by P. N. Elrod
“We weren’t tied to each other. She maybe coulda had someone on the sly that I coulda missed. I dunno for sure, but I don’t think so. Wouldn’t make sense to mess up the sweet spot she had with Booth, would it?”
“Maybe not, but still—”
“I donno. She was a lotta laughs, but she didn’t talk much about herself. Knew how to keep a shut mouth. Never said where she came from, who her people were. Wasn’t my business, anyway.”
“Who else was in Lena’s circle at the time?”
Rita faltered out a few names, but none were familiar to me. Those people had long dropped from circulation or moved elsewhere. I got her talking past the ten-minute limit until she went in a circle and started repeating things. Time to try a different angle.
I caught her eye again, holding for a long time until I was fairly sure I had her. “Tell me the truth, Rita. Did you kill Lena?”
She was under enough not to become angered. Instead, she looked very sad, very tired. “No, I didn’t.”
“Who do you think did?”
“I donno.”
Okay, it was done. I had to ask. For the first time since I’d started working on her my head suddenly hurt. The soft sell was a lot less wear and tear, but still took some effort. I pulled back on the concentration and woke her free of it with another question. “You think you’d like to come to Lena’s memorial service?”
She blinked some more, fighting a drowsiness that had nothing to do with my influence. “A service?”
I explained what had been planned.
“What a decent thing to do. Mighty, mighty decent. Yeah, I think I should go to that. Poor Lena, poor, poor kid.“ She took a big gulp from her glass and hiccupped once.
“Should it be a priest, preacher, or rabbi?”
“Jeez, I don’t know. Preacher, I guess. She once told me she thought the Catholic churches were real pretty compared to the others. Made me think she wasn’t used to ‘em. She never went to church, though.”
Telling Rita the when and where wouldn’t do any good now, so I found a discarded bill envelope and wrote everything down on the back, leaving the note on a clear space atop the liquor cabinet. The task reminded me of something else I had to check. “You got any of Lena’s papers left?”
“Papers?” Rita finished her drink. She was looking too sleepy to last much longer.
“Old letters, birth certificate, insurance—legal stuff.”
“She never kept junk like that.”
“Driver’s license, a passport?”
“Too much bother for her, she said. She’d take a bus or cab or ride around with Booth.”
Interesting. “Sounds pretty odd. She must have had some kind of business papers, a bankbook, something.”
“Nah, nothing like that. After the crash she didn’t hold much with banks.”
“How did she write checks for her bills?”
“She paid cash. Me too. Keeps it simple.”
“Booth Nevis pays you in cash?”
“Best way to do it.”
And cash transactions are near-impossible to trace. “What is it he pays for? What is it you really do for him?”
She hesitated. I repeated the question. She smirked and wagged a playful finger at me, having apparently forgotten the story she’d already given. “None a’ yer beeswax.”
All right. So the influence I was trying to exert had limits. She would cooperate only where she wanted. “Did she leave anything behind? Anything at all?”
“I had to sell or hock most of it to make the rent. It was tough times for a while back then. Booth gimme a raise when he foun’ out. He looks after you.”
A raise or a payoff? Not something I could ask her. Another time, when I could force things. “What about the stuff of Lena’s you couldn’t sell?”
“I got a box of some of her things inna closet. S’nothing much.”
“Show me.”
“It’s inna bedroom.” She drew out the last word in a little girl voice, almost singing it.
“Good. Show me.”
She woke up a bit, smiling, but I had to help her off the couch and keep her steady as she walked. She seemed not to notice and held on to me, humming contentedly.
The bedroom was much like the living room, just more mess with discarded clothes. Under white lace curtains she’d tacked a sheet of black oilcloth over the window. The window faced east, and the glare of the rising sun coming in would have kept her from sleeping off a late night.
Her closet looked like an explosion. She wearily knelt and dug through more clothing that had fallen off hangers, tossing aside a dozen or so shoes before finally pulling out a smashed-in shoe box.
“I think this is it. Yeah, here, but make it quick, sugar.”
Stale dust smell. Inside more dust and a few paltry oddments: a knot of cheap jewelry, much of it turning color, some old track tickets, a few mismatched keys, a broken watch, and a small amber vial about two inches long. It rattled when I shook it. I took out the cork and spilled the contents into my palm. They were four tiny irregular shapes, the color of ivory and oddly familiar.
“What the hell are these?” I asked.
Rita squinted at them. Turned one over using the tip of her nail. “Teeth,” she pronounced.
“Teeth? What kind of teeth?”
“Baby teeth,” she said.
“What’s she doing with baby teeth?”
“They must be hers. I got some of mine in one of my jewel boxes.”
It was grotesque. “Why would she be keeping her baby teeth? Why do you, for that matter?”
She shrugged. “I donno. Just did. Like hanging on to an old doll. No harm in it. Jeez, lookit how eensie they are…”
Not wanting to touch a dead woman’s baby teeth, I slipped them back in the vial and returned it to the box. There were faint scribbles on the track tickets in light pencil. Numbers that might have stood for dollar amounts. “I want to take all this with me. I’ll give it back when I’m done.”
“Sure, Sport, nothing there worth squat.” She put her hand out and I helped lift her. “Are you done now? You said you were gonna make things better than the best for me. Was that a lot of hooey or are you finally gonna do something?”
In answer, I put the box on a table and pulled her in for a strong kiss.
I shut off the part of my mind that had to do with dead Lena. I shut off the part that had to do with my hunger. God help me, I was even able to shut off the part that had to do with Bobbi. I was like a machine, with a machine’s efficiency. I went through the right motions and got the right reactions… and this time Rita didn’t catch on.
It was different from our dressing room encounter. Then I’d been caught up in the lust of the moment, giving in and shunting aside the many sane reasons to stop things before they went too far. Though I’d eventually called a halt, it hadn’t been easy. I didn’t like putting myself through such hoops. Rankling to me, demeaning to the woman. Everyone loses.
But this time I was very much in control, knew exactly what needed to be done, and proceeded to do it.
She eventually had to fight to come up for air. She looked startled, but pleased, then stepped backwards, smiling and drawing me toward her bed. I let her take me, let her sit, bent to kiss her, got kissed back, but she had a lot less energy now, was sleepy, more passive. I worked slowly on her, getting her even more relaxed. I rolled her onto her stomach and undid the dress, exposing the pale flesh of her back, running my hands over its smoothness, kneading, keeping the pressure gentle and constant. She rewarded me with a soft, happy sigh.
“You weren’t kidding me, were you, Jack?” she murmured. “More. There. I like that.”
She wriggled and turned over again, squinting against the bright overhead light we’d left on. I lay next to her, my face close to hers.
“I want you to listen to me, Rita,” I whispered. “Look at me and listen.” Booze or not clouding her brain, I had her full attention and that was the real core of it. I cou
ldn’t forcibly hypnotize her in the usual way, but this was the next best thing. My suggestions would work so long as I kept them in line with her strongest desires. “Do you hear me? Hear my voice?”
She hummed a yes.
“Look at me.”
She made an effort, trying to keep her lids up. I caressed the side of her face and whispered some more, a lot more.
And after a time she slipped into sleep, breathing deeply of the dreams I gave her.
I sat alone on the living room sofa, the crushed shoe box with Lena’s pitiful effects next to me and the radio on, the dial paused on a some kind of slow-paced symphony. The old longhair stuff doesn’t usually appeal to me, but for the time being it was fine for my present thoughtful mood.
Rita would say nothing of our encounter. I’d made certain of that. She’d have no specifics to recall, only remember its sweetness with no regrets that it would never happen again.
When it came down to it, I liked Rita. I really had wanted to do right by her… so far as I was willing and so much as was necessary to make it work for her. There was a line I wasn’t prepared to cross, and it had to do with Bobbi. I loved her, and I would respect that for as long as we were together.
But Rita…
She put up a tough front for a reason. I didn’t know what it might be, but beneath its brittle protection lay a terrible vulnerability that reminded me of Norrie Malone. A hurt child who’s forgotten the cause of the hurt though the scars are visible to those who know where to look. The boozing and men and furious dancing and constant parties helped Rita to keep the demons of her past at bay. It was something I could understand. That was how I knew exactly what to say to her.
Eyes shut, I pushed air around my mostly dormant lungs as though I was a normal, living man. I remembered what that was like in occasional vivid flashes, remembered what it felt to have a beating heart or to sweat in the noon sun heat or to taste a cold beer. Such moments came rarely as time distanced me from what I’d been, but no regrets there, either. Not anymore. If a genie from a lamp suddenly appeared and said he could wish me back to ordinary life again, I’d have turned him down. What I had now for life, with all its shortcomings, consequences, and future sorrows was better than what I’d had before when I walked in the day.
The proof of it lay behind me, asleep in that bland bedroom with the blacked-out window. She would sleep long and well and soundly. I could never have accomplished that as an ordinary guy. When she awoke, she would be happy, even if she did not understand why. It was the last suggestion I’d given her at the end, the only gift I could give her that was of any worth. She didn’t need another notch in her bedpost; she needed peace in her soul.
Maybe I couldn’t impart it permanently, but at least she’d know what it was like and perhaps find it again herself for well and good.
Or so I hoped.
Exhaling one last time, I shifted gears in my head, stood, and looked around. Reflections aside, there was more to do, and I wouldn’t have been worth beans to the Escott Agency if I didn’t know how to take the place apart while the opportunity was available.
I started with the bedroom, working methodically, keeping it quiet. Not that there was much danger of waking Rita anytime soon, but why take chances?
Since the mess in the closet was such that she wouldn’t notice my invasion I started there. The clothes were, so far as I could compare to what Bobbi wore, expensive. There were lots of them, enough for Rita to treat most like she’d gotten them at a dime-store sale. I found plenty of shoes, shoe boxes, dust, and lint, but nothing else looking like souvenirs of her late roommate. The hatboxes on the top shelves contained hats, forgotten bits of jewelry, none of it worth anything.
Her dresser had the usual froth and the real jewels, so I knew where she’d invested most of her earnings from Nevis. The stuff was carelessly thrown into a red lacquer box with the cheaper costume pieces. Lying loose at the bottom in a velvet-lined corner were a couple of irregularly shaped objects: the baby teeth she’d mentioned keeping. Damn weird things to have around, but I suppose to some people they’d be a tangible link to the past, like holding on to old photographs.
I went through the bath, then the living room, then the kitchen. Nothing unusual except that she obviously didn’t eat home a lot. There were more bottles of beer and booze than anything else.
Her intellectual life was pretty thin. The only reading matter lying around was comprised of magazines about film stars and their beauty secrets. Lots of pictures. I checked the books that were neatly lined up in the liquor cabinet behind the bottles. None of the titles were familiar to me, and the few I cracked open all proved to be love stories. No interesting notes dropped from the riffled pages, only a five-year-old track ticket stuck halfway through one. Probably a bookmark.
Rita had said she didn’t have time to read, and since they were mostly hidden by bottles, she wasn’t using them to decorate the place. I checked the publishing date of one I had in hand, which was 1933. I checked the rest. They all either bore that date or that of the previous year. So… these had likely belonged to Lena. Rita now used their cabinet to store her booze, the books overlooked and forgotten in the back.
They were too cheap to hock or sell. The glue holding the end papers had long dried out. One of the older-looking volumes crackled, and pages separated from the spine as I tried to shove it back into place. The glue coming away made it all loose. The more I pushed the more it fell apart. I tried to put it together, and discovered something had been inserted between the end papers and the front cover that prevented it from properly closing flat.
Opening it up, I found the something to be ten one-hundred-dollar bills secreted between the end paper and the front cover.
The back cover and its end paper held identical treasure.
Holy moley.
Keeping control of the tremor that was trying to make me drop things, I knelt and removed all the books, piling them on the floor. For most, the glue was intact, for others it had dried out too much to hold. So far as I could tell by peeling those open enough to count, each book carried two grand in circulated nonsequential C-notes. The dates on them were no earlier than five years ago.
Twenty-six books. Fifty-two thousand dollars.
Where in hell had Lena gotten this kind of cash?
11
Great care had been taken in the hiding of it. A slight wrinkling on the edges indicated that the end papers had been steamed to loosen them. Perhaps she’d used a butter knife to pry them open enough to slip in the bills. Exactly twenty were in each book, front and back, a nice round number, but not so much as to distort the spines. If the glue hadn’t failed on the one, I’d have missed them all.
So, apparently, had Rita. I couldn’t imagine her leaving such a treasure trove lying unused for five years, especially if she’d been hocking stuff to make the rent after Lena’s disappearance. Unless this was the hock money. And I was the king of Sweden. Nope, I’d found what had to be Lena’s very private and not so little nest egg. Rita should have tried reading more in her free time. Quite a rewarding thing, reading.
As for what I would do with it…
That could wait until I had thoroughly studied the situation. Twice now I’d helped myself to mob money that had come my way, confident that no one would make much of a fuss over its disappearance. I wouldn’t mind adding more to my side of Escott’s cellar safe, but wasn’t that greedy. This pile really should go to Lena’s family.
If she had any. It was a good bet that she’d not been born Lena Ashley. Perhaps, like Malone, she’d served time and had tried to put it behind her. The reasons why anyone wants a name change are countless, and few are the result of anything pleasant.
When Escott got back he could start sniffing on her trail if I or the cops came up dry in the next few days. Compared to retrieving kidnapped pooches it was far more worthy of his talents.
Should there be no family… well, conscience dictated that I let Rita know about the cash, w
hat with her being Lena’s only friend.
Undisturbed for so long, it seemed safe enough to leave it here for the time being, but I decided against that. The cops would come around for a visit sooner or later, and they might take it into their heads to make a real job of searching. I got a flat knife from the kitchen, another shoe box from the bedroom closet, and went to work peeling back all the end papers. In a surprisingly short time I had all the money out and the books back in place on the shelf with the booze bottles in front as before. I set two books aside, arranging the rest to fill in the gap. There was a slim chance that Lieutenant Blair might be able to find some of Lena’s fingerprints embedded in the dried glue, which could lead him to her real name. He would not know about the money, though.
Dusting off my knees, I went to look in on Rita. She hadn’t moved a muscle since dropping off. I’d tucked her up snug and demure under the covers; many times I’d done the same for Bobbi when she was especially tired. Thinking about her under the present circumstances gave me no noticeable twinge of guilt. In fact, it was rather reassuring.
Rita was a hell of a gal, but Bobbi was the one I wanted to be with. Always.
I made sure the note about the memorial service was still in place. Since my suggestions would keep Rita from talking about tonight’s adventure, I had no qualms about seeing her again even if Bobbi was around. I did debate on whether to add more to the note, like a little personal compliment telling her that she was a hell of a gal, which took all of a second to decide against. Never leave behind anything that could be misinterpreted.
Or interpreted for that matter.
To be thorough, I went through the flat one more time, checking all the out-of-the-way spots I’d skipped before, being too busy with the more obvious ones. Good that I did, too. When I tipped her floor model radio to see if anything might be under it something shifted inside. The protective backing was loose. I opened it more, peering into the dim interior. Shoved into the narrow space between the cabinet and the works, standing on edge a bare inch from the nearest glowing tube, was a slim gray accounts book.