Then, he stands there, crying in the dark.
<
* * * *
SERVED COLD
Zoë Sharp
Layla’s curse, as she saw it, was that she had an utterly fabulous body attached to an instantly forgettable face. It wasn’t that she was ugly. Ugliness in itself stuck in the mind. It was simply that, from the neck upwards, she was plain. A bland plainness that encouraged male and female eyes alike to slide on past without pausing. Most failed to recall her easily at a second meeting.
From the neck down, though, that was a different story, and had been right from when she’d begun to blossom in eighth grade. Things had started burgeoning over the winter, when nobody noticed the unexpected explosion of curves. But when summer came, with its bathing suits and skinny tops and tight skirts, Layla suddenly became the most whispered-about girl in her class.
A pack of the kind of boys her mother was usually too drunk to warn her about took to following her when she walked home from school. At first, Layla was flattered. But one simmering afternoon, under the banyan and the Spanish moss, she learned a brutal lesson about the kind of attention her new body attracted.
And when her mother’s latest boyfriend started looking at her with those same hot lustful eyes, Layla cut and run. One way or another, she’d been running ever since.
At least the work came easy. Depending on how much she covered up, she could get anything from selling lingerie or perfume in a high-class department store, to exotic dancing. She soon learned to slip on different personae the same way she slipped on a low-cut top or a demure blouse.
Tonight she was wearing a tailored white dress shirt with frills down the front and a dinky little clip-on bow tie. Classy joint. The last time she’d worn a bow-tie to wait tables, she’d worn no top at all.
The fat guy in charge of the wait staff was called Steve and had hands to match his roving eye. That he’d seen beyond Layla’s homely face was mainly because he rarely looked at his female employees above the neck. Layla had noted the way his eyes glazed and his mouth went slack and the sweat beaded at his receding hairline, and she wondered if this was another gig she was going to have to try out for on her back.
She didn’t, in the end, but only, she realized, because Steve thought of himself as sophisticated. The proposition would no doubt come after. Still, Steve only let his pants rule his head so far. Enough to let Layla - and the rest of the girls - know that he’d be taking half their tips tonight. Anyone who tried to hold anything back would be out on her ass.
Layla didn’t care about the tips. That wasn’t why she was here, anyhow.
Now, she stood meekly with the others while Steve walked the line, checking everybody over.
“Got to look sharp out there tonight, girls,” he said. “Mr Dyer, he’s a big man around here. Can’t afford to let him down.”
He seemed to have a thing for the name badges each girl wore pinned above her left breast. Hated it if they were crooked, and liked to straighten them out personally and take his time getting it just so. The girl next to Layla, whose name was Tammy, rolled her eyes while Steve pawed at her. Layla rolled her eyes right back.
Steve paused in front of her, frowning. “Where’s your badge, honey? This one here says your name is Cindy and I know that ain’t right.” And he made sure to nudge the offending item with clammy fingers.
Layla shrugged, surprised he picked up on the deliberate swap. Her face might not stick in the mind, but she couldn’t take the chance that her name might ring a bell.
“Oh, I guess it musta gotten lost,” she said, all breathless and innocent. “I figured seeing as Cindy called in sick and ain’t here - and none of the fancy folk out there is gonna remember my name anyhow - it don’t matter.”
Steve continued to frown and finger the badge for a moment, then met Layla’s brazen stare and realized he’d lingered too long, even for him. With a shifty little sideways glance, he let go and stepped back. “No, it don’t matter,” he muttered, moving on. Alongside her, Tammy rolled her eyes again.
Layla had the contents of her canapé tray hurriedly explained to her by one of the harassed chefs and then ducked out of the service door, along the short drab corridor, and into the main ballroom.
The glitter and the glamour set her heart racing, as it always did. For a few years, she’d dreamed of moving in these circles without a white cloth over her arm and an open bottle in her hand. And, for a time, she’d almost believed that it might be so.
Not any more.
Not since Bobby.
She reached the first cluster of dinner jackets and long dresses that probably cost more than she made in a year — just for the fabric, never mind the stitching - and waited to catch their attention. It took a while.
“Sir? Ma’am? Would you care for a canapé? Those darlin’ little round ones are smoked salmon and caviar, and the square ones are Kobe beef and ginger.”
She smiled, but their eyes were on the food, or they didn’t think it was worth it to smile back. Just stuffed their mouths and continued braying to each other like the stuck-up donkeys they were.
Layla had done this kind of gig many times before. She knew the right pace and frequency to circulate, how often to approach the same guests before attentive turned to irritating, how to slip through the crowd without getting jostled. How to keep her mouth shut and her ears open. Steve might hint that she had to put out to get signed on again, but Layla knew she was good and he was lucky to have her.
Well, after tonight, Stevie-boy, you might just change your mind about that.
She smiled and offered the caviar and the beef, reciting the same words over and over like someone kept pulling a string at the back of her neck. She didn’t need to think about it, so she thought about Bobby instead.
Bobby had been the bouncer in a roadhouse near Tallahassee. A huge guy with a lot of old scar tissue across his knuckles and around his eyes. Tale was he’d been a boxer, had a shot until he’d taken one punch too many in the ring. Then everything had gone into slow motion for Bobby and never speeded up again.
He wore a permanent scowl like he’d rip your head off and spit down your neck, as soon as look at you, but Layla quickly realized that was merely puzzlement. Bobby was slightly overmatched by the pace of life and couldn’t quite work out why. Still plenty fast enough to throw out drunks in a cheap joint, though. And once Bobby had laid his fists on you, you didn’t rush to get up again.
One night in the parking lot, Layla was jumped by a couple of guys who’d fallen foul of the “no touching” rule earlier in the evening and caught the rough side of Bobby’s iron-hard hands. They waited, tanking up on cheap whisky, until closing time. Waited for the lights to go out and the girls to straggle, yawning, from the back door. They grabbed Layla before she had a chance to scream, and were touching all they wanted when Bobby waded in out of nowhere. Layla had never been happier to hear the crack of skulls.
She’d been angry more than shocked and frightened - angry enough to stamp them a few times with those lethal heels once they were on the ground. Angry enough to take their overflowing billfolds, too. But it didn’t last. When Bobby got her back to her rented double-wide, she shook and cried as she clung to him and begged him to help her forget. That night she discovered that Bobby was big and slow in other ways, too. And sometimes that was a real good thing.
For a while, at least.
“Ma’am? Would you care for a canapé? Smoked salmon and caviar on that side, and this right here’s Kobe beef. No, thank you, ma’am.”
Layla worked the room in a pattern she’d laid out inside her head, weaving through the crowd with the nearest thing a person could get to invisibility. It was a big fancy do, that was for sure. Some charity she’d never heard of and would never benefit from. The crowd was circulating like hot dense air through a fan, edging their way up towards the host and hostess at the far end.
The Dyers were old money and gracious with it, but firmly distant to
wards the staff. They knew their place and made sure the little people, like Layla, were aware of theirs. Layla didn’t mind. She was used to being a nobody.
Mr Dyer was indeed a big man, as Steve had said. A mover and shaker. He didn’t need to mingle, he could just stand there, like royalty, with a glass in one hand and the other around the waist of his tall, elegant wife, looking relaxed and casual.
Well, maybe not so relaxed. Every now and again Layla noticed Dyer throw a little sideways look at their guest of honour and frown, as though he still wasn’t quite sure what the guy was doing there.
Guy called Venable. Another big guy. Another mover and shaker. The difference was that Venable had clawed his way up out of the gutter and had never forgotten it. He stood close to the Dyers in his perfectly tailored tux with a kind of secret smile on his face, like he knew they didn’t want him there but also knew they couldn’t afford to get rid of him. But, just in case anyone thought about trying, he’d surrounded himself with four bodyguards.
Layla eyed them surreptitiously, with some concern. They were huge - bigger than Bobby, even when he’d been still standing - each wearing a bulky suit and one of those little curly wires leading up from their collar to their ear, like they was guarding the president himself. But Venable was no statesman, Layla knew for a fact.
She hadn’t expected him to be invited to the Dyers’ annual charity ball, and had worked hard to get herself on the staff list when she’d found out he was. A lot of planning had gone into this, one way or another.
By contrast, the Dyers had no protection. Well, unless you counted that bossy secretary of Mrs Dyer’s. Mrs Dyer was society through and through. The type who wouldn’t remember to get out of bed in the morning without a social secretary to remind her. The type whose only job is looking good and saying the right thing and being seen in the right places. There must be some kind of a college for women like that.
Mrs Dyer had made a big show of inspecting the arrangements, though. She’d walked through the kitchen earlier that day, nodding serenely, just so her husband could toast her publicly tonight for her part in overseeing the organization of the event, and she could look all modest about it and it not quite be a lie.
She’d had the secretary with her then, a slim woman with cool eyes who’d frozen Steve off the first time he’d tried laying a proprietary hand on her shoulder. Layla and the rest of the girls hid their smiles behind bland faces when she’d done that. Even so, Steve took it out on Tammy - had her on her back in the storeroom almost before they were out the door.
The secretary was here tonight, Layla saw. Fussing around her employer, but it was Mr Dyer whose shoulder she stayed close to. Too close, Layla decided, for their relationship to be merely professional. An affair perhaps? She wouldn’t put it past any man to lose his sense and his pants when it came to an attractive woman. Still, she didn’t think the secretary looked the type. Maybe he liked ‘em cool. Maybe she was hoping he’d leave his wife.
At the moment, the secretary’s eyes were on their guest. Venable had been free with his hosts’ champagne all evening and his appetites were not concerned only with the food. Layla watched the way his body language grew predatory when he was introduced to the gauche teenage daughter of one of the guests, and she stepped in with her tray, ignoring the ominous looming of the bodyguards.
“Sir, can I interest you in a canapé? Smoked salmon and caviar or Kobe beef and ginger?”
Venable’s greed got the better of him and he let go of the girl’s hand, which he’d been grasping far too long. She snatched it back, red-faced, and fled. The secretary gave Layla a knowing, grateful smile.
Layla moved away quickly afterwards, a frown on her face, cursing inwardly and knowing he was watching her. She was here for a purpose. One that was too important to allow stupid mistakes like that to risk bringing her unwanted attention. And after she’d tried so hard to blend in.
To calm herself, to negate those shivers of doubt, she thought of Bobby again. They’d moved in together, found a little apartment. Not much, but the first place Layla had lived in years that didn’t need the wheels taken off before you could call it home.
He’d been always gentle with Layla, but then one night he’d hit a guy who was hassling the girls too hard, hurt him real bad, and the management had to let Bobby go. Word got out and he couldn’t get another job. Layla had walked out, too, but she went through a dry spell as far as work was concerned, and now there were two of them to feed and care for.
Eventually, she was forced to go lower than she’d had to go before, taking her clothes off to bad music in a cheap dive that didn’t even bother to have a guy like Bobby to protect the girls. As long as the customers put their money down before they left, the management didn’t care.
Layla soon discovered that some of the girls took to supplementing their income by inviting the occasional guy out into the alley at the back of the club. When the landlord came by twice in the same week threatening to evict her and Bobby, she’d swallowed her pride. By the end of that first night, that wasn’t all she’d had to swallow.
Even Bobby, slow though he might be, soon realized what she was doing. How could he not question where the extra money was coming from when he’d been in the business long enough to know how much the girls made in tips - and what they had to do to earn them? At first, when she’d explained it to him, Layla thought he was cool with it. Until the next night when she was out in the alley between sets, her back hard up against the rough stucco wall with some guy from out of town huffing sweat and beer into her unremarkable face.
One minute she was standing with her eyes tight shut, wondering how much longer the guy was going to last, and the next he was yanked away and she heard that dreadful crack of skulls.
Bobby hadn’t meant to kill him, she was sure of that. He just didn’t know his own strength, was all. Then it was his turn to panic and tremble, but Layla stayed ice cool. They wrapped the body in plastic and put it into the trunk of a borrowed car before driving it down to the Everglades. Bobby carried it out to a pool where the ‘gators gathered, and left it there for them to hide. Layla even went back a week later, just to check, but there was nothing left to find.
They stripped the guy before they dumped him, and struck lucky. He had a decent watch and a bulging wallet. It was a month before Layla had to put out against the stucco in the alley again.
How were they supposed to know he was connected to Venable? That the watch Bobby had pawned would lead Venable’s bone-breakers straight to them?
A month after the killing, Venable’s boys picked Bobby and Layla up from the bar and drove them out to some place by the docks. Bobby swore that Layla wasn’t in on it, that they should leave her alone, let her go. Swore blind that it was so. And eventually, they blinded him, just to make sure.
Layla thought she’d never get the sound of Bobby’s screaming out of her head as they’d tortured him into a confession of sorts. But even when they’d snapped his spine, left him broken and bleeding on that filthy concrete floor, Bobby had not said a word against Layla. And she, to her eternal shame, had been too terrified to confess her part in it all, as though that would make mockery of everything he’d gone through.
So, they’d left her. She was a waitress, a dancer, a hooker. A no-account nobody. Not worth the effort of a beating. Not worth the cost of a bullet.
Helpless as a baby, damaged beyond repair, Bobby went into some institution just north of Tampa and Layla took the bus up to see him every week for the first couple of months. But, gradually, getting on that bus got harder to do. It broke her heart to see him like that, to force the cheerful note into her voice.
Eventually, the bus left the terminal one morning and Layla wasn’t on it.
She’d cried for days. When she’d gotten word that Bobby had snuck a knife out of the dining hall, waited until it was quiet then slit his wrists under the blankets and quietly bled out into his mattress during the night, there had been no more tears left to
fall.
Layla’s heart hardened to a shell. She’d let Bobby down while he was alive, but she could seek justice for him after he was dead. She heard things. That was one of the beauties of being invisible. People talked while she served them drinks, like she wasn’t there. Once Layla had longed to be noticeable, to be accepted. Now she made it her business simply to listen.
Of course, she knew she couldn’t go after Venable alone, so Layla had found another bruiser with no qualms about burying the bodies. And, once he’d had a taste of that spectacular body, he was hers.
Thad was younger than Bobby, sharper, neater, and when it came to killing he had the strike and the morals of a rattlesnake. Layla knew he’d do anything for her, right up until the time she tried to move on, and then he was likely to do anything to her instead.
Well, after tonight, she wouldn’t care.
She slipped out of the ballroom but instead of turning into the kitchen, this time she took the extra few strides to the French windows at the end of the corridor, furtively opened them a crack, then closed them again carefully so they didn’t latch.
Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Page 33