“Once Alice hooked up with her lawman, she had more of an interest in keeping herself in the pink. Lois was a drag on her. It turned out pretty lucky for Alice in the end. But her loose ends may trip us all up yet,” she says, wringing her hands over and over.
I pull the Santa Monica Pier postcard from my pocket.
“Did Lois write this?”
“How should I know?”
“The handwriting?”
“Could be. Lots of the girls write like that.” She reads the card more closely. “Ah, I get it. She was looking to have something over Alice’s head. A bargaining chip.”
“You think Walter Schor killed Lois.”
“I cleaned her up enough times after dates with him,” she says, voice lowering. “And this sure is worth that four hundred: He sent another one of my girls to the hospital after a night of monkeyshines.”
“Because . . . because . . .” I wonder if I can ask it. “Because Alice would never . . . never hurt Lois.” I couldn’t look the woman in the eye.
“I gave up long ago guessing what people were capable of,” she says. “But my money’s on Schor. Question is, How many times did Alice need to put Lois in harm’s way before the party girl turned up cold? And I do know this. And then I’m done. Joe Avalon isn’t about to be a patsy. And he’s capable of just about anything when his back is against the wall.”
Her eyes meet mine, and I feel something very weighty has been communicated to me—but its full meaning is as yet unclear.
“It was Joe Avalon?”
She shakes her head. “You’re missing it. Listen close, and then I’m closing the shutters on the information booth. Joe Avalon isn’t about to be a patsy. And, right now, he’s capable of just about anything.
“By the way,” she adds, rising. “It was Alice Steele, couple years back, who got put in the hospital at Walter Schor’s hands. You don’t forget that kind of dinner date.
“Before we took her in to County, she spent two days in there”—she gestures to the bedroom—“filling it with blood.”
• • •
I park my car three doors down from Olive MacMurray’s house, trying to unravel all she said for my four hundred dollars. I don’t trust myself to drive yet.
I sit for about twenty minutes thinking about Lois and why she let herself fall into Walter Schor’s poisonous arms over and over again—one long death scene. “The kind of dance you’re lucky to make it out of,” she’d said, not so lucky herself.
And I think of Alice, Alice serving herself up to countless men and now sunk deep, heels dug in, in my brother’s home. And Alice once lying on that bed in that fetid house, lying there, body twitching, more blood with each spasm, more pain with every move. Lying there in a doomed attempt to hide, to hide this, to hide all this. And it was to hide, to conceal, to bury, that she sent Lois up to the pyre and watched as the flames ate her alive.
My God, Bill, what you’ve let crawl into your bed . . . you poor, hapless thing . . . must you pay so much for your fine innocence?
I sit for about twenty minutes
I sit for about twenty minutes and then
It is then and there it is. There is no one there, and suddenly, blinking back at the house, I see him flicker up Olive MacMurray’s porch steps out of the corner of my eye.
I have his picture in my head and then he is there. And me
Like a sleepwalker
As someone hypnotized
And there I am, now out of my car, fast and without thinking, slinking past the three houses
Back to 551706 Manchester
Walking in a silence so deep it is as if all sound has been sucked out of the world
I walk along the side of the house
lean up against the wall, against the pitted shingles
along the window, open, paint-flecked
through all this I pretend I didn’t see who I saw, pretend it was just a trick of the light, the eye
like the old adage, Speak of the devil, and he shall appear
I press my hand, my palm against the heat-curled shingles
I might have even whispered it aloud
not Bill it couldn’t be Bill not my brother not
• • •
then I hear the voice through the screen window
• • •
“We’re talking a lot of money here,” he says. “And all the protection you could want.”
Could that hard, anxious sound possibly be my brother’s voice?
“How much money? My life wouldn’t be worth a plug nickel, Detective.”
“He wouldn’t be able to touch you, Mrs. MacMurray. I can promise that. We’re talking serious money.”
“I’d need five grand.”
“Fine. I’ll arrange to have it wired to your bank account this afternoon.”
“Do I look like a landlady? I don’t have a bank account.”
“I’ll get it to you.” A quaver tilts into his voice, and it is Bill and my God—
“He’s going to find out I gave him up to you.”
“He won’t. And if he does, it won’t matter. He’ll be in county jail and then prison for life. Murder first-degree conviction for Avalon. I promise.”
“And I get all his girls. And I get all his studio johns.”
“Right. Who else but you?”
“I suppose even Walter Schor, if I want him.”
“Because you’ve got what I need to pin this on Avalon?” Hot desperation in his voice.
“We can make it work. He’s dirty enough for any frame to work.”
“He’s an animal.” Quaver gone and now a hard bark. “I got into the law to beat guys like this.” Oh, it is horrible.
“Whatever you say, copper,” a low, amused drawl.
A loud noise, a sound like a blood howl
and it is me
• • •
As I watch him walk rapidly out of the house, my body begins moving too. He passes his car and keeps going until he reaches the donut shop. I follow at a distance. Don’t think about it now, don’t think about it now, just find out how, why, anything you can.
Looking furtively to his right and left—my brother, like a criminal—he ducks into the phone booth out front. I move quickly around the back of the shop and then sidle along the far wall, inching as close as I can to the front of the building while still remaining hidden by both the corner and the meager hedgerow that wraps around it. He has shut the phone booth door, but I can still hear.
His voice is loud, raked raw. “I did it. Don’t worry. I took care of it. I told you I would.”
His effort to control his voice, sound strong is painful.
“No,” he says. “It’s just like I promised. She’ll pin him for it. She’ll claim he came to her that night talking about how he’d dumped her in the canyon. She’ll say he did it to keep her in line. She’ll say Lois was terrified of him. Once she has the money, she’ll tell more.”
He pauses for a moment, listening. Listening and, I can hear it, jabbing his fist rhythmically against the door of the booth.
“Yes, yes. I did it all. You know, Alice, you know, he’s done enough bad things he never got caught for. So he can pay by paying for this. He can pay for this. He should pay. This is about the kind of man he is and those things he made you do. He can’t hurt you anymore.”
He can’t stop. He isn’t talking to her. He doesn’t know it, but he’s talking to me.
“He’s going to pay for the things he made you do.”
• • •
I want to protect you from all that, my brother Bill once said to me. I had returned home crying. Some boy who had cornered me in his car, pressed himself so close, so roughly his watch had caught on my sweater and snagged it from collarbone to waist. The sweater was a favorite, was the perfect aquamarine. It was the softest thing I’d ever owned. It felt like pussy willows against my skin. It was the ruined sweater that brought me home with tears stinging. But my brother assumed it was the boy.
br /> —Did he hurt you? Did he force himself on you?
—He tried to. He kept . . . trying.
It was true, after all.
It took nearly an hour to persuade him not to go to this boy’s house. I knew he wouldn’t hurt the boy, just frighten him, scold him. But I was too embarrassed. And part of me would rather listen to him. Listen to him say things like
—I want to protect you from all that. I don’t want you to have to know these things. About men. I want you to be safe forever. I will make you safe forever.
I want to protect you.
From somewhere in the dark murk of my head, the phone jumps at me.
“Lora? It’s Bill. I’m glad you’re there. We’ve been kind of worried about you. Alice says you missed school today.”
Images of my brother at Olive MacMurray’s that very afternoon crackle through my head. I can’t remember anything else I have done in the last six hours. Did I really drive home, park my car, walk up the stairs to my apartment, pour the glass of water in front of me, light the cigarette—whose cigarette?—I seem to be smoking now?
Gathering myself, stopping my pounding heart with my hand, putting on a face, a voice, I say: “I wasn’t feeling well.”
“Well, we thought maybe you forgot about the party. It starts soon.”
“Party?”
“The charity event Alice is hosting, remember? For the Police Benevolent League?”
“Right.” I vaguely remember agreeing to bring a tray of rumaki.
“People are supposed to get here in half an hour.”
“I’ll be there,” I say.
I say it as though nothing has happened. And then it becomes as though nothing has happened. My brother is the same. I am the same. Somehow we’ve all agreed. It is the only way to go forward, to speak, to move. I can do it. There is some strange steel to me . . .
I open the refrigerator door. I don’t have any chicken livers for the rumaki, so water chestnuts will have to do. As I stand wrapping the bacon around each piece, sliding in a pineapple chunk, my mind keeps shuttling back to seeing Bill again, how I’ll see his face and know. Know what? There is nothing to know.
I set my jaw, focus my eyes.
The busier I make myself with the food, the slippery pineapple and the frilly toothpicks and the sticky honey glaze on my fingers, the more I am able to send myself back to my Bill, the Bill who never surprises me except with the extent of his flinty decency, his goodness, his deathless integrity.
The more I think of this, the more I think of what he might do for me if I were so ensnared. The more I think of this, wrapping the rumaki in wax paper, the more the fog in my head clears, my thinking becomes razor-sharp. I can go to the party and I can see what she has brought upon him, what she has brought him to. I can look the damage in the face and then I will know what to do.
The staggering thing is this: amid everything, amid all Alice’s efforts to conceal a murder, to entrap her husband in the treachery, to bribe one partner in crime and frame the other, she still manages to orchestrate another one of her extravagant spectacles.
Japanese lanterns have been artfully positioned to spread a pink haze everywhere, over the platters of egg rolls and plum sauce, fried wontons, fortune cookies, glistening pork on bamboo skewers, and the tureen of chow mein, over the tall vases filled with moon lilies and bamboo stalks, the hanging temple bells tingling serene music from the patio, over the sandalwood fan party favors in the basket by the door, the paper dragon stretched across the fireplace. It is pitch perfect. It is almost obscene.
And there is Alice, her dark hair pulled back tight and her eye makeup straight out of a Charlie Chan movie, emerging from under one of the cherry blossom parasols on the patio in a searing turquoise cheongsam dress, all the rage since Jennifer Jones wore one in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.
As she moves across the room to greet me, I feel a hard chill drag down my spine. Can I really do this, be here, see them? It is as though time has slowed to a hypnotic crawl as she makes her way toward me, the silk of her cheongsam shushing, her feet, in wooden sandals, making no sound on the thick carpet, her head lowered like a good geisha. Then, as she approaches me, her darkly lined lids rise and she looks at me and in that look . . .
In that look, perhaps for the first time since I’ve known her, she conceals nothing. Her gaze—filled with rage, terror, shame, ugliness, and still, her keen beauty—scissors through me, and I feel I have been gored.
“Lora! And you remembered the rumaki,” she coos with a kind of honeyed slither. “I can always count on you.”
I can’t speak, can’t bear to, then—
“Sis.”
I feel the familiar warm, heavy arm on my shoulder, and something in me, something held tight, collapses.
“Hi, Bill.” I can’t look up at him. I merely feel him, smell his old-fashioned aftershave, the scent of which is pressed, warm and peppery, into everything he owns.
And then they are both gone, people coming in behind me and Alice whisking my platter off to the kitchen.
It is only then that I notice the dozen guests already in the room, drinking Singapore slings and mai tais, the women waving their fans languorously and the men lighting cigarettes and the Four Aces crooning, “Your fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing,” on the stereo and everything going on as if nothing . . .
I float around the space like a ghost, avoiding conversations, speaking to no one, trying to disappear into the crimson haze of the decor.
Looking at Alice from across the room, I see that, although her face is powdered an impeccable white, a faint sheen of perspiration is beginning to pearl on her skin. She is laughing and talking and mixing drinks and adjusting the lanterns as men’s heads hit them, but she isn’t pulling off the performance with her usual élan. And it both thrills and frightens me.
As for Bill . . . Bill is no good at all, half-hiding in a corner chair, continually, compulsively running his hand through his hair, rubbing his jaw until it turns red, tugging at his pants legs, reaching for his drink and then changing his mind and returning his hand to his knee, to his ear, which he tugs, to his tie, which he loosens, then straightens, then loosens and straightens again. Oh God, Bill.
The things I heard him say, only hours before, to that woman, that horrible woman:
“We’re talking a lot of money here. And all the protection you could want.”
“. . . you’ve got what I need to pin this on Avalon?”
But then I look back at him, at the tightness around his eyes like when, like when there’s things going wrong, things he can’t control. Like when a masher grabbed me in the movie theater or when a teacher scolded me in front of the class or when my grandparents pillaged my forbidden box of Dubarry face powder and the only bottle of perfume I’d ever had—Soul of Violet—or when . . . or when . . . a very bad and dangerous criminal slipped just out of reach.
I reach over to the bar cart and pour myself a small glass from the first bottle I touch. The feel of it fresh in my throat, I walk across the room to him.
He just wants to save us all, I think. It sends him down some very dark alleys. He can’t help it. He never could.
“Hi.”
He looks up at me and when he does
And when he does and I can’t forget this
it is with unbearably guilty eyes.
I think I might burst into tears.
“Sis,” he says scratchily, one hand to my arm, soft. “I’m glad you’re here.”
This is what he is really saying: “I had to do it, Lora. Otherwise, it all would have meant nothing.”
And suddenly I understand.
Then, he averts his eyes from mine, rises, and walks away.
I think I might die.
• • •
Moving past guests, pretending not to hear anyone who might call my name, I step out onto the empty patio and around the corner to a darker patch of the small yard. A shot of brisk air tingles o
n my face, and I take another long drink.
“I didn’t think you’d show.”
Jumping, I turn and, through the growing dark, make out Mike Standish leaning against the jacaranda tree, hands in his deep linen pockets.
“Likewise,” I say, catching my breath.
“Well, as you know, I’ve always been a great supporter of law enforcement.”
Peering through the tree’s feathery leaves, I think I can see him smiling. He makes no move to indicate he plans on coming out from the shadows.
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately. Almost every time you ask it of me, King.”
“I can’t talk to you,” I say, my chin faintly trembling. I remind myself that everything he says is at least half a lie.
“Why not,” he replies, cool as ever.
“I can’t talk to you at all.” I feel my hands jerking, and surprising myself, I see that this moment may in fact be about Mike and Mike and me and I can’t do it, not now, and I feel the supple, insinuating warmth of his voice as he says my name and I want him to come out from the shadow of the tree, but I’m afraid if he does, I will be lost.
(One thing, Lora, one thing, Alice had said, he warns you that he’s going to charm you, and that warning becomes part of his charm.)
“Just stay away,” my voice, somehow, rings out.
“You think you know things, but you don’t.” At last, he steps out of the heavy darkness of the low black branches.
For the first time since I met him I can almost see a path of stubble, a slight wrinkle of the collar, a hair out of place. It’s heartbreaking.
“King—Lora, you don’t know anything. At least not where I’m concerned,” he says.
This is too much. Something slips in me and there’s no going back. “Don’t come any closer!” I say, my voice at a higher timbre than I’d meant.
Mike’s eyes widen and he stops short.
Out of nowhere, a hand on my shoulder.
“Is he bothering you?” And it is Bill’s taut, broken voice.
Before I even turn around, I feel it in the blood. I feel him straining against his own skin, so desperate for something to fix, to make right. If I’m not this, then what am I?