Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Pea, I won’t leave you unless you want me to. It’s too late.”

  I couldn’t tell if happiness or resignation thickened his voice, but for now I didn’t care. I buried my fingers in his hair. We stayed in that layered, familiar silence until his breathing eased and I could think, He’ll stay, at least a little while. My eyes fell on that slip of paper, resting on the sill, the one that had told him of Maryann West’s death.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why Victor would poison that woman when he went through so much trouble to make sure I’d have the kill.”

  “He didn’t have a choice,” Dev said. “Maryann turned herself in to the police last night. Just after she visited you, I’d guess.”

  “The police?”

  “She wanted to confess, she said. She had dirt on Victor, she said. Someone brought her to an interrogation room and an hour later she was dead. Arsenic in her coffee. One of the men on vice squad must be in Victor’s pay. Valentine will have our heads for this.”

  “Dirt on Victor,” I repeated, bemused. “Last night, she said something strange. She said that the ones with the hands that Trent had spotted for Victor, she said that we didn’t die in pain, she could promise me that. How would she know that? How is that even possible?”

  For a brief moment, as soon seen as gone, Dev looked haunted with pain. “It isn’t,” he said shortly. “But since she was the one selling nitrous oxide and devil knows what else to Victor for a decade, which he used on those he killed, I presume that’s what let her sleep at night.”

  “But she didn’t sleep,” I said softly. “Not since I killed her man. She was working for Victor too? All this time?”

  He shook his head. “She stopped a few years ago. Got caught stealing at her job—got fired. She was a dental assistant.”

  “Dental assistant? They see that many narcotics?”

  He shrugged. “Dirty secret of the profession.”

  “Did she tell them—you—anything important?” I was thinking of her strange smile and her hint of revenge.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I have to get there. And Pea, depending on what she said…”

  He looked sadly at me and I understood. If she had given the police enough information about Trent’s murder, I would have to run. After last night, I could no longer count on Victor’s protection.

  And besides, “I have to try again,” I said, as though I were swallowing medicine. “I can’t leave town with him still in it.”

  Dev closed his eyes briefly. “And your heart?” he said lightly.

  “Oh, that old thing? Let it break. It hasn’t been any good to me for a decade.”

  His hands curled to fists on the mattress.

  Some strange fear entered me, then, whether for him or for myself, I couldn’t tell. “What’s the matter, Dev?” I whispered.

  The taut anger left him as quickly as it had come. He shrugged in self-reproach and levered himself from the bed. “I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything. Lock the door this time, yeah?”

  I stood. His tie wedged under my right breast and my knee slid along the smooth wool of his pants as we kissed. Then I gave him his hat and he gave me a sad half smile before we said goodbye.

  * * *

  Tamara came by a few hours later, just banged on the locked door until I woke up from my nap and opened it without checking the peephole. Her makeup had smudged into coon eyes and she wore a slip dress that she must not have had time to change from the night before.

  “Well, at least she’s still alive!” she said, and then froze when she saw my carpet. “Is that … a bloodstain, Pea?”

  “Nah,” I said, “just grenadine.”

  I closed the door behind her and led her to the kitchen, which as far as I remembered bore no grisly reminders of my profession. Ex-profession.

  “Phyllis! What is going on around here? You won’t answer my calls, neither will Dev, you’ve got a … stain on your carpet and to take the cake, last night someone tried to knock off Victor! He’s got the whole place locked down like the Federal Reserve, you should see him, laying hands on people and flicking his teeth and scaring the bejeezus out of everyone. He punched a hole in one of poor Marty’s paintings! I swear he made the man cry. I barely got out this morning.”

  “Tried to kill him?” I said slowly. “Pity they didn’t finish the job.”

  Tammy’s eyes widened. “Hush your mouth! I don’t like the man any more than you do, but we don’t get the Pelican without Victor. And besides, he’s got some weird juju, Pea. I don’t buy what he’s selling about the hands, but I swear he can tell when you take his name in vain.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Victor sure ain’t the Lord.”

  “Course not. But he might be the devil.”

  “You dance for him.”

  “And you kill for him.”

  I put my head down on the cool Formica of my table and felt each laugh as it bubbled up and burst and hurt.

  She knelt down next to me. “Pea, sugar, I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me, I haven’t gotten any sleep.”

  “Did Victor mention me?”

  “He just asked me where you were. I said you just got out of the hospital, where did he think you’d be? And Pea … you were here, right? You’re in no condition to go climbing fire escapes, right?”

  “Of course not, Tammy,” I said, and we left it at that.

  She pulled out her playing deck and started shuffling, a soft flapping of moth’s wings while I waited for what the numbers might tell me. She laid the cards down fast, one after another, five rows of ten, plus two at the top and two at the bottom.

  “Pick two,” she said. It was her other voice, resonant as a wide bell: she was the oracle now, a role I was never quite sure if she put on like her grass skirt or if it was visited upon her, like my hands.

  I raised my head. My fingers tingled as they passed above the faceless deck. I let them fall and then again.

  “Angel joker and seven of spades,” she said, turning them over. Whatever that meant, I didn’t know. She just nodded and gestured at me: pick two more.

  “Three of hearts and eight of spades, reversed,” she intoned. My skin prickled and my hand in the sling spasmed with a force I felt clear to my shoulder. A small sound escaped me, but the oracle didn’t seem to notice.

  I picked again. King of hearts. The second card I never saw because my left hand spasmed as it lifted it from the others and crushed it between fingers that no longer belonged to me. It was like a dream again, but come down during the day as a waking nightmare. I gasped and Tammy broke from whatever trance had been holding her. She pried the crumpled card from my grip and let me hold her until the force went away.

  “It’s the hands,” I gasped. “They want something from me. They’re angry with me. They’re going to keep at me until they kill me, Tammy, I know it. That’s why I’ve got to—”

  “Why you’ve got to what, Phyllis?”

  But I stopped there and she let me. Tammy had a knack for knowing what she didn’t want to know.

  * * *

  Dev came back, at last, when it was nearly morning. I had notched the passing of the moon with memories of my kills, until its light fell on me in ribbons.

  Little Ray Barry, my first, who had put a bullet through my baby brother’s left lung and left him to die; Sally Moore, a Hell’s Kitchen madam who had beat one of her youngest girls to death for not wanting to go with a client; William—had I ever known his last name?—an Irish Catholic priest who I now suspected had owed Victor some money but at the time I’d believed that he blackmailed his parishioners for sexual favors. And for all I knew, he had.

  And more, rotten dozens more, who greeted me like old high-school friends: half-forgotten, faces bloated and disfigured with time, some names forgotten and some names painful to the touch. I had killed them all. My hands throbbed with each memory and I wondered if I could trust them any longer. What I had always distantly feared turned out to be tr
ue: the power behind my hands had only ever been lent to me, and the lender had come to call in his bill. Maybe they could just wander off on their own, I thought, and do Victor for me, while I lay here in a bed of my regrets.

  I had reached number thirty-nine—a Bowery hooker who killed her johns, and once again I wondered—when I heard the lock turn and Dev’s tired footsteps in the foyer.

  “You don’t have a key,” I said when he paused and watched me from the doorway.

  He smiled and shrugged. “Did I wake you?”

  “Been keeping the man in the moon company. You know in Mexico they say it’s a rabbit?”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and ran his thumb across my forehead. “So do we, in India. Imagine that, some ten thousand miles apart, and we both still see the same humble rabbit wrapped in smoke.”

  I leaned my head into his hand. He smelled of cigarettes, stale coffee, cold stress; the lines around his mouth seemed to have deepened overnight. He was so tired he could barely sit upright, and yet still he looked at me.

  “Vic is calling in everyone for a chat. His phrasing. He lights a candle and calls on Lucifer and then puts his hands on your head and chants. Says he’ll catch the traitor that way, and at the very least, he’s got all the soldiers and lieutenants shitting themselves. Everyone has their little secrets.”

  I smiled up at him, warm as a July afternoon, and he bent down to kiss me between my eyes.

  “How long have I got?”

  “He doesn’t quite suspect you yet. I’d give it a few more days.”

  “And when he lays his hands on me? Will he know?”

  I remembered how Vic had turned at just the moment I ought to have thrown. I hadn’t made a sound; I was a professional, after all.

  “Two more bodies showed up this morning. Missing hands.” He couldn’t get any more out.

  I closed my eyes and pulled him down to me, until his head lay on my chest and his hair tickled my chin.

  “I have to try again,” I whispered.

  His chest shook with a sob. “Couldn’t you just let Walter kill him?”

  “He won’t. A debt, he says. The best he can do is not to stop me.”

  He sighed.

  “What, you’re not even going to try to beg me to go to the police?”

  “Too late for that. Besides, most cops aren’t … Some days it seems like they’re just the other side of the same damned coin.”

  “Valentine wouldn’t like to hear you say that. He’s cleaned the force right up, he says.”

  “Valentine’s … a good man, from what I can tell. But political ambitions cloud one’s vision.”

  I wondered at the stories behind that bleak sentiment, so different from the idealistic determination that had taken me away from the city back then. A wave of vertigo rolled through me, a dizzying awareness of how little we knew about the everyday business of each other’s lives. And now we were going to run away? Live together? Gloria would call me ten kinds of fool for thinking it was possible, and maybe she was right.

  And yet—I pressed my cheek into the crown of his head and held him so tight it hurt. Just like ten years ago, I swelled so full with love there was nowhere to displace it. I could only sit inside its permeable borders, scared and hopeful.

  My voice shook. “I had a second dream, Dev. And now it’s chasing me. Every time Tammy reads the cards for me, they come up all knives and broken hearts. The hands won’t let me turn from this—from him. I’m the one with all those bodies on my back.”

  “So what’s one more, you mean?”

  “This one I’ll take,” I said. “I craved it, you know—the killing. Like dope. A hit of justice. But there’s no such thing, he took that illusion away from me, though Lord knows you tried, and now even real justice feels like—even Victor is still a person. A creation unique and irreplaceable, remember when you said that?”

  He kicked off his pants and slid slowly up my body until we were nose to nose on the pillow. “We were on the water, the Hoboken ferry at sunset, wasn’t it? A regular date, like two civilians.” He laughed. “And I came out with that? No wonder you left me.”

  Regret, with its unmistakable stink, spilled between us.

  “Can you do it?” he asked.

  “I have to,” I said, which was not a yes, which we both knew.

  “When it’s done,” Dev said carefully, “we have to leave. That’s my news from the precinct. The knife you left in Maryann West matched the wounds of two unsolved murders. My friends on the job promise no one will look very hard, but it has to be soon.”

  Shock kept me still. I should have realized—but what else could I have done? Pulled the knife from her shoulder? She would have bled out on my stairwell. “You must have good dirt on someone,” I said.

  “I suppose I do, but that’s not why. Or not mostly. Victor didn’t always lie to you, Pea. The two they’ve matched to you, one was a petty dope dealer and the other a corrupt prison guard. No one was terribly sad to see them go.”

  Somehow, the fact that my justice hadn’t always been a lie made me angrier. “Doesn’t that take the cake. And you won’t miss it? Your thrilling double life?”

  Something grim shuttered his eyes; he busied himself unbuttoning his shirt. “No. If we can make it out of this city, Pea, I’ll make it up to you, as much as I can.”

  I pulled him down gently and ran my fingers over the soft hair on his naked chest. His breath came short.

  “Is it possible,” I said, “that you are assuming blame for sins that have never been and could never be yours?”

  He groaned. I slid my hand lower. His muscles trembled against my palm. “I never told you!”

  I waited. My heart pounded in my ears, but the pulse by his temple jumped faster.

  “I assumed you knew how Victor used you. The way he lied and stretched the truth. I assumed that you only pretended to care about justice. And I should never have assumed it, Pea, because I know you, better than anyone. And I decided that you were worse than my dreams of you, because that made it easier to live as I did. And now I know—what it has done to you, while I thought I was somehow better, or purer, or more enlightened. I let you have that sin, that bad karma, when it was mine—forgive—try—please—”

  He broke against me. And I held him hard and I forgave him without reservation.

  9

  Dev left early the next morning. I resolved to finish this business, one way or another, before he returned. If this killed me, well, wasn’t that all I deserved?

  I would not consider how Dev would take it.

  I found Walter in the basement of the Pelican, where they stored the legal liquor along with linens, extra furniture, cleaning supplies, and whatever odds no one knew what to do with. Victor never dirtied his oxfords on the basement steps, but Walter did on Fridays, when a delivery was due.

  “Is that the last of it, Jack?” he called when my shadow fell across the dim room.

  “Jack’s having a smoke with the boys,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  Walter turned around slowly, like he thought I might have a gun. He squinted at me, and then nodded. “Close the door,” he said.

  By the time I did that and came down the stairs again, he’d made himself comfortable on a backward-facing bar chair. I kept to my feet; even seated he had a way of imposing his physicality, and I’d rather look wary than cowed.

  “What brings you here, Phyllis?” His tone was even, careful, and yet some curiosity still seeped through. His eyes flicked to my hand, hovering over the slit in my dress that gave me access to the knife holstered on my thigh. I should have been more wary of trusting Walter, who they called Red Man for more than one reason, but some other, wayward impulse had only ever been able to see him as a friend. “Victor will know you’re here by now. He’ll be wanting to speak with you.”

  “Lay hands on me, you mean. Two more bodies as of this morning. No wonder there’s so few of us left in the city these days.”

  He shrugged.
“Victor’s angel isn’t usually that sloppy.”

  I flexed my good hand against my thigh. “This time she won’t be,” I said, and prayed it was true.

  Walter just watched me.

  “The part I can’t figure out,” I said, “is why now? Why bother poor Maryann when she’d kept quiet for all those years? And what I guess is that it has something to do with that dead man in that file you gave me, the one with missing hands who you tried to pin on Maryann. He died, and something changed—but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what. So I thought I’d come and ask you.”

  “You never told Victor,” he said, “that there was a witness the night you offed Trent.”

  I paused, trying to determine if that was recrimination, or just observation. “Didn’t come up,” I said, finally.

  Walter’s mouth twitched. “And Trent had kept quiet about his new squeeze. Didn’t occur to Victor that someone else might know what happened that night. Let alone that the witness might be one of his own pharmaceutical suppliers. But then that man—lost his hands, let’s say. They could take away pain with a touch. Not just physical pain. Couldn’t heal you, but those hands made it better for a while. It turned out that Trent had been keeping him on a private payroll, so to speak. He’d give the man food and money, and in exchange Trent would get his troubles washed away. I guess after her man’s death, Maryann needed what was in those hands even more. She kept our friend up in the same way. So when he turned up dead they found her number in his back pocket. One of the precinct cops who went to the interview remembered her from Trent’s stoolie days and made the connection.”

  “And that’s how Victor found out what she saw? One of his own boys on the job?” I whistled.

  “I suspect vice squad already knew. But they kept it quiet for their own reasons. The precinct had never been able to connect the missing hand murders to Victor before.”

  “So, Maryann West connects them, and now she’s cooling her heels at the medical examiner’s office.”

  “Did Dev learn that from his cop friends?”