The Lady Upstairs

by Halley Sutton

  I had other places to be.

  Chapter 20

  Sole del Mare was the sort of address I didn’t naturally drift to, all glass windows and whipped beef tartare and juicy dishonest cocktails. No soft dark corners to hide in. Outside, a deck featured a nice view of the ocean, but it was too hot to stare at something cool and not drink it, so I parked it at the bar, a long, glossy slab underneath a wall of alcohol lit up like a movie-theater marquee.

  As I sat down, I slid my phone out of my purse, keeping an eye on the time. I put the purse on the stool beside me. If anyone asked, I was waiting for someone. Even after running home to change into a black pencil skirt and white silk blouse, I’d gotten there earlier than Carrigan. If he was coming at all. The secretary had told Lou and me that Mondays were his day, but that didn’t mean every week. I could think of a thousand reasons he might not show.

  I took a lap around the restaurant before I settled on the bar, walking out some of my anxious energy as I cased the place. Two bathrooms upstairs, and a more discreet one downstairs, by the kitchen. The dining room, with airy planks of tables, wouldn’t do: nothing quiet or intimate. Communal benches were not made for playing footsie. It wasn’t the type of place I’d have chosen on my own, but I could make it work. I had to.

  When he came—if he came—how to start it? Aren’t you the man I keep seeing on people’s lawns? He might like that, the recognition. But I didn’t want to act like a groupie. You didn’t make time in your schedule for groupies.

  Don’t say anything, then. Stare at him until he says something. Men liked that from a pretty woman, direct, friendly eye contact. Maybe throw him off—offer to buy him a drink. No, his wife’s family had money—he was used to women buying him things. Let him start it, let him say hello. Smile, chat, be a little distant but interested. Make him laugh. Say goodbye before he did, make him work for it.

  It was funny, how easily it all came back.

  The first time, the very first real time after the disaster with the Asshole, Lou had shown up at Tarantula Gardens before I’d even made it home, before I’d even washed the smell of that man off me. I found her sitting, legs crisscross-applesauce, on my doorstep. A bottle of bourbon warming between her thighs.

  “How was it?” she asked.

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to explain it—that I felt both different and exactly the same. I’d shed a skin I didn’t even know I’d had. I felt tough, untouchable, even with the ripe nimbus of the mark’s breath, heavy with nicotine and the rotting flora of unflossed teeth, in my mouth.

  “I don’t drink that,” I said, nodding at the bottle in her lap. “I only drink beer.”

  I put my key into the lock of the apartment I was still getting used to, the one whose first and last months’ rent Lou had paid. I pushed the door open, wishing she’d at least given me an hour to clean myself up, consider my feelings on my own.

  Years later, when I was managing my own set of girls navigating their own first times with marks, I’d realized the strategy to what Lou was doing—not giving me enough time to think things through, to change my mind. I tossed my keys onto the table and set my bag down underneath it, heard Lou following me inside.

  The high from the pie escapades, what we’d done to the Asshole, was starting to burn off. I’d done things in the last week that made me ask myself why I kept saying yes to her. Why was I listening to this woman I barely knew? Why did I let her talk me into the things I was doing? But on the other hand, there was this apartment. I wasn’t sleeping in a car. I wasn’t crying myself to sleep at night. Not every night, anyway.

  And there was that money I owed her boss. I couldn’t forget about that.

  “Beer isn’t gonna cut the mustard tonight,” Lou said, following me inside and plopping herself down on my couch. She was always saying things like that, that made her sound like she’d come out of a different era altogether.

  I went to the kitchen that I still didn’t know, searched a moment or two for a clean glass, and ran it under the tap. Lou’s eyes tracked me as I took long deep gulps of water, trying to wash out the taste of him.

  “How was it?” Lou repeated.

  “Well, it’s the first time I’ve ever fucked someone for money, I’m not entirely sure how it was,” I snapped. My hands were shaking as I refilled the water glass.

  When my back was turned, Lou had stood up, moved to the kitchenette. She put a cool hand on the back of my neck. I flinched—I could feel his slobbering lips moving from my hairline to my spine—but she only reached around and tipped a little of the uncapped bourbon into my glass. Pressed it to my lips like medicine. Her hand on the back of my neck sent tingles up to my scalp and down to my toes, unbearable sparks that fizzled out before they had a chance to catch fire. Trapped between her hand and mine, the imprint of the mark’s gluey kisses on my skin.

  I slurped at the drink, the sharp sting of the booze the only taste in my mouth now. I finished the watery bourbon and turned to face her. Her green eyes had little flecks of gold in them. She was standing so close to me, I could feel heat radiating from her. She moved her hand from my neck to the side of my face, tucked a dark strand of hair behind my ear.

  “Give that to me,” I said, and grabbed the bottle from her. I poured a large splash of brown into the glass, topping it with the barest spritz of water, reversing the percentages. Lou’s smile grew big, and then it grew wolfish.

  “That’s my girl,” she said. “I’ll take one of those.”

  It was the first time she stayed the night with me. We stayed up for hours talking, drinking—I told her every gory detail, all the meanest things. The zits on his ass. The way he’d let out a series of high-pitched whimpers, like an incontinent dog, between lizard-flick licks. That made Lou laugh so hard she’d fallen backward and knocked her head against my sofa.

  “That’s a new one,” she said, giggling, as she sat upright, massaging her head. “That’s perfect. He won’t want anyone to know about that.”

  “What was your first time like?” I asked, trying to think up more things to make her laugh. “When you started working here.” Lou crawled to the bourbon bottle that sat upright between us, like the deity we were worshipping, and took a swig.

  “Oh, that,” Lou said. “My first time fucking for money had nothing to do with working here.”

  It made complete sense as soon as she’d said it; dominoes that had been lined up in my brain finally fell. After that, Lou pushed another drink on me and laid out the plan for how it would all work, how many weeks I’d spend with the mark, how it would end. He did want to see me again, right?

  “Oh yes,” I said, looking down at my hands, thinking of the way he’d played with my hair in the postcoital moments, sniffing it. As I’d left, he’d turned to me, the half-darkness of the shade-drawn room drawing a soft slope down his sagging belly, and said, “You’re lovely, kid. When can I taste you again?”

  At the time, I’d thought the idea of sleeping with him over and over again would be work, real work. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t that much different than sleeping with a bad date because you had nothing to do or nowhere to sleep or because you wanted to be polite. But this was different—better—because I always got to have a secret. Men would buy me drinks, and use their best sweet talk, pull out all the stops to try to tumble me, trick me, onto their sheets. And the whole time, I’d be paying attention, jotting down the things they liked or didn’t, the things that could make Lou laugh, the things that we could use against them. They were always the helpless ones, in the end. I liked that. I liked that so much.

  Lou and I fell asleep in the living room three-quarters of the way into the bottle. I woke up in the middle of the night, spinning, thirsty and bloated, the sugars of the dark drink swelling in my veins. I pushed myself up, feeling like a crust of bread that had been soaked through with liquid—with bourbon—and Lou was snoring a little, her h
ead tucked into the corner between the couch and the fiddle-leaf fig she’d put next to the sliding glass door.

  Months later, Lou would tell me, drunk, that the business had never been the same before me, that she hadn’t even known she needed me until I was there. That I was becoming indispensable to the Lady. That was the word she used, indispensable. “Do you know what that means?” she slurred. “It means you never get to leave me.” But that was fine. I never wanted to.

  All of that was still a hope, then, as I sat there, watching Lou sleep, wondering why I didn’t leave that apartment, call my mother, eat crow. Lou’s hair—she wore it short then—was like a silky auburn halo around her head, one tendril reaching for her arrow-straight nose, the kind of nose the Greeks liked to sculpt for posterity. Her eyelashes flickered and she gasped—a bad dream. I reached out and pushed the hair out of her face and Lou sighed, rolled over. I thought to myself, Now you have a best friend. Now you have a home. And then I pulled myself to the bathroom on my stomach and threw up for hours.

  I thought of all that there, waiting for Carrigan. It had been so long since I’d done a case myself. Once, I’d found it thrilling. I wondered how it would feel, now.

  People started to filter into the bar, young professionals mostly. There was a big tilted mirror above the bar’s top shelf, which I liked—I could see anyone who came in behind me without being caught looking. Even at four in the afternoon, the bar had a few regular customers, well-dressed women in brightly colored silk blouses, meticulously groomed men. Everyone appeared to be speaking at each other, not to each other, and no one was looking at me at all.

  I made eye contact with the bartender, a pretty woman with a mane of dark curly hair and hundreds of dollars of ink crawling up her arms, and ordered another gin and tonic. A double.

  “You don’t want to try something more exotic? Our small-batch elderflower syrup is pretty rad.” She grinned at me, a gap between her front teeth big enough to wedge a tongue into.

  I grimaced.

  She laughed and made the double. I studied the campaign brochure Lou and I had swiped from Carrigan’s office. I examined his face from as many different angles as the pixelated photographs would allow. I wanted to be sure I would recognize him. I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t make any more mistakes.

  Behind me, a large group entered the restaurant and seemed to be trying to decide between sitting outdoors in the gray soupy heat or pressing a few sticky tables together inside. It was a different group from the others that had wandered into Sole del Mare—older, for one thing. A man in a gray suit with his back to me talked to a few of his peers, gesturing up and down as he spoke to emphasize his point. An office party? A happy hour group? Or a campaign strategy meeting?

  “Another, love?” The bartender broke my concentration on the mirror. I wasn’t pacing myself and I’d downed the drink in twenty minutes. I was drinking too fast and I didn’t care. I nodded, checked the mirror again.

  The man in the gray suit was turning, I could almost see his face—I leaned forward toward the bar. It was possible it was Mitch Carrigan, although I wasn’t certain. He was laughing, at his ease. The same dimpled chin from the brochure. The dark and graying hair.

  Somehow, he was better-looking in person.

  The bartender slid my drink to me. Carrigan was moving toward the bar. He’d stopped to chat with a couple, older, posing for an invisible camera. The man was good. He was always on. I knew that feeling. I scratched my thumbnail along the condensation of my glass as I watched.

  As he got closer, I slid my purse off the stool next to me. Now that the bar was full, it was the only empty gap left to order. Carrigan idled up next to me. From the side, he looked like any regular businessman: clean gray suit draped over square-cut shoulders; a head like a block of cement. He cut his eyes toward me, smiled. Friendly, but not pushy about it.

  I turned on my stool so I faced him, crossing my legs. I hung a little smile on my face and watched him for a moment.

  Carrigan was ordering a round of drinks for the table, and he was ignoring me but not well. He maintained a steady way of glancing around the rim of the bar, like he was taking it all in, but his eyes kept finding my cleavage. After they did, he’d look away and smile a little, sheepish, like he knew he’d been caught.

  It took about a decade, but he completed the order for the table, a boss buying shots for his crew, not even asking someone else to do it, that’s the kind of guy he was. A man you could have a drink with. A man who would be good for political office. A man who was three points up, with a lot to lose by a very small margin.

  The bartender started making the drinks, a trough of alcohol, and Carrigan turned to face me, finally. I grinned at him, full force.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello yourself.”

  Chapter 21

  I put a stilettoed foot on the rim of the bar stool and pushed it toward him. Carrigan looked down at my legs and then back up at my face. I hid a smile.

  “Have a seat,” I told him. “You’re going to be a while.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your drinks,” I said, letting my lips spread in a slow smile. “Might be another hour or so before they’re ready.”

  Carrigan was half on the bar stool, the posture of a man reluctant to completely commit himself. One eye shifting back to the party he’d left.

  “What’s the occasion, big shot?”

  He didn’t answer that question. Playing hard to get. “What are you drinking?” he asked, nodding at my glass. Deflecting.

  “This is water,” I said. “But it seems to be making me tipsy.”

  He looked at my glass and then at me. No smile. “So it does.”

  Maybe not playing. I finished the drink and made a small show of setting it down next to him. Carrigan looked at the empty glass and then away. He wasn’t going to offer.

  “What are you drinking?” I asked. Carrigan slapped a palm down on the bar and half-turned. From sweet cross-wearing wifey to Tana the ballbuster, and now here he was, not chatting with me. What did I need to do, stick a hand down his pants? Or maybe he was too scared of Tana.

  “Club soda.”

  Aha. “Not drinking tonight? Scared of revealing yourself?”

  Carrigan frowned, cocked his head. Turned all the way to face me, those big blue eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s an old Bogart quote,” I said, shaking my head a little like I was embarrassed for knowing it. “‘People who don’t drink are afraid of revealing themselves.’ It seemed to fit the bill.”

  “Maybe I am a little afraid of revealing myself,” he said. The bartender finished making the drinks and nodded at Carrigan, who slipped her a card. “Excuse me. Enjoy your evening.”

  And then he was headed back to his table, his group of admirers, leaving me gaping after him. One shot and I’d missed it. Was I so not Carrigan’s type that he couldn’t spare even five minutes to talk to me? I knew he liked blondes, but surely his tastes weren’t so exclusive.

  I tapped the rim of my empty glass, held up two fingers for a double, and the bartender nodded, started to make me another. Had I been too forward? Not forward enough?

  Something danced on the bar top in front of me. It took me a moment to realize that it was a cell phone, my cell phone. It was Lou. I held it in my hands for a moment, debated answering. I was scared that if I answered, Lou would hear in my voice that something was up, that somehow I’d telepathically transmit Carrigan’s presence to her. I was scared that if I didn’t answer, I’d never hear from her again. I stared so long, letting the phone ring and ring, that the toothy bartender slid me the drink and asked, “Are you going to get that?”

  The phone stopped ringing.

  I set the phone down and watched Carrigan’s group in the mirror. He was stoic, serious. Smiled when spoken to but looked, perhaps, a little bit bored. The p
hone started chirping again. I pictured Lou on the other line, missing me. But probably only missing me because she couldn’t reach me. It didn’t matter. As soon as I pictured her face, I was a goner. I answered, my eyes on Carrigan’s party in the mirror. Leading-man handsome. Maybe Lou really would have come out of retirement for him if Ellen hadn’t intervened.

  “Ignoring me?” I heard a smile in Lou’s voice, but it wasn’t toothless.

  “Sorry, it’s not a good time.” Behind me, Carrigan checked his watch. Definitely bored. A man that good-looking didn’t need to waste his time in bars like this, I thought. Maybe he was eager to get back to Tana—maybe there really were still husbands like that. But he came to happy hour here with the boys every week, or almost. Maybe he didn’t even know yet what he was looking for here.

  “Oh? You’re busy?” A pause. “With Robert?”

  I shook my head, even though Lou couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to be thinking of Lou now while I was trying to figure out Carrigan. I didn’t want to deal with her jealousy swings at the Sole del Mare, those moments when she seemed to cling to me. But I wasn’t hanging up the phone, either. “What’s up?”

  “I wanted to see where you were. Thought you might be thirsty, maybe you’d want to grab a drink.”

  I stared down at my double. “I’m taking a break from drinking. I’m grabbing something to eat.”

  A beat of silence. “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone. Call up Mr. Alibi, he can take you for a drink.” My voice sounded bitter. If I closed my eyes, I could see Lou’s face staring at me through Jackal’s car window, tight and disappointed. In me.

  “Out getting a bite to eat. I wondered. I didn’t see your car parked in its spot.”

  I blinked. “You’re at my apartment?”

  “Until five minutes ago. Like I said, I wanted to talk. See how you’re holding up.” Lou took a deep breath on the other line or blew out cigarette smoke—I couldn’t tell which. “Also, there’s an unmarked sitting outside your apartment. I circled the block a few times and he didn’t move. Just sitting there in the dark. I waited about forty minutes. He’s not budging.”