“What are you talking about?”
“You knew what you were doing, didn’t you, doll?” Since when did he call women “doll”? He didn’t like the sound of his voice, wasn’t even sure what it was, but he couldn’t stop. It flew out at sharp angles, shards whizzing through the air. “The biggest stars in town. And ready for a dance with you. You were seeing dollar signs all the way to the back room of the Red Lily.”
“That’s what you think,” she said, with nary a flinch.
“Yes,” he replied, watching her, looking.
‘You know all about it, huh?”
“I know enough.”
‘You don’t know anything,” she said quietly. Then she paused a long ten seconds, face frozen, before raising a hand to her neck and placing it around the scarf tied around it. It loosened; then she gave a hard tug and it slid down quickly to her lap.
Across her neck was a dashed line, pale pink, almost like serration marks, like a girl’s paper doll with different heads you could affix, the mark showing where to cut to replace the golden blonde head with the deep brunette one.
As she pushed her hair back, he could see the line ran from behind one earlobe all the way across her delicate neck to the other ear. For a second, he was frightened that her head would simply fall forward, leaving a red-tipped stump.
“There’s more, Mr. Hopkins,” she said, almost smiling. She turned away from him and placed her fingers on the edge of her skirt, which she began slowly peeling upward. Then she turned back toward him slowly, like some kind of unnatural striptease.
Her full skirt was now gathered at her hips and there were those long, fulsome legs, which Hop took in, from the straps on her sandals and up, up as she turned to face him. She was pulling the skirt all the way to her waist, and Hop found his eyes lifting slowly from her ankles to her knees to the tops of her stockings, to the tight garters clutching her slender thighs.
She looked at him. “Come closer,” she said in that drowsy voice, lulling and hypnotic.
Disturbed and excited and ashamed of his excitement, he leaned forward. What was she going to show him? Did he want to see? How horrible could it be, or was this a come-on? Or both?
His chair skidded loudly as he moved closer. The folds of her skirt grazed his arms as he placed them, tentatively, on either side of her, resting on the seat.
The lighting was low and it was hard to see. There was something pink, folded, tender through the netting of the skirt, above the garters. Something on her skin. At first he thought it was a caesarean scar, but it was too low, too disperse. Then he thought it looked like burns—even branded skin, like a steer’s. Soon he was so close that his face was brushing against her skirts, so close he could smell her: not bergamot, no … honeysuckle. You’re so much sweeter, goodness knows. Honeysuckle rose…
He heard a scrape and realized he had dragged the whole settee on which she sat closer toward him. He still couldn’t quite see and she wasn’t going to lift her skirts any higher, wasn’t going to stand up to give him a better view. She was only going to let him see this way, her way.
Inches from her torso, he realized what he was looking at. A series of rippling scars abraded on the tops of her thighs, across her hip bones, disappearing behind her cream-colored panties, which she had folded down slightly so he could see.
Letters. Words.
They’d been carved into her and remained in raised scars pink as
rose petals, across her hips.
What did they …
What else could they say?
D-E-A-D-W-H-O-R-E.
He kept looking. He was afraid to sit back and meet her eyes. His breath ran hard against her skin. He looked at the words and remembered the blanket at the Red Lily and yes, it was all true. Or true enough. Somehow it was much simpler and much, much more complicated than he’d ever guessed.
His fingers, as if moving of their own accord, were touching the letters gently. He felt her shift ever so slightly, but nary a quiver.
Then, his fingers lightly pressed against her, he heard her voice, slow and strangely sexy.
“He got it half wrong at least. After, I heard both of them tell some fellas who worked there to get rid of my body and they’d get a quick five hundred dollars. This young girl came in while they were deal making. She saw my eyes. She knew. She helped me out the back way. She gave me an old raincoat to cover everything and a few bucks. She said she’d fix it. Later, I figured the men took the five hundred and pretended they’d dumped me in Griffith Park. All they dumped was my purse.”
Hop slowly sat up, his fingers burning, tingling.
“Why not go to the cops?”
She looked at him, not even bothering to pull her dress down. The look said everything. But she told him her story nonetheless. She’d never had a chance to tell anyone before. She was dying to tell.
Marv Sutton, double-breasted and pomaded, all a girl on the hunt could want. He met Jean at the studio commissary, took her to dinner at Chasen’s, for a few long ocean drives to far-flung hotels where he’d thrown her down on the softest sheets she’d ever been thrown down on before. He’d whispered the usual promises, and in spite of herself, she’d almost started to believe him. She let him do things to her, things she didn’t normally do, not even when she was married. He gave her a three-ounce bottle of Chanel No. 5 and lace-topped stockings from Paris. He bought her pearl-drop earrings that hung so heavy on her ear-lobes she could barely lift her head. And, not three weeks after the affair began, she felt it starting to turn. She saw a script girl, flush-faced, come out of his dressing room, adjusting the back seam on her skirt. A girlfriend told her she’d seen him taking a tumble with a Tropics showgirl in the club’s back parking lot. So when she saw him at the Eight Ball, she wasn’t sure how she felt about him anymore. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to bother anymore. But maybe she did. He looked handsome and he was with his partner, Gene Merrel, whom she’d never met. The fact that the pair was there together lent a lot of excitement to the place, and everyone seemed to be talking about their table. Her sad-sack cousin, what a drag that she’d shown up uninvited. She’d had to do some pretty fast talking to get Peggy to play along. But luckily the fast-talking reporter with the pretty face looked ready for anything and ol’ Peg sure was game. Marv paid her a lot of attention and didn’t even blink at the luscious Iolene, so things were looking up.
Wouldn’t Davy Ogul love me to get some shots of this, she thought. He’d been a lousy boyfriend—dim, short-tempered, and perennially unfaithful. But she liked the sheaves of long-stemmed roses, the bunny rabbit he brought her daughter on Easter, the emerald tennis bracelet he gave her (and then took back to pay off his gambling vig). When she was dating him, he’d sweet-talked her and Iolene into doing a few jobs. The usual thing: They went to parties where certain men would be and all they had to do, really, was get those men to go into the bedroom or to another hotel room or even, once, to the balcony of a Hollywood apartment, and get things just wild enough to make the photo pay off. If Jean was the one wriggling against the studio exec or the nightclub owner or the big-shot producer, Iolene was the shutterbug, and vice versa. She’d never had to follow through. She’d never done that, not even when it would have rung up gold. When, if it came to that, she’d cut.
Neither she nor Iolene liked the badger stuff, either, truth told. Even if it paid a few bills and once even got her an audition. Davy really brought them in the deal as a love-ya-kid just for her. So when the romance with Davy ended, so did those jobs. And she for one was glad. Not that she and Iolene were stupid. They made copies of every photo they took before passing over the negatives to Davy. They kept them at Iolene’s and had no reason to believe Davy would ever know. They called it their insurance files. Insurance in case. Once Jean even jacked up the stash by taking some files from her doctor’s office. She was friends with a girl who worked there and once, when the girl left her in the office alone, she’d taken a few fat handfuls and added those to her cache.
But that was all over. Things were easier now, anyway. The child support came more regular. Jobs came. She let it go. Until now, until this opportunity presented itself.
So, when the boys asked her, she said yes to the Red Lily. Why not? She’d heard about it. Who hadn’t? She would have been wary, maybe, but Iolene was coming. Still, she knew she didn’t want Peggy tagging along, ready to use whatever she saw against her, or, worse still, trying to cut in on the action. So she told her cousin that the reporter was worth her time, knew all the players, and besides, wasn’t he darling? Didn’t he look like a movie star? Didn’t she deserve some hay?
At the Red Lily, Marv and Gene had a favorite room. Marv, he said the junk would really get things crazy. It would be great. She wasn’t for junk, but there didn’t seem to be a way to decline and keep the game going.
Iolene brought out her camera and said, “Come on, boys. Let’s get some shots.” And the studio guy, Bix, kept saying, “No pictures. No pictures.” But Marv and Gene were so loaded and they didn’t care and they started posing. Kid stuff. Marv grabbed her and threw her over his knees and pretended to spank her. He lifted her skirt up. But Gene, he got agitated by the bulb. He kept jumping around and pretending to chew and tear at her clothes like some wild animal. It was strange and she didn’t know if it was a joke, but she tried to laugh. Finally, he tore the arm off her dress, trying to pull her toward him on the couch. The more she wriggled, uncomfortable, the more agitated he became. But everyone was laughing and they continued to laugh and that really got him going. In a sweeping motion, he took off his belt and grabbed her and wrapped it tight around her face, her head, wedged it in her mouth. Marv made jokes about steers and cattle. They were laughing and Iolene was not. And Iolene’s camera took one last shot before she stopped. And Jean saw that she was frightened. And Jean thought, I know I should be frightened, too, but I feel nothing.
Jean no longer knew what her plan was. But she found herself telling Iolene that it was okay for her to leave. She told Iolene that she had to do it, had to keep going. She held Iolene’s wrist so tight, like it would break, and told Iolene that she had to do it. It was the only way to end it all. To finally end it.
And then things got kind of hazy, colors swelling, her body stretching like warm taffy, and Iolene was no longer there, and the studio guy wasn’t in the room anymore, either.
Marv said, You don’t mind if Gene stays. He’s just going to sit over there. He won’t bother us. Come on, baby, do it like I like it.
She didn’t really want to. She didn’t much like this Gene, who, so amiable in the movies, so boyish and cheery, the Technicolor Troubadour with the baby face, now seemed …. off. LA funny, far-off look in his eyes. She wondered what he was seeing. And then … and then he started singing. Softlike. “Annie Laurie,” I’d lay me doon and dee, the rolling lilt. Like in the movies but not. Broken or something. Something had turned. The voice, his voice, it echoed, fell in with the creaking sound of water pressing on old wood, lapping on rusty hulls. An old mattress with no spring left, hard thrusts straight through to gasping floors. And that voice, his voice, distorted, as if from an old phonograph, cracked, shuddering, still warbling ancient sea shanties. A siren song. The lost boys.
Marv was whispering, “He takes the pipe because he thinks he’s going to die. Thinks he’s got the syph, but no doc has agreed with him yet. It’s in his head. His head’s not right.”
She wasn’t sure how long it had been—not long—when she looked over, woozily, shakily, barely aware of what Marv was doing, which was as rough and unfriendly as ever, and saw that Gene was crying. Weeping with a strange moaning, wringing his hands. He’s not right, she remembered thinking through the haze. Something’s not right in his head. Then she remembered thinking, What’s right with mine?
And next thing, he was there, with his hands on her neck. Marv made a halfhearted attempt to shove him aside (”Gene, Gene, why you gotta do that stuff?”) but was so loaded himself that he couldn’t seem to make it stop. Gene’s hands were so tight and the smell of burning leaves was everywhere and her own head so swollen with the junk they’d given her.
He was whispering in her ear and there was no other sound, no other feeling, and his breath like something dying inside him, and there he was whispering and saying over and over, “I’m saving you, Jane. I’m saving you. You’ll thank me when it’s over.”
She was thinking, I’m going to die and it’s all over. I’m going to die and he doesn’t even know my name.
Then she saw the knife drop out of his pocket and onto the floor. And he turned, like a dog with his ears pricked up, and he saw his knife and she knew what he was thinking. And he took one hand off her throat to pick up the knife and she drew a quick breath before he could put it back.
And she could feel it dragging. Oh God, she could feel it.
The last thing she remembered saying was, in that breath, “Stop,
stop, I’m already dead.”
And she was out. Thankfully, mercifully out.
She didn’t think she was unconscious for long. When she drifted back, her whole body felt disconnected from her, like a terrible weight from which she could now rise, still tingling from the junk. That was when she heard the voices in the hallway talking about dumping her body. Just outside the door, Marv was frantically pleading (”I’m friends with your boss, the big boss you send the money bags to—they know me and they would want you to help me”), and his words and his promise of money seemed to be enough. And she knew she had no time. And the little girl appeared and she took her chance. The girl found her a raincoat and took her out the back way. Hid her in the cellar until it was safe. Gave her bus fare because she couldn’t find her purse.
On the bus, she opened the coat and looked at herself for the first time. That was when she saw the blood, only blood. It was running along her body. It was forming dark spiderwebs on her legs. It was warm and it wasn’t until then she knew she was alive. She took the bus to Iolene’s, but Iolene wasn’t there, had been staying with her new boyfriend, Jimmy. Iolene’s place was where she’d stashed their pictures, the files she’d cadged from the doctor’s office. All their sins wedged into a file cabinet. The thought of it now made her sick. She opened a drawer and took out half the files. Pulling a suitcase out from underneath the bed, she dumped them in. After an aching, burning shower, she began changing into one of Iolene’s dresses and that was when she looked at the words across her belly. She raised her hand above them, almost as if to touch them. She thought she would faint or become sick. She willed herself to do neither. She wondered now how she did it. But she knew in a flash where she was going. She took five dollars from Iolene’s cookie jar and left.
“So I went to see Davy Ogul. He got one of their doctors to come over and clean me up, sew me back together,” Jean said, as Hop listened, rapt. “Then I showed Davy a few files I thought might be worth something. I said for a hundred dollars, he could have them.”
“And he gave it to you?” Hop managed to ask, his head jammed to numbness with the horrors, with this awful monster movie unfurling before his eyes.
“Sure he gave it to me. He’s no fool.”
Hop almost corrected her (”He was no fool”) but then realized she might not know Ogul vanished soon after she did. Then he realized
there was a lot Jean might not know.
“Did you … did you maybe tell him there were more files?”
“He asked. I said I was leaving town for good, but if he was in the market, he should go to Iolene. I knew he’d do right by her.”
Hop felt something drop in his chest. He did the math in his head. Davy Ogul tries to parlay the files to the wrong guy, or his boss Mickey Cohen finds out about Ogul’s extracurricular blackmailing. Next thing, Ogul goes poof. The hard boys eventually connect the dots and Iolene has a big bull’s-eye on her forehead. Or maybe Iolene, frantic, tries to hustle a little on her own—maybe even hustle those pictures of Jean. Or, most likely of all, Iolene talks u
p the pictures in a panic, like she did to Peggy Spangler. Iolene, she said she couldn’t get them out of her head. She wanted to get rid of them. They were starting to get to her. She said she kept seeing them in her sleep. She said they were in all her dreams. If she told Peggy Spangler about them, who else might she have told? For that matter, who else might Peggy Spangler have told? How long does it take for something that hot to get back to the wrong people? And God knows there were plenty of eyes and ears at the Red Lily to set things in motion. Fuck, Jean, you triggered a hundred ways for Iolene to die. And it only took one. Like Frannie Adair said, Some goon with a half a C-note in his pocket tailed her and got her in the head.
“But Jean…,” he began, but so many questions swarmed his head, he couldn’t pick one. Finally, he blurted, “The note. To Kirk.” He wanted to be sure Midge had been right.
She looked at him vacantly for a moment, then a flash of recognition drifted across her face. “I forgot that was in my purse. I didn’t write that. It’s a souvenir.”
Hop scrambled for another question. “Your cousin said you were pregnant.”
Jean allowed herself a whisper of a smile. “Poor Peg. Did she get her picture in the paper?”
“No. Just you.”
She shook her head, still faintly smiling. “I found that note—just some girl’s note, tossed in the trash. I kept it. It made me think of things I might have forgotten.”
“The girl coming off the Greyhound bus,” Hop murmured. Hell, he’d gotten off that bus.
“What?”
“Skip it,” Hop said. A hundred more questions danced around in his head, but one didn’t come fast enough and he feared she was about to take his pause as her chance to end things.
As if one cue, she smoothed her skirt and adjusted her scarf, and it was like a curtain closing. He could feel his dismissal in the air. He knew he had to hurry.
“So, you can see I’ve left all that behind,” she said.
“Have you?” Hop murmured, distracted by the thoughts racing through his head.