The Crime Writer

Preston is a better friend than he seems. He'd come to see me in jail second, after Chic, browbeating the rookie guard into extending visitor hours. Though he wasn't a smoker, he'd lit up behind the Plexiglas, I'd assumed, out of regard for the ambience. Trying to repress a cough, he'd shot smoke past the crest of his bangs and remarked, "They don't really make a Hallmark card for this one, do they?"

In his interior forties, Preston has intense blue eyes and a square jaw that flexes out at the corners when he's working to a point, which is often. He'd been my editor for all five of my books, and I'd yet to find him wanting for an opinion on any matter trivial or life-threatening. Infuriatingly resolute, unusually hands-on, overly involved, he seems to live through the books he publishes. He loves make-believe, but the set of his features showed a heightened thrill at now being in the real-life-of-it-all.

His head-tilted appraisal of me continued. "How do you feel getting out?" He seemed to have shape-shifted already into the streetwise confederate with a hard-boiled mouth.

"Off balance." I shrugged. "My horoscope says it's because Jupiter's in my twelfth house."

"That is bad," he mused. "Once, growing up, we had a possum in our outhouse." Preston grew up in an academic family in Charlottesville, and now and then he lets a yokelism slip into his conversation. Owning apartments in Manhattan and West Hollywood on an editor's salary doesn't square with outhouse and possum references, but if you took away Preston's affectations, there'd be no one left to argue with.

He looked around, folding his arms, helpless against the mess of my house. "I suppose you seem to be holding together, given the circumstances," he conceded.

"My suffering has ennobled me."

He pursed his lips and regarded me as if perhaps that weren't true.

I said, "Thanks for getting my mail. Not to mention cosigning the mortgage refinance."

Preston waved me off no time for niceties then nodded at the Band-Aid on my foot. "What happened there?"

"I cut myself with a boning knife."

"Naturally. Why?"

"Because I'm a nutcase."

"Why don't you give me the backstory?"

He feigned patience as I filled him in on the bizarre events of last night. When I was done, he said, "Let me make a cup of tea." He disappeared into the kitchen, then called out, "Do you have a lime?"

"Try the fridge."

He returned a few minutes later with a glass of ice and the bottle of Havana Club he'd smuggled back from an ostensible research trip to Cuba and given, also ostensibly, to me as an oh-look-it's-contraband souvenir. He kept it hidden in my kitchen so other guests wouldn't access it. Sitting on the long arm of my sectional's L, he sipped his rum. I noted, with some irritation, he hadn't offered to bring me anything.

"Aren't you supposed to be in New York?" I asked.

"I extended my office leave." A sly grin. "I'm editing out here for the next few months so I can be supportive." He tapped his manicured nails together. "Look, Drew, I'm not gonna lie to you. I don't know if you did it or not. But I do know one thing: If I were you, and if I had a modicum of doubt as to my guilt, I wouldn't be sitting around."

"You'd do what?"

"Investigate."

"Get me forensics, a blood panel, and sat footage of the canyon."

"Don't be a smart-ass. You can't afford it. You may be free, but the public views you as a murderer. You're tarred with that brush, and, unlike O.J., you can't just retire to a golf course and live off your bloated retirement accounts. If you accept the verdict as delivered, fine. Start not drinking again. But if you don't accept that verdict, you have to get away from that tumor, dig down into what happened, and exonerate yourself." He crunched ice thoughtfully. "The story you should be working on is the one that's working on you."

He took another swig, cubes clinking musically against the glass. Unable to manage his own life at all, he was happy to micromanage mine. Would he micromanage me right into a padded room? I settled back in my chair, studied the smooth white ceiling.

He continued, "Harriman effectively painted you as the killer. But this insanity nonsense might not be the real version of events. And if not, you have to find your story. The real story." His eyes gleamed. He was Excited By The Possibilities. "Maybe you didn't do it. Maybe someone did break into your house. Maybe there is a furtive Gaslight plot to mess with your head. We don't read the books about the nine hundred ninety-nine times something goes as expected. We read those about the one time it goes wrong. Or strangely. Or extraordinarily. And there are enough oddities here that this" he pointed at me "could be the case." He stared at me, but before I could respond, he was going again. "This is your life. What have you done to explore this since you've been home?"

"I looked around the house, checked my e-mail and PalmPilot to see if I could piece anything together, talked to "