Dead to Me

by Mary McCoy

  “Why are you telling me that?”

  “Because I don’t want you to think her life is ugly,” Cy said. “I saw your face when I told you she worked at Marty’s. I just didn’t want you to think that was all there was to it.”

  “I don’t think that,” I said, even though I knew he was right. I’d been horrified at the idea of my sister sitting in a bar and flirting with men for money. It had seemed ugly to me.

  But it wasn’t the whole story, and I’d missed the last four years of it. Besides, nothing about Annie could ever be ugly.

  But that wasn’t the only thing Cy was right about.

  He barely knew me, we weren’t friends, and it was none of his business, but he’d still landed on the truth of it: I wasn’t nice. I never was. I’d pushed away the last friend I had, hidden the truth about Annie from my mother, even though I could see she was suffering. And when a boy who’d been nothing but kind to me touched my shoulder, I flinched away from him.

  I decided to pack the last few minutes away, to move someplace a little brighter.

  “Might I read to you a passage from scripture?” I asked, unfolding the newspaper and snapping the pages open. “Something from the gospel of Hedda Hopper?”

  “Oh yes, please,” Cy said.

  The tension that had settled in between us melted as I read him stories from the gossip column about whether Elizabeth Taylor would have to dye her hair for her upcoming role in Little Women, whether a certain MGM leading lady was pregnant, and whether Mickey Rooney was ruining his career. Next, I put on a high, breathy voice and fluttered my eyelashes as I read aloud to Cy about the many challenges facing a particularly vapid newlywed starlet.

  “‘I just want to be a good wife to Bobby. I never have been the kind of girl who made many pot roasts, but, boy, I sure hope I can learn!’”

  “Read another one,” Cy said, laughing as we crossed Western.

  But I didn’t have it in me. My eyes had drifted back down the page to the picture of Conrad and my father and Gabrielle and the dress that Gabrielle was wearing.

  “Cy, please stop the car,” I said, grabbing the dashboard as I turned to him. “I need to get out here.”

  I’d seen that dress before, somewhere a party dress definitely didn’t belong.

  “Are you nuts? I’m not doing that.”

  “Please, Cy, it can’t wait.”

  “I thought you needed to go to the hospital.”

  “The hospital’s not far from here. I can walk.”

  “Alice, you’re being very strange.”

  “Please trust me,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it after you get off work. You can meet me at Cedars.”

  “And you’ll be there?”

  “I promise. Just please let me out of the car.”

  Cy pulled over on Sunset Boulevard, a puzzled look on his face.

  “Are you sure about this, Alice?”

  I nodded, practically leaping out of the car.

  “Be careful,” he called after me as I slammed the door shut.

  “I will be,” I said. “I’ll see you soon, Cy.”

  As soon as he pulled away from the curb, I dashed across Sunset Boulevard, thinking about a yellow chiffon dress I’d seen dancing on a clothesline.

  That was why Ruth didn’t make sense.

  A few minutes later, I was sneaking through the overgrown courtyard at the Stratford Arms, which seemed even less hospitable in the gray hours before daybreak. As I approached Ruth’s bungalow, I dropped to my knees and crawled through the grass. There were no lights on, but I circled the building, looking for signs of movement through the windows. The bedroom window was open, and I hoisted myself up on the sill and pushed aside the gauzy white curtains that fluttered in the breeze.

  Ruth slept on her back, one arm tucked around her waist, the other raised up and cradled around her head like a ballet dancer’s pose. I lowered my feet down to the floor without a sound. She let out a dainty snore as I crept past her bed, and I began to explore the rest of the bungalow.

  It wasn’t like Irma’s place, where you could tell that once upon a time there’d been carefully chosen possessions, lovingly arranged. Here, there had been no effort to make the place homey. The living room I’d already seen, but every room was the same way. Nothing in the bedroom but a bed. One glass, one bowl, one spoon in the kitchen cupboards. A toothbrush in the bathroom.

  A woman with these possessions, a woman who ran a dirty-picture racket with Rex, who kept her drug stash on the pantry shelves, did not spend her Monday mornings washing yellow chiffon party dresses. Not for herself, anyway.

  Finally, I went into the back bedroom, the only other room I hadn’t seen. An empty bed. A slight indentation in the pillow where a head had rested, blanket and sheets pulled back.

  Then I heard a creak on the floorboards and turned to find Ruth standing behind me, ghostly in a white nightgown that hung to the floor. No wonder she could get away with sleeping with her windows open. She’d probably been awake the second my fingers touched the windowsill.

  “I wondered when you’d be coming back,” she said.

  Gabrielle had been here.

  She had been here the day when I first came to the Stratford Arms, hiding in the back bedroom while Ruth and I drank Cokes in the living room. And she’d slipped out the window when Rex went out the back door, chasing after me.

  “Sorry about that,” Ruth said with a shrug.

  If Gabrielle had fallen into Rex’s hands, she was a dead girl. If I’d fallen into Rex’s hands, well, Ruth had just met me, and we hadn’t really hit it off. I understood. Sort of.

  Irma and Millie’s building wasn’t far from the Stratford Arms; Gabrielle had stayed there. She’d stayed at Annie’s Main Street flophouse, and other places, too. Places Ruth didn’t know anything about.

  “She moves around, never more than one night in any place. But not for much longer,” Ruth said. “She’s running out of places to hide. We need to get her out of town.”

  It seemed like such a sensible thing to do that I wondered why they hadn’t done it right away. And why Ruth seemed so disappointed at the prospect.

  “Back to her parents?” I asked. Jerry had said she was a runaway. Maybe they had found a way to get her back to them.

  “Annie told me she would rather we turned her over to Conrad.” Ruth shook her head distractedly, then sighed. “What was she even doing there that night? She was supposed to be here.”

  I remembered what Jerry had told me about the way Annie could sense when to help a girl home to her parents and when the girl would be better off where she was.

  “Who’s she going to stay with? Millie?” I asked, cringing because I realized that this was the plan Ruth had in mind. Millie might have been safely out of town, but it was still no good. Her face had been plastered on the front page of too many movie tabloids. Even with a dye job and conservative clothes, she was bound to attract attention wherever she went. And I had my doubts that she would prove to resemble anything close to a fit guardian.

  “Not forever, but for now, it’s the safest place to send her. Conrad doesn’t know where Millie is, Jerry doesn’t know, you don’t know.”

  Should my word fail to convince you, go to Irma’s apartment at 6326 Lexington and lift up the floorboards under her bed.

  Suddenly, I got a horrible, hollowed-out feeling in my chest, and the sour taste of bile rose in the back of my throat. I half sat, half fell onto the bed as I thought about Millie’s letter. Conrad had read all of it, and the second he and his goons had finished dealing with my father, I knew exactly where they’d be going.

  I believe what you find there will be of interest.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Ruth held her hand to my forehead, brushing back the damp strands of hair that stuck there.

  “Is there any chance that Gabrielle is at Irma’s apartment right now?” I said.

  Her hand dropped from my forehead, and she lifted me up by my elbow. “Alice, I don
’t know. I lost track of her after she ran away from Rex.”

  I didn’t know whether she was telling me the truth or not.

  “If she’s there, you have to get her out!” I shouted, breaking free of her grasp. “There’s some kind of evidence under Irma’s bed, and Conrad knows about it. He’s probably headed there right now!”

  Looking almost ill, Ruth shoved me aside and ran from the room. I followed her to the other bedroom, where I found her already out of her nightgown and tugging a dress over her head.

  When she saw me standing in the doorway, she said, “Want to do something useful?”

  I nodded.

  “Start the car, the blue Lincoln out front. Wanda keeps the keys in the green bowl on her desk.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” I said, feeling like a baby.

  Ruth gave me a poisonous look as she reached behind her back to zip up the dress. “What can you do?”

  Rather than stand there and be sneered at, I ran out the front door and up the sidewalk to the large bungalow that served as Wanda’s office. This time, I was careful of the screen door and closed it quietly behind me. The bowl was buried under a pile of newspapers and movie magazines, all clipped for Wanda’s macabre scrapbook, but the keys were there, just like Ruth said they would be. I snatched them and ran down the sidewalk and out the Stratford Arms gates. The Lincoln was right where Ruth said it would be, too.

  In fact, everything was right where Ruth said it would be, except Ruth. After five minutes had gone by, I took the key out of the ignition and went back to check on her.

  She was long gone, out the back door, and I didn’t know why I’d expected otherwise. I stepped outside and saw what I hadn’t during my last visit. A hard-packed dirt lane ran behind the row of stuccoed buildings, all the way to the road. I could see the tire tracks, and even a city girl like me could tell they were fresh.

  Why had my sister been working with this prickly, lying girl?

  No, I thought, correcting myself. Girl wasn’t the right word for Ruth. It wasn’t the right word for any of them. Girls had someone to take care of them. Annie took care of herself. Girls cried when boys broke their hearts. Ruth didn’t look like she’d cry even if one broke her hand. Girls fluttered about like canaries in a cage. Millie had packed up her entire life in an afternoon and gotten out of town. Their lives were hard—too hard for some of them—but they were free, too, and none of them seemed to be afraid of anything.

  I didn’t exactly like Ruth, but I admired her a little bit.

  Feeling more useless than I’d ever felt before, I turned around and went back into the kitchen, sitting down at the table to collect my thoughts. I could go back to Millie and Irma’s building, but why? If I’d just stayed out of things, none of this would have happened. Ruth knew it, too, and it was no wonder that she wanted me as far away from her as possible. I couldn’t save anyone, couldn’t help anyone, and I certainly couldn’t stop people like Conrad and Rex from doing any twisted, wicked thing they liked.

  So why did Millie give you the letter, then? Why did Annie send you that postcard? You didn’t stumble onto those things by accident. They’d meant for you to have them. They knew what would need to be done, and probably in some way, they knew they wouldn’t be around to do it themselves. You might not be the best girl for the job, but you’re the only one they have.

  I still didn’t know what to do, but one thing was clear in my mind—I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.

  Ruth didn’t have a phone, but I knew that Wanda did. Back up the sidewalk I went, hoping that she wasn’t an early riser. The sky was still gray, but streaked now with ribbons of pink and gold light.

  I unearthed the telephone from Wanda’s desk, picked up the receiver, and dialed the police. I knew Annie’s friends seemed skittish about the police, but I didn’t know where else to turn. And even dirty cops would respond to a burglary in progress. I gave the dispatch Millie and Irma’s apartment address, and threw in Rex’s description for good measure. When she asked my name, I hung up. And then, outside the gates of the Stratford Arms, I taught myself how to drive. I’ll say this for it: it wasn’t the hardest thing I’d done in the past twenty-four hours.

  I flipped the ignition switch on, pushed the starter button, and tapped my foot on the accelerator, just like I’d seen my father do a hundred times. The only problem was, when I did it, nothing happened. I tried again, and each time, the engine wheezed and chugged but wouldn’t start. I beat my hands against the steering wheel in frustration and wished I’d been paying more attention during my sixteen years of being driven around in cars. Suddenly, a little wisp of conversation drifted into my head. Cassie’s father had been teaching her to drive this spring, even if he wouldn’t let her leave the driveway. I remembered one night when I was sitting in my room with the window open and hearing his panicked, half-yelled instructions. “Just a little gas, then pull out the choke. That’s enough! Stop! No! Well, now you’ve flooded the engine, Cassie.”

  With Mr. Jurgens’s nasal Midwestern voice in my mind, I tried again. I pulled out the choke, and the engine wheezed again, but this time, it turned over and the car started. As the car idled, I applied myself to the task of getting the thing in gear, which was easy once I figured out the difference between the brake and the clutch. I put the car in the lowest gear, tapped my foot on the accelerator again, and the car jerked away from the curb.

  I won’t say I drove well, or that the ride was smooth, but I only stalled out three times. All the same, I was glad there weren’t many other cars on the road, early as it was. I parked around the corner from Irma’s and Millie’s apartments, then navigated my way through a maze of alleys, backyards, and parking garages, approaching the building from the rear.

  I wasn’t the first to arrive. As I hunkered down in the mass of shrubs beneath the pepper trees, I saw Rex dash up the stairs. The man with the blue polka-dot suspenders stood at the foot of the stairs pretending to read a newspaper and looking about as natural as a smiling undertaker. It didn’t help that the front of his shirt was spattered with a fine spray of blood. I wondered whose.

  I scanned the street for the others. There was no sign of Conrad’s Rolls-Royce. Then I heard shouting coming from a second-floor window. Both voices were ones I’d heard before.

  “Hand it over!” Rex bellowed. “I know you have it.”

  “What, so you get all the credit? Get your hands off of me.”

  The moment I recognized Ruth’s voice, my heart sunk. If she was here, that meant I’d been right about Gabrielle’s hiding place. Now Gabrielle was trapped up there with Rex, and if she tried to escape, the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders would be waiting at the foot of the stairs for her.

  Or did it mean something else? The way Ruth and Rex were yelling, it didn’t sound like they were fighting over a girl. I’d assumed she was worried about Gabrielle, but maybe it was the evidence under Irma’s bed Ruth had really come running after.

  Either way, it was trouble.

  As they continued to shout at each other, a police car pulled up in front of the building and a pair of officers got out. One was skinny and freckle-faced with red hair. The other was sandy-haired and more solidly built, the beginnings of a gut spilling over his belt. They walked up to Conrad’s man, who put down his newspaper and bid them a good morning. The police officer pointed up toward the second-floor apartment windows and asked the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders something I couldn’t hear.

  The man in the blue polka-dot suspenders whispered something to the two police officers, and I watched in disbelief as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of cash. He peeled several bills off and handed a healthy pile of cash to each of the officers, then winked and laid a finger on the side of his nose. The sandy-haired cop returned the gesture, the thin one tipped his cap, and without another word between them, the officers turned to go back to their car.

  No wonder Annie had worried about turning Gabrielle over to the cops
.

  Just as the officers were pocketing the money, though, I heard the creak of rusty metal coming from above. I craned my neck and peered through the branches of the pepper trees to see a petite figure in ill-fitting clothes climbing down the side of the building on the fire escape. A thick tangle of hair hid the side of her face, but I didn’t need to see it to know that this was Gabrielle. Somehow, she’d gotten out of the apartment without being seen, but climbing down the side of the building, she was exposed. From where he stood, the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders wouldn’t have been able to see her, but if he took even a few steps closer to my hiding place, she’d come into view. If he spotted Gabrielle, there wouldn’t be anywhere for her to go, and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.

  I held my breath as the police officers walked to their car, hoping the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders would stay where he was, his eyes fixed on the officers, hoping nothing would give Gabrielle away.

  Suddenly, there was a crash from the second-floor window. Ruth screamed and a gunshot rang out from inside the apartment building. The two police officers looked at each other, then ran back toward the apartment, guns unholstered. One circled around the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders while the other started toward the stairs.

  Conrad’s man whistled loudly, and I heard footsteps slapping down the steps. Rex emerged into the sunlight, pushing Ruth along in front of him.

  “Search her, boss,” Rex said to the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders. “She’s got the goods.”

  Each of the officers drew their weapons and dropped to one knee, shoulders squared to line up their shots.

  “Let go of the girl,” said the bigger one with the sandy hair.

  I burrowed in as best I could behind the row of stones. On my belly, I crawled through the bushes, hoping I could make it to the relative safety of the overgrown backyards where I could at least stand up and run if bullets started flying.

  They exchanged a short glance, then Rex pushed Ruth to the side and gave the officers what might have once been a charming smile without putting down his gun. The man with the polka-dot suspenders smiled, too, and released his grip on the gun, letting it dangle off his thumb. With his free hand, he slowly reached into his pocket, pulled something from it, and tossed it so it landed in front of the two officers.