by Mary McCoy
The older cop burst out laughing. The younger, redheaded cop looked confused until his partner picked it up and shoved it in front of his face. The man in the blue polka-dot suspenders had thrown down an LAPD badge, just like the ones they wore. The younger man’s eyes grew wide, and he opened his mouth to stammer out an apology.
Rex shot him in the chest before he could get it out.
Before the other officer could register what had happened, the man in the polka-dot suspenders drew up his gun and fired a shot into his head.
For a moment, everything seemed to happen in slow motion—the bullets whizzing through the air, the men falling to the ground. But the blood pooled on the sidewalk so fast, more blood than I’d ever seen at once, more than I’d known could come out of a person. Just as fast, Rex grabbed Ruth and all three of them piled into a black car parked in front of the building and peeled off down the street.
I looked up at the fire escape, but there was no sign of Gabrielle.
I ran from my hiding place. One officer was already dead, his gray eyes motionless and wide open. His partner was still alive, though. He lay on his back, clutching at his chest and sucking for breath. I peeled off my sweater and pressed it to the wound.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
My sweater was already soaked through and hadn’t even slowed the bleeding, so when he lifted a hand from his side, I took it. It seemed to calm him somewhat, and the wet, heaving breaths grew easier and farther apart. I sat with him until his eyelids fluttered for the last time before falling shut for good.
My hands began to shake, and I couldn’t make them stop. The shaking spread up my arms, into my shoulders, and down my legs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said over and over as I rocked back and forth.
How long Jerry had been standing there, how much he had seen, I didn’t know, but suddenly he was kneeling beside me, his arms wrapped around my shoulders so tightly that when I shook against them, it was like waves breaking on a rock. Gently, he unwrapped my fingers from around the dead man’s hand.
“You’re here,” I said.
“Of course I’m here,” he said, staring at the cuts and bruises on my face.
Jerry pulled me to my feet, but when he started to run toward the bushes, I froze in place.
“Come on, Alice,” he said, tugging on my arm. “We have to go.”
He was right. I knew that, but all I could do was look back over my shoulder at the bodies on the sidewalk and think about how the police officer’s last breaths had sounded, the way his hand loosened its grip on mine as he died.
“Alice.” Jerry’s voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of a dream. “There’ll be more police here any minute.”
“Gabrielle,” I said, looking up to the fire escape she’d climbed down just a minute before. “She was here, Jerry.”
Tears filled my eyes, and I fought the urge to sit down on the pavement and sob. Gabrielle had come so close to falling into Conrad’s hands, and I hadn’t been able to help her. She was still out there on her own, and it wouldn’t be long before they were on her trail again.
From the things Rex had been shouting, it sounded like Ruth had managed to collect whatever piece of evidence Millie had hidden in the lockbox under Irma’s bed, but she was in a car with Conrad’s cronies. It wouldn’t be long before they forced it out of her hands.
And worst of all, two men were dead.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think straight. My head felt like it was full of tangled string, and every thread I picked up led to a giant knot in the space where my brain should be. There was one thread, though, that spooled out yard after yard after yard—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
They were both the right age to have been soldiers not so long ago. It seemed cruel to think that they’d escaped German and Japanese and Italian bullets, only to be brought down by American ones. And I’d as good as killed both of them.
“It’s my fault the police were there,” I said, my breath coming in gasps as I tried to hold back the scream I could feel rising in my throat. “I called them. I told them to come.”
Jerry dragged me through the shrubs and around to the back of the apartment building so at least we were out of view.
“Alice, tell me about Gabrielle,” he said patiently. “Is that the girl Annie was protecting? She was here?”
I stammered out what I’d seen. I told him about the fire escape, about Rex shouting for the man in the blue polka-dot suspenders to search Ruth before shoving her into their getaway car.
“It’s not too late,” Jerry said when I’d finished talking. “We can still find her, but we need to move fast. Can you do that, Alice?”
He looked at me with concern, and I nodded. Then he reached inside his coat pocket and drew out a Kodak Brownie camera.
“I found this under Irma’s bed,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder. “Conrad doesn’t have it, he doesn’t have Gabrielle, and he’s not going to. Now, let’s go.”
I stared at him, stunned by what he’d just shown me. I’d doubted Jerry, believed the things that Millie had told me, and yet, when I needed him most, there he was.
“How did you find me?” I asked. “How did you know I was here?”
“Not now,” he said. “We don’t have much time to look for her.”
Together, we set off through a row of hedges. We cut through the backyards at breakneck speed, searching every garden, shrub, alley, and derelict shed on the block without success. As we neared the street Jerry slowed to a walk and peered up and down the sidewalk, looking for any signs of danger before we stepped out into the open. A few yards away, I saw his beat-up Plymouth.
“Act natural,” he said.
We walked down the sidewalk at a leisurely pace, like we were two ordinary people out for an early morning stroll. However, our talk was anything but small.
“We should check bus stops,” I said, thinking back to my escape from Griffith Park the night before. “Streetcar stations.”
“Good idea,” Jerry said.
We got in the Plymouth and drove, zigzagging through the streets of Hollywood, as far as Gabrielle could have run in the ten minutes or so since she’d climbed down the fire escape. First, we checked the main streets: Sunset, Vine, Santa Monica Boulevard. When we didn’t find her waiting for a bus or a streetcar, we took to the less-trafficked streets.
“I called Cy at Marty’s an hour or so ago,” Jerry said, steering the Plymouth down a sleepy residential street. “That’s how I found you. He told me you jumped out of his car at the corner of Sunset and Western at four thirty in the morning for no reason. I could only think of two places you’d be going from there.”
“Ruth’s place or Millie and Irma’s,” I said.
“I went to both.”
“So did I.”
We could drive more slowly on these streets without attracting attention. I peered out the passenger-side window, under cars, behind fences, between houses, but there was no sign of Gabrielle anywhere. It was like she’d just disappeared.
After a few more minutes, Jerry turned to me and said, “We can’t keep doing this much longer, Alice.”
I wanted to argue with him. It felt wrong to give up the search when we were this close, but this time, I knew he was right. If Gabrielle had managed to catch a streetcar, she could have been two miles away. She could have been hiding in a backyard we’d missed. She could have been anywhere, and we were out of time.
Someone would have found the two bodies on the sidewalk. The police would be on their way. They’d find my sweater at the crime scene. They’d start combing the neighborhood for suspicious cars.
And if they found us, there would be no hiding my hands, the front of my shirt, the tips of my shoes, all smeared with a dead police officer’s blood.
“Where are we going?” I asked. We were heading south now, away from Hollywood.
“My office,” Jerry said. “I’ll feel better once we get you cl
eaned up and I have the film in this camera developed.”
As we neared downtown, Jerry swerved into a narrow alley, dinging a trash can with his fender. Instead of slowing down, he pushed the gas pedal to the floor. Finally, we stopped near the back entrance of a seedy brownstone that might have once been someplace comparatively nice, maybe a state mental hospital or a women’s prison. Jerry parked the car in the alley, and I followed him inside.
We took the stairs to the fourth floor. Jerry unlocked the door to an office at the top of the stairs, then handed me the keys to the washroom at the end of the hall.
“Come back to my office when you’re finished,” he said. “I’ll be in the darkroom.”
After locking myself in the washroom, I peeled off my shirt and ran it under the faucet, scrubbing soap into the fabric until the bloodstains faded to pink. Then I scrubbed my shoes, my hands, and my arms before getting dressed again.
As I studied my face and my sodden clothes in the washroom mirror, I thought about my father and wondered what kind of shape he was in at that moment. It was morning, seven or eight hours since he’d made his escape from the trunk of Conrad’s car. Where had he run from there? Conrad’s cronies had made their way out of the park in that time and gone over to Irma’s apartment. Did that mean they’d found my father, or that they’d given up looking?
I closed my eyes and pictured him running out of the park toward Hollywood Boulevard, just like I had. I hoped that was how it’d happened. Even if I couldn’t imagine what might have happened to him after that.
When I went back to Jerry’s office, there was percolator coffee brewing on a hot plate, a clean mug drying on the edge of the sink for me.
And Cy, staring out the window that looked onto a fire escape and another seedy brownstone.
When I opened the office door, he jumped and nearly knocked over the percolator. Jerry’s office was about the same size as one of my mother’s closets, and Cy crossed it in two steps. For a moment, I thought he was going to hug me, but he seemed to think better of it when he saw my soaking-wet shirt. Instead, he took my hand and squeezed it.
“I was so worried, Alice.”
“I’m here now.” I squeezed his hand back. “And I’m fine.”
“Why didn’t you go to the hospital? After Jerry called me, I tried to get ahold of your friend Cassie there, and she said you never showed up. Then I went by your house, and after that, I just drove up and down Sunset Boulevard looking for you.”
Behind what looked like a closet door, I heard a thump and a clatter, followed by swearing.
“Everything’s okay. Don’t come in,” Jerry shouted once he’d recovered himself. “Light will ruin the film.”
Cy continued. “When I couldn’t think of anyplace else you might be, I came here. I thought maybe Jerry had found you.”
I took the mug from the sink and poured myself coffee from the percolator. I needed it badly.
“How’d you get in?” I asked, taking a sip.
“Let myself in,” Cy said, pulling a huge ring of keys from his pocket. There was probably one for every job he had, or had ever had.
“You’re supposed to be at work right now, aren’t you?”
“I went to Marty’s for an hour or so before Jerry called, but I wasn’t exactly in a toilet-scrubbing state of mind. Mostly I just paced around the bar worrying about you,” he said. “Alice, I’m so sorry. I never should have let you get out of the car like that. I should have gone with you.”
Looking at Cy’s tired face and bloodshot eyes, I remembered I wasn’t the only one who had been up all night. I handed him my mug of coffee.
“No, you shouldn’t have,” I said. I wouldn’t have wished the things I’d seen that morning on anyone. “I’m glad you’re here now, though.”
Too tired to stand another minute, I took a seat on the window-sill. Cy sat down next to me, and we passed the mug of coffee back and forth, sipping quietly, until Jerry emerged from the darkroom. A heady brew of developing solutions wafted out.
Jerry unclipped the freshly developed negatives from the wire where they’d been drying, and brought them over to the window.
“Let’s see what we have,” he said, holding the negatives up to the light.
We all gathered in close and studied them, one image after another. None of us lasted more than a few seconds. Cy gasped. I covered my mouth with the back of my hand. Jerry looked away.
The pictures were dark and hard to make out, but then I guessed that whoever took them hadn’t dared use a flash. In the first, Conrad Donahue punched my sister in the face. In the second, Rex swung a baseball bat at her. Her back arched from the force of the blow, her arms lifted out to the sides as if she was about to take flight. In the third, Conrad kicked Annie in the stomach while she lay huddled on the ground.
“Thank god we found these first,” Jerry said, his voice hardly above a whisper.
“How did you get them?” Cy asked.
I wondered myself. Jerry had never seen Millie’s Open If I Am Dead or Missing letter, so I wondered how he’d known to look under the floorboards.
“Annie told me about that hiding spot in Irma’s apartment a long time ago. She just happened to mention it in conversation—she thought it was neat,” Jerry said. “The way Millie was watching that apartment like a hawk—when she should have been getting out of town—made me think there was something up there she didn’t want me getting my hands on.”
Jerry continued. “Better me than Conrad, though. I think even Millie would agree with that.”
“What about the pictures?” I asked. “Who took them?”
“My guess is Millie. If Annie didn’t trust the meeting enough to bring Gabrielle, maybe she thought something was going to go bad. Maybe this was her insurance.”
Stunned, I took the negatives from him and held them up to the light again.
“Why wouldn’t she just call the police?”
“Annie was supposed to be meeting the police. I didn’t know it was a setup,” Jerry said quietly. “I never told anyone except the cop she was supposed to meet. But maybe there’s really nobody left in the department we can trust anymore. I didn’t even know Walter Hanrahan was dirty until I saw him shoot a man in cold blood this morning.”
“Who’s Walter Hanrahan?” I asked.
Jerry cleared his throat, and I remembered that I could narrow down the number of police officers who had shot a man in cold blood that morning to exactly one.
Hanrahan. So that was his name. I’d wanted to trust him last night in the hills, taken his polka-dot suspenders as some sign of genial goodwill. Of course I had. He was my friendly neighborhood police officer. Looking trustworthy was his business.
Jerry rapped his knuckles on the desk. “I say if we can’t go to the police, we go to the papers. The pictures nail Conrad and Rex for what they did to Annie. It’ll be safe for Gabrielle then. She won’t have to hide anymore.”
“She won’t be safe. She’ll be in more danger than ever if we turn over those pictures,” Cy said, shaking his head. “Jerry, has it occurred to you that maybe the reason you haven’t found Gabrielle by now is that she doesn’t want to be found?”
Jerry looked baffled. “Don’t you want justice for Irma and Annie?”
“I’d rather get Gabrielle out of town in one piece.”
They continued to argue, but their voices became indistinct and turned to white noise in my ears. They were talking about a future where Gabrielle could come out of hiding or get out of town, but it didn’t change the fact that we needed to find her first. She wasn’t safe yet, and what Ruth had told me a few hours before was more true than ever—Gabrielle was running out of places to hide.
I wondered where Annie told her to go if things went bad. If Gabrielle was really desperate, where would she turn? Jerry? Cy? Me?
“I need someone to take me to the hospital,” I said, interrupting Jerry and Cy’s argument in midsentence.
It hit me all at once where Gabriel
le had been headed when she climbed down the fire escape. If things got this bad, if she had nowhere else to turn, if everyone she knew to trust was gone, there was only one option.
Gabrielle would go to Annie.
“Are you okay?” Jerry asked.
Millie had been hiding Gabrielle, too, and she knew Annie was in the hospital. If the girl had asked, I was sure Millie would have told her where my sister was—maybe even what had happened to her.
“I-I think that’s where she is.”
It sounded so possible when it was only in my head. Once the words were out of my mouth, though, I didn’t feel half so sure of them.
Jerry wasn’t convinced, either.
“You need sleep, Alice. You’re not making any sense,” Jerry said. “Even if Gabrielle decided to go to the hospital, how would she know which one?”
“I’ll take you,” Cy interjected, but Jerry wasn’t finished.
“And even if she did find her, what good would it do? Your sister isn’t in any position to help her now.”
Cy and I both turned on him, our eyes narrowed.
“Do you have any better ideas?” Cy asked.
“Are you saying we shouldn’t look for her?” I asked.
Jerry threw up his hands.
“Look for her,” he said. “By all means, look. You should. Maybe your luck will be better than mine.”
“Do you want to go with us?” I asked.
Jerry shook his head. “I’m going to stay here and make prints of these negatives for the newspapers. I know you don’t like it, Cy, but I still think it’s the best chance we have.”
Cy shifted his feet, a thoughtful look on his face as he considered his next words.
“No, I get it,” he said. “If you go to the papers with dirt like this on Conrad Donahue, there’s going to be blowback. Just make sure you’re ready for it.”
“I have to go,” I told Jerry, feeling disloyal for leaving him here. “I have to look for her.”
