“Guess you’d better,” she said.
I walked, slow as she ever did, to where my handbag lay and kneeled down for it, tossing the knife inside. Still kneeling, I arced my arm in a wide circle, sweeping the gun and the letter opener into the bag as well. Then I rose and pulled out a handkerchief and my compact. Looking straight into the mirror, straight at my face, batter white except for the two thick, gruesome red streaks down either side of my mouth, I ran the handkerchief over my chin, dainty as a society lady at a dinner party.
“I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” I said, tucking the purse under my arm, twisting on my heels, and walking out.
Out on the street, I breathed the misty air as deep as I could. After that small space, hot, wet, and close, like the inside of something slowly constricting, I was grateful for the chill in the air, the strangely clean smell of exhaust fumes, factory grit, the whole steel and concrete feel.
In the car, I kept the windows rolled all the way down even though the night was raw. I ignored the stench still in my nostrils. I ignored the rearview mirror, didn’t want to see my face. There was a sound in my head that I wanted to drown out. There was a sound that was knocking around up there. It was the sound of his shoe hitting the radiator again and again with each swing of her arm, each time she brought that brass blade down. Over and over and over and I was standing there. And I was watching and his torso was spraying blood like an atomizer. And I was glad I was standing behind her so I couldn’t see his face, or hers.
When I was back at his building, my errands done, I stopped myself before going inside. The thought of going in that room again. The thought of what she might be like now. But the only other choice was to skip town and never come back. She had my number now. We were bound together. It had happened that fast and now there was no way out.
I knocked at his door and didn’t hear anything. But I could feel her on the other side of the door. She was silent, but I tell you I could feel her there. The charge coming off her, and the fear in her too, and I don’t know which was more surprising.
I leaned forward and whispered, barely a whisper, “It’s me.”
The door opened slowly and I slipped in, my herringbone trench over my arm. She shut the door fast behind me. I saw she’d washed her face, fixed her hair, erased everything from the neck up, and it was all smooth again. Smooth like a mannequin. But if you looked close enough, you could still see gritty specks in her hair. I could see them.
She began unbuttoning her jacket, its browning blood, its awfulness. She peeled it off. I averted my eyes as I heard her unzip the skirt, peel off the stockings, which made a sucking noise, the nylon weighted with rusting blood. I didn’t want to see any more.
“Hand it to me,” she demanded and I had to look as I tossed the coat to her. I had to look at her. She was wearing a full slip and the blood had seeped through to the delicate silk to her white, white
skin, like pearly wax.
“The bag.”
I handed her the shopping bag I’d brought and she dropped her
things in it.
“Okay,” she said, pulling the coat on, tying the sash tightly around her waist, then raising the collar until it stood crisply, chicly, framing her cheekbones. With the Monroe’s Fine Clothes bag dangling from her wrist, she might as well have been the mayor’s wife on her way to high tea and cucumber sandwiches.
“So what are we doing now?” I asked, nodding toward the bloody
corner.
“Don’t worry about that.”
“We’re just leaving it?” I said, trying to keep my voice low but
feeling a growing panic. “What about John Law?”
“What about it? Since when have you been worried about them?”
I looked at her, feeling that pinching feeling in my head again. “Since when?” I asked, trying to keep the hysteria out of my voice. “Since that,” I said, pointing at the corner. “Since that.”
“Don’t worry, honey,” she repeated, tucking one last stray wisp of hair into place. “It’s all taken care of.”
“What do you mean,” I said, my voice turning queer. I wondered for a scary second if she’d lost her mind, if she’d somehow forgotten
everything, wiped it as clean as her blank face.
“The Mounties’ll just think Mackey finally took his due.”
“Gloria,” I said. “The body. Mackey’s boys don’t… do those things.
They don’t do it like that. That way. They don’t …” I paused. She was almost smiling and it sent a hard blast of cold up my
spine.
“Gloria, when they see the body …”
She shrugged. “There isn’t going to be a body to see.”
“Gloria, you don’t mean for us to get rid of it?”
“We don’t do that sort of job,” she said, as if her hands hadn’t been
drenched in hot blood a half hour before. “I called Mackey. He’s sending his hard boys over. They’re taking care of it.”
“You called … But why would they do that for you?”
“Because I’m paying off this pantywaist’s vig,” she said, jabbing her thumb toward the corner of the room as though Vic were there to listen, to hear the distaste in her voice.
“My God, Gloria, you’re paying off thirty Gs?”
She looked at me for a second and the whisper of a smile slanted across her lips. “Thirty? Honey, Vic Riordan owed Mackey two grand even.”
Here was the ultimate sucker punch. One last parting gift from Vic, from beyond the grave. “Are you sure?” I tried, my mouth dry.
“Sure as summer rain, baby. You think they’d’ve given that cheapjack a leash so long? He owed that much, he’d’ve been hanging
by his toes a month ago.”
“Right,” I said. What could I say, after all.
She walked over to the light switch and turned it off and on again.
“That’s their signal to come up. Then we can beat it.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what did you tell Mackey?”
“I told him we know how to take care of business.”
A few minutes later, two boys with ham-hock upper arms strolled in the door. One carried a long canvas bag, like the kind my old man had from his army days.
“Holy Christ,” the one with the bag said, lifting his cap off his forehead as he walked over to where the body lay.
“How tall you think he is?” the other muttered, rubbing his face tiredly. “I don’t think we’ll need the lye.”
“The bathtub’s that way,” Gloria said. “And you saw the back entrance in the alley, right?”
“Yeah,” the first one said, still looking at the body. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Neither of them could. “We saw it.”
“Okay,” she said, cocking her head toward me. “Let’s blow.”
I looked over at her and there was something in her face that was almost worse than anything that had come before. Almost worse than what that white mask concealed. It was satisfaction. It was satisfaction stone-cut into her face, into the corners of her mouth, which lifted just high enough to approach a smile. It was the ugliest thing I’d seen all night. The ugliest thing I’d ever seen, sure.
“Yeah,” I managed. “Let’s blow.”
∞◊∞
We drove back to her place. She wanted me to stay with her. She said it was a precaution, that in case there were complications we should be ready at a moment’s notice. But I knew the real reason. She thought I might skip or worse. She wanted a close watch on me. She wasn’t going to take her eyes off me.
I spent the night on her sofa, tangled up in an oversize satin tufted bedspread, staring out into the dark of the room, eyes on her half-open bedroom door.
I felt bone tired but years away from real sleep. And I couldn’t get my heart to stop jackhammering. There was no sound coming from her room and her light was off, but I couldn’t imagine how she could be sleeping either. All I could think about was the things I’d seen that night. All I could think about was what I’d let loose. I’d been rooked by Vic, that was true, but it was penny-ante stuff in the big picture. I started to wonder what she would have done if she’d known everything. If she’d known I wasn’t a knocked-around girlfriend beaten into giving up the goods for her man. What would she have done if she knew I was in the center of the whole setup?
Then I thought maybe she did know but didn’t want to look at it. Maybe she did know but there’s all kinds of lies you tell yourself when you want to. Like the lie I was telling myself about what I’d done that night. The lie that said I did what I had to. I had no choice.
But, I reminded myself, there was Vic fixing me from the start, in cahoots with the furrier, watching me and waiting for me, to ride me to fat city, a place Vic had to know he’d never stay for long, always one bet away from the skids. Always counting seconds to his next big loss, and now he’d hit this last one.
Who was I to feel a heart-tug about his sayonara? He’d played me like easy pickings. I wasn’t about to cry into my pillow for him.
I’d been lying there for an hour or more, drifting in and out of near-sleep, of bad dreams, of cannibals with sharpened teeth, with necklaces made of bone, with shrunken heads hanging by long tails of hair from their raised hands.
I can’t be sure I was really awake, it’s true. But I tell you, my eyelids weren’t all the way closed and through my lashes, even in the blue-dark of the room, I could see her standing there. Standing at the foot of the sofa in her ermine-colored robe looking at me. Too dark to see her face (there was no face, just a black maw), but it was her. Light from the streetlamp shot through her hair.
She was standing there and for a minute I thought, This is it. She’d been waiting for me to fall asleep and now she was going to finish me off. Why wouldn’t she? Once she stepped back, she had to realize, like I did, that we were bound now and she couldn’t let there be anyone out there who had something on her. And worse still, she couldn’t let there be somebody out there who’d seen the dark thing behind her eyes, the dark thing crawling under her skin. I’d seen it. I’d seen it. But she didn’t move and I didn’t move. And then, finally, she seemed to recede back into the darkness and I closed my eyes tighter and I almost started praying. Honest. I almost started praying like I haven’t done since my communion, since I started filling out, since my old man stopped sitting on the edge of the bed when he said good night.
In the morning, she came out of her bedroom dressed to the nines, from her tucked satin hat to her bleach-white gloves to the gardenia on her collar.
“I’ve got the rounds to do,” she said. “I’ll be gone all day. You can wear this.” She handed me a mint-colored day suit on a hanger. “It’ll be long on you, but it’ll be all right for today. I’ll have some of your things sent here.”
I stopped myself from asking how long she saw this new living arrangement lasting.
In the bathroom, I put the suit on, the smell of her perfume woven in it, choking in my throat as I lifted it over my head. I didn’t look in the mirror.
When I walked out, she walked towards me, checking how low the hem fell and finally approving. “It’ll do. I’ll drop you off at your car. While I’m gone, you’ll be taking care of this.” She handed me a crisp envelope, thick with bills.
“What am I doing with that?” I said.
“Taking it to the Venetian Gardens,” she said. “But slather on some more paint before you go. You still look like something hanging in a meat market.”
“I’m the one making the drop to Mackey?” I said, resisting the
urge to touch my face.
“Why not? It’s your boyfriend’s tab. Isn’t that fair play?”
She ran her hand briskly across a faint wrinkle on her seersucker skirt.
“What if he asks me questions? What am I supposed to say?” It was slowly beginning to hit me. I’d been too crazy the night before to really see things. Now, in the glare of daylight, the way she’d cleaned up no longer looked so clean. It looked shoddy, desperate. One of the big rules was never to let anyone have something on you, the way we had something on each other now. But there’d been no avoiding that. What we could’ve avoided was Mackey having something on us. What’d stop him from using it?
“If he braces you, just give him your toothiest smile. Shrug your shoulders and play the hip-grinding vestal. It’s an act you got down.”
“What does that mean?”
She threw me my purse. “It means you’re a long way from pro, honey, but you sure know how to play both sides to your advantage.”
The minute I was in my car, or at least the car that she allowed me to use, I felt my foot twitching over the gas, ready to hit the interstate and hightail it out of town for good. I could leave the state, drive clear across to Saint Louis, Memphis, Denver, Colorado. So far she’d never find me. Change my name. Go back to school. Take dictation in a big office of actuaries or CPAs or junior executives in dark flannel suits with leather briefcases who took commuter trains that delivered them to warm-faced wives in oven mitts. And maybe someday I’d be one of those warm-faced wives in oven mitts, with red-cheeked Tommy and corkscrew-curled Debbie nestling into my skirts.
I could have that.
I could have that.
Just step harder on the gas. Turn the wheel hard at the next left
and be on the interstate and never look back.
But she would find me.
She would find me.
Look at the heat in her when she’s double-crossed, when she’s
betrayed. How could she not find me?
She’d track me down and string me up by the hair and slice me up the middle, and make Tommy and Debbie watch. She knew how to end things. She knew how to make it so you’d never forget. Never shake the sight of her in full dark bloom.
She was an artist.
The Venetian Gardens was jammed in the center of the ritz district that ran along the western ridge of town. Outside was a stone facade and a fountain that gushed out cascades of gold-flecked water from a big copper Neptune. Inside, the place was decked out with black and gold columns, gold-dust glass candelabras, and gold-marbled mirrors from wall to ceiling. To get to the main dining room you had to walk across a replica marble Bridge of Sighs. In the evening all these fireworks probably made you feel like Italian royalty, but by daylight it hurt your eyes.