with it anyway.'
It was just a skip to a wicked irony, one that had contributed to my insomnia these past months. Genevieve may have died because of my brain tumor, but her dying had likely saved my life.
I said, 'This makes me guilty even if I'm innocent.'
'No, it don't make you guilty. It makes you feel guilty. It makes you guiltier if you actually did it. But whatever way it happened or didn't, I got your back.'
'Even if I'm guilty-guilty?'
'If you're innocent, you don't need no help, do you?'
I didn't trust my voice to thank him, but he saw it in my face.
He winked and took another pull of near beer. 'They say a real friend is someone who helps you move. The neighborhood I'm from, a real friend is someone who helps you move a body.' He cocked his head, training his brown eyes on me. His curled lashes, vaguely feminine, didn't match the rest of him. 'Now, how 'bout you fill me in on what's really going on?'
I told him about the previous night's dream and the cut on my foot and driving to Genevieve's. 'I can't live with this,' I said. 'I wake up and I don't know where I've been. I set up a goddamned digital camera in my bedroom to watchdog myself. I'm checking my odometer to see if I left the house. The obvious explanation is that I'm insane. But I know I'm not insane.'
'Or maybe you a little insane, like the rest of us.'
'You think I cut my own foot?'
Chic shrugged. 'First day back in the world, you up in your head like you are? I'd lay odds on yeah. Especially with all this secret tumor business should be clear why you obsessed. But I'll tell you this: If someone is messing with you? Then this is only the introduction.'
'Why's that?'
'They're doing it for a rea-son. And given you're not a politician or Donald Trump, someone's doin' a lot of work to get… what?'
He ran his massive palm over his hair, shaved tight to his scalp with a silly line cut diagonally in the front like a part.
'So which do I hope for?' I finally asked. 'That I am being fucked with? Or that I'm losing it?'
'What's behind Door Number Three?'
I blew out a breath. 'I can't stop picking at this, but at the same time what if I don't like what I find?'
He finished his O'Doul's, musing powerfully as only Chic can. Then he said, 'Face everything.' He tossed the empty bottle and hit the open trash can ten yards away. 'One day at a time.'
We drove back to my house in silence, Chic reaching over once or twice to squeeze my neck. I was halfway up the walk when he whistled through his teeth. He was at the curb, truck running behind him. 'I know it's been circled around, but no one ever says it dead on.' He licked his lips, not looking away. 'I'm sorry this happened to you.'
As he headed back around the truck, a passing jogger flipped him off.
He waved.
Chapter 8
That night I sat and watched commercials. Just commercials. I wasn't up to sustained drama. The usual high-stakes action ensued. Soap products busied themselves fighting grime. Closet messes overwhelmed frazzled housewives. Animated fungi rooted under toenails.
My cell phone vibrated pleasingly in my pocket, and I dug it out.
Preston asked, 'What are you doing?'
'Lying around listlessly. Bemoaning an unjust universe.'
'I'm in the neighborhood. Drop by?'
'No?'
'See you in ten.'
Forty-five minutes later, the doorbell rang. I yelled, 'You have a key!'
Preston came in, glanced around the family room. 'The drawn curtains. The dirty dishes. The ragged clothing. How about we rewrite this scene?'
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,
