by Mary McCoy
It’s just the three of us now. After my father was relieved of his duties at Insignia Pictures, he was relieved of them at home as well. My mother sent him packing, and to his credit, he didn’t try to fight her. Unburdening his soul at the Hollywood Precinct about the things he’d done seemed to have left him a changed man.
At least for a few weeks.
Once it became clear that he’d actually face trial for his crimes, his guilty conscience began to have second thoughts. He’d worked Hollywood magic so many times before for his troubled stars; now he began to conjure a little for himself. Nervous executives from Insignia Pictures materialized and began greasing palms, and just like that, the pandering charges were dropped; nobody ever remembered my father going anywhere near Rex’s dirty-picture ring, and all that was left was one charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He got a couple years of probation for that.
After that, his stock in Hollywood was reduced, but not ruined, and to a certain kind of movie studio, my father’s notoriety was something of a selling point. Last I heard, he’d gone to work at Corinthian Films, where he does steady business pushing movies about women on chain gangs and the black-market baby trade.
He gets a lot of mileage out of being the man who shot Conrad Donahue in the leg.
Good for him, I guess.
Amos Carey—who now writes for the crime beat—matched up the bullets in Conrad’s leg and in one of the dead police officers, and wrote all about it in the Herald. Rex was sunk. Both bullets had been fired from his gun, and my father had an airtight alibi—he was already in police custody when the officers were killed.
Rex had no choice but to confess. I was sure he’d point the finger at Hanrahan when he did it, but I hadn’t counted on Rex’s loyalty. He came out of the interrogation room at police headquarters with his nose broken, his eyes swollen shut, swearing up and down that he’d killed both officers himself.
The prosecutors were happy enough with that story. If anyone found it strange that the bullets pulled out of those police officers came from two different guns, that the second gun was never found, that no one ever breathed a word about sending Rex to the gas chamber at San Quentin for what he’d done, I suppose they kept those thoughts to themselves.
If you cover up a dirty cop’s crime, he can make prison a little bit easier for you. It’s in his interest to.
Jerry told me, “Alice, you make sure Hanrahan never finds out you were anywhere near Irma and Millie’s apartment that morning. Don’t get any crazy ideas.”
He doesn’t know that I told that part of the story to the policewoman that day at the station. The only thing is, nobody ever brought it up again. It was as if Detective Cobb had thrown that page away, the one part of my story she decided was simply too difficult to believe after all.
My mother invited Annie to come home again. She said it like it would be easy, but I knew better, and so did Annie. After four years out on her own, she didn’t want to go back to school, keep a curfew, or live under someone else’s roof. She did move home for a month after she got out of the hospital. It was nice to have her back, but nothing like I’d imagined. She slept more than half the day and spent hours stretching, learning how to walk without a limp, practicing the words that sometimes slurred off her tongue now if she wasn’t careful. She and I worked on those things instead of ciphers.
But once she had healed, her face beautiful as it had ever been, the limp almost imperceptible, she surprised us with the announcement that she’d found a job and a little house in North Hollywood.
This time she didn’t disappear, though I don’t see her as often as I’d like to. Sometimes she invites me out to her house, which does have a lemon tree in the backyard, and I suppose our conversation is sparkling enough. On good days, I sit down at the upright piano in her parlor and accompany her as she sings. We don’t sing show tunes anymore, though. Now Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald are our favorites. On less good days, she nags me about what I’m going to do with myself when I finish school and reminds me that I can’t keep working for Jerry forever. Annie’s gotten out of the private-detective business herself. Now she works at a music shop and gives voice lessons on the side. Sometimes I wonder how she can be happy living such an ordinary life, but for now she says it’s enough.
She comes over for dinner at our place, too. Whenever Millie’s in town, she comes over, too, bringing with her stories about all the gangsters and movie stars she’s met performing her act at the Flamingo. In Las Vegas, being Camille Grabo actually works in her favor. She’s not a laughingstock; she’s a star. She says Las Vegas is going to be bigger than Hollywood ever was. My mother, Cassie, Gabrielle, and I sit with our mouths open, hanging on every word of her stories, but Annie just shakes her head and tells Millie to be careful, for god’s sake.
After everything was over, I was amazed how quickly everyone went back to treating me like a high school sophomore without a driver’s license or any opinions worth inquiring after. Jerry was the one exception. I guess because he never knew me when that was all I was. He doesn’t let me do anything that’s actually dangerous at the office—mostly I develop film and answer the phone—but it’s still interesting.
In the weeks following Conrad’s arrest, it seemed as if everyone wanted to hire Jerry to find their stolen silver, lost cats, and faithless spouses, but most of them really only wanted stories to take back to their friends about the detective who helped bring Conrad Donahue down. Jerry never takes those people on as clients.
But there are others, too, people who come because they heard about Annie and Gabrielle. They never mention the case, but we always know when that’s what brought them. They talk about lost children, lost brothers and sisters, army buddies and sweethearts. They’re people who had given up on ever finding answers, but they all walk into Jerry’s office with the same tentative hope in their eyes. More often than not, he lives up to it.
Annie never talks about Cy, who hasn’t dared show his face in town since that day in the hospital, the same day the last of Conrad’s worthless promises blew up in his face.
It wasn’t for money that he’d done it—that came out later.
He’d done it for a part.
The movie was called The Wrong Angel, and there was a nice role in it, a kid who takes a bullet to save the leading lady just before the hero—played by Conrad, of course—bursts through the door and finishes off the villain. All Cy had to do to get it was tell Annie that the plan had changed and she was supposed to go to MacArthur Park that night.
Conrad promised he wouldn’t hurt my sister, after he’d promised the part. He only wanted to talk to her, he said, but she would never agree to a meeting.
Maybe he was very convincing.
I know it’s no good thinking about it like that. I’ll never know how Conrad persuaded Cy to betray Annie, or how easily he betrayed her.
Ruth disappeared like Cy did. Jerry says she turned in her police badge the same day they arrested Conrad. Cassie, Gabrielle, and I went to her bungalow at the Stratford Arms after everything had happened and found it abandoned. The brown couch was still there, the unhemmed serge curtains. But there was no sign of Ruth.
At first, we wondered whether she’d been killed and left in the hills somewhere like Irma. Even in jail, I had no doubt that Rex and Conrad could arrange for something like that to happen. And so could Hanrahan, for that matter.
But one day I was waiting for a bus at the corner of Wilshire and Western when Ruth pulled up next to me in Wanda’s big blue Lincoln and asked if I needed a ride home. I didn’t, but curiosity got the better of me and I got into the car with her anyway. As she drove down Wilshire, she asked after Gabrielle and Jerry and Annie, as though they were old school friends with whom she’d fallen out of touch. I caught her up as cheerfully as I could, and with as few specific details.
Without taking her eyes off the road, Ruth said, “I’m leaving town. Hanrahan came out of it okay, but he knows it was a close shave,
and the way he sees it, I’m the one holding the razor. It’s not safe for me here anymore.”
“What about my family?” I asked. While I didn’t want Ruth to come to any harm, my priorities were elsewhere. “Are we safe?”
“Hanrahan’s watching you—don’t forget that for a minute. If you’re thinking about making trouble for him, remember he could certainly make trouble for you.”
I noticed that Ruth wasn’t driving in the direction of our old house, but she wasn’t driving toward the new one in East Hollywood, either. We couldn’t afford to live in our old neighborhood on my mother’s hairdresser salary, and we were too notorious for it anyway. Now my mother, Gabrielle, and I crammed into a two-bedroom rented cottage off Melrose. While Annie stayed with us, my mother slept on the couch.
It isn’t much, but unlike our old house, it feels like a family lives there.
Ruth wove through the side streets south of Wilshire almost as if her turns were determined by the flip of a coin.
“So, are you?” Ruth asked.
“Am I what?”
“Thinking about making any trouble. Is there anything else you know that you haven’t told yet?”
She still had her cop’s instincts. She knew perfectly well there was, but getting me to tell it was another story. I thought about the phone call I’d placed from Wanda’s office, the shots I’d seen Rex and Walter Hanrahan fire in front of Irma and Millie’s apartment, the blood on the sidewalk.
“No,” I lied. “There isn’t anything else.”
“Well, then I guess you don’t have anything to worry about, do you?” Ruth said. “Anyhow, I’m glad I ran into you because I never got the chance to tell you I was sorry about Annie. For not being there to help her that night, I mean.”
I nodded.
“You’ll tell Annie I said that, won’t you?”
I said that I would, and wondered why it mattered now.
“It’s not the kind of thing you want to leave unsaid. Whether it does any good or not.”
Ruth came through for Gabrielle in the end, but she’d sacrificed something of herself along the way. There must have been so many things she’d seen and turned a blind eye to, so many people she hadn’t gone out of her way to help for fear that it would blow her cover. A person couldn’t spend that much time around the likes of Rex and Hanrahan, covering up their small sins in the hopes of finding something bigger, without being somehow damaged by it.
I thought about the things I hadn’t told Ruth and how dangerous that information could be in the wrong hands. When I put my hand to my forehead, it came away damp with sweat, and suddenly, I wanted very badly to be out of the car.
“Can you let me out here?” I asked.
“We’re nowhere near your house,” Ruth said.
“No,” I replied. “We’re not.”
She gave me a strange look but pulled over to the curb. She straightened the kerchief around her head and gave me a little wave as I got out of the car. “See you around, Alice.”
I waved back and watched as she drove away. It was west and it was into the sunset, but it wasn’t like that.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first thank-yous go to Maddie Raffel, who discovered this story at the soda counter at Schwab’s Pharmacy and got it a screen test, and to Laura Schreiber, who made it a star.
I’m also tremendously grateful to Josh Getzler and Danielle Burby for advice, encouragement, brilliant ideas, and talking me through the tough spots.
Thank you to Rachel Kitzmann, without whom this book never would have been started, and to Gwen Sharp, without whom it never would have been finished.
To my friends at the Los Angeles Public Library, thank you for all of your kindness and smarts, especially to thoughtful readers and genius fact-checkers Glen Creason, David Kelly, Christina Rice, and Jim Sherman.
Thank you to Cecil Castellucci, Kim Cooper, Kelly Loy Gilbert, Stacey Lee, Nicole Maggi, and Marc Weitz for being my encouragers, guides, inspirations, and friends.
I would never have become a writer were it not for the teachers who helped me to believe that I was one. Thank you to Christine Martuccio Mowrey, Julie MacRae, Kay Pollock, and John Warner for lighting that spark in me.
Thank you to my parents, John and Karla McCoy, for teaching me to love stories, for showing me the value of hard work, and for always encouraging me to follow my dreams. And thank you to my sister, Amy Browne, for always believing in me. If I could have picked any family in the world, I would have picked you.
Thank you to Brady Potts for a message written in code and hidden inside a necklace that I wear close to my heart. Thank you for understanding what makes me tick, and for all the times you put me before you so I could write this book.
And finally, thank you to Shelby, for keeping me company while I did.
Mary McCoy is the Senior Librarian at Teen’Scape, the young adult department at the Los Angeles Public Library. She’s also worked as a hot dog vendor, a hotel maid, a bass player, a fund-raiser for public television, and as a contributor to On Bunker Hill and the 1947project, where she wrote stories about Los Angeles’s notorious past. Mary grew up in western Pennsylvania and holds degrees from Rhodes College and the University of Wisconsin. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.
