by Mary McCoy
“After he marries your mother, though, he wants more steady work, so he goes into the publicity department at Insignia Pictures. But everybody still knows him as a man who can round up a dozen pretty girls to sing a song, mingle, dance, and generally liven up a party on a moment’s notice. Ask any one of these big studio guys if they’d rather go to a party full of aspiring actresses and dancers or one with all the big names, and he’ll pick the girls who aren’t famous every time. Less trouble and more fun. And that’s what your father’s good at, so good that soon some of his higher-ups at the studio get wind of it, some of the actors, too, and start asking him to put together private parties for them.
“Your father likes it because he’s getting all kinds of face time with the really important people, and he tells himself, well, he’s helping the girls, too. They make a few bucks, dance a little, have a few drinks, and on top of that, they get to spend the evening letting famous actors and directors flirt with them. Good, harmless fun, and one or two of them even get a walk-on role out of the deal.
“Some of the men can be a little bit coarse, a little rough, but most of them just like a night out with pretty women who aren’t their wives.
“But your father isn’t good at saying no, especially not to these people, and word gets around. The parties get wilder, things have to be hushed up, girls have to be paid off. Some won’t go to the parties anymore, and a few won’t even return your father’s phone calls. Then Conrad Donahue comes along. And I’m sure you think he’s the most handsome man alive. Everyone does, himself included. But he is not exactly known for playing nicely with others. Especially not women.
“Your father makes arrangements for some girls to show up at a party. Three go in, one comes out. So if he seems a little on edge lately, that’s why.”
“But what does Annie have to do with it?” I asked, stretching my legs, which had begun to go numb during Jerry’s story. “She wasn’t even there.”
“An operation like this depends on the girls being disposable. Girls nobody cares about. They get hurt, they disappear, and nobody asks many questions about what happened to them. Conrad thought Irma was one of those girls. But Irma and Annie have been friends for years. They look out for each other. They take care of each other. If Conrad did something to Irma, there’s no way Annie would let him get away with it.”
“Do you think she’s dead?” I asked.
“Irma’s dead, I’m sure of that. I’m sure she died that night, and I’m just as sure that Conrad killed her, and that no one will ever find her body unless Conrad decides he wants it found.”
I thought about the photographs from my father’s safe. Two of the women I recognized, but I’d never seen the other girls. Now I was almost certain that the girls in the pictures were Annie’s friend Irma Martin and the runaway who’d been at the party with her. The woman in the picture holding the apple, the one who’d reminded me of an exhausted, angry Snow White. She was my sister’s friend. Or at least what passed for a friend.
“What about the other girl?” I asked. Even with the wig and makeup, I could still picture her face exactly. “What happened to her?”
Jerry looked over his shoulder, then leaned in so close I could feel his breath in my ear.
“Alice, she’s alive,” he whispered. “She saw everything, and she’s still out there somewhere. Annie was hiding her away somewhere no one could hurt her.”
“Where is she now?”
“That’s just it. I haven’t the faintest idea. I don’t know what she looks like; I don’t even know her name. I’ve watched Annie help a lot of girls, but she’s never acted like that before.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like protecting that girl was her own personal mission,” Jerry said. “I thought she was being paranoid, but she was right to be. The night Annie was attacked—that was the appointment she didn’t show up for. She was supposed to bring the girl to me, and then the three of us were going to go to the police together. But something went bad. Someone else found out what Annie was up to.”
“My father?”
“Whatever bad blood was between them, I have a hard time imagining that he’d have his own daughter killed. But if this comes out, there’s no way it doesn’t touch him. Him and all the people he’s supposed to be making look good.”
“So what do we do now?”
“We need to find the girl, and fast. As long as she was with Annie, nobody—not Rex or your father or Conrad Donahue—could have found her in a hundred years. But with Annie out of the picture, she’s just a scared kid. She doesn’t know where to go or who to trust. They’ll find her in no time.”
“Well, you haven’t found her yet. Maybe Annie taught her a thing or two.”
“Maybe.”
Every Conrad Donahue movie made buckets of money, and I knew firsthand how the studio people fell over themselves keeping him happy. My father wasn’t an isolated case. People generally liked making themselves indispensible to famous people. And if that familiar, million-dollar face showed up at your doorstep and asked, “Have you seen this girl?” how could you resist telling him what you knew? It was a testament to Annie’s craftiness and knowledge of the city’s hard-to-find nooks and crannies that the girl had stayed hidden this long, and I was proud of her for it.
I thought over what Jerry had told me, then asked, “Do you know where Annie was living?”
Jerry shook his head. “She would never have hidden her there.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “What if there’s something else there?”
“I’ve been through everything with a fine-tooth comb already.”
“That’s just it,” I said. “Annie keeps anything important in code. She always has. Or at least she used to. It could be something sitting out in plain sight.”
Jerry slapped his newspaper down on his knee so hard that I jumped.
“Don’t you get it, Alice? This is not some rinky-dink decoder ring and magnifying glass Kid Sherlock operation. This is no fantasy land, and there are no secret codes leading to runaway girls.”
I leaned forward in my chair and narrowed my eyes at Jerry.
“How do you think I found the Stratford Arms in the first place? I know Annie better than anybody, and if there’s anything in that apartment that will help find this girl, I’ll find it.”
Jerry took me by the shoulders and pushed me back in the chair, as though he was correcting my posture.
“You knew your sister better than anybody. Get it? Past tense, Alice. I bet you could rummage through every scrap of paper in that apartment and not find a thing you recognized as your sister.”
“I can help,” I said, wishing I sounded more like I believed it was true.
Jerry took his hands off my shoulder, sat back, and sighed. “Annie told me you were a good kid, that you had a nice, normal life. She was happy for you. Do you think Annie would want you mixed up in any of this?”
I pointed to the comatose body on the bed.
“What if she doesn’t know me anymore, either?” I asked.
The Annie I knew as a child was just a memory, warped at the edges and faded to dusty golds and blues. The Annie in the bed was a ghost, hollowed out inside with dark pits for eyes. But the Annie who rescued girls and navigated the Hollywood underworld was somewhere in between. The girl who worked with Jerry and taught him secret codes was someone I could try to understand, and maybe someone I could help.
“She wanted to know you,” Jerry said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Jerry chuckled. I noticed he had a habit of laughing at things he didn’t actually find funny.
“It was you, Alice. That’s how I met her. She hired me to check up on you, maybe a year or so ago. She wanted to make sure you were doing okay, that you seemed happy.”
“You followed me?”
“I didn’t peep through your window or anything. I just told her that you went to school, caught a movie now and again. You should
know. It’s your life.”
The way he said it, it didn’t sound like much to write home about.
“The funny thing is, I could have been anyone. She picked my name at random out of the phone book. I could have been out sick with the flu that day. Her finger could have landed somewhere else on the page. But it didn’t. And now here we are.”
“Are you sorry?”
“That’s the other funny thing,” he said. “I’m not.”
It was a strange thing to say, yet somehow I knew what he meant.
“Annie’s special.”
Jerry nodded. “She is.”
We sat there by Annie’s bed, neither one of us saying a word. After a long moment, Jerry cleared his throat and met my eyes.
“I’m sorry I said you didn’t know your sister anymore,” he said. “It wasn’t very nice, and it’s not true.”
“It’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. I was halfway to believing it myself.
“People change, but the thing is, they don’t. Not all the way through.”
He looked at her for a moment more, then stood up, put on his hat, and went to the door. I thought he was about to leave without saying good-bye, but then he froze in the doorway and turned around to face me, a strange expression on his face.
“Tell me again how you wound up at the Stratford Arms,” he said.
I explained breaking into my father’s office, finding the postcard, and how it had led me to Ruth’s bungalow.
When I’d finished, he let out a sigh, then motioned for me to follow him.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll pull the car around.”
I cocked my head to the side, not sure I’d heard him correctly.
“You want me to come with you?”
He nodded, looking like he was already thinking better of it.
“There might be something I could use your help with after all, Alice.”
Jerry’s car was a two-seater Plymouth, the kind traveling salesmen favored because it had a big trunk for hauling vacuum cleaners and sets of encyclopedias. In any case, it was a good car for people who traveled alone and carried a lot of baggage with them.
“Get in,” he said.
We crossed the river, and downtown Los Angeles rose up from the horizon like some mountain kingdom blanketed in clouds and mist. As we got closer, it wasn’t half so magical. The buildings that peeked through the smog were squat and derelict with fire escapes bolted on the front, and ads for chewing tobacco painted on the sides. When we turned onto Main Street, the first thing I saw was a man in a stained undershirt holding up his pants with one hand and making violent gestures with the other. On the opposite corner, I spotted the target of his abuse, a white-haired man who was trying to sweep the sidewalk in front of a small grocery. He looked so frail and hunched that it would have been a long job, even if the gutters had not been overflowing with cigarette butts, bottles, and other, much worse things.
Jerry parked the Plymouth in front of the store and nodded to him.
“Hi, Otto.” He pointed to the man in the stained undershirt, now reeling across the street with malevolent but unsteady purpose. “This guy giving you a hard time?”
Otto shrugged. “He knows I don’t sell bottles on credit. Never keeps him from asking, though.”
“Somebody should tell him to ask nicer,” Jerry said.
We positioned ourselves on either side of the old man and stared down the man in the stained undershirt. He sized us up and decided we didn’t look like much of a threat.
“Sell me a drink, or I’ll break your face.”
Jerry put a nickel in the drunk’s hand and folded his fingers around it. “Get yourself a cup of coffee, fella. Later, if you still feel like it, you can come back and break this old man’s face.”
His voice was gentler than I’d ever heard it before, but there was a coil of steel running through it.
The man started to make a nasty remark, thought better of it, lurched forward a step or two, regained his balance, and then stumbled off down the street.
Otto shrugged his thanks. “No need for you to get involved. I had him.”
Jerry winked at him. “I don’t doubt it.”
Otto grunted, and went back to his sweeping. “You’re here to see her, I suppose.”
Jerry nodded. “You seen her lately?”
Was it my imagination, or did Otto’s face seem to droop as he shook his head?
“Not for ages. If you see her, you tell her Otto is trying not to have hurt feelings that she doesn’t pay rent in person anymore. You tell her not to be a stranger next time, okay?”
Suddenly, Otto noticed me and grinned broadly. “And who is your lovely assistant?”
“Nobody you ever saw,” Jerry said, touching a finger to the side of his nose.
Otto returned the gesture as Jerry slipped a five-dollar bill into his palm. “Never saw her in my life.”
We walked into the alley next to the shop, and Jerry led me up a rickety wooden flight of stairs that seemed to have been tacked onto the wall as an afterthought. The stairs creaked under our weight, and I held my breath as we ascended to the second, third, and fourth floors. Finally, Jerry opened the landing door and we stepped into a comparably sturdy hallway. Jerry stopped in front of the next-to-last doorway and opened it with a key he pulled out of his pocket.
“She’d kill me if she knew I let you see this place,” he said.
It wasn’t much of a place.
Most of the floor space was taken up by a twin cot piled high with blankets, and a fiberboard chest of drawers. There was a small, rust-stained sink crammed into a corner beneath a window that let in an anemic ray of sunlight. The cheeriest things about the room were the two coat hooks on the wall, as though years before some glass-half-full kind of tenant had installed them thinking that if he had no place for his guests to sit, well, at least he’d have somewhere for them to hang their coats.
Jerry sat down on the cot and gestured to the room in all its shabby glory.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Have a look around. See if you can find anything I missed.”
I pulled open the top dresser drawer and inhaled sharply. It was filled with blouses and sweaters and camisoles, all stacked in neatly folded piles. Annie’s things. I reached out to touch them, carefully, as though they held some kind of magic, having been chosen by her, touched by her. A lump rose in my throat.
But then the breath I’d taken registered in my brain, and I knew something wasn’t right. The clothes all smelled of mothballs. My eyes fell on a peach-colored sweater—Annie loathed the color and never would have worn it. As I burrowed through the clothes, I saw that the nicest pieces were stacked on top. Beneath them were cotton shifts in indiscriminate sizes and styles, stained slips, blouses with torn sleeves. Clothes that could have been bought cheaply and by the sackful for a quarter or two.
I got on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. There, I saw a hot plate with a frayed cord, and a stack of paperback novels with the same mothball smell as the clothing in the dressers. I paged through some of them, but found nothing except mildew in the bindings.
Jerry was right. There was nothing here, and certainly nothing that had ever belonged to my sister.
“Annie never lived here,” I said.
“You’re a quicker study than me,” he said. “But this is the only address she ever gave me. Like I said, she moved around a lot. As far as I can figure, this was the address she used when she had to give one out. She and Otto had some kind of arrangement—she paid rent on time, and he didn’t ask any questions, like why she never seemed to be here.”
“So, there’s just enough here to make someone who didn’t know Annie very well think that they’d found her place.”
“Bingo.” Jerry nodded. “She even planted a couple of false leads here and there, just so a nosy snoop didn’t have to walk away empty-handed. I spent an hour or so running down a fake locker combination she’d written inside one of those books before I re
alized what she was up to.”
“Really?” My eyes lit up. “Can I see it?”
He handed me a particularly unloved and waterlogged-looking dime novel, and indicated the address and numbers penciled in the margin. It read:
FIGUEROA YWCA
86 64 50 77
“I had to get a lady friend of mine to test out the combination on every lock on every locker at the YWCA on Figueroa, and believe me, she wasn’t happy about it.”
For a moment, her handwriting had the same magical quality as the clothing in her dresser when I’d first opened it. But again, I knew immediately that something was off. Unlike my father, Annie would never in a million years write a combination where it could be found by any snoop. I studied the page for a moment longer, then erupted in a giggle that almost made Jerry swallow his toothpick.
“That’s not a locker combination,” I said, digging in my purse for a paper and pen. “It’s a word.”
If you ever want them to be read, ciphers need keys. The problem with keys and code words is that they can be intercepted, guessed, and found out. People are rather predictable about things like that. They pick their dog’s name, their birthday, their phone number. But if your key is too obscure, the person you want to decrypt it can’t—unless you find another way to give them the key.
The beauty of Annie’s key was that it hid in plain sight. Jerry saw a locker room at the Young Women’s Christian Association on Figueroa Street. I saw everything I needed to crack the code.
The most basic, simple way of making a cipher that turns letters into numbers is to start with a Polybius square:
This creates a chart that gives every letter of the alphabet a two-digit number to stand in for it. A is 11; Z is 55. ALICE becomes 11 31 24 13 15.
The problem with a Polybius square by itself is that it’s too easy to figure out. A is always 11; Z is always 55. You don’t have to see many of these before you’re fluent in them. So you have to make things a little bit more interesting.
