I felt my eyes turning hot. Goddamn her.
I couldn’t talk in the elevator up to her place and I knew it looked fishy. But I thought if I talked, my voice would do things, that I wouldn’t be able to stop it from shaking or going queer on me. I had a hard time looking her in the face too.
Standing there, I fixed my eyes on her hands, her white netted gloves. I made myself think about what those hands had done, could do. I thought about those hands wrapped around a brass blade, curled around gold grips. I thought about her face, what it could become, what she had shown me. The thing she had shown me, it would never leave. It was a scar just as thick and sealed over as those burn marks the bosses put on her. She had no right to leave those marks on me, bound as we were.
“You should clean up,” she said as she unlocked the door and we stepped in. “You go around looking like that, people are gonna think you spent the night tossing at a sawdust joint.”
“Okay,” I said, heart battering around in my chest. Would they come right away? Was it going to happen now? If they didn’t come now, could I hold on?
She set her overnight satchel on top of the tall console against the wall and opened it.
“I have something,” she said.
“A delivery for me?”
“No.” She pulled out a small bag of cream-colored velvet. “Something for you.”
I fidgeted, wrenching off one of my gloves and twisting it with the other hand. Was she going to pull this now? Was she going to give me a present right before I knifed her for the bulls?
She handed me the bag. She couldn’t help but see my hands trembling as I took it.
“It’s not a diamond necklace, kid,” she said. “Don’t get rattled.”
I shook the bag over my open hand and out dropped a long, narrow object, heavy for its size.
I stifled a gasp. It was a letter opener. Instead of the two heads at the top it was one woman’s head, with flowing hair that wrapped around the bronze blade, stem to sharp tip. Other than that, it was the same, felt the same. And the feeling of it in my hand was terrible. Vic’s chest, the sound in his throat, the way his eyes had fallen back, struck.
“It’s not exactly like before,” she said. “But it’s close.”
“Why… why would you give me this?” I felt my head go light. My hand to my chest, I began to think I might faint, like some girl.
“What do you mean?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s a replacement.”
“Why would you want to remind me of that? Of what you did to him?”
She shook her head. She even seemed to turn a little pale with surprise. “It ain’t like that, kid. Don’t you get it? That gift, it was the only thing anyone ever gave me. You see? It was the only thing I ever got like that.”
Her voice, as she said it, was steely as ever, but the soft words, they were rough on me. They did things to me. Even as I held that horrible thing in my hand, the words felt like knives in my ears.
At the same time, though, it hit me even harder how much all of this had to end. How much it had to be over. If I waited any longer, I might stop seeing that. Then it would be me and her, her and me, forever.
“Don’t you get it, Gloria?” I said, dropping the letter opener on the table. “I thought you’d get it by now.”
Before I could go on, not even sure what I was going to lay on her, the doorbell rang. Shaking off her heavy gaze, her slightly surprised eyes, I went to answer it. It was Clancy and Nast, guns out.
I whipped around to see her face. I wanted to see her face when it happened. Even as I thought it might really turn me to stone.
But her face showed nothing. It was the same arch mask. Smooth, expressionless, like a mannequin, a picture in a magazine, glossy and flat and untouchable.
“Don’t move,” Clancy was saying. “Hands in the air.”
“Which one is it,” she was saying in that granite voice of hers. “Make up your mind.”
“Get those goddamned hands in the air, Miss Denton,” Nast said, moving in on her.
She looked over at me. She looked at me to see what part I was playing—innocent bystander, accomplice, or worse.
But she could see the way it was going, the way they weren’t even looking at me. And I wasn’t trying to pretend. I didn’t bother to pretend.
It’s true. I wanted her to see. I wanted her to see I’d sung. I wanted her to see I’d sold her even as she’d given me everything and was ready to give me more.
I watched her eyes as she ran the numbers, jerked the lever, figured the odds, and it came up me. The look in her eyes when she realized there was no other way to figure it, when she knew I was the finger man and this was it—the look was nothing I’d ever seen in her before. It wasn’t the cold, snaky wrath, it wasn’t the frenzied, red fury. It was something sad, pulsing, unshut.
It was there in her face, open and bare, for an instant.
But then it disappeared like a face card flipping over. And the hard face returned. And she had her hand on her overnight satchel.
And Clancy and Nast were moving in and shouting.
And I thought she might go for a gun.
She looked like she might.
“For that lousy chalk player?” she was saying to me. “You fingered me for some two-bit hustler with a head of hair and some shiny teeth?”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” I found myself shouting. “Why’d you have to break him like that, Gloria?” Even as I knew Vic was just one of my reasons for selling her like I did. There were so many. It was the easiest reason to give.
“You should’ve thanked me,” she snarled.
And I saw her go for the letter opener.
I saw her go for it and then I knew what she was going to do. I knew it and I couldn’t move and the cops were shouting their heads off because they didn’t see what she was going to do. But I did. I did.
She had her eyes on me the whole time she lifted its blade. Her eyes on me, dark and bottomless, as she dug its sharp tip fast, hard, and deep into her throat. She knew just how and where and she did it and—
Her face. Her face.
They got halfway across the room before it was over. They caught her before she hit the floor but her throat was already open, the blood pirouetting.
They were holding on to her, surrounding her, and when I walked over, I saw Clancy’s hands clasped tight around the frothing wound, red sluicing from between his fingers, Nast on his radio, voice high and frantic.
I looked down at them, looked down and caught her face, whiter than white, eyes staring up. They were still looking at me. Maybe they’d always be looking at me.
Clancy said he’d never have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself.
“If I hadn’t been standing right there, I would’ve called it homicide. Never saw anyone do that to their own throat like that, straight to the artery,” he said, shaking his head grimly. “The white coats say it’s impossible. But I saw it.”
Nast nodded, his face a little green. We were back at the station house.
“What a waste,” Clancy said. “We weren’t going after her. We were going to use her to get to the big boys.”
“She wouldn’t have gone for that,” I said, surprised to hear my own voice, low and calm. “She wouldn’t play the stool for you.”
“Bet she thought the same of you,” he said.
“No,” I said, taking my gloves out of my purse and putting them on. “You don’t get it.”
I looked down at my hands, stretched out my fingers. I felt like I could see things now I’d never seen before.
“She was so much better than me,” I said, as if to myself.
Clancy paused, then said, “But look.”
“Yeah,” I said, getting up to go.
They never found Vic’s body. In some ways, I was glad, though I couldn’t say why. Somehow it fit Vic that he wouldn’t be in any fixed place, at least not for long. Now instead of in some junkyard or on some slab, I would forever be ab
le to picture him on the move, flashing smile, bounding forward, eyes always on the horizon, on the next shot, the next roll, the flip of another card, the next chance to lose it all, all over again.
I gave Clancy and Nast some information, some drop spots, some clip joint addresses. They knew most of it anyway. I didn’t have that much to give. I was on the outside. I never got inside. She’d been careful that way and now it paid off. But I knew they’d keep me in their sights, in case. They told me not to leave town, but I knew damn sure I couldn’t stick around.
I was probably safe, sure. No one knew I was a rat. No one but the furrier and she was a rat too. No one knew my real name to find me. I could just slip away.
I thought about going back to the old man, showing him how I might have taken a wrong turn back there but in the end I’d fixed things and maybe that somehow made up for a year or more of making bucks off the sins both venial and mortal of lost souls and indulging in many of those same sins myself. He’d glower and sulk and send me to confession and make me have long meetings with Father Bernard, but I’d come out okay and start things fresh, clean hands, clear eyes, a still dewy-faced girl ready to make some clean-shaven, honest working stiff, probably some lunch-bucket worker from the neighborhood, a good home, a decent home, a home with laughing children and a crucifix on the wall above the bed.
In the end, though, I got in the Impala—my Impala now—and drove thirteen miles downriver, stopping in the first town I’d never been to that I knew wasn’t one of ours. Theirs. Hers. It looked just big enough to get lost in and just small enough that there was no action. Friday night poker games on lazy cul-de-sacs seemed as lively as it got and that was okay by me.
I had a small stack of cash I’d grabbed from my apartment before I beat town, a few pieces of paste I could pawn in a pinch, but not enough to high-life it on for more than a banker’s holiday. Two weeks in, I was doing payroll at Lavery’s Department Store, a big brick eyesore that ruled the main thoroughfare and looked straight off the curled pages of the Currier and Ives calendar on the kitchen wall when I was a kid.
There I was, back punching numbers at a metal desk, back in sensible flats and high-neck blouses, the stuff office girls wear in towns like this one, and back making a lousy dime. At least I wasn’t taking the bus.
A few weeks on the job, I caught the women’s wear manager giving me some long looks while I was straightening my seams in the employee lounge. But it turned out she just wanted to tell me if I went down to the beauty parlor on the first floor for a Madame Rose Hair Color Bath in Champagne Blonde or Moon Gold, then she could use me as a showroom model for the mainliners and flush out-of-towners. And of course there was some off-the-books coin to be had if you played it right. I told her I’d think about it.
Not two days later, the office manager told me to skip the drugstore lunch counter and go to Gould’s Restaurant at twelve sharp instead.
“What’s the idea?”
“The boss—the owner—wants to meet you.”
“Mr. Lavery?”
“There is no Mr. Lavery. Not since he took a dive out the housewares window in ’twenty-nine. I mean the moneybags who owns the operation now.”
“Why does he want to be bothered with me?”
“I can think of a few ideas,” he said wearily. He looked like he felt a little sorry for me and I pictured myself spending my future days running around some big shot’s desk like out of a Sunday paper cartoon.
Gould’s at noontime was packed with every red-faced banker and merchant on Main Street. It was one of those brass-rail, mahogany-bar, steak-and-spinach places that midsized towns everywhere have, where all the bosses tucked into their white-napkin and martini lunches while all their employees were stuck belly to some drugstore lunch counter for ham sandwiches five days a week.
“Follow me, miss,” the maitre d’ said.
I had a pretty good idea what to expect, but I figured at least I’d get a New York strip out of it.
Feeling like a bump-and-grinder walking into a smoker, I tucked my purse under my arm, adjusted my skirt, and made my way through the smoky throng.
At first, I thought I was seeing things when I passed by the far end of the bar and spotted a familiar man leaning on the mahogany, talking to the bow-tied bartender.
And then I saw I wasn’t.
Amos Mackey.
What was he doing here?
What was he doing in this Sunday school, church social, Fourth of July picnic kind of town?
For a split second, I thought maybe he was coming after me.
That he was coming after me for who knew what but at the very least for squealing to the cops.
But it didn’t look that way.
And he had no reason to come after me himself when he had plenty of musclemen to do it for him.
As I passed, I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that he’d spotted me. And as I kept walking, I could feel his eyes on me and it wasn’t like he was figuring an angle. No. No. Something in the way he fastened his eyes on me, it was like he had something for me.
But here’s the thing: I couldn’t believe the fast jolt it gave me. He wasn’t the type to set me going, but there was something. Something in the way he stood there, like a king, manicured hand curling around the edge of the bar like it was the arm of his throne, watching everything, appraising.
And knowing something about me, knowing it.
Who could guess, really, how much he might know about me.
So sure, I gave him my best walk, half class, half pay-broad. If you can twist those two tightly, fellas don’t know what hit ’em. They can’t peg you. It gets them—the smart ones—going. Spinning hard trying to fix you. You’re like the best parts of their grammar school sweetheart and their first whore all in one sizzling package.
The maitre d’ ushered me to a corner table, empty except for a half-full highball glass with a twist. That was when I got the picture. Even if it hit me too late to run the odds or figure out how to play it. Within a few seconds, Mackey had seated himself across from me in front of the highball and the waiter in the starched uniform was setting another one in front of me.
Mackey looked at me, eyes slightly hooded, gold watch fob knocking light into my eyes. He was smiling slightly, mouth closed, and he was rapping his round, baby pink fingers on the white tablecloth.
“Do the new hires down in stock rate this kind of treatment too, boss?” I said, pulling off my gloves finger by finger.
“I’ve been looking for you for a while,” he said quietly.
Then, folding his hands together on the table, he told me how his boys had been heeling for me for a few weeks, finally tracked me down through the Impala. And he’d been staking out this turf anyway, looking for virgin snow.
“I made Lavery’s an offer and bought the whole operation for a song,” he said, bright white collar nudging against the smooth skin of his jaw. “So here I am your employer.”
Listening to him, staring at the untouched drink in front of me, I figured maybe he didn’t just want me to shimmy for my supper after all. Maybe he wanted me to cook his books for him. So I asked if that was what he had in mind.
He almost laughed, said that wasn’t so. He wouldn’t waste my time on that. Looking me in the eye but still leaning back in his chair, arms relaxed, head slightly tilted, he said he had big, big plans for me.
It was like this: he was moving in on my old bosses. They were going the way of the pantaloon and waxed mustache, he said. And then he fixed me with his eyes and they became darker, more purposeful. In spite of myself, I felt he was passing along a great secret to me and I’d better listen up.
“I’m the future, kid,” he said, with a kind of serene force. “I’m the next four decades.”
He said it and it was as though a long, long war had finally ended, after many battles waged and blood drawn, and now the rightful victor had been crowned with laurels on his head, spoils at his feet, and all enemies vanquished. He said it and yo
u knew with your gut it was true, or true enough.
“Congratulations,” I said, still not touching my drink. “What’s it got to do with me?”
His smile grew just slightly. I could smell the Sen-Sen on his breath, the expensive hair tonic. His silk shirt rustled ever so faintly against his suit jacket as he leaned forward, just a few inches.
“I want you to work for me. And not in payroll.”
I felt that jolt again, harder this time. But I kept it cool. “Work for you like breaking in your featherbed?”
He shook his head, again with that smile that didn’t show his teeth. It was the smile of a man who hadn’t been surprised in a very long time but who felt like he was finally going to be surprised again and was enjoying it.
I wondered if he knew I’d stooled for the cops. I wondered if he still believed, had ever believed whatever Gloria whispered in his ear about me, about what I had done or could do. Then I figured he might know but not care. Then I figured he might know and think that it showed something in me, hard and smart and ruthless and striving, that he could use.
“It’s like this,” he said, spreading his palms on the table. And he laid it out. I’d be his girl. I’d do the pickups, drop-offs, the pad. I’d handle the casinos, the tracks, big and small, the grind joints, the high-hat restaurants, the after-hours loading docks, and everything in between.
Everything would pass through my hands before it would touch his.
“Consider it… a promotion,” he said, and I thought maybe he winked as he said it, but it might have been the light off his diamond stickpin.
I told him I needed time to think on it, to walk it around the park a little. He said fine and ordered us two porterhouse specials.
When mine was set before me, so rare it was matching me pulse for pulse, I stared at it like it was a hypnotist’s spiral.
It was there and I knew it. I knew what I was good for. I knew the payoff and the price.
My hands on everything, like resting on a pile of jewels, pressing my palms into the sharp angles, pressing them hard enough to break skin. There would be endless diamonds, slithery jade cuffs, pearls like drops of custard, the glittery crust of filigreed brooches, slick topaz bracelets too heavy for me to lift my wrist. There’d be the thunder, the nervy thrills of the track, torn tickets fluttering through the air, collecting like leaves under my feet, my teetering moll heels. Better still, the hazy, sex-tipped groan of the casinos, everyone working, sweating, toiling for the payoff, the big hit. I could listen to the soft rake across the felt, the rubbing of chips between eager fingers, the gallop of the roulette ball, the whispers, sighs, trembles shuddering through the whole sin-heady joint. I could listen to all of it forever.