The Crime Writer Read Free Page B

This isn’t fair to you. I should go.”
    Later I’d awakened somewhere in the early-morning hours to find my hand clasped between her clammy palms, her front teeth worrying a pale lower lip, her eyes seeking comfort even as she said, “It’s not going to work with us.” I didn’t have the energy to talk her around anymore. She packed up the few belongings she kept here, plugged in to opera on her i Pod so we wouldn’t argue as an excuse to lose nerve.
    All the media confabulations about her made me realize how difficult she’d been to know. Despite her vague claims of managing a portion of the family real-estate portfolio, she hadn’t worked. She read a lot. She went to matinees. She knew good bakeries. She hadn’t asked a lot of life, and, in the end, it had given her less. I couldn’t help but think now of the experiences she’d never get to have. The whole world denied to her, irrevocably.
    I wanted to shake off the past four months like an unsettling dream. But certain facts are like boulders. They get in your way. They’ve got sharp edges that cut you when you try to move them. For weeks after my mother died, I awoke in the morning, reduced to the most basic, childlike thoughts. I want this not to be true. I want it not to have happened. I just couldn’t bend my brain around it. My father’s death a year and a half later was equally painful, though by then at least I’d had some practice. But where to file Genevieve with the gash through the solar plexus?
    “I didn’t do it,” I said to the tumor.
    It gazed back indifferently.
    I headed downstairs, opened the Jack Daniel’s, and inhaled the rich, satisfying aroma. Then I walked over to the kitchen sink and poured the smoky single-barrel down the drain. The Jews leave a glass of wine for Elijah; the Buddhists offer fruit; the gangbangers pour one out for their dead homeys. You’ve got to feed the gods. Or the gods feed on you.
    Not that they won’t feed on you anyway.
    A brass-plated cappuccino maker overcrowded the counter like a perched Labrador. I’d picked it up for Genevieve in the five-minute period when things were going smoothly between us, and it had put out fifteen shots of sludgelike espresso at a cost of $147 a cup. The refrigerator held three bottled waters and a dark chocolate bar, half eaten by April. Walking over to the cupboard, I removed the juice glass and white bowl that I’d just put away. I set them on the counter and stared at them as if I expected them to start talking.
    Breakfast, September 23. My last memory before waking up in the recovery room.
    I couldn’t stop my gaze from moving to the knives resting in the wooden block on the counter. A dark curiosity stirred in the pit of my gut. It felt like a blue-hot flame. Like a twenty-year scotch hitting the blood after a two-hour jog. I walked over to the wooden block, guessing correctly at which was the boning knife. I bounced it, feeling its heft. Stainless gleam, Japanese character on the blade. I’d used my knives maybe four or five times. Why had my hand found the boning knife so easily?
    I stared at my hands for a good long time, then at my reflection in the window above the sink, some guy holding a knife, a notched line of hair over his scar. The sight made me shudder.
    I visited my humidor, then went out to a deck chair, put my feet on the railing, and smoked a cigar down to the yellow speckled band. My sole remaining vice. Except writing.
    If I ever actually wrote again.
    The night was dark and January-sharp. People forget how cool L.A. can be in the winter—Pacific breeze, Santa Ana winds, angry spates of rain with half-assed lightning, like a constipated monsoon trying to find relief.
    A view heals all woes. A view makes you feel as if you own something bigger than yourself, as if you own a place on the planet.
    I watched the Valley twinkle in the heat below, like the ocean only prettier, because it was a sea of lights, because it was movement and life, because