by Mary McCoy
I wrenched my arm out of Ruth’s grip.
“You set Annie up,” I said. “I won’t lie for you. You can’t make me say anything.”
A strange look crossed Ruth’s face as she caught hold of my arm again and bent my wrist between my shoulder blades.
“If you’re smart,” she said, “you won’t say another word.”
I struggled to get loose, but Ruth was stronger than she looked. She shoved me in the direction of the stairs.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
Ruth didn’t answer, and I realized it didn’t matter. She must have known I’d overheard everything. There was no way she’d let me out of her sight until she’d delivered Gabrielle to the police. And after that, there was no telling what she, Rex, and Conrad had in mind for me.
As we wound our way down the stairs toward the hospital lobby, I found one tiny hope to hold on to. Ruth didn’t know Gabrielle had trusted me with her story—the real version—and now we were about to share a ride to police headquarters. Maybe seeing me would prick her conscience and remind her of what my sister had done for her. Maybe she’d at least think twice about going along with Conrad and Ruth’s plan.
Down in the hospital lobby, it was bedlam. Reporters and photographers fought their way into the hallways and stairwells while lines of unblinking LAPD officers forced them back, nightsticks at the ready. A few who tried to reach for a door handle or who were shoved from behind into the police barricade got a taste of those. No chance we were getting out this way.
Ruth steered me behind the line of officers, then down another hallway to the hospital’s rear entrance, where the ambulances were dispatched and the truly dire cases were admitted. Conrad’s Rolls-Royce was idling there, Rex behind the wheel and Gabrielle sitting next to him in the front seat.
“Get in,” Ruth said. She shoved me into the backseat, then crawled in next to me.
“Gabrielle,” I said, but she wouldn’t look at me. She wouldn’t even turn around.
The tires squealed as Rex threw the car in reverse and peeled out of the lot. But not before I saw two things.
First, the ambulance bay door flew open and Jerry appeared, panting, arms pumping as he vaulted down the flight of steps and hit the pavement without breaking his stride. His hat was missing, and blood streamed down the side of his swollen face. I turned around and watched through the back window as he chased the Rolls-Royce across the parking lot, looking like he might collapse at any moment.
As I wondered what had happened to his face, I saw Walter Hanrahan stroll out from between two parked ambulances and tip his hat to Jerry before getting into his police cruiser.
I pressed my hand to the glass as the last wisps of hope I’d held on to melted away.
It was over. Just like that.
As I stretched my cramped, prickling legs out in front of me, one of my feet bumped a broom that was propped up against the wall of the supply closet. Both Gabrielle and I scrambled to catch it before it hit the floor and the noise gave away our hiding place.
“How long did it take you to walk back?” I whispered, leaning the broom in a safer corner of the closet.
“The whole day. It was almost dark when I got back to the Stratford Arms,” said Gabrielle. “I went straight to Ruth’s. She didn’t ask me where I’d been, not at first. She fed me spaghetti and made me drink about fifty glasses of water, and then I went to bed.”
“What happened the next morning?”
“She asked a lot of questions then. What happened at the party? Did somebody hurt me? I wouldn’t tell her anything. Then she got mad and said she knew I was a runaway from the moment Rex set me up in the bungalows. She said she knew I was underage, and that she should have turned me over to Juvenile Welfare when she’d had the chance.
“Then she fed me another plate of spaghetti and said that she was going to take me to stay with her friend Annie. She told me Annie was smart and knew how to keep a secret. And if I was smart, I’d do what she told me.”
Ruth pointed out a spot across the street from the police station, and Rex parked the car. The Rolls-Royce had already turned enough heads that there was no sense trying to sneak in the back door now. When we got out of the car, Rex took Gabrielle roughly by the arm and began to drag her toward the station.
“For heaven’s sake, Rex, lay off,” Ruth said. He glared at her, but let go of Gabrielle. Ruth stepped between them and patted the girl on the shoulder. “Just do what we talked about, and this will be over before you know it.”
Gabrielle flinched from her touch, and I saw a look of worry cross Ruth’s face, like she’d realized for the first time that maybe Gabrielle wouldn’t go along with Conrad’s plan.
The four of us got into an empty elevator, and Ruth punched the button for the third floor, checking her plum lipstick in the chrome paneling. As the door closed behind us, I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, a flash of metal, and I thought, Uh-oh.
Ruth knocked Gabrielle to the ground and threw herself between Rex and the girl.
“Did you see that?” Rex asked. “She tried to take my gun!”
“Put that down,” Ruth said, putting a hand on Rex’s forearm. “We’re in a police station. You can’t just go waving your gun around every time a little girl looks at you funny.”
Ruth punched a button, and the elevator screeched to a stop between floors.
Then she looked down at Gabrielle, cowering in the corner of the elevator, and said, “The next time you want to take somebody’s gun away, do it like this.”
By the time we reached our floor and the elevator doors opened, Ruth had snapped a pair of handcuffs around Rex’s wrists and disarmed him. She marched him down the hall and threw him into the first interrogation room she came to. We passed a blue-uniformed LAPD officer in the hall. I felt sure he’d stop us and ask what the meaning of this was, but he only nodded in our direction and said, “Detective Forrester.”
Ruth nodded back and continued down the hall. Gabrielle and I followed behind, about as surprised as Rex had looked the moment Ruth handcuffed him.
It was a lot to take in at once. I had never been able to make sense of Ruth. She didn’t seem like a pinup girl, a party girl, a junkie, Rex’s partner in crime, or Annie’s friend, but I wouldn’t have guessed she was a cop, either.
As they walked down the hall, Ruth made sure that every cop she passed knew that one of the men who shot Officers Greeley and Carver that morning was ready to be questioned.
“Go on in and take first crack at him if you want to,” she sneered.
When Ruth stopped in front of an office door, Gabrielle looked up at her, her big eyes filled with worry.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked.
“I’m going to open this door, and you’re going to go into that room,” Ruth said. “And you can tell them whatever you want to. You can even tell them what really happened. But whatever you say here, you can’t unsay. You can’t change your mind later if you don’t like the way that things turn out. So think hard about how you want to play this, because this is your one chance.”
Gabrielle said she understood.
“You,” she said, turning to me. “Wait here a minute.”
They disappeared behind the opaque glass, and I sat in the hallway feeling like I’d just been used as the rope in a game of tug-o-war. Had this been Ruth’s plan from the beginning?
Before I had a chance to consider that, she stepped out into the hallway, cocked her head to the side, and asked, “What were you doing outside of Conrad’s room anyway?”
“I was going to smother him with a pillow,” I said.
Ruth smirked, then frowned. “I almost wish I hadn’t been in such a hurry to find you. Come on.”
I didn’t know where she was taking me, but when she snapped her fingers, I got to my feet and followed her down the hallway. She stopped in front of another office door and gave me a hard look. “Are you ready to make your statement?”
It had never occurred to me that I would be asked to talk to the police, too. Whatever you say here, you can’t unsay. The words Ruth had spoken to Gabrielle hadn’t meant much to me a few minutes ago. Now I realized how serious they were.
“What am I supposed to tell them?” I asked.
“Be careful,” Ruth said. “Stick to the truth, but only the version of it that’s easiest to verify. And hope that’s enough.”
As pep talks went, it wasn’t much of one. She opened the door, and I found myself in a room with white flaking walls and a hulking wooden desk that took up nearly its entire width. On one side of the desk sat a policewoman wearing a small round hat that looked like a breakfast Danish sitting on top of her head.
“I’m supposed to be on break,” the woman said. When she spoke, the tight gray curls at her temples shook like a pair of tiny fists.
“I’m sorry, Detective Cobb. This shouldn’t take long,” Ruth said, then closed the door behind her before the policewoman could protest further.
“Sit down,” she said, sighing heavily. “State your name, age, and home address.”
I looked the policewoman in the eye and saw nothing. Not a single clue as to whether she was kind or cruel or inclined to believe a word I said. But I didn’t care. For years, I’d been lied to about the biggest, most important thing in my life. And at that moment, the idea of being careful, of telling a watered-down version of the truth, felt uglier to me than a lie.
I knew I wouldn’t want to unsay any of it. I wanted it all out and open and said.
Detective Cobb didn’t interrupt me much while I told my story, which was fortunate because every time she opened her mouth, I felt like screaming.
“You realize that’s the police department’s job,” she said, when I explained how I’d planned to track down my sister’s attacker. And instead of going to the Stratford Arms myself, why hadn’t I just asked my parents about the postcard?
When I told her about being kidnapped from the pay phone by Rex, Conrad, and Walter Hanrahan, she asked, “What were you doing out by yourself at that hour?”
“Making a phone call,” I said through clenched teeth.
When I reached the end, she looked at me with her blank, bored face and said, “This is all very difficult to believe, Miss Gates.”
“It’s true.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t true. Only that it was difficult to believe.”
“Oh.”
“If there’s nothing else, you’re free to go.”
“Are you going to do anything?” I asked. “What happens now?”
“Don’t worry, Miss Gates. This is in our hands now.”
I left the room feeling like I’d just spent a week in bed with the flu, weak and emptied out and desperate for company. There was no sign of Ruth or Gabrielle in the hallway, so I found a bench and lay down on it, curling my knees up to my chest. I only meant to rest my eyes for a moment, but when I opened them again, the light in the hallway had changed and Jerry was there, shaking me by the shoulder.
“Hey there, Alice,” he said.
I pressed my hand to my cheek and felt the grain of the wood slats imprinted there. My hair stuck out in chicken wings on one side and my shoulder ached from sleeping on the hard bench, but I smiled anyway. I think Jerry was glad to see me, too.
The blood that streaked his face as he chased the Rolls-Royce through the hospital parking lot had been wiped away, but he had a lump the size of a golf ball on his forehead and the beginnings of a black eye.
“What happened to you?” I asked groggily.
Jerry looked over his shoulder, then leaned in and whispered, “When I went after Gabrielle, I found Hanrahan waiting for me in the stairwell. He gave me a whack with his billy club and pushed me down the steps.”
I sat up so fast my head spun.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Jerry shrugged and waved me off. “I’ve had worse. What about you? People have been trying to wake you up all afternoon.”
It had been nice to pass an hour or so when all my cares and worries were the size of a bench in a police station hallway, but now I was awake and back in the world—and I remembered the news I had to share with Jerry.
“Jerry, I was wrong about Ruth. She wasn’t working with Rex—”
“She’s an undercover cop,” Jerry said, finishing my thought.
“You knew?”
“Ruth and I have known each other for a long time,” Jerry said. “We used to be on the vice squad together.”
So what Cy had told me was true. I wondered if he’d known about Ruth, too.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“When Ruth sent Gabrielle off to Annie the first time, she didn’t know about Conrad and Irma. All she knew was she had a scared underage girl on her hands, and all she wanted to do was bundle her off someplace far away from Rex and the Stratford Arms in a hurry.
“The kind of cop I was, things were more straightforward, at least in theory. You arrested the bad guys and brought them in. But if you’re undercover like Ruth, it’s different. Certain things you let slide, sometimes because they’re small potatoes and not worth your trouble, and sometimes because you can help a girl more by turning her over to someone like Annie than you can sending her downtown.
“Once Annie found out what had happened to Gabrielle, what Conrad had done to Irma, keeping her safe wasn’t enough. Annie wanted to go to the police, but she didn’t know who to trust. Ruth was suspicious, too. It wasn’t how your sister usually worked, and Ruth thought maybe it was a setup. She was worried it would blow her cover, too, seeing how she and Gabrielle already knew each other.
“I talked them into trusting each other. I promised Ruth we wouldn’t blow her cover. I told Annie that if Ruth had gone bad, then the whole LAPD had. In the end, your sister agreed to meet with her, and, well, you know the rest.”
“Ruth didn’t show up,” I said.
Jerry nodded. “It’s been a long time since I was LAPD, and vice squad has a way of changing people. When I saw it was starting to change me, I got out. I was beginning to think it had changed Ruth, too. That I’d made a terrible mistake in trusting her.”
Now I understood why Millie hated Jerry so much—she blamed him. And no wonder he hadn’t been in a hurry to tell me about Ruth. What difference did it make if she was a cop or not if she was as crooked and dangerous as the rest of them?
“When did you know you hadn’t made a mistake?”
“When I found you here,” Jerry said. “She figured out a way to get you girls out of there, away from Conrad. And when I found out she’d turned Rex in, I knew she’d decided to blow her cover. That’s not a decision she’d make lightly, Alice. Once the word gets out, she’ll be a marked woman.”
I remembered the bag of dope I found while I was hiding in Ruth’s pantry at the Stratford Arms. I couldn’t see Ruth using it herself, but it occurred to me that she might sell it if she ever needed to disappear. As big as it was, I bet she could disappear for a long time on that money. Maybe Ruth had intended to bring Gabrielle in to the police all along—she just needed more time to get her house in order in case the worst happened.
She wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble if she was secretly working for Conrad, and she certainly wouldn’t have brought Gabrielle here.
“That means Ruth wasn’t the one who’d set Annie up,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t look that way,” Jerry said. “There’s something else that happened while you were sleeping, Alice.”
He took off his hat and set it down next to him on the bench.
“The county sheriff’s department found Irma’s body. It was a couple of hours ago, not far from where Gabrielle said Conrad had taken her. The strange thing is, someone called in an anonymous tip this morning that led them right to her. The body wasn’t anywhere a person was likely to stumble across it. You couldn’t see her from the road. Even with what Gabrielle had told them, it might have
taken days to find her, maybe longer. That phone call was a lucky thing. A strange, lucky thing.”
Not luck, I thought.
I might not have been able to figure Ruth out, but I’d thought long and hard about Millie. If she had intended to run, she would have done it before the night I met her. And she didn’t strike me as the running-away type anyhow. She hadn’t become a recluse after her disgrace, hiding out in Chicago or living in obscurity in Palm Springs. She’d rented a one-bedroom in Hollywood where anyone could see her. The night Millie had pulled me inside Irma’s apartment, I’d assumed that she was removing all trace of herself to avoid being implicated in so sordid a thing as Irma’s life. It had never occurred to me that she might be saving the scraps and mementos of their friendship. It never occurred to me how dangerous it would have been for her to stay put, waiting until she’d found the girl and heard the words from Gabrielle’s own mouth about how Irma had died and where Conrad had taken her.
Not until later. And not until later did I realize that a person who would do that would never leave her best friend’s body to rot in a shallow mountain grave. A person like that would look.
The call to the sheriff’s department was anonymous, but I knew who had placed it immediately. No matter how they tried, Conrad and his dirty cops couldn’t control everything. Annie wasn’t the only person out there who cared about justice. I wasn’t, either.
“What they need now is evidence,” Jerry said. “Something beyond Gabrielle’s word that puts the three of them at the beach that night.”
“Beyond her word?” I asked. Really, it was more like yelling than asking. “Didn’t about fifty people see them leave that party together? Would their word be good enough? Does someone famous have to give a statement before they do something?”
Jerry caught one of my angrily flailing hands in his and said, “Hard evidence, Alice. Something beyond words and who saw what. They believe Gabrielle. But they know Conrad will have lawyers. Good ones. It’s for Gabrielle’s own good—and yours and Annie’s, too—that they do this the right way.”
“Have they found anything yet?” I asked.