Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

  “I know you do,” he said. “Just don’t…I don’t know…try not to get your hopes up.”

  “Give me one of those business cards for keeps,” I said.

  “What for?” he asked, but reached into his pocket and handed me one. It was bent at the corner and smudged with a thumbprint.

  “So I can call you when I find her,” I said.

  Cy and I went down the steps and out the back door, squinting in the too-bright sun. Cy led me around the corner and down the alley, where we found his car stashed by the loading platform of a store that looked like it had gone out of business long ago.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked, opening the door for me. “You look terrible.”

  “I know I do,” I said. I didn’t need Cy to tell me about it. I’d had two hours of sleep in as many days, my clothes were wet and stained, and I knew that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  After I climbed into the car, Cy went around to the driver’s side and slid into the seat next to me.

  “I’m sorry,” Cy said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I mean, you do look terrible, but there are extenuating circumstances. I get the feeling that most of the time, you look very nice.”

  “Cy, it’s not important,” I said, oddly touched that he’d try to make me feel better about the state of my face at a time like this.

  “Okay, better than very nice,” he said, starting the car. “I could go as far as ‘pretty.’ ‘Pretty’ would not be an exaggeration.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at that.

  “Are you coming to the hospital with me?” I asked.

  “I thought maybe we’d split up,” he said. “Jerry had a point about Gabrielle not knowing which one to go to. If she got her information from Millie, she might have gone to County Hospital instead.”

  “Should we go there first?” I asked.

  He pulled out of the alley and turned onto Wilshire Boulevard.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “You should get to Cedars anyway. You were supposed to be there hours ago.”

  “Okay,” I said, already dreading what my mother would have to say when she saw me.

  “I’ll meet you at the hospital as soon as I can,” he said. “Maybe by then Jerry will have his pictures to take to the newspapers, and one of us will have Gabrielle.”

  “I hope so,” I said, and put my hand on his shoulder. The cotton shirt he wore had been washed so many times that the fabric was thin and soft as a petal.

  We drove like that for a while, Cy’s eyes fixed straight ahead, my hand resting on his shoulder, and with every block, I felt another muscle unclench. When we got to Vermont Avenue, he said at last, “I just want all of this to be over.”

  “It can be over,” I said, so insistent that I squeezed his arm without meaning to. “You and Jerry and Millie and Gabrielle and me. We tell them everything we’ve seen, show them the pictures. How can they not believe that?”

  He brushed my hand away. “The word of an ex-cop? People like Millie and me? You’d be amazed how much they won’t believe us.”

  “What do you mean, an ex-cop?” I asked.

  Cy pursed his lips and downshifted as he turned onto Vermont.

  “I guess Jerry didn’t tell you. Well, he was, and from what I hear, it wasn’t the most amicable parting of ways.”

  “Is that why Millie doesn’t trust him?”

  “It has nothing to do with that. Alice, Jerry means well, but he’s a screwup. Millie knew where Gabrielle was, and she still didn’t tell him. She wouldn’t have trusted Jerry Shaffer with a potted plant, much less a girl’s life.”

  I didn’t like thinking that way about Jerry, but Cy wasn’t entirely wrong. It didn’t matter to me that he used to be a cop—not everyone with a badge was dirty, not even in the LAPD. But he’d trusted the wrong person, and it had almost gotten Annie killed.

  And then, this morning he’d shown up like a miracle, just at the moment I needed him the most. He’d swooped in and intercepted the camera before Conrad or his people could get to it. He was going to get the photographs to the newspapers, and make sure Conrad paid for what he’d done.

  “Maybe Millie’s wrong,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Cy said with a shrug. He was quiet for a minute or two, then asked, “What do you hope happens when all of this is over? Perfect world and all that.”

  I looked out the window at the billboards and sandwich shops that lined Vermont Avenue. I couldn’t imagine a time when this would ever feel like it was over.

  “I want Annie to wake up,” I said. “I want Gabrielle to be safe. I want Conrad and Rex and Walter Hanrahan to go to prison for the rest of their lives.”

  “I want Gabrielle to find a home. A real one,” Cy said.

  “I want to crack a Nihilist cipher on the front porch with Annie.”

  Cy laughed. “I want Millie to make a triumphant comeback in some smash hit, and maybe talk the director into finding a teensy part for her dear pal Cy.”

  “I want to sleep for a thousand years,” I said.

  “I want to know I’ll see you again.”

  There was something else I’d been about to say, but Cy’s words knocked me off center, and all I could think to ask was, “Why?”

  Cy’s smile deflated, and I realized how nasty and defensive I must have sounded. Only I wasn’t trying to be cruel. What I was thinking about was his eyes, how warm and kind they were, and how I didn’t know what they saw in me.

  We had pulled up in front of the hospital now, and Cy put on the parking brake and turned to face me.

  He took a deep breath and said, “I want to know what you’re like when you’re not having the worst week of your life. You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before, Alice. You’re up against the most powerful movie star in Hollywood and the LAPD, and you’re still talking like you’re going to win.”

  “You think I’m naive.”

  “I think you’re brave,” he said.

  He leaned in toward me, his head tilted to the side, and I saw where this was going.

  That’s not what I want, I thought. Not now.

  Visions of the dead police officers, of Conrad kicking my sister in the ribs, and Rex hitting her with a baseball bat, still swam up before my eyes. It was all still so fresh, and I knew that if I kissed Cy now, that’s what I’d be thinking about, that’s what I’d remember whenever I thought about what it was like to feel his lips on mine.

  I didn’t want it to be that way between us, always tethered to violence and fear and the worst week of our lives.

  Maybe he could tell what I was thinking, or maybe it was what he’d planned on doing all along, but before I could pull away, Cy touched my chin with his fingertips and kissed me gently on my good cheek.

  “I want to know I’ll see you again because I think you’re smart,” he said. “And determined.”

  As he leaned back in his seat and went on talking, I fought the urge to touch my face in the spot where he’d kissed it.

  “And pretty.”

  “You said that one already,” I said.

  “And not nice.”

  “You said that already, too.”

  Then he plucked a beautiful handkerchief from his pants pocket and handed it to me.

  “Take it,” he said. “That cut is bleeding again.”

  I pressed the fabric under my eye and was surprised how good it felt. I’d expected a coarse pocket square made of cambric or cotton, but there was no mistaking this was pure silk. Something like that had to have been a gift, and now it was ruined.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, pulling the handkerchief away from my face as though I could undo the bloodstain.

  Cy shooed me away. “It’s nothing, Alice. Get that cut looked at, okay?”

  “I will,” I said.

  “And say you’ll think about it,” he said. “Seeing me again.”

  I got out of the car, shutting the door behind me. As I walked toward the hospital, I looked back over my shoulder and smiled
at him.

  “I already have.”

  Talking with Cy made me feel like I had some kind of electric current buzzing through my veins. It kept me alert, kept me upright. By the time his taillights disappeared around the corner, though, I could feel all of it drain away. I walked toward Cedars of Lebanon in a daze, the task before me suddenly too large to manage on my own. I couldn’t search an entire hospital for Gabrielle. All I wanted was to pull a cot up next to Annie’s bed and snuggle in next to her. I’d close my eyes and drift off and think about a future where all the things I wanted came true—everyone safe and well and happy and together. Everyone who deserved it, anyway.

  But as soon as I opened the door and stepped into the hospital lobby, I knew I wasn’t going to be getting any sleep.

  A crowd of reporters and photographers huddled around the pay phones and paced cagily around the lobby, snapping photographs and shouting punchy, over-caffeinated questions at a stocky nurse, who shouted back and shooed them away from the desk. I waded into the crowd and tugged at the sleeve of the least agitated-looking of the reporters.

  “What’s going on?”

  He was no taller than I was, but twice as wide, and his knees seemed to bend inward under his bulk. A light brown fringe of hair ringed his head, and he had craggy red skin, heavily veined. He wore an LA EVENING HERALD & EXPRESS press pass in his breast pocket.

  “Conrad Donahue was admitted this morning. Statement says he ‘shot himself’ in the leg ‘while he was cleaning his gun,’” he said, rolling his eyes. “I thought I might actually get to write a real story today.”

  “Conrad Donahue is here?” I asked. “What room is he in?”

  Last night in Griffith Park, I’d seen my father go for Rex’s gun, and as I ran away with my hands tied behind my back, I’d heard a gunshot. I’d been worried about whether my father was dead or alive—it had never occurred to me that the bullet might have struck someone else, that the fine spray of blood across the front of Hanrahan’s shirt might belong to Conrad Donahue.

  And now Donahue was here, in the same building as Annie and Cassie and my mother. My blood ran cold.

  The reporter took my gape-mouthed surprise for that of a star-struck girl and chuckled. “Don’t get any wild ideas. They’re not letting anyone near him.”

  The nurse muscled the crush of reporters back, wielding her clipboard like a shield. It was a madhouse. What they needed right about now was for someone at Insignia Pictures to issue a press release. Give the reporters a nibble—a decent, if watery, quote—and they’d go away happy. Too bad Conrad hadn’t thought of that before he locked up the head of publicity at Insignia Pictures in the trunk of his car.

  “I’m not going to do anything,” I said. “I’m here to see my sister.”

  “Well, then he’s somewhere on the fourth floor, I think. That’s where all the private rooms are.”

  I thanked the reporter and shoved my way through the sea of notepads and patched tweed sleeves until I reached the front desk.

  “What room is Annie Gates in?” I asked the nurse at reception. “She would have come in last night with my mother and another girl.”

  The nurse studied her clipboard and gave me a room number on the third floor. Then I saw her expression turn skeptical as she asked, “Who’s your friend?”

  When I looked over my shoulder, I saw the Herald reporter standing two steps behind me, his press badge and notepad hidden away in a pocket, and the grave look of a hospital visitor dashed across his face.

  “He’s nobody,” I said, then backtracked as the nurse’s lips pursed in mistrust. “I mean, he’s my uncle. We’re here to see Annie.”

  Why not, I thought as she waved us through the door. Most of the reporters in that waiting room would have told me to get lost. Besides, I wasn’t feeling particularly respectful of Conrad’s privacy, and it couldn’t hurt to have a reporter who owed me a favor.

  “That was swell of you,” he said, huffing a little as we wound our way up the stairwell. “You like movie stars?”

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  “Me neither.”

  He paused on the landing, and I waited with him as he struggled to catch his breath. Then I had an idea.

  “Did you hear about the police officers who got shot this morning?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “If you want to write a real news story, see if you can get someone to compare the slug in Conrad Donahue’s leg to the ones they pulled out of those officers this morning. I bet anything you’ll get a match.”

  He knitted his brow as my words sank in, then grinned nervously.

  “Do you know what you’re saying, kid? How can you know something like that?”

  “Just do it,” I said, ignoring his indulgent smirk. “You won’t be sorry.”

  The smile faded as he pulled the notepad out of his jacket pocket.

  “It’s not every day I see a schoolgirl with a shiner like that,” he said. “I’m going to guess you didn’t get it in a car accident.”

  “Not even close,” I said.

  We parted ways at the top of the stairs, the reporter looking back over his shoulder at me, wary and puzzled. My fingers twitched with adrenaline at having told a stranger so much, so carelessly. They shook as I opened the door to Annie’s floor and started down the hall.

  It was too quiet, too dim. At the County Hospital the floor had buzzed with activity, so even in the middle of the night you never felt totally alone, but here, something felt wrong.

  Cedars of Lebanon was shaped like a V, with rooms extending down each wing. I stood at the center of the V, snaking my neck around the corner to examine the area near Annie’s room. The stairwell door glided shut, its latch catching on the jamb before closing with a soft click.

  A second later, there were two men coming down the hall, one of them wearing a police uniform, the other in blue polka-dot suspenders. I gasped and turned down the other wing, not quite walking, not quite running. I skated along the floor, moving so that the hard soles of my shoes did not clatter against the tile, and tried the first door I came to.

  It opened into a dark room with the sharp chemical whiff of a hospital supply closet. I closed the door behind me and dropped to the floor. It was too dark to see, but sitting in what I judged to be the middle of the closet, I could feel a concrete floor that stretched about three feet in any direction before giving way to flimsy metal shelves lined with bottles, bedpans, gauze, and rags. I crawled toward the darkest, farthest corner of the closet, careful not to send anything crashing to the floor. My hand grazed a bottle, a metal grate, a pile of rags.

  No, I thought. It was too solid and too warm to be a pile of rags. I squinted into the darkness, and the outlines of things slipped into focus. A mop of hair, sharp features, and big, round eyes, just like I’d seen in the picture in my father’s safe, the picture from the Los Angeles Times.

  “You,” I said.

  I didn’t flinch away from the rag she waved in front of my face. It was a supply closet, after all, and it was just a rag.

  As the rough fibers brushed against my lips and nose, though, I caught a whiff of something acrid and sweet. I knew something was wrong, but by then, it was already too late. My body slumped to the floor.

  When I opened my eyes, I heard a small raspy voice whispering in my ear, “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

  “Gabrielle,” I mumbled, still woozy from whatever she had doused on that rag.

  I heard a rustle of skirts as she crawled around to the side of my body before taking my hand and helping me sit up.

  “Thank god you’re all right,” she said. “I’m sorry I knocked you out. I didn’t know it was you.”

  Rubbing at my aching temples, I accepted her apology.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked, tossing a head full of ratty black curls so they fell in front of her eyes.

  The only light in the room fell across the floor in three thin strips through vents near the bot
tom of the door, but it was enough to get a good look at her, now that I knew who I was looking at.

  She had the same small face, the same pointed chin, the same dark eyes I’d seen in the pictures, now alert and staring with undisguised curiosity. She looked more like a bratty kid than a pinup girl, and I couldn’t imagine how she’d come this far, gotten this lost, without someone taking her by the elbow and marching her straight home, possibly stopping to feed her a sandwich on the way.

  I wanted to keep my face neutral—she must have been looking for a reason to run, a reason to decide I wasn’t worth trusting. Unfortunately, my insides were feeling anything but neutral. Had she intended for me to find her here? Had she been followed? Now that I’d finally found her, what was I supposed to do next?

  The cut under my eye had opened again, and the skin around it was raised and sticky. The other side of my face was less damaged, but lopsided from the swelling in my jaw. Even the lightest touch made me wince in pain.

  “Conrad?” she asked.

  “How did you guess?”

  “Rex would have hit you somewhere it didn’t show.”

  It sounded so wrong to hear those words coming out of her mouth. Maybe we were only two or three years apart, but it felt like more.

  “Did you know he was here?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Annie told me, ‘If something goes wrong, find me and I’ll take care of you.’ I got so lost. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So that’s what I did.”

  “How long have you been hiding here?”

  “Not long,” she said. “I went to County Hospital first, but they wouldn’t tell me where she was. I pretended to leave, then I hid around the corner from the nurses’ station until I heard someone tell an orderly to clean the room where the girl who got moved to Cedars had been so they could put someone else in it.

  “I wasn’t sure it was her at first, but they kept talking. They were arguing about how she got all beat up like that, and why the girl and the detective who’d been visiting her didn’t bother calling her mother. It was pretty clear who they were talking about then.”