On an early morning, before anyone in the area of bars and restaurants was around to open the businesses, he made an inspection of the alley behind the bar. He found a place to stand on the far side of the alley wall, where, at night, he could not be seen but where he could see perfectly the back door of the bar, the trash-can area, and the place where Flint parked Marguerite’s Toyota. He held up his hand, as if he were holding up the German Luger, and imagined pulling the trigger. The gesture and the pow sound he made had become a habit.
On the morning of the day that Gus planned to kill Lefty Flint, he went to Mass at a church he had never been to before. He sat in a back pew throughout the service without participating in it, like a street person seeking temporary shelter, neither reciting the prayers nor taking communion.
“What the hell are you doing here, Gus?” asked a voice from behind him as he was leaving the church.
Gus, surprised, turned. It was Faye Converse.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he replied.
“They’ve got a hospice here for some of my people,” said Faye. “I come to visit from time to time. Brucie is here. Remember Brucie? My secretary. You met her on the plane.”
“Sure I remember Brucie. How is she?”
Faye shrugged the shrug that said not good, or good under the circumstances.
“Give her my love.”
“You look strange, Gus.”
“How strange?”
“Not yourself. Haunted, sort of.”
“How’s this?” he asked, assuming a happy stance.
“Better. Better. I read your piece on Elias Renthal in prison. The son of a bitch.”
“Why son of a bitch?”
“Did you know he stopped payment on the two-million-dollar check he gave me at the ball?”
“I don’t believe it!” replied Gus, amazed, although he did believe it. It was the first time in weeks he had been interested in anything but Lefty Flint.
“Ruby made the check good, though,” said Faye. “I liked Ruby. Terrible position she’s in now.”
“She’s a class act, Ruby,” said Gus.
“You never let me know when you’re out here. How long are you staying?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m having a party tonight. Come.”
“Can’t tonight.”
“Yes, you can. What are you doing that’s more important than a movie-star party at Faye Converse’s?”
“I’m going to kill a guy.”
“Well, come after you kill the guy,” she said.
They both laughed.
Later, on the evening of that day, Gus went to see Peach. He stood in the doorway of her bedroom most of the time, rather than sitting on the end of her bed, as he usually did.
“Did I ever tell you about this woman I know in New York called Ruby Renthal?” asked Gus.
“Whose husband is in prison for insider trading, that one?”
“That one.”
“I don’t know if you did or not. She gives parties and lives in that vast apartment. I’ve read all that.”
“Her name used to be Ruby Nolte. She used to be an airline stewardess.”
“Is there a punch to all this?”
“There is. About seven years ago, when she was still a stewardess, she got beaten up here in Los Angeles, by a man she was involved with at the time. The guy really bashed her face in.”
Peach, interested now, looked at Gus.
“She was in the hospital for ten days. She wanted to press charges, but the guy warned her not to, and the guy had some tough friends, and so she didn’t press charges.”
“Yes?”
“The guy was Lefty Flint.”
“Why did I know that was what you were going to say?”
“He’s going to do it again. You know that, don’t you?”
“Then call the police, Gus.”
“The police can’t do anything until after the damage is done.”
They remained in silence for a few moments.
“I have to go,” said Gus, finally, looking at his watch, as if he were on a schedule. He walked toward her bed. As usual, she was barricaded in it by her wheelchair and the long table covered with books and magazines. He undid the brake of her wheelchair and backed it out of his way, pushed the table to the side, and walked up to her. When he was by her side, he bent down and kissed her. In his gesture, she read farewell.
“S’long,” he said.
“You sound like you’re going on a trip,” she replied.
“No.”
“Are you all right, Gus?”
“Sure.”
“You sound odd.”
He looked at the woman he had been married to for so many years, and divorced from for so many years. Nearly bedridden, she had become accustomed to staring at a television set with picture but no sound when she did not wish to deal with the moment at hand in her life, but this time she returned her former husband’s look. He felt a tremendous affection for her.
He turned and replaced the wheelchair in its correct position, braked it, put her table back in place, and walked out of her room, down her hallway to the front door. There, on a table, in a chipped porcelain bowl, was a bouquet of roses from Peach’s garden, jammed together, in an arrangement that Lorenza, in the unlikely event she ever saw it, would disapprove of. Gus reached in and pulled out a yellow rose, open to almost full flower, and took it with him as he opened the front door and walked to his rented car parked in the driveway.
“Gus,” called Peach after him, but he did not hear. In a louder voice, she called for her housekeeper. “Immaculata! Immaculata!” Next to her bed, on the overcrowded table, she found her bell and rang it and rang it again.
“Si, señora?” said the older woman, shuffling into Peach’s room in bedroom slippers.
“Stop him,” cried Peach. “Outside. Mr. Bailey. Stop him.”
Immaculata shuffled out of the room, unhurried, as always, down the hall to the front door, just as Gus’s car was pulling out of the driveway. Alerted now to the emergency of the moment, she ran down the steps of the house, waving her dish towel in the air, but Gus did not see her.
His German Luger, cleaned and loaded, was in the glove compartment of his rented car. At eleven o’clock he drove to Studio City, being very careful to adhere to the posted speed limit, allowing other cars, going beyond the limit, to pass him. A car coming toward him in the opposite lane had on its bright lights, and he was momentarily blinded. He put his hand up to shield his eyes. As the two cars passed, he turned to curse the occupant, and his eyes locked for an instant with the driver’s. He felt troubled, but he did not understand why.
He parked his car on a side street a block away from Marguerite’s bar. He remained in the car until a quartet of noisy bar hoppers had turned the corner, and then he opened the glove compartment and took out the German Luger. He walked to the alley and took his place behind the wall. It was several moments before he realized that Marguerite’s car was not parked in its usual place. An image of the car with bright lights flashed through his mind, and he wondered if he was now imagining that it had been Nile green. He walked out the alley to the street and turned the corner to where the entrance of the bar was. He had not been inside the bar since his brief encounter with Marguerite some months before. Entering, he turned away from the bar itself as if he were going to the men’s room. Losing himself behind some patrons, he looked over at the bar. Lefty Flint was not tending bar.
“Help you?” asked a waiter with a tray of beer bottles.
“No, no, thanks,” said Gus, making his way to the door.
Outside he ran the several blocks to his car. He drove to 1342¼ South Reeves. He parked his car on the street and walked down the driveway at the side of the complex, staying as close to the shrubbery as possible. Behind, the Nile-green Toyota was not in the parking place below the garage apartment. Upstairs, the venetian blinds were closed, but Gus could see light coming through the slats
.
Frightened now, his heart beating fast, Gus mounted the rickety wooden stairway that led to the front door of the apartment. He looked but could not find a bell. He took the gun from his pocket and held it in one hand. With the other, he knocked on the door. There was no reply. He knocked again.
From within, he heard sounds. A shade covered the glass part of the door. He saw someone pull back the shade a crack and look out.
“Who is it?” came a woman’s voice.
“I’m looking for Lefty,” said Gus.
“You’re too late,” said the voice he recognized as Marguerite’s. “Lefty’s gone.”
“It’s Gus Bailey, Marguerite. We met once before,” said Gus through the door.
She opened the door but left the chain on. “What do you want, Mr. Bailey?” she asked.
“Where’s Lefty?”
“Gone. I should have listened to you, Mr. Bailey,” she replied. “I guess you were trying to help me, but I didn’t want to hear back then.”
“Open the door, Marguerite. Let me in.”
She took off the chain and opened the door. When Gus walked into the kitchen of her small apartment, he saw that her eye was closed, and her face had been beaten.
“Jesus,” he said. “Come on with me. I’ll take you to the emergency room at Cedars.”
“I’m okay,” she said. “I got off easy. It’s not bad. I feel like such a goddamn fool. He just used me. I arranged for him to have a job when he got out, and a place to live, and he was all full of good intentions, and the parole officer thought he was all rehabilitated and on the straight and narrow, but working behind a bar was not exactly what he had in mind for himself. I thought the guy was in love with me, when I used to visit him in Vacaville, but the pickins are slim for guys in prison. They’re not in great demand, if you know what I mean, and it’s only some asshole like me, with my misguided sense of social consciousness, who would have thought that a man who strangled a woman and beat up other women was rehabilitated in three years.”
“Where did he go, Marguerite?”
“You’re just as big a fool as he is to go searching for him with a gun, Mr. Bailey,” she answered.
“Tell me where he went,” repeated Gus, insistently.
“Put your gun away, Mr. Bailey. He’s gone. He’s on a plane somewhere.”
“Where?”
“He didn’t confide in me. He just knocked me around a bit.”
“Where do you think he went?”
“You weren’t at the parole hearing, were you?”
“No. There was no point.”
“There was some rich lady there who asked the parole board not to release him. He had a real grudge against that lady.”
Gus stared at Marguerite. “What rich lady?”
“She’s always in the magazines.”
“You’re not talking about Ruby Renthal, are you?”
“Ruby, that’s right. Very high society.”
Gus, listening, was stunned at what she said. “Ruby Renthal was at the parole hearing?”
“She asked the board not to release him.”
“My God,” said Gus.
49
On the day before she left New York for good, to take up permanent residence at Merry Hill, Ruby Renthal, in a nostalgic mood, paid a last visit to her apartment, which was shortly to be divided up into three smaller apartments. Wandering through the large empty rooms, she wondered if people would continue to refer to it as the Elias Renthal apartment, even after they were gone, in the way that people had continued to refer to it as the Sweetzer Clarke apartment for many months after she and Elias had purchased it, before it had become inalterably their own through its magnificent transformation by Cora Mandell, with the help of Maisie Verdurin and Jamesey Crocus. Only that day Ruby had seen a layout in the Times Magazine section showing Yvonne Bulbenkian lighting tapers for one of her parties in a pair of silver candlesticks that had only recently been her own, on a Chippendale dining table that had also been hers, beneath a portrait of King Boris of Bulgaria in hunting attire that had until their scandal hung in her own dining room. She felt no craving to own them again.
In her persimmon-lacquered drawing room, nineteen coats, or was it twenty, she wondered, the windows were bare, stripped of their elaborate hangings with the fringe from France that had taken weeks to come. She looked at the spot on the wall where her Monet of the water lilies, that she and Elias had purchased from Maisie Verdurin’s wall on the night of her first party in New York, had hung, and the places on each side of the marble fireplace where her console tables with the inlaid rams’ heads, from the Orromeo auction in London, had stood until she discovered they were fakes and donated them to the White House, which had returned them at the time of the auction, for reasons unknown.
In her ballroom, which she had not entered since the night of her ball, she stood at the top of the stairs, where she had received on that night, and remembered how it was in the magnificent hours before her world had begun to topple. She walked down the stairway and heard the music, the waltzes, and stood in the middle of the dance floor and closed her eyes as she remembered waltzing with Elias, with Mickie Minardos, with Gus Bailey, and her royal princes, from countries that no longer wanted them, who used to impress her so much. She looked up and could see the ten thousand butterflies, in the thirty seconds of their beauty, and hear the exclamations of joy from the mouths of her four hundred guests.
“Well, Ruby Nolte, as I live and breathe,” came the voice that interrupted her reverie. She opened her eyes with a start.
Standing at the top of the short stairway leading to her ballroom was Lefty Flint. She watched him walk down the steps and across the dance floor to her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, trying to keep the panic out of her voice.
“Paying a call,” he replied. “You got yourself a gentleman caller, Ruby.”
“How did you get in here?”
“I told them you were expecting me.”
“But I don’t live here anymore. How did you know I was here?”
“I got my ways.” He looked around him, at the gold-and-white paneling of the room. “What do you call this room, Ruby? The ballroom? I didn’t know people still had ballrooms. My, my. Imagine, having your own ballroom. You did good, didn’t you, Ruby, for a stewardess? Look at you. Anyone who didn’t know what I know about you would think you were one of the swells.”
“Get out of here, Lefty, right now,” she said.
“We’ve got a few things to go over, Ruby.”
“No, we don’t. We have nothing to go over.”
“Oh, yes, we do. How fucking dare you come to my parole hearing and try to keep me in that place?”
“Obviously, it didn’t have any effect.”
“How could you do that to me?”
“I’d do it again.”
“Listen, rich lady. I went to prison. I did my time. I have atoned.”
“Only in your kind of circles, Lefty.” Calm now, sure of herself, she met his eyes.
He looked at her. “You’ve changed,” he said.
“You don’t know how much,” she answered. “If you have in mind to punch me out, I’d think again if I were you.” She opened her bag and looked in it as if she were searching for her lipstick or compact. She lifted out her pistol and pointed it at him. “When my husband bought me this pistol, I thought it was the laugh of the year. He would say to me over and over, ‘There are mad people out there, out to get people like us.’ I never took him seriously about that, but now I see how right he was. I told you once. Now I’m telling you again. Get out, just the way you came in.”
“Your husband in the slammer, that guy?” sneered Lefty.
“That guy,” she answered, holding the pistol on him.
“Who stole all the money?”
“Who stole all the money,” she replied.
“You’re holding him up to me?”
“There’s one big difference between y
ou and my husband, Lefty. He didn’t beat women or kill them. He can pay back the money. You can’t give back the life you took. Wherever you go, people will say, ‘He’s the guy who strangled Becky Bailey.’ You’re a murderer.”
Lefty said nothing. He moved toward Ruby.
“Get out of here, you son of a bitch,” she screamed.
“Hold it, Lefty,” came a voice from behind. Lefty turned quickly and faced Gus Bailey, standing on the stairs, his Luger drawn. During the split second before he fired, Gus remembered saying to Bernie Slatkin, “I want him to be looking at me at the moment. I want him to know it was me who did it.”
Gus fired.
50
Men’s Correctional Institute
Vacaville, California
Dear Peach:
My duties here, all manual so far (although there is hope that a position in the library will open up soon, when Boyd Lonergan, who shot the jewelry salesman by mistake in the Tiffany’s robbery, is released next month), have kept me so busy of late that exhaustion has kept me from writing sooner. Isn’t it extraordinary that they should have sent me to the same place that they sent Lefty? Several of the inmates here remember him, and all of the guards. I’m pleased to say they remember him without affection. He told Boyd, with whom he shared a cell briefly, that he had beaten several women before he killed Becky.
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