The Crime Writer

"Actually…" The idea sprang up, surprising me, though it had been lurking just beneath awareness all along. "I was wondering if I could get my hands on the case files."

"We won the case, Andrew. You're free of all that now." There was a pause, and then he said, "You're writing a book?"

"Just trying to work through what happened."

"What do you say you take a night off? Even Katherine Harriman is out having a drink. One of our paralegals just spotted her crying into her martini on the Promenade."

"Katherine Harriman doesn't cry. And certainly not in public."

"And neither should you. Not tonight anyway. Listen, Terry and I have encountered this a lot with our acquitted clients. They rework the trial like worrying a loose tooth, trying to find… I don't know, absolution. They don't find it there. Let me give you some advice: Let it go. Get back to your life."

I reached my turn. Right to my house, left to the freeway. I veered left. "I'd like those files, Donnie."

His breath blew across the receiver. "Well, they're yours, Andrew. We're certainly not gonna keep them from you. We'll need a day or two to make copies."

"Thank you."

"Anything else?"

"Yeah," I said. "Which bar did your paralegal see Katherine Harriman in?"

Coyly set a half block back from Santa Monica's heavily trod Third Street Promenade, Voda serves a hundred-plus labels of vodka and the one grade of caviar that counts. With its black-suited doormen and reserved seating, it likes to believe it's exclusive, but the management isn't above siphoning in tourists when the upholstered booths aren't filling up. Past the bouncer, who hesitated, recognizing but not placing me, were imported bottles, protruding on stone ledges from the wall, and plenty of glossy men and women, also available for consumption. Candles, Hawaiian protea blossoms, and flagstone waterfalls completed the confused tropical-gulag motif.

Harriman was at the black lacquer bar, slender legs crossed. Tapping an impaled pickled onion on the rim of her Gibson, she watched me approach without so much as a lifted eyebrow.

I dropped into the swivel chair next to her and ordered a Brilliant vodka on the rocks, which I sniffed and left on the cocktail napkin. She ignored me as if ignoring men were something she'd spent a lifetime perfecting, and so we sat and watched the water trickle down the flagstone as I worked up my nerve.

"I knew about my brain tumor." The words, finally spoken, continued to resonate in my head. "My health insurance had lapsed. I was waiting on another script deal to get my Writers Guild coverage back. I'd had migraines for six months, then a short blackout. I went to a private provider in Ventura so if the tests did reveal something, it wouldn't go on record as a preexisting condition. That's why nothing showed up in any of the medical records you subpoenaed."

I didn't add that my failure to act hadn't been just about the money though the money had played a considerable role. I'd stalled because I'd had a book deadline and an upcoming tour and a new relationship. And, like anyone else, I was terrified. When a surgery is elective, when do you make that firm decision to let a team of people carve around inside your brain? How do you choose the day? What if you don't wake up? Or worse, what if they make a mistake and then you do?

A few days after I'd blacked out over the washing machine, I'd seen a neurologist, who'd given me the unhappy diagnosis. The doctor had urged me to get the surgery, but I'd told him, protected under the veil of confidentiality, that I was willing to take the gamble and wait. The trial had provided me ample time to relive his answer. Are you willing to gamble the lives of the family in the minivan you crash into when you black out behind the wheel?

Harriman lifted the onion off the plastic spike with her teeth, and as she crunched, I wondered whether she'd respond. Finally she said, "How much was the operation going to cost?"

"Sixty-two grand."

"And how much was your legal retainer?"

"Two-fifty."

She snickered she couldn't help it and it took me a moment to realize she was laughing at us both.

"Well," she said, "I'm sure you'll get plenty of screenwriting deals now."

"Yeah, I figured this would be an effective career strategy."

"There is something compellingly nai've about you. Even earnest." She made a face, then signaled the bartender for another drink. Not her second.

"How so?"

"What you just confirmed is no thunderbolt from on high. We'd considered it, of course, did some investigating."

"Why didn't you just ask me when you had me on the stand?"

"Because we weren't sure, and even if we were right, you would have lied."

"Why do you assume that?"

"You wouldn't go to a doctor off record to cheat an insurance company if you were an honest guy."

"Fair enough. But I also wouldn't have lied under oath."