“True blue, baby. So can I see you? I been thinking about
you.About the catch in your throat you get … About your—”
“I’m not exactly pretty as a picture,” I said. “Besides, it’s too risky.
“Okay, baby. You’ll let me know when it’s time. I’ll be waiting.”
“Yeah,Vic. I will.”
When I hung up, I knew three things. First, he’d either bet some or all of the dough at the track, or he’d gotten some kind of payoff from passing on what he knew about the odds at the track that day. Second, he hadn’t settled up with Amos Mackey. At most, he’d paid an ounce of vig to hold off the baseball bat. Third, he was now in the hole deeper than ever. If I were putting money on it, I’d have bet he’d lost every last thin dime at one of the grind joints the night after he’d collected big.
All for nothing, I thought, pouring myself a vodka chaser to go with the morphine haze. If I skate out of this, if I make it, that’s it. Here on out, I only bend for her. I only got ears for Mama.
∞◊∞
You get one, I kept saying to myself. That was your one.
The next evening she was taking me out to dinner. She said I’d
been through a lot and I deserved it.
The night before, I’d dreamt of things happening to me, to her. Every story I’d heard about her, every story she’d told me about them, the bosses, came back in shards, piercing sounds. Faceless men in black cars running me down, long blades and hinges of skin, shotguns in my face, and the smell of my own flesh against the radiator.
I knew I had to shake the fear. It was all over me. I had to shake it. I had to play it regular.
She’d made special reservations, she said, at the swank new Venetian Gardens. “It’s one of Amos Mackey’s new joints,” she’d said
on the phone. “He’s on the move, that one.”
“Is that so,” I’d said as flat as she ever taught me.
I wanted her to see I was on the mend, would be ready to dance for her again soon. I troweled a thick layer of Pan-Cake over my mottled face. Looking in the mirror, I watched as the creamy Amber Rose erased all the Technicolor, leaving everything smooth, molded, like the pinch-face Nancy Ann Storybook doll I had when I was a kid.
Before, even with all the bruises, the sunken cheekbone, I had seen myself in the glass. I could look in the mirror and see me. Now, with the makeup leaving only slits for eyes, it was like that face was gone and in its place was something else. Someone else. I knew who else.
She came over at nine P.M., dressed head to toe in sharky silver.
“You look good.” She nodded at me. “But this is an occasion. And occasions call for little extras.” She lifted the garment bag in her hand. “You can wear it tonight.”
I smiled, feeling the Pan-Cake crack slightly. “But I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve anything.”
She looked at me and shook her head. “Don’t sweat it, kid. It’s just one twist in a long seam. Don’t worry your black-and-blue head over it.”
She must have seen the relief in my eyes, my slitted eyes, because she added, “You don’t give me enough credit, baby. I don’t leave you hung out to dry. It’s not good business. And besides, you’re my girl.”
Her garnet lips curled, slanted into something, something like a smile. The closest to a smile she came. I smiled back. I felt like I must have been crazy to do what I’d done to her. After everything. She was the one in my corner. The only one.
“Now let’s go celebrate,” she said. “Toast your recovery. Let’s paint the town.”
She lifted the garment bag high, like a fisherman showing off his biggest catch. “We’re going to dress you to kill,” she said. “You gotta show ‘em you’re not down for the count.”
I said okay. I said I’d love to. I was hers.
In one long stroke, she unzipped the garment bag and the shimmering red dress gushed out.
“With your fox,” she said. “It’s meant to go with the platina fox.”The one she’d bought me for my first night of casino rounds. My favorite piece, silvertips hand-dyed by Regina, when Regina was still around.
I slid out of my sheath dress and felt her hand touch my still-raw back as I stepped into the gown. The neckline hung low, weighted down with heavy beading like scales against my chest. We walked over to the long mirror in the corner of the room. She stood behind me, six inches taller, that crown of titian hair and those eyes thin as dark threads punched in her face.
We stood there a long time. I could feel something was happening. It was razoring in the back of my head without coming to the fore. The way she was looking at me.
She laced her silver gloves across my collarbones, eyes trained on our reflection in the mirror. It was as if she was saying to herself, This was me once. I guess I’m a thousand years old to you, I’ve seen it all. But look. We’re the same, we’re the same. I made you. Sometimes it’s as if I made you up inside my head.
I watched the red panels splash against the silver of her suit. My teeth were clattering. I looked in her eyes, the lashy slots. Were those my eyes? Would they be? Those eyes, they knew everything. Everything.
I felt like we would be locked like this forever, pressed against each other, front to back, she with one sharp stiletto jutting between my stocking feet. The red dress tight across my breasts, my hips, her hands splayed across my throat. That’s when I got it. This was it. It wasn’t me and her. We weren’t the same. It was me and Candy Annie at the ladies’ room in the Breakwater Hotel. The one who got it with
a straight-edge razor, gutted like a flopping fish.
But I couldn’t move.
Maybe I didn’t want to.
“I hope he was worth it,” she said, even as her mouth was still.
“Was he worth it.”
Her arm came forward and I saw that bronze letter opener in her gloved hands. She held it to one side of my throat.
I’d like to say I said a Hail Mary or something like it. But I didn’t. The pointy tip grazing a throbbing vein in my throat, I just shut my eyes and waited for it. Waited for the warm jet, the feeling of my body sinking. I was ready.
But it didn’t come.
“You’re lucky I’m soft,” her voice rang out, loud and rickety. Not her voice at all. I opened my eyes as she dropped her raised arm to her side. With a shove, she knocked me down and my knees hit the floor with a familiar crack.
“Gloria, I—”
“Hell, I put in good time with you. I gave you a year. I’m not throwing it away just because you can’t keep your legs together when it comes to two-bit pikers like your boy Vic Riordan.”
I let myself slide completely to the floor, curling a hand around my neck. She was still holding the letter opener and it was at my eye
level. It kept catching the light.
“How did you find out?” I managed.
She let her head fall to one side mockingly. “Oh, kid, you know
better than that. How couldn’t I have found out? Imagine my disappointment with how easy you got caught.”
“You tailed me?”
“Amos Mackey got me wise weeks ago,” she said, grabbing her handbag and dropping the letter opener in it. I was glad to see it go. “I’d already figured you were giving it up to some sharpie. It was written all over your face. Your body was twisting with it. But I didn’t know who it was until Mackey told me.”
“How did he know?” I asked, sliding back against the front of the sofa.
“He had a tail on your lover boy. He wanted his money. He saw you going into Riordan’s apartment every night, coming out an hour later with your stockings in your hands. I never pegged you for such a round heels, Tinker Bell. I thought I’d snagged a good girl from a long line of fish eaters.”
I didn’t say anything.
She looked down at me. Looking at me seemed to rock her all over
again.
“Get off your honeyed ass, little girl,” she spat. “Put on your coat.”
“Where are we—”
“You know where.”
We were in her car. She made me drive. It was a fifteen-minute ride to Vic’s, which didn’t seem nearly long enough to talk her out of anything.
“What are you going to do, Gloria?” I asked, keeping my voice steady. She was moving in this queer, jerking way, not her usual measured gestures, her slow turns, the methodical way she’d open and close her purse, light a cigarette, get into a car. As I drove, she kept coiling around in her seat, her mouth hooked across her face, a strand of hair, no two, slipping from her chignon, catching in her mouth.
I didn’t recognize her. She wasn’t the Gloria I knew, but maybe she was the Gloria I’d heard about.The one from those stories they told at the Tee Hee. I felt a phantom pulse in my neck where the letter opener had pressed, its two-headed handle nestled in my jaw.
“Mackey’s boys will take care of him, Gloria. He’s in so deep, he—”
“Like hell I’ll leave it to them,” she tore out at me, voice deep and guttural. “He tangled with me. He’s going to answer to me.”
“But why put the heat on you,” I said, counting on her endless practicality, her all-business style. “Why draw the spot-light—”
“This is the gink who beat you raw like street trade,” she snarled. “He’s going to see what it’s like to be ridden.”
Hearing that gave me a window in. Seemed like maybe she didn’t know how Judas I was. Didn’t know I was a game partner in the setup. Well, let her go on thinking that way. Looking at her blood-rimmed eyes, who was I to correct her? If she was almost willing to slice me just for being a doormat girlfriend, who knew what she’d do if— Well, that meant bad things for Vic.
“But I never want to see him again,” I tried. We were a half mile away and time was running out. As much as it was looking like Vic had played me, I didn’t want to unleash her on him. Besides, who knew what he might say to her about me? Back against the wall, he could start spilling like a stuck pig.
“I don’t give a damn what you want,” she snapped. “You had to lift your skirt for him. For that bridge jumper. Every gal in town has his
number, but you, you can’t help yourself?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Even at your age I knew who was worth letting into my bed,” she said, voicing shaking. “They had to show me the velvet. They had to show me they were standup. They had to show me their stuff. I was careful, do you see? I was discriminating. That’s how you last.” Then, more quietly, “That’s how I lasted.”
It was the closest she’d ever come to showing me something. It wasn’t heat, but it was something. Maybe her forehead burned above room temperature once. Maybe she’d once felt it like you couldn’t stop it, like a thudding, aching thing.
We were at Vic’s building. I tried one more time. “He knows Mackey’s boys are after him. He’s probably skipped town.”
She looked at me like I was a prize sap. Which I was.
“He might have a gun,” I said.
She kept looking at me, but something was shifting in her face. Something burning behind her eyes, something roaring up. It was
like she couldn’t stop herself now, like she could taste hot blood on her lips. Here was her heat, I realized. This was her heat.
She was breathing so hard the pearls around her neck were wobbling with each exhale. Patting her handbag, she said, “I hope to hell he does.”
My hand shook as I knocked. She stood several feet away. Don’t open it, Vic, I kept thinking. Don’t be there. He knows Mackey’s goons are ready to take their pound of the flesh, he can’t possibly be sitting in his apartment like a slaughterhouse lamb.
“Look who busted out to see me,” he said, grinning at me as he opened the door.
“Vic,” I started, but before I could get a word out, she was behind me, shoving me in the apartment in front of her. Vic’s eyes went wide as she slammed the door behind her. He even backed up a few steps.
“Isn’t this a surprise,” he said, voice still steady. “Gloria Denton.Your reputation precedes you. I feel honored—”
“Cut the theatrics, flannel mouth,” she barked. I stood slightly behind her and she seemed, suddenly, to be ten feet tall in the small space. This room, this room where you let him … where you did that…
I couldn’t look him in the eye.
“Your skin game’s over and look what it got you,” she continued, waving her purse around the empty room.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, smiling foolishly.
“But I’m awful glad to see my girl. You chaperoning now?”
“Vic, don’t—” I started, but her eyes flashed at me and I shut up.
“You cheap clip artist. You think you got any business laying your
flyweight hands on my girl?”
His eyes narrowed a little, his pose became stiffer. “She wasn’t complaining.” Then he turned to me. “Were you, sweet-face?”
His eyes fixed on me, he took a step toward me, and I could smell the bay rum, the Old Golds. I’d like to say I didn’t feel it in my knees. But I did. Of course I did.
I did terrible things with him, Gloria. I couldn’t help myself. I want to say I regret it but I don’t, not even now. Not one dirty thing. I loved them all.
She shot a hard look at me, like she could feel the heat on me, feel it coming off me. Her head swung back towards Vic. “Why don’t you
tell her about Regina,” she said, voice thick.
Regina.
He looked over at her, lifting his eyebrows. “Regina who?”
She smiled nastily. “Regina the furrier.”
“You knew Regina?” I said, my voice quavering in spite of myself
“Sure,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “She made the rounds. We’ve yapped on occasion.”
“I’d say so. You were flopping at her apartment until a few months
back.”
“What does this mean …” I said, my voice trailing off.
“It means the whole setup was a setup,” she said. “This chiseler got Regina to make nice with you.”
“To take her share of the Dutton job?” I asked, feeling a cold wetness at my temples, on my palms.
“And to get in with you, Little Miss Muffet,” she said, and I couldn’t look at her because I knew it was true. I looked at him instead, and it got my blood up. It got some steel in my bones to see him so bare. How many ways can you play the sap? I asked myself. You played them all.
“You been working me from the start?” I said, cold as she taught me.
“I never played a dame,” he said, shaking his head, backing up a little. “There’s no dividend in it. Not even the ones with bank accounts of their own. They all got some fella behind the scenes ready to make trouble. Sugar daddies, lawyers, private bankers, vag husbands back in town.” He was talking way too much. It was all
laying out there now, splayed out.
“So where s Regina now? What, she’s gone home crying to Ma?”
“Buried under two feet of lime for all I know,” he said, and the hardness hit me like a sucker punch. “But not from me,” he added. “She was spreading her sweet butter all over town. Sure, I heard about the stones, but I wasn’t in on that and I sure as hell would’ve stopped her from jawing about it door to door, flashing her new belly button emerald to every fast-money boy on the strip.”
“That’s bunk,” she said, walking toward him slowly. “And you know it. She took her shot because she’d borrowed heavy to cover your debts and then she was in deep with the sharks herself. So she got a nice haul from the jewelry deal, but before she could pay off her cuff, you’d taken her honey pot for yourself and dumped it all on another chalk bet at the track.”
He smiled again, but it was a sickly smile, toothless, like the broken men who played Texas twist for bottles of applejack in the lowest sawdust joints in the lowest part of town.
“She had to pull a Houdini,” she went on, “or they’d have strung her up. So you figured you’d move on to the bigger catch. The one you’d had your eye on all along. That’s why you kept your pretty face out of the rock heist. You were saving your grand entrance for my girl. You knew she’d have sweeter candy for you than little Regina ever could.”
“Ha. I should be so slick,” he said, looking over at me, rolling on the balls of his feet like a kid trying to bluff at the blackboard. “I’m a bettor, and a bad one. I’m no hustler. Hell, angel face over there knows, I can’t plan fifteen minutes ahead.”
“Lucky for you, you don’t have to,” she said, and I saw the hand go into her purse. And I knew what was coming. And I didn’t know if I cared. I didn’t know anything. My hand rose slightly at my side as if to say something, stop something. But it all felt hollow. I didn’t feel a thing.
Not even when I saw the revolver in her silver-gloved hands.
“Hey, look,” he said, backing away, lifting his arms up at his sides like an old pro. “Let’s jaw this around a bit. What do you want, the scratch? Sure, I lost it, but I can win it back. Give me a day, two tops.”
Beads of sweat began popping on his brow. Oh, Vic. But I felt nothing, not even satisfaction.
“You think we want your sad little chump change,” she said and my
eyes were on the gold grips of the revolver.
“That’s going to be loud,” I found myself saying.
“It’s not a blaster,” she said matter-of-factly, without even looking at me. “Besides, you think anyone around here cares? There’ll be a parade.”
He was backing up. I wondered if he had a gun. I’d never seen him with one. If he’d had one, he’d probably hocked it for another round of blackjack. I eyed his open suit jacket but saw nothing. Then, as his arm turned, I spotted the flash of a blade under his shirt cuff. So he was dumb but not that dumb. He’d been ready for something, someone. But who did he think he was dealing with that a knife was going to save him?
“You’re going to shoot me because she’s a liar and a tramp,” he suddenly barked, nodding toward me, his face greenish, gleaming with fear. “How’s that work?”
It was a mistake. He couldn’t know it, but it was a mistake. I saw the heat rise back up in her. It was visible. He couldn’t have known, but there it was.
“You think you can talk that way, think you can manhandle my girl, knock her around, put the scare in her, beat her until she ponies up for you? Bruise her fine flesh?” Her chignon came loose, that satiny auburn hair tumbling. “Well, that’s my flesh you’re marking, little boy.”
“Manhandle? Pony up?” He looked over at me, then back at her. “Is that what she told you—”
“He’s got a knife,” I blurted out, before he could go on.
Sure, I did. Who’d turned me out? She’d take me with her to the end, not just to the nearest strip of silk. Besides, how did I know that gun wouldn’t turn on me?
Before he could speak, I heard a strange wail come from her and saw the silver-gloved fingers squeeze and the two shots in fast succession.
They felt like the loudest noises I’d ever heard, booming in my ears.
I looked over at him and there was a quick, hot splatter of blood from his face. No, his jaw. She’d hit him in the jaw. He began to lean forward and I saw the other shot had gotten him in the gut, but barely.
Had she tried to kill him and missed? At just ten feet away?
He started lurching toward her, hand under his chin, flaps of skin and muscle hanging from where his lower jaw had been.
In spite of everything, his eyes were shining and I thought I could see the corners of his mouth rising, like he was smiling at his luck. Like he would have been smiling if he could have, if his smile hadn’t been half torn away. Maybe under all the pulp, he was smiling.
Either way, he was going for the gun and everything went so fast and the next thing I knew they were intertwined, he was grabbing her legs as he collapsed, and the gun went flying, landed in the far corner of the room, then slid across the bare floor and into the bedroom.
“Get it. Get the goddamned gun,” she was growling as he writhed on the floor, clinging at her, dragging her down.
I saw the knife slip from his sleeve, saw its flash. He couldn’t reach for it, she was on him, the heel of her hand wedged in his gut wound, twisting. But I wanted that knife. I didn’t want that knife in anyone else’s hands.
Dropping to my knees, I made a lunge for it as it lay several inches from Vic’s shaking fingertips.
I meant only to take it out of both of their grasps. That was all I wanted. To get it out of reach. But before I knew what I was doing I was looking at his outstretched hand, still reaching for it as he wrestled with her. His hand was wriggling and I saw his eyes dart over toward me, asking me something, asking me for something. And then. And then.
I raised the knife and plunged it down through the center of his hand and into the wooden floor. The sound he made was not a cry or a shout but a sad little wheeze, soft and despondent,
Rising to my feet, I scrambled across the room for the gun. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I was going to get it.
It was on the floor of the bedroom and a bullet had popped out and rolled. I grabbed that too, shoving it back in the chamber as I ran back into the living room.
I couldn’t have been gone more than ten seconds, five maybe.
But the wrestling match had ended. She was on top of him, legs astride. I saw the knife standing up, wedged into the floor, pinning his hand down, and she had the letter opener out. It was out and
raised above her head.
“I have the gun. I have the gun,” I shouted.
Her head darted around to look at me. Her eyes, were they red?
And a low, ugly whisper: “I don’t want the gun.”
I thought she was just going to finish him off, don’t you see?
Yeah, that was bad too, but he wasn’t going to make it anyhow, his face falling off, a bullet rolling around in his gut. I thought she was just going to finish the job, a deep, clean jag across the throat without the noise of another gunshot. Maybe the opener’s point was sharp enough. Maybe she could make it quick.
But there was something wrong. She was lifting her arms in those strange, jerking moves, like she was on strings and when I saw the pointy tip … and then it went down and up and down and up in jittering motions, like an old movie reel jumping and rocking. And the blood kept spinning up like a Tilt-A-Whirl and it was spraying her face and her hair and I saw that she’d slipped off her mask, finally, and here was her heat but look what kind of heat it was.
Her gloves soaked through red, pooling in her fingertips. She peeled them off and they fell like swollen petals in a pile beside her and still she didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. I saw that. She’d never stop.
I tossed the gun and grabbed her under her arms and pulled as hard as I could, fighting her strength. I think now that it was the first time I’d ever touched her, she who’d put her hand on me countless times, adjusting my clothes, smoothing my hair, straightening my seams, grooming me, making me …
I lifted her to her feet. Her arms, her hands, her whole torso was shaking. We both nearly slipped on the slick floor.
The letter opener was in her hand, her grip so tight her fingers had slipped and I could see its blade pressed in her palm. Still standing behind her, I uncurled her fingers from it one by one until it dropped to the floor with a clatter.
“Well, that’s done,” she muttered, breathless. She was looking down. I couldn’t look down. But I could smell the horrible sweetness and could feel it.
I stepped back and bent down to pick up the gun, and as I did, I saw her silver stiletto pull back right beside Vic’s head, then kick
forward, tugging the last strands of muscle loose and sending the jaw bone skimming across the floor towards me.
“Don’t worry,” she said, turning towards me, cool as ever. “We’ll find someone else for you to fuck.”
∞◊∞
We might have been standing there thirty seconds or thirty years. She was figuring things, you could see her running it down in her head. And her chest was heaving, and she was giving off waves of heat. She was deciding what to do, how to fix it. I was watching her, wondering how it happened, wondering how she’d lost it all.
The front of her sharkskin suit steeped in blood, her stockings drenched red along the shin bones, her hair spattered with it. Worst of all was her face. I kept thinking of those pictures of South Seas headhunters in Weird Tales. When I was a kid, I’d look at those pictures for hours, my fingers pressed on the pages, on the fearsome mandaus they brandished, hair teeth and claws rising from the hilts. I’d have nightmares they were coming for me, crossing oceans and continents for fair-faced little girls to behead, to roast on spits over the fire. That’s what she looked like, she looked like one of those Dyak warriors, her face red and raw, streaked and spangled.
Gloria, all those stories about you were true. And they weren’t half as dark as this.
As we stood there, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to say a word. I couldn’t imagine what I could say. I wasn’t looking at the body in the corner, and I couldn’t bear to look her in the face. I stared at the floor.
Finally, she spoke. “It’s going to work like this,” she said. “You’re taking the El Dorado. You’re going to do three things. Are you ready? Are you with me? Pull it together, kid.”
I forced myself to meet her gaze, but she couldn’t make me focus my eyes. Instead, I looked at a blur of red, red hair, red face, red lips, snaky tongue.
“What …” I whispered. If I was going to get through this, I needed cool Gloria back, in her cool white suits, her precise French twists, her powdered face, textureless, planar, marble.
“Don’t turn greenhorn on me now,” she said, facing me. “Listen up. I want you to take the gun and the letter opener. I want you to drop the gun in the sewer drain, but drive at least five miles from town. By the paper mill. Got it? Then drive over by the loading docks and drop the letter opener in the water.
“I’m hoping I don’t need to tell you to make sure no one sees you. Do whatever you have to do to dodge any eyes. Then drive to your place, it’s closer, and pick me up a coat, something long, your trench coat. And a bag. A shopping bag. I can’t walk out of here with this butcher’s apron on. You get it, baby? You get it?”
She grabbed my chin in her hand. It was wet and she wanted it on me. She wanted his blood on me. She curled her fingers so high up my chin they touched the bottom of my lips. The wet touched my lips and lingered there.
“You’re going to do it and you’re going to do it smart. And don’t even think of going Pollyanna on me,” she muttered. “That knife didn’t get there by itself.”
We both turned and looked at Vic’s knife poised there, straight in the air. Still in his hand. Still in Vic’s hand. Had I done that?
Looking at it got my head on straight again, knocked the horror out of my bones and reminded me of the stakes here, for us and for me. Reminded me of the world beyond that room, a world larger than all this, with rules, laws, machines of its own that didn’t care about my dread, about what I had going on inside me, about the ugly red haze stuck in my head.
Then, hearing her breathing next to me, smelling it, and smelling the desperation on her, I realized I had to do something. I had to show her I wasn’t going soft. If she thought I was going soft, there was no telling what she’d do.
I walked over, leaned down, and yanked the knife out. I made sure I didn’t even twitch when the body jolted with the motion.
Holding up the knife, I said, “Guess I’ll toss this while I’m at it.”
She looked at me, her right hand dangling at her side. I could feel the blood on my chin, along my jawline where that hand had been.