“And what about your father and Andrea?”
She turned away from me and stared out the side window for a while, then she took a deep breath.
“I had only one secret from Andrea,” she said, “and you know what it was. She always had a sexy little bod. I would see my father sniffing around her, and knowing what he’d done to me, I was terrified. I told him point blank, once—if you ever touch Andrea I’ll kill you. He thought that was pretty funny at the time. Well, the bottom line is that he stayed away from her until I left town to go to college. Until then, Andrea and I were always together when he saw her. Soon after I’d started at Teddington—about the time Jerry was teaching his course there—my father shows up at Andrea’s apartment. He tells her he’s brought her a gift, expensive lingerie he’d hauled back from Hong Kong or somewhere tacky like that. She doesn’t know how to react. He says, ‘Aren’t you going to try it on for me?’ She says she doesn’t think that would be appropriate. He gets himself wound up, reminds her of all the presents he’s given her over the years, all the expensive trips he’s taken her along on. She starts to feel bad. She says, okay, she’ll try on the lingerie, but then he has to leave. After all, she thinks, he’s seen me in a bikini—what’s the big deal? Andrea’s a bit naive that way. She goes into the bedroom to change. He waits till she comes out. Do I need to go on? She said she felt sorry for him. Can you imagine? And, of course, she was scared to tell me. Finally, she did, though—last weekend, at her apartment, just before I was due to meet Jerry. We were sitting on the bed where it had happened.
“By that time, Jerry had got my father wrapped up in his crazy scheme. He’d already delivered enough explosives to blow up City Hall. Andrea looks at me with those big eyes of hers. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that she’s not the only one, but I assure her it’s not her fault, and I promise her I’ll take care of things—whatever I meant by that.”
She reached into her bag and took out a letter. It was addressed to Andrea.
“Give this to her, will you? It explains a lot of stuff she should know.”
“If we’re going to see her, why don’t you give it to her yourself? Or just tell her?”
“Too much to tell all at once. I’d rather she reads it when I’m not there.”
We were almost at Janice’s apartment. For the first time I could remember, there was a parking place almost directly in front of the building. Lydia fixed her hair in the mirror behind the sun visor, then we walked up the stoop to the blue door, the little Ruger still clutched in Lydia’s fist. I rang the bell and Janice answered it.
“Well, at least you didn’t take too long,” she said.
Then she saw the bloody gash on my cheek, and the gun in Lydia’s hand, and tried to slam the door. I blocked it with my foot and forced it open with my shoulder.
“We’re just coming in for a few minutes,” said Lydia, “then I’ll go.”
She pushed past Janice who just gaped at my face.
“She didn’t do it,” I told her.
Andrea must have heard Lydia’s voice. When she saw it really was her, she screamed for joy. Lydia ran to her and they embraced. Then Lydia waved the gun at Janice and me and said, “Give us five minutes alone. Don’t worry. I’m not going to take her anywhere. She’s been through enough already.”
Janice gave me her best helpless look, and I led her back into the back parlor and closed the door.
“What’s going on?” she hissed.
“If this plays out as it supposed to,” I said, “these girls are going to have a little reunion and then the blonde’s going to turn herself in to the cops.”
“She’s got a gun!”
“I noticed. Just try to stay quiet for a few minutes.”
The door between us and the living room was a solid piece of craftsmanship that had been there for a hundred years or more. You couldn’t hear much through it, except some nervous laughter, some sobbing, the occasional cliché—“I’ll be okay…Don’t worry about me…This is for the best.”
Lydia was doing most of the talking. After maybe ten minutes, I heard her call out, in a louder voice, “Whatever you do, do not follow me. Promise?”
Then I heard the front door close, and I heard Andrea call out, “No…”
I stepped into the living room and saw her standing at the window.
“Is she turning herself in?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Andrea. “She said she was going to Pierrot le Fou.”
I knew what that meant.
I flew across the room and pulled Andrea to the ground just a moment before the truck exploded into a ball of fire.
NINETEEN
For the second time in my life, I spent the night in a cell, and for several days after that, I fielded a barrage of questions from NYPD detectives, the FBI, and other interested parties. Emerging from one of these grillings, I ran into Detective Campbell. He said he’d been meaning to look me up anyway.
“Too bad about your friend Olga,” he said.
“What happened to Olga?” I asked.
“I wish I could have let her go,” he said, “but it’s my job to protect the citizens of this great metropolis from moral turpitude and flagrant perversity, though, to tell the truth, I don’t know who I was protecting from moral turpitude unless it was the johns who were paying her fifty an hour to have her tie them up and tickle them with a bullwhip. But, hey, this is New Amsterdam not Amsterdam, and prostitution is illegal here, right? I had to bust her.”
“So that’s why I’ve seen so much of you lately?”
“Well, that’s one reason. Olga asked me, by the way, to tell you that you’ll have to wait for a while, but the offer still stands.”
Andrea Marshall had a rough ride. Her parents put her into Greenholme—a so-called progressive facility in Connecticut. She signed herself out after a couple of years, went back to school somewhere in Virginia, graduated with a major in psychology, married some guy with a job in local television news, and had a kid. She came to see me once, to show me that she was all right. At twenty-something she was more beautiful than she had been when I first set eyes on her. She said she wanted to thank me, I never quite figured out for what. The marriage didn’t pan out, but I heard that afterward she had a girlfriend, a veterinarian, who helped her bring up the kid.
I hope the memory of the exploding truck doesn’t unreel in her mind too often, and that she can sometimes get through a night without hearing Lydia say, “Whatever you do, do not follow me…”
As Belmondo mutters, the moment before the dynamite detonates:
“Merde!”
About the Author
Photograph by Jonathan Mills, 2012
Christopher Finch was born and raised on the island of Guernsey in the British Channel Islands. He lived in London and Paris before moving to New York City in the late 1960s, the setting of Good Girl, Bad Girl. After working as a freelance writer and artist in New York for more than two decades, he moved to Los Angeles, where he continues to write and make art. Christopher has mounted one-man shows in both New York and Los Angeles, and his work has been included in museum exhibitions. He has occasionally written for television; his Judy Garland biography, Rainbow, was made into a movie for television. He is married to Linda Rosenkrantz, who is an author and the cofounder of the website nameberry.com. They have a daughter named Chloe.
Good Girl, Bad Girl (An Alex Novalis Novel) Page 17
