The Lady Upstairs

by Halley Sutton

  “About Ellen,” he clarified. “About exactly what happened that night.”

  “What a hero you are. Isn’t this sort of like asking me?”

  Jackal shrugged and took a swallow of the wine. Usually it was him watching me drink. Funny that I’d never noticed before. Funny that this was the way things would end.

  I tried again to kiss him, and Jackal let me, but again he broke it. I stared at him. “You don’t want me? Now that you’ve seen me with Carrigan?”

  Jackal closed his eyes and dropped his head onto the couch back. “It’s not that.”

  “So what, then?”

  Jackal’s leg jiggled against the cushions. “It’s not what I want to remember about you,” he said. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “The Lady would say you’re getting soft,” I teased, trying not to feel stung. “I guess it’s a good thing you’re leaving.”

  Jackal winced, and I took another sip of my drink. Around us, my apartment was so empty. I thought that if I had plans to stay I’d have to decorate. But the new version of Jo, the one headed for a different country, different life, she’d decorate another apartment. She’d make a home somewhere else.

  “Here’s some advice: drop the stuff about the Lady,” Jackal said. “We don’t know anything about her, only Lou. Don’t you think that’s odd? I’ve been thinking— Jo, I think—”

  “Easy enough for you to say drop it,” I snapped. “If you’re smart, you’ll be in Mexico by sunrise and heading for Brazil in twelve hours. Finding some new rich woman to foot your bills.”

  “You could’ve come,” Jackal said. “I wanted you to come. Didn’t I offer to let you come with me?”

  “So generous. Tell me, did you give what’s-her-name that option before the Lady had her killed?”

  Jackal blanched. He stared at me for so long without saying anything that I almost wished I could take it back. “I’m drunk,” I started to say, but Jackal just shook his head. After a moment, I said, “What were you going to say? About the Lady?” I didn’t think he knew the name Rita Palmer, but I wondered what he had pieced together over the years.

  “Nothing,” Jackal said. “What do I know, anyway?”

  We both stewed in silence for a bit until Jackal stood up, went to the kitchen, and brought us each a glass of water. “To sober up,” he said.

  I reached forward and turned on the TV. I curled into him—I wouldn’t call it cuddling, exactly, but if you squinted, it wasn’t such a stretch to call it a loverly thing to do. He didn’t try to kiss me, but he stroked my hair, my back, lulling me into a drowsy half-awakeness. I could feel the yes and no of him inside me even then, the thing that pulled him close and the thing that pushed him away. Maybe one and the same.

  I finished my bottle of wine, and when I was done, Jackal silently handed me his. It was near midnight when he stood up—my head completely soggy by then—and told me it was time for him to go.

  I walked him to his car. No long, drawn out goodbyes for us. Three years had taught us both that; it wasn’t our style. And it had been only three years. Of what? Nothing worth crying over. Nothing I couldn’t do without. Instead, I tried to focus on the car, which was swimming in front of me.

  “You have all your things packed in there? How did you manage that?”

  “I travel light,” Jackal said. “Except for that fifteen large.” He unlocked his car and fiddled with the keys.

  “Adios, my lovely,” I said, making a joke of it. “My best to the woman you’ll be screwing tomorrow night. I’ll think of you if you think of me.”

  Even then, Jackal didn’t know how to be soft. His fingers crept around the back of my neck, like he might choke me—once more, for old time’s sake—and his thumb stroked the hollow at the base of my throat.

  He leaned in to kiss me, and I reached up to meet him, then changed my mind at the last second and pulled back. “The St. Leo. Just tell me,” I whispered.

  “Lou asked me to swing by the Albatross,” he said. “Pick up a bill, and then . . . well, you can guess. I really did lose track of time.”

  “You’re a goddamn—” I started, but he leaned forward and caught me in a kiss that didn’t end. Finally, he broke the seal between us and took a deep shuddering breath, a serious breath, a one-last-declaration breath, and I thought of what Lou had drilled into me: never get attached, never love someone so much you lose yourself. I ducked my head down, tried to nip at his thumb with my teeth. He jerked his hand away as though it had been scalded. “Everything’s always a joke with you.”

  “Goodbye, Robert,” I said.

  He walked away, then turned back for one last glance, a hand on the roof of his car. “Think about what I said. You should get out.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. I could tell he didn’t believe me. “You should go,” I said. “Wherever you’re going has a lot of miles between here and there.”

  “I’ll still buy you that last drink sometime.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’ll be nice. I’ll be waiting for it.”

  He started the car, the engine loud and whirring. It didn’t sound healthy. It didn’t sound like it could take him far. He rolled down the window and said something to me. I couldn’t hear it, or pretended I couldn’t, and waved one more time and turned and walked back to my apartment.

  Chapter 29

  Red lipstick looked wrong for the occasion—too celebratory, perhaps—and I couldn’t get the line right. I kept frowning at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. This close, my reflection was always choppy, like none of the parts of my face fit together. One arch of my lip was higher than the other, giving me the look of a demented Kewpie doll, and there was a shadow of Hell Hath No Fury beneath my lower lip.

  I didn’t have many superstitions, but one thing Lou had taught me was that looking the part was the first step to feeling the part. Had I ever told Ellen that? I couldn’t remember. I hoped I had. Not that it mattered anymore.

  When I stepped into the police office with the name of the Lady, the selection of Jackal’s photographs that didn’t showcase Lou, and the phone records, I would be wearing my power lipstick. I would feel confident because I would look confident, and that’s what they would see. Not a murderer, or a working girl, or someone with something to hide.

  I grabbed the bullet and tried to even out the lines, but I couldn’t stop my hands shaking, and I realized, quickly, that I was making it worse rather than better. I took a deep breath and stared at myself in the rearview mirror. Now or never, Jo.

  The heat had started to clear a little, and the trees with their banana leaves shimmied a little with the cool breeze. If you waited long enough, the heat on anything went down. You got used to living like that in the city. I grabbed my purse from the back seat and locked my car, wondering if it would be impounded if I was arrested, and stepped into the station. The station was a good-looking building downtown that might have once rivaled Doheny’s mansion for opulence. Above the entryway, a gold statue of Lady Justice welcomed entrants with a blind blank stare: her eyes had been gouged out. I blinked, looked again—but no, just the usual blindfold this time. A few anemic trees gave the illusion of landscaping outside the front doors. Healthier-looking blue agave cracked apart the dry brown soil, bursting from the ground like heads of buried pineapple.

  Inside was less striking than the exterior: an open floor plan of rows and rows of identical cubicles. Justice is a bureaucracy like any other. I made eye contact with every blue I passed and smiled, as though I weren’t the least bit concerned to be there. How I imagined a woman who hadn’t murdered anybody would look at a police station.

  I gave MacLeish’s name to the bored-looking receptionist and waited while she picked up the phone and let him know he had a woman at the front. I tried to ignore the way she eyed me, as though she could smell the sex for
money on my skin, and looked past her to the small square of the station floor I could see. After a moment, I caught a flash of a face I recognized. Escobar and I realized it at the same moment. His jaw dropped and he caught my eyes and held them, but before either of us could move, MacLeish appeared behind the secretary and gave me a warm smile.

  “Jo,” he said, friendly as I could’ve hoped for. “What a pleasant surprise. How can I help you?”

  My mouth had gone dry. I peeled my gaze away from his partner, whose eyes were darting between us, and tried not to feel triumphant just yet. “Turns out, I do have some information that may interest you.”

  MacLeish escorted me past the receptionist, past Escobar, who said, “William, what are you—” but then we were beyond him and into a small room at the very back of the station, a fluorescently lit room with a single plastic table and two uncomfortable chairs. An interrogation room straight out of central casting.

  “Are there cameras behind that one-way glass?” I asked, thinking of Jackal and his recording equipment as MacLeish pulled a chair out for me.

  MacLeish didn’t answer, but he did reach under the table and pull out a recorder. “You’re in the nick of time,” he said. “The St. Leo turns over the security tapes tomorrow. I wouldn’t be able to do anything for you, then.” He punched the recorder on, and nodded at me in encouragement.

  I leaned down and grabbed my purse and pulled out the photographs, along with the phone records.

  “What you said, about being under the Lady’s thumb. You’re right. I don’t want to live that way anymore.” I nodded at the photographs, telling myself I was doing the right thing. Even if I gave the Lady the money, Lou and I were too much at her mercy now. Knowledge is power, and she had too much of both. “This should be proof enough about the type of operation she’s running. I have a name, too.”

  MacLeish stared at the photographs and, with one finger, spread them out across the table, a patchwork Kama Sutra. He mouthed the names of the men in the photographs as he looked at them. “Jesus,” he breathed softly, and then his eyes flicked up, away from the photographs, directly into the one-way glass. He kept them there for one long moment, and then he looked back at me, eyes full again of that hangdog sadness. He reached across the table and softly punched the recorder off.

  That’s when I realized I’d made a mistake.

  From outside the interrogation room, there came a swift two-knock. MacLeish crossed to the door and opened it. I expected his partner to walk through the door, but it seemed I couldn’t get anything right.

  A man entered, dressed in black jeans and a white button-down shirt. Sleeves rolled up. Nice-quality shoes, black leather shined to mirrorlike proportions. The shoes always give the game away.

  “Jo. My boss, the chief of detectives, Graham Lafferty,” MacLeish said. It was the most formal sentence I’d ever heard him pronounce. Graham. A little sound came out of me but I managed a nod.

  Chief of Detectives Graham Lafferty stood a little over six feet tall, with a face a mother might’ve struggled to love. He stood and moved with the most perfect posture I’d ever seen, like he might be photographed at any time.

  Mr. Alibi, I presume, I thought but didn’t say. It would only matter if I made it out of the room uncuffed. And I hated to admit it but it was another of Lou’s smart moves, an extra insurance policy. But if I was here, that meant he hadn’t cracked her—or that Lafferty didn’t know she was part of the Lady’s operations.

  He turned his head to MacLeish and said, “A moment alone with the young lady?”

  MacLeish stood up. He didn’t even look back. My palms started to sweat. When was the last time I’d been nervous to be alone in a room with a strange man? I couldn’t remember. That thought brought me back. There wasn’t a man alive who couldn’t be manipulated if you could find the right pull. Wear the con like a coat, hide in the spotlight, Jo.

  Lafferty stared at me, not smiling and not friendly, until he finally said: “So tell me what happened. With the dead girl and the producer and the Lady.”

  I stared at the tape recorder. Lafferty hadn’t bothered to turn it back on.

  “Now, let’s be clear with each other,” he went on. “For whatever reason—and I’m a nice man, I won’t ask questions—our monthly stipend got lost somewhere. Okay, that happens. It’s not great business, but we have bigger problems now. Now, we have a body. Two bodies. Good people.”

  I scoffed, trying to remember what a confident woman would say. “Define good. Klein was rich, certainly. I didn’t—”

  Lafferty tucked his finger against his lips, the universal shhh sign, and shook his head. “It doesn’t really matter to me what you did or didn’t do. You’re going to keep selling the story that Howard wasn’t one of your girls? Or, rather, the Lady’s girls.” At the mention of the Lady, Lafferty’s gray eyes took on a brighter glow.

  “Here’s a theory,” Lafferty said. “The two of you were working Hiram Klein, had yourselves a little party. All three of you together. Something went wrong, and he winds up dead. The two of you move the body, but Ellen gets squeamish, wants to call the police. You can’t have that. Now the dead bodies perform a miracle and multiply.”

  I was still watching the tape recorder, looking for a little red light. Could they have rigged it to record without suspects ever knowing? They had it out on the table. You couldn’t pretend you weren’t informed about it. I licked my lips. I could see myself, suddenly, as he saw me: so confident, thinking I was such hot shit with my photographs—but what was that worth if he knew I’d been involved in Ellen’s murder? Nothing.

  “If that was the case,” Lafferty went on, “you’d be looking at twenty years, give or take, a jury sends you, twenty-five years max. You’re pretty, you can cry on command I’m sure—so no jury gives you max. You might even get light, ten, fifteen years. No priors, after all. Some sob story about no money, no man, had to do what you could. All sorts of ways it could play, if that’s how things go. But that’s still likely a decade of your life we’re talking about. If that’s how things go.”

  “If,” I repeated.

  “I believe Detective MacLeish told you his views about the victim,” Lafferty said. “As it happens, I share them. Hiram Klein had a lot of money, and his death is taking up a lot of ink, but he lived large and he crossed the finish line a lot better off than most will. But Ellen Howard matters, to me.”

  “You’re some sort of feminist,” I said, “threatening me here in this room.”

  “Ellen Howard matters because she’s one of your girls,” Lafferty said, “isn’t she.”

  It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. I crossed my arms and then unhooked them and scooted my chair closer. “What do you want from me?”

  “I’m a reasonable man,” Lafferty said. “I bet your Lady likes the anonymity for her work, makes her feel more powerful. I can understand that. I’m not looking to take that away. Not entirely.

  “But this Klein case isn’t good for business. The bodies, the publicity. Your boss needs to be brought to heel. I don’t mind a nice lady playing in the field, but I do mind when she overreaches herself and makes it messy for us all. I want a say on all the cases she takes from now on.”

  “You don’t mind?” I said. “That’s big of you. I’m sure she appreciates your permission.”

  A say on all the cases she takes on? I’d been hoping that when I gave them the photographs and her name, they’d lock her up and throw away the key, and Lou and I would be free to waltz off into our own new, shiny lives with the Carrigan cash. Not this. Not a partnership with Lafferty. Christ. She’d be even more powerful with closer ties to the police. And she’d know that I’d ratted—and, worse, that Lou had given me the name to do so. Retirement parties all around. I hadn’t counted on that. I licked my lips nervously, not sure what to do with the new information.

  “You and MacLeish un
derstand each other well,” I said, stalling.

  Lafferty smiled, like a teacher who’d finally gotten his slow pupil to a passing grade. “He used to be my partner. When we met your girl Lou.”

  I jerked a little in my seat and tried to disguise my surprise. One glance at his face and I knew he’d caught it. So he did know she was involved. I thought of Lou’s stress the last few weeks, the details she’d let slip. Maybe Lafferty had been hounding her from the other side, and not just about the murders.

  “Six years ago. Sitting across from me in this very room. MacLeish there.” He nodded at the corner. “We were the first investors in your business, you might say.”

  I had a flash, a sudden certain vision of a younger Lou sitting in this same chair, scared but not too much, in control of the situation, or trying to be. A plume of blue smoke from her cigarette covering her face like a veil.

  “Then why isn’t Lou here, answering these questions?”

  “Because Lou isn’t the one who was with Ellen Howard at the St. Leo. And because she has an airtight alibi for the night Ms. Howard died.”

  Airtight. I tried not to picture his fingers on Lou’s body. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Tell me what you want to know.”

  Lafferty cracked his neck, his eyes flicking up to the one-way glass above us. “I want your boss’s name,” Lafferty said. “I want anything you know about her. I want her address, I want her shoe size, I want her sitting here across from me. Or else I book you as a suspect in the Klein murders.”

  It was no different than what I’d half expected from the moment MacLeish left me alone, but I still felt my stomach drop at the threat. “Then I guess I’ve made my decision,” I said. “But I want MacLeish in here, too, when I tell it.” I wanted a friendly face. I wanted no confusion about the deal I was getting.

  Lafferty’s eyes flicked, almost imperceptibly, to the one-way glass. “I’ll be right back,” Lafferty said.

  I took a moment to gather myself, breathed deeply, thinking about it all. Six years before, Lou had had a run-in with the cops—a case gone bad, probably, and she’d made an arrangement. Maybe more than one. Lou had taken so many lucky gambles in the Lady’s name.