by Dianne Emley
“What information?”
“Probably nothing. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“You should tell the police, whatever it is.”
“Not now. Not after what they said in the paper.”
“I guess you know what you’re doing.”
“Not really, but I’m doing it, anyway. So, what’s going on this weekend? Going out with that guy again?”
“Michael… third date.”
“Uh-oh. The Third Date. Fuck him or forget him,” Iris taunted.
“Cynic.”
“Realist. So… ?”
“So, what?”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know. I’m gun-shy after Teddy. He called again last night. Late. I think he was high.”
“Probably.”
“He starts out slow. Tells me how much he loves me, maybe we can get together again, and so on. Then he escalates. Calls me a bitch and a whore. Tells me I’ll be sorry.”
“He threatened you? He’s basically a nice guy but it’s getting harder to care about him.”
“I hate looking over my shoulder. I feel like I make one error in judgment and it’s going to haunt me my whole life. So, what are you doing this weekend?”
“Going to a party with Steve tonight.”
“That’s still going on?”
“It’s still going on. Why?”
“He’s a noncommittal womanizer.”
“He’s cute and laughs at my jokes and listens to me and isn’t judgmental and we have great sex.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“You deserve more.”
“Probably. He’s like junk food, I guess. I gotta get back. See ya.” Iris chucked the half-eaten salad in Jaynie’s trash and walked back toward the sales department. The administrative area was quiet at lunchtime. She walked past the empty photocopy and fax room, then wheeled around and started walking toward the other end of the suite, toward the supply room, toward Alley’s desk. It seemed natural to visit Alley. It seemed odd that he wouldn’t be there, filling out his supply orders, keeping everything neat and straight, chastising people who pulled out a ream of paper or legal pads and left the neat stacks unaligned, or took too many pens, rationing them, taking them out of folks’ hands, taking his job very seriously, sitting at his desk, eating the burrito his mother had made for him and that he’d warmed in the microwave, watching the numbers count down on the dial, since he couldn’t hear the buzzer, reading one of his self-help books while he ate, turning and smiling up at Iris when she walked in and put her hands on his shoulders to announce herself, swatting at his mouth with a napkin held in his bad hand and smoothing his tie with the other.
Alley wasn’t going to be in the supply room. Iris wanted to look at his empty desk and know what it was like for him to be dead.
The supply room lights were on. She walked closer and stopped dead when she heard her name from inside. A chill went down her back. She remembered the dream and considered with dread that Alley might haunt her, that he might be a ghost and she got angry. He’d already given her too much to think about. On the other hand, ever practical, maybe she could ask him what he expected her to do with the safe-deposit box.
She heard her name again. She stopped outside the door and flattened her back against the wall. It wasn’t a ghost. It was Stan Raab, speaking quietly.
“… relationship with Drye and I hated to do it, but Drye’s my other top person.”
“I just saw Iris in the lunchroom. I told her I’d keep our conversation confidential, but…”
Thanks, Joe, Iris said to herself.
“… she’d just left her meeting with you and was pretty upset. Drye had made some crack about it.”
“I’d hoped I could avoid that,” Stan said. “That Drye… if his numbers weren’t so good.”
“Anyway, I told her that you’d always spoken highly of her and that you were doing what you had to do to please the client.”
“Was she better?”
“She understands. She has a lot of savvy. We’re lucky to have her.”
You’re back to being a good guy, Joe.
“Joe, you know I value your input. I couldn’t run this place if you weren’t here with me, if I didn’t have one person I could trust implicitly.”
“A lot of water under the bridge, Stan.”
“Sure is. I don’t see anything here.”
“What do you think he meant by this on his calendar, this wacatil… O-A-X… ?”
“Who knows? Joe, I’ve been thinking. Maybe we should let the police in on Worldco.”
“C’mon, Stan. We’d both go to jail.”
“They wouldn’t have to know the details. We could just say that Alley manipulated a client’s funds. It would make their job easier.”
“Can’t do it, Stan. It can’t go any further than you.”
“It never has. It’s just that I feel responsible about Worldco, Joe. My mailroom clerk embezzled ten million dollars from my best friend’s father, who’s also one of the firm’s best clients. On my fax machine! Let’s get out of here.”
Iris walked as fast as she could back to her desk, her heart pounding. She picked up the phone, punched in the number of the next person on her prospect list, and turned to watch Teddy hard-sell penny stocks to strangers.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Madonna or whore? Whore. Definitely. It had been the kind of week that cried out for something saucy, something different, something to help her drop the work week like a dead skin. Something to let her forget herself. Steve would like it.
The freeway condition sign reported heavy traffic. Iris knew this. She drove with one eye on the TR’s temperature gauge. The needle had passed the midpoint and was two-thirds to “H.” One more tick and she’d take the surface streets. It wouldn’t be any faster, but she’d get some speed up and pull air through the radiator, cooling the engine down. The TR hated traffic.
“There’s T.M.C. on the freeways today, folks,” the radio announcer said. “Too Many Cars. It’s a parking lot on the One-thirty-four near Figueroa. A brush fire on the hillside has jumped the center divider…”
An older Buick splashed with gray primer was in the lane next to Iris. Its windows were tinted black and rolled all the way up. It casually drifted across the dashed white line into her lane. She held her ground but the small hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She was in the line of fire. A target.
Relax, she told herself. They couldn’t escape in this traffic without a helicopter. Then she thought, What if they don’t want to escape? What if the driver has a suicide note in his pocket?
“A trailer hauling barbecue sauce dumped its load on the Five past Slauson. Traffic’s tied up for ten miles in both directions. A load of chickens was lost on the Six-oh-five between Rosecrans and Alondra. Now, all we need are some briquettes.”
A Mercedes convertible with the top down, its tanned, balding driver talking on a cellular phone, his big gold watch reflecting the sun, moved out from behind the TR and sped up to slide in front, a breath away from the TR’s bumper, making the Los Angeles drive-right-or-fuck-you statement in response to Iris’s not tailgating. He gained one car length.
She yelled, “What’s your hurry, asshole? Reservations aren’t until eight-thirty,” but he didn’t hear her.
A pick-up truck that was behind the Mercedes, sitting high above the asphalt on balloon tires three feet in diameter, a decorative roll-bar behind the cab, rushed to close the gap the Mercedes had left. Its polished chrome bumper obliterated the TR’s rear window. The bass from the truck’s stereo moved the earth.
“Cocky bastard,” Iris muttered. “I’ll slam on my brakes. Explain that to your insurance company, if you have insurance.”
She punched the button for the New Age station, watched the temperature gauge, and tried to rise above.
A man on a motorcycle wove through the stagnant traffic.
White letters were stenciled on the back of his leather jacket: DO U KNOW JESUS?
No. What kind of car does he drive?
At the mall, Iris wandered slowly, window-shopping and eating a frozen yogurt. A woman behind her walked close enough to brush Iris’s skirt with her packages. Iris abruptly stopped walking and the woman crashed into her with a crumple of shopping bags. She skirted around Iris without looking at her or apologizing. Iris smiled. It was a small amount of control, but she’d take it.
She bought a black leather bomber jacket with silver zippers and grommets and a matching thigh-high miniskirt after gasping at the price then deciding she had to have it, couldn’t live without it. She bought a black merry widow and G-string set and black stockings with dots and a jogging bra in the lingerie department, squirming when she handed her selections to the sales clerk, who was about her mother’s age.
At home, Iris threw the bags onto the raw silk couch and opened the sliding glass door. The sea air blew in. There were two messages on her phone machine. One from Steve, confirming that he’d meet her at Josh’s house. One from her mother, checking in.
Iris poured a glass of white wine and finished half of it before she felt up to returning her mother’s call. She took the cordless phone onto the terrace.
“Hi, Mom. Nothing’s wrong. You called me, remember? Guess who I ran into? Remember John Somers? On the street.”
She didn’t tell her mother about the murder. Even though it had happened to someone else somewhere else and had nothing to do with her, her mother would worry about Iris’s brush with violence, would worry that Iris was next, would worry every time Iris went to work. Would worry.
“He’s a cop. Isn’t that a scream? He was not a hippie, Mom. He’s divorced. That’s ancient history. People don’t change that much. To a party with Steve at his friend’s house. Steve has a job. Nothing’s wrong. How can I sound worried? Everything’s fine. I just had a long week, okay? I gotta go. Okay? Me too.”
She refilled her glass and paced the living room. The taste of the wine hardly mattered anymore. She drank expensive chardonnays and jug Chablis with the same mindlessness. All she tasted was the cool bite on her tongue while she waited for the tension to be released.
She walked out onto the terrace and looked at the sun sparkling on the ocean. She dug her finger around in a clay pot on the terrace wall where an anemic philodendron lived, its leaves coated with small, black particles that fell out from the smog. She splashed some wine into the pot and told herself to water it later. Then she forgot about it.
She went inside, opened the shopping bags, and displayed her purchases on the Oriental rug that covered the hardwood floor. She plopped into the leather recliner, sat for two seconds, then got up and started to pace the room again.
She ran water in the bathtub and squirted liquid bubble bath where the water hit the porcelain. She covered herself with bubbles, sipped wine, read her horoscope in Cosmo, and finally started to relax. She read the column where people write in for help with their problems. She was better off than those people, she told herself. Most of them just lack the gumption to get what they want in life, to ask for what they need, to raise their hand. Not Iris. She had set her goals and worked hard to achieve them. She had got just what she wanted. She was just where she wanted to be.
She pulled into the driveway of Josh’s Pacific Palisades home at about 9:45, shooting for fashionably late but still too early, judging by the availability of street parking. She pulled down her leather mini and bomber jacket and fluffed her workday hair that she had moussed and pulled into a wild mane. She opened the door and walked confidently into the house, copping the distant, jaded attitude of Los Angeles’s night-crawling hipsters and trendzoids. The other people there casually looked at her, but not too long, not wanting to seem too interested. She looked for a familiar face and didn’t find one.
She walked into a bedroom where everyone was throwing jackets and purses and stashed her slim shoulder bag between the mattress and box springs. She located the bar and poured a glass of white wine and finally saw Steve through the French doors, standing on a flagstone terrace that overlooked the undeveloped Santa Monica Mountains and the ocean.
A petite brunette was talking to him. She was wearing flowing harem pants that were wrapped around her legs somehow so that the wind that always blew off the ocean through the canyon lifted the fabric, revealing leg almost to her waist. The wind pressed the thin fabric of her blouse against her braless breasts, which Iris could tell at a distance of thirty feet were bigger than hers. The girl caressed Steve’s cheek with her palm.
Iris stood in the doorway, wondering whether she should approach him or disappear, wondering whether Steve had said, “Come to the party with me” or “Come to the party,” wondering whether she was his date or just another guest.
“Well, Ms. Thorne,” Steve smiled at her, his hazel eyes sparkling.
He was leaning against the wooden terrace railing, wearing faded Levi’s, a faded polo shirt, and weathered deck shoes with no socks. The thinned fabric of the worn clothing lay close against his body, which was tan-on-tan and muscular from outdoor work. His sun-bleached hair was freshly brushed, the front cut short and the back falling to his shoulders. A dangling silver-and-turquoise earring sparkled against his tan skin.
She walked toward him, like an arrow, just like she had done the first time she had seen him at another party six months before, forgetting the other femme, forgetting all. He circled his arm around her waist and kissed her on the lips. The brunette mumbled something and excused herself.
“Ms. Thorne, you look delicious.” He nuzzled her neck, tickling her. She twisted in his arms, giggling wildly. He wrapped his arms around her ribs and squeezed tighter and tighter while she gritted her teeth and tried not to make a sound but ended up forcing out a mouse squeak. He laughed and rhythmically squeezed her again and again. She squeaked and he laughed. Their game. It was silly and made her feel giddy, as if she was thirteen and holding hands with her first beau. She laughed until tears popped into her eyes. It felt good.
“How was your week?” he asked.
She shook her head and shrugged and waved her hand toward the railing, pushing it out to sea.
“Look at these stockings.” He crouched beside her and picked at the dots with his fingers. “Very nice.” He ran his hands up and down her legs then stood up again and pulled her close. His skin smelled of lemon-scented soap. The fibers of his clothes were puffy and soft and smelled freshly laundered.
She put her nose against his neck and guzzled his scent. She ran her fingers through his soft, fine hair and down and across his neck and shoulders, squeezing the lean muscles. She wished she were alone with him. She wanted him to tickle her and make her laugh and look at her the way that he did, both knowing and appreciative, the look that she couldn’t get enough of, that made her stomach spin around.
A dry Santa Ana breeze blew. Iris felt it suck the moisture out of her face. She stood in the crook of Steve’s shoulder and they faced the canyon and listened to the darkness. A coyote yipped somewhere on the hillside. Steve yipped back at it. The coyote answered. He laughed.
“I should greet the other guests,” he said. “I’m supposed to be the co-host.”
He didn’t ask so she didn’t ask to go with him. She leaned against the railing and watched him walk up to a group of people who put their arms around him. Everyone wanted to touch him.
Crickets chirped. The wind rustled dry weeds on the hillside and Iris felt unconnected. She gathered herself. She looked great. She would have a good time.
The bass on the stereo was turned up and the down beat pounded through the house. Iris refilled her glass. She was drunk enough to feel reckless enough to talk to strangers face-to-face, without a telephone in between. She roamed through the house, bouncing her shoulders with the music.
“I was, like, I’m so sure. He had, like, a new Beemer, you know? But he was, like, a major geek. Totally DD,” a girl
said to her friend. She wore a black bra top studded with silver grommets and a black nylon net skirt over black lace leggings. Her crimped hair was wrapped with a floppy bow on the side of her head.
Her girlfriend wore a black bra with black fringe dangling from the middle and tight black toreador pants laced together at the sides that let tanning-salon skin peek through all the way up and a Spanish-style broad-brimmed black hat with little balls dangling from the brim. “Ohmygod, DD—doesn’t dress, doesn’t dance,” she said. “I’m so sure. Tell him to get real. Get, like, a life.”
Iris wandered into the kitchen and stood near four men wearing earth-toned Levi’s Dockers, open-necked cotton shirts with the sleeves rolled up, short haircuts with sideburns clipped even with their ears, and spreading hips.
“The One-eighteen was beautiful today. Took me twenty-five minutes.”
“Yeah? The One-oh-one was easy too. Only took half an hour instead of an hour and a half.”
“Well, the Four-oh-five was, you know, the Four-oh-five. A couch fell off a truck. Two hours to get from the Valley to Manhattan Beach.”
Everyone grimaced.
One guy said, “Yeah, Four-oh-five means it’ll take you four or five hours to get there.”
They all cracked up.
“I go the back road, the Four-oh-five to the One-oh-one to the One-thirty-four to the Two-ten to the Six-oh-five to the Ninety-one. I used to go the Four-oh-five to the One-oh-one to the One-eleven to the Ninety-one…”
“Right through downtown. Brother.”
“Really. I save half an hour this way.”
“The Ten’s open every day for me,” Iris said brightly.
They turned to look at her dispassionately although she’d been standing on the edge of their circle for several minutes.
“I take it at five-thirty in the morning,” she said, picking up her own bait.
“Five-thirty?” Four-oh-five said. “Wait, you’re in the financial markets, right?”