Maybe she was trying to get me drunk.
“I had to, Lou,” I said, my fingers jittering against the glass of the tumbler. Maybe she hadn’t understood me; maybe she didn’t realize how bad this was. The name hadn’t gotten me anywhere. “But it didn’t mean anything to them; they didn’t believe me. They thought I was making it up.”
Lou was looking past me out the window, her face still frozen. Those lovely big eyes, dark and blank. “They wouldn’t have let you know if they believed you,” she said, her voice low. “Rita Palmer. Well.”
“Didn’t you hear me? We have to go now, tonight. If we don’t get the money and leave right now—”
“I heard you.”
She snapped herself back from whatever mental void she’d fallen into and smiled at me. It wasn’t her usual smile, and it wasn’t very convincing, but it was better than nothing.
“I heard you,” she said again, leaning forward to pour me another tipple of gin. The silk robe moved with her, tugging open down her chest. I closed my eyes, knuckling my fists into them so I could concentrate.
“Lou, please, you have to understand, I didn’t have any choice—”
Lou scooched the drink to me across the marble countertop of the kitchen island. “Okay,” she said softly. “We’ll go tonight.” She met my eyes briefly—shyly, almost—and I stopped talking, not sure I’d heard her right.
“What?”
Lou nodded, and then she knocked back the gin she hadn’t touched yet, grimacing. “You’re right—you’re always right, Jo. There’s no point staying anymore. We’ll go.”
In my wildest dreams, I hadn’t imagined that it would be so easy, that Lou would agree with me so quickly. But I’d always known she was the survivor, capable of seeing the writing on the wall. There was nothing left for us with the Lady, now. It was exactly what it had to be. I slumped in relief against the countertop.
“Where should we go?” I asked. I hadn’t packed anything—we’d have to stop by my apartment, for me to pick up my things. And the money. But MacLeish and Lafferty were probably watching my apartment, I thought, the panic starting to rise in me. They’d be suspicious if I came there with Lou, grabbed anything.
I closed my eyes, trying to think it all through. When I looked up, Lou had taken a step closer to me, silk wrinkling and flexing with each move. I closed my eyes, and I could smell the lemon in her hair without even trying. When I opened them again, she was standing right in front of me, her face tilted up to mine. Her eyes didn’t look flinty now, only sad and wet. Her face twitched and the freckles on her nose jumped and danced.
“We’ll go,” she whispered, her breath light against my lips, “anywhere you want.” And then she shrugged off her robe, putting her arms around me. I could feel my heart drumming in my chest and her own answered, and I was thinking to myself, Was that all it took? A simple murder and some blackmail? And then she was kissing me, moving her hands across me, and the only thing I was thinking was, Finally, finally, finally.
* * *
Afterward, upstairs in her bed, Lou shook a cigarette out of her case and lit it, stretching like a cat and flipping herself upside down before taking a drag. The smoke drifted down for half a beat, toward the carpet, and then back up. I touched her toe, near my head, and Lou smiled.
“How ugly is this bed?” Lou lifted her head, which had been purpling from hanging off the edge of the mattress, and watched herself make small circles with dusty feet on the virginal white of her headboard. A lock of hair had fallen into the corner of her mouth, and she didn’t bother to move it.
My limbs were full and drowsy and my head was cloudy—from the gin, from Lou, the tangy taste of her still on my lips. “We could torch it,” I said. “On our way out of town.”
“Yeah,” Lou said dreamily, walking her feet across the quilted satin, back and forth, a half-assed Charleston. “We could.”
I sat up in bed, tucking the sheets under my armpits. We should’ve been on the road hours before, as soon as she’d agreed, but I couldn’t make myself regret what had happened. “The money,” I said, and Lou looked at me, cricking her neck upward to meet my eyes. “We have to go back by my apartment for the rest of Carrigan’s cash. And then we could go—Palm Springs, maybe. For the night. We can come up with a better plan tomorrow.”
Lou nodded slowly, her eyes unfocused. She liked the plan, I could tell. The desert drive, the night wind in our hair. Lou flipped over, onto her stomach, making a figure-four shape. Her toes dug into the pale flesh at the back of her knee. She placed her chin onto her overlapped hands and stared at me, then nodded, another of her quick decisions.
“I’ll drive,” she said, suddenly all brisk business. She sat up, letting the sheet fall, and I caught my breath—she was so beautiful. Statues were made of bodies like hers.
“But first, let me make some coffee to help me sober up for the trip. You stay there,” she said with a wink as I tried to sit up, reach for her. “I like this view.” She crept down the stairs, not bothering to cover her nakedness with a stitch of clothing.
Goofy grins are for chumps, not murderesses on the run, but I couldn’t help myself. I was under no illusions: running away with Lou wouldn’t be easy. Being on the run was, I imagined, its own special kind of hell. Having to always look over your shoulder. The strain wouldn’t be easy on Lou and me, either, I figured, whatever we were, or were becoming. And it would be made worse by the dreams of Ellen. Those weren’t going away. If I closed my eyes, I could see her and Klein in the car. His sagging, wrinkly body. Her face unmarred by so much as a laugh line. Both rotting.
In our line of work, we trafficked only in the young or the wealthy. Even when you slept with an old man, you thought of the money, each caress of wrinkled flesh making you more grateful for the elastic quality of your own. I hoped, very hard, that I would never grow old, that some terrible car crash would end it for me, leaving my body mangled but young. Death should come sudden or not at all.
Perhaps Ellen had been lucky, after all. Perhaps I’d made her lucky.
I pushed the thought out of my head. Below, I could hear the steam of Lou’s kettle and her soft voice, maybe talking to herself. Maybe singing. I couldn’t keep the goofy smile off my face for anything after that.
I pulled myself out of bed, despite Lou’s instructions, slipped my clothes back on, and began hunting around for a suitcase or a duffel bag—I could help her get a head start on packing. We could splurge tonight, I thought. Pick some fancy resort in the desert, order room service tomorrow morning and sleep in. And then maybe Mexico. Maybe, I thought, my mouth twisting, we’d even cross paths with Jackal again. Wouldn’t that be something.
Lou’s closet was a mess. I should’ve expected that, the way she kept her desk. I pulled a few of my favorites of her dresses and tossed them on the disheveled bed. But I couldn’t find a suitcase underneath the piles of her shoes and old magazines.
I got down on my knees and flipped the bed curtain up. Bingo. Pressed so far back it was nearly against the headboard, an old beige suitcase was gathering dust. I pulled it out and flipped it open, ready to start packing for Lou.
But it wasn’t empty.
Inside, there was a magazine and an oatmeal-colored cardigan—a color I’d never seen Lou wear. I frowned and lifted it out. Embroidered on the collar were the words Good Vibes! in pink thread. Not Lou’s style at all. Good Vibes—I’d seen that before. Ellen’s shower curtain that we’d wrapped Klein’s body in. I frowned, uneasy, and lifted the sweater to my nose. A faint trace of plasticky, candy-smelling perfume. I knew that smell.
Frantic, I threw the cardigan on the bed and clutched the magazine, a glossy tabloid that screamed coverage of the Klein-Howard murders. Something a murderer might keep, if she was sloppy. A trophy. Underneath it, case notes in my handwriting, with Ellen’s name on them.
Underneath that—the tip of a g
un resting on a bed of white. I thought of what Escobar had asked, what I’d done with the gun. I hadn’t seen it since that night. And yet here it was.
But the gun wasn’t the worst of it. My fingers trembled as I pulled one of dozens of the Lady’s embossed fleur-de-lis envelopes from Lou’s suitcase. The Lady’s special stationery—in Lou’s suitcase.
Before I could process it, the door creaked open and Lou, still naked, handed me a tumbler.
“What the hell is this?” I asked, setting the tumbler on the bedside table so I could hold the envelope out to her.
Lou glanced at the envelope and then at the spread of evidence on her bed. Her expression didn’t change. She grabbed the silk robe from the foot of the bed where she’d abandoned it, turning away from me to cinch the belt. I watched the long line of her neck bent over her task.
Maybe there was a simple explanation for it all—the gun, the envelopes, a piece of clothing doused in Ellen’s perfume. Maybe the gun was for safekeeping. But the envelopes . . . “Lou, why do you have the Lady’s stationery?”
Lou sighed and turned to face me, eyebrows raised. The faint marks my lips had made against her skin were starting to bloom, and a pulse in her neck ticked as I stared. She didn’t look like my Lou. But then: she’d never been my Lou, never. I closed my eyes, feeling sick.
“Come on, Jo,” she said, still turned away from me. “You must’ve guessed.”
I thought of the Jo I’d been that morning: nervous, unsure where the day would take me. I thought of MacLeish telling me without telling me what I already knew. I thought of plane tickets to Spain that would never be purchased and Jackal trying to warn me and Lafferty saying I needed to bring him the Lady and the crinkle in Lou’s nose when I made her laugh and Ellen’s dead weight in my arms and lemony Lou lying next to me in bed for a few short minutes.
She’d never been my Lou, but she’d always been my Lady.
Chapter 31
I wanted to tell you,” she said, her arms crossed over her silk robe. She didn’t sound particularly regretful that she hadn’t. Until she said it, I had been holding out hope that I was wrong.
“But you never quite got around to it.” I could feel the shadow of the gun on the bed behind me, a black, throbbing presence. “And it would’ve been so hard? Take me out for a drink, say, By the way, I’m really the Lady Upstairs?”
Lou gestured to the tumbler on the table. “You might like a sip of that. It might make you feel better.”
“You were so cool, giving me orders. But they never seemed like orders, did they? They always seemed like suggestions. Good advice. All of it, from the pie diner to that night with . . . Ellen.”
Lou’s green eyes sparkled, as though I’d told her a joke. “I’m surprised Jackal didn’t say anything, I know he was on to me by the end. The way he wouldn’t talk to me.” That one stung. She narrowed her eyes and smiled a little. “You know, I always wondered if he’d be able to do it, if I asked. Take care of you.” She must’ve caught the look on my face because her smile blossomed. “Oh yes, he was much handier than he looked. You can convince that man to do just about anything for an afternoon at the racetrack. And he was so good at keeping the girls quiet.” Lou’s face softened a touch, and she took a step toward me. “But I never really wanted you dead, Jo.”
Jackal, the Lady’s—Lou’s—hitman. I wasn’t sure which was worse: that he’d never told me, or that I’d never guessed. Jackal, the man with nothing under the surface. If only I’d known, I thought. Murder was something we could’ve bonded over. I could’ve laughed except it was so unfunny. I wondered how many over the years, who and how and when. The room tilted on its axis and started to realign itself in unfamiliar ways. Monsters, all of us, I realized. Not only me. All three of us.
I licked my lips, tried to look away from her, and my eyes landed on the still-open luggage, the gun. Fuck. I couldn’t remember if I’d touched it or not. “The police told me you bribed them years ago, when a case went wrong,” I said. “That’s how it started?”
Lou laughed bitterly, taking a step forward, still between me and the door. “That wasn’t half a mess. One of my very first cases—back when I was doing it all myself, you can imagine what a disaster that was—and the mark called my bluff, went to the police with the photos and the note and everything. Said he didn’t care about the photos in the paper, he wasn’t going to let some little cunt run his life.”
Lou laughed again. It sounded like she was gargling glass. Despite everything, my heart ached at the idea of her, alone and scared, trying to run the grift on her own.
“That one had quite the mouth on him. Nasty, nasty man.” She shrugged at me. “So I talked my way out of the situation. I invented a boss, someone powerful, someone who could keep the police from taking advantage of me. Another layer of protection.”
Lou had to have a good reason for keeping the gun. Maybe she didn’t know how to get rid of it without being sure the police would find it. Maybe she’d panicked, thought it was safest to keep it. I could come up with a million excuses for her, in my mind. The twist of my stomach told me something different.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, my voice cracking. I was surprised how much that one hurt, how that was the thing that hurt most after all. “Did you think I wouldn’t keep your secret?”
Lou’s feet made soft indentations in the carpet as she crossed to her purse, bending over to snag a pack of cigarettes from her bag. She cupped her hand over a cigarette and sparked the lighter with the other.
She took her time with the smoke, luxuriating in it while I shivered and waited. Finally, she said: “You used to be so good at your job, Jo. What happened? All of a sudden, there were so many little slipups. Little things matter. They matter. But you couldn’t stop drinking, you were taking too long on the cases—it shouldn’t have taken you more than a year, tops, to pay me back. And that’s not even the worst part.” She shook her head, disgusted. “I saw so much potential in you. So much. That day at the diner and then . . . after. I knew I couldn’t let you walk away from me.”
She slid me a sly look and my stomach dropped. None of it had been a mistake—even the debt had been a ploy to tie me closer to her. Somehow she’d let slip a detail to the Asshole that made him able to trace it all back to me. They’d been alone in that conference room for twenty minutes—who knows what she’d said while she tied him up, while she straddled him. I’d always assumed it had been my fault he’d found us. Because it couldn’t have been Lou. It could never have been Lou’s fault.
“I want you to know I wouldn’t have done this if you hadn’t forced me,” Lou said. Lou, or maybe really Rita Palmer. Unless that had been a lie, too. “You started to make such a mess. I asked Jackal to go to the Albatross that day because—well, because I know him. I knew what would happen, he’d never show up. And then I’d have a reason, you know? I could justify it with Jackal. You’d fucked up so bad, over and over again—I don’t know if you got sloppy or lazy or—”
My head was pounding, and I could hear my blood beat in the spaces where I should’ve been able to hear my own breath. It felt like I hadn’t taken one in minutes, hours. I backed up until my legs bumped the bed, jostling the suitcase with the gun nestled inside.
She could’ve thrown it in the ocean. That would have been so easy. But no. She’d kept it for a reason. For this.
“Or if you’re so in love with me you can’t see straight anymore.” Lou looked at me, very level, very steady, one hand supporting the elbow of her cigarette hand. She blew out a plume of smoke. “What’s our one rule with the girls?”
I reached a hand back and found the edge of the suitcase to steady myself. “Lou, what are you—”
“One rule, Jo. You get attached, you start to fuck up. How could you forget that?” She smiled a little. Like she was enjoying herself. That pretty face of hers, all angles, all sharpness where once it had been s
oft toward me, always soft to me. “I’m not going back to the streets, just me. You think you know tough? You don’t know anything about it.”
“I’m going to be sick,” I said.
“Be my guest. The police should be here any minute. I called them from downstairs just now. I told them I felt obligated to help in their search for justice.” She gave me a little smile and wink. “Don’t you think Ellen deserves justice?”
The police. I had one small chip left to play. “MacLeish told me that the St. Leo turns over the security tapes tomorrow. Going back months. You were there with her, Lou. Remember? If I go down for this, you do, too. But we could still go. Start over somewhere new. Let’s go, please let’s just go.”
For the first time, a small shadow passed over Lou’s face, and then she shook it off, her cheeks creasing in dimples. “Looks like Mr. Alibi will be coming in handy for more than an alibi,” she said with a wink. “Tapes get erased all the time.”
I gagged on the taste of gin still in my mouth. I’d never drink gin again after this, I promised myself, after this very moment I was done with juniper, Lou was right, it did taste like Christmas tree piss. My vision was pinwheeling to a small point, like Lou was the only thing I could see. I couldn’t stand to look at that face, that beautiful, terrible face.
Lou took another drag of the cigarette, shrugged. That same little smile. “Not so tough now,” she said.
I took a breath and forced myself to take another one, and another. I nodded and nodded and nodded, and then I swung the gun up from behind me and pointed it at her face. She froze. “Move, Lou. Get out of my way.”
That got a reaction from her, finally. “Put the gun down, Jo. It’s too late.” But her face was pale, the freckles bright against her nose. She took one small step toward me, still between me and the door. “Jo, listen to me.”
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