The Crime Writer

Caroline sipped a beer while I nursed a ginger ale. The remains of burgers and chili cheese fries lay on the table before us, weighing down grease-stained paper inside red plastic baskets. A few stragglers at the bar, an empty pool table, the Stones reminding us from the jukebox that we can't always get what we want. We'd caravanned a few miles to a less downscale section of town. I'd left Xena dozing happily in my backseat, guarding the Guiltmobile with her vicious killer instincts.

Caroline had brought a persistent curiosity to bear over the meal. She maintained direct eye contact, maybe a therapist habit, but it didn't make me as uncomfortable as I would have thought. I fielded one sharp question after another about my trial, my theories, my ongoing investigation, and how it had wound up with me and Junior in the clink.

"That is one smart kid," I said.

"Junior was left in an alley as a baby with the umbilical cord still attached. He's a lifer in the system, and it's taught him quite a few tricks." She took another pull of Corona. "He's very taken with you. Maybe you should see him. After tomorrow's required court date, I mean."

I shrugged. "Might be good for me to do something for someone else."

"I don't trust anything that doesn't have selfish motives. Be a Big Brother to him if you want to. For you."

Her face had hardened. I studied it, trying to decipher the mood shifts, a skill I had honed during my years with Genevieve. I had a tough time not staring at the scars. Their lines were clean, if jagged, leading me to guess they'd been inflicted by a blade, probably the result of an attack. I ran a risk, I realized, of fetishizing Caroline's face, of finding it fascinating in its own right. Aside from the obvious damage, her skin was smooth, well tended with lotion. I would have bet that she had taken pride in her skin once; maybe she was astute enough to still appreciate its appeal. Her body was lean, but she had curves overlaying the muscles in the right places, a variation between hard and soft that seemed to match her personality. She was a few years older than me, having already closed on forty, but her hands, wrinkled in the palms, were the only part of her that showed her age. They looked soft and forgiving, more fragile than the rest of her.

I glanced around, mostly to stop examining her.

On the sole overhead TV not tuned to ESPN1, 2, or 12, Johnny Ordean appeared, rerun in his usual role, Detective Aiden O'Shannon. A stage-named Jew from Brooklyn playing an Irish Chicago cop on the backlot at Fox. Welcome to Hollywood.

Johnny and I had one of those 310 friendships I pretended to flutter around his flame, and he kept me programmed into his cell phone in case I accidentally wrote something else that his agents could package.

Detective O'Shannon crouched over a mangled corpse, eating a get this hot dog and holding up an ejected bullet casing with a bent paper clip. The closed-captioning read, with appropriate humorlessness,

HUSTLE THIS TO FORENSICS THE CASING NOT THE HOT DOG.

Caroline followed my gaze. "Isn't that the guy who played whatever they turned Derek Chainer into for that crappy film?"

"You've read my stuff?" I was thrilled.

"Of course I've read you. Why do you think I watched the trial?"

"Perverse curiosity?"

"That's why I read you, too." When she smiled, the scars straightened, and the indentations carved through her lips aligned. The damage hardly disappeared, but it grew significantly less pronounced. The wounds had been inflicted when she was scowling, or weeping, or screaming, and somehow a smile simulated those conditions enough to bring back the original lines of the blade. "You never played into the trial. You didn't turn into a trained seal. I bet it was difficult not to."

"It was a learning experience all the way around."

"What'd you take away from it all?"

"I can smell auras."

"Really?"

"My Spidey-senses are tingling right now, in fact. And your aura smells a little like" I leaned over the table, sniffed her delightful head "wet dog."

"Wet dog?" She wasn't smiling.

"Yeah. Pekingese, maybe."

She backhanded my shoulder.

"I thought you liked me for my sense of humor."

"I don't like you. But if I did, it would be for your vast infamy."

"It'll fade. Time heals all wounds."

"No," she said. "It doesn't." She studied the tips of her hair.

"Uh-oh."

"What?"

"You're Engaging in Private Grooming Habits. If I'm to believe Men's Health, that means you've lost interest in this conversation."

"Men's Health?"

"Yeah. Sorry 'bout that."

"Despite prevailing scientific wisdom, it doesn't mean I've lost interest. It means I'm uncomfortable."

"Because…"

"I work now. I don't go to dinner with men I don't know."

Laughter over by the pool table drew our attention. At one of the bar tables, a musclehead with twinning ear pierces nuzzled his spectacular girlfriend. Blond hair, blue eyes she was a recessive-gene showcase. They looked young, likely in on fake IDs.