Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

  Gabrielle found she could neither move nor scream, that at that moment she could only think a single thought, over and over again: This is the moment when I die. This is the moment when he kills me.

  Every other thought she had, like Get out of the car and run or Hide in the rocks, was overpowered by it. The moment to run was before she’d gotten in the car, before she’d gone to the party, before she’d let Rex take all those pictures, before she’d left home. That moment was long past.

  But then she saw him walking toward the shore with Irma’s body slung over his shoulder, and she did move. Irma’s shoes and purse were still sitting on the front seat where she’d left them. Gabrielle threw them onto the floorboards in the backseat and flung herself on top of them as though they might wriggle away.

  She’d missed her best chance to escape and knew it, felt powerless to do anything except stretch out across the floor of the car, her eyes squinched shut as if not being able to see would make her invisible, too. Maybe it would be dark enough. Maybe Conrad wouldn’t look. Maybe he’d think that she ran away.

  She heard light footsteps padding just outside the car, and the squeal of hinges as the trunk opened. There was a thud, and the rear of the car rocked, and then the trunk slammed shut and the footsteps padded away.

  “He was getting their clothes,” Gabrielle explained.

  Soon she heard him return, heard the sound of pants being zipped up. He hummed to himself as he dressed. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes from the moment that Conrad drowned Irma to the moment he slid behind the wheel and drove away with her body in the trunk.

  They drove for at least an hour, twisting along winding canyon roads. Gabrielle couldn’t see the terrain, but she could feel it, every hill, every bump. Conrad turned on the radio and sang along with the songs in the broadcast. After a while he turned to a news station, and once he was bored with that, he started running lines.

  “You bet your life I’ll get your wagons to Oregon Territory, or my name isn’t Clay Macomber!”

  He must have said it fifty times, in different accents, with the emphasis on different words. Gabrielle thought she would scream. How had she never noticed before what a terrible actor he was?

  “You betcher life I’ll get yer wagons to Oregon Territory, or my name isn’t Clay Macomber.”

  Of course, that was the least of his offenses. Between the bumps in the road and Conrad’s insipid line readings, Gabrielle felt half crazy and scared out of her wits besides. The sharp little heels of Irma’s shoes dug into her chest with each bump until finally she could bear it no more.

  As slowly and carefully as she could, Gabrielle slid the purse and shoes out from under her and pushed them underneath the driver’s seat. By the time she was done, she could almost hear her heart pounding at the insides of her rib cage.

  Conrad drove on, careening around the hairpin turns at dangerous speeds. He tried out a few more of his lines, then switched the radio back on and began to hum along.

  And then he cleared his throat and said, “I haven’t forgotten about you, you know.”

  That was the moment when Gabrielle should have given up, cried for the series of choices that had led her to this backseat on this night, prayed that it would all be over quickly.

  But it wasn’t.

  “That was the moment when I made up my mind that I was going to live.”

  Gabrielle was counting on my help because Annie had told her she could. Knowing that made me brave enough to let myself out of the supply closet. I held my breath as I inched down the hall and turned the doorknob to the stairwell, and didn’t let it out until I was halfway down the stairs. My mind worked furiously, trying to make sense of everything that had happened, everything that Gabrielle had told me, the size of the lie and the number of wrongs that had to be righted. It was like a web that spread from Malibu to MacArthur Park, impenetrable and impossibly dense.

  When I made it to the hospital lobby, there was a line five deep to use the pay phones, and my friend from the Los Angeles Evening Herald was standing in front of one of them. He leaned against the wall, barking his copy over the wire as he flipped through the pages in a wallet-sized notebook. All the other reporters in line behind him eavesdropped shamelessly.

  “Nick Gates told police that he shot Donahue in a ‘prank gone wrong.’ However, Donahue denies Gates’s version of the events, calling him ‘a dear man, but quite confused.’ He maintains that he accidentally shot himself in the leg while cleaning his gun.”

  I felt a surge of relief when I heard the reporter say my father’s name. Somehow he had gotten a statement out of him, which meant that Conrad’s driver had been right—my father made it out of the hills alive that night. The big question now was, where was he? And what on earth was he doing lying to reporters at a time like this?

  “That’s what he said, hand to God. I got more, too.” He cupped his hand around the mouthpiece and turned his back. The other reporters nearly fell over themselves leaning forward to make out his whispering.

  “I’ll see if there’s anything to it; have something for you tomorrow if there is,” he said, and started to hang up.

  When he’d finished, he turned around to face a line of reporters, tapping their toes and glaring as they waited. It must have been close to deadline for the afternoon editions of the papers, and every second the reporter from the Herald stayed on the line was a second less they’d have to file their stories.

  So they were extra furious when I shoved my way to the front, took the phone from his hand, and said with a desperation that was only slightly faked, “Please can I use this line? It’s an emergency!”

  The reporter from the Los Angeles Herald ignored the audible grumbling from the men in line and handed me the phone. I was glad I’d helped him sneak up to see Conrad.

  “Where did you find Nick Gates?” I asked, fishing through my skirt pocket for a nickel. When he told me, I was so surprised I dropped it.

  I didn’t know my father well, but over the years I had picked up a thing of two about his line of work. Most men in a predicament as bad as his would have emptied out a bank account, bought a train ticket, and stayed gone for about a decade. But my father wouldn’t have been happy in Spokane or Chattanooga or even New York. He was a Hollywood man, through and through. And more than that, he was a publicity man, and even now, after everything that had happened, he was trying to find a way to control the story.

  That was my guess about why he’d issued the false statement. The where was already confirmed.

  My father, Nick Gates, director of publicity for Insignia Pictures, was in custody at the Hollywood Precinct of the Los Angeles Police Department after confessing to shooting Conrad Donahue in the leg.

  I took the smudged business card Jerry had given me out of my pocket and dialed his number.

  “Jerry,” I said when he picked up the phone, “you need to get to Cedars of Lebanon in a hurry.”

  “Is that you, Alice?” he asked. “The prints are still drying.”

  “Bring them anyway,” I said. “Bring every single one of them.”

  Then I told him about the reporters, about my father and the bullet in Conrad’s leg. I told him about everything except Gabrielle. I’d meant to—that was why I asked for his card in the first place—but with so many people milling around, sniffing out whatever scraps of information they could, I decided the news could wait until we were face-to-face.

  After I hung up, the newspaperman from the Herald stood there, his mouth hanging open like a door with a broken hinge. He’d listened to everything.

  “Nick Gates is your father?” he asked.

  I nodded, and he took me by the elbow and swept me off to a corner of the room. The other reporters descended upon the pay phone like it was made of rib eyes and dollar bills.

  Away from prying eyes and ears, he asked,” So, kid, any chance you’d let me buy you a cup of coffee and help me understand why Conrad and your dad can’t get their stories
straight?”

  I told the reporter that if he could sweeten the pot with some food, we had a deal. It would be a few minutes until Jerry arrived, and I hadn’t had anything to eat since the bacon sandwich my mother had made me the night before.

  Soon, we were sitting at the counter in the hospital cafeteria, a cup of coffee and a ham-and-cheese sandwich in front of each of us.

  “Conrad isn’t following the script,” I said after I’d eaten half my sandwich in two bites and washed it down with a swig of coffee.

  He fumbled for his notebook. “What do you mean ‘following the script’?”

  That was something else I knew about my father’s job. The actors at Insignia Pictures thought he existed to herald them, to polish up their stars so they shone as brightly as possible. But I saw him when he got home, when he loosened his necktie and poured himself three fingers of scotch. It seemed to me that at least half of his job was cleaning up the messes they made, smoothing over the careless things they said.

  I tried to explain to the Herald reporter what I meant.

  “‘Shot himself while cleaning his gun’? That’s more or less code for ‘botched suicide attempt.’ The studio doesn’t let a story like that get out, especially not about one of its big stars,” I said, wolfing down the rest of my sandwich.

  When I’d finished chewing, I said, “On the other hand, they don’t care if people think Conrad Donahue and his friends get drunk and shoot off their guns. And if one of them occasionally gets hit in the leg, that kind of headline doesn’t hurt movie ticket sales.”

  It was only a hunch, but it seemed like that was what my father was up to. What I didn’t understand was why. It certainly wasn’t for Conrad’s sake. Was it for the studio? Himself?

  “So you’re saying Conrad tried to kill himself?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But my father does. You should go to the Hollywood Precinct and ask him again, only this time, tell him his wife and daughters are in the hospital about a hundred yards away from Conrad Donahue. I doubt he’ll care, but he should probably know.”

  The reporter and I finished our coffees and went back out to the hospital lobby. He thanked me and started for the door, but before he could go, I tapped him on the shoulder.

  “And you should talk to him, too,” I said, pointing toward the reception desk.

  When Jerry saw my waving arms, he made a beeline for the corner where I stood with the reporter.

  “Jerry, this is…” I trailed off, realizing I’d never asked the name of this person to whom I’d entrusted so much.

  “Amos Carey,” he said. “Los Angeles Evening Herald.”

  Jerry handed him copies of the prints that showed Conrad standing over my sister’s prone body, Rex hitting her with the baseball bat.

  “Make sure you show those to my father, too,” I said.

  When I told Jerry that Gabrielle was hiding in a closet down the hall from Annie’s room, he went pale and looked a little as though he might be sick. I tried to reassure him about her resourcefulness by telling him how she’d knocked me out with ether, but for some reason, it didn’t seem to make him feel any better.

  As for me, with Gabrielle found, pictures of Conrad guaranteed to make the front page of every newspaper in Los Angeles, and my father positioned to spill the beans on any amount of incriminating activity, I thought, why hide? Why not get Gabrielle out and march her down the hall right past the uniformed goons Conrad had stationed there? What could they do to us now?

  Those thoughts all disappeared the moment I saw the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders—Walter Hanrahan—leaning against the door outside Annie’s room, gun holstered at his belt. I took hold of Jerry’s arm and tried not to think about sitting with my hands bound in the back of Conrad’s car or those police officers lying dead on the sidewalk. Hanrahan smiled at me and tipped his hat as Jerry pulled me quickly through the door.

  My mother sat next to the bed holding Annie’s limp hand to her cheek. Her eyes were closed and her lips moved without sound. I didn’t know if she was praying or whispering, but either way, I hated to interrupt.

  “Mom?” I spoke in a gentle whisper so as not to startle her.

  No sooner had she opened her eyes and seen my face than she got up and ran toward me. The tendons in her neck were stretched taut as bowstrings as she grabbed me by the arm and yanked me into a hug that crushed my bruised cheek against her chest.

  “What happened?” she asked, shaking me furiously against her. “Who did this to you?”

  My eyes darted nervously toward the door. I was terrified that any minute, I’d see Walter Hanrahan come through it, gun drawn.

  I leaned in and whispered in her ear, “Conrad Donahue.”

  I didn’t expect she’d believe me right away. I thought it would be like it had been with Cassie, and that she’d be furious at me for lying at a time like this.

  She didn’t look surprised at all, though.

  Her face reminded me of a woman I’d seen years ago in a newsreel. It’d been during the war, and in the scheme of things, not a big story, just something sandwiched in between some cartoons and a bad Lassie movie. All three of the woman’s sons had been killed in the war. One was a pilot who had been shot down over Germany, one had been blown to bits during the invasion of Sicily, and the third had died in a freak submarine accident in the Solomon Islands. When they interviewed her for the newsreel, she’d said all the right things—that her boys had gone off to war together and now they’d come home together, that they had served bravely and not died in vain—but her eyes had told a different story, and I was sure that there was a part of her that would have waved the white flag to Hitler himself if it meant one more day with her boys.

  “No,” my mother said, her voice quaking. “No, no, no.”

  She pulled away from me and went to the window that looked out over Hollywood. There was something dangerous about her as she stood there, crackling and quivering like an electrical line on a humid day. She pressed her palms against the glass, fingers splayed open.

  “I’ll kill him,” she whispered, striking the window with the flat of her hand. “I’ll kill him, and he’ll never come near this family again.”

  She clenched her hands and began to pound on the glass with her fists.

  And then Walter Hanrahan did come storming into the room, hand on his holster. I thought about how fast he’d pulled out his gun when he shot the police officer in the chest earlier that morning. The man hadn’t even seen it coming.

  I pulled my mother’s hands down from the glass and wrapped my arms around her.

  “Is everything all right in here?” Walter Hanrahan asked.

  “It’s fine,” said Jerry.

  “The lady seems upset.”

  “Her daughter almost died,” Jerry said, gesturing toward Annie. “She is upset.”

  “Please leave us alone,” my mother said.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay a moment,” he said, giving Jerry a nasty look, “just to make sure everything is okay.”

  “I do mind,” my mother said.

  I could feel every muscle in her body coiled tight, ready to explode in Walter Hanrahan’s direction the moment I let go of her.

  “The LAPD is here to help, ma’am.”

  “Like hell you are!” she said. “I asked you to get out. Now, are you going to do it or not?”

  That was when Cassie came in, bearing a stack of sandwiches wrapped in paper and two bottles of soda, and looking like a soldier who had seen combat. Without batting an eye, she put down the sandwiches, took my mother by the arm, and sat her down in a chair on the far side of Annie’s bed.

  I knew Cassie had a head for movie stars and Hollywood gossip and field hockey, but when it came to keeping people calm in a crisis, she was a miracle worker. My mother stopped screaming at Walter Hanrahan and followed her, meek as a lamb.

  “What happen
ed?” Cassie whispered in my ear as she guided me toward a chair next to my mother. “You were supposed to be here hours ago.”

  Then she looked around the room and saw Jerry Shaffer standing uselessly in the corner. She saw my mother clutch my hands and hold them in hers. She saw all three of us, our eyes fixed on Walter Hanrahan with some mixture of anger and terror.

  Hanrahan had propped himself up against the wall, arms folded across his chest. He stood there watching us watch him, and smirking.

  “What’s he doing in the room?” Cassie asked my mother.

  Without taking her eyes off Walter Hanrahan, my mother said, “He tells me Annie is in danger and they have to post a guard around the clock.”

  Her voice betrayed nothing but scorn, but I could see the fear in her eyes as she squeezed my hands in hers again and again.

  “He won’t tell me why, though. Isn’t that strange?”

  I nodded as she spoke, then my eyes went wide, though it wasn’t because of anything she said. It was the way she kept squeezing my hands.

  A short squeeze, then a long one. Another short squeeze, then two long squeezes. Short, then long. Long, short, long. Short.

  Short, long.

  Short, long, long.

  Short, long.

  Long, short, long.

  Short.

  Again and again she did it. At first I didn’t see the pattern, but then there it was, Morse code as clear and steady as a metronome.

  AWAKE

  AWAKE

  AWAKE

  Our eyes met, and my mother dropped my hands and pulled me into her arms, more gently this time.

  “Please don’t leave again, Alice. Please stay here with us,” she said. “I need you with me.”

  As I hugged my mother, I wished I could pour all the things I wanted to say to her through my arms.

  I’m so sorry for everything. Once this is over, things will be different. No more secrets, no more revenge. I’ll stay with you as long as you want. I remember who taught Annie and me how to do the ciphers, who helped us learn Morse code during the war. I remember it wasn’t all etiquette lessons and hors d’oeuvres trays. I remember there was cake baking and gin rummy and picture books, too, just the three of us. I know you tried to love us. But I can’t stay. Not until this is done.