“Goodness. Well, Lieutenant Detective, you’d better come in and make yourself at home.”
“I was only seeing to it Rose got home safely.”
“Nonsense. You’re here now. Stay a bit.” The Lieutenant Detective staggered forward in a daze as Odalie hooked her arm through his and sat him on the divan where she’d been lounging just seconds before. He seemed acutely aware of this latter fact and scooted politely so he was perched on the outermost edge of the upholstered seat. She gave him an assessing look, her mouth involuntarily wriggling in a way I understood meant she was deciding how to regain control of the situation. I knew she would be unsettled until she had extracted a tacit guarantee that the Lieutenant Detective wouldn’t give away her secret, and to do so first she needed to size him up. “I could offer you something to drink,” she said. He looked at her. “Something to calm your nerves,” she said. It was clear she did not mean coffee or tea, and he seemed to understand his acceptance of a cocktail would in fact calm his hostess’s nerves.
“Sure.”
As Odalie got up to mix the drinks, the Lieutenant Detective’s eyes followed her, and I took the opportunity to sneak down the hall and into her bedroom to change my clothes. If Odalie had taken note of the brutally shredded hemline of the dress I’d borrowed, either she did not care or did not care to comment. I knew it was not likely she would say anything to reproach me. Nonetheless I felt guilty, having ruined something I knew I could not afford to replace. From the other room the spurt of the seltzer bottle sounded in several staccato blasts. In the months after I’d moved in, Odalie and I had taken to sharing one big closet and I stood before it now, studying its contents. As I rooted about for something to wear I heard Odalie bring a tray of drinks to the coffee table, the ice tinkling as she crossed the room. The sharp fragrance of fresh lime drifted from the sitting room into the bedroom, and I guessed she’d elected to make gin rickeys. Odalie, never one to drink the concoctions of ethanol and juniper syrup sold in the speakeasies—commonly referred to as bathtub gin—had very likely used the last of the bottle of real English gin we kept in the kitchenette bar (it was destined to mysteriously replace itself the very next day). Curiously, my mouth watered in anticipation, a phenomenon I’d never experienced before, being something of an amateur drinker myself.
I stared at the wall of hanging clothes and tried to hurry up. If the Lieutenant Detective had diplomatically gone home like proper decorum dictated, the decision would have been simple and I would’ve put on my nightgown, ready to be comfortable for the evening. But I ruled this out immediately. My regular nightgown was not an improper garment, per se. In fact it possessed certain features reminiscent of the sexless nightshirts we were made to wear in the orphanage: bleached white linen of a coarse and scratchy variety, a high starched neck, and long sleeves with string-pulls that cinched at the wrists. But I knew I’d rather die than have the Lieutenant Detective see me in any nightgown, let alone that particular one. I searched about for something more suitable.
“That’s a very nice pair of bracelets,” I overheard the Lieutenant Detective remark to Odalie. Immediately I knew the ones he meant. She hadn’t been wearing them earlier, but I had spotted them twinkling on her wrists when we walked in the door. The baubles in question were a pair of diamond bracelets, the like of which I’d never seen in my admittedly provincial life. They were far out of the range of anything I ever glimpsed in Mrs. Lebrun’s jewelry box as she taught me how to properly clean precious stones and their settings. I will probably never see anything to rival Odalie’s bracelets ever again. Most curious to me at the time was the fact I’d never seen Odalie wear them out. Instead, she had a queer habit of putting them on when she stayed in, wearing them around the apartment the way another sort of woman might wear a housecoat.
“Are they real?” he asked. I heard Odalie laugh, the musical peals of her voice striking a perfectly ambiguous note, implying yes, of course and no, don’t be silly all at the same time. I had wondered about the answer to this question myself, but had never been so bold as to ask. Finally, I found something of my own buried deep in the closet. I threw on a very plain blue cotton dress and made my way back to the sitting room, but hovered in the doorway, just out of sight, peering in on them from a vantage point where they were not likely to notice me.
“Do you know,” she leaned in excitedly, “they were a gift; I’ve never asked whether or not they’re real.” She laughed again. I noticed she had pronounced the word gift sharply, like it had a bitter bite to it. The Lieutenant Detective also did not fail to notice this.
“That so? A gift?”
“Yes. Well. An engagement present, to be more precise.”
“Oh, forgive me. I was under the impression you were . . .” He reached around for the most inoffensive word and found none. “. . . a bachelorette,” he finally concluded, feminizing the more familiar (and notably less offensive) masculine term. Odalie smiled, pleased and Sphinx-like.
“I am.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. Again.”
Odalie did not reply to this last comment and instead stretched her wrists out in front of the Lieutenant Detective’s eyes. “But they really are something, aren’t they.” It was not a question. She rolled her wrists slowly to the left and then to the right, allowing the diamonds to shoot off the full color spectrum of their tiny prismatic flares. He gazed at them with appreciation.
“I’ve never seen a woman wear bracelets on both wrists, matching like that.”
The bitter bite came back into the shape of her mouth as she smiled at the Lieutenant Detective’s impressed countenance and gave a brittle laugh. “Yes. They look a little like . . . like handcuffs, don’t they?” She crossed her wrists together and posed. The Lieutenant Detective started at this grim comparison and glanced at Odalie in surprise. She leaned closer to him. “In fact, I’ll let you in on a secret: That’s what engagement presents always are, in one way or another.” She cocked her head playfully, but there was something dark, too, in her demeanor. I felt the prickle of something proprietary awaken in me, but I wasn’t entirely certain to which party this feeling was directed.
I held my breath as Odalie reduced the inches of empty space between them. “Doll a thing up all you want, but you still can’t change what it is. A rose by another other name . . .” she said coquettishly. Hearing the homonym of my name stung my ears somewhat. “Do you think any of the suspects down at the precinct would be envious if they knew my handcuffs are fancier than theirs?” Odalie was grinning wolfishly now, her rouged lips stretched wide over the white of her teeth, her body almost touching the Lieutenant Detective. Suddenly the urge to enter the room overcame me. I coughed.
Their attention snapped in my direction, a couple of woodland creatures frozen instantly upon realizing they are not alone in the forest. The Lieutenant Detective’s face colored up to his ears, and he rose reactively from the divan.
“Oh! Yes. Well. I should be going. I’m quite glad to have seen you home safely, Miss Baker.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Detective. For all your . . .” I searched for the right word, lamely shrugged, and finally murmured, “. . . assistance.” I hadn’t meant it sarcastically, but I could tell that was how he took it. He straightened his spine in an aggrieved manner that simultaneously suggested he felt truly sorry for the events of the night—for having been caught making eyes at Odalie, for having ruined the dress, perhaps even for the raid itself. He reached for his hat.
“Oh, but Frank, stay awhile. You haven’t finished your drink,” Odalie complained, gesturing to the glass still half full with gin rickey. She reached a hand up to tug playfully at his jacket sleeve. There was a familiar ease about the way Odalie pronounced the Lieutenant Detective’s given name; it was as though she had said it that way many times over already. As I took in the image of the two of them there in the sitting room, it occurred to me the Lieutenant Detective did not look so ov
erwhelmed and disconcerted by his surroundings as I had originally thought. For the first time a certain suspicion began to form itself in my head.
“No, no. It’s late, and I’ve already had more than my fill tonight, no need to tank up before going home.” Still standing where he had abruptly leapt to his feet from the divan, he made a halfhearted attempt to smooth his rumpled suit. Despite his best efforts, the suit still hung on him in its signature slouchy manner. I suppose I had always known there was something of the handsome rogue about the Lieutenant Detective, but just at that moment, as he looked up at me with the scar on his forehead furrowed in the lamplight and a crooked grin forming on his lips, I began to see why he was so often fussed over when he found himself in the company of ladies.
“Besides,” he added, “it’s been quite an eventful evening.” At this, Odalie looked at him askance. “I’ll let Rose—beg pardon, I mean Miss Baker—recount the particulars.”
Odalie saw him to the door. “The other way . . . to your right,” I heard her call softly as he went the wrong direction to find his way back to the elevator. The suspicion that had hatched itself in my brain only minutes earlier subsided a bit. I don’t believe his disorientation was the product of too much drink. It was his first visit to the hotel, as far as I knew, and people often found themselves overwhelmed upon their premier visit to Odalie’s apartment.
Odalie came back into the sitting room, and from the shift in her manner it was immediately clear she was expecting a thorough debriefing on the subject of my recent interaction with the Lieutenant Detective. “It was very nice of him to see you home like that,” she said. She threw her body over the divan like a wet blanket. There was something perpetually fluid about her movements, even in spite of the fact she was mostly long lines and hard angles. For months now I’d been trying to understand this paradox, and I knew I was not the first to try to puzzle it out.
“And don’t worry,” she continued once I had failed to reply. “I won’t get too cozy with him.” I knew right away this was a lie. She leaned forward from the divan and reached to pat the back of my hand where it rested on my knee. “I can tell you wouldn’t want me to.” There was an excitement in her voice the way she said it, and I realized the Lieutenant Detective had very recently gained an element of true appeal in Odalie’s eyes. But it didn’t matter to me just then, as there was another matter of great importance at hand.
“Odalie,” I tentatively began. “There was a raid at the club tonight.”
She was in the midst of taking a sip from the Lieutenant Detective’s leftover gin rickey. She spat it out in a fine mist, and the piney scent of gin and citrus lime hit the air. Within seconds she was on the telephone, barking out one ’phone number after another at a very flustered operator, who—I gathered from the sound of it—kept returning on the line with the unacceptable news that none of the parties requested could be reached.
14
The Sergeant had said we. When the Lieutenant Detective asked if the Sergeant had somehow managed, in a very expedited manner and against all odds, to obtain Mr. Vitalli’s confession, the Sergeant had looked at me (with meaning!) and had said, We did. I felt those two simple words had never borne more weight.
You see, in the years I’d known the Sergeant, he was never a man given to frequent use of the word we. His habit of stinginess with that particular word only made my respect for him grow in weight and size. I suppose that’s fairly common; we always value those individuals who make us feel it is really something to have their friendship, to belong in their club. The Sergeant had a very precise mental ruler by which he measured people. He never hid it from you if you did not measure up, and he did not give a fig for how it made you feel. In his mind, that was not his problem; it was yours.
I say this now because when he gave me that look and said we, I knew it meant something. I knew it was a moment of great significance! I believed with my whole heart the Sergeant was a man who always did things by the book, and here he was condescending to bend the rules with me. With me! I knew he had a very strong sense of moral justice and it was only in the most extreme of circumstances and only with very special, like-minded individuals that he would ever dare to force Lady Justice’s hand. I don’t particularly care for the word vigilante, for it has a particularly anarchical and rebellious sound to it and as such does not suit the Sergeant at all. I believe the Sergeant was something more finely wrought, something acutely attuned to a higher call. And you may call me a fool, but I believe—or rather, I believed, as the past tense is more accurate here—when he used the word we it was his way of saying, Why yes, Rose, we are cut from the same cloth.
I know I have said it before, but I will say it again: You mustn’t think there was anything improper going on between the Sergeant and myself. There were absolutely no, shall we say, exchanges between us. Nor did I ever “give him the check to cash later,” as Odalie was often wont to say of the promises she’d made to those suitors whose desires she did not wish to immediately gratify. No, the bond that united the Sergeant and myself was of a much more pure variety. In addition to being a role model in the professional sense, he was a husband and a father, and although I admit I was sometimes inordinately curious and disdainful about the creature who was his wife (a woman whom, by the by, I have never met), I did not necessarily want him to stop being these things. Nor did I want him to be anything less than a man of his word. I did not imagine myself his mistress. Why yes, on a few (very rare!) occasions, I had let myself imagine what it might be like to be married to the Sergeant, to have him come home and eat a meal I’d prepared especially for him, to have his handlebar mustache tickle my skin as he leaned in to kiss my cheek. To have his handlebar mustache tickle me, full stop. Oh! But I can assure you, I entertained these fantasies very sparingly, and only on special occasions.
Of course, I never let on that such images ran through my head. At work I was always the model of proper decorum and professional courtesy. Although it was plain to everyone that I’d lately fallen in with Odalie and her lot, I nonetheless believe the Sergeant knew I was not susceptible to becoming some sort of wanton flapper or else some despicable gangster’s moll. There had never been an abundance of words between us, but we’d never needed them. I’d always felt he’d known me straightaway, from the moment of that first interview. And in typing up Mr. Vitalli’s confession, I knew I had done something that went well beyond professional courtesy. Neither of us was particularly religious, but I think in some strange way we shared the abstract belief we were doing God’s work. We were two morally upright souls, ridding the world of another foul injustice. I thought of the Sergeant and myself as being a bit cleaner than the other people around us, and somehow above the dirtier politics of life. Naturally, for all these reasons and more, I was very nervous about coming into the precinct after the raid on the speakeasy.
Odalie had been unable to do very much over the telephone on the night of the raid. The largest chunk of information she’d been able to procure had come from a fourteen-year-old street urchin named Charlie Whiting who sometimes delivered messages for Gib and Odalie. Charlie was paid to sit in a back room and answer the telephone like an office boy and write down cryptic orders like Philadelphia, 110 (which Charlie usually spelled “Filladelfeea”) or sometimes Baltimore, 50 (which Charlie usually spelled “Bawlamore”). Charlie had emerged from the back room that night to deliver a message to Gib, and afterward had stuck around to see if he could get away with a few swallows of gin before somebody disapprovingly remarked upon his age. He was a smallish, almost elfin boy, petite even for a fourteen-year-old, and had always loudly lamented this fact. But in the confusion of the raid, Charlie had benefited from his smaller stature and had managed to slip out a basement window.
It was almost dawn when we received a very apologetic knock at our door—the ’phone line was tied up, the bell-boy explained, and we were needed downstairs to dispense with the rather youthful “guest
” who had come to call upon us. Standing in the echoing cathedral of the lobby with his newsboy cap tipped far back on his head as he gazed in awe at his present surroundings, Charlie appeared smaller and younger than ever. But Odalie clearly cared nothing for the impressionable fragility of true youth. She marched right up to him and snapped her fingers in his upward-gazing face, in response to which he blinked as though coming out of a hypnotic trance. Almost immediately Odalie began reeling off a list of names, counting them down one by one on her fingers. To each name Charlie alternately said yes, no, or else think so, ma’am to indicate who had been “pinched” by the police, as he phrased it. By the time the sun had risen and we were dressed and headed to the precinct for a new day of work, Odalie had drafted together a sort of makeshift partial list.
When we arrived that morning at the precinct, Odalie fixed herself a cup of coffee and walked very slowly in the direction of the holding cell, tacitly gazing into the bars with a casual air. It was as though she were a visitor strolling down the salon of a large echoing museum, coolly contemplating the lesser-known works of a great master. Equally passive and reserved were Gib, Redmond, and the many other prominent faces I recognized from the speakeasy. Unflinching, they held Odalie’s gaze but remained silent, not a single one of them giving the slightest indication they were already acquainted with the woman staring at them from the other side of the bars. I intuited a whole conversation was taking place, despite the fact not a word was spoken. I resolved I would watch Odalie closely that day, curious as to what her plan would be. It was a sure bet she had a plan.
The Other Typist Page 18