The Crime Writer

Chapter 36

Far from the madding crowd, I sat like a tailgater on my little rented rectangle of Hollywood asphalt and dialed my cell phone.

"I'd like to see you," I said. "I'm in your neck of the woods."

"Ah, yes," she said, "I can hear the excess in the background."

The parking-lot attendant gave me a peculiar look as I pulled out. For twenty bucks I should've set up camp for the night.

Caroline proved to live in a corner unit on the sixth floor of a recently renovated building on Crescent Heights. I tripped over some vestigial scaffolding on my way in, the doorman kindly pretending not to notice. I waited in the freshly carpeted hall while she undid a profusion of dead bolts. She double-checked me through a veil of security chains, and then the door closed on me again. More metallic unhooking and we were face-to-face.

She reached out, gingerly touched my right temple just beyond the stitches. "Have you iced that?"

Minutes later I was sitting on her plush sofa, she on the adjoining coffee table, the better to press a bag of frozen corn kernels to my eye. I described to her the nature of my disagreement with Mort. To my surprise she didn't reprimand me for Junior's role, but then, she knew him better than I and, given her profession, likely applied a stringent doctrine of accountability regardless of age.

The edge of the bag caught a stitch, and I grimaced. Leaning forward, she adjusted, and then our faces were close, the air chilled from the frozen bag. She brushed the hair off my forehead gently, and her lips parted a bit, her gaze on my mouth. I moved the bag aside, but she stood abruptly and said, "What are we doing here, Drew? I mean, why do you like being with me?"

"Your trusting nature?"

"I'm serious."

I set the bag on my knee. "Because it's the only time I don't want to be anywhere else."

She opened her mouth to say something, but instead she held up a finger and walked swiftly down the hall, and then I heard a door close and the sounds of retching. The sink ran for a while, and there was toothbrushing and gargling, and soon she returned, red-faced, reluctant to make eye contact.

I said, "If I kiss you, does your head explode?"

She said, incredulous, "You still want to kiss me?"

"I do. I also want to wake up next to you." I held up both hands. "Today, a year from now, whenever. I'm just letting you know that I find you "

She said, "Come here." She was shaking. She took my hand and led me to her bedroom, and then she turned off the lights and stepped out of her sweatpants. She kissed me nervously, too hard, and said, "Get a condom. It's in the drawer," and as I fumbled out of my clothes, she tugged me on top of her. I moved to lift her shirt, but she grabbed my wrist, firmly, and said, "I want to keep it on," and then guided my shoulders and set her jaw in the best spirit of let's-get-it-over-with.

I kept thinking I had the angle or position wrong until it struck me that she had tightened up, locked down her body in panic until it was as though there were no aperture. We shifted and reshifted until she laughed and said bitterly, "Hey, you wanted to," and rolled over, and then her shoulders shook once, and I realized she was crying.

"I'm not crying," she said.

I lay there in the dark beside her, wanting to touch her but not sure if that was the right call.

"That moved a little fast for me," I said. "I'd imagine it felt the same way to you."

She kept on her stomach, angled away, her head lowered to the cross of her arms. Her voice was hoarse and unsteady, but gentle. "Just lock the front door behind you, okay?"

"What are you feeling?"

"Philosophical."

"That's not a feeling."

"Oh, great. This game."

"Knock it off," I said.

She was silent for a long time, and then she said, "I'm sorry. That's a reasonable question. I don't know if I'm clear enough to answer it."

"So make it up."

"How do I feel…?" A car horn blared in the distance. From one of the apartments in floating proximity came Eric Clapton, an accompaniment to someone's romantic dinner. Caroline's shoulders seized a bit more, but she didn't make a noise, and then she hung her head off the bed and miraculously came up with a tissue and blew her nose, all the while keeping her face from view. She settled back into position. Her voice cracked when she spoke. "That if I'm not vigilant, undisclosed awful things will happen to me. And." A deep breath. "That I may not be brave enough to allow myself something like this."

We breathed for a while in the semidarkness, and then eventually I said, "Do you mind if I take the rest of my clothes off?"

She turned slowly, hair hiding one eye. Sheer lavender curtains filtered the faint lights from the street below. She watched me for a long time. "No."

She'd pulled me to her so furiously that my clothes were still clinging to me one shoe, both socks, a tangle of boxers at my ankle. I stripped and she watched me, and then I lay flat on her bed, hands at my sides, and said, "Okay. I have no expectations. I'm just lying here naked so you can look at me."

She pulled her shirt back into place, sat Indian style before me, and studied me clinically.

After a time I asked, "How do you feel now?"

"Anxious. I haven't, obviously, since…"

"I figured."

"Can I touch you?"

"Yes."

She pressed both palms flat against my chest and leaned, as if testing my consistency. She stroked my thigh with the tips of her nails. She cupped me in her hand and said, "You're so soft."

"Not if you keep that up."

She laughed, covering her mouth as if the sound had caught her off guard. She tugged out her ponytail holder, and her lank, sandalwood hair relaxed into wisps, which brushed my chest as she leaned over me. She felt my entire body, inch by inch, a blind person learning a new shape. After maybe twenty minutes of silent examination, she lifted off her own shirt.

Her torso, too, bore the marks of the abuse she'd endured, though they were less striking, inlaid against her splendid form. A short run of mottled flesh at her left shoulder, a ridge of stomach muscle, a gnarl of scar tissue at her ribs, the swell of her breasts.

"You can touch," she said. "Me."

I lifted my hands from my sides and explored her delightful, unpredictable body. Her breathing shifted. She tilted her head, let her hair spill across her face. Falling back, she pulled me on top of her again and clutched my back. Her breath came hot against my neck. It took time for her to unclench; we moved slowly, with patience, murmuring and kissing, one vivid moment at a time. And finally we were making love. It was not without awkwardness, but it wasn't without grace either.

Afterward she clung to me, started crying, and didn't stop. She wept with the abandon of a child, until she was limp, until her face was drained to a dishwater gray. Beneath the veneer of exhaustion and terror, she looked elated.

She slung a leg across my stomach and propped herself up on an elbow, her face beside mine. "Sorry I cried."

"I don't mind. Apologize to yourself if you want to."

She lowered her chin to my chest. "I used to be good at this, you know."

"I'm told I never was."

She laughed, hit me weakly.

"They say the eyes are the windows to the soul," I said. "I do not believe this to be true. I believe the toes are the windows to the soul."

"Oh? How are my toes?" She wiggled them, showing off.

"Magnificent."

We talked a bit more and then dozed off together. At 11:32 I awoke with a start.

"What?" she said sleepily. "What's wrong?"

I sat up to try to slow my breathing.

She felt my shoulders. "Jesus, you're drenched."

My dream-memory streamed back in vivid detail, me in my car the night of, driving to Genevieve's. Alone. Running up her stairs. Alone. Finding the key. Alone.

"I can't spend the night here. The last time I spent the night with someone was when I…"

"You don't know."

"Exactly."

"Either way. Whatever you did or didn't do, you had a brain tumor."

"I've done or not done plenty since then."

Like when I'd awakened to find the slice above my little toe. With a clean bill of mental health, I'd followed my own bloody footprints around the house. Returned to find my boning knife, bearing my own prints, by the bed. Discovered the shattered jar in the sink and ganglioglioma gone spelunking down the disposal. What if I hadn't been gassed with sevoflurane? What if Morton Frankel had never been to my house? What if this was all my writer's mind at work on an elaborate fiction? A more convenient tale, spun for the age-old reason all escapist yarns are?

A memory hit me, fresh as a vision. Genevieve bouncing foot to foot along the cliff's edge above Santa Monica Beach, giggling manically as I shadowed her five feet off. An ingenious blackmail should I be scared? Indifferent? Should I approach? Tourists watching with trepidation, parents shepherding their kids away. We'd gotten into a fight over something monumental taco stand or Korean barbecue and it had erupted as it often did. What's the matter, Drew? I'm embarrassing you? Embarrassment, sure, but also terror that she'd misjudge her footing, resentment at how my hands clutched the air every time she wobbled. At the time I hadn't identified the sensation hiding beneath the others like a buried ember. Rage.

I believe that anyone is capable of anything.

In addition to my own unstable self, I had other nocturnal dangers to offer. Kaden and Delveckio could come calling after all, I still owed them a gun and drag Caroline into the investigation. Morton Frankel could be smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in the alley below, staring up at this window right now.

"I don't trust where I am. I need to get more answers."

"Sorry," she said, "but there's only room for my issues in this relationship."

That drew a smile from me. She threw on a nightgown as I dressed. At the door we kissed. I ran my thumb along the line of one of her scars.

She asked, "What if you get to the end of this road and discover you did do it?"

"I don't know that I could live with myself."

"Drew," she said, "we're generally not given that choice."