The Crime Writer

Chapter 7

Desperate for sleep, I lay on my bed, willing myself to doze off into another fragment of lost time. But my internal clock had decided to wake up and pay attention to the fact that it was 11:00 A.M. I went downstairs, sat at the kitchen table with my stale almonds and a glass of pomegranate juice, and took in the view. I was still acclimating to what daytime felt like when it wasn't filtered through bars.

After April's, I'd gone on my first light-of-day outing down to Whole Foods to get groceries. I'd found people surprisingly warm. An old woman with a tennis visor gave me a surreptitious thumbs-up from Dried Fruits. The clerk, shuttling my groceries into compostable bags, leaned forward as we waited for the receipt to print and said, sotto voce, "I'm glad for you." I knew I was dealing with a skewed sample those who didn't think I was a drooling lunatic were more likely to approach but these quiet, kind exchanges more than made up for the drubbing I'd received from my favorite morning-talk-show hosts.

My cell phone rang.

Chic said, "What are you doing?"

I picked an almond from a fold in my shirt, popped it into my mouth. "Writing."

"How 'bout some bar-bee-cue? Get your mind off the human fucking condition."

"No thanks."

"I'll pick you up in twenty minutes."

"Sure," I told the dial tone, "that'd be swell."

Chic drives a cherry red Chevy pickup, so big that riding in it you feel like a Playskool figurine. I'm officially six feet tall, ever since I fudged the extra inch at the DMV when I turned sixteen, but Chic looms over me. And requires more vehicular headroom.

Onetime first baseman for the Dodgers, he'd made the All-Star Team two years running, but that was before The Pop-Up. After that, he opened a chain of rib joints, which he'd named Chics Stics. He forgot the apostrophe and went without the k, and it took off from there. Branding genius, homegrown.

On the Chevy's tailgate is an elaborate sign, CHIC'S STICS, featuring an apostrophe I added with a Magic Marker one day while he was distracted by a flat tire. That his truck still bears a Dodgers license-plate frame says more about the man than I ever could.

His driving slow and steady matches his personality. Chic has not a smugness but the relaxed, found-his-priorities demeanor of a recovering alcoholic. Someone who'd lived hard and found it not to work, who now knew what mattered and what was a waste of energy. We'd met in those rooms five years ago when I'd hit "reset" on my life, and we'd gravitated to each other immediately. Despite almost running his marriage into the ground a time or twelve, the requisite string of away-game affairs, the massive swings in fortune, he was still with his high-school sweetheart. He wasn't overwhelmingly handsome, except when he smiled. And he had a sweet, soft laugh, the kind that drove the road girls wild. At least before The Pop-Up.

He'd played as the nineties rolled in, just before athletes started making tycoon money. And though he was sure of his talents, he'd be quick to tell you that he hadn't started either All-Star Game in which he'd played, that he'd crumbled with his best years ahead of him. Aside from the infamy, he now led a peaceful life with his family in Mar Vista, a bedroom community tucked between Santa Monica and Venice. Close enough to the beach for the salt erosion but too far for a view, it had, like much Westside real estate, gone from middle class to upper in a hurry over the past decade. When his restaurants had taken off, Chic could've upgraded to a place in Brentwood or the Palisades, but instead he'd bought his neighbor's house, torn it down, and made a giant yard for his eight kids, complete with a mini baseball diamond.

Angela met us at the door, baby clasped to her side, sobbing toddler clinging to her leg, three or four various-size kids flashing in and out of view behind her as they circled the kitchen table playing chase or death tag. "Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew, Drew." She angled a cooking spoon, wet from baked beans, to the side and offered up a delightfully smooth cheek for me to kiss, which I did gladly. "Boy, we prayed for you till this here floor got tired of our knees."

A few of the Baleses spun off from the typhoon and collided with my knees, shouting my name. I rubbed their heads. "Ronnie, you grew."

"That's 'cuz I'm Jamaal."

"Where's Ronnie?"

"Over here."

"I thought you were Keyshawn."

"Ain't no Keyshawn in this house, Drew."

And so the game went.

Somehow juggling three children and a platter of fried boneless chicken thighs if this were fiction, I'd wimp out and make it something else, but chicken it was Angela hustled us through to the side door. We sat at the picnic table in the middle of what would have been the neighbor's front yard. I watched her, as I often did, with awe. To me she was the Great Mother, a beautiful woman with soft curves and a ready grin, always pregnant or nursing or laying cornbread on a just-wiped table. We ate lunch. Buckets of sweet potatoes, trays of corn, sliced sourdough off the cutting board.

Angela pressed the tops of her breasts, grimacing. "I'm engorged. I need a mouth."

I said, "Don't look at me."

Frowning her amusement, she threw a blanket over one shoulder as Jamaal handed off the baby.

Chic buzzsawed through a plate of baby backs, shrapnel flying. He paused to belch, and Asia, chin level with the table, said, "Don't forget you can't do that when you start kindergarten."

"Okay, baby." Chic pointed at Ronnie's plate. "You gonna eat all that?"

Ronnie shielded his plate with both arms. "Uh-huh."

"All right, then. You don't finish, I gonna make you clean the toilets with your toothbrush."

"Nuh-uh."

"Just you wait and see."

Ronnie went back to picking at his plate. Finally he slid it over to his father, who crowded him in the crook of his elbow and kissed him, leaving a greasy stain on his forehead that the other kids groaned about. Angela sat the baby in her lap, biting off his fingernails and spitting them into the bougainvillea. It was cool and the air smelled of jasmine, and I looked over at Angela and said, "Thank you."

She winked at me and rose, signaling that the clearing phase had begun. The ambulatory children helped, then were dispensed to their rooms for naps or reading or setting fires.

Chic and I sat at the picnic table, drinking O'Doul's and counting the passing cars. We got to fifteen before a middle-aged guy in a construction truck bellowed, "You're a fuckin' choker, Bales!"

Chic and I waved as we'd practiced many a time, the beauty-queen hand pivot.

A one-game playoff to determine the NL West had taken place up at San Francisco a few years before I'd met Chic. The Pop-Up. I'd cursed at it live, and thousands of replays had kept it fresh in my mind ever since. Bottom of the eighth, Dodgers in the field, up by one. Runners at the corners. Tie game. Robbie Thompson hits a towering pop-up, two outs voiding the infield-fly rule. Bales is under it, waves off the second baseman. An eternity as the ball fights swirling Candlestick winds. Uribe, circling from first, is halfway down the third-base line when the ball nicks Bales's glove, strikes his thigh, and dribbles into the Dodgers' dugout. The Men in Blue go three up, three down in the top of the ninth and lose the pennant. Chic goes out drinking and doesn't come back for two years.

I said, "At least now I can keep you company in the ranks of the despised. I feel like the tuba player in high school."

Chic smiled. "High school. Worst six years of my life."

"Does it ever get to you?"

"Nope."

"Really?"

"Course it does, Drew-Drew. But then I remind myself: Everyone carries a burden. It's about how gracefully you elect to bear it. Don't you read the Good Book?" He snickered, worked something out from between his teeth. "My burden's making a fuckload of money, then becoming one of the biggest goats in the history of Major League Baseball. So I made a fool of myself in front of twenty million people. Nineteen-plus of who I don't know and never will." He shrugged. "Beats getting gang-raped in a Rwandan torture camp."

I conceded the point.

"What I did ain't no J-O-B. Yours ain't neither. There's no need for our so-called services, and no sick baby gonna get cured by a page-turner or an opposite-field line drive." He paused, his thick arms straightening in an air swing. "Pretty as it may be. What I provided can't even be construed as a luxury. Lamenting that I been marginalized? Hated? Shit, I'd rather work on my barbecue sauce. 'Cuz you know that takes a brother having his head on right."

"But I didn't just drop a pop fly," I said.

"Oh, now you know what you did or didn't do?" He flicked a kernel of corn off his knee. "James wrote a project last week about the environment. That drunk-ass Exxon Valdez captain, spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil in that sound up there. Eleven million. Killed about a kazillion birds and otters and shit. The government said and the government, in my humble GED opinion, is overly optimistic that it'd take thirty years to clean up. That puts it out till, shit, 2020. And I'm pretending to help James write this muthafucker until Angela finishes with Asia in the bath, and the whole time I'm wondering, how's that poor muthafucker get up in the morning? So after James goes to bed, I look him up. He's an insurance adjuster in Long Island. Wakes up every day, drinks his coffee, and goes to work like the rest of us sorry sacks. He got moufs to feed. And I say, good for him." He looked over at me and said, "What's wrong? This is supposed to be uplifting."

"I knew about the tumor. For months." I looked for shock or condemnation in his face but found neither. "I was too scared and too strapped to do anything about it. I kept it secret because I was worried that when I got health insurance again they wouldn't pay for the surgery if they knew it was a preexisting condition."

"So?"

"So?"

"I didn't hear no lawyer ask you if you knew you had a tumor. You didn't perjure yourself. And, far as I know, thinking about defrauding an insurance company ain't a crime. I doubt you would've had the nerve to go through with it anyway."

It was just a skip to a wicked irony, one that had contributed to my insomnia these past months. Genevieve may have died because of my brain tumor, but her dying had likely saved my life.

I said, "This makes me guilty even if I'm innocent."

"No, it don't make you guilty. It makes you feel guilty. It makes you guiltier if you actually did it. But whatever way it happened or didn't, I got your back."

"Even if I'm guilty-guilty?"

"If you're innocent, you don't need no help, do you?"

I didn't trust my voice to thank him, but he saw it in my face.

He winked and took another pull of near beer. "They say a real friend is someone who helps you move. The neighborhood I'm from, a real friend is someone who helps you move a body." He cocked his head, training his brown eyes on me. His curled lashes, vaguely feminine, didn't match the rest of him. "Now, how 'bout you fill me in on what's really going on?"

I told him about the previous night's dream and the cut on my foot and driving to Genevieve's. "I can't live with this," I said. "I wake up and I don't know where I've been. I set up a goddamned digital camera in my bedroom to watchdog myself. I'm checking my odometer to see if I left the house. The obvious explanation is that I'm insane. But I know I'm not insane."

"Or maybe you a little insane, like the rest of us."

"You think I cut my own foot?"

Chic shrugged. "First day back in the world, you up in your head like you are? I'd lay odds on yeah. Especially with all this secret tumor business should be clear why you obsessed. But I'll tell you this: If someone is messing with you? Then this is only the introduction."

"Why's that?"

"They're doing it for a rea-son. And given you're not a politician or Donald Trump, someone's doin' a lot of work to get… what?"

He ran his massive palm over his hair, shaved tight to his scalp with a silly line cut diagonally in the front like a part.

"So which do I hope for?" I finally asked. "That I am being fucked with? Or that I'm losing it?"

"What's behind Door Number Three?"

I blew out a breath. "I can't stop picking at this, but at the same time what if I don't like what I find?"

He finished his O'Doul's, musing powerfully as only Chic can. Then he said, "Face everything." He tossed the empty bottle and hit the open trash can ten yards away. "One day at a time."

We drove back to my house in silence, Chic reaching over once or twice to squeeze my neck. I was halfway up the walk when he whistled through his teeth. He was at the curb, truck running behind him. "I know it's been circled around, but no one ever says it dead on." He licked his lips, not looking away. "I'm sorry this happened to you."

As he headed back around the truck, a passing jogger flipped him off.

He waved.