The Lady Upstairs

by Halley Sutton

  At the last possible moment, I reached for her hand but caught only air and told myself it was for the best.

  * * *

  Jackal kept a key taped to the back of the fire extinguisher outside his apartment door, snuggled against the dry and gummy cobwebs that crisscrossed the back of the box. He trusted too much in the laziness of other people; it was a hiding place that would stop a determined thief for all of thirty seconds.

  The apartment was still hot from the day, clammy almost, if walls can be clammy. I could hear the whirr-buzz of Jackal’s air unit propped inside his bedroom window. I knew his place almost as well as my own. But I didn’t want it to feel like mine. I didn’t want anything of his to feel like mine.

  I crept through his house on unsteady feet shucked of shoes. A small but tidy apartment. No stacks of books. Carpet always freshly vacuumed. He hired a maid to come in and clean everything twice a week, but that was never enough; he couldn’t go to sleep unless he’d wiped down the counters and cleaned every dish. But the ceiling was pocked with asbestos and the tiles beneath the sink were mushy. Jackal was all freshly closed seams and tight corners, as though that could hide the rot underneath.

  Robert Jackal: inveterate gambler, enforcer, and photog for the Lady, sometime paramour to me and any other disposable dark-haired vixen who strolled through the office.

  I slipped through his foyer, past his kitchen, which smelled of lemons, like Lou’s hair, and into his bedroom. Jackal’s bedspread was tugged down to his waist. Wiry black chest hair rose and sank with each breath. I wondered how far down his body that naked went. I stood in the doorway for a moment, carpet swaying beneath me like a choppy sea.

  It disarmed me to watch him sleep. Those shoulders I knew so well, pocked with glowing half-moon reminders of me, his dark lashes fluttering as he dreamt. Staring at him, I thought there weren’t enough words in the dictionary for the things we were—not friends, lovers certainly, but something and nothing more, too. And then he stirred and frowned, a dark lock of hair falling over his perfect face, and the anger took root.

  I wanted to slap him awake. I leaned down and pressed a kiss lightly to the corner of his mouth. He grunted and twitched but didn’t wake up. I slipped my pantyhose down but left the dress on. In the dark, the gray-green of his sheets looked like swamp water. I eased back his covers and sat on top of him. Jackal’s eyelids fluttered. He started to sit up and I pressed him back down, moving a knee over his most sensitive part as I dragged my nails around the edges of his jaw. I wanted to scrape him raw and eat the leftover bits.

  He looked at me, groggy still, and opened his mouth to say something, but I leaned down and cupped my hands over his eyes, pressing gently at first and then harder when I could feel his eyelashes flickering back and forth. I kissed my way down his chest, stopping to tease his nipples first with my tongue and then my teeth, tugging until he yelped. I brought my mouth to his face and bit down on his lips. The mood I was in, I could rip one off and not notice. Farewell to that lovely face.

  He tasted like night sweats and nicotine, and I could almost detect the tangy smell of well-handled cash, which gave me a clue where he’d been when he was supposed to be with me. I pressed down harder on his eyes. I imagined sliding my fingernails into his green circles. Jackal let out a strangled sigh. I wondered if he knew what I’d been dreaming of, but I slipped him into me so easily. One hand drifted up, reaching for me. I let his thumb hollow out in my collarbone, pressing hard enough to feel a sharp crack under my skin. He tried to bring his other hand to the back of my neck, bend me over him, but I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t want any sort of affection from him tonight.

  I rocked on him, clamping my thighs against his ribs, until I could feel the old familiar sparks moving from my toes to my scalp. I didn’t want to see his face, so I pressed it away from me, cranking his head into the pillow until he grunted in pain. I liked the feel of him underneath my hands, and I wished they were larger, like a man’s, so I could really hurt him. I imagined him panicked and trying not to show me, wondering what I would do to him, how far I was going to take this, and it sent me over the edge.

  As I came, I bit his thumb hard enough to draw blood. I could tell that he was close, too, by the hitch in his breathing, but there had to be some sort of punishment for standing me up at the St. Leo, so I slid off him with no warning. He gazed up at me, pumping recklessly for a moment, mouth gaping like a fish. I leaned down and slapped him, once, twice, until I could see my hand’s red shadow on his face.

  “Listen to me,” I hissed. “I don’t care where the hell you were or who you were with, but you better thank your lucky goddamn stars I convinced Ellen to see Klein again. If you fuck that one up for me, I’ll do worse than this, understand?” He blinked up at me, mute, and I felt a rush of hatred. I wasn’t sure if it was for him or myself or both of us.

  I gathered my stockings and swayed unsteadily out of his bedroom into the kitchen, where the lemon smell was making me dizzy. It followed me all the way back to my car and into my own bed and even, it seemed, my own dreams.

  Chapter 3

  The Lady Upstairs’ Staffing Agency was located in the center of Little Busan Plaza, on the second floor, above Fish Heaven Aquarium Repair and Seven Galbi BBQ, and between a nail salon that never did any business—I had my own theories about that—and a payday loan shop that had long since been closed.

  You could say we brought style to the place.

  Seven Galbi was the main attraction, and their delicious specialty beef kept me shampooing my hair every day, trying to get the smell out. It was not the aphrodisiac you might have supposed. On weekends and at night, the restaurant was so crowded that we had to give the valet our keys. But during the day, I could’ve parked my car across three spaces and there still would’ve been room to spare. That day, there were only two other cars parked in the lot, a gray Mercedes and an oxidizing Honda that had once been beige.

  It was a habit from another lifetime, one I couldn’t seem to shake, the need to be at the office by 8 a.m. Even when I knew Lou and Jackal wouldn’t be in for hours still. Even when I was so hungover I couldn’t remember my zip code. But that morning, having the threat of the Lady hanging over my head added an extra incentive. I needed all the time I could get to figure out Ellen’s next rendezvous.

  I could feel Jackal and last night between my legs with each stair up to our office—the pleasant soreness of the well fucked, a little throbbing ache that lives in you like a secret—taking the steps two at a time to feel it deeper. It gave me something to focus on while I gnawed on the soft guts of a croissant, my pantyhose already sweat-chafing my thighs from the single flight of stairs.

  Even this early in the morning, the smell of browning meat wafted up with me. I suppressed a gag. The sun bounced off the aluminum roof and cast dusty rays into my hangover, subtle as a spotlight, and I kept my head ducked like I was trying to crawl up the stairs incognito.

  I’d almost bumped into her before I looked up.

  She could’ve been twenty-five or forty, depending on which part of her you were looking at, with the calves of a go-go dancer and the carefully moisturized lipstick lines of a well-tended woman battling the inevitable with grace. She wore a silk blouse the color of a ripe melon, and the inch of dark roots under her bottle job seemed exactly right—the obvious artifice making it clear how good she looked. Large smoky sunglasses shaded her eyes, and she had one hand on our door. I couldn’t tell if she was coming or going.

  “Hullo,” she said. Her voice was low for a woman, and her fingernails were painted a bright blue. She tapped one against the door and then her hand dropped. Around her wrist, another slim circle of blue. I squinted. A tattoo, little stars inked in a faded denim color.

  “Can I help you?”

  She flipped her sunglasses to the top of her head and studied me for a moment. Her dark eyes were bright but flat, the way I’d always heard shar
ks’ eyes described. Behind her ear, I could still make out the faintly tattooed outline of Perfect Alignment Massage’s logo on our door, the business that had owned the joint until the Lady came along.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t think you can.” She didn’t move. I didn’t, either.

  When the Lady had taken over the lease, back when Lou’s and my little side project had gone wrong and we’d needed cover, she’d registered our business as a staffing agency. It gave us cover for the shuffle of girls coming by the office, and more importantly, it gave us respectability. We’d created our cover so well that occasionally, we got mistaken for a real staffing agency. Sometimes, when business was slow and Lou was bored, she’d even take jobs and place girls for the hell of it, adding the seventy-five-dollar check to her rainy-day fund.

  Half distracted, digging through my purse for the key and wondering how quickly I could reasonably expect Ellen to reschedule with Klein, I started to say, “Are you looking for a temp? Because I’m about to—” But she held up a hand. She hadn’t blinked since she’d taken off her sunglasses.

  “Be a dear and give this to Lou for me,” she said, handing me a white envelope embossed with a blue fleur-de-lis. My scalp began to prickle. “I’d prefer it go to her unopened,” she added as she sashayed past me down the stairs, and I stepped automatically out of her way, then wished I hadn’t.

  “Excuse me,” I called after her, but she held up a hand so I could see each cobalt almond perfectly. The diamond on her ring finger, big enough to anchor a small yacht, caught the sun, and little sequins of light burst across my face. My scalp prickled again, harder.

  I dropped the croissant and followed her down the stairs, not sure what I meant to say, but she turned before I reached the bottom, one hand on the driver-side door of the Mercedes, like she’d been expecting me to follow, like it was a script, and said: “Lou told me you were pretty, but high hopes are such a bitch, aren’t they? Nowhere for them to go but down.”

  And then she turned the engine and drove away.

  Across the street, a congregation of women gathered on greenery in front of a flat-topped church. I watched her drive away, memorizing her plate number before I felt the eyes of someone else on me—one of the women clustered on the lawn, moving their arms in circles and slow spins, somewhere between kung fu and ballet. A sunglassed dumpling of a grandmother had her face tipped in my direction, and I held up a hand, dazed.

  She gave me the finger.

  I walked back up the stairs and unlocked the door. The massage parlor had left us with a small waiting area. Behind the front desk, there were three doors that led to separate offices for each of us. At the very back of the office proper, a bathroom, a sink, and a little balcony that afforded a view of dark glossy skyscrapers. At the front desk, a phone that almost never rang was nestled among neatly collated file folders.

  At the front desk, I jotted down the license plate number on the back of the envelope in letters as small as I could manage. And then I peeked inside. It didn’t disappoint.

  I stood listening to the envelope chatter in my hands, and that was how Jackal found me, pushing open the now-unlocked door. He snarled something rude at me, a word I only liked to be called behind bedroom doors, but it passed over my head. It didn’t matter. We would say and do worse to each other before our dance was over.

  “Did you see her?” I asked.

  “What? Who?”

  “Blue nail polish.”

  “Are you still drunk?” He shouldered past me to his office, the massage table long since replaced by a desk, even though his door still bore a trace of a lotus-flower sticker.

  “The Lady Upstairs wears blue nail polish,” I said out loud, to no one.

  * * *

  Lou didn’t get to the office until noon, which surprised me: she’d had less to drink than me, and said she was going straight home. But my morning hadn’t gone to waste, at least: one call to Klein’s secretary had confirmed an opening in his schedule—for a prostate exam, which wasn’t exactly a lie—on both Thursday and Saturday afternoons. She’d promised to hold the spots in his calendar while she confirmed with him. I called the St. Leo and booked rooms for both afternoons, to be safe.

  I sat at my desk, thinking about how the Lady’s blue fingernails would look wrapped around my throat, when Lou popped her head into my doorway. Her hair was dark and slightly damp, and she grinned at me, fresh and not hungover.

  “Guess what!” Lou chirped.

  I winced, sliding the Lady’s envelope into my desk drawer. “Good morning to you, too,” I said drily. “Or, I should say, afternoon. You’re in a good mood.”

  “I’m a miracle worker,” Lou said, twirling into the seat across from me. I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for a month. “You’ve got until Friday.”

  I bit off a tight smile in Lou’s direction. If I could convince Ellen, a Thursday afternoon rendezvous left a one-day turnaround. It was just possible. “Thank you,” I said with stiff lips. If Lou noticed I was less than thrilled, she didn’t show it.

  “And,” Lou said, “I got this.” She held up another envelope, a twin of the one I’d tucked away in my desk. I jerked in my chair and tried to disguise it as a cough. “A new name,” Lou announced, her lopsided smile turning wicked. “We’re in a busy season.” She chucked the envelope onto my desk and then draped herself in the chair across from me.

  As I opened it, pulling out the folded note—one single line, not even a full name, no other information: M. Carrigan—Lou asked, “Have you set the new date with Ellen?”

  I danced the mouse across the pad at my desk, waking up my computer and typing in M. Carrigan, Los Angeles. “I’m expecting her any minute,” I said. “Where did you get this? Was it on your desk?”

  Lou yawned, wide—goddammit, what had she been doing?—and shrugged. “Yep.”

  Maybe the envelope the Lady had handed me was a test, a way to prove that even now, deadline looming, I was still loyal to her. “Lou, wait a second, let me—”

  “Mitch Carrigan,” Lou went on happily. She was never as happy as at the beginning of the grift. All those possibilities still out there, all those different ways to ruin an asshole’s life.

  Then it clicked.

  “Carrigan? Like the city music hall Carrigans, those Carrigans? Old-money founding-fathers-of-Pasadena Carrigans, those Carrigans?”

  “One and the same,” Lou said, her expression smug. “Ours. All ours. And once you’re done with Ellen”—her smile wavered—“we can work it together. Like the old days.”

  “Like the old days,” I repeated. A sharp memory of a bra-clad Lou clutching my arm, fighting down giggles. Our very first case all over again—only this time, we wouldn’t leave any loose ends.

  Lou came to my side of the desk so we could read the articles together on my screen. She rested her elbows on my back, sharp points that made me shiver as she shifted positions, shiatsuing my shoulder blades. “Mayoral dark horse thunders into the lead.” She read the Times headline over my shoulder. Goose bumps rose on my skin each time her elbows slipped. “Family name pays dividends for would-be mayor.” She read another, yawning again.

  I shrugged her elbows off me and skated my chair backward so I could look at her. I could see each pale freckle on her nose. I could probably count them if I tried. I wanted to tell her I didn’t have time to waste on a new mark, not when I had four days to turn around Klein or else leave her and this life we’d built together before the Lady put me down like a dog shot in the street.

  “Lou, I should tell you— Is that the same blouse you were wearing yesterday?”

  “Hmm?” Lou had moved to the bar cart she’d bought to celebrate my first anniversary with the Lady—the same day I’d paid off twenty large on the debt—and was fixing a cocktail, humming as she did. My mouth watered, not pleasantly, and I narrowed my eyes at her back. Black,
linen, sheer—I was almost positive I was right. I heard the chime of the front door—Jackal leaving. Even better. I didn’t want him to overhear what I was about to say.

  “Never mind,” I said quickly. “Lou, come here and tell me if—”

  Lou turned around, toasting me with a tumbler of tea-colored liquor, capsizing a maraschino cherry. “It’ll be tricky, but Mitch Carrigan, our biggest score ever—”

  “Hello?”

  Ellen rapped two small fingers on my office door and pushed it open, but she didn’t step inside. Her hair was pulled away from her face with a clip, which was a mistake—it wasn’t that kind of face. A small cluster of acne blossomed on her chin. She was wearing blue jeans and a tight pink sweater with embroidered pom-poms, and she looked younger than legal.

  Lou’s mouth dropped open, but she recovered quicker than I did. “Hello,” she said, pulling Ellen in for a kiss on each cheek. “So nice to see you again.” Ellen stammered something back, half dazed. Lou could have that effect on people. It was why I’d had Lou meet Ellen and me for drinks at the St. Leo back at the beginning of the case: she was still the best at making the girls see past the payoff and want to be involved with what we did. Lou could sell anything.

  There’s a magic Lou has, a certain kindness in her face. It’s a small miracle, finding a nice face in this city. People respond to it, even when they shouldn’t. Even when she was wearing day-old clothes and no makeup and hadn’t gotten enough sleep because God knew why.

  “Ellen, a little birdie told me you’re killing this case. Jo says you’re one of the best we’ve ever had.” Lou smiled, warm and homey, and Ellen smiled back, a little uncertainly, making knots of her fingers and venturing a glance at me as Lou tugged her to my desk.

  I was not smiling, not at either of them. I was wondering exactly how much Ellen had overheard and why she looked like such a flight risk.