Cold Desert Sky

by Rod Reynolds

  The motor court was on the Reno Highway, so as soon as the bags were in the car, I sped out of there and put Las Vegas a dozen miles behind us before I even took a breath. Sheriff’s cruisers, Siegel’s men, maybe Tanner’s men – it felt like almost any car behind us could be a tail. Lizzie sat up front with me, Nancy in the back. I angled the rearview to be able to see her. I wanted to ask her so many things, but from experience of dealing with victims, I knew she’d speak only in her own time.

  *

  A hundred miles in, there was uninterrupted desert on all sides. The road was a two-lane, a solitary car visible behind us. It’d been back there less than ten miles. I felt sure no one had followed us, and somehow that made me more alert – as if some sleight of hand was at play that I had no way to detect.

  Nancy Hill had only spoken once – to speculate on Siegel’s whereabouts, questioning whether he really would have gone to Mexico.

  We stopped for gas and food in a busted mining town called Tonopah. I was checking the road as the attendant started the pump when I noticed Nancy gazing at an abandoned shaft headframe in the distance. She looked away when she saw me watching.

  I asked if there was a payphone in town and the man said no, but I could use his line for a dollar. I made it up with coins and forked it over. I opened the back door of the car and ducked inside.

  ‘I’m going to make a call to your mother, you want to come with me?’

  She shook her head. ‘You can tell her I’m doing fine.’

  Lizzie looked at me, asking with her eyes if she should say something. I signalled to let it pass. ‘I’ll tell her you’re safe.’ I crouched down, hesitating. ‘There’s something else. About Julie – I should alert her family. Do you know how I can reach them?’

  She looked over, at a loss. She shook her head.

  ‘What was her real name? Can you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I kept my gaze on her.

  ‘Really, I don’t know.’

  ‘She’s not from the same town as you?’

  She shook again. ‘We met on the bus. In California.’

  ‘She never told you her name? Her hometown? Anything?’

  ‘She didn’t want to talk about it. That’s how Hollywood is, no one cares who you were before.’

  The prospect of a family somewhere never knowing their daughter’s fate opened up a new fissure inside me.

  *

  There were black fingerprints all over the telephone’s housing. I lifted the receiver and dialled and it took a time for the operators to make the connections before they finally announced my name to Nancy’s mother. When she spoke, it was with a mix of hope and fear in her voice. ‘Mr Yates?’

  ‘Mrs Hill, I have your daughter with me. She’s safe.’

  ‘Oh—’ The line went quiet. There were muffled whimpers, as if she had her hand over her mouth.

  ‘We’re heading in your direction, but it’ll take a few days. Mrs Hill, did you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, I heard you. Blessed Jesus, oh, Mr Yates, you have no idea—I’m so relieved, I’m in your debt. I’m in your debt.’

  ‘I’ll call you again in a day or two to let you know our progress.’

  ‘Thank you. Mr Yates, thank you so much.’

  I rang off, guilt tugging at me because I didn’t know if I could make good on my words.

  *

  It was another hundred miles and late into the afternoon when Nancy said, ‘It wasn’t how you think.’

  She said it soft enough that I glanced at Lizzie to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.

  I waited to let her speak again, but she offered nothing more. ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘Ben loves me. He told me as much.’

  Her eyes were wide as full moons in the rearview – imploring, certain.

  ‘Sometimes a man will tell a lady what he thinks she wants to hear.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that? He had others, too, I’m not stupid. But I know what’s in his heart.’

  Lizzie swivelled in her seat to face her. ‘Have you considered how he could make you do the things he did if that were true?’

  ‘No one made me.’

  I saw her staring hard at Lizzie. In a murmur, she added, ‘At the start, anyway.’

  ‘But you can’t have … it wasn’t by choice.’

  ‘You can say that because you don’t know the alternative. We were flat broke. I had sixty cents to my name my last morning in Los Angeles.’

  I was burning to ask her about Julie Desjardins, but feared she’d clam up if I was too direct. ‘Nancy, what happened when you went to the TPK lot?’

  She took a sidelong look out her window. ‘We thought we knew what to expect.’

  She was tiptoeing towards it. I watched her in the mirror. ‘How do you mean?’

  Her mouth moved but she didn’t say anything at first, as if rehearsing how she’d tell it. ‘Nick Maskill approached us at a call we went to. He’s this big wheel at TPK. He said he could get us a private acting gig that paid well and said we should come down to his studio. Julie rolled her eyes when he called it that – she’d auditioned for him before, so she knew all about him. But he swore it wasn’t how it sounded, to come along and he’d explain. He promised us ten bucks just for showing up.’

  ‘When we went there that day, he treated us like we were already in pictures. He had one of his girls fix our hair and makeup, he took us to Wardrobe to pick out dresses for us, he gave us a script to read and had us do a screen test; it was fun. When he was happy with that, he asked all kinds of questions about where we came from and where we lived and things of that kind. Then when he was through, he told us we could keep the dresses and suggested we all go out to eat.’

  There was control in her voice as she spoke, and a precision to her words that made me think she’d been practising this account for some time.

  ‘He drove us to Ciglio’s, this Italian joint on Hollywood Boulevard, and he bought us some wine and that’s when I met Ben – he came and joined us at our table and I recognised who he was right away. I could tell he liked me because he told me I looked beautiful. He stayed a little while and had a drink with us, and then when he left he winked at me and said maybe he’d see me again someplace else.

  ‘After that, Nick took us back to his house and I figured that’s when he’d want to get fresh. Julie said not to worry about it because she thought he was cute anyway. He opened champagne for us all and then he kissed Julie, but he was just kinda fooling around and she didn’t have any objections anyhow. Then sometime later he said we could live this way every day and earn a lot of money for doing it, if we’d just go to Las Vegas and keep some wealthy men company. He took two hundreddollar bills out of his billfold and put them on the table and said they were ours to keep if we agreed.’

  ‘I was tipsy so I didn’t know what to think. I blurted out that we’d have nowhere to stay, but Julie laughed at me and Nick said all of that would be taken care of. He made out like if we did it for a month, he’d bring us back and maybe have a part for us – kind of like we were in training. He told us everyone we’d ever heard of had done the same when they were breaking in.

  ‘Nick went off to make a call and next thing I knew, a car showed up and he said we should go right then. I was in two minds but Julie was insistent, she kept saying she couldn’t make the rent and Mrs Snyder would kick us out on the street. I was so tired by then I thought, why not? and went along with it. I was tipsy, it didn’t sound so bad. We were in Las Vegas the next morning.’

  Listening to her tell it, it was clear she was still trying to make sense of the situation she’d got caught up in; maybe even explain her own actions to herself. The defiance, the insistence that no one had made her at the start – it was a trait I’d encountered in victims time and again; an underlying illusion of control, created by reassuring herself that even though she’d made bad choices, they’d been her choices to make. It worried me because it was the start of blaming hersel
f for what had happened.

  The other part that came through was guilt over what had happened to Julie. Taking pains to note Julie’s enthusiasm at every stage was Nancy’s way of signalling she couldn’t be blamed for her death – a sign of what she really felt.

  ‘You told me Rosenberg was responsible for Julie’s death.’

  She nodded. ‘He was always a swine.’

  Lizzie looked numb at all of it. She glanced at me and then turned back to Nancy. ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘He told us. He said he’d do the same to anyone else tried to steal from him the way she did.’

  Beaten, strangled and stripped, left in the desert to be found. A warning to the others. ‘What did she steal?’

  She faltered for the first time, her voice cracking. ‘The money. The hundred dollars.’

  I saw it right away but Lizzie frowned in confusion. ‘The money they gave you in Los Angeles?’

  ‘He told us—The first night he came to the house, he told us the money was an advance and we all had to work it off. She …’ She moistened her lips but couldn’t finish.

  ‘Julie tried to run away,’ I said.

  She covered her eyes and nodded.

  Lizzie swivelled around fully to take her hand.

  She sobbed in silence and I imagined her stuck in that ranch house having to do the same, too afraid to even make a sound.

  We travelled that way for a long minute, the engine a relentless purr that sounded cold in its indifference to the young woman in the back.

  Then she said, ‘It was because she’d tried it once before.’

  ‘Running away?’ Lizzie said.

  She closed her eyes and nodded. ‘The first time, when that pig caught her, he brought her back and made us watch while he put a pillow over her face. I only figured out later it was because he didn’t want to leave a mark. He pressed it down while she was kicking and bucking, and no one even dared to scream. I thought he was going to kill her for sure. When he took it off her, he said if any of us tried it again, he wouldn’t be so gentle the next time.’

  I could see the image in my mind. I glanced at Lizzie’s face, the welt he’d put there, and shook at the memory of his promise of what he’d do to her. Having no doubt he would, if given the chance. And now, instead of rotting in jail, he was sitting pretty under Colt Tanner’s wing.

  *

  We made Reno at dusk. An arch spanned the road on the edge of downtown; it read, ‘Reno The Biggest Little City In The World.’

  We found a motel close to the Truckee River and holed up for the night. The proprietor took Nancy to be our daughter and we let him keep that notion.

  Nancy asked to take a bath so I went outside to give her some privacy. I walked across the parking lot and stood on the edge of the highway, the river beyond it burbling in the darkness. I looked back down the road, following the line of the blacktop to where it met the night.

  Lizzie came up behind me, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She stopped next to me and followed my gaze, the road empty. ‘Sometimes I wonder if there’s good in this world at all. That poor girl.’

  ‘I never imagined …’ I shuffled my feet, scraping them in the gravel. ‘Her story’s so much worse than I thought.’

  ‘You looked faraway. What are you thinking about?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘Siegel? And Rosenberg?’

  I nodded. But there was more.

  ‘Do you think we did the right thing?’ She inclined her head towards the room.

  ‘Do you?’

  She lingered, taking a breath. ‘I change my mind once an hour.’ She slipped her arm through mine. ‘I want so badly for those men to pay, that’s the part I have a hard time with. It feels as if they’re getting off lightly and I wonder if we’ve let that happen.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have spoken against Siegel.’

  She looked at the ground, nodding. ‘I can’t understand how she can still have a care for him.’

  ‘She’s lost. There’s an avalanche of guilt and anger and blame waiting to hit her and the only thing holding it back is her infatuation for him. So she’s clinging to it.’

  Something unspoken passed between us, and I wondered if I’d skated too close to our own circumstances in the wake of Alice’s murder. The chance it was still unfolding.

  ‘What will you do if she keeps refusing to go home?’ she said.

  ‘I’m hoping she’ll see sense when we get closer.’

  ‘What did her mother say on the telephone?’

  ‘Her emotions got the better of her. Thank you was about as much as she could manage.’

  ‘After everything and she still won’t speak to her.’ She shook her head. ‘They must have had some falling out.’

  I turned to look at her then, surprised I hadn’t seen it myself.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘I never thought of it that way.’ My wife’s capacity for insight was startling; even in this, my own obsession, she saw things I’d missed. ‘I always assumed she was running to Hollywood. I never considered she’d be running from something.’

  She kissed me on the cheek. ‘Don’t be hard on yourself.’ Her breath fogged in the air.

  I felt her shiver and pulled her close. ‘Don’t get cold. You should go inside.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’

  She kept her eyes on me, reading me as plain as day. ‘Is there something else on your mind?’

  I gazed back down the road.

  ‘What is it?’

  I was about to say nothing; old habits die hard. But I stopped myself, knowing she deserved better. ‘Tanner.’

  She circled around in front of me now, looking me full in the face.

  ‘We ran from him in Los Angeles and he never forgot it. Then he catches up with us this morning, says he wants Nancy, then gives us a window to ditch out on him again.’

  Her eyes flicked between mine.

  ‘If he meant to have a man guard our room, why didn’t he bring one with him?’ I said.

  She took my sleeve. ‘What’re you suggesting?’

  ‘He’s shown up at the drop of a hat time and again, but today needs an hour’s notice to summon one of his men. In a town as small as Las Vegas.’

  She looked away over her shoulder. A pool of light came from the motel’s office, the road melting into the black shortly beyond it. The feeling of eyes lurking just out of sight.

  ‘Are you saying he knew we’d run?’

  *

  The cold snap broke the next morning and although the air was still crisp, there was real warmth in the sun.

  None of us had slept much. We gathered our few things and loaded them into the car in near silence. I offered to fetch some breakfast, but neither Lizzie nor Nancy showed any enthusiasm for food.

  Before she would get in the car, Nancy asked where we were headed.

  ‘We have to keep moving,’ I said.

  ‘That doesn’t answer the question. I wasn’t fooling when I said I’d wait here for him.’

  I laid my hands on the hood. ‘Clark County Sheriff’s won’t just forget about us. They can get here just as fast as we did.’

  ‘Women come here all the time on their own. I can blend in.’

  ‘The Reno Cure’ – loose divorce rules that drew runaway wives from all over the country. ‘You have no money.’

  ‘I can earn.’

  ‘You’d sooner that than go home to your family?’

  She looked away.

  ‘What caused you to leave, Nancy?’

  She didn’t respond.

  Lizzie had already sat herself in the car but now she stepped out again. ‘Whatever it was, there’s nothing can’t be patched up.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘I know your mother would give anything to see you,’ I said. ‘She’s been a wreck while you were missing.’

  She looked over as if deciding whether to beli
eve me.

  ‘I haven’t told her a word about what happened to you,’ I said. ‘As far as she knows, you were in Los Angeles. There’s no shame in what you’ve been through, but it’s nobody’s business but yours to say anything more.’

  The silence stretched. I could hear a car passing along the highway in the distance, the flow of the Truckee a murmur underneath it.

  I was about to try again when she opened the door and slipped into the backseat.

  *

  It took three days to reach Iowa. Nancy hailed from a company town name of Enterprise, some twenty miles north of Des Moines in the centre of the state. The route from Reno took us across northern Utah, into southern Wyoming and through Nebraska, the terrain shifting colour as we passed from the red-brown of the desert to the blistering white of the snow-covered prairie. The only constant was the sky above, blue and cloudless most all the time, and seemingly limitless.

  We drove from sunup to dusk every day, staying at whatever motel was closest when I reached the limit of my endurance. I watched the road behind compulsively, but saw nothing to suggest we’d attracted a tail. We were the only car in sight for hours at a time, and after enough stretches on those straight, empty roads, it became easier to believe what my eyes were telling me – that we were an anonymous speck, crossing the continent unnoticed.

  We passed long periods without speaking, but the silence was never easy. I sensed Nancy struggling to come to terms with what’d happened, the beginnings of a reckoning that would last long beyond our journey. I wanted to say something to offer her solace, but I didn’t know where to begin. On occasion I’d return from the restroom to find Lizzie in quiet conversation with her, and I was hopeful my wife would be able to impart something that would help. With the resilience she’d shown in the face of everything she’d endured, there was no better person to try.

  Nancy gave up intermittent snatches of what had gone on. At different times, she told of how Siegel would visit with her at the ranch to shower her with gifts and promises; of his talk of bringing her back to Los Angeles and making her a movie star; of taking her to Europe with him to see Paris and Rome and London; of living in mansions and riding in limousines. All of it there to be had, if she could just wait a little longer while he finished his business in Las Vegas. It didn’t need to be said what he’d expected of her in return, and it seemed she’d never questioned it in the depths of proceedings. His horseshit sounded so fantastical as she recounted it that there were moments she seemed incredulous at her own words; it was those moments gave me hope she’d see it all clearly one day. The one thing I wanted her to understand was the illusion she’d been free to leave; if she could see that, she could scotch the notion that she was somehow to blame.