“Miss Howard?”
The staticky buzz of the intercom in Ellen’s living room made me jump, but it made Ellen shriek outright. I thumped her on the shoulder and held a finger up to my lip. She stared at me from the floor, where she was trying to soak up Klein’s blood with a sponge, fingers curling and uncurling. What do I do? she mouthed.
“Miss Howard, it’s the front desk. Pick up, please.”
I nodded at her, and Ellen moved to the intercom on tiptoe, as though they could hear her on the other line. She pressed the buzzer with one trembling finger, staring straight at me.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Miss Howard, do you have a guest over tonight?”
Ellen’s finger slipped off the button, and I couldn’t suppress a rising tide of terror, staring down at the body next to me. Someone had heard his scream; someone had heard the shot. We were so fucked.
“Ummm . . . I . . . I’m not quite sure . . .”
“A silver Audi, parked in the guest spot? You have to fill out the paperwork ahead of time for guest spots, Miss Howard. We’ve been over this. Someone’s already reserved that parking spot tonight.”
I blew out a sigh of relief, leaning forward a little and then catching myself as I swayed too close to Klein’s body. In the living room, Ellen was laughing, borderline hysterical, thanking the front desk over and over, telling them she’d have her guest move the car as soon as he was no longer indisposed.
“It’s not a request, Miss Howard. Please move the vehicle now.”
“Hang up,” I hissed at her, looking around the room for where Klein might have left his keys. His coat, tossed over a dining room chair. I jumped off the bed, Klein bumping up and down as I did so, and shook the jacket loose, searching through the pockets. Nothing. No part of tonight was going to come easy.
The dead man’s pants were in the bedroom, crumpled at the foot of Ellen’s postcoital bed. I avoided making eye contact with the body as I picked them up by the hem.
“What are you doing?” Ellen shrieked.
I shook the pants out, and Klein’s keys jangled onto the floor. I fished them out and held them up to Ellen. She reached for them, and I had a sudden vision of Ellen flooring the gas pedal, driving off into the distance, and leaving me behind with Klein’s body in the bedroom.
“Huh-uh,” I said, snatching them back and shouldering past her and out the front door, checking both directions before I scurried into the lobby.
Ellen’s apartment was located on only the second floor of the Alto Nido. It was a short elevator ride down to the subterranean parking garage, but I counted the steps between Ellen’s front door and the lift: fifty-six. Three apartments on either side. One person stepping out into the hallway for a late-night drive, to take out the trash, and it’d be game over. No, it would have to be the fire escape. We’d have to try not to fumble Klein’s body over the side on the way down.
It didn’t take me long to find his car, a silver Audi with vanity plates that read MOVIEMN. At least he’d take his last ride in style. I checked before I slid in to see if anyone had noticed me—the last thing I needed was some witness remembering a tall brunette who didn’t live in the building driving a car with vanity plates into the alley. At the last minute, I remembered the bungee cords in my trunk—I’d helped Lou move a bookshelf weeks ago—and doubled back to my car to fish them out, taking the steps three at a time to get back to Ellen’s apartment.
When I opened the door, I recoiled back over the threshold, my eyes burning. The entire apartment reeked of bleach. I wondered if the smell could seep through the walls, if the neighbors would smell it and wonder. Coughing, I propped the windows open, then immediately shut them—that wouldn’t help our low profile.
In the bedroom, Klein was still swaddled in patchy sheets where I’d left him, the rest of the bed naked beneath him. Ellen was crouched above his head, careful not to touch the body, sobbing as she scrubbed at the reddening headboard, making a frothy mess of herself.
“Ellen,” I said, “we have to go.”
It wasn’t ideal—there was so much left to clean—but with the car parked in the alley, we had to move quickly. Tomorrow, when the clues started to pile up, I didn’t want anyone remembering Klein’s car parked behind the Alto Nido. Hey, did he know anyone there? Wait a minute, a bit player from one of his movies lives here? Strange coincidence . . .
She didn’t seem to hear me, her breathing getting heavier, her sobs turning into hiccups as she scoured the fabric.
“Ellen!”
I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off the bed. She kicked Klein on the way down and gave a faint yelp. I pressed a hand over her mouth, gripping her cheeks so hard they turned white.
“We have to go now.”
Klein wasn’t a big man, a little taller than Ellen but not as tall as me, and while not thin, per se, not exactly fat, either, but he was heavier than I’d expected him to be and more difficult to hold on to. The blood made him slippery, and the feeling of his guts on my hands made the hackles at the back of my neck rise so that I jerked and nearly dropped him every time I thought I felt a slickness on my palms. Soon Ellen and I were sweating, wrestling the bedding and shower curtain around the body—starting to smell, which wasn’t helping matters, either—clipping Klein into place with the bungee cords.
“Oh God,” Ellen muttered as the body slumped against the bed frame, neck jammed unnaturally against the wood. Then she bent over and threw up on the floor, most of the splatter hitting the shower curtain tucked around him and outlining his sunken face in wet bile. I didn’t say anything as she apologized over and over again. I was too busy trying not to stare, trying not to get sick myself.
“Now or never,” I said, as much to myself as to Ellen, and grabbed him under the armpits. He was heavy and sagged unnaturally between us—a human hammock—but we got him to the window. Before I knew it, I had my arms full of dead producer on her fire escape, feeling backward with my toe for the next step, trying not to breathe through my nose, not to groan or trip or make any noise at all.
Together, we bumped him down the stairs. The shower curtain slipped once, and I caught a glimpse that made me queasy. I stopped to cover him back up so that I didn’t throw up, too. The entire time, a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, like even as everything was lurching forward without my permission—the dead producer, having to bring the car around to the alley before we could completely douse the apartment in bleach—it was all happening exactly the way it should.
When we reached the bottom, Ellen propped Klein against the car, shuddering and crying, her face turned away as she kept him in place while I popped the trunk. A bungee cord snicked loose as we slid him into the trunk, and I grabbed it and threw it in the back seat. As he rolled into the car, the shower curtain, tacky with blood, stuck on the carpet and shifted, revealing the corner of his blown-apart face. Just days since I’d seen him at Hollywood Forever, alive, if not well. I cursed under my breath, panting, unable to look away for a moment.
I pushed the trunk softly closed and shoved Ellen into the front seat. She was starting to hyperventilate, to make a strange sound deep in her lungs somewhere between a whistle and a howl.
“Stop that,” I said, my own voice harsh, almost unrecognizable. My arms were shaking from the effort it had taken to drag Klein down the fire escape, and my back was aching. I was crunched up against the steering wheel because Klein’s legs were shorter than mine and I didn’t want to stop to fix it until we’d driven him far, far away from the Alto Nido.
The glow of approaching headlights in the rearview blinded me for a moment. I turned the key in the ignition so sharply the car sputtered and died. Behind me, the headlights flicked their brights, annoyed. They’d gotten an eyeful of the vanity plate now, I thought. I ducked down in my seat and turned the engine again—this time, it caught. I stomped on the gas, spinning my whee
ls for a second as I screeched out of the alleyway, leaving scorched tire marks in my wake.
Ellen started to make a strange, high-pitched noise, unearthly. I couldn’t think with that sound in my head. But one thing was becoming clear. On the drive to Ellen’s apartment, I’d put off calling Lou. I’d had the fantasy I could handle it on my own. I’d already screwed up so many times. But now, with Klein decomposing in the car, I realized how mistaken I’d been. How much I needed her.
Lou would know what to do next. Lou would help me. I was almost positive.
Chapter 15
When Lou’s car pulled up behind me in the canyon, spewing gravel, I let out a long shuddering sigh and nearly buckled over the steering wheel. Don’t cry, I told myself. Don’t you fucking cry. Ellen was doing plenty of crying for us both.
I climbed out of the car and held up a hand. Even before she was out of the car, I could see that Lou’s eyes were big, enormous, and her lips were white. I walked to the back of the car, popped the trunk, and waited for Lou to meet me. There was a chill in the night air and I started to shiver, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the dip in temperature or the twist of both relief and nerves I felt now that Lou was here. I knew she’d help me. She would. But there would be a price.
I’d told her I could handle Ellen. I’d told her I had it under control.
Even in the dark, I could see the body was leaking. The first thing I thought when I noticed it was that I was glad Klein’s car was taking the hit. The carpet in his trunk would never be the same.
Of course, we’d probably end up torching the car anyway—wasn’t that how people disposed of corpses? And Ellen would probably have to get rid of her bed. It was a thing of nightmares now. The balance of my eight grand she hadn’t spent on party dresses would go to a new apartment.
Lou, chain-smoking beside me, hadn’t said much since she’d arrived. Instead, we stood shoulder to shoulder, staring into the trunk of Klein’s car. The light from the filter tip on her cigarette crackled, glowed, and shrank rhythmically next to me, like a series of tiny dying stars. A piece of ash was stuck to the corner of her lip like a gray snowflake, and every so often she tapped the butt of her cigarette against her brow.
In the car, Ellen began the wailing again and I shut the door, mostly for a little peace and quiet but also so I could avoid Lou’s eyes on me.
“Did you check his pulse?” Ellen had asked me on the drive to the canyon. “Maybe they could still do something, maybe if we . . . took him to a hospital . . .”
I hadn’t said anything. We both knew it was useless. Instead, I’d kept turning and twisting the car down different roads, my only objective to get as far from the city lights as I could.
“Please,” she said, and then she repeated it over and over and over again until I gripped her wrist, one hand still on the steering wheel, eyes on the road. I told her if she didn’t shut up, I was going to put her in the trunk with Klein. Her eyes got big and round, and she didn’t say anything after that.
I’d waited until I passed an address I could read and counted my turns until I found a deserted stretch of arroyo seco to my liking. Then I called Lou.
In the dark the trickling liquid from the trunk might have been oil if it wasn’t for the sucked-penny smell of Klein’s blood. Lou turned her eyes back to what had once been Hiram Klein, and she leaned in close to his sort-of face, gone soft and mushy now, collapsing in on the crater of what was once an eyeball.
“Good shot,” she said finally. “Where did it happen?”
Somewhere in the distance a coyote moaned and Ellen mimicked the sound. I still didn’t want to think about her.
I told Lou everything I knew, which wasn’t much. Somewhere in the middle of my story, Lou’s cigarette burned out, but she didn’t make a move to light a new one and she let it burn down to her fingers.
Ellen was keening from the car like something dying, and Lou’s gaze kept flicking toward the back seat. I could see it clearly in that moment. I had a choice: pin it all on Ellen or decide that she was one of our own. And Lou and me, we protected our own.
“Maybe he did it to himself,” I said. “Maybe it was a suicide.”
Lou’s eyes glittered at me in the dark. I knew better than to get close to any of the girls we worked with. And I never would have considered myself close to Ellen, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it: Make him pay. I shuddered.
“You think he got bored of waiting for her to slip into something more comfortable and put one in his own eye? You think that’s a story we could sell?”
My hands were shaking. I put them on top of the trunk and squeezed the metal with my thumbs. My nails rattled against the paint. “He hit her, you know,” I said. “Maybe it was self-defense.” Lou was silent. “She’s fucked if she goes to the police, I promise you that. She won’t say anything. I know she won’t say anything.”
“Okay.” Lou leaned closer to the trunk so that she was nearly eye level with Klein. My arms bridged over them both. “Okay. So what do you want us to do with him? Call Robert?”
I imagined Jackal coming to our aid in his fresh white shirt and dry-clean-only slacks. I imagined the worry on his face at the stains a body would leave. I imagined a scene in which he got hysterical and I had to slap him back and forth across the face screaming, SNAP OUT OF IT, BE A MAN.
But that wasn’t Jackal at all. Maybe that was me. I didn’t want to see his face, I thought, and then I realized maybe it was truer that I didn’t want him to see mine.
“We don’t need him,” I said.
“How are we moving the body, then?” Lou straightened from the car and exhaled twin streams of smoke from her nostrils. For the first time, I noticed she was wearing a black dress, silk and tight. She’d swapped shoes that would’ve matched the outfit for sneakers. Whatever she’d been doing, she’d had enough time to grab the right footwear, but not to change.
“Bungee cords from my car,” I said.
Lou’s mouth dropped open. “You did not.”
“Back seat.”
Lou walked around the side of the car and peered into the back seat, which caused a fresh eruption of wails from Ellen. When she turned back to me, Lou had an expression on her face I’d never seen before. She brought her fists up to her eyes and knuckled them, swaying back and forth until she swayed into my chest, her head against my collarbone for a few seconds, and that’s when I realized she was laughing.
“This isn’t funny, Lou. Come on, I need you.” She pulled back, but I could still feel the weight of her against me. It wasn’t a good feeling, the phantom heft of her. “Stop laughing at me and be helpful,” I snapped.
I’d have been better paid if bodies were a regular occurrence in our line of work. In three years, this was my first. My fingers were accustomed to the glossy coating of hotel key cards and silky scraps of lingerie. Not the oil slick of blood and viscera and other things leaking out of Hiram Klein. Before this week, I’d never expected bodies to be part of our work. I wondered if Lou had ever handled any before this.
“We could drive him to the river. Push the car in,” I said.
“There’s no water in the river,” she said. “And the ocean’s too far. The sun will be coming up by then.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay, okay. So here are the facts. We have a dead body in the trunk.”
“Yes.”
“Along with this dead body, we have . . . we have some paper trail about Klein being our mark. We have someone who hired us, who knows that Klein was being professionally played. We also have a grieving widow who will want answers.” Ellen’s wailing hit a fever pitch, and I leaned forward and smacked the back window with the palm of my hand. “Goddammit, be quiet for one minute!”
“Jo.”
“The body has to go,” I said. “The car has to go. But they can’t really go. Klein is too visible to disappear.”
&nb
sp; Lou nodded, her cheeks hollowed like she was sucking on a lemon. She was waiting for me. She was trying so hard not to tell me what she’d already figured out.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “How much was the contract? Has it already been paid?”
“Jo.” Lou stepped toward me, putting one hand on my shoulder, cupping the smeary mess I’d made of my face. “You’re my girl who can sell any story. Think for a moment. What’s the story we can sell here? One of the richest men in California is dead, and how? What will his wife say? What will the press say?”
I could feel my mouth starting to tremble. Keep it together, Jo, you fucking crybaby. “He was— Maybe it was a robbery gone bad, a c-carjacking—”
“Jo,” Lou said, stroking my cheek. She cupped my face in her hands, a lover’s move, and whispered, “You said anything. You’d do anything.”
The answer was staring me in the face and I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to see it at all.
I thought of the Lady, with her stupid blue tattoo and so much money she could write a monthly bribe to the police for eight grand. The Lady, who held my life in her hands. And on the other side, Ellen, with too much information and too many reasons to turn over what she knew, the best reasons now. With each blink, I could see a different Ellen—the imprint of her arm in the glow of the TV at the Aldo Nido, then her face streaked with tears and pink feathers in the front seat of my car.
I closed my eyes, let my cheek lean into the curve of Lou’s hand. Remembered Lou’s lips on mine on Olvera Street. The brush of her fingertips as she tucked a cocktail umbrella behind my ear. Lou’s face tipped to mine, telling me she knew I’d do anything for her, she could count on me. Telling me without telling me: we could always count on each other. If no one else, always each other.
And then again, for the last time, the sound of Ellen keening in the car.
The Lady Upstairs Page 13