For a long minute I was afraid he was taking me to show me Vic, somehow dug up and half rotted through on a slab. But it turned out he was just looking for a quiet place to talk.
“What’d they lasso you in for, copper penny?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
Up close, his face looked sweaty, like he’d been dipped in castor
oil. “They’re fishing. Watch your step. Watch your step.” “I’m not worried.These chumps don’t scare me.”
“I didn’t spill, daisy,” he said. “I didn’t give ‘em a butcher’s inch.” Slipping off his cap, he wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, licking his lips nervously. “But there’s bigger trouble out there than the Boys Blue, you know?”
My eyes twitched. Sure, I knew what he meant, or had a good idea.
“I’m talking about your lady. You get?”
I looked at him.
“You get?” he repeated. “She’s got eyes in the back of her head.
Listen, angel. Listen. She’s got eyes in the back of her head and everyplace else. I heard her talking to my guy. To Mr. Mackey”
“When?” I said, cool, busying my hands with an invisible something underneath my fingernail.
“Today. She was putting it on, honey. She was putting quite a lot of ribbons on you, you see? And not the kind you like. Maybe he believes her and maybe he don’t. But sounded to me like she all but fingered you as the button on your boy.”
“Why would she do that?” I said, squinting, trying to fight the quake he’d sent through me.
“She’s making sure all her bets are covered. And if she’ll play you for Isaac to my boss, who says she won’t to her own? That’s the way she dances. Don’t you know it yet? I’ve been seeing her run her mirror act since I was in short pants. She knows how to keep things working for her. She always has things working for her. If something goes down she don’t like, you’re the lamb. Get it?”
“I hear you, but I’m not listening,” I said, flicking my fingernails tiredly. Even as I knew he was right. Even as I knew it was true, even as I knew it was the smart thing, even as it made my stomach turn for a thousand reasons including this: I thought I was her girl. I thought I was her girl and she’s ready to sell me. Would she really, push come shove, sell me?
In a heartbeat.
Detective Clancy was just what you’d guess. A Scotch-Irish flush about him, his hands rough and red and always planted on his hips. Fluffy ledge of hair hanging over his forehead like a schoolboy’s. Mean eyes, lashes long but with something cold and cunning nestled beneath them.
He looked at me like he knew me. Like he knew all about me. This I was used to. Cops came in different sizes and had different scars, but they were all wired the same. They all looked at you like you came off some B-girl assembly line, molded plastic dolls with the shine worn off from too many rough boy fingers. All you were good for was lowdown and laydowns.
The worst were the ones who didn’t hold out their hands, palms up. The true believers. But Clancy didn’t look like one of those.
Something weary, wasted, tugged at his face. He had no fire left. Truth was, I hadn’t met one of those true believers yet.
I was nervous, though, sure. Seeing the Cap down there, the things he said, the hot and desperate look in his eyes. And too, still feeling the ghostly grit of dirt under my fingernails from last night’s grave robbing. If it hadn’t been for the heavy dose of tooies, I’d’ve been shaking like a virgin bride.
“So,” Clancy said. “Can’t say you’re not a familiar face to the fellas around here.”
“I support my local police department whenever I can.”
“Well, I’m pretty new around here, three weeks in, so you’re going to have to show me how it is,” he said, and boy, did he think he was clever. He figured he was hustling me like the sixteen-year-old knowit-all at the local Podunk pool hall.
“How is it?” I asked, blinking my eyes like Betty Boop. Maybe he wasn’t on my Dear Santa list yet, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to be. And it didn’t mean he wasn’t on someone else’s. Beneath the schoolboy peach fuzz, I could see him half on his way to turning wise, like he might not mind being wrapped in velvet. Something about the sheen on his shirt, the way his shoes squeaked. A taste he was considering letting sit on his tongue.
“You know, miss,” he said. “The arrangement.”
“The arrangement? I’m sorry, Detective Clancy, I don’t—”
“Nice try, honey,” he said, leaning back against his desk. “Why
don’t you just lay it out for me. Save me some time.”
“I always like to assist the police,” I said. “But I’m not sure how I can—”
“All right, all right,” he half groaned, rolling his eyes. “We didn’t drag you in here to talk about graft anyway, girlie.You’re not here about that at all. That’s small potatoes compared to what I got on you, missy.”
I fought off a flinch, put the mask on. “Get out the hot lights,” I said, smiling with my teeth.
He hit me with Vic right away. No dinner first, no peck on the cheek. He wanted to know when the last time I saw him was. The “Vic who?” routine didn’t fly.
“We know you’ve been shacking up with him, so don’t play the
tenderfoot with me.”
“I wish I could help you, but I just don’t know the fella.”
“Don’t waste my time,” he said, arms folded across his chest. I didn’t like his confidence. I wondered what he had. Maybe Mackey’s night watchmen, the ones who’d staked out Vic’s place and sold me out to Gloria, spilled to the law too. “We have witnesses.”
“You don’t have anything,” I said, twisting my legs, pretending they were a mile long like hers. “If you did, this whole scene would be playing different. You’d be putting the hammer to me.”
“We have a witness saw you in and out of his place on more than one occasion. We have a witness who talked to Riordan himself. Riordan told this witness he’d been banging you for weeks.”
“This witness is lying to you,” I said, calm and easy. But I can’t say I wasn’t getting nervous.
Soon enough, he brought in a Detective Nast, another new face to me. It was like the department had changed hands overnight. And Nast, a furrow-browed, thick-jawed type, the kind who spoke without moving his lips, was no more charmed by me than Clancy and both of them were holding their cards close to their chest.
“So where’d your boyfriend go, anyway?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend, Detective.”
“What happened to your face, miss?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, stopping myself before my hand
rose to my cheek.
“Looks like you got knocked around recently. That a parting gift from your boyfriend,Vic?”
I wasn’t sure what they knew, or if these witnesses really existed, but it was plain they knew something. And thinking of Gloria buzzing in Mackey’s ear, wrapping me up for him like a Christmas package,
things didn’t fall right, I was starting to feel sick to my stomach.
“So how much did you steal for your boyfriend?”
“What,” I asked, and that time they could probably hear the quiver
just edging into my voice.
“And how come you get off scot-free and he seems to have been given a free pass to nowhere land?”
“I wish I could help you, gentlemen, but I just don’t know what you’re talking—”
“We have a witness who heard gunfire at Vic Riordan’s apartment
on the fifteenth.”
The landlady.
“And we have a witness who places you coming out of the
apartment within twenty minutes of the gunfire.”
This was the bluff, I could feel it. Could feel it dripping off them, sweaty and hopeful.
“Must’ve been another girl,” I said. “There’s plenty like me. Aren’t we a dime a dozen to you fellas?”
“And it all fits,” Clancy said. “Because we have that witness who says Vic told her all about you.”
Her. The witness was a her.
“That Vic told her he was playing you like a ukulele and the payoff would be huge. But it was a big risk. And he liked risks, didn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Big risk because you were working with him to get a big score. But you were doing it on the sly from your big boss.”
Who was this goddamned rat?
“What boss?” I replied. “I don’t have a boss. I’m between jobs.”
“Your boss Gloria Denton. Gloria Denton, the lady, the legend,” Clancy said, his teeth shiny, like he was practicing his front-page face already.
There it was. I saw the whole deal now. They wanted her. They wanted her.
“I don’t know—”
“You can’t play that game in this building, little miss,” Nast said, running a toothpick back and forth along his gums. “Everyone here knows about you and the pad. The ones on it aren’t talking. That’s how we know who’s on it.”
“And that’s why you got sent here, huh? To clean up the joint?” I smirked. “Best of luck.”
“Oh that ain’t all,” Clancy said, smirking back at me. “We know Riordan’s dead as mutton. We know it. And you’re going to tell us how it happened.”
“I don’t know a goddamned thing,” I said, leaning back in my chair and swinging one leg over the other. “But I got time if you do.”
They danced me for two, three hours. I didn’t dip for them, didn’t do any twirls. I never once pressed my chest close, even to tease. I wouldn’t be singing in their ear. Even with the feeling maybe I still had about Vic, Vic trapped in that bag, pressed against hard prongs of barbed wire, all that gaudy energy choked under seeping oil drums, all alone, all alone, even with the Mackey ruckus, with what she’d done, was doing, could do, I didn’t see ever giving it up to these meter maids. What would be the dividend? Keep me from behind crossbars? Maybe, if I thought they could hang it on me. But if they really had something on me, they’d’ve shown it by now.
That’s what I told myself at least.
“Let’s take a breather,” Clancy said, looking over at Nast meaningfully. “Give her some time to think things over.”
They walked me into a room down the hall, parked me in a metal chair, gave me nothing but a wall to stare at. My palms were wet, I admit it. But as nervous as I might be, they could never touch the scares she could put in me. All this seemed like hopscotch compared to one dark look from her.
I was in the room for five minutes when the door opened and a heady gust of tuberose rushed me in the face.
“I told them I’d squawk,” a voice needled through me, “but only if I got to tell you what a no-good tramp you are when they pulled you in.”
I looked up.
The furrier.
∞◊∞
Twitchy little Regina, the rotten bitch. Risen from rumored death
or Siberia. To play the rat.
“What’d I ever do to you?” I asked, rising to my feet.
Fluffing out her poodle collar and shaking her springy curls, she shot a hard look. “How about making a play for my boyfriend while I’m on the lam for him, ducking his lousy collectors?” She puffed out her chest and walked right up to me. It was quite a show. “You may play class, but you’re all whore,” she continued, jabbing her thumb at her breast. “Vic’s my man.”
I put on a big grin. “Yeah, well, he never mentioned that when he was fucking me.”
She winced, but then came right back at me. “Probably too busy biting his knuckle, trying not to get sick,” she said, trying to regain her bluster, swinging her mink-tipped wrap around her like the queen of the station house.
I felt my temples pulse. “You think you can put the frame on me, shaver,” I said, my voice hard and unfamiliar. “Just you try. I’ll have you in pieces on the floor. Three cracks and—” I snapped my fingers in her face like I was Little Caesar. It was quite a show.
Inside, though, I tried to get my head working. What had Vic told her? What had she told the cops? Always keep in front, that’s what I’d been taught. Don’t get stuck in the heat. Move to the cool space three beats ahead.
“You don’t scare me,” she said, tossing her mink muff purse down and resting her palms flat on the tabletop like cops in the movies. “You’re just an errand boy. I know all about you.”
I gave her a stare with a slight smile and didn’t say a word. She was so high on nerves I figured it would throw her. It did. I could see it in the way her body clenched up, her jaw went tight, lashes flapping. Worked better than all the brassy talk. I kept the stare going until she broke it.
“I told the badges all about you,” she said, fighting a tremble in her voice. “Vic used to telephone me. He used to telephone me and say how he was putting it to you and if he put it to you long enough, he’d be in clover. We both would.”
“Let me guess,” I said calmly, working like I knew she would, like I knew Gloria would. “You heard whispers that he was seeing me and you called him, threatened to squeal, to throw him to his sharks. So then he says, ‘No, Regina, it ain’t that way. I’m doing it for you, for us.’ Was that how it was, Regina?”
The mink paws around her shoulders began to quake, tiny claws clicking against their beady glass eyes. Her eyelashes fluttered.
“He promises you, like he’s promised you a million times,” I went on.”‘Just one last score, baby, so we can be together.’” I stretched my voice out like Vic’s. I looked Regina in the eye and gave her my best crooked Vic smile. “‘I’d like to deck you out in diamonds, baby. You deserve more than late-night rolls with me after some other gee’s bought you dinner. I’d like to have you on my arm at the tony joints, swing you round the dance floor, take you to a show every night, bring you home and lay you down on satin sheets and look at you knowing I had something in my pocket more than a last-chance chip. Isn’t that what you want, baby?’”
As my mouth wrapped around his honeyed words, I could see it hitting her hard, knocking all the air out of her. Her face lost its color, began to look small, like the softly shaking head of a half-broken doll.
“What’d you do to Vic?” she said, her voice just a quiver.
There it was. He had her on the love rack. I could see it on her, could see everything he’d done to her, how he’d gotten under her skin. More than that. I could see her.
I wondered what my face looked like to her. What she could see on
me.
“I didn’t do anything to Vic,” I said. “Not a thing, baby.”
“Where is he?” she asked, sinking down into the metal folding