The Crime Writer

Chapter 22

I knocked again on the hemlock-wood door, then peered through one of the frosted glass panes. Though I'd picked up Preston out front many times, I'd never actually been inside his condo, a balconied two-room floating among the billboards of Sunset. It occurred to me that I'd always had an image of it Milanese furniture, stone bathtub, faint whiff of sage hand soap.

The door opened face width. For an instant even from this close I mistook Preston for someone else. His hair, usually flared so carefully over his forehead, lay limp against his head, and he was unshaven, his stubble sprinkled with gray. I could see the lapels of a bathrobe he hadn't left all day?

Mortification flickered across his features.

I tried for a joke to put him at ease. "I didn't tell you I was picking you up for a black-tie at the Beattys'?"

His face was tense; for once he wasn't sure what to say. He cleared his throat, eased the door farther open. "I've been editing. No time to get my face on." He said it with a defensive edge, and it occurred to me that in the years I'd known him he'd never extended an invitation for me to drop by. He always seemed so comfortable marching into my house with his own key that I'd assumed the informality ran both ways.

"Bad time?" I asked. "I could "

"Well, you might as well come in now." He stepped back, and I followed him down a brief, dark hall into the main room. The furnishings were hardly threadbare, but I was shocked by their ordinariness. A standard couch. White-tile kitchen. An antique credenza with hairline cracks, a ding or two away from a garage sale.

Preston returned to the tiny table by the window, sat, and gestured to the other chair. The table, stacked with shuffled sections of the New York Times, wasn't really sized for more than one person. Preston set aside Arts and went back to the soggy bowl of cereal I assumed was his dinner. A bare leg poked out from the fold of his bathrobe.

The whole scene was so banal, so unfabulous, so decidedly unPreston. I'd never seen him unshaven. I'd never seen him not nattily attired. I'd never seen him eating food bought at a grocery store. It was a perfectly ordinary scene in a perfectly nice condo, but it was also somehow a breach in my view of him and how he kept himself, and this we both sensed. Nothing had happened nothing at all but the awkwardness was pervasive.

"So?" he asked. "What's so urgent it couldn't wait for me to barge in on you?" He didn't lift his gaze from the bowl; his heart wasn't in the joke.

I pressed forward. "You'll get a kick out of this. That kid Junior, right? So I found him at Hope House…"

But the surroundings continued to distract me. Sodden coffee filter on the counter. A lonesome glass in the sink, awaiting the dishwasher. Manuscript sheaves, bearing Preston's editor-red scrawl, had colonized most of the condo's flat surfaces. The thought of him in here alone, only these chunks of text keeping him company, seemed oddly dismal. Had I expected him to edit during cocktail parties?

Atop the crammed bookshelf by the TV, bookended between two heavy mugs, sat a row of my hardcovers. The closest thing to a display in sight. Preston always badgered me so much about my writing that I'd forgotten that maybe he liked it. The possibility that he valued me more than he let on oddly diminished my view of him. A trust-fund editor more articulate than I was, he'd taken a gamble on me five books ago, and I hadn't really updated my underlying view of him since. Though we'd become good friends, if not intimates, in my hidden thinking he'd always remained part of the unscalable edifice of New York publishing, and I felt a devotion to him for giving me that first hand up. I knew, of course, that I was an opportunity for him then and especially now. But perhaps I represented a more profound opportunity than I'd thought. Like the rest of us, Preston was busted in his own lovely way. But maybe he was also ordinary like the rest of us. Maybe he needed me as much as I needed him.

Preston had said something.

I refocused. "Sorry?"

"I said, 'Yes, you found Junior…?' "

I forged back into the story Xena and the cop and the jail cell but I couldn't convey the maddening hilarity of it. Preston humored me with a faint smile and the occasional nod, but we were both distracted and aware that the surface exchange had become a charade.

When I was finished, I said lamely, "You gotta meet this kid." I riffled the edges of the nearest newspaper section until the noise grated. The air felt unvented, claustrophobic. I was eager to get out of there, impatient to start looking into the vehicle ID Junior had given me. Finally I said, "I gotta get over to Lloyd's. Tell him about the Volvo. I just thought you'd get a kick out of the other stuff."

"Sorry to disappoint."

"You never disappoint, Preston."

He summoned a smile before rising to see me out. "No," he said. "Of course not."