The Crime Writer

Whistling along, I went upstairs and freed Xena from the master bathroom. There was no upholstery for her to masticate, but she'd gotten into the bath mat pretty good and, for good measure, overturned her bowl of water.

She followed me to my office. I pulled my notepad from my back pocket and set it on the desk to the left of my keyboard. The loaded. 22 I placed beside it. Tools of the trade.

How times had changed.

I fell into my chair, elbowed out the armrests, slid a Bic behind my left ear. Eighty pounds of Doberman-rottweiler curled on my feet. The house was quiet, the windows black rectangles pinpricked by the lights of the Valley below. A small plane blinked its way from Van Nuys Airport off into the night. My fingertips found the raised bump of my surgical scar and then the shallow indentations of the keyboard letters.

Right now Kaden and Delveckio could have Morton Frankel under the hot light. Maybe answers were being spilled what had been done to Genevieve, to Kasey Broach.

To all of us.

Or maybe it wouldn't be so easy. Maybe the interrogation would yield more questions, more vagaries, more dead ends and broken trails. Maybe Morton Frankel was really just a nice guy with a dented Volvo who didn't appreciate being treated like a plot device.

I faced the blank page. Waiting, like me, for chaos to be forced into order.

Chapter 32

The voice came at an inappropriate volume through my cell-phone headset. "We're at your house. Where the hell are you?"

"Kaden?"

"And what's wrong with your home line?"

"I'm waiting for Pac Bell to deliver excellent service."

In the backseat Xena belched. Junior giggled yet another break in the glumness he'd been attempting to convey since I'd picked him up to bring his dog to the new home he claimed to have lined up. He was way too talkative to sulk effectively.

"Where's the gun?" Kaden asked.

"Upstairs on my desk."

"Where are you?"

"Returning a dog."

"Smart, dipshit."

"I figured you wouldn't want me to leave a. 22 in a manila envelope on my porch."

"We want you to be home to give us the damn gun."

"It's noon. You told me you were coming by in the morning."

It had been hard for me to shake a sense of dread at dawn. I'd been out of jail a week to the day and still woke up panicked that I was encased by cinder blocks. In hopes of lightening my mood, I'd set out a breakfast bowl of pistachios on the deck for Gus, but he hadn't shown, tied up, no doubt, in a coyote's digestive tract. Stranded like a tramp in a Beckett play, I'd returned to my computer and pounded wrathfully on my loud keyboard, a clackety holdover I'd preserved for precisely such moods.

Chic had called before I'd left, saying word had come back from the cheap seats that Morton Frankel wasn't known as a thug-for-hire. Merely as a vicious criminal. I felt better about talking openly with Kaden and Delveckio and worse about being me.

"We were busy," Kaden said.

"With Frankel?"

"No interviewing the kid who found the gun. We questioned Frankel last night."

"And?"

"You'll be shocked to hear he said he didn't do it."

"He alibied?"

"Sleeping alone. Which, if he wasn't carving up Kasey Broach, is reasonably what he'd be doing."

"Can't you take a DNA sample? Just one hair?"

"Sure, right after the covert CIA chopper drops him off at Guantanamo Bay. It doesn't work that way, clown. You need what we here in nonfiction refer to as 'probable cause.' And a brown Volvo ain't enough to make a judge sign on the dotted. Now we need that gun."

"I'll run it over to Parker when I get home."

"You bet your ass you will."

"How hard did you press him? Frankel?"

"Hard." A rustle as he started to hang up.

"Hey, Kaden? When you unplugged the security camera in the interrogation room with me, that was just bad-cop posturing, right?"

I heard the whistle of wind across his mouthpiece. "Sure thing, Danner."

I ducked out of the headset, almost knocking my pen from its perch behind my ear.

Junior's mouth picked up right where it had left off. "… and they drop off this mad jungle gym, homes. Got ladders and bars and shit. The retarded kid went apeshit, pissed hisself down the twisty slide.

Dude say it was donated by some rich a-hole, didn't know what to do wid' all his money."

"Sounds like an a-hole, all right."

"Turn here. Now get over a lane."

"How much farther?"

"We almost there, Big Brother. Left here. Now right. Go straight. Okay."

We were at Morton Frankel's apartment complex. I glowered at Junior.

"I been thinkin'…" he said. "Homeboy who you followin'? You need a hair." He pointed across the street at Frankel's apartment. "That's where the shit would be."

"I'll just ring and ask him politely."

"HelZo? Workday."

"Maybe not after he spent the night getting questioned. And besides, how am I gonna get inside his apartment?"

Junior slapped his chest with both hands, insulted. "What the fuck?"

"No. Oh, no."

He hopped out.

"As your Big Brother, I am ordering you to get your juvenile-delinquent ass back in this car."