The Crime Writer

I cut through the crowd, and it yielded to my apathy. Inside, over an ungodly remix beat, some kid covered Bob Seger without the grit or gravitas.

"Drew Danner," I told the girl at the door. "I'm with Johnny Ordean."

At both names the frontmost constituents of the throng stilled and the girl dropped the clipboard against her thigh, revealing it for the prop that it was, and wordlessly unhooked the maroon rope.

Sliced-and-diced Seger had given way to pump-and-hump rhythm. Threesomes were freaking under seizure-inducing lights. I find me bitches left and right. I find me bitches every night. Production-development girls in Chanel grooved in a circle, their oblivious movement an inadvertently droll endorsement of the lyrics. The club had a kind of magnetic energy that pointed to the rear corner, where indeed I found Johnny Ordean and his franchise face. Fulfilling the no-neck contingency of the entourage, his cousin sat deep in the booth, hammering cigarettes into his face one after another.

He slid out and I slid in. Johnny wrapped an arm around my shoulders, raised his brows at my vibrant eye, and gave my neck a squeeze like an old-school mobster. Playing the part, I reached inside my jacket pocket, removed the envelope, and dropped it on the table like a payoff. The envelope held a Ziploc containing a single specimen of Morton Frankel's hair. The others I was saving for a rainy day.

Johnny wound his finger in the air, a let's-get-moving gesture, and his cousin shifted the cig from one end of his mouth to the other and pressed a cell phone to his sweaty cheek.

"Fast and quiet," I said.

Johnny squeezed my neck again.

"And thank you."

"Of course, bro. What good is celebrity if you can't put it to work?"

It was, I thought, an excellent question.

Chapter 36

Far from the madding crowd, I sat like a tailgater on my little rented rectangle of Hollywood asphalt and dialed my cell phone.

"I'd like to see you," I said. "I'm in your neck of the woods."

"Ah, yes," she said, "I can hear the excess in the background."

The parking-lot attendant gave me a peculiar look as I pulled out. For twenty bucks I should've set up camp for the night.

Caroline proved to live in a corner unit on the sixth floor of a recently renovated building on Crescent Heights. I tripped over some vestigial scaffolding on my way in, the doorman kindly pretending not to notice. I waited in the freshly carpeted hall while she undid a profusion of dead bolts. She double-checked me through a veil of security chains, and then the door closed on me again. More metallic unhooking and we were face-to-face.

She reached out, gingerly touched my right temple just beyond the stitches. "Have you iced that?"

Minutes later I was sitting on her plush sofa, she on the adjoining coffee table, the better to press a bag of frozen corn kernels to my eye. I described to her the nature of my disagreement with Mort. To my surprise she didn't reprimand me for Junior's role, but then, she knew him better than I and, given her profession, likely applied a stringent doctrine of accountability regardless of age.

The edge of the bag caught a stitch, and I grimaced. Leaning forward, she adjusted, and then our faces were close, the air chilled from the frozen bag. She brushed the hair off my forehead gently, and her lips parted a bit, her gaze on my mouth. I moved the bag aside, but she stood abruptly and said, "What are we doing here, Drew? I mean, why do you like being with me?"

"Your trusting nature?"

"I'm serious."

I set the bag on my knee. "Because it's the only time I don't want to be anywhere else."

She opened her mouth to say something, but instead she held up a finger and walked swiftly down the hall, and then I heard a door close and the sounds of retching. The sink ran for a while, and there was toothbrushing and gargling, and soon she returned, red-faced, reluctant to make eye contact.

I said, "If I kiss you, does your head explode?"

She said, incredulous, "You still want to kiss me?"

"I do. I also want to wake up next to you." I held up both hands. "Today, a year from now, whenever. I'm just letting you know that I find you "

She said, "Come here." She was shaking. She took my hand and led me to her bedroom, and then she turned off the lights and stepped out of her sweatpants. She kissed me nervously, too hard, and said, "Get a condom. It's in the drawer," and as I fumbled out of my clothes, she tugged me on top of her. I moved to lift her shirt, but she grabbed my wrist, firmly, and said, "I want to keep it on," and then guided my shoulders and set her jaw in the best spirit of let's-get-it-over-with.

I kept thinking I had the angle or position wrong until it struck me that she had tightened up, locked down her body in panic until it was as though there were no aperture. We shifted and reshifted until she laughed and said bitterly, "Hey, you wanted to," and rolled over, and then her shoulders shook once, and I realized she was crying.

"I'm not crying," she said.