I gave her a hard sell, even though she didn’t need it. Told her to clam up, that the more heat they put on it, the more likely Vic was to stay lost and was that what she wanted, really? Or worse still, guffing all over town might put the spotlight on him, leading the sharks straight to him. Then it really would be finis.
By the time I was done I’d half convinced myself Vic could still be saved.
She fell hard, like I knew she would, and by the time Clancy and Nast returned, she was recanting like Galileo. Grim-faced, they tossed me out of the station house, but first they gave me a good earful about how they knew all about me and all about my boss. They didn’t have what they needed on me now, but they were sure it was only a matter of time.
“Don’t even think about beating town,” Clancy said, hands on me like I was some pink pants on the boulevard. “And if you’ve got anything rattling around up there under all that hair, you’ll be back within twenty-four hours to sing for us. ’Cause if we make a case without you, you’ll be riding the lightning seat along with your boss come springtime.”
I gave him a blank face. I didn’t even know what he was talking about.
Sure, I left feeling like I’d won something big, slid out from some clutches, but that feeling was long gone by the time I’d driven back to her place, our place. I’d beaten one rap, for the time being, but I was headed back into a different kind of stir.
Taking the elevator up, my stomach twisted at the thought of seeing her again, the first time since our little excavation party. And that sent me back to thinking of Vic, of Vic in pieces, of the sweet tang of rotting oil drums, the raw smell of pooling sewage. And that sent me to thinking of her again, the way she’d been, the way she could be again. Would this go on forever?
“Where’ve you been?” She looked ready to go out, dressed in a long, jade-colored suit, an eel-skin bag in her hand. “I got calls you were hours late for half your drops.”
“I thought I was being followed,” I said carefully.
“Followed? By who?” And the way she said it was like she wasn’t worried for a second that I might have really been tailed. I got it fast: she was worried that I might be so loaded up on nerves that I might think I was.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I shook whoever it was. Maybe it was nobody.”
She had her eyes on me, doing that thing, reading me, reading my worth. Was I too far gone to risk keeping around? Was I more trouble than I was worth?
“What kind of car?”
“A Chrysler Imperial, hardtop,” I lied, tugging off my suit jacket. “Listen, I’m okay now. I was shaky, but it’s past. I’ve got it together. I’ve got it beat.”
“Okay,” she said, still watching me. “I’m going up to Tunsdell and won’t be back until tomorrow morning. I need you to drive me to the train station.” She looked me up and down. “But first, beef Wellington at Hy’s. You look like you need something in your mouth.”
I nodded and walked by her, headed toward the bathroom. As I did, I glanced over into her bedroom. The closet door was open and, in that fleeting instant, I could see something trailing out. And I knew what it was. A beaded evening coat, peacock green.
I walked into the bathroom and shut the door. I knew several things at once and all of them were making my mouth go dry, my blood sing. That coat had been hanging at the very back of the closet. That coat was only worn in the winter. That coat only could have been pulled aside for one reason. For the thing hidden behind it. My dress. She was looking for my dress. The dress I’d worn that night. The dress I’d burned to soft ash in the basement incinerator. She knew I knew. She knew and who could guess what she’d do.
When are you going to show your hand, Gloria?”
My voice thick with Manhattans, I felt the words coming from my mouth, I couldn’t stop them. Since we’d sat down at Hy’s Steakhouse, I’d been knocking back the drinks, trying to stop my hands from shaking, trying to fight off the dread.
But the booze both jazzed up the panic and gave me some nerve. Wasn’t that what booze was for? Wasn’t that why she never needed it? I leaned my elbow forward, nearly sliding it into the half-empty dinner plate in front of me. I felt like there were no rules left. Why not say anything? That was how I felt. What was left to lose? Beating that furrier at her own game so handily, ending it with my heel on her chicken neck had really worked me up, fixed me with some kind of crazy courage.
“When are you going to show me your hand?” I heard my voice repeat itself. “How long are you going to make me wait?”
“You really shouldn’t drink, kid,” she said, uncapping her lipstick. But something in her tone told me she knew what I was talking about.
“You’d sell me for a sawbuck,” I said, my head wobbling. “What’re you waiting for? My next slipup?”
“That what you think?” she asked.
“I don’t think it,” I said, hoisting my shoulders, almost not believing I’d made it this far, said this much. Don’t think I didn’t get the joke of it all: I was pulling it off only because I was aping her. “I don’t think it,” I repeated. “I know it. I saw the dress in your closet. My dress from that night. You were holding it. You figured me for a patsy. Just like Vic did. Well, I’m no patsy.”
“No?” she said, raising an eyebrow. I thought I saw a flicker of amusement in her eyes and it made me madder.
“No,” I said roughly. “I’m no one’s goddamned pigeon. I burned it, Gloria. I burned the dress all up. So good luck. I got rid of it and it’s gone and you’ve got nothing on me. I beat you out of the gate.”
“I know you got rid of it,” she said, running a slash of crimson across her face, across the faintest lines above her upper lip.
“I figured that too,” I said, trying for a smirk. “I saw the closet open tonight. See, I beat you to it, Gloria. I did.”
“Sure I knew you got rid of it, cream puff,” she said, popping open that tortoiseshell compact of hers and appraising her handiwork. “I’d’ve been pretty disappointed if you hadn’t. I hope I’ve done a better job on you than that.”
I felt the warm alcohol swirl away and my chest grow frigid, all in an instant. “You meant for me to find it,” I said, realizing it as I said it.
“I had to know you had your head on straight, kid. Lately, you’ve had a pretty shaky trigger finger. Soft-headed moves, phantom tail jobs.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You were holding it. You were holding it as insurance.”
“Insurance against what? What do you think I could be scared of? Nothing you could throw my way, junior.” She capped the lipstick and dropped it into her purse. “Listen, if you tangled with me, I wouldn’t toss you to the bulls.”
“Mackey,” I blurted out. “How about to Mackey?”
“Or Mackey either,” she said without skipping a beat. “I may throw a few distractions his way, a bluff or two to keep him guessing. But that’s beside the point. If I found out you really tangled with me, kid,” she said, fixing me in the eye, “I think you know what I’d do. I take care of my own business. Right?”
“Right,” I said, without thinking. I didn’t need to think. There was nothing to think about.
I can say it. She’d put a fear in me. I couldn’t let go of it. I couldn’t see how it would ever stop. We were chained together, cuffed at the wrist, the ankle, the hip. What would the escape be? There was no end, far as I could see. Well, one. My throat open like a long pink seam. Or hers. But I didn’t have her steel. I knew that. So it’d be me.
I had to sell her. What choice did I have?
I’d done it once. She was the sap for thinking I wouldn’t do it again.
“I’m yours, Clancy.”
I called from the pay phone at the rail station, dialing the minute her train slipped from view.
The words were out and I felt it all falling apart around me. I felt it all breaking up inside me.
“You’re doing the right thing,” he said in his cop voice. And part of me wa
nted to smash his face in. But part of me thought at least I had this going for me. As rotten as I felt, it was what my old man might’ve called the standup thing to do, right? Maybe that mattered to someone, somewhere. Maybe somewhere in me that mattered.
But then I thought, what did the old man know, really? Still making beans after thirty years on the job. Getting pushed around by a bunch of bohunks. Sitting in the back of the church on Sunday getting yelled at by the priest about what lousy sinners we all were. Getting the fish eye from the bank whenever he’s a day late on payments he’s been making regular, nails to bone, for two decades or more. Oh, Pop…
But if I wanted to lay it all out there, lay it bare, there was this: Look at how she sold me short. Look at how she thought I was all hers and not strong enough to take her. Turns out maybe I could take her, take her and still come out clean and all by my own rules and there was nothing she could do.
I was still half lit from the Manhattans on the way to the junkyard. It was better that way because it put a hazy mist around all the corners, made it all seem part of the same long nightmare. The kind where you keep ending up in the same place no matter how far you try to go. You’re in deepest Africa, the Casbah, Red China, and the Pyramids, and then somehow you’re back in your own bed, coverlet to chin.
The salvage yard was just as damp and foggy as the night before, the smell just as earthy and sickly sweet. Clancy had to swerve for a pair of mean-faced raccoons, nearly hitting the end of a long row of steel canisters.
“Your kind of joint, eh?” he said as our feet sunk into the spongy ground.
“You’re getting what you want,” I said, my tongue still heavy, my words slow.
I led the way, my ankles spattered, itching, eyes on the barbed wire fence, ears filled with that moaning wind through the metal skeletons, the empty drums.
“Over there,” I said. “This is as close as I’m getting.”
Clancy and Nast trudged toward the fence. I leaned up against a sleeper car and pulled out a cigarette, nearly lighting before a strong waft of gasoline knocked me in the face and I thought better of it.
I was waiting for the bad feeling to come back when I saw that canvas bag. I was trying not to think about what might happen when they found it. When they opened it. When they opened it and I would have to see, even from a distance.
But when I looked over, the detectives were just standing there alongside the family rocking drums. At first they’d poked their heads around, even rolling some of the drums this way and that. But now they were just standing there.
Finally, Clancy beckoned me with his arm. As I tramped over, though, I got it. I got it and here I was all over again. I got it hard, a haymaker right to the gut.
The body was gone.
They had me under the hot lights for real this time.
My head a jumbled mess, I spilled but good. They believed me, sure. They believed that Gloria Denton had given Vic Riordan a one-way ticket to Golden Slumbers. They believed she’d buried him, or had him buried. They believed all that. But what good did it do?
They had nothing to hang their hat on, not even a body. And what use was the word of a piece like me? A B-girl, a B-boy runner, a girl with a lifetime of mug shots and Statesville stints and world-class beatings from hard-fisted boys ahead of her and who-knew-what behind her.
I didn’t want to do it.
But now I had even less of a choice.
I didn’t want to do it because I still felt ripped up inside.
I didn’t want to do it because I still didn’t like laying it open for the blue.
I didn’t want to do it because it was my last stake and I didn’t want to give it up unless I had to.
But I had to.
“I have the gun,” I said, finally. “I have the gun and the blade. I took them and I hid them. I have them both,” I said, so I couldn’t take it back.
The die was thrown, so loud you could hear it thump on the green felt.
Fuck me, Gloria, I had to play you this way. I did.
They drove me to my apartment. Walking through it, with the blinds down and more than a week’s worth of dust gathering on the chrome, the glass, I felt like a trespasser, a burglar. Like it had never really been mine. Which, truth told, it hadn’t.
I led them to the bedroom closet. They stood there and watched as I pulled the hatbox down from the uppermost shelf and removed the lid for them.
My hands weren’t even shaking as I lifted the mohair cloche hat from the layers of tissue paper and flipped it over so they could see the revolver, its gold grips glinting, and the burnished letter opener, tacky with old blood.
Looking at them now, they didn’t even seem real. They seemed like so many glittering trinkets that had glided through my gloved hands, the endless stream of bright-colored swag I’d passed from hard boy to tough guy to hard boy without ever letting it touch my skin.
Clancy paused for a second, then looked over at Nast, who was bouncing on the balls of his feet. Both of them started beaming like it was a goddamned birthday cake just for them.
I didn’t tell you about keeping the gun, the letter opener. I wasn’t sure I would ever use them. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t like to think about keeping them, holding them. Or about tossing the knife I’d used on Vic’s hand, long ago tossing it down a sewer drain. I didn’t think about any of it if I could help it. Didn’t like how it made me come off. Like I was a double-crosser, a fink, a Judas every chance I got. It wasn’t that way. She’d taught me. I was doing what she’d taught me, what any kid at the head of the class would do. No matter what you see, do, are a part of, no matter how hot, crazy, out of control things get, you gotta be thinking three steps ahead. How can I make this play right for me? Save yourself, serve yourself. She taught me that. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying it was her.
“You’re the candy kid,” Clancy was telling me, back at the station house, nearing seven a.m.
“My prints are on it too,” I said. “Don’t think about selling me. I played it square.”
He smiled. “You can unfurrow, sweetheart.”
“You don’t interest us at all,” Nast said, sliding me a cup of gray coffee.
“It’ll be over soon,” Clancy added, like he was my kindly uncle now that I’d given it up for him.
“Why do I have to be there?” I said, twisting in my skirt, numb as a housewife on Saturday night.
“We’re not taking any chances,” Clancy said, shoving a bear claw into his mouth. “Not with this one. She trusts you and we gotta use that.”
“You pick her up at the train station like regular,” Nast said, straightening his holster. “We’re watching nearby.”
“She can spot a tail a mile—”
“We’ll be a good distance,” Clancy said, mouth still glistening with pastry glaze. “We’ll follow you back to her place and make the cuff. Easy as apple pie. You just gotta stand back and watch the show.”
It was all happening so fast I didn’t have time to look at the thing. Before I knew it, I was sitting at the wheel at the deserted station, watching her walk toward the car.
That was when it started to hit me and I felt my leg go jerky, start shaking, my heel rattling against the gas pedal.
It was looking at her, looking at her coming through the early morning mist, head high, auburn hair swept up off her face, those enormous white-framed sunglasses, her fitted suit in creamy seafoam, those endless legs winding and unwinding with each step, her whole body arching and snapping like the showgirl she was.
I want the legs, that’s what I thought.
Walking toward me like that, she seemed ageless. Eternal. She could be one or a thousand years old and always be like this, always be walking slowly toward me, eyes on me, knowing everything. Giving me everything.
She gave me everything.
But it was too late thinking like that now. The time had passed for shimmery regrets like some kind of ladies’ picture tugging tears at the Bijou. We were never me
ant for that.
Her hand on the door, the filmy air flush on my face as she opened it…
“You look like you slept with your face mashed into a carpet,” she said, as she settled herself in the seat. “Don’t tell me you picked yourself up a new toy last night.”
I didn’t say anything, but my leg stopped shaking and I hit the gas.
As we drove the three miles to her place, she was yapping the whole way. About the mess she had to clean up in Tunsdell, about how everything had gotten jammed up when I was down for the count and now she had to work twice as hard to get the operation running again. You couldn’t leave any one of those stooges and filchers alone for a day without them mucking things up, one of them beating some sad-sack delivery man into a coma over a busted case of gin, another skimming off last night’s winnings, then blowing the wad at the carpet joint next door, one forcing himself on a cigarette girl, and another knocking around some coffee shop waitress until she cried bloody murder. It never ended. It just showed how you had to keep on top of everything all the time. No more slipups like the kind that had put us in this hole. We had to keep things running smooth as country cream or we were in for more trouble.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying not to glance in the rearview mirror. Trying not to see if Clancy and Nast were in sight. “It won’t happen again.” I kept my eyes on the road.
She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was looking at me.
“I don’t mean to lay it all on you, kid,” she said, which surprised me. “It’s just a bump in the road.”
I nodded, feeling something vaguely pinching, tickling in my chest. I know it might not seem like much, but I’d never heard her say anything like that.
“Before you came along,” she went on, “I had to do it all myself and no one even to spill to.”