The heat, exhaustion, and champagne were having their way with Anna. She felt she might not look her best. She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and lifted her chin. She began to descend from the handcar, caught her Louis heel on a ladder rung, and felt herself falling gracelessly forward into the air, flailing her limbs. Joe caught her in his arms. She buried her face in his salty neck and began to sob. “I’m sorry they tossed you from the train, but it wasn’t my fault, and I’m of two minds about you.”
“I know.” Joe held her against him and she didn’t resist. “Where did you get the handcar?”
“If I told you I stole it, would you arrest me?”
“No, I’m planning on becoming an accomplice. You got any water?”
“I gave you water.”
“I drank it.” He pulled the silver flask from his pocket. It was dented nearly in half.
“There’s champagne on the handcar.” Anna hiccupped.
Joe smiled. “That explains a lot.” He climbed the steps to the platform with leaden boots, favoring his right leg. The champagne bottle lay propped up between a wooden box and Anna’s pillowcase. Joe grabbed it, tilted back his head, and swigged, finishing the last few sips.
Anna looked back down the tracks toward Yuma. They had a long journey ahead of them, and it would only get hotter. They had been walking or pumping for hours.
A feathery mesquite tree near a large rock formation cast shade onto the desert not fifteen feet from the tracks. “Maybe you should rest in the shade. I brought food and your hat.” Anna rummaged in the pillowcase for Joe’s derby hat, which now had a dent, and set it on his bare head. “I was so worried that you’d been injured falling from the train. I feared you’d been eaten by a pack of coyotes. Even though you don’t deserve my sympathy.” She touched a red mark on his cheek. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m bruised and I’ve got cactus spines in my—”
“I can get them out,” she said quickly. Even if they were fighting, she should not withhold treatment.
“Thanks. But we are miles away from any tweezers.”
Anna took his hand. “Come and rest in the shade, then.” She led him to the shadow of the rock formation, his hand warm and comforting in hers after the horror of fearing for his safety. The second champagne bottle felt hot to the touch. She popped the cork. Warm bubbles overflowed the top. She rescued them with her mouth, then handed the bottle to Joe. He tipped his head back and drank.
Anna lowered herself onto the ground with her legs out in front of her, her back against a rock. Joe took off his hat and lay down with his head in her lap.
She stroked his hair. “Are you hungry?”
“Starving.”
She began to feed him from the pillowcase. Having forgone the heavy silverware, she resorted to dipping crackers in the pate and raising them to his curved, sunburnt lips.
Joe chewed and swallowed. “How far is it to Georges?” He intercepted the next cracker and guided it to Anna’s mouth.
She swallowed. “You mean how far to Yuma?”
“Same thing. Georges is in Yuma.”
“Yes . . . Well, maybe.”
Joe tilted his head back to look up at her. “What do you mean, maybe?”
She folded her arms across her breasts and looked away.
“We took the train to Yuma because Georges is in Yuma. You told me the hotel clerk said Georges went to Yuma.”
If Anna’s judgment hadn’t been compromised by champagne, if she hadn’t been thoroughly exhausted, she may have remained quiet. But as her mind was muddled by the heat and the bubbles, and she was especially susceptible to Joe Singer when he’d been thrown from trains, and as he had cactus spines in his bottom, she confessed. “I may have misspoken.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It might not have been the hotel clerk that told me Georges was in Yuma. It might have been someone else.”
“Who?”
“A . . . um . . . a French dancer.”
Joe sat up, turned his face to her, and frowned. “Georges’s mother told you?”
“Yes. And at the time . . . well . . . I believed her. She’s a woman of faith. But now I’m thinking . . . would a mother, no matter how religious, really tell her lover’s wife’s spawn—the wife who replaced her—would she tell her rival’s spawn how to capture her blood son so they could arrest him? And if I were feeling spiteful, I might send someone on a wild goose chase to Yuma.”
“And you just decided that now?”
“Actually, I wondered about it from the beginning, and decided she was definitely lying while we waited for the train.”
Joe ran his hands through his hair. “You lied to me.”
Anna crossed her arms. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . You are trying to hang my brother.”
“It’s my job.”
“You should have recused yourself and given the case to Detective Snow.”
“Detective Snow? You know he couldn’t solve a murder if it happened right in front of him. Anna, a man is dead.”
“Yes, I know. It’s a tragedy. It really is. He’s never going to laugh or sing or buy ugly suits again. But persecuting my brother won’t change any of that. He didn’t do it.”
“If he didn’t do it, you don’t want Detective Snow on the case. He might plant evidence. You want someone honest.”
“Wolf then.”
“Wolf’s in love with you!”
“You’re supposed to be in love with me too!”
“It’s because I love you that I’m staying on the case! Luckily, Captain Wells doesn’t know I’m in love with you, so he’s not going to take me off the case. Why did you have to drag me all the way out into the desert? You just wanted Georges to get away.”
“That’s not true,” she said without conviction. Even Anna wasn’t sure what was true. That was a danger when one lied. She put her head in her hands. Torn ribbon that had previously adorned false fruits dangled from her hat.
“Why did you bring me out here, Anna?” He swept his hand across the forbidding desert horizon and rippling mirages. “I thought you wanted to be a detective.”
Anna wiped her brow with her sleeve. “Georges didn’t do it. I wanted to find the real killer. I thought we could carry on to Oklahoma City, and I didn’t think you’d go because you were too busy chasing Georges. We have to interview Samara’s father or rather Flossie’s father. I suppose his name would be Edmands.”
“And the Oklahoma City cops couldn’t interview him or at least establish an alibi before we trek all the way out there?”
“Like they interviewed Samuel Grayson’s father? I’ve tried with them. They didn’t ask him any of the questions on my list. We need to interview him all over again. By the time we get back, maybe Georges will be home.”
“I can’t believe you lied to me. And I’m not riding on your ding-busted handcar.” He made a loud, agonized growling sound. “And all I can think about is you naked.” He narrowed his eyes at her, rose painfully to his feet, turned his back, and limped down the tracks toward Yuma.
Anna sat dumbly against the rock and watched him go. She shouldn’t have lied. She shifted against the rock. She was a bad estranged fiancée. She had known that story was taffy all along. She just hadn’t admitted it at first because deep down, she had wanted to lead Joe astray—the man she loved. She wasn’t foolish. Foolish could be excused. She was duplicitous. She pinched herself hard. She did it again.
Anna loved her brother, too, and loyalty was a virtue. Pursuing him as a suspect was an unspeakable betrayal of kin.
But did she truly know her brother? What if he was guilty? For the first time, Anna allowed her mind to visit that possibility. What if he had drugged Matilda and killed Samuel Grayson? Shouldn’t she want him to hang? She pictured his beloved face and tried to imagine him as a killer. Then, Anna pinched herself for disloyalty.
“Why do you have to be so hard on my brother when I love you so much?” she yelled after the tiny s
peck on the horizon that was Joe.
As she watched him leave her, she became aware of a bad smell, a horrible smell, like Lucifer himself had indigestion, as if hell was opening up to swallow all liars. She hadn’t done it; it wasn’t a lady’s smell. Joe couldn’t have done it. She reached down beside her to grab her pillowcase and flee the ungodly odor. She felt something smooth and fat, like a large snakeskin purse bursting with money. It was laying on top of her pillowcase.
Anna had no snakeskin purse, and if she had, it would not have been bursting with money.
Before she could react, something clamped down hard on her finger. A sizzling pain shot up her arm. She tried to retract it, but the grip was like a vise. Anna bent to face her attacker and looked down into lizard eyes and the face of a beast of mythic proportions. He stretched as long as a baseball bat, wider than her thigh, with a coral-colored pattern on his sin-black skin.
Anna tried to stand and couldn’t; the heavy monster still dangled by its jaws from her finger. She collapsed onto rocky soil and cacti that pricked her such that Joe would need tweezers. The giant lizard clung. The pain worsened, blinding her. She felt dizzy, like spinning sunlight. She picked up a rock and struck at the beast again and again.
Everything went black.
CHAPTER 34
Anna briefly regained consciousness lying on her back on the handcar. Joe had made a tent to shade her face with his shirt, her hat, and two champagne bottles. She was touched that, even when her very life was threatened, he cared about preventing freckles. She looked up to see him in relief against the dazzling sun. He wore his derby hat and undershirt, his bare arms muscular and sun-reddened, laboring to push the lever down and up with a keen ferocity. His lips were moving, singing only silently with the rhythm of the handcar. She wanted to say something to him, such as to offer again to take the spines out of his biscuits, but her tongue felt heavy and she didn’t feel she could spare the breath. Her dress was wet with perspiration, and she shivered. Her finger burned. She lifted her head to assess her injury. The monster was gone, but her digit had swollen up like a sausage at the end of a log that must be her arm. Anna turned her head and vomited. This horrified her and she swooned.
CHAPTER 35
The snorting sounds of her own snores awakened her. Joe sat beside her, mopping her brow with a wet cloth. He was as red as a devil. Out the window, she saw an impossibly green tree, its trunk and branches the color of winter grass. A sheet draped the vanity mirror, covering the glass. Her brow crinkled in confusion. She lisped thickly. “I’m dead, aren’t I? He ate me.” An even more terrible thought struck her. Her lispy voice sounded panicked. “I’m in hell!”
Joe put a calming hand on her shoulder. “No baby. We’re in Yuma. You’ve just had a bad lizard bite.”
“He was a bad, bad lizard.” The words sounded wrong, like “He was a ba ba liza.”
“Yeah, but you showed him.”
“I did?” She glanced at her bandaged sausage finger at the end of her log arm.
“You did.” His mouth smiled. His eyes did not.
Anna tried to close her mouth, but her tongue seemed to be propping it open. “Where’s my railcar?”
“It went on to Oklahoma City. You’ve been asleep since yesterday.”
“Biscuits.”
There was a knock, and a man let himself into the room as if he’d been there before. He was tall with dark eyes, nearly black hair, and a doctor’s bag. “Good. She’s awake.”
“Anna, say hello to Doctor Helmer.”
The doctor was young and nice looking, though he wore spectacles. Anna worried that she had not fixed her bun. She proffered her most winning smile to make up for her disheveled appearance, glancing up from beneath feathered lashes. “Hello.” She tried to clear her throat but could only make a rasping sound as desiccated as the desert.
The doctor leaned over her with his stethoscope. She saw a strange reflection in his eyeglasses—a monkey man with a face swollen up, lips and tongue protruding many times their natural size, worse than an orangutan—a hellish vision for a lady still in the fog of sleep. Anna recoiled in horror, yet at the same time felt a morbid fascination. The poor soul’s tongue was inflamed so that his mouth could not close, his eyes mere puffy slits, his skin red and welted. A rat’s nest of messy hair sprung from edges of his grotesque face. She looked around to locate the unfortunate creature, then realized the reflection was her own.
She was the monkey man. She bellowed like an ape in distress.
“Anna, it’s okay.”
The doctor’s opinion of her hair no longer mattered. She was a monkey face, and Joe Singer had witnessed it. She may be angry with her fiancé, but the point was moot. He’d saved her life—he was heroic that way. But, he’d never want her now.
Anna was ugly.
The doctor felt Anna’s forehead and took her pulse. “She’s very lucky to be alive.” He poured a tincture from a bottle into a spoon and pushed it past her swollen tongue into her mouth. The laudanum tasted as bitter as her fate.
The doctor set the bottle on the dresser. “The danger now is infection, in which case, she could lose her finger.” He lowered his voice ominously. “Or worse.”
Worse? What could be worse? With her trigger finger amputated, she could never use her rod again. She could never be stealthy if she looked like an orangutan, and stealth was important for detective work. Now everyone would stare and point and recognize her as the orangutan lady who looked like a man—the least fair lady in the land.
“Just let me die.”
Joe leaned close and whispered, “I’m not going to let you die.”
“Yes, but I’m ugly now.”
“You’ve looked better.”
Doctor Helmer unwound her dressing revealing a deep, angry furrow down her pointer. The Gila monster had filleted her finger with his teeth. The gore fascinated Anna but would have been far more interesting on someone else’s hand. The doctor gave her medicine to swallow, then washed her wound in a basin. He began to stitch it together with thread. It hurt. She closed her eyes so that she could no longer see her reflection in his glasses. “The nuns said I shouldn’t rely on my beauty, that I must develop character.” She scrunched up her swollen face. “But I didn’t.”
Joe took her good hand. “Yes, you did. Now go to sleep.”
When she next awoke, her finger throbbed. Joe was sleeping in the bed next to her with one arm and one leg draped over her body. He wore only his undershirt and drawers and smelled heavenly—like soap and man. He must have bathed. His bare, hairy leg touched her bare fuzzy leg.
She liked it intensely.
She herself felt sticky and stale. Also, she resembled an orangutan. How could he sleep next to her when she looked like something from a nightmare? She turned her face away self-consciously. “They are going to throw you out of the hotel, just like they threw you off the train.”
“The proprietor thinks we’re married,” he mumbled, half asleep.
“You lied?”
Joe Singer never lied. It was part of his code. She turned to look at him. He had sleepy eyes and needed a haircut. Nonetheless, he looked good enough to eat.
“I carried you over the threshold. That’s got to count for something.” “You lied.”
“No. I didn’t correct them. Someone had to nurse you.”
“You would do anything for me?”
“Near enough.”
“Because you feel sorry for me because I’m ugly now.”
Joe yawned and stretched. “Anna, my cousin’s face swelled up when he got stung by a bee. In a week he was right back to normal.”
“Yes, but that’s not going to happen for me. This is Petronilla’s work. I wasn’t stung by a bee. I was bitten by a dragon. And I will probably lose my finger.”
“Maybe, but you don’t really need it.”
Anna furrowed her brow and thought about this for a moment. How important was a pointer finger? Needed for pointing, surely, but pointin
g was rude and thus prohibited. Important for pulling triggers, but couldn’t Anna pull a trigger with her middle finger if she practiced? Pointer fingers were necessary for good manicures and filling out gloves, but one could stuff gloves, and with a face as morbidly fascinating as Anna’s, no one would ever look at her manicure. They would stare at her face as they backed slowly out of the room.
Joe was right. She didn’t need it. Perhaps she could survive an amputation.
“Anna, you’re going to be okay. I promise.”
Anna nodded dumbly. He was being kind, even after they’d fought. It stirred her conscience. She said in a half sob, “I’m gullible and duplicitous, and I dragged you all the way to Yuma.”
Joe sat up on one elbow and caressed her swollen face. “You make good sense when you take laudanum.” He reached for the laudanum bottle from the nightstand, filled the spoon, and slipped it between her lips. He began to sing a catchy tune in his beautiful tenor voice.
“She’s on the case again.
Got me tossed off the train
The desert could not stop her
She slayed the Gila monster.”
“I didn’t get you tossed off the train.”
“Sweetheart, it was worth it.”
Anna slept all day and through the next night, with Joe periodically waking her to give her laudanum or to feed her sips of broth with a spoon. Grief for her lost beauty and threatened finger filled her stomach so that she couldn’t take food. She would turn her ugly face away, refusing it. In her foggy state, she heard the afternoon train whistle.
When she awoke the following morning, Doctor Helmer was unwrapping her dressing. She felt sluggish from the laudanum and her finger ached. Talking was still difficult—like wielding a club instead of a rapier. She yawned her monkey mouth, then lisped, “Doctor, are you going to amputate?” She sounded like “Docta, ah you goin a amputay?”
“Well, good morning, Mrs. Singer. No, not today. Perhaps tomorrow if it shows signs of infection.” He extended his hand to Joe to shake. “She should try to walk a little today.”
The Body in Griffith Park Page 22
