No More Birthdays (Carol Ann Baker Crime)

by Pelzer,Lissa

  Lilly paced the sidewalk next to the entrance. She had to think straight and it was just for the next few hours, she had to concentrate on doing what she came here to do.

  When the cab came it was just a car with a magnetic sticker on the side.

  ‘Do you know the bridge in The Colorado District?’ she asked taking off her heels.

  ‘Is that a trick question?’

  She sat back, wasn’t in the mood to be sarcastic. ‘Can we stop there, please?’

  The guy didn’t reply and Lilly had to take it as a confirmation.

  ‘Actually. I need an ATM,’ she said. ‘Is there one near The Colorado Palace Hotel?’

  ‘Is that a trick question?’ The guy asked again and she didn’t answer.

  Lilly leaned forward and rubbed her hand against her forehead. She didn’t want to be like this, but he didn’t seem the type to understand. When they pulled up to the ATM she said she couldn’t reach and got out.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly and took off running as best she could with her bag over her shoulder.

  She ran to the corner and looked back. The taxicab had pulled away. The guy hadn’t even got out of the car. He must have known it wouldn’t be worth it.

  Lilly picked up her wedges and came the long way to get to the park, through the neighborhoods and past the crack shack, stopping at every corner just waiting for Davis’s wrinkly face to pop up. She came up just close enough to the street to see the emptiness and stopped. The stands and the stores were all gone now. The party was over. It was bird-on-a-wire land and she edged back into the shade of the park. She could sit here now until three o’clock until Bobby came out. But something made her unsure. His car was here, but it was only a rental. Something told her to check on him. She couldn’t just sit there, waiting out the clock while he made off. This was it. It was paying up time.

  The metal door at the back of the hotel mustn’t have slammed as loudly as she thought because no one had relocked it. Lilly went in, opened it like she was meant to be there and raised her hand to the kitchen worker in a stained apron smoking against the wall.

  ‘You lost?’ the cook asked as she walked through.

  ‘I was just out smoking,’ she told him and pushed open a swing door that led to the restaurant. She really had no idea where she was, but you had to keep your head up when this kind of thing happened. On Sea Island, when Bobby came back to the room and told her to leave for the airport, she’d done the same. She’d left her bag with him and gone down the back stairs, taken the door they had seen the room cleaners take and gone out through the grounds, not through the main gates, just acting like she knew where she was going until she got to the road.

  Bobby had told her to stay under the trees, to keep walking until she found a gas station or a restaurant. If she saw a bus, he said, she was to get on it. She could get off downtown or wherever there were taxicabs parked. He’d stuffed a fifty into her hand for the ride. And that was what she’d done.

  The restaurant at The Colorado Palace led out into the center of the lobby one way, the other way went out towards the back stairs. Lilly hovered at the doorway, inching her nose around to scope the route out. Davis was there. Davis was on one of the couches her head rhythmically scanning the room. Too rhythmically it would seem. Lilly waited for a pass and made a dash for it behind a woman in a white suit. She grabbed the banister and went on up to the third floor.

  She came to Bobby’s door and knocked.

  ‘God damn it! We have a late check-out!’ Bobby called out thru the door.

  Lilly lowered her hand and smiled. That was all she needed to know.

  She thought about knocking again, just to piss him off. But thinking of Cassandra wrapped in a white sheet, praying that the room cleaner didn’t open the door and see her in bed with this old man, Lilly left at that. She took a piece of gum out of its wrapper and gave it a chew, wrote ‘I’ll be waiting. D watching in the lobby. Take back door.’ And stuck it to the inside of the handle.

  She had two hours to wait but knew she shouldn’t be here when Bobby came out. She started down the stairs, but when she saw that shadow against the wall, she knew somehow from its stillness that it was Davis.

  Lilly turned and went quietly back up. She got in the elevator knowing at least she could walk out the front door. The elevator pinged, the door opened onto the lobby and she stepped out. Gary took her by the arm and steered her back in. He didn’t look at her, just pressed the button for the second floor and waited for the doors to close.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Just hang on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get inside.’

  Chapter 17

  Gary was driving her down the corridor, gripping her like he would squeeze and break the bone if she tried to get away. He didn’t need to bother, it wasn’t like she was going to scream or make a scene.

  ‘Take a seat,’ he said pushing the door open with his foot and dumping his man bag down on the desk. He turned around and rested his ass there. It spread out a little too easily.

  Lilly looked at the bed and decided to take a chair by the window instead.

  ‘At least you’re easy to find.’

  She waited for him to carry on, but he didn’t. ‘What the hell?’

  He pointed his finger at her like a gun. ‘Right back at ya sister! What the hell?’ His face tightened. ‘Who the hell goes out the bathroom window on a date with Terence McCoy?’

  ‘That was a date?’

  ‘What were you thinking?’ Gary slapped his forehead. ‘I thought you were into him. I thought we were on the same page.’

  She didn’t say it out loud. She didn’t point out that the guy was in his late fifties. That thinking she’d be into him was just a little bit fucked up. ‘I just… I couldn’t. Look I’m sorry if you’d arranged something, but….’ No need to be rude. This had nothing to do with her getting her money out of Bobby in a couple of hours. She wouldn’t let Gary Madison affect that.

  ‘You were acting like you were game.’

  ‘I really wasn’t trying to give that impression.’

  He counted off on his fingers. ‘How about when you came in my room on Friday night and took a shower… all rubbing yourself.’

  ‘You mean like I was taking a shower?’

  ‘Like, when I told you the deal on the way to the presentation and you said – cool.’

  ‘Did I?

  ‘Yeah, you did.’

  She turned her face away. ‘I am sorry for any embarrassment I caused. You should apologize to your friend for me, but I have to go.’ She got up.

  ‘Sit the fuck down.’ Gary pushed her back into the seat. ‘We’re not done here.’

  Lilly pulled her purse up onto her lap. There were thoughts coming at her like someone blowing bubbles at her face. Her hand fingered the plastic end of the grip.

  But what could she do that wouldn’t end up hurting her more than it hurt him? Like Bobby had said, if you pulled a gun on a man you better be willing to shoot him. Right now she could pull a gun on Gary, take Cassandra’s little pug dog out and point it at him and walk right out. But what if he just laughed at her and come at her still. She might be able to get down a fire escape to get away from a creep in the middle of the night, but after a gunshot, a few more eyes would be looking out of windows.

  ‘So what?’ she asked. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You’re lucky. I am a very reasonable man. I really only had one objective for this weekend, get Terence back in a nice, manageable relationship with a nice, appreciative young lady… and you fucked that up.’

  ‘I said, I’m sorry.’

  ‘But then you had to come to his party, at his house and bring along some little crack whore…’

  Lilly was on her feet. ‘Don’t you say that.’

  ‘Who gets herself fucked to death by a bunch of financiers…’

  The red flashed at the side of her eyeballs. She had her hands on him, but Gary was just as quick. He took her by both wrists.
/>
  ‘Don’t you fucking dare say it! That’s not her.’ Her voice was loud. She could hear it against the walls, rattling inside her own skull and he let go of one wrist and landed a hand across her face.

  The room shuddered.

  ‘Be quiet. What the hell is wrong with you?’

  Her face burnt like a flame had been blown across it by the wind and she fell back on the bed, down into the layers of pillows and blankets on the soft bedspread.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She pressed her hand to her face.

  ‘Shhh! This is a nice hotel.’

  ‘That’s not her.’

  ‘You want another one?’ He raised his hand like he wanted to.

  Lilly flinched and he came at her again, wanting her to flinch. He was straddling her now and she twisted, but his knees just pressed deeper into her hipbones.

  ‘Calm down. You want the cops in here?’

  She didn’t even mean to scream, but she did. He had a pillow in his hands and held it over her head like a threat, but she couldn’t stop. She felt the fabric against her tongue. Pain and heat built up in her jaw and temples and inside her ears as everything went beyond dark.

  As she was huffing and no air was coming.

  She was somewhere else.

  Wherever she was, Moon Face was there too.

  They were in a dark tunnel, like how she imagined the inside of an asshole must look, drifting down on a current, getting pulled and pushed around the soft bends.

  ‘What’s your date of birth?’ Moon Face was asking.

  ‘My birthday’s today,’ she said.

  ‘That makes you nineteen. Welcome to adult life.’

  ‘I’ve been doing this a while.’ She felt her eyes rolling in her head.

  ‘Doing what, dying?’

  Lilly thought about it. ‘Maybe.’

  Moon Face’s face was moving away from her. Her hand reached out, foreshortening and turning her fingertips into dots.

  ‘I’m not dying.’

  ‘It’s no big deal. Everybody does it. You can’t just keep having birthdays forever.’

  ‘I can.’

  And Moon Face was laughing at her so hard Lilly thought she’d break something. The girl bent over and seemed to snap as she folded in the middle. She drifted away like a dead wasp.

  Someone somewhere was gasping and crying. Someone else was talking. The first person was her.

  ‘Come on now,’ Gary was saying, standing over her with something in his hand. ‘You need to get a grip.’ He handed her the glass and she pushed it away, heard it bounce off wood on the other side of the room. ‘Good thing that was cheap shit.’ His voice echoed. ‘Come on now. Time to act like a big girl, stop acting like a baby.’

  But there was pain everywhere. She didn’t want to get a grip.

  ‘It’s not her,’ she said again. ‘It’s not…’ She felt for the name, not Moon Face, not Summer, but Janine, only she couldn’t say that name either. Lilly closed her eyes and saw her again, floating away. But the agony she expected to feel wasn’t there. She tried to hold onto it, thought again of what had happened, but it was like trying to pick up sand under the water.

  ‘Hey,’ Gary said. ‘No one knows who she is and that’s probably for the best.’ The bed moved as he sat down. ‘Look, I don’t really care. But you fucked up. You should have been at the presentation with me. We would have gone to the party with Terence. Instead, you brought that girl along and now we’re in the shit because of it – so you’ve got to fix it.’

  ‘I didn’t bring her. She brought herself. She got in trouble, that’s why I got kicked out.’

  ‘Either way. Doesn’t matter.’ He held up a hand. ‘At least you left and people saw you leave. Lucky for us you’d already met Terence by then, otherwise he’d still have been there when it happened.’ He shook his head. ‘I guarantee, if you’d sealed the deal with him last night, you wouldn’t be giving a shit about that girl either. You’d be with Terence, halfway to Tokyo, first class…’

  Lilly blinked.

  ‘Yeah. Not so smart now, are you?’ He knocked back the drink in his hand.

  ‘She has a name…’ Lilly said. ‘She wanted to be a writer, that’s the only reason she was doing what she was doing.’

  Gary pulled his fat bottom lip into his mouth and let it slide out. ‘Good job you picked up the message from the desk…I’m going to count my lucky stars, that’s what I’m going to do.’ And I better get you an ice pack. That was stupid of me. I’m sorry.’

  Lilly turned away. She didn’t want to hear his voice. She reached up and felt the spring of swollen skin under her eye.

  ‘What the hell was I thinking?’ He handed her a blue sports ice pack and Lilly pressed it to her face. ‘I need someone to talk to the guy at reception, just casually.’

  ‘You want me to.’

  ‘No. I’m just thinking out loud.’ He moved off to the other side of the room and Lilly picked her bag up off the floor.

  ‘The guy on reception clocked off at two-thirty last night. I asked the girl. And you were here before that! Thank fuck.’

  ‘So what?’ She put the ice pack down.

  ‘So what? Here…’ He put his drink down and pressed the ice pack back to her face himself. ‘So everything. It’s fact versus speculation. We couldn’t take Terence out the front door of his own party before it was over. We couldn’t walk him in here, sign him in at reception for everyone to see at two o’clock… Lilly!’ He grabbed her arm and she flinched. ‘You’re a grade-A pain in the ass, but right now…you’re the better of two evils. You’re the big mouthed slut the guy is with while someone else is murdering his wife.’

  She could hear him speaking, but the visions in her head were somewhere else, in a dark room, with a plastic sheet. ‘Terence didn’t do it…’ she said.

  ‘Of course he didn’t. He was here with you. They know who she was with. They’ve got their own lawyers. You don’t need to worry about them.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘You need to go public, say Terence McCoy was here in this room with you last night. That’s all. I can’t have him hanging out in a room down the hall while some girl gets it. You can’t have Terence McCoy at a party where things like that happen. After he left, things got out of hand… After he left! End of story.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She put the ice pack down again. ‘I don’t know what you expect of me, but I don’t really give a shit about Terence-fucking-McCoy.’

  And Gary lifted his hand and she flinched and ducked and raised her arm and realized there was a difference between men like Bobby and men like Gary.

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t ‘go public’. Sorry, you’ve picked the wrong girl this time, for sure.’

  ‘I didn’t pick anyone, sister. You’ve picked yourself. You’re going to play it like this. You’re going to go into the police department down here and say you saw her wasted at the party and you spoke to her. They want to know who she is and they’re going to start asking you question - who you are, why you were there, when you came when you left.’ He grabbed her wrists again. ‘Then it’s just going to fall out of your mouth. ‘Terence McCoy, you, him, here… Time and date. Got it? It’ll get leaked. Small town cops need the money. The reception guy will get hounded and it’ll be confirmed. Terence McCoy wasn’t even in the building… And if any magazines or websites even mention his name in the same sentence as the incident, we’ll sue the shirts off their damn backs.’

  ‘You should just ask someone else. I don’t think I’m that believable.’

  ‘There isn’t anyone else. You were the only one seen talking to him.’

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s not going to work. I didn’t really know her.’ She could go into a cop shop. Davis would be there in a minute.

  ‘Hey, concentrate please. It’s not about some girl. It’s about you being with Terence ‘fucking’ McCoy.’

  ‘I’ve got no proof of that either! They’re g
oing to call me a liar.’

  He twisted her wrists again. This time, his short manicure nails dug in. He knew what he was doing, knew how to hurt her and make it look incidental. ‘Taken care of!’ He let go and Lilly fell back on the bed. ‘You don’t need to prove anything to the cops. You just need to tell them everything you did, before and after the party. You need to show them your ID. For fuck’s sake.’ He wiped his nose. ‘Thank God you’re not a minor.’

  Gary had something in his pocket, was it coke or crank, something in a baggie.

  ‘They’re going to ask for your clothes from last night, for forensics. So you show the cops your dress. There!’ He flicked the baggie at her face. ‘Lewinsky style. It goes to forensic, but it won’t match any of those guys.’

  She shook her head and pulled away. Looked down and saw what was in the baggie. It was white, but you wouldn’t want to sniff it.

  ‘Pick it up!’ He demanded. ‘Pick it up!’ He came towards her and made a fist.

  ‘Okay!’ She wouldn’t tell him again that she couldn’t do it.

  ‘Good. Go like that. Don’t get made up. Just go like that…’ He stood up and went to the bathroom, washed his hands without closing the door. ‘If anyone asks about your face, say one of those guys did it. Yeah. That’s good, that’s what happened.’

  Lilly watched him in the mirror, the way he examined himself from all angles, his eyes darting around his own face. She touched her face and stood up, saw her own reflection in the mirror above the table, her cheek red and angry. The same cheek he had slapped on Friday night.

  He looked back at her standing there. ‘I mean it. Go now and come back here right away when you’re done. If there aren’t reporters calling me in two hours, I’m going to need to leak the story myself.’