The Crime Writer

Donnie asked for a recess so I could get myself together to take the stand, but the judge denied the request. My heart still pounding, I climbed those three short steps to the birch witness stand and raised my right hand, finally able to take in the faces of the gallery without peeking furtively over a shoulder. There was a heightened intensity to it all, yet also an apologetic ordinariness. Reporters in their good suits, cameramen with their digital gear, the court stenographer pretending not to chew gum.

Donnie questioned me gently and with great empathy. When her time came, Harriman strolled toward me, relaxed, a text open in one hand like a psalmbook. She'd removed the dust jacket, so I didn't know what was coming until she read, "'We all have an ex-lover we want to kill. If we're lucky, we've got two or three.' "

The book snapped shut like a turtle's jaws, startling the jurors in their seats. "Do you believe that?"

"No," I said.

"You wrote that, did you not?"

I acknowledged that I had.

"So you don't expect us to believe what you write?"

"Of course not," I said. Terry gave me the patting-down hands, so I proceeded, more obligingly. "The protagonist, Derek Chainer, says that. An author doesn't necessarily endorse the views voiced by his characters. I create characters who are not me and on a good day breathe life into them."

"So you write things you don't believe?"

"I try to let the characters express their own opinions."

"Just a way to sell more trashy novels in supermarkets?"

"And airports."

She smiled. Just two friends bantering. "How about this line? 'I believe, in my darkest heart of hearts, that when fate and passion align, every last one of us, from the pulpit crier to the bus-stop blue-hair, is capable of murder.' " She circled closer to me. "Is that your belief, or merely the expressed view of a character?"

There was a gallows silence, an electric sense in the air that, as they say, it all came down to this.

I said, "I believe that anyone is capable of anything."

My attorneys crumpled in a fashion that might have been amusing under different circumstances, and Harriman's eyes got bright and excited.

"So you believe right now, when you're allegedly sound of mind, that you could very well be capable of committing the unspeakable act for which you've been found guilty."

"Capable, yes," and here I had to raise my voice to speak over her cutting me off "just like you."

"Except, last I checked, Genevieve Bertrand didn't break off an engagement to me." Harriman nodded away the judge's reprimand, one hand raised in a mea culpa.

Stories, no matter how bad, are L.A.'s lifeblood. I'd bet that Ms. Harriman, like every prosecutor I'd met within Dolby distance of the film studios, had been asked at one time to be a consultant for a one-hour drama. Or she'd had a writer like me tag along for a trial to pester her with questions. A cousin's husband, perhaps, who needed a few minutes on the phone so he could make that third act of his script sing. Many a time I'd been that guy, that sheepish eavesdropper to the hue and cry of the Angeleno justice system. I'd dealt with cops who watched too much TV about cops, so they acted like the cops they watched on TV who were imitating real-life cop advisers. Narrative and crime a twirling snake with its tale in its mouth. Wudn't me. I was just minding my own bidness when…

A few hours later as I listened, rapt, to Katherine Harriman's closing argument, it dawned on me just how skilled a storyteller she was. And this, she claimed, was my story.

On the night of September 23 at 1:08 A.M., roused by a ringing phone, I'd slid from my bed, leaving April there, asleep. As I'd listened to the voice-mail message left by Genevieve Bertrand, all my resentment and bitterness had congealed into a plan. I'd driven over to her house, a hobbler stuck in a canyon fold off Coldwater. I'd retrieved the key from under the potted philodendron on the porch and entered, turning left to the kitchen, where I'd taken the boning knife from its oak block. I'd drifted up the flight of stairs to Genevieve's bedroom. Awakened by my prowlings, she'd met me halfway across her white carpet, where I'd thrust the blade through her solar plexus on the rise, evading her ribs and piercing her heart. She'd died more or less instantly. Afterward I'd held and rolled her body around in its fluttery silk gown, like a cat batting a wounded mouse. For the finale, panic-stricken by the crime I'd just perpetrated, I'd had a mental break, a complex partial seizure that, when the cops and paramedics arrived, secondarily generalized into a grand mal. I'd fallen on top of the body and seized almost continuously until I'd reached the Cedars-Sinai ER, where they'd run IV Ativan to calm my thrashing. A CT had revealed the stowaway nestled into the anterior reaches of my temporal lobe, as well as some hemorrhaging, and I'd been whisked into surgery, awakening at breakfast time with a stunningly opportune justification.