“Of course.” She nods, and now she is smiling but softly, a streak of red seared to her cheek. “Of course. That’s what you really want to know. That’s all you really want.”
She shakes her head. “Lora, that doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t. I don’t,” I say, shaking my head, shaking it loose.
“I came to him when I had no choice left. Bill, he . . .” She starts, then stumbles.
“He was in love and he couldn’t distinguish,” I say, turning away from her, eyes brimming. I say it not for her but for him. Only for him.
We each take a long drink from our glasses. The liqueur snakes down my throat, steeling me.
“I’m not stopping,” I say in a scratchy voice I don’t recognize. “I have to help him. He can’t see . . .”
Her expression turns from loose to tight, a flat mask. “You’ll bring him down. Is that what you want? That bum cop you’re spilling to. Joe told me all about him. You do know he’ll have your brother’s badge. Lock him up and throw away the key. It’ll be your fault. Is that what you want?”
I’ve never heard her talk quite this way, quite this hard.
“Is that what you want?” she prods.
“You—you crashed into him,” I suddenly, incongruously say, then furl my brow. What am I saying? The words make no sense.
“I can save him.” I recover. He’s saved me.
“Listen,” she says, brittle and dangerous. “The only way you can save him is by letting this go. Just let it get handled and shake the cop off us.”
I feel my hand gripping the rail. I swivel toward her.
You think you can . . . infect him. You think you have the right. You have no right. I can protect him from you, from it, from whatever this is that you’ve tried to . . . pollute him with.
I think all this, my head throbbing, vein pulsing in my brain. But my only chance is in her not knowing that I found out about the plan to frame Joe Avalon and, most of all, the plan to leave the next day. I can’t let her know that I learned he is risking everything and doing things he’d never, never do.
So all I say is, “Okay. Okay, Alice Steele.”
He wouldn’t tell me at all. He’d just make it go away.
The puckering anisette still in my veins, her voice still hot in my head, I drive straight to the only place where I have a chance, even though it is a slim one.
Parking my car half a block down on Flower Street, I walk quickly to Joe Avalon’s house, rehearsing in my head what I will say.
He doesn’t seem surprised to see me, even though it is nearly three in the morning.
Not saying a word, he jerks his unshaven jaw to gesture me in, a highball glass in his hand.
Somehow—I would never understand this later—I am not afraid. Not of him, at least.
All the blinds are closed, and I sit on the edge of one of the thick leather chairs.
“Olive told me you might be by,” he says gruffly. “I can’t figure out what you’re up to, Miss King. Not for the life of me. I oughta call your fucking brother and threaten you dead if he doesn’t stop.”
I think of clever Olive MacMurray playing both sides, working Joe Avalon while agreeing to help frame him.
“You could call him,” I say evenly. “But I don’t think you will.”
“Why not?”
I pull my brother’s pistol out of my purse and direct it toward his stomach.
His smudge-circled eyes barely widen. “You gotta be kidding me,” he mutters. “I’ve lost all instinct about you girls.”
“I want to know what happened. To Lois.”
“You aren’t going to use that.” He gestures toward the pistol. “I could get it from you in under a second.”
“Maybe.” I nod. “But like you said, you’ve lost all instinct. I think you’d rather be careful. I think you’re nothing if not cautious. I’m asking very little.”
He sighs, sitting on the arm of the sofa, resting the glass on his knee. He is a very tired man. All these men are so, so tired.
“I knew Schor might end up doing something like it, but Alice kept saying, Lois can take care of herself. Don’t want to lose the butter and egg man.”
“Alice?”
He smiles. “For toughness, I got nothing on her, honey. You don’t even know. I’m a fucking ingenue. Never saw one like it, and that includes three dances in San Quentin. You have no idea.”
“But—”
“Schor did her, but Alice and I, we took care of it. Alice didn’t want to stop the gravy train. She was ready to keep Schor happy.”
“Why did she do it?” I demand. “She had everything. Why didn’t she just cut ties?”
He shrugs, his eyes suddenly dreamy. “Never could explain her. Not that one. She couldn’t step out of it. And it served her. But Lois was getting too close. Talking too much. To everyone. To you.”
His eyes turn harder, quite suddenly. “Those girls, they’d have been nothing without me and they both fucked me. Even if I slip out of this frame, I still gotta leave town.”
“And Edie Beauvais?”
“You know about that one?” He seems almost impressed. “Alice introduced us. She had a liking for some bad stuff, had been sampling it with Alice, two housewives sitting on the patio in the middle of the day doped up to their pearl necklaces. It ended up getting the best of her. There’s no darker story than that, as far as she goes. It was one long suicide.”
“I see.”
I’d never imagined Edie as anything more than the slope of her stomach, waiting to be a mother. To me, she was still Sunday dinners at Charlie’s table, flitting around, arms bending under serving dishes. Somehow, that wasn’t her, not really, cracked and tilted, on the bathroom floor of the bungalow apartment on Pico Boulevard. One long suicide. All these lost girls . . .
“Well, Alice and I were cleaning everything up. But then you, little girl.” He points a long finger at me. “You sicced the law on us. It fucked everything up. The cop you’ve been dancing with started following me. He was following Alice. I had to start playing for myself, and apparently so did she. But she had the D.A.’s office on her side. At least one member of it. Tough competition. She told her daddy—your brother. Fessed up to a version of the truth, far as I can tell. And what do you know, he’s come out guns blazing to save her skin.”
“You don’t—”
“Hey.” He leans back, touching his chest lightly with his fingertips. “Is it my fault your brother developed such a taste for trash? Too many years tunneling through it on the job and it’s in him.”
I feel my knuckles shake against the pistol. It is all I can do not to squeeze the trigger. The feeling is so strong that I terrify myself.
“Should I let you out of here?” he continues, not noticing my hand, my quavering fingers. “How do I know you’re not out to fuck me, too? You don’t even know how to use that thing.”
“I don’t care,” I say, my voice tremulous, eerily wailing like something inhuman, trapped. “I’ll keep pulling the trigger until I get it right.”
He watches me closely. “I think I know what you could do and what you couldn’t.”
“How could you?” I say with a keening hum. “How could you when I don’t know?”
I feel an awareness nearly come crashing in.
“Look at what I’m doing. Look at me,” I find myself saying, my face hot.
His eyes fix on mine. In the dark room, I can see them glistening, reading, piercing. I let him see it all. I let him see everything.
He holds my gaze for a long twenty seconds, then, with a twitch, he shakes it off. Narrowing his eyes suddenly, he barks, “But I think you got something for me. I think this goes two ways.”
“It will all happen tomorrow.”
My brother’s voice, tingling through my head, touching lightly every nerve—no, like ink spreading:
“I had to do it. Otherwise, it meant nothing.”
. . . like a door shutting somewhere . . .
> I pick up the phone and hold it in my lap for a moment. Then I take a deep breath.
“Gardenia two–five four three five.” I read the number off the small card Joe Avalon has given me.
“One moment.”
I let it ring twelve times. No answer.
I walk around my apartment three times. I wash my face and hands. I stare in the mirror, smoothing my eyebrows, my hair.
I call again.
No answer.
I walk into my kitchen and pull out a mop. I clean the floors with extra bleach. Open a window. Notice the sheen of dust on the sill. Pull out a dust rag and dust every window in the apartment.
I call again.
No answer.
I run the carpet cleaner over the figured rugs. I straighten the shoes in my closet, adjusting the shoe trees. I run down to the lobby to get my mail. It hasn’t arrived.
I call again.
“Yeah?” Joe Avalon’s voice, but even harder, icier than the night before.
“Are you ready?” It isn’t me talking, but someone is talking. Some cool, measured voice with firm enunciation. Fine as piano wire.
“Go.”
“She’s going to be at the San Pedro Port, boarding the SS Tarantha at 6 P.M.”
And I set the receiver back down on the base curled in my lap.
Later, I remember looking in the mirror for a long time, struck.
• • •
I imagine it in advance. My brother’s pleading voice.
—I have to go, Lora.
—You said you’d protect me.
—You don’t need me now. Alice does. I can save her.
I imagine it and know it won’t work, not like that. To make him believe he needs to stay, I have to make it so that he can’t leave.
• • •
Timing is the linchpin, and luckily I know the schedule. I make several calls to the D.A.’s office to track Bill’s movements. I figure he plans to meet Alice by 5:30, but by then, if everything falls as it should, he will be speeding his way, siren on, to my apartment in far-flung Pasadena.
I go to the Western Union office first and write the telegram to be delivered the following day.
I return to my apartment, mind racing, imagining scenarios, plotting as though I’ve been living this way my whole life. I look at my watch and wait for the minute hand to strike five minutes to five—the time his shift is supposed to end.
I pick up the phone and dial him.
“Bill.”
“Lora. You just caught me on my way out.” How can he try to sound as if everything is normal, thinking, as he does, that he will be abandoning everything within a few hours?
“Bill, it’s over.” I feed a light sob into my voice.
“What? Lora, what’s wrong?”
“Don’t blame . . . don’t blame . . .”
“Lora. Is this about Standish? I knew last night . . . Did he hurt you?”
Out of my mouth, the half-remembered lyric.
“This, my darling, this is the end of everything.”
And as I hang up, I can hear him say, “I’ll be right there. Don’t do anything, Sis. I’ll be right there.”
The irony is blissful. He thinks it is he who is saving me.
• • •
I walk out my apartment door and head toward the stairwell, my feet clattering on the tiled floors.
Something inside me jerks, and it feels like a surge of cold air slicing through me.
I stand at the top of the first flight, twelve steep faience-covered steps. I look down at the shining lobby floor.
I can’t say there is even a thought.
I can’t say I pause at all, somehow knowing I can’t.
The second my heel hits the top of the stair, I swivel it around and twist my body as hard as I can, my hip hitting the railing and my body rising and then crashing and then
• • •
How like the astonishing leaps my brother and I used to take off the warped and quivering dock at our grandparents’ house. Leap after leap into the sludge-thick water. It was easy, as true and as ancient as anything I’d ever known.
• • •
By the time I limp back up the stairs to my apartment, a throbbing wound is hanging heavily over my right eye. My ankle is swelling neatly. The sharper pain in my chest makes me think I probably cracked a rib or two.
I make it to my living room. My head growing foggier, my stomach pitching with nausea, in a flash I am no longer upright.
By the time he arrives, like some Wild West sheriff storming through my door, my head feels strangely suspended, refusing my body entirely.
I can barely feel his hands on me when he lifts my head off the floor and slides a pillow underneath. He is careful not to move me. Even in his rage, his gorgeous, frustrated rage that nearly terrifies, he knows what to do and not do. Or he’s remembering.
The sounds from his mouth fade in and out. “. . . did this to you . . . I knew . . . I knew . . . what happened . . . can’t you tell me . . . doctor . . . hospital . . .”
And then, as he winds down, as the ambulance comes and as he curls up beside me before they place me on the gurney, grave whispers, breath on my ear, heart pressed against my chest, sighing promises, and I know I have him.
I am in the hospital for three days with bruised ribs and a concussion and a sprained ankle. How could I know my brother would go to Mike Standish and break his jaw, two teeth, and his own hand in doing so?
Mike took the beating and kept his mouth shut. That is what Mike does.
When urged to press charges, I merely turn my head to the side and look away. In this way, I never have to tell another story.
Within a week, we are home. Bill moves my things into his house and closes out my lease. He tells me he has filed a missing person’s report for Alice King née Steele, who apparently has left town.
I listen to his lies, all of them, with sympathetic eyes. Bill tells me he has found out that Alice bought a ticket to South America. That she planned to leave him. But that she never showed up on the ship’s passenger list, so she could be anywhere.
“Are you going to try to find her? Take a leave of absence?”
His expression stiffens, in his eyes something distant and unbearably close at once. “No. No, she’ll come home when she’s ready.”
“Of course she will,” I say, pouring him his morning cup of coffee.
His eyes float over to the window above the sink, as if she might suddenly appear there.
What is he thinking happened? That she, feeling abandoned by him when he didn’t show up at the dock, has disappeared as a way of punishing him?
He never says a word about the telegram I sent in her name (Darling—I couldn’t bring this upon you too. Stop. It’s better this way. Stop. I can start over and you can go on. Stop. I love you. Stop. Alice. Stop.).
I like to think that somehow he knew everything I had done, knew and understood. That this is ultimately, secretly what he wanted, too. He is free now, free of everything she brought and everything she drew out in him.
I hate to think that we can never speak of it, that both of us hold and will continue to hold and hold secrets so dark that to ask questions of the other might risk contaminating everything.
But standing there beside him as he waits for me to finish filling his coffee cup, standing there in the sun-drenched kitchen so white it glows, I feel that in an instant everything can be erased, that we are, in a quick breath, born anew and time has disintegrated and then rebuilt itself and a new world has formed that is the same as the old, the world before the accident, that awful collision and everything it brought.
• • •
I have one last, strained phone conversation with Mike Standish. He is gentlemanly about the jaw and the split teeth. And he says he won’t ask me any questions about it.
“I guess I don’t want to know, King. I imagine you’re probably glad that Alice split.”
“It’s been very hard for my
brother.”
“I’m sure it has. But, you know, I bet you’re taking awfully good care of him.”
“I’m trying to,” I say, ignoring something strange in his tone.
“So is this it? You’re through with me?”
“Aren’t you through with me?” I say.
He pauses briefly, as if deciding.
Then, “I don’t know, King. Last night I read a book. What do you make of that?”
I feel something knock loose inside me, I feel his face in front of me, eyes on me and silky hands warmer than they should be, than they have any right to be.
“Your world . . . it’s so dirty,” I whisper, as if to him in the dark, as if to myself. “How do you live in it?”
I hear him laugh softly to himself, and in that laugh are things that are tender and things that are harder, meaner, truer. It is both at once. Always both at once.
“Lora,” he says. “One last thing.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you ever think that maybe I was just trying to protect you?”
“From what?” I shot back.
“Never mind. Never mind.” His voice trails off, and then I hear the receiver click. I hear it click over and over again. I think I held the phone in my hand, pressed to my ear, forever.
• • •
The letter is forwarded to me from my old address. It is postmarked the very day the ship was to leave dock. She must have mailed it on her way to meet my brother. I read it three times very fast and then I tear it up and then
Listen, Lora, when I told you what happened with Lois, it wasn’t to boast and it wasn’t to come clean, to confess. I told you because I wanted you to see. It was time for you to see.
You never trusted me, not once. How could you, given what your brother is? Who could be good enough, special enough, worthy enough, righteous enough for a man like your brother? God, he could make me shudder long after no man could make me shudder.
I guess I can tell you now: I started working you right away. I knew what I was up against. I was careful how dark my lipstick was, how low I’d wear my neckline, how I hung the drapes, made his dinner, danced with him at parties, and looked at him across rooms, across oceans, across crowded cocktail parties. I was beyond reproach.