“And I’m not going to,” I said, starting to feel annoyed. “The bartender sure is attentive. When did you stop being a regular? Why didn’t you ever bring me here before?”
“Does Jackal know Ellen’s name?”
“Yes, he knows her name.”
Lou leaned back in her chair, staring slightly above my head. The bartender reached in front of me, set down another drink. His T-shirt bunched up, and I could see the tattoo on his biceps, the white flesh pebbled like an uncooked chicken. He was looking straight at Lou. Staring at her, in fact.
“Thank you, that’s enough,” I snapped at him. He straightened and left.
Lou cleared her throat. “It’ll be on the news. He’ll want to know what happened. And,” she said, looking me over, “you’re half in the bag already.” She drew her phone from her purse, punching a few buttons with her thumb. When Jackal answered, she told him the address and hung up. Seeing my face she added, “You know it’s better if we tell him a handful of details. Get ahead of it. That way he won’t be guessing.”
“Sure,” I said, not liking the idea of all of us together in a bar, socializing. One cozy murderous family.
After that, it all went quickly. What to tell the police if and when they came to the office. If anyone asked, Lou had never met Ellen, never seen her even once. That part I’d insisted on. I’d watched Lou’s face as I’d said it, watched the way she opened her mouth and then shut it before nodding.
I was nursing the last of my third whiskey. It was a nice bar, even if it was the color of silt. Lou had excused herself to go to the bathroom, and in my alone time something else occurred to me, something that seemed more urgent even than the police. When Lou came back with splotches of wet on the front of her dress that could’ve been water or tears, I cornered her.
“Will you tell the tattooed bitch about our”—I pulled one hand away from my glass so I could make air quotes—“little problem?”
Lou froze, half crouched above the chair. “What?”
“That tacky, ugly blue.” I reunited with my drink and tickled the ice with my teeth. It had been a long thirty seconds apart for us both. “Woman with the blue tattoo, a.k.a. the Lady Upstairs, a.k.a. the boss you refuse to tell me anything about. Your hero.”
Lou frowned and leaned forward. “Blue tattoo? What are you talking about?”
“Might’ve told you, but you were probably busy with Alibi. Good old Alibi. Trusty old Alibi. I met her. In the office. What, you think I don’t have secrets, too?”
The look on Lou’s face made me grin. I stretched my arms over my head—pretty, pretty princess. My blouse was slicked to me like it had been painted on, but I felt in control of the conversation for the first time, even with the softness of the booze in my veins.
“I bet you’re jealous I met her and I didn’t need you to do it.”
“What was she doing in the office?”
That question knocked me close to sober. “I’m not sure. Looking for you. She said she’d find you.”
“The two of you spoke?”
“Uh-huh. Blue tattoo on her wrist. Not even a nice blue, like a navy. Ugly blue, ugly, ugly.”
“What did she say to you? Did you mention anything about Ellen? Even her name?”
Lou tucked her lips between her teeth and glared at me, staring intently at my face. I liked having an effect on her.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Jo . . . !”
“Temper, temper,” I chided. “I didn’t mention Ellen. I did not believe that Ms. Howard was relevant at that time.” I unfurled each word carefully from my tongue. “Should we mention her now?”
Lou shot me a what are you, crazy? look. “You better hope she never finds out.” She punched out her cigarette. “Jo, this isn’t a joke. She’ll say you’ve gotten lazy, that I’ve gotten soft. That I should’ve put you in that car with Ellen. Or at least left the two of you for the cops to find. She has a business to run.”
The bar door swung open, and Robert stood there, framed in light. It was still bright outside, still daytime. That was surprising. It felt like we’d been in the dark for hours, underwater.
Lou turned to him, and she was standing now, smiling for him, absolutely nothing wrong, nothing weighing heavy on her mind. She leaned forward as he stepped closer, and I noticed crow’s feet starting to tug at the corner of her eyes, gone when she didn’t smile or laugh. And I couldn’t help myself, him walking toward us, it slipped out, I said: “I’m glad, Lou. I’m glad it’s going to always be there between the two of us. Forever. Just you and me.”
Chapter 18
If there was more to Robert Jackal than met the eye, he did an awfully good job of hiding it, although truthfully I never tried to dig very deep. My favorite thing about him—besides that face—was that you never felt like you were missing anything. There was never any wondering what he was thinking.
When Lou brought up Ellen—the story abridged so that what had happened was between her and the ghost of Klein, but we’d all have to be careful about what we said to anyone dancing around the office—Jackal didn’t even flinch. He slurped his drink.
“So if the police come to the office—” Jackal started to say, but Lou cut him off.
“When the police come, you tell them you never even met her,” she said. “Because you never did. Right?”
“I told you he didn’t,” I said. Lou kept her eyes fixed on Jackal. Waited for him to answer.
“Not once.”
“And”—here Lou hesitated, stared at me, tried to tell me something, but I wasn’t reading it—“we’re pausing our cases, everything we’ve been working on. We need to keep a low profile, until all of this blows over. We can’t afford any attention.”
Jackal frowned, and his eyes narrowed. He cocked his head and stared at Lou. “That comes from the Lady? She knows about this?”
“It’s from me,” Lou said, locking eyes with him. Something was happening between them, a power struggle that I couldn’t read or understand. “We don’t want the Lady knowing about any of this.”
Jackal nodded, his lips twisted ugly into a sneer. He turned to me, eyebrows raised. If he was looking for backing from me, he wouldn’t get it. The man looked the other way when his girlfriends took the long snooze. He finally said, grudgingly, “Fine by me.”
That was the last the three of us talked shop that night. Instead, Lou and Jackal launched into a conversation about a movie they’d both seen, a talky shoot-’em-up Jackal couldn’t convince me to sit through. Lou was loose with him, flirtatious and not meaning it, and Jackal, the man who never stepped offstage, wasn’t always searching for his cue. He fumbled with words. He had a goofy laugh, a snorty hyuk-hyuk, when he wasn’t trying to seduce someone. Watching them, I could see the dynamic that must have existed before me. They shared the happy-go-lucky manner of nonmurderers.
You’re drunk, Jo, I told myself, and then realized that it was mostly true but could be truer. I looked around for the bartender. Somehow, the bar had filled up and I hadn’t noticed. No bartender. When it wasn’t Lou calling, he couldn’t be bothered. I stood up to go look for him.
“Jo?”
Behind me, Lou’s voice had taken on a worried pitch. But she didn’t stand up and I didn’t turn around. If she and Jackal were enjoying themselves so much without me, I could find someone to enjoy myself with, too.
I walked to the bar, happy I wasn’t swaying, happy that to anyone who didn’t know me I looked sober enough. I wandered around, swerving through conversations, looking for the bartender to grab his attention.
I thought of something Ellen had said once, when we’d gone to grab a drink after one of her first meetings with Klein. She’d wanted to order something new, said she didn’t feel like herself. I’d worried that she was unraveling already, couldn’t handle the heat of the game, and I’d asked her ab
out it—why didn’t she feel like herself? She smiled at me strangely, lips pressed together, not looking at all like the half-sure girl I’d always known her to be. “That’s how I wanted it to feel,” she said. “I’m so sick of always being myself.” She’d ordered a dirty martini with blue-cheese-stuffed olives, and she’d only taken one sip of it before she sat back, dismayed. “That’s disgusting,” she’d said.
I leaned over the bar top, plucking at the bottles racked neatly behind the counter. I jostled the couple next to me, tipping a woman in heels into her date.
“Hey, what the hell?” I couldn’t tell who said it. I didn’t care. Then there were two big hands around my waist, gently pulling me back. The smell of Jackal’s cologne in my face, even from behind. The man bathed in it.
“I wanted one more,” I said. “Blue cheese.”
“Time to go.” Jackal spun me around, marching me back to Lou, who was standing with her arms crossed over her chest.
Lou walked behind Jackal and me, quiet until he poured me into the passenger seat of his car, and then she said, “Keep an eye on her. This was too sloppy by half.”
She pushed the door closed in my face as Jackal moved to the driver’s side. I wanted to press a finger against the glass, tell her something I knew she needed to know, but she was staring down at me like she’d never seen me before, like she never wanted to see me again. I don’t think she looked at me like that even when I brought her to Ellen. And then we were driving away and I couldn’t see Lou at all anymore.
The swaying motion of the car lulled me into a calmness that was like sobriety except for the disjointedness of my thoughts. Jackal tried to talk to me once or twice. He’d even, voice gruff and unsure, asked if I wanted to talk about Ellen.
“Don’t you say her name to me,” I snapped at him, and then I cranked the seat back and closed my eyes and pretended to sleep the whole drive back to his place.
The car rocked as Jackal’s door slammed shut and I jerked awake, the ruse having turned real somewhere on the freeway. I could see him silhouetted, walking up to the gate of his apartment complex. He meant to leave me in the car to sleep it off. I stumbled out, the alarm cooing behind me, and followed him to his apartment.
Jackal hadn’t even bothered to turn a light on before he wandered into his bedroom, leaving the door ajar. I could hear him prop his window open, start up the box fan, then lean out to click off the car alarm. He came back into the living room, went to the fridge, and stared inside for a moment. He closed it without grabbing anything. Went to the bathroom, started to brush his teeth in the dark. Like I wasn’t even there.
“Are you going to make me sleep on the couch?”
Jackal leaned into the sink and spat. “I don’t care where you sleep.” Coming out of the bathroom, he stared at my face, and when he asked, “Are you crying?” it was a surprise to me that he was right.
“No,” I said, and unbuttoned my pants, reaching for him. “No, no, no.”
* * *
After, I went to the fridge, in search of anything. I was more in control now, fucked sober, but a sandwich would still help. I’d never cried in front of Jackal before, not real tears. Inside his fridge, there were two beers, a half-drunk bottle of red—in the fridge?—the wedged-inside cork grazing the humming yellow light. The only actual food a half-eaten wheel of cheese.
I’d never once been inside Jackal’s apartment when it hadn’t been clean. When things first turned extracurricular between the two of us, I’d wondered if he kept it clean because he wanted to impress me. Later, I’d realized that was just how Jackal was, like white teeth full of cavities. Nothing in the fridge, but not one item out of place.
“Do you bring other women here?” I asked, bare-assed in front of the Camembert.
“Jealous?” Jackal purred from the couch, his mouth still dewy from me.
“How much do those photographs go for?” What was the point of running your own blackmail sideshow if you kept the fridge three-quarters empty? It made me sad, the idea of some other woman seeing this pathetic excuse for a fridge.
“Not this again,” Jackal muttered, folding his arms behind his head.
“Two hundred a print? Three? And who wants them? The Lady would know if they ever became public.”
“They’ll never become public,” he assured me. “Stop worrying about it.”
I couldn’t, but I didn’t have it in me to argue anymore, not that day. I’d press Jackal again in the morning. With Klein dead, so, too, was my hope of an easy recoup of the police’s bribe.
“You need something to take your mind off what’s-her-name. That’s all you need.” A smile crept over Jackal’s face and he palmed himself. “Well, maybe not all . . .”
I didn’t normally stay over at his place. I hated the ritual of waking up together, getting back into my old clothes like a paid woman but with no cash in my pocket. Or, worse, Jackal fixing breakfast in the kitchen while I slept, laying out the paper, starting our morning together.
That night I let him wrap himself around me in his damp thousand-count sheets, but there was no sleep on the horizon. When I could hear him snoring, I considered grabbing his keys, driving back to my apartment. But I didn’t want to be alone again. Instead, I tossed and turned, thinking of the look on Lou’s face as Jackal and I had pulled away from Chinatown. So I’d had a few drinks. After we’d left the canyon, she’d gone back to Mr. Alibi. I’d cried for Ellen in my cold bed by myself. That counted for something.
I couldn’t sleep. Jackal kept wrapping his arms around me, and the box fan wasn’t up to the task of keeping me cool with his hairy chest pressed to my face. Around midnight, I crawled out of bed and stretched out on the couch. I turned on the TV and passed through different shows, a rerun that I could tell was supposed to be funny, the way the laugh track was yakking on and on. The lead actress was making her life more complicated than it needed to be, but weren’t we all. Flip. A channel that only half came in, tinsel hopping across the screen. Flip.
An old movie, black and white. Two women in a car with the top down, driving around winding cliffs—Italy, maybe. One of the women wore a scarf that blew in the wind behind her, and her chocolate-chip freckles reminded me of Lou. The one driving had her hands clenched on the steering wheel. Bug-eyed sunglasses covered half her face. She looked happy—she glanced over at her compatriot, and that was the word I was thinking, happy. She said something to her friend in lisping Spanish, and on the subtitles I caught the words Costa Brava. Around one turn, the unsuspecting women giggled together—lovers? in black and white?—and then the car swerved and they . . .
Flip.
The news. A shiny-toothed anchor announced a new development in the mayoral race. Somehow, Carrigan was pulling ahead—polling well with housewives, no doubt. It was only a three-point lead, but we were down to the wire. I studied his face on the TV, superimposed in the right-hand corner. We’d been so close. A late-breaking three-point lead, I could’ve done something with that. But Ellen had put an end to it. Like the television anchor had read my thoughts, his photo dissolved, replaced by Ellen’s face.
A young reporter in a skirt suit stood in front of the St. Leo Hotel in the waning light of early evening. My heart stopped beating, and I pressed the volume up, up, up, not caring if I woke Jackal.
“And now, to the case that’s captured the attention of our city, a small break in the investigation of the deaths of Hollywood producer Hiram Klein and his young mistress, Ellen ‘Lenny’ Howard.”
Lenny. I tried to reconcile my Ellen with a girl who could be called Lenny.
“Sources tell me, in a Channel 7 exclusive, that Klein and Howard were known to frequent the St. Leo Hotel. It may even have been the scene of the last-known sighting of the pair alive together. The two checked into a room earlier in the week, and witnesses claim that Klein left in a hurry, looking angry. Ms. Howard left the hotel an
hour later.” No mention of her bruised face from these observant witnesses. Or of me. “Authorities are asking anyone with further information to come forward.”
A hotline to call for tips flashed across the screen, and it panned away from the young reporter back to the desk, to a man and a woman who looked appropriately sympathetic for the loss of two lives but who broke into immediate smiles once the St. Leo was out of frame. How nice to have that option, to set it down.
The news moved on to other tragedies. But I couldn’t get the picture of the St. Leo out of my head. I’d known it was only a matter of time, but still.
Here we go. It was really starting. I was almost glad.
Chapter 19
Four days later, early Monday morning, the cops found me.
Since Chinatown, I’d kept myself busy scouring the office, trying to erase all traces of her. I grabbed anything she’d touched—the picture of buffalo in Golden Gate Park Lou had given me that Ellen admired once, the tumbler I’d made her drink out of—and piled it all on the chair she’d sat in the last time she’d been in the office, when she’d tried to blackmail her way out of the Klein job. It took three sweaty trips to dumpsters four blocks away from the office to clear her out.
It helped keep me from thinking about what we’d done. Or the fact that I hadn’t heard from Lou since Chinatown. She hadn’t come to the office; she hadn’t called. I didn’t bother calling her first. If I called and she didn’t pick up, I’d know for sure she was ignoring me.
In the picture the papers ran—the same headshot she’d given me, that I dug out from a drawer—a big blue flower perched fatly behind Ellen’s right ear. A dahlia. A cheap mall headshot from a time when she had hopes of being an actress who stayed vertical. There was a soft halo of light around her head that wasn’t doing her hairstyle any favors, and you could see where her lipstick was smeared along the corner of one tooth. Make him pay, I thought, staring at those dark eyes, her stretched-mouth smile. Make him pay. I ripped the photo in two and buried the pieces in a notebook on my desk.
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