“No . . . ,” he says, shuffling through the folders.
“Try Linda Tattersal.”
“Bingo.”
The folder is slim. It has only a carbon copy of basic personnel information.
“The police probably took the rest,” I realize.
Mike looks at me briefly, then looks back down at the form. “Not much here.”
I look at the form.
“Five five one seven oh six Manchester.”
“What?”
The address strikes me suddenly. Lois lived so transiently that I didn’t expect it to have any significance, but it does.
“Where is that?”
“Hell if I know.” Mike shrugs. “Not my part of town.”
“Could that be Manchester and La Cienega?”
“I don’t know, why?” His eyes look strangely bright, his hand on the folder I’m still holding.
“Just wondering,” I say. I look at the name listed next to the address, the spot usually reserved for landlords or landladies. It reads, “Olive MacMurray.”
“What are you looking at?” Mike asks, placing his other hand on my shoulder.
“Nothing,” I say. I wonder if she is the woman I saw when I dropped Lois off at the house on Manchester after picking her up at the Rest E-Z Motel.
But somehow I don’t want to tell Mike that. The more he asks, the less inclined I feel to tell. He seems too eager to leave, to wrap things up.
He takes the folder from my hands.
“Sorry this wasn’t more help,” he says, opening the drawer and slipping the folder back in its place.
“That’s okay.”
“Let’s go grab a nightcap, King. Sit on this a little.”
“I’m tired. Maybe we’d just better call it a night.”
The next day, I leave work early and drive the same route I had with Lois, along La Cienega, all the way to the large display donut, its slightly rusting candy sprinkles nearly shaking from it.
At the door, I take a deep breath and ring the shrill, oversprung bell.
It is the same tall woman with the crimson cone of curls on top of her head, her brows pinch-knitted red on her forehead. She appraises me with cool suspicion through the screen door.
“Miss MacMurray?”
Squinting, a cigarette wedged in her scarlet-edged lips, she mutters, “It’s Mrs. What do you want?”
“I wondered if I might have a moment of your time.”
She surveys me, from the pale, custard-colored hat on my head to my pigskin pumps.
“No God stuff here,” she finally says, starting to shut the door.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to get into that house much less get the information I want. In the basted pocket of my dress, I grasp my only bargaining chip.
“Oh,” I say, waving my hand. “I’m not one of those. I just have some questions for you.”
“That’s how it always starts.”
“It’s about Lois Slattery,” I blurt out, just as the closing door nearly blocks my view of her.
She pulls the door back with a jerk, raising an eyebrow in a way that looks painful, like risking the opening of a wound.
“Don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“But you do.” I try to fix a stare.
She pauses, then says, with a faint snarl, “Who are you to me, anyway? I don’t talk at all and I don’t talk to just anybody.”
“I’m an acquaintance of Joe Avalon.”
She smirks so bodily that the powder on her chalky bosom rises, hangs in the air for a minute, and then falls again.
“I don’t think so, honey, but that’s just funny enough to get you inside.”
She props open the door with one acid green slipper. I hurry past it and into the darkened living room.
“Twenty and I’ll listen,” she says, sitting down on a worn velvet armchair much like the one on the front lawn.
I can barely see in the dim space, but what I can discern seems strangely unlived in. A sofa that matches the armchair, a large radio of the kind common before the war, a fringed lamp wrapped in dust. Otherwise, the room is bare.
Through an open door I can see a bedroom empty save a bed with a bare mattress on top and a pile of towels at the foot.
Nobody lives here. They pass through.
“Twenty,” she repeats.
“Pardon?” I sit down on the low edge of the sagging sofa, my knees nearly reaching my chin. “Oh, of course.”
I reach into my purse and hand Mrs. MacMurray a bill, hoping that money won’t be her sole bartering interest. If so, the meeting will be over soon after it starts.
“You don’t know Joe Avalon,” she says, sliding the bill into the pocket of her robe and folding her maroon-tipped talons in her lap.
“I do.”
“How?”
“That’s not important.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she says, hard as the edges of the bulbous jade on her right hand. The ring looks real.
“You don’t live here,” I say. Her eyebrows pitch up suddenly.
“No.” She shrugs, as if deciding that this particular fact bears no weight. “Of course not.”
Leaning forward, the dust in the air mingling with the powder on her chest, she fixes me with a steely stare. “I’m losing interest. Tell me who you are and what you want or I’ll make things ugly. You don’t throw that name around lightly.”
As she speaks, she moves her face so close I can see the bleeding edge of her painted mouth. Inexplicably, it makes me shudder.
“Lois Slattery,” I say quickly. “She worked for you?”
She doesn’t respond but looks ready to say or do something that I am pretty sure I won’t like. I know I have to move quickly.
“She’s dead,” I say. “Murdered. Don’t you care?”
She leans back, pursing her lips and nearly curling herself into a purring smile.
“That no-count bitch. How do you know I didn’t kill her myself? She caused me enough trouble.”
“You didn’t,” I say, suddenly realizing I have no idea if she did. “But you know things.”
Her back stiffens. “You better have a bankroll the size of my fist if you want that kind of information.”
“No bankroll. But something that might be worth more.” I reach into my pocket and pull out Joe Avalon’s address book. The book that has been sitting in my dresser for months.
I can tell from the hitch in her eyes that she recognizes it on sight. In a flash, however, she puts on a poker face.
“Is this where the music rises and I clasp my chest like Kay Francis?” She is tough, but she shows more than she means to. She wants the book.
“You need to tell me everything you know about Lois and what happened to her,” I say coolly. “And then you get this. And you don’t need to waste my time. I know you know what it is.”
“Is that so—”
“Now I’m losing interest.” I feign brusqueness, gathering my gloves and bag. “I know other people who will give me information and a fat bankroll to boot for this.”
She sighs, eyes continually darting toward the address book.
“What good does that book do me? I don’t need addresses, phone numbers.”
This is what I am afraid of. Is that all the book contains? Even with its funny code? The shorthand that I can’t crack?
“I think you know it’s more than that,” I bluff.
“Let me see it.”
“I’m listening,” I say, leaning back for effect, even as I feel the sofa’s dust seal itself to my back.
She pauses, running her pointy fingers from her throat to her ample cleavage.
“Fine. Fine. Slattery. A no-good whore. What else do you need to know?”
“You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“She was a party girl. I take care of party girls. They stay here when they need to. They get taken care of”—she gestures ominously to the bedroom—“when they need to.
Lois was one of dozens. She was especially popular because she was especially . . . agreeable. Some girls have rules. Lois had no rules.”
Suddenly, her cool breaks, for a split second. Her face visibly darkens. “No rules,” she murmurs grimly, looking down at her hands.
Shaking herself out of it, she continues, “Girls like that don’t end well. She must have made the wrong date.”
“She had a date the night she was killed?”
“That book in your hand better be damn good,” she says coldly. “Come here.”
She rises and wearily walks me over to the door adjacent to the bedroom. Stepping in, I see a small room dominated by a large, sagging bookshelf.
“Girls leave things here. When they’re flopping. They leave valuables, personal items. I let them,” she says, reaching down to the bottom shelf. She grabs a large shoe box that has “Lois” scrawled across it in loopy script. I guess I’ve never seen Lois’s childlike scribble.
I take the box from her outstretched hands.
“Didn’t the police seize this?” I ask, before thinking.
“They’re looking for Linda Tattersal, wherever Lois got that name. They haven’t been here. They don’t know anything.” She eyes me frostily. “Do they?”
“Not as far as I know. Which is good luck for us both,” I say. I carry the box back into the living room and open it.
Somehow I thought it would contain revelations, by magic some proof—like a photograph of her own murder.
The first thing I see is a gold shell compact I recognize as my own. I had presumed it lost months ago. There are a handful of swizzle sticks from places like Dynamite Jackson’s and Café Society. In one corner a sticky-looking syringe has wedged itself.
“That can’t be any surprise,” Mrs. MacMurray growls. “She didn’t just use. She booted it.”
“She what?”
“She booted it—hit the needle real slow, pulling back and pumping the blood again and again to get a bigger fix. Tough stuff, that one. And I only know tough.”
A few lipsticks roll from one end of the box to the other. I notice a small, pocket-size pad of mauve paper beneath the syringe and slide it out.
“That’s the idea,” Mrs. MacMurray says blankly, one eye searching for the address book, which I have temporarily returned to my pocket.
It is a list of hotels and motels and nightclubs, as far as I can tell. Next to each is a set of initials. The printing is in neat black grease pencil.
“Favorite haunts of her regulars. Hard to keep them straight. I told her to log them to help her remember which name to call out.”
“These are just initials.”
“And those are just numbers and addresses, right?” she says, pointing to the address book.
I scan the list quickly, looking for the Rest E-Z Motel. If any of Lois’s dates were dangerous, that was one of them.
On the third page, there it is: “Rest E-Z: WS.”
“Walter Schor,” I say out loud, remembering Mike’s comment about Joe Avalon’s main studio client.
“Why not? Walter Schor, William Shakespeare. Why not look for Louis B. Mayer in there while you’re at it? Darryl Zanuck.”
“You want this?” I finger the address book.
“You want this?” She reaches into her robe pocket and pulls out a small, shiny revolver. The gesture is so cinematic that I feel no fear. Just a cold rush of adrenaline.
“You don’t want to use that. You would have used it already if that’s what you wanted.”
She smiles lightly. “Sure, I don’t want to use it. That’s not a mess I want to clean up. Look, I’m a lying, cheating grifter. But I play fair, within reason. I promised you information for the book. I’ve given you all you need. Now give me the book and you can take that box and get it far, far away from me. I’ve washed my hands of her. She stains badly, little girl. I don’t need it.”
I hand her the book, as happy to be rid of it as she is to be rid of Lois’s things. She opens it immediately. As far as she is concerned, I’m already gone.
“Thank you, Mrs. MacMurray,” I say, rising, tucking the shoe box under my arm. “I’ll show myself out.”
Her eyes tear across the pages as I head toward the door. As I open it, I decide to take one last shot. From over my shoulder, I call out, “Oh, and where’s Alice Steele’s box?”
Without looking up, ravenously consuming each mystifying page, she mutters, “She picked that up long ago.”
• • •
It is hours later, with the box set on my tufted bedspread, that I understand why I was so struck by Lois’s name on the top. It had been tingling in the back of my head ever since.
The writing in the pad did not match. It had been written by someone else—maybe Joe Avalon, or likely Mrs. MacMurray herself. As for the scrawled name on the box, I suddenly recognize the hand. The same looping, wavering, slanted scribble.
Your brothers wife is a tramp, she’s no good and she’ll rune him. if you dont beleve me, ask at the Red room lounge in Holywd.
The postcard of the Santa Monica Pier that had led me to the Red Room Lounge.
Lois had been trying to tell me something. Maybe she lost her nerve once I arrived. Or maybe she was just seeing if I’d bite. Maybe she was showing Alice how close she could get to me. Or maybe, maybe she was looking for help.
If WS was Walter Schor and he was the man who had beaten up Lois, it wasn’t hard to believe he was the type of man who could also have killed her. I wonder if Alice knew and if she did, why she didn’t do anything about it. And if she didn’t, then why she was content to let Lois just disappear.
I think of Lois’s torn body at the Rest E-Z Motel. I think of the look in her eyes, of despair and wry defeat, or provocation and surrender. She wanted me to see, to know the kind of world she—and by extension, Alice—lived in. Was she blackmailing Alice or just refusing Alice her own escape?
Pushing aside my doubts from the night before, I call Mike.
“Can you tell me something about Walter Schor?”
“Sure. What are you looking for, sweetheart?”
“Would he be the type who would hurt women?”
He doesn’t even pause. “No, no. He’s not the one you’re looking for, Lora. You’re on the wrong track. Besides, I heard that Lois was running up and down Central Avenue every night. Far more likely this has to do with drugs and a bad scene.”
The feeling I had in the file room as he snapped up Lois’s file folder returns, but with more intensity—a bristling up my spine, rough as a razor. “When did you hear this?”
“Asking around. She was moving in a very rough crowd. These things happen.”
“What’s wrong?” I nearly gulp, straining for air. When Mike saw Olive MacMurray’s name in Lois’s file, he somehow figured it all out. Figured out that this wasn’t just about Alice and a two-bit thug like Joe Avalon, an easily replaceable pimp. This went higher, sunk deeper. He is lost to me.
“Wrong?”
“You sound different from last night, at my apartment.”
“Different? No, baby, not different. Listen, I had an idea. How about you and me and a drive up the coast this weekend? Or Catalina and all that? Get our minds off all this. Forget about it.”
I try to get some control of my voice. I want to sound casual. I want to sound like nothing is wrong.
“That sounds wonderful, Mike. But I’ve got a lot of work to do this weekend, stacks of student papers and lesson plans. Listen, I’ll call you later.”
“Okay. What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Just cleaning house,” I say as I hang up. I am going to have to do it alone.
Lois lying, facedown, in dark water. Born only to die and to die like this, lost, forgotten, brutalized, released, left faceless, nameless, alone. Somebody had to speak for her. That night, I dream of her. Of her speaking to me. Hair twisted with seaweed, face swimming out of dark water, eyes imploring, mouth coiled darkly, queerly into a smile. Lora, she woul
d say, Lora, you know more than you think. You know everything.
• • •
These are the things I barely remember: Calling in sick. Driving to my bank. Waiting twenty minutes for it to open. Withdrawing my savings—only four hundred dollars, but a world of effort for me. Driving back to the ghostly house on Manchester, the long, long drive past countless streets baroque and scarred, nondescript and ominous.
The next thing I know I am looking at Olive MacMurray’s startled expression as she peers at me from around the corner of the sofa, ten feet and a screen door separating us.
There must be something in my eyes, something hanging there, dangling dangerously, because she stands, not moving closer, only hissing faintly, “What are you doing here?”
“I need to see you.”
“We finished our business,” she says in clipped, hushed tones, stripped of the prior day’s wile.
“I have money. I need to know some things about Alice Steele.”
She rushes to the door, her face stretched tight, and hastily ushers me in with trembling hands. “Listen, you, you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into. I don’t want any part of this.”
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“How much do you have?” She twists her fingers anxiously.
“Four hundred dollars. But only if you can answer all my questions.”
She waves me over to the sofa. Someone has gotten to her. Joe Avalon has gotten to her. I feel my teeth set on edge.
“I’ll take that money. I need that money now.” The powdered flesh of her bosom mottled today, her hands clenching.
“Who wrote Lois’s schedule of dates? Was that you?”
“No. It was your sister-in-law,” she snaps.
“Why?” I snap back, only then realizing what she has said: Your sister-in-law. She knows who I am, maybe has known all along. But there is no time for this revelation. I repeat, “Why?”
She takes a deep breath, then, “She was one of the girls, fancy ambitions but dangerous habits. She had an arrangement with Avalon. She helped control Lois. Helped keep her jumping—Lois and her big mouth. Joe wanted to dump her or worse, and Alice kept her alive. She was her lucky piece, as they say.”
“I guess she couldn’t keep her alive forever,” I murmur, my head throbbing.