist. "Uh-huh. Slight slant."

"Male?"

"Power behind the stab."

"Body moved?"

"Yeah. A bunch." Another awkward pause. "By you. Your seizure started as a complex partial. Not the thrashing kind, more of a break in consciousness with automatisms lip smacking, repetitive finger movement. People can walk around, even. Complex partial seizures have been used as a defense in shoplifting cases, though that's pushing it. But you would've been functional enough to manipulate Genevieve Bertrand's body. Until your seizure generalized into a grand mal."

"Would I have been able to stab her in that state? The complex partial?"

"Not likely. I agree with Harriman that your break probably occurred after the murder." He studied my face, then said softly, "I'm sorry, Drew."

I sat back, rubbed at the soreness in my eyes with the heels of my hands. "I had a dream my first night home. I was driving over to her house that night. In a frenzy. She kept a key under a plant pot on her porch. I cracked the clay saucer getting to it. When I woke up, I drove over to her place." Would I tell him the rest? Could I? Lloyd's house was so still I thought I could make out the faint sigh of hospital equipment from the other end. "The saucer was cracked. It wasn't cracked the last time I remember seeing it. I think I dreamed a piece of memory. I think I'm starting to put together fragments of what happened that night."

He frowned severely, taking this in. "What do you mean when you say you were in a frenzy?"

"I was sweating a lot. Feeling panicky."

"Do you recall any unusual smell?"

The band of skin at the back of my neck went cold. My voice tangled in my throat, so I nodded.

"Bitter? Like burning rubber?" Lloyd didn't have to wait for an answer; he could read my face. "It's called an olfactory aura. They often occur just before seizures."

I remembered hearing about auras, but I hadn't put the information together with my dream. "Can I ask you about something else?"

"The question is, can I answer?"

"I want to know about sevoflurane," I said.

Lloyd pulled on his glasses, as if they helped him think better, and said cautiously, "What about it?"

"You found traces in Kasey Broach's bloodstream."

"Kaden and Delveckio revealed that to you?"

I couldn't tell if he was shocked or angry. "The night of the dream, when I woke up, I was really groggy and I had blurred vision. I also had a cut on my foot I think someone might have knocked me out and stolen blood to frame me."

Lloyd let out an unamused cough of a laugh. "Drew "

"Just hear me out, Lloyd. I did some research on sevoflurane today. It's a perfect drug for that. Easy to inhale, quickly induces anesthesia, nonpungent odor. It leaves the bloodstream quickly, so it's hard to test for. No strong aftereffects, so I wouldn't know I'd been drugged."

"Did you know?"

"Well, the killer had a running start, because I mostly figured I was insane to begin with. But here's the thing sevoflurane also produces amnesia."

"So you're thinking…"

"I'm thinking the gas dumped me back into the same memory wasteland of brainspace as my tumor did. It helped me retrieve part of that night." My voice was loud, excited. Lloyd started to say something, but I held up my hand. "I found out sevoflurane also gives a 'good duration of action,' but I think I woke up early. I might have seen the intruder in the street in front of my house, which means I came to sooner than he wanted. I'm wondering why. Maybe I have a higher tolerance from my checkered past."

"It would be the opposite, actually. If there's liver damage, it would make you more sensitive to sevoflurane. But you're stacking an awful lot of assumptions here. Even your memory loss, to begin with you can't know what caused it. The tumor? The surgery? The anesthesia?"

I mused on this a moment. But there were too many moving parts to get a handle on now. "How's it administered? Sevoflurane?"

Lloyd shifted on the sofa, swirled his drink around. "Face mask."

"I figured. So maybe I woke up because it was imperfectly administered. Maybe at my house the killer wore an oxygen mask and let the gas loose in my bedroom, near my face, while I slept." I snapped my fingers, leaning forward. "Remember, there were signs of a struggle in Kasey Broach's bedroom."

"Kaden and Delveckio told you that, too?"

"Broach would've woken up when the killer pressed the mask over her face, but he figured he was strong enough to hold her down until the gas took effect. She's a petite woman, looks what? a buck ten?"

"A hundred and thirteen pounds," Lloyd said quietly.

"Right. But I doubt he'd want to take his chances waking me up by pressing a mask over my face. So he released the gas into the air while I was sleeping."

"Do you have any proof you can hang this theory on?"

"Not a scrap. Maybe this points to someone with medical expertise. Is it hard to get? Sevoflurane?"

"It's controlled, but not like an opiate."

"Can you tell from Kasey Broach's blood level how long she was kept unconscious?"

"Nearly impossible to determine."

"Can you tell when my DNA got on her body? Or the plastic drop cloth?"

"There's no way to put an age on DNA. Only that it was there during analysis." Lloyd held up his hands, thin fingers spread. "Let's hold on a minute. Slow down. You're not working off facts "

"How else did my DNA get on Kasey Broach's body?"

"For the record, we didn't get you on DNA. This isn't a TV show we need at least forty-eight hours to DNA type. We did a traditional ABO. You're AB negative, which puts you with less than one percent of the population."

"They SWAT-raided me off that?"

He rooted in his knapsack and came out with a report, which he tossed at me irritably. "The hair follicle. I matched the cuticle and medulla with a known sample we had for you."

"How about these?" I pointed at four samples farther down the page. "These don't match."

"That's because one's mine and two are from Ted McGraw, who helped me examine the body." He studied my expression and shook his head. "A simple contamination during processing, happens all the time. Don't go putting poor Ted in the conservatory with the candlestick."

"How about the fourth hair?"

"Unidentified. No match in the databases. We're holding it, but it's probably nothing. Frankly, I'm surprised we didn't pick up more strays, the way the wind was blowing."

"So one hair for me, one for Mr. Mystery. But my door gets the battering ram."

"Between your hair, the blood-type match, and the similarities to Bertrand's body, Kaden and Delveckio were ready to make a move on you. At this stage you're the only link between the victims." Lloyd's gaze was steady. Not judgmental, not accusatory. Just steady. "The blood DNA comes back tomorrow. I wouldn't hold your breath that it'll exonerate you."

"It could be someone inside. Kaden and Delveckio said the killer posed the body like Genevieve's, in ways that weren't released to the press. And a cop or detective might want me to go down for Genevieve's killing."

Lloyd looked at me as if I were paranoid, which I was. "So badly that they'd murder an innocent girl? Come on, Drew. Crime-scene photos leak." He leaned over and snatched the paper back from me. "Unlike criminalist reports. Plus, given the trial, there were a lot of lawyers and reporters poking around the Bertrand case files. The specifics were hardly kept as state secrets. Kaden and Delveckio were probably just trying to rattle you."

The crime-scene photos I'd stolen reinforced Lloyd's point. Kaden had grown touchy when I'd pushed for more information on what they'd gotten off the body. Ah, here it is: None of your fucking business.

I led him a bit with my next question. "What about the other key piece of evidence?"

"The rope? It's an all-cotton brand used for bondage. Probably bought at an erotic specialty store."

"Why tie rope around the ankles but tape the wrists?"

"Easier to transport a body. Easier to throw it out a vehicle. No limbs flapping around."

"No, I mean, why use different restraints on the same body?"

"You ever bind someone's wrists with rope?"

"No. Have you?"

He guffawed I'd forgotten about his great, unruly laugh. "No. But it's difficult. You can squirm your hands free easier than you can your feet."

"So why not use electrical tape on both the wrists and ankles?"

"I don't have an answer for you, Drew. But we're looking into it. This and more." He set down his glass and yawned. I could only imagine his exhaustion working long days, caring for his wife every spare waking hour. He walked me to the door. "It goes without saying that you can't mention to anyone and I mean anyone that I saw you today."

"I won't. And don't worry you didn't tell me anything that hasn't already been disclosed to me." I felt like a heel. This was a guy who, when asked to confirm an autopsy detail for me, would fax me a two-page essay. Now he'd stepped away from work and left his dying wife to help me, and I'd manipulated him, then lied about it. Not the first time I'd lied in pursuit of something I wanted, but I told myself I wouldn't let it come back to bite him in the ass. We shook hands, and I said, "I'm very appreciative that you took the time to talk with me. I know you're on overload."

He nodded, pausing in the doorway while I walked up the gravel drive. He didn't seem eager to head back down that hall. I got to the gate and turned around, and there he was, still silhouetted against the faint light from the kitchen.

"Leave it alone, Drew," he called after me. "This isn't one of your books."

I raised a hand and slipped through onto the street.

The hell it isn't.