The Lady Upstairs

by Halley Sutton

  I crossed my arms over my chest and decided to play it righteous and offended. “We had reports that there was a man sitting in his car, staring at some of the women across the street. It was creeping the other girls out in the office, so I said I’d come check. Everything okay?”

  He stared at me, not moving a muscle in his face, sizing me up. Taking in my face—I could feel it was pink, pinker than a trip down the stairs warranted—my hair frizzing in the morning heat, sweat darkening my blouse.

  “Sorry,” he said finally. “I guess I should get going.” He didn’t move, but his gaze turned thoughtful and his sunglasses flicked up to the second story of the complex. “Looks like you were coming out of the Lady Upstairs’ Staffing Agency. Is that your office?”

  Why had I said office? I could’ve bitten my tongue out. No choice now but to play it out. “That’s right.” I chucked my chin at the second story of the complex and shivered in the heat.

  “So you must know Lou,” he said, smiling, friendly. We were chums now.

  “I do.” I kept my face as stony as I could.

  To my surprise, he simply nodded and smiled again, turning back to his car and lumbering inside. “Tell her MacLeish stopped by,” he said, “if you don’t mind. Tell her I’d be real happy if she gave me a call.” There was a message that would never get delivered.

  He didn’t wait for me to respond. Instead, he rolled the car away, not moving quickly, holding up a hand out of the window in a parting goodbye. I breathed a sigh of relief, glancing quickly back up at the office. No Jackal silhouette, no telltale retreat from the window. I’d bought myself some time.

  But only a very little bit. MacLeish had been friendly enough, hadn’t threatened me or even Lou. A simple request still. But then, it had only been a few days. It wouldn’t be long before the courtesies were replaced by something brassier. I had to fix it all, pay the bribe money back, before it ever came to that.

  There would be no second chances this time. Because this was the second chance.

  I’d almost toppled her empire once before.

  If Lou’s and my little extracurricular excursion to pay back the Asshole had ended there, the two of us pressed cheek to cheek against the laminate wood of his boss’s door listening to him beg for help that wouldn’t come, my life would have been different. But then again, I might also have been an Ellen—a girl looking for a quick buck, an adventure, simply passing through the Lady’s enterprise on my way back to the straight and narrow. It could have so easily been that, if he hadn’t heard us. If he hadn’t found me.

  But we must have been louder than I’d realized. Two days later, he was pounding down the front door of my soon-to-be-former apartment, yelling that if I didn’t let him in right the fuck now, he’d call the police on me and my little friend and whatever grifter game we had running.

  “You think I don’t know the sound of your voice? You think I don’t remember the sound of your laughter?” the Asshole said, nearly cross-eyed with anger, slamming his fist into my Formica countertops.

  It was, hands down, the most romantic thing he’d ever said to me.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. When he guessed I was involved, he’d followed me straight to Lou’s place. He knew we were in it together. I’d led him right to her. And because he was an asshole but not an idiot, he had enough of the pieces about the Lady’s agency to make real trouble. Lou hadn’t taken pictures. He had no reason not to go to the police. Unless we paid him one hundred large. He’d smiled as my jaw dropped. I had been the office manager—I knew what he made each year. It wasn’t even a drop in the bucket to him. But he might as well have asked me for a plane ticket to Mars, the sum was that far out of reach for me. And he knew it. He didn’t need the money. He just wanted to remind me what power really was.

  He’d won. Again.

  What choice did we have? I’d asked Lou. None, she’d told me. The only option was to fess up, come clean, fall on the mercy of our boss. She’d handle it for me—after all, before that moment, the Lady hadn’t even heard my name—but whatever terms the Lady set, I owed her.

  The expense, Lou explained to me, hadn’t been only the bribe. It had been the protective measures the Lady was now taking. Before, Lou and Jackal had worked freelance, picking up cases from the Lady and coordinating over drinks or other public spaces. But the Asshole had figured it out—what was to keep him from threatening to go to the police again, even now that he had his money? The Lady’s arrangement with the police predated me, predated even Lou, but even they couldn’t sweep it under the rug if he made a big enough stink, got to the right person, an honest cop.

  Enter: Perfect Alignment Massage. The Lady had bought the ailing business, done the bare minimum to convert the space. Now we had a legitimate cover, even paid taxes, the whole shebang. Girls? Of course we had girls coming through our doors. Los Angeles needed a lot of secretaries. We were doing the fine, upstanding work of placing them. Check the books. All in order. Every last penny accounted for.

  Lou put a good face on it when we moved in. “This makes us respectable,” she told me. “It makes us more of a team.” We could call it Jo’s Place, she’d joked, since really I was responsible for the office in the first place, in a roundabout way. If only that wouldn’t attract too much attention, too many questions from passersby. Jo’s Place? A massage parlor? What exactly was offered . . . ? If only they knew.

  At least the Lady hadn’t made me foot the rent bill on top of the bribe.

  When I got back to the office, I stood in the front lobby for a moment, shaking. I made myself take three deep breaths before I moved, before I said anything. “I’m going home,” I called to Jackal. “Remember. The St. Leo. Two thirty tomorrow. Be there or I’ll drag you from the racetrack myself.”

  “Take it easy on the bottle tonight,” he retorted.

  I slammed the door to the office behind me. It wasn’t bad advice from him, for once, I thought. Only there was no way I was going to follow it. Not tonight.

  * * *

  The phone ringing woke me up. Lou, I assumed, calling to tell me whatever new nugget she’d sussed out about Carrigan. I jabbed the button on my phone without bothering to check the number. “Too early,” I moaned into the receiver. The gin from earlier in the night was sloshing in my gut. I wished I’d thought to set out painkillers and water for myself before I’d fallen asleep on the couch. Past Jo, never looking out for Future Jo. “Can’t you ever call me at a normal hour, f’ fuck’s sake.”

  “Jo?”

  Not the voice I’d expected. I sat up on the couch, rubbing my face. The TV flickered, an old black-and-white movie nearly muted. A woman dancing, singing, by herself in front of a crowd, a phantom partner she kept repelling and embracing.

  “Ellen? What is it, what’s wrong?”

  Amado mio, love me forever . . .

  I knew without her having to tell me it was bad. But I didn’t know how bad.

  “I think you need to come over.”

  “Ellen, what—”

  . . . and let forever . . . begin tonight . . .

  “I think . . . he might be dead. Klein. He’s not breathing and there’s . . . there’s so much . . . blood. In my apartment, oh God, it’s everywhere. Come over right now.”

  Chapter 14

  Outside her front door, Ellen had set up a planter filled with fake succulents and a welcome mat that said #BLESSED in big block letters. Ellen didn’t answer the door right away, so I stood on her #BLESSED doormat and made a bloody mess of my cuticles with my teeth. I waited another twenty seconds before I rapped again on the door, harder, not stopping until she swung it open.

  “Sorry,” Ellen said. “I was in the bathroom.” She turned away before I could study her face, but the waft of sweat and vomit coming off her let me know she hadn’t been in the bathroom prepping her face for me.

  “Well, come in,�
� she said, sitting down on the couch and staring blankly at the television, which wasn’t on. “He’s in there.” She pointed in the general direction of the bedroom.

  She seemed fairly normal, if a little stiff and pale. Better posture than I’d ever seen, spine perfectly straight like she’d been impaled on a board. Her hands were trembling on her lap, but otherwise, she didn’t seem that fragile. In shock, maybe.

  From the living room, I could see a dark lump on the bed, spread-eagled, a thick black stain beneath him, turning the sheets a gluey, rusty color.

  “Ellen, what did you do?”

  “Is he . . . Is he really dead?”

  I stepped into the darkened bedroom. Klein was in the center of the bed. Freshly dead, he looked like a mannequin, waxy and unreal. The back of his ruined head lolled off the side of a pillow. Blood had puddled onto the Berber on his side of the bed, and I could see small clumps of bone and viscera on the fog-gray walls, as far up as the crown molding. That satin headboard was a goner.

  I’d never seen a dead body before.

  “Yes,” I said, after a moment, leaving the doorway and turning back to Ellen. I didn’t need to take his pulse to be sure. I wasn’t going to touch that thing with my bare hands. “He’s dead.”

  That’s when Ellen unspooled, my pronouncement unlocking shudders that started in her toes and moved up, until I could see even that poufy blonde hair start to dance on end. The whole time, she was chattering away, telling me what had happened, giving me every excuse.

  “. . . said I was some dumb kid, a bimbo, not even worth the Viagra . . .”

  How long had he been dead? How long had she waited to call me? I stared at the smudgy browning streaks on the Lucite coffee table between us, faint enough to have been chocolate if I didn’t know better, if there hadn’t been a man oozing behind me in the bedroom. Where had those streaks come from—Ellen herself? Had she touched the body? Had she been stupid enough to touch him?

  “. . . and then he, he, he, he choked me, and we’d never done that before and I tried to act like it . . . was fine, but he wouldn’t stop, he was laughing, and then it was over and I don’t know, I think I . . .”

  I forced my attention back to Ellen, trying to get a read on her. Her face was so pale it was almost blue. She was gouging at the threads of the couch cushion underneath her legs rhythmically with her nails. Her eyes wouldn’t settle on any one thing, but her glance kept being tugged back to the bedroom.

  All those slaps. And that wife he wouldn’t leave. I wondered which had mattered more to Ellen, in the moment.

  Days ago, I’d been so eager to catch those slaps on Jackal’s bedside mic. What great leverage they’d have been. I forced myself to shake it off, count backward from fifty until my head cleared. If I fell down that self-loathing path now, I’d be no use to Ellen or myself.

  “. . . and you told me, you said, ‘Make him pay,’ and that’s what I . . . that’s what I thought . . .” She circled her hands in the direction of the ruined producer, fingers flopping and jerking from loose wrists.

  “Wait, stop. Start over,” I said. Make him pay. Jesus Christ. Come on, Jo, get a grip. “Why was he even here?”

  But I knew the answer to that one, or could guess. Which way had the call gone—inbound or outbound? Sorry, baby, let me make last night up to you. The same script, from either party. In the end, it didn’t matter. Here we were.

  Instead of answering, Ellen’s face crumpled and she sobbed into her hands.

  I let her sob. I walked back to the bedroom door, staring at the thickening black pool behind what was left of Klein’s head. One day before the sting. One day before I would have had my money back, before the Lady would have canceled the debt. I closed my eyes for a moment against the wave of nausea that burned my stomach. I’d been so close.

  And now, instead of cash, I’d be laying a dead body at her feet.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw something on the bed move and I flinched, but it was only his hand, made slippery with blood, settling. I turned away from the body and walked to Ellen’s window, the one I’d been on the other side of a few days prior, and peered down into the street. No one congregating in the alleyway, making notes about a suspected murder. No one outside at all, in fact. A fire escape that looked like it had seen very little use.

  I hadn’t known what to bring, hadn’t been thinking at all, in fact. All I’d wanted to do was get in the car and see for myself. I hadn’t thought to bring anything to cover the body, and I didn’t even stock cleaning materials in serious supply in my own apartment. We’d have to use whatever Ellen had on hand. I looked around the living room—not so much as a wheeled bar cart we could’ve used to move him. I left Ellen chattering away in the living room, confessing everything to the walls like someone was capable of absolving her, and poked into her bathroom.

  “I asked him to come over, I wanted to make sure he would still come over, after the, the party—” Ellen’s shower curtain wasn’t as opaque as I would have wanted, and it was decorated by gold and pink glitter swirls and a cupcake print, complete with cherry on top. In the top corner, gold foil spelled out Good Vibes Only! I yanked the curtain off the rod and brought it back to the living room, where Ellen was still talking.

  “—and it was like, like everything was fine, you know? At least for a little while. He brought champagne. And flowers.”

  With my arms still full of Klein’s pastel makeshift burial shroud, my eyes found the big spray of birds-of-paradise in a cut-crystal vase on Ellen’s mantel, which made me think of the duvet at the St. Leo. I wondered if Klein, too, had thought of the acrylic bedspread when he bought them, if that’s what had triggered thoughts of Ellen. His last living joke. I remembered a thing I’d heard once: birds-of-paradise are the goriest flower to kill. Decapitate them, and you have to deal with thick gray-green sap all over your hands, your clothes, the kind that never washes off. Birds-of-paradise bleed like any living thing.

  “We made . . . love. But then he started choking me, you know, during, and he’s never . . . That was new, you know? I tried to play along, act like I was fine with it, like it turned me on even—” I caught Ellen’s shudder at that one. She was starting to repeat herself, verbatim. She’d practiced her speech before I got there, I realized. More than once.

  “Oh my God,” she said, starting to hyperventilate. For the first time since I’d stepped into the apartment, I caught her looking at the body, really looking at Klein. Her mouth dropped open—maybe to start screaming—and her body rocked as she suppressed a gag.

  I crossed the room in three strides and took her by the shoulders. I gripped her in a rough hug, pressing her face into my collarbone until I was sure she wouldn’t make a sound.

  I was stroking her hair without even realizing it and murmuring soothing sounds into her ear, like you would with any frightened animal. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said over and over, the words like glass in my throat. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”

  I needed her to keep it together. There was no way I could get Klein’s body out of the apartment by myself. It wasn’t going to be okay, for me or for Ellen or for Klein, but I needed her cooperation for what I knew would come next.

  On the drive over, before I’d been sure that Klein was dead, I’d thought of all the worst-case scenarios, my next possible play.

  If Klein really was dead, going to the police was not an option. I’d suspected Ellen wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut about the Lady, the operation, and she was confirming that belief more and more each second. Especially since they were still missing their bribe money. And now, with Klein dead, no chance to get it back. No chance to get any of it back.

  And what would the Lady say when I brought her this conundrum? No money and one of my girls turned murderess, the body of a highly public figure, one who would be missed for the very same reasons we’d picked him as a mark, dec
omposing in her bed.

  I couldn’t see that playing well, either.

  I started to rattle questions off fast and hard at Ellen, wanting to shock her into giving me the truth, wanting to keep both of us from fixating on the corpse in her bed. This time, her answers were less practiced. No, she didn’t think she’d touched the body. Well, maybe she had—she couldn’t remember; she couldn’t be sure. He had screamed, a little, although no one had come to check—the shot had been so fast, muffled by the pillows, it hadn’t been any louder than a television sound effect. The gun was a present, from her uncle. (I’d stared hard at her at that one, trying to tell if she was lying.) No, she was pretty sure he hadn’t told anyone he was coming over.

  It wasn’t great, but we would make it work—we had to. I told her to grab all the cleaning supplies she could find. Ellen sprang into action, flopping to her knees and putting sponge to carpet. She’d always been good with directions. But I already knew that: I’d profiled her myself. Make him pay. Oh yes, she could follow directions all right. My ears began to ring, and for a moment I felt light-headed, almost like I was going to pass out, but I gritted my teeth and braced my arms against the door frame of the bedroom. My gaze leveled, and I gulped down a few more breaths, bending over until I was steady, until I could think again.

  Ellen started scrubbing down anything she could get her hands on, places I was sure Klein had never touched—the TV, the doorway, her kitchen tile. Anything to avoid the body in her bed. But some part of me had already guessed that would fall to me.

  I began winding the sheets around the body, peeling him up from the mattress, where a pinkish stain spread out beneath him, trying to think only about the next thirty seconds. I didn’t let myself imagine what Lou would say. In my fingers, the body felt like rubber. His remaining eye was closed, but his mouth was open, a faint trace of pale peach sparkle slicked to one lip. Ellen’s lip gloss. I covered his mouth with the sheet and rubbed gently, trying to clean him off. His lips stuck to the sheet, to my fingers, which wouldn’t stop trembling. I gave up, shuddering.