Die a Little

  “And she’s not here. She hasn’t been here all day. They said she called in sick. They called me at work to see if I could pick up her students’ assignments and take them home. They . . .” He trails off.

  “She’s probably at home in bed. A misunderstanding—”

  “Yes.” He lifts his head. “I’m sure. Obvious. Thanks, Sis. You know me, overreacting as usual.”

  I try for a smile and walk the final steps, moving toward him.

  “She’s just been a little sick, so I’ve tried to keep a close eye on her.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sure she appreciates it.” Then I add, touching his arm lightly, “It’s what you do.”

  He turns his head and looks at me, his eyes fastening on mine, my eyes. “That’s right, Sis. You always know. You always knew.”

  After he leaves, I shut the door to my classroom and lock it. I sit at my desk for ten minutes, ignoring the students gathering in the hallway. I don’t even hear their rising clatter. I sit at my desk, hands folded, looking out the window, thinking, knowing things. Things I will have to do.

  He wouldn’t tell me. He’d just make it go away.

  I haven’t seen him in ten long days, since before seeing Lois’s body. Have been avoiding him, not wanting to feel tempted to tell him about Lois, afraid, in part maybe, that he might already know. I haven’t returned the calls he’s left with the front desk of my apartment building. I don’t let myself think about it. If I start to think about it, I remind myself who introduced us.

  At night, when I’m trying to sleep, pictures of them together gather in my head. Mike and Alice in the far corner of the room, her head thrown back in laughter as he talks in her ear. Mike and Alice smoking on the back porch at one of her parties, each making droll faces, telling old jokes. Who knows how many conversations? Who could guess all that had passed from his wry mouth to her tilted ear? Then from her mouth to . . . anywhere. There is something so horrible in the thought of that, so horrible that I shut it all down. I shut it all down until I feel nothing.

  And then there he is.

  Standing in the hallway in front of the door to my apartment. His hat is pushed back, and he is fishing through his coat pocket.

  He looks up and sees me, eyes dancing. “So what, you’re finished with me, is that it?” But smiling, always smiling.

  I don’t say anything. I reach into my purse to retrieve my key.

  “Kind of a shabby way to let me know. Hearing from the building manager that I’m no longer allowed in when you’re not here.”

  Leaning his shoulder against the wall, he pulls out a cigarette and lights it.

  It is true. Two days before, I told the manager not to let him or anyone else in. After what Detective Cudahy said, I couldn’t take any chances.

  I unlock the door and walk in, leaving it open for him to follow.

  I turn on a lamp, and he sets his hat down on a table.

  “Why would you want to be here when I’m not here?” I say as I walk around the back of the sofa and flip on two more lights.

  He sits down and returns to his cigarette. “To wait for you. Like you do at my place. Or like you used to do.”

  I sit down on the arm of the chair across from him, folding my hands in my lap.

  “And now you don’t even offer me a drink.” He throws his hands in the air and shakes his head. “That’s how it is, is it? I gotta tell you, King, this is not something that happens to me all the time.”

  “Not with someone like me, you mean.”

  He meets my gaze and talks through the cigarette. “That’s right. That’s exactly right.”

  “If you wanted to get in my apartment so badly, what stopped you? Don’t all you press agents have ways to get in places you’re not supposed to be?”

  “I didn’t know it was a place I wasn’t supposed to be,” he says, blowing a gust of smoke at me. “I guess if I had, I would have brought my set of pick locks and just— You think I’m a real snake, don’t you? Jesus, Lora, how could you have sullied yourself so long with me?”

  He is good. His face displays genuine injury. Of course, I remind myself, putting on a first-class front is his bread and butter.

  “Why would you want to be here when I’m not?” I say again, my mind continually rotating back to his connection with Alice, his history with Alice.

  He twists his head from side to side with irritation. “I told you, King. I came to see you. You weren’t here. I was going to wait. Scandalous.”

  “Why would you think I would be here? Did you call first?”

  “I guess I didn’t give it all that much thought,” he says, with more than a little annoyed sarcasm. “Call me irresponsible.”

  “What did you think you might find?”

  “Find?” His eyebrows lift.

  “I’m not as naïve as you think.”

  “Jesus.” He punches out his cigarette. “Okay. If that’s how you want to play it. If I wanted to come when you weren’t here, why would I be waiting for you?”

  “How do I know you were waiting for me?”

  “This could go on forever. I don’t know what dark secrets you think your apartment holds for me, but to tell you the truth, I’m not that interested. Maybe it’s me who should be asking you questions. Why don’t you just tell me who the guy is?”

  “What guy?” I say.

  “The one you’re tossing me for. I hear he’s a badge.”

  “A badge.”

  “A cop, or a police detective. Which makes for a kind of poetic justice.” He pushes out a faint wrinkle in his gabardines and leans back, folding his arms behind his head.

  “Poetic? . . . I don’t . . .” Has he seen me with Detective Cudahy?

  “What, did you think Alice wouldn’t tell me?”

  I feel a cold blast across my chest. She is always so many steps ahead.

  “Alice . . .” My mind reels. I slide down off the arm onto the chair cushion. How much could she know about Detective Cudahy? I realize suddenly that whatever she has figured out, or guessed at, she is determined to make sure that I know about it. Know she is watching.

  “So when did you decide you preferred hot dog stands and chop suey joints to Ciro’s and Mocambo?” Mike continues.

  Alice. I try to pull myself together. I close my eyes, place a hand on either side of my head, and try to focus. Don’t think about it now, don’t think about it now, just find out how, why, anything you can.

  “What are you so upset about, King?” I hear him get up and move over to the bar cart. “I’m the one who got played.”

  He pours me a short drink and walks it over to me before getting one for himself.

  I gulp it and look up at him.

  “Who’s being played?” My voice sounds funny. “For God’s sake. Are you just some kind of spy? A snitch? Did she tell you to take me out, seduce me just so she can keep tabs on me?” It doesn’t sound like me. It sounds fast, hard and crackling, my teeth chattering with nerves.

  “Seduce you?” He chortles. “King, is that really how you remember it?”

  “What, do you tell her everything about me, about us?”

  He stops laughing and throws me a severe look I’ve never seen on him. “That’s right. I tell her ev-erything. Let’s see.” He looks up, as though trying to recollect and begins counting off on his fingers. “I told her how I had you in my bed within three hours of meeting you. I told her how you’d come by my place for a late-night fuck after you’d been on dates with other men. I told her how you liked to be flipped in bed and how you like it when I push your face into the pillow. I told her how—”

  “You’re a real bastard.”

  “King.” He shakes his head. “I didn’t tell her a thing. I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m such a cad. The worst you could say about me is I don’t mind keeping secrets. Including yours.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, because suddenly, forcefully I believe him. Something raw in his eyes amid all the polish and flash. So
mething I’ve never seen before.

  “Now,” he says, reaching for the bottle he’d set on the coffee table and pouring us both another drink. “Isn’t it time you told me what’s going on?”

  I pause for a moment, but there he is, there he is. And I do it. I tell him what I know about Alice and Lois, and then I tell him about going to get Lois at the Rest E-Z Motel. And then I tell him about Edie Beauvais and Joe Avalon, and about seeing the articles in the paper and, last, about seeing Lois’s body in the morgue. I tell him many things, but not everything. Without thinking, I instinctively leave out anything about what I have done and said to keep Bill’s name as far out of it as possible.

  Mike listens to it all, smoking a new cigarette and not speaking. When I finish, he leans forward, squinting through the billow in front of him.

  “Is that everything?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “There are some things I can help you with. Some things I can tell you.”

  “I thought maybe.”

  “So why didn’t you talk to me before?”

  “I didn’t trust you.” There is no kind way to say it. And I am through with being kind.

  He looks at me. “But you do now?”

  “I’m not sure how much of it is trust and how much is desperation,” I say, truthfully.

  “Nobody ever is,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette. “Joe Avalon, that fellow, he hustles women for people in the business. I guess you figured that out. I’ve seen him before. In my line, he’s one of the numbers you call. Some of these guys can be counted on more than others. Some end up in the blackmail business.”

  “Is he one of them?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Sure, I wouldn’t put it past him. But I can’t be positive.”

  “Did you know he knew Lois?”

  “No.”

  “What else do you know about him?”

  “He worked for Walter Schor a lot.”

  “I know.” I tell him about seeing Joe Avalon coming from meeting a Mr. Schor at the studio. “Who is Schor exactly?”

  “A big gun. Very high up at the studio. Avalon must be doing well for himself. He gets to skip the go-betweens. Like me,” he adds. “But you can’t be surprised by any of this.”

  “No. Is that all you can tell me? Do you think Lois worked for Joe Avalon?”

  Mike rubs his eyes and pauses. Then, “Of course.”

  “Do you think Alice worked for Joe Avalon?”

  He pauses again, eyeing me. “Of course.”

  I feel my torso lift suddenly, as if in shock, but I am too numb to feel shock. “Why . . .”

  “How else would she know a guy like that? Even if she also bought drugs from him, I’d be surprised if she hadn’t worked for him at one time.”

  “Bought drugs?”

  “He sells dope, too. They all do. Or at least he’s a middleman. Don’t you think he’s the one who was so good at keeping Lois half bent?”

  “I see,” I say. “And Alice?”

  “Alice used to take bennies—Benzedrine—when she worked at the studio. All kinds of pep pills. A lot of them do. I don’t know if she still does.”

  I think about Alice, about her manic hostessing, her frenzied housework, her rabid energy, and her occasionally surging speech. And I think about her days in bed with “migraines,” her disappearances from school, the thin enamel of sweat that often gleamed off her body.

  “And what did Alice do for him?”

  “What do you think?” He rakes a hand through his immaculate hair. “She found girls. She found all the girls, Lora. I saw her do it. She knew them all, the Girl with the Tape. She met them that way. Word was she’d pick out the ones she thought would sell. Is that what you want?”

  An image flashes before my eyes: Alice on her knees, pins in her mouth, measuring Lois for her Indian Girl costume. I swallow hard and push forward. “What else?”

  “Let’s stop here for now.” He straightens his tie and jacket. “I’ll tell you a few more things on the way.”

  “On the way?”

  “We’re going to the studio.”

  “Why?”

  “It may not be as exciting as tailing people, but old-fashioned bureaucratic files can do a lot of talking.”

  • • •

  As we drive, my mind swirling, Mike talks.

  “She’d call me and want to meet for lunch, and then she’d ask me if we’d slept together and what it was like, what I did and what you did. Did you know that?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I generally don’t kiss and tell, but that rule doesn’t usually apply to telling women, or women like Alice. But somehow I couldn’t tell her. Somehow . . . I just didn’t,” he says, then laughs. “Maybe some kind of press agent instinct.”

  “What did she want to know?”

  “Everything. And she’d want to know if you would feel bad about what you’d done. And she’d want to know if you ever liked it to hurt, liked it rough, you know?”

  “What did you tell her?”

  He looks over at me with his lazy smile. “I lied. But I don’t think she believed me.”

  “No,” I say, feeling my face turn hot. “I guess I wouldn’t either.”

  He grabs my hand lightly, fingertips touching my palm. It is so genuine a gesture that it startles me. I resist both the urge to pull my hand away and the urge to seize his tightly.

  “D-d-does”—my mouth inexplicably tripping me up—“does my brother know about you and Alice? Your history?”

  “Oh, God, no. I’m sure he doesn’t. She is nothing if not careful about what your brother knows.”

  “I suppose that’s right.”

  • • •

  The warren of offices has an eerie silver chill at night. The sound of our shoes seems unbearably loud. Even though I know Mike is allowed to be here—this is his work, after all—I can’t get past the feeling we are trespassing. I speak barely above a hush.

  “You don’t need to whisper yet.” Mike smirks. “We’re still in legit territory.”

  We pass through several winding corridors without seeing a soul.

  “Some people are around, but not in this building. They’d be over on the soundstages—or else the writers in their building across the street. I doubt we’ll see anyone.”

  I follow Mike into a suite of offices. SECURITY is etched in glass on the first door. We move through an outer office and up to a door marked WARREN DIXON, CHIEF OF SECURITY.

  Mike reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sterling key ring.

  “You have a key to his office?”

  He smiles again. “It’s my job, King. When that barrel-chested all-American box office champ gets caught pants around his ankles in the back room of Café Zombie, sharing a needle with a twelve-year-old hustler, I need to be able to fix it fast.”

  He unlocks the office door and pushes it open before me. “And this is the place to start.”

  I walk in, my feet sinking into carpet as thick as a sponge. “Here?”

  He breezes past me and moves to the other side of the dim office, illuminated by large set lights across the street. As I follow, he raps his fingers on a paneled door. “Files. Secrets enough to bury an industry.”

  “You don’t have to impress me,” I say. “And if you’re allowed in here, why can’t we turn on the lights?”

  “No need to draw extra attention.” He grins, opening the door.

  I was expecting a closet, but it is a large windowless room, twice as big as the office that led into it, filled with filing cabinets with mahogany fronts.

  Before my eyes can adjust to the bright lights, Mike is opening a long drawer marked “Personnel—Costume—1950–52.”

  “I think she moved here from Universal in ’fifty-one,” he says, his fingers dancing along the colored tabs.

  “And there she is.” He whistles, pulling out what strikes me as a disproportionately large folder marked “Steele, Alice.”

  As if re
ading my mind, Mike says, “She worked here for, what, just two years and her file is bigger than Joan Crawford’s.”

  “May I see?” I say, tiptoeing over his arm.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he mutters, paging through furiously. “Just let me pull out the relevant stuff. There’s a lot of administrative material we don’t want to waste our time with.”

  “Maybe I should decide that,” I say.

  He stops for a second and looks at me, raising an eyebrow. “Still don’t trust me, eh?”

  “I trust you enough,” I say. “Enough for some things.”

  “Well, fasten your eyes on this.” He hands me a document bearing the black stamp PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. “If I got caught showing you this, I’d be on a plane back to Connecticut. That’s trust, King.”

  It holds a copy of a police report. Alice P. Steele, 9/14/52. Suspect was arrested outside the Black Flamingo nightclub. Pandering. Solicitation. Public drunkenness. Suspected narcotics use. Assaulting an officer.

  “But she was never formally charged? She’d have been fired.”

  “She must have had friends in high places. Friends within these walls. We may take care of the talent, but costume girls don’t normally rate such treatment.”

  “Joe Avalon and his . . . clients?”

  “You got it.” He pulls out another document. “Didn’t you say Alice graduated from someplace in Van Nuys?”

  I remember my conversation with Principal Evans. “Well, that’s what she said.”

  “According to her personnel papers, she never graduated high school.”

  “I guess I knew that was a lie,” I say.

  “A reprimand.”

  “Pardon?”

  “This memo shows that her bosses in Costume reprimanded her for what they call ‘improper conduct and questionable behavior.’ I’d have to talk to Costume to find out what that was about. Could be anything from tardiness to giving head to the grips—” He stops himself and smiles at me. “Pardon me.”

  I pull out a cache of paper from behind the memo. Paging through, I can’t find anything relating to Joe Avalon/John Davalos, Walter Schor, or Lois Slattery.

  “Would Lois have a file?”

  Mike returns Alice’s to the drawer and walks over to a set of cabinets entitled “Extras.”