As my lawyers leapt to their feet with objections, Harriman remained perfectly still, a slight smile tensing her lips, her eyes never leaving mine. She was articulate and sharp, attuned to the inherent ridiculousness of matters. Her calm unnerved me. There was much murmuring and disorder in the court, and the judge nodded to the bailiff, who called for recess.
After we returned, the onslaught continued. Our witnesses. Their witnesses. Detective Three Bill Kaden assumed the stand, every bit as sturdy as he'd been in that moment when I'd returned to consciousness. Bristly mustache, thick wrists, golf shirt under a blazer. Scrappy, chinless Ed Delveckio watched from the gallery and nodded along with Kaden's testimony, twenty courtroom feet and one rank separating him from his senior partner. The boning knife made an appearance, stained nearly to the end of the handle, swinging crudely in an evidence bag. I did my best not to break down or react with anger.
Next up was Lloyd Wagner, a criminalist who'd lent me his time on several occasions to process fictitious bodies and who'd responded with the lab team to Genevieve's house. Yet another disturbing spillover from my prior life. We got along well, and I had found him alarmingly adept at helping me massage plot elements, so much so that on occasion I'd brought him whole scenes to put his skills to work on. Dressed in his dated court suit and holding a duplicate knife taken from my very own kitchen, Lloyd offered me an apologetic little nod before displaying on a dummy the forcefulness of the plunge that had yielded the stab wound. I found myself, along with the jury and audience, wincing at the viciousness.
After Lloyd's performance the voice mail Genevieve had left for me the night of her death was given yet another airing, issuing from Katherine Harriman's laptop.
A respectful silence for the voice of the dead. 'I wanted to tell you I'm with someone new. I hope I hurt you. I hope you feel this pain. I hope you feel so alone. Good-bye.'
Of course, Genevieve hadn't been with someone new, at least no one she'd told her friends or family about. Her not-so-deft manipulation wasn't devastating to me from where I sat now, though the prosecution asserted that it had been on the night of September 23. The defense asserted privately that the message made Genevieve less sympathetic and publicly that it had provided the final jolt of head pressure to initiate my ganglioglioma's interference. Given my lack of criminal history, Donnie argued, the tumor was the only logical explanation for my behavior.
On day five of sanity, cutting through any calluses I thought I had built up, Genevieve's family made their eagerly awaited entrance. Her mother, long of bone and broad of bosom, requisite Hermes scarf draped across her clay-court shoulders, rode the arm of her husband, ever dapper in a bespoke suit. Though they carried themselves with characteristic elegance, there was a hollowing in their cheeks, a nearly imperceptible erosion in posture, that betrayed their crushing loss. At Luc's other side strode Adeline, her fair face flushed to overtake her freckles. Though they stared at me with unmitigated hatred, the reality of their diminished presence, Luc's quavering hand touching the hard wood before he sat, undid whatever self-protective remove I'd managed. Their appearance, timed just before I was to take the stand, had precisely the effect on me Harriman wanted. My throat tightened, my lips jumped, and I leaned forward on the table and pressed both palms to my face as if to hold it together. My reaction was likely taken by the jury as shame, but it was worse than shame. It was the final roosting of Genevieve's loss, a woman whom I had loved, perhaps not wisely, but had loved nonetheless.
Donnie asked for a recess so I could get myself together to take the stand, but the judge denied the request. My heart still pounding, I climbed those three short steps to the birch witness stand and raised my right hand, finally able to take in the faces of the gallery without peeking furtively over a shoulder. There was a heightened intensity to it all, yet also an apologetic ordinariness. Reporters in their good suits, cameramen with their digital gear, the court stenographer pretending not to chew gum.
Donnie questioned me gently and with great empathy. When her time came, Harriman strolled toward me, relaxed, a text open in one hand like a psalmbook. She'd removed the dust jacket, so I didn't know what was coming until she read, ''We all have an ex-lover we want to kill. If we're lucky, we've got two or three.' '
The book snapped shut like a turtle's jaws, startling the jurors in their seats. 'Do you believe that?'
'No,' I said.
'You wrote that, did you not?'
I acknowledged that I had.
'So you don't expect us to believe what you write?'
'Of course not,' I said. Terry gave me the patting-down hands, so I proceeded, more obligingly. 'The protagonist, Derek Chainer, says that. An author doesn't necessarily endorse the views voiced by his characters. I create characters who are not me and on a good day breathe life into them.'
'So you write things you don't believe?'
'I try to let the characters express their own opinions.'
'Just a way to sell more trashy novels in supermarkets?'
'And airports.'
She smiled. Just two friends bantering. 'How about this line? 'I believe, in my darkest heart of hearts, that when fate and passion align, every last one of us, from the pulpit crier to the bus-stop blue-hair, is capable of murder.' ' She circled closer to me. 'Is that your belief, or merely the expressed view of a character?'
There was a gallows silence, an electric sense in the air that, as they say, it all came down to this.
I said, 'I believe that anyone is capable of anything.'
My attorneys crumpled in a fashion that might have been amusing under different circumstances, and Harriman's eyes got bright and excited.
'So you believe right now, when you're allegedly sound of mind, that you could very well be capable of committing the unspeakable act for which you've been found guilty.'
'Capable, yes,' and here I had to raise my voice to speak over her cutting me off 'just like you.'
'Except, last I checked, Genevieve Bertrand didn't break off an engagement to me.' Harriman nodded away the judge's reprimand, one hand raised in a mea culpa.
Stories, no matter how bad, are L.A.'s lifeblood. I'd bet that Ms. Harriman, like every prosecutor I'd met within Dolby distance of the film studios, had been asked at one time to be a consultant for a one-hour drama. Or she'd had a writer like me tag along for a trial to pester her with questions. A cousin's husband, perhaps, who needed a few minutes on the phone so he could make that third act of his script sing. Many a time I'd been that guy, that sheepish eavesdropper to the hue and cry of the Angeleno justice system. I'd dealt with cops who watched too much TV about cops, so they acted like the cops they watched on TV who were imitating real-life cop advisers. Narrative and crime a twirling snake with its tale in its mouth. Wudn't me. I was just minding my own bidness when…
A few hours later as I listened, rapt, to Katherine Harriman's closing argument, it dawned on me just how skilled a storyteller she was. And this, she claimed, was my story.
On the night of September 23 at 1:08 A.M., roused by a ringing phone, I'd slid from my bed, leaving April there, asleep. As I'd listened to the voice-mail message left by Genevieve Bertrand, all my resentment and bitterness had congealed into a plan. I'd driven over to her house, a hobbler stuck in a canyon fold off Coldwater. I'd retrieved the key from under the potted philodendron on the porch and entered, turning left to the kitchen, where I'd taken the boning knife from its oak block. I'd drifted up the flight of stairs to Genevieve's bedroom. Awakened by my prowlings, she'd met me halfway across her white carpet, where I'd thrust the blade through her solar plexus on the rise, evading her ribs and piercing her heart. She'd died more or less instantly. Afterward I'd held and rolled her body around in its fluttery silk gown, like a cat batting a wounded mouse. For the finale, panic-stricken by the crime I'd just perpetrated, I'd had a mental break, a complex partial seizure that, when the cops and paramedics arrived, secondarily generalized into a grand mal. I'd fallen on top of the body and seized almost continuously until I'd reached the Cedars-Sinai ER, where they'd run IV Ativan to calm my thrashing. A CT had revealed the stowaway nestled into the anterior reaches of my temporal lobe, as well as some hemorrhaging, and I'd been whisked into surgery, awakening at breakfast time with a stunningly opportune justification.
Katherine Harriman thanked the jury for their time and attention, smiled disarmingly, and sat down, immersing herself in paperwork so she wouldn't have to acknowledge Donnie as he began his closing.
'Our clever killer, our plotter of murder most foul, could come up with no scheme better than this? He snuck over to Genevieve Bertrand's house and then… what? Decided to leave the front door wide open? So both Westec and the neighbors would call the police, you see. Because he also planned precisely when he was going to have a seizure. He held back until just the right moment, you see. This man, this clever man, thought it would be beneficial
