The Other Typist

by Rindell, Suzanne

  Of course I was a little on edge about my own fate that morning; I was very aware of the fact I had been at the selfsame speakeasy that was now at the center of scrutiny. Although I had deduced from the tacit exchange of looks between Odalie and the men in the holding cell that her anonymity was assured, it was not entirely clear mine would likewise be maintained. Even the Lieutenant Detective was a source of worry for me, as he had neither made any of the arrests, nor explained to anybody at the precinct why he was suspiciously absent at the time the raid went into effect. I fretted over what he would say. Would my name be mentioned? I knew him to be a man who was quite content to stretch the truth when it aided his cause, but I doubted he would feel comfortable telling the Sergeant a handful of outright lies.

  But as it turned out, all my fretting on this particular score was for nothing. A wave of relief swept over me when I was told the Lieutenant Detective had telephoned earlier that morning and would not be coming in. He reported that a sudden and very uncomfortable stomach illness had forced his early departure from the raid, and as it had not yet subsided he was going to have to absent himself from the precinct for the day. If I had to make a conjecture on the matter, I would guess lying is very likely less difficult when it is done over the telephone. It is interesting to me how technology has in many ways facilitated and refined the practice of deception.

  Somehow Odalie got herself assigned to each and every case that bore any relation to the speakeasy. They started with Gib, as I predicted they would. It was one of the Sergeant’s clever interview tactics. The formula of it was simple, and he always did the same thing: He started with “the big fish,” as he called it, and had a dialogue about what the consequences might be if the big fish didn’t come clean. Then the big fish was redeposited to the holding cell and left to grow increasingly nervous as one by one, smaller fry were extracted and escorted to the interrogation room. By the end of the day the big fish was usually talking, fearful the smaller fish had already given him up. I was sure Odalie would lose her cool when they hauled Gib from the holding cell, roughly shoving him as they did. But she never broke. Odalie never showed the slightest sign of elevated interest. Instead, she got up, coolly gathered together some files and rolls of stenotype paper, and clack-clack-clacked in her high heels down the hall in calm pursuit of the Sergeant.

  And then it happened.

  I say it happened because still to this day I am not entirely sure what Odalie did, although now with the advantage of hindsight I have a handful of very strong theories. What I do know for certain is this: Fifteen minutes after Odalie followed Gib and the Sergeant into the interrogation room, we heard footsteps coming down the hall and, surprised that someone should emerge so soon, turned to look. We were further surprised when our eyes met with the sight of Gib, alone and moving in a casual stroll in the direction of the precinct entrance. Every head in the precinct turned to watch him. He was apparently free to go. I remember he was almost merry about it, which was in keeping with his character, for after all Gib always did enjoy having a good gloat. With an air of arrogant simplicity, he whistled a cheerful tune and slid his charcoal gray fedora back into place on his head, cocking the brim ever so slightly to one side in the style he customarily wore it. He pushed through the front door with a jaunty swing of his shoulder, and the last trace we saw of him was the silhouette of his hat bobbing in a series of disjointed flashes as his image broke up through the tessellated glass of the precinct’s entrance door. With every passing second his shape grew further shattered as he ambled down the stairs of the stoop and away from the building.

  I glanced around the room and made eye contact with Marie, who was filing reports on the other side of the room. Though she had always been a heavyset woman, it seemed like overnight Marie had grown very visibly pregnant, her belly already straining at the fabric of her dress with the queer, perfectly smooth roundness of a balloon. Her watery blue eyes were made more blue by the blotchy redness of her complexion. Even her posture had shifted all of a sudden; she stood with one hand or the other almost always balled into a fist and pushing into her lower back, wedged into her flesh deeply as if to leverage her spine. She caught my eye, rolled her bottom lip out, and shrugged, as if to say, Who knows what these men are about? He looked guilty to me, too. Then she returned to her filing.

  In the wake of Gib’s exit, the din of noise around me resumed itself. I couldn’t help but wonder what Odalie had possibly said in order to secure Gib’s release, for surely she must’ve said something to the Sergeant that made him agree to let Gib go in good conscience. At the time, it only made sense to me that Odalie must’ve had to cook up something rather elaborate in order to convince the Sergeant, as after all the Sergeant was an upright man and would have little tolerance for anything that sounded remotely like tomfoolery. Sure, I thought, he had collaborated with me when it came to helping Vitalli’s confession along, but that was something altogether different. As I’ve said, the Sergeant and I shared a bond, and together we answered to a higher calling. The affair with Vitalli was a matter of ensuring justice did not slip through the cracks, as it is all too often wont to do. I could not let myself believe for a second it would not be the same with the Sergeant and Odalie. No, I thought, Odalie must’ve had to trot out the best stuff her imagination had to offer, but Odalie was nothing if not creative.

  Of course I felt a little funny about this, given my loyalty to the Sergeant. Odalie was tricking him, and after all, that is what she had come to the precinct to do. By that time, I had come to accept what I already knew to be the truth. The rumors had been right about Odalie—or at least half right. She had taken the typing position at our precinct in order to manipulate the system, but the bootlegger she was ultimately protecting was herself. Please don’t misunderstand; I don’t mean to imply I only just then comprehended that fact. I am not an utter dunce. From the very first night Odalie had taken me into the speakeasy, even when I thought perhaps she was a mere attendee and not its ringleader, I understood the simple truth that Odalie was in fact a woman who walked both sides of the law. What I didn’t realize is that by putting my hand in hers and crossing into that very first blind, I myself had become a woman who walked both sides of the law. On the day after the raid, as Odalie pulled some sort of ruse on the Sergeant in order to free her cohorts, I could hardly raise an objection.

  Whatever it was Odalie said to the Sergeant, it proved effective. For the remainder of the afternoon, the exoneration that had allowed Gib to gloat all the way to the front door and down the precinct stoop was reissued several times for a number of the other men in the holding cell. Their handling became routine: a brief questioning session followed immediately by a prompt and perfunctory release. Suspects that had been arrested at the speakeasy went into the interrogation room with Odalie and the Sergeant and reemerged after no more than ten or fifteen minutes, only to saunter through the main floor of the precinct and sail out the front door.

  I suppose I should have been happy to see it, and it should have been cause for celebration. There was one moment, one moment I remember ever so clearly, when Redmond was released (no thanks to my own efforts), and he walked by my desk and looked me in the eye with a scowl on his face that said, Thank you but no thank you, Miss Rose—oh, I see how far you’d go for your “friends,” and I felt a small tremor of relief wash over me that Odalie had been successful in setting these men free. I felt truly bad about Redmond. The last exchange we’d had was my drink order, and then I’d gone and disappeared right before the raid, leaving him to his own devices. And I’d only very narrowly missed being pinched by the police myself, and if I’d been nabbed I’m certain desperation for my own freedom would’ve overcome any moral high ground I can possibly claim. When I saw Redmond released, I felt glad for a moment, and considered that perhaps what Odalie was doing wasn’t so bad after all.

  • • •

  LATER THAT EVENING, with the events of the workday finally behind
us, we took a taxi back to the apartment. Since moving in with Odalie, I hadn’t so much as set foot in a subway car. We always took taxi-cabs to and from work. I thought of this now and realized the image of the many subway platforms I had previously haunted lingered only faintly in my memory, and it was as though I had dreamed them. I stared thoughtfully out the taxi window as we rolled along the Manhattan streets and worked up my nerve to ask Odalie what she had told the Sergeant to secure the men’s releases.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You know. I mean, what was the line? It must’ve been something quite sturdy; the Sergeant is not an easy man to convince.”

  Odalie turned her head from the window and regarded me carefully. I had never directly questioned her about the stories she told; my pulse quickened as I worried I had perhaps just violated the pact of complicity between us. But Odalie’s response surprised me. “Rose,” she said, “you put altogether too much faith in the Sergeant. You really oughtn’t.” She returned her gaze to the skyscrapers rolling steadily by. “You’d do better to remember, my dear, he’s only a man,” she murmured somewhat distractedly.

  I did not question her further on the subject, but Odalie’s enigmatic statement plagued me for the rest of the evening. An uneasy feeling descended upon me every time I tried to puzzle out what Odalie had meant about the Sergeant. I became resolved not to think on it, but I was only somewhat successful in this resolution, as it remained niggling at the back of my brain. You see, doubt is a magnificently difficult pest of which to try and rid oneself, and is worse than any other kind of infestation. It can creep in quietly and through the tiniest of cracks, and once inside, it is almost impossible to ever completely remove.

  After dinner, I spent the evening alone in my room attempting to distract myself by reading books and listening to the phonograph. Five Mozart records and nine chapters of The Scarlet Letter later, my mind was no closer to peace. With a sigh, I switched off the electric lamp and crawled into bed. It was past midnight and I was tired, but exhaustion had crept too far into my bones, and now sleep was reluctant to come. I grew frustrated. I’d always had the gift of falling asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, and sleep was one of the very sweet reliefs I’d come to count upon. In fact, there were only two times I could recall having difficulty falling asleep during all my years at the orphanage. Both times, Adele had sensed my frustration and kept a vigil with me, keeping me occupied with fairy stories in an attempt to induce drowsiness. Once, she’d even snuck into the kitchen and warmed up a lovely concoction of milk, cinnamon, and nutmeg for me to drink down.

  Remembering this, I thought of the sizable and well-appointed kitchen in our apartment and how generously stocked it always was (Odalie had a standing order that fresh groceries be delivered every third day). Very likely, I might find all the ingredients I needed to re-create Adele’s soothing cure—milk, cinnamon, nutmeg. I slid my feet into my slippers and padded toward the kitchen. But as I crossed the apartment and turned into the kitchen, I discovered the light was already on, and somebody was already in there.

  “Oh!” said Odalie. “Well, fancy meeting you here.” She was dressed in a creamy off-white satin robe. The way she wore it, it looked more like an evening gown than a robe. I observed the manner in which it hugged her body in some places and strategically draped in others. She gave a girlish little laugh and took my hand in hers as if we had just bumped into each other in a busy uptown restaurant. As her tanned wrists emerged from her sleeves, I noticed she was wearing the diamond bracelets again. It was curious to me; I wondered what mysterious urge had prompted her to slip them on. “Sandman hasn’t come to fetch you for a date yet?”

  I gave a skeptical grunt. “It appears I’ve been stood up,” I said in a dry voice, volleying back the metaphor. “You, too?”

  “Yes. But I have just the thing!” I sank into a kitchen chair and looked to where she stood at the stove. Something seemed incongruous, and as I blinked my weary eyes I realized I had never before seen Odalie standing in front of any kitchen appliance, let alone one in active operation. The aroma of cinnamon hit my nose and I started, surprised to smell a version of the very concoction I had come into the kitchen planning to make. “Trust me, this is divine,” she said as she poured the contents of a saucepan into two mugs. She put one in front of me, where a snail’s trail of stream curled upward to my nostrils.

  “Careful, it’s hot,” she said unnecessarily as I lifted the mug. I blew across the lip of it to show her my willingness to be patient. She slipped into the kitchen chair across from me. My eyes took stock of her as we waited for our bedtime toddies to cool. She looked quite composed, even at such an ungodly hour. Her complexion was tanned and smooth, her inky black bob as shiny as if it had been freshly brushed. I had never noticed the fundamental disproportion of her features before: Her eyes were quite large, her mouth was quite small, and everything clustered toward the center of her face, as if all were bound eventually for the tidy rosebud shape of her lips. I felt a shiver of admiration, laced—as most admiration tends to be—with a tiny hint of envy. And then my eyes fell upon her wrists again.

  “They’re quite something, aren’t they?” she said, catching me looking at the bracelets. They were indeed. I nodded. For a fleeting second I thought to ask her about the fiancé who had given them to her, the one she’d mentioned in passing to the Lieutenant Detective. But before the question made its way from my brain to my lips, Odalie spoke up of her own accord. “We were given them, my sister and I,” she said, pushing the bracelet on her left wrist around with an idle finger. I stared at her incredulously. Slowly, my mind began to absorb the fact that my eavesdropping had gone undetected. Odalie did not think for a second I’d heard what she’d told the Lieutenant Detective, this much was clear. She had no plans to tell me the story of acquiring the bracelets as an engagement present. She sighed and continued.

  “It was our legacy. My father gave one to me, and one to my sister,” she explained. As she pronounced the word sister, a very theatrical and forlorn expression came over her face. I stifled an indignant snort. Surely she was joking, I thought. I had seen just such an expression on Helen’s face many times, albeit with a much more amateurish execution. But she sighed again and I realized this was no practical joke. “He was something of a gambler, I suppose. Made a lot of money in steel, but then lost it all on the railroads.” I felt for a fleeting second I was reading the latest headline in the Times. “He died when we were still very young,” she said, her face solemn as the grave itself, “and left us only these—one for each of us. We wore them everywhere. It was as though they twinned us. We made all sorts of dramatic oaths to each other that we would never take them off.” She laid a finger over the swath of diamonds twinkling around her wrist. “Of course, he also left us with his debt,” she said, and smiled bitterly with that sort of tenacious, impecunious glee that suggests the bearer has known far more long nights and lean days than you have. “Her name was Violet,” Odalie said. “And she was sweet and lovely, just like the very flower of her name.” She pondered the meaning of this sentence, as though it was only just now washing over her anew. “Oh—like you!” she said, feigning sudden realization of the floral-themed similarity of my name. And then Odalie became quite serious. The corners of her mouth turned downward, something I’d never seen them do. It was a very unnatural pose for her features. “Violet took great care of me, made many sacrifices.”

  Her calculation was deliberate, and very precise. When she made statements like this, it left her listener to wonder what those sacrifices were, and to assume the worst. It was as though a shaft of heavenly light descended to illuminate the momentary apparition that was Odalie’s imaginary saint of a sister. The long, plaintive notes of a string instrument would’ve completed the picture.

  “You know, I have always felt the love of women was much truer than the love of men,” she said, looking directly into my eyes. “Do you know
what I mean?” I gave a polite nod. As she took a breath, her gaze flicked to my face, and she looked at me as though some sharp memory now pained her. “When she died, Violet handed over her bracelet and told me to wear one on each wrist and to think of us as paired for always and forever. Even when I had scraped lower than I’d ever thought I could go, I never gave more than a fleeting thought to selling these,” she concluded, her chest heaving as though she had just swum in from some far-flung shore. Suddenly I wanted to laugh, to roll my eyes, to poke fun at this ridiculous creature sitting before me at that very minute. But I didn’t ask the obvious question: Why, if her sister was dying and yet so precious to Odalie, didn’t it make more sense to sell the bracelets and do what was necessary to ensure her sister’s continued well-being? Instead, I bit my lip and proceeded to blow on the tiny rippling lake that was the surface of the liquid in my mug. Still debating whether or not to voice my disbelief, I took a sip. An abrupt jolt of pleasure overcame me.

  “Oh,” I exclaimed. “Why, that is good!”

  “It should be. I used condensed milk to sweeten it,” she reported, and smiled at me as though her tragic monologue had been abruptly forgotten. “You see, Rose, you and I, we’re like sisters now,” Odalie continued in a low purr. Before I had a chance to respond to this, she continued. “I know how right it was for you to do what you did about the Vitalli case; you only did what a righteous person is called to do. I think you’re very brave for it. I really do. I admire you! And something else about sisters.” She paused and smiled sweetly at me. “Sisters keep each other’s secrets. I’m sure when the time comes, you’ll keep mine.”

  There was something chilling in her voice as she pronounced this last statement. For a moment I had a flash of myself as the man who decides to paint the floor of his house and somehow manages to paint himself into a corner.