The Crime Writer Read Free Page A

I flipped my cell phone shut and powered off my computer, leaving the office in peace.
    The bedroom told a story of its own, the tale of April’s departure. Door ajar. Sheets thrown back. A few of my toiletries knocked over on the bathroom counter as she’d scrambled to pack up her overnight bag. Pink razor overlooked in the shower. Maybe I’d give it a try later for old times’ sake. April had dropped one of her socks by the sink in her haste to leave.
    We’d still been in the first flush of romance. An orthopedist with neat, pretty features and an even temperament I’d enviously put down to a midwestern upbringing, April had seen me after I’d snapped a collarbone playing pickup ball at Balboa Park. The firm medical touch, the caring tempered by reason, the proximity of our faces as she manipulated my arm through this test or that—I hadn’t stood a chance. We were three months new, full of imaginings that seemed youthful for a couple of hunkered-down thirty-eight-year-olds. Good-night calls. Ice cream from the carton in bed. Howard Hawks classics and Fabrocini’s pizza. The occasional sleepover, just for practice. Then a brutal killing.
    That interrupted a kind of levity and hopefulness I’d doubted I would feel again after Genevieve and I had gone our separate, bemused ways half a year before. Or, according to the prosecution and the cable anchors, our bitter, vituperative ways.
    I picked up April’s sock, feeling the emotion rising again before deciding I wouldn’t allow myself to get all blubbery over footwear. I set my tumor on the nightstand, made the bed, then sat on top of the sheets, wondering what kind of loneliness we were in for. Me and my tumor.
    Gazing at that suspended mass of brown cells, my mind pulled again to Genevieve, the horror of her death, the greater horror of my unknown implication in it. She’d brought a tinge of the exotic to her tastes, to her pronouncements, that I’d found irresistible. Most of her I found attractive. The finality of her judgments. The sureness of her passions. She was a big woman, thick around the thighs and hips, and refreshingly comfortable—no, confident —in her body and in what it could do. I remembered her mostly as a collection of sensations. The smoothness of a cheek brushing my chest. Traces of Petite Cherie on the pillowcase. Beads of sweat on her alabaster back. Her sleeping face—smooth as a child’s. She had no bad angles, Genevieve, and no bad-face days. It’s much harder to resent someone when she has no bad angles. It takes a measure more of behavioral ugliness. But while I took my time getting there, she raced ahead, resenting her moods enough for us both. I was in love with her, certainly, but more in love with holding her together, and she was the only one of us perceptive enough to grasp that complexity.
    The night of our breakup, she’d run her full gamut. I’d emerged from my office in the evening to find her sitting in my bedroom, watching The Bachelor ’s rose ceremony, pint of Chunky Monkey in her lap. She’d held up the spoon in my direction to prevent me from distracting her from the TV. “Jane’s a vile cow, and she needs to go home. ” The trace of French accent undercut the prosaic declaration, making me suppress a smile. Then later, with a devilish giggle: “Let’s grab a bite. If we stay in, we’ll just fight or fuck.” She’d held my hand across the restaurant table, face soft with ecstasy, while she named the spices in the merguez. We’d gone home and made love, sweaty in the hot breeze through the screen. That night I’d lost her into another dark mood, coming upon her sobbing in the shower. “There’s no dignity in anything anymore. It’s all so cheap. ”
    She was sitting on the tile, water pounding her chest. I’d crouched, feeling the familiar helplessness, the streams striking my sleeve. “What is?”
    “All of it. TV. Nothing. I’m sorry. My head’s not right. It’s one of those…I’m sorry.