The 3rd Woman

by Jonathan Freedland

‘I was as shocked as you were by that, Maddy. Truly. You know if this had been my investigation, it would have been air-locked. But Barbara runs her own show, that’s—’

  ‘Air-locked would have been nice. Saying fucking nothing would have been great. But I know how these things work, Jeff. No one ever stays quiet. Here’s the thing though. If the LAPD’s going to start shooting its mouth off about my sister, somebody could have told me in advance. A little heads up, before going to the media. I don’t mean as—’ She hesitated, not knowing the word for a woman who refuses to be a girlfriend. ‘I don’t mean as someone who knows you. I mean as family, Jeff. We had a right to know.’

  Frustratingly, he didn’t argue. He pleaded guilty on behalf of the department and promised to get answers. There was nowhere left to go.

  ‘So what’s happening now?’ she asked, exploiting her advantage.

  He told her the current focus was entirely on the footage from the Great Hall of the People. Detectives were speaking to everyone there that night, trying to build as complete a picture of the man seen speaking to Abigail at the bar as they could, working out whether they had been seen together earlier that evening and whether they had, in fact, left together.

  ‘The trouble is, I hear the picture quality is pretty poor. Abigail’s clear enough, apparently. But the image of the guy is very grainy. There’s not much there to work with.’

  Maddy fought the urge to speak, fearing what she might let slip. She pictured the man she had seen, his face visible only in profile, much of it whited out by the glare of the lights. What had struck her at the time was the short hair and the muscular bearing, but it was quite true: the rest was just whitish pixels. Abigail, in those few seconds after she turned, allowing her profile to come into view, had been sharper but he, in Maddy’s memory at least, was much harder to make out.

  And then she heard the voice of the technician, munching on his salad among the CCTV monitors at the Great Hall. A couple of nights a week … she was a regular here. For the hundredth time, Maddy pictured her sister, turning up at that place. What was she looking for that she couldn’t find somewhere else? Abigail was gorgeous, she surely had no trouble finding a boyfriend. Why would she want to hang out there, perched at the bar, not once in a while but twice a week? What kick did she get out of it?

  Jeff was still speaking. Maddy forced herself to retune to his voice, to come back to the conversation.

  ‘Listen, Jeff. I can’t reach Miller. Can I tell you what I’ve picked up and you pass it on to her?’

  ‘I don’t feel that comfortable acting as go-between on—’

  ‘What can I do, she doesn’t answer her phone? Listen, it’s just one thing. Two weeks ago a woman called Rosario Padilla – papa alpha delta indigo lima lima alpha – died of a heroin overdose which her family believe is suspicious. Check the file. She had no history of drug use, just like Abigail. Suspicious circumstances too.’

  ‘Madison, I—’

  ‘Just hear me out. It may be nothing, but she had blonde hair and very pale skin. Just like Abigail.’

  ‘Maddy. You’re in shock. Worse than shock. You’ve suffered a great loss. This is not what you should be doing right now, chasing wild—’

  ‘I’m serious, Jeff. I think there could be a connection here. The man in the bar, the man we’re looking for – what if he’s done this before?’

  ‘We shouldn’t even be having this conversation. It’s completely inappropriate.’

  ‘Inappropriate? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Having your sister murdered and the TV news telling you she was getting high and it was all her fault. That’s inappropriate.’

  ‘Please, Maddy, that’s not what I meant. I mean it’s not right for you. To be doing this now. Besides, you don’t need me to tell you: serial killers can be opportunists. There’s often no strict pattern to the victims.’

  ‘Often, yes. But—’

  ‘There may be a broad category of victim, but they’ll also grab an opportunity when they get one.’

  ‘You don’t think the blonde hair—’

  ‘I’m not dismissing it, Maddy. But—’

  ‘So do me a favour. At least mention it to Barbara. Tell her it’s worth looking at previous cases. Also—’

  ‘No, Madison.’

  ‘I haven’t even said what it is yet.’

  ‘I don’t need—’

  ‘Photographs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Photographs from the crime scene. Crime scenes, plural. Get Barbara to compare them. How was Rosario Padilla’s body found and is that similar to—’

  ‘Madison, I cannot stress enough how wrong this is. This is a hundred shades of wrong.’

  ‘Will you just mention it? Or take a look yourself. I know how that database works. Just take a look. If I’m wrong and there’s no connection, then you get to say “I told you so.”’ She was trying to keep it light, even ever so slightly flirtatious. It was the tone, the manner, that got her into this mess with Jeff in the first place. She shook her head at her own folly.

  But it worked. He promised he would do what he could. Still, there was something in his voice that she could not quite work out, a hesitation, a worry, she was not sure. She ended the call and spent the next twenty minutes staring straight ahead, summoning again and again those blurred images from the CCTV cameras, each time her mind’s eye trying to get a closer look at the man, his face becoming more indistinct the closer she examined it.

  The car had turned off the freeway and had made the series of turns and lights that led to Circle Park. She had pulled up and turned off the engine before she realized what had happened. The sudden quiet in the car broke the spell. She was a good twenty minutes away from the café, but she understood what had brought her here.

  She looked around before getting out, checking the distances and line of sight. She was far enough away, especially on a smoggy morning like this one. Still, she clambered out of her seat slowly and closed the car door softly, to attract least attention.

  The air was filled with the tinny sound of a loudspeaker mounted on a mast. Made of metal, it seemed to have rusted from the inside. But the sound it played was clear enough, a disco oldie: ‘Staying Alive’.

  And there on the asphalt square, where on the weekends you might see kids on skateboards or bikes, were eight lines of people, seven or eight in each row, moving in time to the music. Most were in tracksuits, a few of the women in leggings, perhaps the same outfits they had worn in aerobics classes in the 1980s. For the distinguishing feature of this group was that they were all old.

  This was not the first time she had seen them and the same things struck her as always. The group, in which women dominated by a ratio of about two to one, did not smile or laugh, but wore expressions instead of grave concentration. Their movements were similarly restrained, unexpectedly graceful, their feet making delicate turns, the fingers on their hands outstretched as they moved both arms across their chests to point first to the right and then to the left.

  The style was not the disco dancing Maddy had seen on those eighties nostalgia shows, arms propelled wildly, heads thrown back in simulated ecstasy. These movements were more careful, less frantic. And everyone danced the same precise steps. For an amateur group they were remarkably well co-ordinated. Only one man was out of time, turning one way when it should have been the other, showing his back when it should have been his front. But even he did not laugh at his error. He too was concentrating, trying to stay in harmony with the others.

  As always, Maddy looked in vain for the leader but if he or she was there, it was not obvious. Instead they seemed to move under their own direction, focused on the collective goal of dancing well as a group. When the song finished and before the next one began there was no applause, even from the few dog-walkers and morning joggers who had stopped to look. This was not a performance.

  As the next routine began – to the backing of ‘Mo Li Hua’, the traditional Chinese tune which had become a kitsch
y favourite – Maddy filtered out everyone else and looked only at one person, the same way she always did. This woman’s movements were especially neat, her toes pointed outward just as any ballet teacher would demand. A good dancer since her girlhood, she was not content merely to extend her arms, but turned her wrists too, her fingers rigidly in position. She allowed her hips a little extra shimmy on the turns, a departure from the script which made Maddy smile. It was not hard to see who, thirty years ago, would have been the beauty of this, or any other, group. Only the eyes betrayed her. Even from this distance, Maddy could see they were far away.

  Madison watched her mother do one more song, but didn’t risk waiting till the end of the routine, in case it was the last. She slipped back into her car and headed to the appointment she had made, to discuss the death of the youngest daughter of the elegant woman in the second row who, as Maddy drove away, was still dancing, each step as neat and perfect as the one before.

  There was a strange comfort in doing this again: on the road, an address punched into the GPS, notebook on the passenger seat. She knew how to be a reporter, if nothing else.

  The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was almost empty, the way so many places were in late January, its blackboard list of special lattes and themed mochas looking distinctly half-hearted. America always used to feel like this in the last few days of November, as everyone headed somewhere else for Thanksgiving, and at the close of December too, but this January exodus still felt like a novelty.

  Maddy was early but so was Amy Alice. She was at a corner table, by the window, her eyes fixed on a pad and, next to it, a volume that was slim but heavily bookmarked, its pages sprouting little periscopes of paper. She was, Maddy guessed, of mixed race, her dark hair pinned back, wearing glasses and no make-up, that look favoured by so many off-duty actresses, especially the pretty ones, a look designed to convey seriousness of purpose, confounding any expectations of airhead starlet.

  Maddy sat down without introduction. She had an urge to come right out with it, to save them both the time: So. This friend of yours. Was she blonde or not? In her exhausted state, she thought she had earned the right to dispense with the pleasantries, the journalistic ruses required to soften up a source. As the sister of a murder victim, wasn’t she allowed, just this once, not to be sensitive or emotionally intelligent but to get straight to the damned point? Because if this woman’s friend turned out to be a junkie, she might as well know now. And if she wasn’t fair-skinned and blonde she needed to know that too because, at this moment, that’s all she had tying Abigail to Rosario Padilla. Without it, Abigail’s death was random – just another hardluck LA homicide.

  But Maddy had no chance to try a new, direct approach. Amy Alice was giving her a long look. She then shook her head in rueful reflection on the pity of it all, before making a gesture that caught Maddy by surprise. She reached across the table and took Maddy’s hands in hers. ‘Oh Madison,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Maddy tried to reply but could only manage a resigned, that’s-life smile.

  ‘I know that face, though,’ Amy Alice said. ‘That’s how I felt for days afterwards. And Eveline was only my friend. You’ve lost your sister.’

  Maddy nodded and then got to her feet, needing the busyness of a task to dilute the moment. She took Amy’s coffee order, bought a bottle of water for herself, took a long draught from it and girded herself. She needed to wrest back control of this encounter, before it turned into bereavement counselling.

  ‘So tell me about your friend,’ she said at last.

  Amy Alice took a deep breath and then placed her palms flat on the table. ‘Eveline was an actress, like me. She was doing better than me, too. She’d done some TV. She’d done a music video. She’d done some modelling. She was sexy, if you know what I mean.’

  Maddy nodded. The fact that Eveline had been cast in a music video suggested curves: the Asian market in particular looked to America to provide T&A.

  ‘She was very different from me. I’m from Chicago, but she was from Iowa. You know, a farmer’s daughter.’

  ‘What kind of different?’

  ‘Sort of innocent, I’d say. People would laugh, if you saw some of the things she did. Bumping and grinding, wearing not that much. But she was real innocent, believe me.’

  ‘This is why you don’t think she ever took drugs?’

  ‘Exactly. She’d grown up with people smoking and drinking, for sure. But heroin, no way. Just the very last person who’d be into that.’

  ‘But naïve people can be sucked into that kind of thing, they can—’

  ‘I know what you’re saying, Mad—’ She paused. ‘What do I call you? It said Madison in the article, but you’re Maddy on—’

  ‘Call me Maddy. You don’t think your friend might have been so innocent, she just didn’t realize—’

  ‘No. And I tell you why. We were very different, Eveline and me. We really were. I like all this stuff,’ she gestured at the book on the table, a text of Long Day’s Journey into Night. ‘And Eveline wanted nothing more than to get a part in a soap. That was really her ambition. But we were both new here and we just hung out together.’

  Maddy raised her eyebrows.

  ‘As in, all the time. We shared the apartment; if we went out in the evening, we usually went together. We worked together a lot. If anything had been happening, I’d have known about it.’

  ‘And you said all this to the police?’

  Amy Alice nodded. ‘But they weren’t interested. I think it was because of some of the stuff Eveline had done. You know, the filming.’

  ‘Music videos?’

  ‘Yeah and maybe some other stuff. Before I met her.’

  Maddy got the idea. ‘So given her résumé, the police thought smack in the bloodstream was not shocking enough to merit any questions?’

  ‘They took a statement from me. Since I was the one that found her.’ Amy went on to describe the moment, in the early evening. How she had put the key in her front door, called out as usual. She had bought Chinese food for the two of them to share, partly as a thank you to Eveline. But there was no sound. Once she was in the shared living room, she saw her friend stretched out on the floor, arms at her side, her right sleeve rolled up, her lips blue. She thought she felt the faintest trace of a pulse. She had tried CPR, she tried breathing into Eveline’s cold mouth, her hands touching her matted hair, her own blood draining from her face as she realized what was happening. She had called 911, but you know how it is these days: they took nearly twenty minutes to come. ‘By then, she was dead.’ As she spoke, Amy Alice’s eyes began to glitter, but no more.

  ‘Did you know she’d OD’d, as soon as you saw her?’

  ‘I had a pretty good idea.’ She made a slight upward roll of the eyes, a sign of too much experience. ‘I’m from Chicago.’

  ‘And was there any suggestion …’ Maddy hesitated. ‘Did it look as if anything else had happened to Eveline?’ When she saw Amy Alice’s look of incomprehension, she forced herself to be more explicit. ‘Do you think she had been raped?’

  The woman shook her head quickly. ‘No. The police never mentioned anything about that.’

  Madison added a sentence to her notebook and underlined it. She remembered what she had heard from Rosario Padilla’s brother and Jeff Howe’s account of the pathologist’s report on Abigail. No sign of sexual contact, he had said. No sign at all, Madison. None. It was a relief, but also a puzzle. Back when she was on the crime beat, she had covered several multiple homicide cases involving female victims: she could not think of one that did not involve sexual violence.

  She looked out the café window, at the cheap red lantern dangling from the awning of the store across the street and the notice in the window promising roast duck in a bag, special for the season, at half price.

  ‘“Partly as a thank you”,’ Maddy began quietly. ‘What were you thanking Eveline for?’

  At that Alice’s eyes darkened. She swallowed. ‘Remember I s
aid that we sometimes worked together?’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Yes. I suppose that was unusual, right? Getting parts in the same shows?’

  Amy Alice smiled. ‘That tells me you’re not an actor.’ She leaned forward, as if letting Maddy in on a trade secret. ‘Most of the work you do as an actor is … not acting. You gotta pay the rent.’

  ‘Of course. And how did you pay the rent?’

  Amy Alice looked straight at her, an expression that contained a hint of defiance. ‘Cleaning. That’s where I’ve come from right now. I called you just before my shift.’

  So that was why Amy Alice was working early but free by noon. ‘You clean houses?’

  ‘Don’t look so surprised. There are lots of us doing it.’

  ‘Of course. Sure.’

  ‘It pays OK. And it’s flexible.’

  Maddy worried what her face was saying. One of the risks of sheer exhaustion: your face could have a mind of its own. ‘And you both did it, you and Eveline?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Where? In this neighbourhood?’

  ‘All over. In private houses, offices. Wherever the agency sends us. Sometimes you don’t know till you show up. Today was a daycare centre. And they don’t care which one of you does the shift, as long as somebody does it.’

  ‘And this had something to do with thanking Eveline?’

  ‘I was booked to do a shift with the agency that day. And then this audition came up, the night before. An all-black production of The Cherry Orchard, out in Ventura. Eveline was so sweet about it. She was like, “You have to do it, Amy. This is for you.” And I was like, “Really? Are you sure?” But we did that for one another. If you really couldn’t make it, the other one would cover for you.’

  ‘So that’s what happened? Eveline did your shift?’

  Alice nodded, mutely. Her guilt was solid, a presence in the room, so palpable Maddy knew the answer to her next question. ‘And after the shift, that’s how you found her? On the floor?’

  She nodded again, the edges of her nostrils twitching as she held back tears. There are some women who cry readily. Maddy was not one of them and nor, she could see, was Amy Alice. Maddy extended her hand, to touch hers.