The Lady Upstairs

by Halley Sutton

  I studied them as Lou chattered away at Ellen, tossing compliments her way, reaching out once to tuck some of Ellen’s frizz back against her head. Something Lou taught me years ago, good advice to live by: never trust women who don’t like other women. At the rate Lou was working Ellen, the three of us would be tangling together friendship bracelets by happy hour.

  Finally, Lou pushed away from the desk and tossed a half-penitent shrug at me, as though she truly regretted leaving. “I’ll get out of your hair now,” Lou said, smiling over dazzled Ellen’s head at me, widening her eyes so I knew she, too, was wondering how much Ellen had heard, and shut the door behind her. Ellen stared after her, ignoring me. She didn’t want to meet my eyes, I realized.

  Later, I thought about how it might have gone if I’d been wise enough to play nice, be the smart older sister with a plan. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Lady with her blue nail polish and her easy disposal of the girls she’d once worked with, and the envelope in my desk I hadn’t quite managed to mention to Lou, and speaking of Lou, where the hell had she gone last night after the bar, and then there was that hangover to consider, no small thing, the mezcal that was refusing to play nice with the gin. Maybe if any one of those things had been different, everything would have been.

  There’s excuses, and then there’s excuses.

  Instead, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t get up from my desk. Ellen was frozen, half turned to the door. I kept my eyebrows raised, waiting for her to make the first move. Finally, she took a step toward the chair, moving tentatively. She searched my face for an invite to sit and, when it wasn’t forthcoming, bypassed it and circled the room.

  She paused in front of the drink cart. She turned the bottles this way and that, no doubt looking for something to do with her hands. Coming across like she’d never seen liquor before.

  Maybe with Klein’s money in her pocket, the knowledge of what she could do to a powerful man, she wouldn’t always wait for other people to tell her what to do. I hoped so. I wasn’t convinced.

  “Is this a good time?” Ellen asked finally, turning to me and rubbing her pale lips together. Her fingers drummed against the cart. Nervous. She’d been thinking since last night. I didn’t like it.

  “As good a time as any. Pour me a drink and let’s get down to business.”

  Ellen’s mouth dropped open, a who, me? thing that made me want to slap her.

  “A . . . drink?”

  “Gin. Straight.”

  Ellen reached down on autopilot, hand hovering over the black glass bottle, and I felt a little smile in my chest, aha. I still had her. But then she pulled her fingers back like she’d been burned and said, “You want me to pour you a glass of gin?”

  “Not all the way full. A few fingers, not the whole hand. It’s still early.”

  She didn’t like it, but because I’d done my job well and picked a girl who could take a few slaps but couldn’t figure out if she minded, she yanked the top off the bottle like it had done something ugly and personal to her and dunked a few splashes into two separate tumblers.

  She slammed the glass down on the desk, a few drops of gin splashing up onto my neck, and sat down in the chair across from me with even more force, crossing her legs and bouncing her foot up and down. It was a practiced move, not comfortable, like she’d seen someone do it in a movie once. She swirled her glass of gin and bent her face to it, sniffing. She took one big slug and her nostrils flared. But to her credit, she choked it down. I almost laughed.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Do you have any ice, at least?”

  “No,” I lied.

  She nodded, up and down, up and down, a little sad about the state of the world she’d found herself in. But I still had her. And even better, she was so distracted, she didn’t seem to have picked up on anything she might’ve overheard between me and Lou. Good.

  I kept it brisk and all business. “Klein’s free Thursday afternoon. I’ve booked the St. Leo already so all that’s left is for you to call him—”

  Ellen was turning red, and she started to shake her head. She mouthed something, but no sound came out, and I watched her face as I talked until the words exploded out of her: “No! No, no, Thursday isn’t going to work. No!”

  The hangover was making it hard for me to focus on anything other than the blotchy red spots spreading across her cheeks.

  “What, you have other plans? Okay, if Thursday’s no good, we could—”

  “Thursday isn’t going to work because I’m not doing this anymore,” Ellen said. “Any of it. I mean it. I’m out. Finish the job without me because I’m done.”

  Chapter 4

  It was lucky for me that Ellen was not a good negotiator. After her outburst, she couldn’t stop talking—she didn’t uncork so much as explode.

  “You can keep the money, that’s fine, that is fine with me,” she said. The more she repeated the word, the less I believed her, and I was right: “Although technically I’ve been working for weeks, so maybe we could come up with some sort of pro-rated— But all I’m saying is that I’m not doing it anymore. And that’s final. Nothing you can say would convince me. Nothing. Zilch. That is all I’m saying. I mean it.”

  Mistake one: never speak first.

  I folded my hands at my desk and watched her. She was breathing hard—emotional—no doubt scared of what I would say. Which meant I still had some power over her. That was good to know. The threat of the Lady’s forced retirement beat in my head like a second heart, but I kept my face as blank as I could.

  “You know, you said to me, two, three weeks tops. You made it sound like it was going to be a lot of fun, like I’d be getting to play dress-up and having great sex and eating fancy dinners and . . .”

  My patience was a very dry well. What was dinner and dress-up compared with bringing Hollywood’s richest scumbag to his knees? “He hasn’t been feeding you? He hasn’t made you feel real pretty?” Easy, Jo. You need her more than she realizes.

  “Do you know what it’s like, having to fuck that old man? And then he hits me,” she said, as if I didn’t know. “I’m not doing it again. The way he looks at me. God.” She raised a hand to her cheek—the outline from the afternoon before had faded, but I was willing to bet it was still tender. She bit her lip and sucked on her teeth. I remembered she was trying to make it as an actress in this town. Well, who wasn’t.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Ellen was working up a good cry, her dark eyes glistening and slick. She was so shocked, she choked mid-sniffle and gaped at me. Now she didn’t know what to do with all that effort.

  Mistake number two: tears worked on men; they were wasted on me.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “I said okay. It’s been a tough case. We fucked up. We promised you a schedule, and you’ve kept up your side of the bargain. We didn’t. Tough shit for me, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.” I even worked up a smile for her, gnashing my teeth together.

  “Really?” Ellen exhaled, and her shoulders dropped about a foot from her ears to her knees. She beamed a beatific smile of relief in my direction, like the Virgin Mary successfully pleading a headache to the Holy Spirit.

  “Sure, no hard feelings. I get it. He’s a tough man to get it slick for. We’ll grab Lou and cash you out. But let’s celebrate all your hard work first. To your perseverance,” I said, raising my glass. Ellen raised hers in return, but she set it back down without taking a sip. The juniper quieted my headache a little but not nearly enough. “You’ve been lovely, Ellen. Truly. Thank you for your service.”

  I paused the tumbler of gin halfway to my lips before I set it back down on the desk, as though I’d just remembered something. Ka-thunk. A solid weight to these tumblers Lou had bought, I mused. In a pinch, you could use ’em to murder a pesky blonde.

  “It’s too bad you won’t get a chance to say goodbye,
” I said. “To Hy.”

  Ellen flinched at the sound of his name—aha. “That’s—that’s fine . . . What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” I said, trying not to enjoy it yet—there were so many ways it could still go wrong, “we’ll have to terminate your work on set. It’s in your contract, a small clause—we rarely have to use it, but it seems these are exceptional circumstances.”

  “All right,” Ellen warbled. “That’s . . . all right.”

  “And you understand the precautions we’ll have to take, of course. Calling the wife is never fun, but we have to be sure you don’t see him again. You get it.” I plucked my phone from the desk and held it out to her. Conspiratorial. Like we were girlfriends crank-calling local dreamboats at a sleepover.

  Ellen blanched. “What? I’m not doing that!”

  There was a near-dead part of me that admired her, clinging to the memory of her life before me, the time when I didn’t call the shots. I’d seen Klein up close. He was doughy without being fat, which was, somehow, worse, an inch of pale flab separating him from the younger version of himself, with the skin of an unpaved street. I had the image of her cradled between his splayed legs, and it made me shudder.

  But had my first mark been any different, or worse? You didn’t do it to fuck men you liked.

  “Lou’s policy,” I said, faux apologetic. “To make sure none of the girls run jobs with our marks on their own.” I shrugged. “What can I say, it works.”

  “You want me to . . . to call her? You want me to tell his wife that we’re—that we’ve been—”

  “I promise you, he’ll never bother you again after that,” I said. “Plus, I thought you were so eager to know what she’d say yesterday at the hotel, about the two of you together. I thought you’d enjoy the opportunity.” I held my breath, wondering if I’d tipped it too far.

  Ellen’s big brown eyes got watery, and she cocked her head, a kicked puppy. No, I thought. She can take a bit more. “Why are you so mean?”

  “Here, I’ll dial.” I started to punch the numbers in, and Ellen practically vaulted over the desk to knock the phone out of my hand. She glared at me, more fire in her face than I expected.

  “Stop it! Stop. I’m not doing it anymore, I told you,” Ellen said, her voice squeaky but harsh. “I’m not calling anyone and I’m not seeing him again. That’s final.”

  “Come on, Ellen, if you want out, you’ve gotta—”

  “I can make calls, too, you know.” Now she was standing straight, towering over me still seated at my desk. “What if I make a call to Mitch Carrigan’s office and warn him about this, this, this honeypot brothel you’re running here, huh? Tell him he better watch his back because I have it on very good authority he’s the next target. What if I do that, huh?”

  Her threat bounced around my office, getting bigger with each passing second. In the vacuum, just the sound of both of us breathing—Ellen, hard; me, barely at all. No air at all while I thought of what Lou would say, what the Lady would think, not only that I’d screwed the Klein job to bits—all those weeks of preparation and we’d end up with nothing—but that I’d managed to scuttle our newest job, too. “Mitch Carrigan, our biggest score ever,” Lou had said, practically bouncing on her toes. There’d be no salvaging that fuckup, no matter how much Lou begged. And it was Lou she’d overheard. Lou would be on the line then, too. The thought struck me cold.

  I stood up. Even in flats, I was taller than Ellen by more than an inch or two, and she stumbled back and almost tripped ass-first into the chair. But I bypassed her and walked to the liquor cart, grabbing the gin myself. My hand drifted over the bottles as I thought of what to say. No answers in any of them, but it didn’t stop me looking. I topped off my own glass and then waved the bottle under Ellen’s nose, but she twisted away like I’d raised a hand to slap her. I took a long deep drink, and when I came out of the glass, I knew what I was going to do.

  I pulled the Lady’s fleur-de-lis envelope from the drawer and held it out to Ellen. “For Thursday. On top of your cut.”

  “What?”

  Ellen snatched the envelope from me so quick it sliced a finger. I popped it in my mouth and sucked on the welling blood as I watched her open it. Her eyes went wide. Inside: a folded piece of paper, the same weight as the envelope, the same embossed blue fleur-de-lis in the corner. Of course the Lady had a stationery set. When you rubbed the two halves of the paper together, they made a lovely shish-shish sound, like silk on skin. In thick marker strokes on the page: A monthly courtesy for our brave blues. Ellen tossed the paper and the envelope onto the desk without sparing either a glance.

  Beneath the folded piece of paper, bundled together with a rubber band, a thick wedge of crisp green. The money, I’d realized when I’d peeked inside the envelope, must be the monthly bribe the Lady paid the cops. To ensure they looked the other way in case one of our marks decided it was worth the public humiliation to complain about what we did.

  “There must be thousands of dollars here!”

  “Eight large,” I said, half wishing I could grab it back out of her hands.

  “This on top of what I already get?”

  “That’s right.”

  It was more money than she’d make in at least three months anywhere else and I knew it. More importantly, she knew it. I regretted offering it even as she shoved the money into her purse. I thought of her threat to tell Carrigan. I hadn’t expected that.

  “I’ll assume this means you’re free Thursday.”

  Ellen stood up and smoothed out invisible wrinkles over her middle. Her cheeks were red and blotchy, but she wasn’t crying anymore. “All right. One more time. And that’s it.” Still trying to be firm, show me how in charge she was. I wanted to say her pique was wasted—that she should save it for Klein; that empowerment came from topping him, not me—but I couldn’t. The weight of what I’d just done—and what I owed the Lady now—was stuck in my throat like a tumor. “Thursday, the St. Leo—and you will be there, right?”

  “Yes.” With Jackal in tow, dead or alive, and more than one camera, just in case.

  She told me she’d call me with the time when they’d settled on it. I watched her face as she said it—she’d surprised me twice today, which was two times too many—and thought the odds were close to even that she’d try to find some way to wiggle out of it once Thursday came. I’d need a backup plan. But that’s what the Lady paid me for.

  As she was leaving, Ellen turned at the door, and said, “You know, when I first met you, I thought I wanted to be exactly like you. You were wearing these snakeskin pumps and leather pants, and it wasn’t even 10 a.m. yet, you were at the dentist, for chrissakes, and I thought, Now, there’s a woman who knows what it’s like to take what she wants instead of waiting to see what’s left when the world gets around to her. I thought, What would it be like to be dangerous?” She laughed again, unhappily, shaking her head. “And now I know you, this world you slither around in, and you know what?”

  I wondered if she’d start crying again or tell me she wished she’d never met me. My lips twisted and my nail tinked against the crystal tumbler. In that pink sweater, she looked sixteen years old, the little sister I’d never had, except the coloring was all wrong. She’s too shortsighted to see what I’m doing for her, what we’re doing together by taking down assholes like Klein, I thought, right before she surprised me for the third time that day: “I still think I want it. It’s the craziest goddamned thing.”

  And then she left, taking with her the Lady’s bribe money for the police, and leaving me back in a hole that looked, from the bottom of it, exactly nineteen grand deep.

  Chapter 5

  After Ellen left, I tried to clear my head, get back to Carrigan. But it was no good. Nineteen grand now and a week to pay it back—my stomach dropped. Less, I realized. It wouldn’t take the police long to discover their hush-hush money was missi
ng. I couldn’t count on more than a few days before they brought it up to the Lady and put their heads together and figured out where the cash had gone. If everything went perfectly, I’d have the money Friday. But now I’d need more from Klein, I realized. If we got fifty grand for the photos, that meant my cut was twelve point five. I needed nineteen now. Which meant I had to get seventy-five from him. The slaps might not be enough to warrant that kind of money. Ellen might have to deal with something worse than slaps. I tried not to think of what that might be.

  It became a chant in my head—something worse, something worse—as I scrolled through different clips of the new mark, killing time so I didn’t go crazy waiting to hear back from Ellen. Or imagining which would be worse: the Lady forcing me into “retirement” or what the police would do to all of us if I couldn’t deliver their money quickly. Something worse, I thought, trying to focus on Mitch Carrigan’s handsome face.

  He was the best-looking politician I’d ever seen—one of the best-looking men I’d ever seen. A jaw like a lantern, dark blue eyes like a pair of sapphire earrings. A full head of graying hair, shoulders that filled the entire photo frame and then some. Movie-star handsome, but in a nonthreatening way, a believable way. I wondered how far that Carrigan ambition stretched.

  It made me uneasy, that face. A face like that tended to mean a girlfriend at every campaign stop and a full team dedicated to crushing unseemly rumors. If the Lady had picked him, there were good odds he had some major flaw. The unimaginative one was easy to guess.

  But that wasn’t the only problem. For another thing, he was too connected.

  Our marks had to be wealthy—whether they were handpicked by the Lady herself or chosen by those who hired her via gimlet-soaked referrals given poolside at the Beverly Hilton, the chic set dispatching blackmail orders from a cabana—or the marks had to be well connected and visible, able to lay their hands on tiny mountains of cash quickly. But Carrigan was another level of wealthy, a name synonymous with the founding of our city. There wasn’t a cop, or an attorney, in this city who didn’t know that name. You couldn’t drive half a block without finding some memento of his family lineage. The Carrigans would be no strangers to blackmail. They wouldn’t scare easy. They would have friends with the right connections.