The Crime Writer

Chapter 45

I'm a free citizen, at least until my next brain tumor. Cal leaked Genevieve's voice-mail message to the press, which, on the crest of the sensationalist coverage of Lloyd's machinations, restored my name to whatever dubious standing it had achieved before the trial. My sales continue to increase.

A deputy corroborated my account of the jail rec-room incident, but before I could formally file a complaint against Kaden and Delveckio, all pending charges against me were dropped. Morton Frankel awaits trial, but I have been informed that he is as they say in the hallowed halls of Parker Center fucked.

Sometimes Cal drops by and we smoke cigars on the back deck, overlooking the city. He's not promoted yet, but his captain's got his ear to the ground and says any day now. We talked about the case a lot, me and Cal, and then all of a sudden we didn't.

I've still heard nothing from the Bertrands, and doubt I ever will. My association with the ugliness surrounding their daughter has branded me guilty, even if I am not, and I don't begrudge them their construal of events.

Sissy Ballantine completed a swift recovery and eventually made the marrow donation to her brother. I got to meet him, a brunch that was a better idea in theory than awkward reality. His wasted shoulders poked at his vintage bowling shirt, he had the first wisps of a beard coming in, and he looked baffled and humbled by all the commotion that had happened around him. When I shook his hand, I could feel his bones clearly through the skin. Sissy followed me out and gave me a quick hug. "Thank you," she said, smiling the wide smile of the healthy, and damned if I didn't feel, for a brief moment, up to snuff with Derek Chainer.

The Broaches had lost one child, in effect, because they'd lost another years before. Think about that the next time you're feeling secure about your place in the divine order.

The home-administered chemo had emptied Janice Wagner's bones of marrow in preparation for the second transplant that never came, and there'd been nothing to replace it. About a week after Lloyd's death, she died. It's hardly justice, but not quite karma.

I guess it's life.

The Broaches granted the exhumation order, and when the coroner peeled back the abraded flesh on Kasey's hip, he'd found the bone beneath marred with barely premortem needle punctures. The photos found their way to the tabloids.

Kasey's marrow, as you may have guessed, hadn't been taking in Janice's bones. It's not a complicated business, I've been told, but complicated enough that they don't sell home kits. Lloyd hadn't gotten enough marrow from Broach's right hip alone; he'd needed to extract it also from her left, but the detectives surmised that he'd been concerned that dueling hip abrasions on the corpse would have been hard to sell.

From the beginning, the tight time frame had left Lloyd desperate. Once Janice's bones had been ravished, he'd had to move swiftly on Broach thus the gun and the at-home neighbors and he'd rushed Sissy Bal lantine even more. One of the doctors treating Janice had later said that Lloyd seemed to have worked out the kinks, that his chemo cocktails had put her leukemia into temporary remission, so the second transplant could very well have taken. But, of course, the rest of Sissy Ballantine's marrow prudently taken from both sides of her pelvic bone hadn't made it from the filter to Janice's veins. Instead it had been removed from the machine and put on ice for Sissy's brother, for whom it had originally been intended.

Janice had been sufficiently impaired to withhold and withstand keen questioning, and she'd pushed off from the dock without anyone ascertaining how much she knew about what Lloyd was up to in that suite down the hall. I believe I heard that she never even found out that her husband had died just one room away from her.

The day after her death, Cal showed me an entry from Lloyd's journal, full of tortured remorse and pleading apology, with a clarity about grief and loss that gave me a pang of empathy.

A pang.

I suppose Lloyd will draw some comfort during his long drift across the river Styx from the fact that his wife never had to find out his full story.

What was his story? As Chic would say, that's no groundballer. Lloyd was a guy like any other, I suppose, subjected to the right pressures and passions. A guy whose wife was dying in sluggish, wrenching increments. Day after day he hacked into that transplant registry and stared at those two stubborn owners of matching marrow, his brain redlining to come up with an angle any angle that could get him and Janice to their twenty-fifth anniversary. Unlike any other guy, Lloyd had an extraordinary skill set to counter those pressures. I'll still be out in my yard, or lined up at the In-N-Out drive-through, and remember some other wrinkle Lloyd had forensically smoothed from the fabric of his plan. I'd never considered the ramifications of the first time he'd called me excited about a murder scene years ago, a bizarre hot-tub death in Manhattan Beach. My greed as a writer brought me into this. I had volunteered to be his subject when I drew Lloyd into devising my stories. I always wanted my plots to be realer than I could make them myself. And I needed someone who lived it. I needed someone who'd smelled that stench. And I got it.

A story, after all, doesn't have to be true. Just convincing.

Spring is slow in coming, though you can't tell by the weather. I have a vicious killer of a dog, who attacks pillows and shoes and hardcover novels like nobody's business. I have a Little Brother who can spray-paint and pick locks well beyond his years. He takes me to Dodgers games and batting cages and, most frequently, to court when he violates probation. I still see Genevieve at times through the steam in the shower, humming a melody, as I'm driving some stretch of road but less often now.

This morning, at the end of breakfast, guess who reappeared out on the deck? Gus. Big grin, pouched cheeks, and buck teeth, like a smug third-grader back from some mysterious adventure and privy to secrets we'll never know. He wobbled across the deck and began assiduously chewing a hole through the garden hose. I rose and pulled back the sliding glass door. Caroline followed me out and tossed Gus a scrap of toast. He looked up at us indifferently, then scampered off through his path in the ivy.

Like the rest of us, trying to stay one squirrel step ahead of the coyotes.