Remember Me, Irene

by Jan Burke

He looked up at me. “Yes, you were,” he chided, as if I had denied it aloud. “You were looking in the altar for the treasure. Come here.”

  I didn’t move. He grabbed my hand and yanked me along toward the bar. He stopped in front of it, but he kept hold of my hand.

  “As your guardian angel, I will lead you in the ways of righteousness. I know all the secrets of the altar.”

  Right at that moment, I really didn’t care about what was hidden in the bar. But he pulled me over to it, back into the bartender’s working space. He saw my purse and stuffed the beeper inside it, freeing his hand. He grabbed the purse and put it on his shoulder. His now, I supposed. I glanced around, but couldn’t see the manila envelope. Lisa must have taken it with her. I prayed she’d figure out who to give the papers to if I ended up with my skull bashed in or worse.

  He looked up at the back of the bar, its intricate carvings and mirrored panels, and smiled. “You have to rub them,” he said. “I watched him all the time.”

  He took my other hand, guided both hands toward a panel on our left. He placed each hand on one of the wings of two cherubs which graced the sides of one panel of the mirror. I tried not to think about the smell of his breath over my shoulder. It was one of several sharp, distinctive fragrances emanating from him. The man was a riot of olfactory stimulants.

  Our darkened reflections stared back at me from a mirror. Mine, scared. His, pleased.

  “Both at the same time or it won’t work,” he said. He gently curved his fingers over mine, moved our hands over the wings simultaneously. I felt the wings move backward. They rolled on some sort of ball-and-socket joint. I heard a creaking noise.

  “Now forward, and back again,” he said.

  We moved the wings again, making the angels “fly.”

  Another creaking noise, and this time, I could see that the mirror had come forward as the wings went back.

  We repeated the motion with the wings, and now the mirror was far enough forward to give me a clear view of what lay behind it: a lever.

  “Pull it down! Pull it down!” Two Toes said excitedly, letting go of my hands.

  I did. The entire section beside the mirror swung out, away from the back of the bar. He laughed and pulled it all the way open. There was a compartment beneath it.

  “I can’t see what’s in there,” I said, curiosity temporarily overcoming all other considerations.

  Two Toes fumbled in his jacket and produced a match. He struck it and its flame softly illuminated the area where we stood. He briefly held it over the compartment and I saw what was hidden there.

  Nothing.

  “It’s empty!”

  “Shhh!” he said, clamping a dirty hand over my mouth. He dragged me close to him, put a big arm around my waist, pinning my arms. He straightened and my feet lifted from the ground. He rounded to the back of the bar, pulled on another cherub as he leaned a knee against a smooth panel there. It gave, moved noiselessly, turning like a revolving door, and we were suddenly in absolute darkness.

  I tried to struggle, but he tightened his grip on my waist and jaw until I stopped. There was nothing but darkness and his scent mixed with that of dust and old wood. At first I thought we were in some sort of closet compartment in the old bar, but we began moving. He was carrying me down a set of stairs, it seemed. The bar must have covered some passageway, probably a means of getting booze in and out during its speakeasy days.

  He stopped, then loosened his grip on my waist long enough to open a door. The air was cooler, but it was still very dark. He set my feet on the ground.

  “If I let go of you, will you be quiet?” he whispered in my ear.

  I nodded.

  “I don’t want to hit you, but I will if you make noise.”

  I nodded again.

  He lifted his hand a little, as if testing me, then took it away completely. I rubbed my jaw.

  Where was Lisa? I told myself that even going downstairs in a panic, fourteen flights would take some time.

  He still had hold of my waist. His head was cocked to one side, as if he were listening to something. I heard it, too. Footsteps above us. Distant, but crossing the large room above. The old wooden floor was creaking.

  Looking for me! I thought frantically. She’s found help and they’re looking for me! I opened my mouth to call out, but Two Toes’ big hand came over it again. As he dragged me along, I wondered how Lisa had managed to find help so quickly. The security guard? Maybe my luck was improving.

  Soon I realized that we had come out into the hallway of the floor below. The one where Lucas had died.

  Two Toes knew which room that was—he had been there. He was going there again. I heard myself whimper as he pulled me into the room.

  “Shhh!” he hissed, and shut the door.

  37

  IT GOT WORSE.

  If Two Toes had stopped in the room itself, maybe I would have managed not to think about where I had seen Lucas’s body, about the pennies on his eyes. Maybe not.

  He kept moving. He dragged me first into the bathroom, but when I used my legs to kick against the fixtures, he seemed dissatisfied with it as a hiding place. He dropped my purse into the old clawfoot bathtub, then reestablished his grip on me.

  “Stop it!” he whispered fiercely, dragging me back out into the room. “I don’t want to hurt you! I don’t!”

  He moved out of the bathroom, back into the bedroom itself, where there was a little light. Very little. He closed the bathroom door with his foot, and moved toward the windows. I felt a little relief until we seemed to be going straight to the bloodstained radiator. He moved away from it, though, and into the small closet. He shut the door, and we were in absolute darkness.

  If being unable to escape from a small, dark, confined space was not my worst nightmare come to life, it was only because I had failed to add the prospect of being there not alone, but with a hulking maniac. He turned me so that I faced him, pressed himself full-length against me. He had an erection.

  I stopped struggling. I don’t think I’ve ever held so still in my life.

  “Oops,” he whispered. “I’m not being a very good angel.”

  He shifted his pelvis slightly. His weight still held me against the wall, but at least I wasn’t being prodded through our clothes.

  It was that small act of consideration that finally made me reconsider what was happening to me. He wasn’t hurting me. He was hiding me.

  Then I realized how quiet the building was.

  If, by some miracle, Lisa had found help quickly and the police had arrived, there would have been lights and sound. They would have treated this as a hostage situation—it wouldn’t be quiet, like this.

  Maybe it was just Lisa and the security guard. Maybe the security guard was trying to be John Wayne. Maybe he was silently looking for me while the police tried to find the place. After all, the Angelus probably hadn’t been operating as a hotel for over a decade …

  But Lisa knew right where it was. Lisa, who wouldn’t have been out of high school when it closed. When I had spoken to her on the phone, I had asked, “Do you know where the Angelus Hotel is?” and she had answered “Yes.” Without hesitation.

  But the implications of that made me argue against myself. Maybe she had seen the hotel mentioned in one of the papers in the attic. Or overheard Andre talk about it. Maybe Roberta told her that Lucas died in this hotel, and Lisa came by to see it. That didn’t seem likely. I tried to think of other explanations. I was sure there had to be one.

  Sure, until I heard the stairwell door close at the end of the hallway. Whoever was coming onto this floor made no attempt to hide his or her presence.

  She might have known where the hotel was by some other means, but Lisa wouldn’t have known which room he had died in, what floor it was on. Not unless she had been here on the night he died.

  Had he been alive when she saw him?

  I remembered what Two Toes, my “guardian angel,” had said when he last appeared before me, in
the alley near my car. He spoke of Lucas being turned away from the shelter, coming to the hotel. He had said that Lucas had a guardian angel of his own:

  The one that watched over him wherever he would go. He talked to the angel, and the angel went away… It scared me to watch that angel.

  Lucas had been alive.

  Alive on a cold wet night visited by an angel carrying a thermos full of coffee. The thermos in the room was not Lucas’s thermos. Did Lisa have one? Maybe it was Jerry’s, filled with hot coffee from his kitchen, with the pills taken from the spare supply of heart medication from his cabinet—heart medication Jerry kept on hand to save his father’s life. This had been a different kind of emergency.

  If Lucas had made it into the shelter, would she have gone in like a Good Samaritan? The director’s young friend Lisa, sharing coffee and visiting with an old friend? Or did she delay him in some way, make certain that he was too late to find a bed there?

  Heart medication. It wouldn’t be such a difficult way to kill someone. In the coffee, it would have been tasteless. Heart medications are powerful drugs. What will save one person could kill another; enough of it will kill anyone. What had she said to him? The same thing she said to me? My father hid some papers in an attic? He’s never loved me, I want to help you?

  I pictured Lucas beguiled by her. Compassionate, trusting her. Drinking the coffee until he had enough in his system to do the damage. In that moment of dizziness before he fell against the radiator, did he know? Clutching his ring against his chest, did he know his trust had been betrayed again?

  I shuddered. Two Toes leaned his cheek against the top of my head, moved the arm around my waist to pat my back. Childlike.

  Childlike. The thought that Andre’s daughter might be just as manipulative and ruthless as her father was one I didn’t like to face. The apple never falls too far from the tree, Jerry Selman had quoted to me. I had been looking at the wrong apple.

  Lisa. Why? Why?

  Was she so angry with Andre ignoring her that she’d try to frame him for murder? Was that why she had come to me? To make me a party to the accusations? Get the newspaper reporter to say it, so that she didn’t have to? No wonder she was upset when I defended him in any way.

  And now she had Ben’s calendar pages, Ivy’s faxes, the copy of Jeff McCutchen’s suicide note. How ironic that she didn’t need to frame Andre—he had probably already committed a murder.

  The footsteps in the hallway were cautious, but steadily approaching. Two Toes seemed to notice that I wasn’t trying to struggle. He relaxed his grip. I wanted to communicate my trust to him somehow, but didn’t dare to even whisper. I couldn’t see his face, he couldn’t see the change in mine. He eased away slightly. I reached for his hand, gently squeezed it. He squeezed mine back, just as gently. He stood back a little more, dropped his arms, no longer covering my mouth or holding me to him.

  A moment later, any remaining doubts I may have held on to, the slim, denying hope that said no one that I had cared for so much could have killed Lucas, vanished when I heard a sharp bang against the door to the hallway. It quickly banged again as it hit against a wall, sounding as if it had been kicked open.

  “I’ve got a gun,” Lisa’s voice said from a slight distance. “Bring Irene out now.”

  Two Toes reached for my face, found my mouth, and patted his fingers on my lips. I nodded as he held them there lightly. He then turned around slightly, his back to me.

  I wondered if she really had a gun. We had heard her footsteps overhead, in the bar. Her knapsack. Had she gone back to retrieve a weapon?

  “Do you hear me? I said to bring her out now!”

  The air inside the closet seemed to be gone.

  When we didn’t emerge, she called out, “I have magic, Mr. Jones. I’ll trade you my magic for Irene.”

  Mr. Jones. She had learned Two Toes’ name, but not his street name. From Roberta, perhaps? Two Toes had been to the shelter. Was she hunting him, too?

  Two Toes wasn’t quite as gullible as she hoped, it seems. He didn’t move.

  “Irene?” Her voice was less cocky now. “Irene, try to make some sound. It’s the only way I can save you.”

  Listening to her lie brought a bitter taste to my mouth.

  I heard her walk cautiously into the room, her shoes making the same sound I had heard upstairs, as if she had something sticky on the soles of her running shoes.

  The light of the flashlight played near the closet door. The footsteps were hesitant, unsure.

  Suddenly there was a piercing noise—I barely registered what it was before gunfire rang out. The echo of the shot had hardly faded before I realized what the first noise was: my beeper, going off in the old iron, claw-foot bathtub.

  The acrid smell of gunpowder filled the small room.

  The beeper stopped.

  “Now,” she said shakily, “you know I wasn’t lying about the gun.”

  The beeper went off again.

  “Shut that thing off!” she shouted.

  It continued.

  She fired again; I heard the sound of something shattering, probably the bathroom mirror. The gun seemed to be fired near us. She had to be standing to one side of the bathroom door, firing through it, into the bathroom.

  The beeper stopped for a moment, started up again.

  “Come out of that bathroom, or I’m coming in!” she shouted, her voice not far from the closet.

  The beeper stopped.

  It occurred to me that with the flashlight in one hand and the gun in the other, she didn’t have a hand free. Her steps moved nearer the bathroom door.

  “Do it!” she shouted. “Do it now!”

  As if obeying her order, Two Toes burst out of the closet like a berserker, screaming as he launched himself into the room. I followed, staying low.

  Lisa had turned at the sound, the flashlight beam spinning our way. The surprise kept her from taking aim, but she fired the gun as Two Toes leapt at her.

  He grunted as he tackled her to the floor, grabbing her right wrist, tearing the gun from her hand and sending it across the room. I grabbed the left hand, prying the flashlight from her fingers as she tried to hit Two Toes with it. She struggled against him, but he overpowered her. I used the flashlight to find the gun, turned to see her flailing her fists against Two Toes in impotent fury.

  He backhanded her hard against the face. She lay stunned from that blow. He smacked her across the face again. He was pinning her wrists above her head in one hand now, sitting astride her. He was about three times her size. He raised his hand for another blow.

  “No,” I said. “Two Toes, no!”

  He paused, looked up at me.

  “Get off me, you filthy cocksucker!” Lisa shouted.

  He smacked her again.

  She started crying.

  He was raising his hand.

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  “She needs to be punished,” he said simply.

  “Not by you,” I said, trying to think of a way through to him. “You’re my guardian angel.”

  She laughed. “What? Did he tell you he used to be a bodyguard? I thought Roberta made that up.”

  He smacked her another time. “I’m guarding her. You hurt people. You hurt me.”

  For all the anger and disappointment I felt in her, I couldn’t stand idle, letting Two Toes beat her senseless right before my eyes. “Guardian angels don’t hurt anyone,” I said. “They take care of people. You take care of me.”

  He paused, but seemed undecided.

  One of the first prayers I ever learned, one I probably knew by heart before I was five, came back to me. I said it to him in the same singsong way I had said it as a child:

  Angel of God,

  My guardian dear,

  To whom God’s love,

  Entrusts me here,

  Ever this day,

  Be at my side,

  To light, to guard,

  To rule and guide.

  He smiled
. “Say it again.”

  I repeated it.

  “My side hurts,” he said, and reached a hand down to the ribs on his righthand side, opposite of where I sat with the flashlight. When he brought the hand up again, it was covered with blood. “See?”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, and moved so that I could see his other side. A dark stain was slowly spreading on his jacket.

  “No, just an angel,” he said seriously. “We’d better tie her up,” I said. “Then I’ll try to help you. Do you have a knife?”

  He nodded, reached into his jacket, and tossed a pocket knife to me. I used it to cut the straps off Lisa’s knapsack. I tied her hands tightly.

  “I don’t understand you,” I said to her.

  She didn’t say a word.

  As I tied her ankles, I saw that the bottoms of her running shoes had mud encrusted in them—and little pieces of date palm debris. I was willing to bet her footprints would match the cast taken of the ones leading into the hotel. She would have picked up the mud and debris on the way into the hotel on a rainy night. She hadn’t picked that up when she walked across the grounds with me this afternoon—Keene’s crew had cleaned up just before then. The debris in the shoes would probably match the pulp left on Roberta’s office carpet.

  I untied her shoes and pulled them off.

  “Hurry,” Two Toes said.

  I convinced him to prop himself up against a wall. I set the gun down. He eyed it.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  He let me open his jacket, allowed me to unbutton his shirt.

  He had a sly smile on his face.

  “Forget that, too. Keep an eye on Lisa.”

  I pulled the shirt away and found another. Three layers down, I found the wound.

  “Ow!” he said as I pulled his undershirt away from it.

  “Sorry.”

  The wound was just above his hip. It looked as if the bullet had grazed him. Painful, but not too deep, and if I could staunch the bleeding, probably not fatal.

  “Press on it,” I told him, placing his hands near it. “Like this. Don’t let up on it. I’ll try to make a bandage.”

  “Socks,” he said. “Get the socks.”

  “What socks?”