That did worry me.
I filled a mug half with coffee and half with gin, then went back to my computer, clicking play on a video accompanying one of the latest news articles.
A perky reporter with the whitest teeth I’d ever seen was interviewing a woman in a navy-blue blazer, hair chopped into a frosty bob. The bottom of the screen identified her as Tana Carrigan, Wife of Mayoral Candidate, and then, in small letters, Philanthropist. Carrigan’s choice of bride would tell me as much about him as anything I could find online. I turned up the volume.
“Tell me about your husband’s plans, if he’s elected,” the reporter said.
Tana smiled, drawing a perfectly French manicured hand through her hair, which shook itself out and settled back into the exact same position. “He really cares about this city,” she said. “The Carrigans have deep roots in Los Angeles. Who better to run it?”
“And has he always had political aspirations?” the reporter asked, seemingly not caring that Tana hadn’t answered her question.
“He’s always wanted to make a difference,” Tana said. “It was one of the first things that drew me to him.” I pictured Carrigan’s cut-marble jawline, those steel blue eyes. One of the first things.
“Some have said it’s your family’s ambition, and not your husband’s, that he run for office. Care to comment on that?” This reporter had finally grown some teeth.
I watched Tana’s face creak under her Botox, but her immaculate smile didn’t flag for a second. “Some,” she said. “Is it good journalistic practice to cite vague, unnamed sources?”
The reporter had the grace to look flustered. “I think your constituents have a right to know.”
“Oh, by all means.” Someone had taken plaster to Tana’s face. She couldn’t stop smiling if she tried. “Go on.”
“Well, there’s the fact that he made the nontraditional move of taking your name upon marriage. Which some have said is to cash in on your family’s legacy and increase voter recognition.”
Tana flicked a hand in front of her face, as if waving away a gnat. “That was all Mitch’s decision. I would say to those unnamed sources, you don’t know my husband. No one can make my Mitch do anything he doesn’t want to do.” There was only a touch of murder in her voice.
The interview switched to a family picture of the wife, the candidate, and a towheaded cherub who was pink all over, like a half-cooked ham. It was unfortunate, the way attractive people never seem to breed well. I studied Carrigan on the screen. Those shoulders had my vote, and probably that was true for a lot of other women in this city.
So he’d taken his wife’s last name. I kicked that one around in my brain for a bit but couldn’t decide what to make of it. It could mean he didn’t have access to the family money. But it could also make him more desperate to protect his reputation. He had a lot more than most men to lose in a divorce.
I stopped the video after a plug for an upcoming campaign fund-raiser, to be held at Olvera Street in a few weeks. “Join us in the heart of Old Los Angeles,” Tana had said, her sunny blonde beauty at odds with her trilling pronunciation of El Pueblo de Los Angeles. I had a hard time believing the Carrigans had any real Californio roots, but if she said it enough times, people wouldn’t care. That was the magic of Los Angeles: over time, the artificial became as historic as the true.
Somewhere near the bottom of my ginned-up coffee, the booze too warm, the coffee only lukely so, I had to get a little honest with myself and admit I was avoiding looking at Klein’s file, avoiding thinking about Ellen and the money I owed to both the Lady and the police now. I wasn’t sure which was worse. The glands in my mouth started to sweat, and soon I had a mouthful of saliva that gin wouldn’t wash down. I leaned over and spat into my trash can.
I couldn’t let my guard down until it was over. Ellen would try to get the drop on me again. She had the cash in her grubby little fists—she’d won this round—but she’d tipped her hand, too. That was a bigger mistake than she knew. I couldn’t afford to underestimate her again.
When Lou popped her head into my doorway to tell me she was leaving, my office was dark, the sun long since gone and only the glow of my computer illuminating my face, the bottle of juniper snugged between a coffeepot and a succulent on my desk.
“How’d it go with your girl?” Lou asked, fingers dancing along my door frame.
“She meets with him Thursday,” I said, which wasn’t really an answer.
Lou’s face relaxed. I wondered what she had to promise our boss to get my extension. “Money to the Lady before you know it,” she said, reassuring me. I let us both pretend it worked. She promised to pick me up the next morning at my apartment, and we’d start scouting Carrigan together. She glanced at the gin bottle on my desk and added, “I’ll bring coffee.”
The bottle was drying up by the time I powered the computer down. Damn thing must’ve been leaking. I put my head on my desk to rest my eyes and didn’t open them again until I heard the faint tinkle of chimes on the front door. I sat up, wondering if the Lady had brought that sharpened shiv of a diamond ring back for the envelope. Or for me. But when I poked my head out into the hallway, no one was there. I shook my head. Just the gin making me jumpy. Time for me to be going.
On my way out, I paused at Jackal’s door. I hadn’t seen him since that morning, but I hadn’t expected to. For the better part of the day, he’d kept his door locked and wouldn’t even answer for Lou, because professionalism was a thing he’d left behind the day he bent me over the front desk to welcome me to the job, way back when. But he’d come around. Eventually.
His door was barely open, light slivering between the jamb and the knob, thin as the line dividing flesh from garter. From inside, a strangled bark of laughter—Jackal’s. A different sound from when I made him laugh. I leaned my head closer and heard the crash of something falling from his desk to the ground and then the erotic hoot of a woman trying too hard. The sound made me tired. It was a nice thing to believe about myself after Ellen, that my instinct for sisterhood wasn’t quite dead.
I listened, wondering what else I was going to hear—when you go to the trouble of listening at mostly closed doors, you do have certain expectations—wondering, too, what I would feel when I heard it. The fresh zhish of a zipper, the giggles swallowed between two mouths.
Jackal groaned, and I bit my lip, tasted blood. A feeling like a cold cloud of stars exploding in my stomach. I pressed a hand against the door and rested my cheek on it.
I let the fleshy sounds go on for a few minutes before I tipped the door farther open. Jackal had kept only one light on, a desk lamp, and it looked like his paramour had attempted to fling a scarf over it to create a mood. She’d misjudged, and the scarf piled on Jackal’s carpet. The girl was propped on his desk, her feet pushing against the desk chair’s arms for leverage. Jackal’s fist formed a ponytail in her long dark hair, his own body jammed between her and the chair. His pants were still creased in the back, and every time she tried to catch hold of his shirt, Jackal jerked away, not willing to grub up his starch. Fastidious, even in his one-night stands.
He moaned a name, too low for me to catch, and tugged the ponytail to one side so I had a clear view. Young, fox-pretty face, thick brows like slashes across her forehead. Lots of dark hair. Looked like me back when I’d started working in the office. I pictured sticky vinyl lips and realized she looked a bit, too, like the woman who had been retired. Jackal’s ex. I shuddered. He had a type.
From her position on the desk, Jackal’s new girl had a straight shot at my face, if she wanted it. But Jackal was good at this, I knew firsthand. She didn’t look up until the whole thing came to the rather expected end. Jackal finally stepped back, tucking himself back into his pants, and she caught sight of me. The brunette shrieked and covered her unbuttoned chest with her hands, glaring at me.
“Feel better now?” I asked him.<
br />
“Robert, what is she doing here? Was she watching us?”
Jackal was still breathing heavy, but his eyes met mine, ember-hot. “Babe, I didn’t know you were there.”
I laughed, saluting him, trying to ignore the tightness in my chest. “Oh, I’m sure.”
The brunette was looking back and forth between us, a growing horror in her eyes. “Babe?”
“I know,” I said, sparing her a glance. A fine sheen of sweat glazed her brow, and a blush was vivid but fading across her chest. “I didn’t much care for that term, either.”
Jackal smoothed his mussed hair back. It wasn’t that I was angry—though I was, but not because he’d brought another woman into the office. Or, rather, exactly because he’d brought another woman into the office and into our games—civilian casualties weren’t my style.
“You proved your point,” I said.
The girl jumped from the desk and jammed a finger into my face. “You sick bitch, what the hell do you—”
“Easy,” I said. “He’s not worth fighting over.” I opened my arms, the gin zipping up and down my veins, looking at Jackal as I said it. “You want him? He’s all yours.”
She glared at me, still finishing her buttons, and I raised my eyebrows and let my arms drop. “I didn’t think so,” I said after a moment. I jerked my head to the door, eyes on the girl again. “I imagine you’re a bit sticky. There’s a bathroom down the hall.”
Jackal made a show of watching her ass as she walked past, but she turned and glared at him from the door. “You sick shit,” she said, and then she walked out, slamming his door behind her. The twinge of a conscience I thought I’d gotten rid of rose into my throat, but I pushed it down. Jackal had brought her into this, not me. And maybe next time, she’d be smarter. Maybe this memory would save her from the next pretty asshole who looked twice at her over a beer.
“Next time you’re pissed at me,” I said, “take it out on me.”
Jackal snorted, his perfectly shaped lips curling up into a sneer. “Please,” he said. “You think you’re any better, what you do with those girls?”
“That’s different.”
Jackal didn’t say anything, just stared at me, arms crossed. The wiry black hairs of his forearms fluttered with the fan overhead.
“They know what they’re getting into,” I said, not sure why it mattered to me. To Jackal, what we did was only a paycheck. I bent down and grabbed the abandoned scarf from Jackal’s floor, twirling it around my own neck.
In the distance, I heard the slam of the front door, the chimes hitting glass sharp enough to crack. She wouldn’t be back. But then, Jackal didn’t need her to be. Expendable, I thought, all of us, even the ones who were his type. I perched on the farthest corner of the desk. What was it in me that wanted to wipe up all the traces of that girl from his desk with my own back? If my mother could only see me now, I thought.
“I show them what real power tastes like,” I went on. “I’m not sure who you were trying to humiliate just now, but you’re the one who looked like an ass.”
Jackal stepped forward, his pants brushing against my knees on the desk. He dropped those arms on either side of me, caging me in, and leaned forward. “Whatever bullshit you need to tell yourself to sleep at night, babe,” Jackal said into my ear, sending traitorous shivers down my spine. “We’re the same, you and me.”
“You’ll end up in some lonely place someday,” I whispered. “Without me. And I’ll be laughing.”
“Liar,” Jackal whispered, and leaned forward, kissing me hard.
Even in a city that worshipped beauty, no one was as handsome as Robert Jackal. More than handsome, he was beautiful, though not feminine. And he could be charming when he wanted—he must’ve sweet-talked that girl straight from the bar to flinging her panties on his desk in under an hour—but charm was cheap in this city. I never had to pretend to be any better than I was with him. The first man I’d ever loved, I kept waiting for him to find out the slimy, ratty parts of me. With Jackal, there was no waiting. He already knew.
I’d never mistaken it for love between us. Maybe it was something much worse. But it had been enough to solder us together all these years.
Or at least until he hadn’t showed at the St. Leo.
I pushed him away, wiped my mouth, my head spinning. “You feel better now we’re back to square? Ready to tell me why you fucked me at the St. Leo?” I distracted myself from his arms by looking around his office. My eyes were drawn down to his desk, stacks of file folders in neat piles, the edges so meticulously aligned that it looked like one thick brick of peach. Old notes from Lou, the word albatross peeking out from behind a folder—funny, I hadn’t been so sure Jackal could read.
“I forgot,” Jackal said. The handsome liar. I hadn’t been able to talk about anything else for weeks—even, occasionally, in bed—and he’d forgotten? Not possible. “Sorry. What are you gonna do.”
“You forgot,” I repeated. On the ground, the wreckage of the file folders that had been pushed off his desk in the affair, which must’ve been the crash I’d heard. Glaring out from the edge of one, a black-and-white photograph of a man I’d never met before. Young, attractive—high cheekbones, rounded chin, the haircut of a cop, looking away from the camera. Nothing salacious.
I might not have met him, but I recognized him: a hero-kid cop who had a nasty habit of asking for favors from the women—junkies, working girls—he cleared off the streets. Lou had run his case last year. He wasn’t the first, or the only, uniform in the city who partook in that particular indulgence, but he was easy pickings. After the Lady was through with him, he’d resigned, worked in insurance now. Lou had shared the photographs one bourbon-soaked night, the two of us laughing over the kid with an unloaded gun between the thighs of a girl I’d trained. Still wearing his badge, the dumb fuck.
“You forgot,” I said again. “I don’t believe you.”
“Sorry, babe,” Jackal said, shifting between me and the photograph so I couldn’t see it anymore. “I owe you one. I fucked up.”
Now I was sure he was lying. If he really had forgotten, if it had been an honest mistake, he would’ve picked a fight with me, tried to make me feel bad about what he thought wasn’t his fault. So I missed the show, big fuckin’ whoop. I’ll be there next time. But an apologetic Jackal? I’d never seen it. He was trying to keep me from asking questions. Like if he’d been on a heater and decided the tables were more important than our case. Than me.
Or questions about what he was doing with evidence from an old case that should be with the Lady for safekeeping, like all the other photographs he took.
“What do I have to do to keep you from forgetting the time and place on Thursday?” I grinned at him, sticking my tongue behind my left uppermost molar. It did not feel sexy, but he seemed to like it. Thongs, practiced smiles, anal beads—what was it with some men and the allure of uncomfortable things?
Jackal reeled me into him. “Let me make it up to you.”
We told the marks we destroyed the negatives and the SIM cards after they’d paid up, which of course wasn’t true. But it was true that we’d never used the photographs against someone who’d paid—they were insurance, that’s all. Lou gathered them at the end of every case and passed them to the Lady, one of our many rituals. If Jackal had copies, that meant he was running something on the side, had a buyer or was looking for one. Probably trying to pick up cash for a poker debt. The Lady wouldn’t like that.
“Did you have something in mind?” I purred, inching myself forward on his desk, moving my legs apart.
Jackal nuzzled my neck. “I’ll think of something.” He started to stroke up my leg, massaging from knee to thigh.
In all the years we’d been whatevering, there were certain secrets I’d kept from Jackal. My debt to the Lady, for one. And what Lou and I had done to incur that debt. But—stupid
me—I’d never considered he might have secrets of his own. Jackal seemed so easy to read. But continuing to blackmail old marks after the Lady’s sting had ended, or else selling them to someone new—I hadn’t guessed he had it in him. A reporter looking for a scoop, a rival business partner, an ex-wife with an axe to grind—pictures worth a thousand words and almost certainly several thousand dollars all told. Double-dipping would be an easy score.
“Come here,” I said, guiding Jackal so close there was almost no space between us.
The nineteen grand in exchange for my silence would be a simple solution, if Jackal had it, but I’d already made one reckless decision that day that had backfired. With Lou and me, there was a code—we watched each other’s backs and we took care of our girls, helped them to their fair share of the cut. But Jackal had brought that girl in here tonight, he’d let me down at the St. Leo, and he’d been complicit in whatever had happened to his ex. No loyalty to anyone but himself. Getting involved with Jackal’s side business was one more bad bet I couldn’t afford.
But maybe there was another way I could use the photographs.
Besides recording the footage, Jackal was the one who collected from the marks, keeping the girls out of danger and making the marks less likely to cause trouble. The Lady set the amount, but it wasn’t like she followed up to make sure that the blackmail had met their satisfaction. If Jackal upped the Klein bribe on the sly, I could slip the excess back to the police before anyone noticed it was missing. And no one would ever have to know it had taken a detour first. Neat, easy, not even stealing, not technically.
Jackal’s eyes were darker than normal, even in the half-light, and a fine sheen of sweat filmed his skin. I liked his eyes on me, and I liked the hate I felt for him even as I wanted him. Hate: an exciting emotion. I studied his face. Hair sticking up, combed by not-my-fingers. A little saliva hanging off the corner of his lip. Still more handsome than a man had any right to be. I smiled and reached for him, liking the feel of his shoulders beneath my fingers, his musky scent mixed with the sticky-candy smell of that girl’s perfume. I kissed his cheek and melted into him, my hands at his belt now.
The Lady Upstairs Page 5