The Lady Upstairs

by Halley Sutton

  Praise for The Lady Upstairs

  “Halley Sutton’s propulsive, delectable noir is one of the most thrilling debuts I can remember. With a pair of utterly captivating femmes fatales at its dark and twisty heart, The Lady Upstairs is sharp, sly, and crackling with erotic tension. I didn’t just read this one—I devoured it.”

  —Elizabeth Little, author of Dear Daughter

  “The Lady Upstairs is seductive and as sharp as a knife sliding between your ribs. Feminist noir that should scare a few awful men into better behavior. Loved it.”

  —Lori Rader-Day, author of The Lucky One

  “Halley Sutton’s The Lady Upstairs is a haunting, unforgettable debut that sizzles with menace and charm. This dark noir is loaded with mesmerizing characterization and a taut, always-moving plot that left me thirsty for more. Packed with well-crafted twists and a hypnotic voice, Sutton evokes the work of authors like Alafair Burke and Megan Abbott while adding her own unique verve and fire. I loved this book.”

  —Alex Segura, acclaimed author of Blackout and Miami Midnight

  “Sultry, captivating, and electric with tension . . . With sharp, magnetic prose, Sutton dives into the darkness of women’s lives, illuminating how venom and vulnerability are often two sides of the same coin.”

  —Megan Collins, author of The Winter Sister

  “Halley Sutton’s debut crackles with the unmistakable voice of its heroine, a cynical, wisecracking femme fatale straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel, who becomes enmeshed in a twisty tale of greed, betrayal, and vengeance. As dark as Megan Abbott and as voice-y as Lisa Lutz, this astoundingly self-assured debut ranks its author alongside the best in her genre. The Lady Upstairs is LA noir at its finest.”

  —Amy Gentry, author of Good as Gone and Last Woman Standing

  “This diamond-blade feminist noir is near-impossible to put down. . . . A stunning new voice in LA noir, Halley Sutton has set the bar high. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.”

  —Wendy Heard, author of Hunting Annabelle

  “Savvy, seductive, twisted—noir at its best. Shrewd women enact vengeance to fill their empty pocketbooks and hollow souls. Sutton’s timely plot will chill and resonate beyond the page.”

  —Vicki Hendricks, author of Miami Purity

  “A stunning debut, noir as hell, filled with complex and daunting characters, and just a real good time.”

  —Tod Goldberg, author of Gangsterland and Gangster Nation

  “Sharp as a stiletto and twice as sexy, The Lady Upstairs is the smart, sultry noir we need right now. Sutton’s feminist femme fatale heroine will seduce and intoxicate you, and you’ll love every second of it.”

  —Layne Fargo, author of Temper

  “A twisty, perfectly plotted, feminist crime noir that juxtaposes the glittering LA social scene with its gritty underbelly, this thriller sizzles with tension.”

  —Samantha M. Bailey, author of Woman on the Edge

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Halley Sutton

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sutton, Halley, author.

  Title: The lady upstairs / Halley Sutton.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020013916 (print) | LCCN 2020013917 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593187739 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593187746 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.U8944 L33 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.U8944 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013916

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013917

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  To my parents,

  who didn’t even flinch

  when their baby girl handed them this book

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for The Lady Upstairs

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  Discussion Guide

  A Conversation with Halley Sutton

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I’d picked the hotel for the sting because the bar had one hell of a happy hour—if you liked your drinks cheap and strong, the glasses washed maybe once in the last week. It was down the street from the studios, the right type of place to entice a movie man to meet an obliging blonde for a quick afternoon pick-me-up.

  And not the least of my calculations: the St. Leo let me have my choice of adjoining rooms whenever I checked in, and didn’t mind early arrangements or a quick redecoration, for the right price.

  By my second drink, the apricot-tinted windows were purpling with twilight—happening so early these days—turning the light in the bar a good soft color for sloppy bad decisions. I was waiting on my third when I saw Ellen escorting the mark through the lobby to the elevator.

  She stayed cool, didn’t toss me so much as a backward glance. It was harder to do than it looked. But Ellen kept her eyes firmly on the mark’s face, fingers curled around the patched elbow of his tweed blazer—a gift from one of his grandkids, no doubt, or one of the grown children benefitting from his production company’s rampant nepotism. When I’d researched him for Lou and our shadowy employer, the Lady Upstairs, it had been one of the things that sold me: he kept his grabby sons on set, even after numerous complaints had been filed. I’d read that and thought: This one’s perfect.

  He looked at me—a swoop of terror in my stomach, but it was no more than the passing glance of a man surveying the room. I met his eyes and looked away without smiling, letting my gaze go through him.

  Once they got upstairs: showtime.

  Even on a Saturday afternoon, prime drinking hours, the bar was nearly empty. It was big business when a young couple sat down by the windows, and I watched them as I waited for the mark to reappear. Distracting myself. Her long honey-brown hair was ironed straight and scissored over her fac
e, while his fingers plucked at the neck of his sweat-splotched shirt. They ignored each other and the fact that neither one of them was having any fun. She’d ordered something clear—vodka soda, I bet, unfussy and low-calorie, See how low maintenance I am?—and watched it melt all over her napkin.

  They hadn’t slept together yet, I was positive. Perhaps tonight was the night. Another bet: between the heat and the poor hotel accommodations and the fact that they were working hard to ignore each other, it wouldn’t be a night to remember.

  Making up stories about strangers is not usually in my nature.

  “Relax, Jo, would ya?” Robert Jackal had said that morning, buttoning his shirt collar and studying himself in my bathroom mirror. Eyelashes longer than any woman’s, but that was the only thing womanly at all about that carved handsome face, eyes pure no-hazel green, dark hair in disarray like a sleepy boy’s, crunchy between my fingers. “It’s not like you to be nervous.”

  Even before the sun was up, my walls sweated little beads of condensation. I was enjoying the coolness of the pillow against my cheek, starfishing my limbs and trying to find some chill in the spot he’d left. I didn’t answer him.

  “By the time I’m done, we’ll have so much footage we won’t know what to do with it all,” he said, then bent down to kiss me on the forehead, reaching down to tap his fingers against the bracelet he’d given me as a birthday present a few years back, a mistake he hadn’t repeated since. I’d slapped his face away.

  As I waited, I piled my fleshless lime rinds into dimpled green pyramids. Keeping the trash to mark time, how many drinks I’d had, keeping my fingers busy so I wouldn’t start doing algebra about Klein’s net worth on the bar top. Three hundred twenty-six million meant he’d pay how much for photographs of his nasty predilections? What about for a video? Six blockbusters scheduled to come out in the next year meant a reputation was worth how much exactly? Fifty grand? More? My 20 percent of fifty grand would just about do it.

  Calm down, I told myself. In less than an hour, you’ll have the prints. And this time tomorrow, or the day after, say, you’ll have what you owe to the Lady Upstairs.

  Every three minutes, I allowed myself one long swallow of gin.

  I let the couple distract me as I waited out Ellen’s seduction. The girl’s purse had crept from the floor to her lap, and now she clutched it tight between her knees like a chastity belt.

  There are women who can spend time with men and manage to keep smiles on their faces no matter what. She wasn’t one of them and I liked her for it.

  The man said something, too low for me to catch, leaning in close and intimate. I leaned forward, too. The girl tilted her head. He placed both hands flat on the table and repeated it again, louder, slower. As though the problem was with her hearing. The girl rocketed backward, a blush throttling her neck, and then, slowly, deliberately, she tipped the three-quarters-full beer he’d been nursing into his lap. He jumped up and flapped his hands at his crotch, squawking. I laughed out loud.

  And then there was the flare of the elevator as it opened on a familiar face—the mark, the object of every stakeout I’d sat through for the last three months, first me alone and then later, when I’d recruited her, with Ellen. He looked flustered. Pissed. I snuck a quick peek around the lobby. Luckily, most patrons were still tracking the beer-foam bath, and no one seemed to notice one of the wealthiest men in the city barreling for the door.

  My pulse jumping, I reached for my purse steadily, measuring my movements in slow seconds, thankful for the commotion. I signaled to the bartender, slipping out a credit card and the room key in one motion, the number 345 scribbled in thick black strokes on an attached Post-it, being very careful not to turn and look at Hiram Klein.

  Behind me, I heard someone from the bar call out, “Hey, aren’t you that movie guy—” and I turned my head, but the mark, Hiram Klein, billionaire movie producer and launcher of a thousand careers, was hustling out of the lobby. The bar patron sat back down, not enticed enough to chase after that movie guy. The bartender handed me my check, and I smiled, cozying up to him across the bar top, skin buzzing, trying to imagine what celluloid gold Jackal must have gotten if Klein was that fired up.

  “Was that a celebrity?” I asked him, testing the waters. I have a reckless streak sometimes.

  “Not much of one,” he said, and passed me my receipt.

  * * *

  The door to 345 opened with a smooth click. The bathroom was barely bigger than a closet, and I could hear the erratic drip of a leaky faucet. The room was 90 percent bed—no use wasting space. The only art on the walls was something Lou had picked out, a shamelessly tacky Thomas Kinkade wannabe’s whale scene Jackal had mounted before Ellen and Klein arrived. The eye of the whale could take up to sixty minutes of video, but the Moby-Dick we were chasing hadn’t needed it—he’d finished within thirty-five flat. The bedside alarm clock housed a speaker that Jackal monitored from the next room, magnifying everything said or whispered or moaned in that bed to a mountaintop yodel when you played it back.

  In the center of the bed in question, legs butterflied, sheet dripping down her chest, was my girl Ellen. Her fluffy blonde hair was a nimbus around her head, and a few strands of it had been tugged out and dangled across the grayish-white pillowcases. A black-and-orange duvet was crumpled on the floor, like it had been yanked off. Ellen’s big black eyes were glassy—a little bit thrilled, a little bit tearful—and one bright red mark clawed across her face. I could see the outline of two fingers forming on her cheek.

  So he’d used an open hand this time.

  “How’d it go?”

  Ellen shrugged. “Same as before,” she said. “A few slaps, during. A bit harder today for the video. I told him to prove he was a real man.” Ellen rubbed her jaw and a little squeak came out of her. I hissed in sympathy—it was easy to be kind with the chorus of mon-ey, mon-ey, mon-ey galloping through my veins. I tapped on the adjoining door, eager for Jackal’s playback.

  No answer.

  I had a bad feeling. I tried to ignore it. Maybe he was in the bathroom. I looked over my shoulder at Ellen, who was slowly combing her fingers through her pillow-fluffed hair. “Was the room already set up when you got here?”

  She nodded. I tested the door for myself and it opened. I pushed at its mirror twin to reveal a bed and a bathroom. No light on. No sign of anyone. Not Robert Jackal, not the recording equipment he should’ve set up to catch Mr. Casting Couch in flagrante delicto, not even a note.

  I didn’t bother to close the door before I climbed up on the dresser, grappling the Kinkade down from the wall. I threw it on the bed, narrowly missing Ellen, who shrieked. The whale’s eye was empty. Just an eye.

  I let fly a string of expletives that came out of me twisted and nonsensical—“Fuck, fuck, fuck, that asshole!” A perfect goddamn opportunity and Jackal had wasted it.

  “What’s wrong?” Ellen asked. “He didn’t get it?” Her voice took on a slight hysterical edge. “That was all for nothing?”

  I ignored her and looked more closely around the room. Klein hadn’t left anything behind, not a watch or a button, nothing to prove he’d ever been there.

  Goddammit, Jackal. Eleven thousand dollars. That was all I needed. Eleven grand, and he’d fucked me out of it. There were two options I could think of as to why—another woman, a poker table—and neither was a good excuse for fucking me out of the last bit of the money I needed to pay off my debt to our boss.

  I pressed my knuckles into my eyes until little comets pinged around my lids. Think, Jo. It was a setback, sure, but as long as Ellen hadn’t blown it with Klein, we still had him on the hook. What was another week when I’d been waiting nearly three years to be clear of the Lady? It was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  As long as I still had Ellen on my side.

  I pasted a sympathetic smile on my face and turned toward Ellen on the bed. “Y
ou okay?” I asked, my voice sweet enough to maraschino an onion.

  “Yeah,” she said, still working her jaw. “Sometimes I almost like it.” She smiled for me, maybe putting on a brave face, maybe not. She’d been a good pick for this particular job.

  “That’s good, Ellen. I’m really happy to hear that. Because I’m going to need you to tough it out for me a little longer.”

  Ellen’s face froze, and she tugged the sheet up to her chin. “I thought you said this was the last week.”

  “Plans change. It’s the nature of the job.”

  Ellen’s face reddened, and she sat all the way up, the sheet falling to her waist. If she thought I’d be impressed with the view, she was mistaken. “I can’t do this another week!”

  On the best of days, patience was not my strong suit, and this was no longer the best of days. “You have a better acting gig on the books?” I snapped. “You have any other producers breaking down your door?”

  Ellen glared at me from behind her puffy thatch of blonde hair. “It’s not exactly empowering to be acting like his mistress all the time.”

  I bit my tongue. Loose tempers weren’t what I needed; what I needed was a compliant Ellen, still on my side. I sat down on the bed. I didn’t touch her, but I let my hand get close so she knew I was making the effort to respect her space. The mark on her cheek would fade soon, I thought, but those slaps would’ve cracked like gunshots in the bedside mic. Goddamn.

  “Ellen,” I said—a person’s name is usually their most comforting sound, which is also true for dogs—“Ellen, I’m really sorry. An emergency must’ve kept Jackal today, but I promise you, we won’t miss it again. I need you to do this one little favor for me, and then it’ll all be over. You’ll have your money and you’ll never have to see him again. And guess what? I bet he’ll never smack another girl again in his life. He’ll be too scared of what you could do to him.”

  I wasn’t sure that was true, but I was certain he wouldn’t guide another extra to the casting couch without thinking twice, that was for damn sure. And Ellen would know that she’d done that, she’d been the one to change him. I could see her turn it over. She furrowed her brow and stared into her lap, hard. Not a yes, not a no.