The Crime Writer

Chapter 32

The voice came at an inappropriate volume through my cell-phone headset. "We're at your house. Where the hell are you?"

"Kaden?"

"And what's wrong with your home line?"

"I'm waiting for Pac Bell to deliver excellent service."

In the backseat Xena belched. Junior giggled yet another break in the glumness he'd been attempting to convey since I'd picked him up to bring his dog to the new home he claimed to have lined up. He was way too talkative to sulk effectively.

"Where's the gun?" Kaden asked.

"Upstairs on my desk."

"Where are you?"

"Returning a dog."

"Smart, dipshit."

"I figured you wouldn't want me to leave a. 22 in a manila envelope on my porch."

"We want you to be home to give us the damn gun."

"It's noon. You told me you were coming by in the morning."

It had been hard for me to shake a sense of dread at dawn. I'd been out of jail a week to the day and still woke up panicked that I was encased by cinder blocks. In hopes of lightening my mood, I'd set out a breakfast bowl of pistachios on the deck for Gus, but he hadn't shown, tied up, no doubt, in a coyote's digestive tract. Stranded like a tramp in a Beckett play, I'd returned to my computer and pounded wrathfully on my loud keyboard, a clackety holdover I'd preserved for precisely such moods.

Chic had called before I'd left, saying word had come back from the cheap seats that Morton Frankel wasn't known as a thug-for-hire. Merely as a vicious criminal. I felt better about talking openly with Kaden and Delveckio and worse about being me.

"We were busy," Kaden said.

"With Frankel?"

"No interviewing the kid who found the gun. We questioned Frankel last night."

"And?"

"You'll be shocked to hear he said he didn't do it."

"He alibied?"

"Sleeping alone. Which, if he wasn't carving up Kasey Broach, is reasonably what he'd be doing."

"Can't you take a DNA sample? Just one hair?"

"Sure, right after the covert CIA chopper drops him off at Guantanamo Bay. It doesn't work that way, clown. You need what we here in nonfiction refer to as 'probable cause.' And a brown Volvo ain't enough to make a judge sign on the dotted. Now we need that gun."

"I'll run it over to Parker when I get home."

"You bet your ass you will."

"How hard did you press him? Frankel?"

"Hard." A rustle as he started to hang up.

"Hey, Kaden? When you unplugged the security camera in the interrogation room with me, that was just bad-cop posturing, right?"

I heard the whistle of wind across his mouthpiece. "Sure thing, Danner."

I ducked out of the headset, almost knocking my pen from its perch behind my ear.

Junior's mouth picked up right where it had left off. "… and they drop off this mad jungle gym, homes. Got ladders and bars and shit. The retarded kid went apeshit, pissed hisself down the twisty slide.

Dude say it was donated by some rich a-hole, didn't know what to do wid' all his money."

"Sounds like an a-hole, all right."

"Turn here. Now get over a lane."

"How much farther?"

"We almost there, Big Brother. Left here. Now right. Go straight. Okay."

We were at Morton Frankel's apartment complex. I glowered at Junior.

"I been thinkin'…" he said. "Homeboy who you followin'? You need a hair." He pointed across the street at Frankel's apartment. "That's where the shit would be."

"I'll just ring and ask him politely."

"HelZo? Workday."

"Maybe not after he spent the night getting questioned. And besides, how am I gonna get inside his apartment?"

Junior slapped his chest with both hands, insulted. "What the fuck?"

"No. Oh, no."

He hopped out.

"As your Big Brother, I am ordering you to get your juvenile-delinquent ass back in this car."

He sprinted across the street. The light changed, and I had to wait for a string of cars before I could follow. I took the steps two at a time. Frankel's door rested open, kissing the strike plate, and Junior was leaning against the wall beside it, pretending to buff his fingernails on his Lakers jersey. A pick dangled from his lips. I grabbed his arm and dragged him back down the stairs. He complained and swore all the way to the car. I opened the passenger door and deposited him roughly in the seat.

He looked at me sullenly. "I was just tryin' to help."

I tossed him the keys. "Keep an eye on the street and honk if you see him coming."

A two-second delay, then a grin lightened his face. "Awright, Big Bro-Bro."

Leaving his chanting behind, I crossed again and climbed the stairs, a bit more cautiously. The hinges gave off a creep-show whine when I knuckled the door open a few inches. The strip of visible room looked empty enough. A puddle of sheets on a mattress. No bed frame. Alarm clock on a shoe box turned on its side. The drawn blinds left the air dim and unvented. I pressed a shoulder to the door, widening my field of vision a few degrees. Of course the furnishings budget had gone to a big-screen TV and a Barcalounger maroon, with a remote-control pouch and a cup holder hole-punching one plush arm.

A quick jog, a hair plucked from a brush or comb, and I'd be on my way. Easing inside, I took in the odor of curtain dust and tired plumbing. I kept the door cracked behind me, leaving no barriers to a hasty retreat.

Despite the sparseness and the moldy smell, the place was kept neat cardboard boxes stacked in one corner, lintless carpet, countertop scrubbed clean. The drip of the kitchen sink was maddeningly loud.

Open facedown on the floor behind the mattress, a paperback of Chainer's Law. Heart pounding, I stared at the familiar cover, my name lettered in vibrant red. After all the searching and digging, at last a concrete link between me and Morton Frankel. I lifted the book, looking for marked passages. He'd reached. A receipt slipped from the book and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up. Chainer's Law, $7.99 plus tax. The purchase date? Today.

Having recognized me yesterday, he'd started a bit of research of his own. Or was this ongoing study, further indication of his fixation on me? Standing here, violating precisely the kind of privacy rights I paid lip service to during more convenient times in my life, I was forced to consider again if I was making headway or only confronting obstacles I'd thrown in my own path the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of plotting. I was lost in my own story, banging the labyrinthine walls of my investigation.

Setting the book back in its place, I didn't bother telling myself to stop. What's the use? I never listen.

A brief hall, broken by a coat closet and a metal footlocker, led to the bathroom. Keeping the lights off, I made tentative but steady progress. Pairs of shoes along the far wall, lined almost decoratively. An adequate oil painting of a farmhouse in a shaft of purple light. A few wire hangers bent and stuffed into a grocery bag used as a trash can. The footlocker blocked the hall, dust streaks indicating it had been recently moved. I paused over it, took in the fat padlock dangling from the clasp. Maybe Frankel had pulled it out after last night's visit with Kaden and Delveckio, a reminder to dispose of whatever was locked within.

A bead of sweat ran down my ribs before my shirt caught it.

I crouched and gripped the footlocker, which tilted accommodatingly, its contents sliding with a rattle. After tugging at the padlock idiotically, I continued into the bathroom, rattling the shower curtain back on its rings to make sure I was alone. The mirrored medicine cabinet revealed a toothbrush tilting from a coffee mug. The drawer under the sink held a gaggle of disposable razors, a Hustler, a spare bar of soap, and, way in the back, a kelly green comb.

I removed the comb, angled it to the light. Not a strand of hair. I checked the drawer, then sink. Nothing, save flecks of dried soap and toothpaste.

A spot of color at the threshold stabbed at my peripheral vision.

I turned little by little, like an animal before a predator's gaze, concerned that a sharp motion would draw attention.

Just beyond the doorway in the hall, a matchbook.

Skull and bones on the cover.

My mouth had gone dry. There was no way I would have stepped over the matchbook without noticing. Even focused as I was on the drawers, the cabinet, the promise of a comb.

Moving with excruciating slowness, careful that my shoes not so much as squeak on the linoleum, I took a step forward, kneeled. Plucking the matchbook off the floor, I spread it open.

I STILL SEE YOU.

A thump to my right, and a blinding strike knocked me flat on the floor. Seconds stretched out, the sharpness of the pain lending everything intense clarity. The floorboards, sprayed with my saliva. My pen, looming large before my left eye, rolling away into normal perspective. A workman's boot, laced loosely across a stiff leather tongue.

I had one instinct only do not get caught down.

I'd barely registered the wood grinding my cheek when I sprang up as if off a bounce and squared myself, vision swimming, desperate to fix on something despite the motion and the throbbing of my head. Then I heard the low tick of a chuckle, and Morton Frankel stepped forward into focus, opening a folding blade and letting the spring flick it closed. The coat-closet door was open behind him.

Without hesitation I charged. You don't need courage when you have familiarity with self-destruction. Once you've had a quart of Gran Patron pumped from your stomach, you don't expect God, or fate, or yourself to be much concerned with your preservation. So it wasn't courage, not exactly. More like readjusted expectations about the warranty package.

I knocked his knife hand wide with a sweep of my arm and drove my forehead down into his nose. I missed but caught his chin, and then he wheeled and stabbed the knife back at my side, and I caught his wrist awkwardly, and we fell. There were no direct punches, no clean kung fu angles, just glancing blows, grappling, and almost instantaneous exhaustion. In the tight space, we kicked our bodies around, fighting for position, walking the walls in a thoughtful sort of slow motion as our clothes twisted and our breathing grew harsh.

Methodically, he gained position on me, driving a knee into my side, leaning over me and turning his sweaty wrist in my grip, trying to free his knife hand. Our faces stayed close enough to kiss, a drop of perspiration threatening to fall from the tip of his nose, those bared teeth grotesque in close-up. The bitter scent of his skin factory grime and chemical soap pervaded the narrow hall. He got the bar of his forearm across the bridge of my nose, prying his knife hand free. My flailing shoe caught the footlocker, jammed it against the wall for resistance, and I shoved, flipping onto my stomach and trying to take his arm with me.

His knife hand popped loose.

I was on my stomach, Frankel straddling my back with both arms free, the knife lost from my field of vision. I scrambled on the floorboards but was pinned, so I bucked to keep him off balance. Each unguarded instant seemed an impossible duration.

His knee braced against the wall, setting his weight. A sharp intake of breath and a whistle of fabric as he drew an arm back for the plunge.

My escaped pen spun lethargically across the floor. I lunged, straining, getting it at my fingertips. Closing the plastic Bic into the vise of my fist, I rotated and jammed the uncapped point into the meat of Frankel's outer thigh. He let out a hiss, his swipe thrown off by our twisting momentum, the blade embedding in the wall and releasing a puff of drywall dust. I jammed the heel of my hand north, cracking his nose, the pain raising him to a bent-legged hover. Shoving free, I hooked his ankle with a foot, knocking him down onto his ass. His hands, bloodless from the pressure, gripped his thigh around the pen. As crimson blotted the white leg of his Dickies, I leaned over him, squeezed a handful of his hair, and ripped.

I ran, his fingernails scrabbling against the walls behind me as he pulled himself up. I pitched forward against the front door, banging it open, and stumbled down the stairs. Junior and Xena filled the Highlander's windows, the whites of their eyes visible across two lanes. As I dodged traffic, Junior turned over the engine and flung my door wide. Keeping my left hand curled tight to trap the protruding hairs, I fell into the driver's seat and peeled out, door slamming on its own as the Highlander hurtled forward.

Morton Frankel stood at a tilt on the second floor, two red hands curled around the railing like talons, watching us go.