“No.”
She looked at him with tears in her eyes.
“She was a sweet kid, y’know? Kinda like my little sister or somethin’. I really liked her, but she lef’ me too. Everybody always leaves me, Danny. You’re gonna leave me too, huh?”
“Yes, I am, Marcie.”
“Wha’ abou’ tonight? Can I call you?”
“Sure. I’ll look forward to it.”
Crockett stood and Marcie lurched to one elbow, tipping over her empty glass.
“The Bev’ly Monarch, right?” she said.
“That’s the place.”
She wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand, smearing her clotted mascara, and did her best to smile seductively.
“Don’t I get a goodbye kiss?” Marcie asked.
Crockett bent and kissed her on the lips, allowing her frightened tongue a moment of desperate access, then, without looking back, walked across the room, down the stairs, to the door, and outside. He stood in the sun for a moment, pissed off because she’d allowed herself to become such a parody, angry because he’d lied to her, and relieved that Daniel Beckett was not registered at his hotel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
How she got that way
Crockett spent the rest of the day loafing in his room, thinking about some of the women in his life. LaVonne, standing on his sidewalk while dust in an unknown grave, her daughter Leona who had turned to porn, also been used by the mob, and disappeared off the face of the earth leaving behind a nameless and faceless daughter that would, most likely, be untraceable. Marcia Bennett, clawing at age and insecurity with white talons, tanning beds, exercise, silicon, booze, and sex she didn’t want and didn’t believe she could survive without. Ellie Barkman, walking slowly toward that good night swathed in grace and beauty and charm, resisting the inevitable with good humor and delightful wit. And Ruby LaCost, full of life and herself, battered by demons she couldn’t or wouldn’t share with him, no matter how much he loved her. A sharp tongue backed by a slippery mind that could knock Crockett down and prop him up in the same sentence, give him joy with a word, humility with a glance, warm fuzzies with a touch, and youth with a kiss. Dear Ruby, who loved him in every way but one, and became embarrassed when he found out she was having a friend over for dinner. A woman he could not live with, and couldn’t bear the thought of living without.
At around five Crockett roused himself from the depths of melancholy and sat in the Jacuzzi for a while. He called the airport and made a reservation, took a shower, brushed his teeth, and picked up the phone again. What the hell.
“Hello?”
“I survived.”
“Ha! I was hoping you’d call, but I wasn’t sure you’d have the strength. Find out anything about Cindi?”
“Too much and not enough.”
“I can imagine.”
“I wish I couldn’t.”
“How much longer are you going to be here?”
“Not much. My plane leaves tomorrow morning a little after eleven.”
“California’s loss. Mine too, perhaps.”
“Tomorrow’s not here yet. Dinner and drinks tonight?”
“Dinner, too? My. Free food. Did you just up the ante?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t gamble much.”
“Me either, Dan. Give me an hour. I’ll see you in the bar.”
Ellie spent the night. She wasn’t Rachael and she could never be Ruby but, for those few hours, she was exactly what he needed.
At about eight-thirty the next morning it dawned on Crockett that he had forgotten to call Ruby. She answered on the third ring.
“Doctor LaCost.”
“Wish they all could be California girls.”
“You said you’d call last night. Liar.”
“Yeah. Well, like, we got totally amped and went to this rad kegger on the beach, Dude, and I got, like stoked totally, y’know? And these three chicks showed up from Berkley and had this massive weed, and then the sun was like, ah, shining, y’know? And I couldn’t find my board, and Moondoggie got nailed by a jellyfish and hurled chunks in the cooler on our last two bottles of hard lemonade. Wow!”
Ruby laughed. “Jesus Christ!” she said. “Shut up!”
“Okay.”
“How are you?”
“Strangely at peace this morning. I’m comin’ home, Miss Ruby.”
“When?”
“Around five, Kaycee time.”
“Want me to come get you?”
“Naw. I’ll grab a cab. Dinner tonight at Ruth’s?”
“What are we celebrating?”
“Our reunion.”
“In that case, why don’t we eat at my place?”
“You’re gonna cook?”
“I’m Italian, Crockett.”
“No!”
“Come home.”
“I’m already packed, Sweetheart.”
“Dinner is at eight. Look nice.”
“See ya tonight.”
“Yes, you will. Bye.”
Crockett grinned almost all the way home. It’s nice when things get back in balance. L.A. was just L.A. Kansas City was Ruby.
At ten minutes to eight Crockett finished arranging the two-dozen lavender roses he’d picked up on the way home from the airport in an old cut-glass vase he’d had for years and washed his hands. He brushed his teeth, tied his tie, slipped on a sport coat, picked up the flowers, walked into his closet, and knocked on Ruby’s door.
Her living and dining rooms were illuminated only by candles. The table gleamed in glowing crystal and muted silver. Brubeck’s Blue Rondo a la Turk wafted through the air, thickening the golden glow that seeped from every corner of the space. In the middle of all that wonderful warmth, stood Ruby.
She was wearing the proverbial “little black dress” only hers was very dark brown with spaghetti straps and a hemline that ended just above her knees. The dress stayed with her when she moved to take the roses, clinging and relaxing on her lush figure in precisely the correct way to catch the candlelight. She wore coffee-colored hose, three- inch brown suede pumps, dark lipstick and no jewelry. Her hair framed her face and fell caressingly across her shoulders, luxuriant with highlights.
Ruby put the flowers on the table. “These are beautiful, Crockett,” she said. “So are you.”
He couldn’t speak. He could only stare at her as Ruby crossed the distance between them, put her marvelous arms around his neck, and embraced him cheek to cheek.
“Why is my house so goddammed empty when you are not in your house?” Ruby whispered.
“How long have I been gone?” Crockett said. “A month?”
Ruby buried her face in his neck. “I didn’t think I missed you until I knew you were coming back,” she said. “Today has been just awful.”
“The only reason that I won’t come back, Ruby, is if I never leave.”
“I’m gonna cry, Crockett. I don’t wanna cry. I’ll get mascara streaks on my face and be ugly. Then you’ll ask somebody else to the prom.”
Crockett pulled back a little and smiled. “If there ain’t you,” he said, “there ain’t no prom.”
He dropped his hands and rubbed her bottom. Ruby arched an eyebrow.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?”
“Trying to pick out the best possible spot for that kiss I promised you over the phone.”
“The spot is ladies choice. I’ll let ya know later. Go open the wine then come sit. Dinner is about to be served.”
Dinner was a light feta and endive salad dressed in raspberry vinaigrette, followed by spinach and baby shrimp lasagna with garlic bread so delicate it was barely heavy enough to remain on the table. Spumoni with a sweet lime sauce was the perfect desert. They made small talk intermittently throughout the meal. When they finished, Ruby produced two snifters of some really amazing cognac, and led Crockett to the couch. She stepped out of her shoes and sat on his right side, drawing her knees up so her left thigh rested partially in his lap and put her left arm
on the back of the couch behind Crockett’s shoulders. Stan Getz breathed his tenor horn through “You Go To My Head” and Ruby touched her glass to his.
“To us,” she said.
“Who else?”
Ruby stared at the low blue flames from the gas log in her fireplace for a moment and leaned into him a little. Crockett could feel her marshaling her thoughts. She’d gone lighter than usual on the wine during dinner. Something was up. He waited on her. Finally he felt her energy shift and she kissed him on the cheek.
“Crockett,” she said, “I’m embarrassed, and by all standards of our twisted relationship, I have no reason to be. I also feel a little guilty, and I shouldn’t.”
She was silent for a while so it seemed safe to speak and not appear to be a bad listener.
“Embarrassment and guilt are five of the seven deadly sins, aren’t they?” Crockett said.
She appeared not to have heard him. Oops. He shut up.
Ruby cleared her throat. “When you called the other night,” she said, “and Jeri showed up while we were on the phone, I felt like I’d been caught doing something really awful. Like I was cheating on you, or on us, or whatever. I was embarrassed that you knew, I had all this guilt that came up out of nowhere.”
“That’s absurd,” Crockett said. Ruby stiffened.
“That’s how I feel, Crockett.”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Lady. While the feeling is absurd, it is not absurd for you to feel that way. You have the right to feel any way you do. Okay? Nobody on this entire couch is trying to invalidate your feelings.”
“And now I’m all defensive about the whole thing! Just now I was ready to stick my thumb in your eye.”
Crockett smiled. “God you’re beautiful when you’re emotionally unbalanced,” he said. “Kiss me, you fool.”
Ruby snorted and pecked his cheek, then stared at the fire some more before she spoke again.
“Crockett,” she said, “I’m gay.”
“You’re gay? Christ! All this time I thought it was me!”
“Shut the fuck up, will ya?”
“Yes, Dear.”
Ruby sipped her drink and stared at the fire some more, and Crockett could feel her gather herself.
“I lost my virginity when I was eight,” she said. “From the time I was five until I was eleven we, me and my mom and dad, lived with my father’s older brother in Cicero. He had a huge old house. I even had my own room. Uncle Dominick kept very odd hours. He was a professional gambler and up and around anytime of the day or night. He started in on me when I was eight. I was never raped in the conventional sense of the word, just manipulation and probing with his fingers and such, but by the time we left when I was eleven, he’d worked up to forcing me to perform masturbation and fellatio.”
Ruby rubbed her arms as if she’d taken a chill and forged on.
“You have no idea how terrible it made me feel. The physical aspect of it was next to nothing compared to the emotional pain. He reinforced that portion as much as he could. It was the best way he had to keep me quiet. If the shame is big enough, silence is sure to follow. I couldn’t tell my mother what a bad girl I was. I couldn’t trust the nuns at my school to understand or keep my secret. The only person I could turn to was my uncle Dom’s daughter, Mae. She was three or four years older than me, and I idolized her.”
She paused and took a sip of her cognac.
“Late one night after Dom had finished with me and I’d cleaned up and brushed my teeth, I crept into her room and confessed. Then she confessed. She’d been through the same thing until she reached puberty. That was when Uncle Dom transferred his attentions from her to me. She held me, comforted me, understood exactly what I was going through, and kept me from just flying apart. I began to go to her room and then into her bed, whenever I had been abused or woke up frightened, or just thought I couldn’t live with it anymore.”
Ruby lifted her glass and stared at the liquor swirling in the bottom.
“Dutch courage,” she said, and went on with her story.
“Mae was a lesbian and, in her own way, as much a victim as I and as much a predator as her father. But her abuse didn’t feel like abuse. It felt like compassion. It felt like understanding. It felt like love. As far as I was concerned, it was love, I suppose. I was so young and so vulnerable. She knew just what I wanted to hear and exactly how to turn my pain and confusion to her advantage.”
She put the glass back on the table.
“We remained lovers until I was well through puberty and she went away to college. When I was seventeen I started to date. The first boy I ever went out with was named Pauly. He was the son of a made man. A Sicilian. On our third date, he raped me. I didn’t tell my folks, I just didn’t go out with him again. I dated several other boys over the next year or two, mostly to keep my mother happy. Those dates were sweaty, heavy-handed affairs. It seems that Pauly’s conquest of me was common knowledge among his cohorts and I was fair game to be groped and grabbed at will. I was never raped again, but I also was never asked out a second time. That was fine. Men were pigs.”
Ruby rose and walked to stand by the window, turning her back to Crockett.
“In college I gave up on the naïve notion of heterosexual relationships and became a full-time lesbian. But I also found how easy it was to manipulate men. The right clothes, the right attitude, the right walk, the right pout. A little lean, an inadvertent nudge, an accidental brush, some thigh, some cleavage, some tongue and, from professors to jocks, I could have almost any of them eating out of my hand. All I had to do was feed their fantasies and remain totally faithful to an imaginary boyfriend who lived far enough away they didn’t quite lose hope. Tits and ass create control. Control is power, Crockett. I enjoyed the power. I still do. I went to men for power and control, and to women for sex and love. I have had sex with two men in my adult life. One of them willingly. You. I have made love with one man in my entire life. You.”
She turned, squared her shoulders and caught his eyes.
“With that behind me,” Ruby said, “and with our agreement that our relationship is unique and not sexually binding in any respect, when you called the other night and Jeri came to the door, I had a shot of embarrassment and guilt that hit me like a brick. I still feel as if I have been unfaithful to you.”
“You haven’t.”
“Feelings, Crockett. Feelings.”
“I know, LaCost. Everybody has ‘em. Even me.”
“You have feelings?”
“Occasionally. I told you once that it was impossible to be unfaithful to someone to whom you had not been faithful in the first place. It shouldn’t be an issue, Ruby. Christ! You keep telling me to take the duck for a walk!”
Ruby laughed and returned to her seat on the couch.
“Now that’s a sight I’d like to see,” she said. “A little collar, a tiny leash.”
“Don’t make fun of the little fella. He doesn’t get out much.”
“That’s not my fault. I put you and Rachael together, I practically threw Spike at you–”
“Not to mention Bailey Carson.”
“Carson Bailey.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“The point is, LaCost, that none of that made you feel badly, did it?”
“Of course not.”
“What if I went out and found a woman on my own?”
Ruby looked at him for a moment and blinked.
“Jesus,” she said.
“A little different, huh?”
“Yeah, but it shouldn’t be!”
“Shouldn’t ain’t got shit to do with it, Ruby, and you know it.”
“Okay. How’d you feel when you knew that Jeri had come over?”
“I laid and stared at the ceiling for about two hours.”
“You did?”
“Yeah.”
Ruby snuggled into his shoulder.
“Aw, Crockett,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
/>
“It’s not your problem, Ruby! I have no sexual claim on you!”
“And I don’t have one on you either, Crockett. We don’t make love, or–”
“Bullshit!”
“What?”
“Bullshit! We do too make love. We make love all the time! Little packages of love, big buckets of love, fountains of love, nuggets of love. We make more love in a month than most of the poor bastards in this world make in their whole lives. We manufacture the stuff! We’re making it right now! We oughta get a goddam trophy! What we don’t do is fuck! Fucking has very little to do with love.”
Crockett needed to stretch. He lit a Sherman against the house rules and stomped into the kitchen to find an ashtray. When he got back to the couch, Ruby hadn’t moved. He sat and she looked at him.
“And another thing,” he said.
“What?” she whispered.
“It means a lot to me,” he said, “that you trust me enough to tell me how you got this way.”
Ruby smiled. “Thanks,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
Ruby got up and carried their glasses into the kitchen. When she returned, she pulled up her skirt, sat straddle-legged on Crockett’s lap, and gave him a slow kiss.
“Power trip?” he asked when she pulled away.
“Maybe a little,” Ruby said, “but I’ve been thinking about this all day.”
“About what?”
“About the fact that we should go to bed together tonight.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I want you to spoon me, and hold me, and tell me that you love me. And I want to wake up with you in the morning and feel you next to me, and kiss you before I brush my teeth, and smell you on my sheets.”
“Jesus. That’s quite a list. Is that all?”
“For now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Haggis at the corner
Crockett wished he could have said that the night was blissful. Part of the reason he couldn’t was because he was simply unaccustomed to sleeping with anyone. An obstacle in the bed, even one so glorious as Ms. LaCost, was still an obstacle. Plus, the room was a bit warm for his taste, the bed a little soft, the covers too poofy, and his pillow sucked. He also realized that none of that would have made much difference if Ruby has assumed the role of wanton sex poodle. In fact, she didn’t and it did. She slipped into sleep in less than ten minutes, leaving Crockett to fuss and fidget in an effort to not wake her up. Ruby spent most of the night curled into a ball, her forehead pressed into his chest, her knees against the front of Crockett’s thighs, as he lay on his bad side and struggled not to disturb her. The position was perfect so he could protect her from the world, and she could protect herself from a man in her bed. Crockett muddled through.
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