Joe looked up and down the empty road. “Sherlock!” He picked a direction and ran. When Anna felt sure her lips were safe, she extricated herself from the juniper. She rubbed the tiny stinging welts that rose on her hands where her skin had touched the shrub. She could hear Joe calling on the next block, “Sherlock! You're being an idiot! Holmes!”
Anna walked in the opposite direction, cautiously scanning the empty streets. The storefront windows were dark. The signs, barely legible in the moonlight, were written in letters she could not decipher. Where was Wolf? Had the rape fiend gotten him?
Anna needed to get out of Boyle Heights. In the distance, she saw the Los Angeles Herald building, glowing like a beacon. The presses might still be working, and the trolley stopped there, at Ink Alley. If it wasn't too late, she could catch the Owl back to Angel's Flight. She lifted her skirts and ran.
Anna reached the Los Angeles Herald building, sweaty and out of breath. Her tapered shoes pinched her toes, and her heels had angry blisters. She slowed to a walk, stowing the gun in the pocket of her skirt. The cold metal bumped her leg as she walked.
Under the burning gas lamps, drivers slumped in wagon seats, softly snoring, reins wrapped around their fists, the horses flicking their manes. Newsboys loitered in their caps and knee pants or slept in the backs of wagons. A clock chimed once. The building's big doors opened and the night crew poured out. Newsboys roused themselves and formed a chain, hauling bundles of papers from the building to their wagons.
Anna approached a worker on the steps and addressed him. “Excuse me. Did I miss the trolley?”
“You shouldn't be out alone, Miss. There's a criminal about.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Take the Owl with the printers. It's the last car of the night, but it's coming soon. You miss the Owl, you'll have to walk home, and you might not ever arrive.”
Anna thanked him and melted into the shadows to wait. It was the natural place for Joe to look for her, and she didn't want to be found.
Soon, the trolley rolled up, and workers from the Herald crowded on. Anna ran from the shadows and hopped in front. As she made her way to the back, she saw Joe on the street, striding next to the trolley, searching every face on board, looking for Anna. All the dreaminess was gone from his eyes, replaced by worry and, for the first time that night, fear.
Joe's eyes landed on Anna and flashed. His fear became anger. Anna crossed her arms and turned her back on him.
“This isn't a game, Holmes! You can't just walk off in the middle of a job because you got your feelings hurt!” he said.
Anna huffed. She knew he was right. A man would never behave thus, and she had been the one to suggest that they make pretend police love. Still, she clung to her indignation, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
“Holmes!” he shouted.
“Oh, all right!” She crossed the aisle to the back door and jumped off just as the trolley picked up speed. The landing hurt her blisters. She adjusted the straps on her lovely, brutal shoes as the tram disappeared around the corner. Anna straightened up and looked for Joe on the street. She turned full circle and didn't see him. She called his name. He didn't answer.
Around her, the night shift scattered like mercury. The wagon drivers were pulling away, newsboys perched atop the stacks of papers. The lights at the Herald began to go out one by one. Anna steeled herself to assess the situation. Wolf was missing. The Owl had gone, and she was going to have to walk home. Joe was gone, probably on the Owl. This was a good thing. It would be safer for Anna to do the walk alone than to do it holding Joe's arm, with her lips mere inches from his mouth.
Anna's house stood a good five miles northwest of Boyle Heights—seven if she avoided the bad neighborhoods near the red light district. If she started now, and didn't get lost, she could make it back before the servants woke up and declared her missing. Anna started hustling west.
Blocks ahead, a swarm of printers swam down the street like minnows, heading west. Two peeled off from the group and entered a brick house. When the door closed, the swarm traveled on. Several buildings up, they halted and waited as one climbed the steps to an apartment.
There was safety in swarms. Anna sped in their direction. The printers crossed the road and disappeared down a tributary. When Anna reached the intersection, they were gone. She turned in a circle and saw no one. Not even a stray dog.
The night felt ten degrees colder. Anna limped west on swelling feet, hoping to find the printers. She soothed herself by fingering Joe's gun, humming Joe's song, though from her lips, it would have been hard to recognize the tune. His gun felt heavy in her hand, but she dared not pocket it. Anna wished Joe back, even if it meant kissing him passionately in the pampas grass until morning.
After an hour, the streets began to replay themselves—the sites of previous crimes where Joe had taken her over and over. Somewhere, she'd lost west. She tried a different way, placing one blistered foot in front of the other, padding softly, staying in the shadows. The sidewalks and street lamps disappeared. A trash bin overflowed with trimmings from unfamiliar vegetables—the Japanese section.
Anna was still in Boyle Heights.
Blood pounded in Anna's ears. She turned around and hurried back the way she came. Up ahead, she saw the silhouette of the Los Angeles Herald building. There was the synagogue with the yellow star. There was the fire hydrant with the straw hat. And there, leaning up against a building, trimming his nails with a long, sharp knife, was Douglas Doogan. He looked up at her with red, gleaming eyes.
Anna ran. She ran like prey. The heel broke off her buckled shoe and she left it behind. She didn't stop, didn't look back, turning, running, turning again. Clumsy with fatigue, she tripped on a crack and spilled onto the pavement. She lay like a puddle on the dirty sidewalk, thoroughly and completely lost, her chest heaving, her stolen skirt torn, the heels of her hands raw and stinging.
Above her, the synagogue's gold star shone. Douglas Doogan was gone. A cigarette glowed under the awning of the men's club, which had long since closed. A man in a suit smoked in the shadows. Wolf. Her heart lifted. She scrambled to her feet. “Detective Wolf!”
The man tossed his cigarette and walked gracefully off in the opposite direction. She caught a glimpse of white-blond hair beneath his hat. It was the man from the trolley. She hurried after him, calling out, but when she reached the corner, he was nowhere to be found. Maybe it wasn't the man from the trolley.
Anna walked for another half hour before succumbing to exhaustion. She found a darkened doorway near the mouth of an alley and sat curled up like a pill bug, knees to chin, paring knife in one hand, gun in the other. She felt like a girl made out of tissue paper, crouching in the rain.
If the rape fiend or Douglas Doogan didn't find her tonight, someone would find her in the morning and bring her home to her father. He would take the gun away and lock her up in the cellar, where she would turn green and fuzzy from mold. She thought of Edgar and what he'd think of her when he learned that she'd bribed the Widow Crisp, lied to everyone, and set out to trap criminals.
With all her strength, Anna willed her eyes to stay open. Time stood as still as a truly dead possum. Or did it fly by, she didn't know. Her eyelids were soggy. Clouds drifted off toward the mountains.
A man's soft voice brought Anna to attention. “Take off your clothes. If you scream or run, I'll kill him.”
Her eyes focused, but a cloud had covered the moon, and she saw no man, nothing but shadows. For a moment, she thought she was caught in a dream, that this whole night was a dream. But in the stillness, she could just discern a faint whimper.
She eased herself up quietly, clutching the gun, her mind and body moving without her, as if she'd done this before. She had fired a gun only once, a hunting rifle she had pilfered from her father and which he quickly repossessed. But she had never fired a revolver, and never at a man. She cocked the trigger and stepped out from her hiding place.
Nothing. No on
e. She crept forward and heard the whimpering again, coming from the alley. Somehow, her soggy tissue-paper-self began to solidify like papier-mâché around the balloon core of a piñata—the kind of piñata you have to whack hard to get the candy. She slipped to the edge of the building and peered around the corner into the dark depths. She saw nothing, heard nothing.
The scent of the night was spoiled with urine smells and the stink of garbage. Overlaid on this rank perfume, Anna smelled her own fear. Her revolver shuddered. The cloud floated away from the moon, restoring its light to the dark streets. It illuminated a scene of terror.
Halfway down the alley, a man lay in the muck, tied and gagged, his eyes bulging with frustration, his trousers wet at the groin. Against the brick wall, a woman fumbled with her corset, her dress in a heap on the ground. A second man, dressed as a printer, sleeves stained with ink, stood watching the bound man and unbuckling his belt, a long sharp knife between his teeth.
Anna watched for a moment, as if it were a play—the humiliated man, the ink-stained villain with the knife, the trembling woman, all actors performing for her class at the convent, only it was the wrong play. She stepped into the alley, lifted the gun and aimed. Her throat was hard, made of steel. She was made of steel. She shouted, “Reach for the roof!”
Joe Singer searched up every street and every alley in Boyle Heights, armed only with a rock picked up from the gutter. His trousers were ripped and his knee bled from when he had jumped off the moving trolley after he'd discovered that Anna was no longer on board. He was terrified, afraid that he would find her around the next corner hurt or that he wouldn't find her at all. She had snubbed him, tattled on him, insulted him, led him into corruption, teased him, stolen his gun, and kneed him in the balls. He didn't know what he'd do if anything happened to her.
He checked his watch. It was three a.m. He told himself it was a good sign that he hadn't found Anna stripped and bound and ravaged, because if the rape fiend had caught her, that's how she'd be. He told himself that by and by dawn would come and he would go to her mansion and find her safe in her bed, furious with him for having violated her sweet lips and worse yet, for showing up on her doorstep and compromising her double life.
He shouldn't have kissed her. If he hadn't, she'd be with him now, holding safely to his arm, singing off-key. But she had been mooning up at him, pressing against him, sending him heat, and telling him to make love to her. He had to kiss her because she wanted to be kissed and she was the most interesting girl he knew; because it was a full moon in Hollenbeck Park; because she was marrying Edgar Wright and he would never get a chance at those honeyed lips again. If it hadn't ended like this, her running off into danger, he wouldn't have taken that kiss back for anything.
In the dust ahead of him, he saw something glimmering in the road. When he got closer, he could see it was a shoe. He picked it up. It was scuffed and dusty, and the heel was missing, but he recognized it. A faint stain marred the finish from where he'd thrown up on Anna her first day at the station. His stomach tightened and he closed his eyes. It didn't bode well. She wouldn't just leave it there. She either lost it running away, or being taken away.
It wasn't just the rape fiend that he worried about. There was more than one kind of danger in LA at night. There were muggers and killers and kidnappers and all this talk about white slavery. He stuck the shoe in his empty holster in the dim hope that she would need it again, and he kept on looking.
Then, he heard a blessed sound. The sweetest of sounds. Anna Blanc was yelling, yelling at the top of her lungs. “Reach for the roof!”
Anna strode forward, gun trained on the rape fiend. He bolted. Anna ran after him. Somewhere, vaguely, she heard Joe calling her name, or sort of her name. “Sherlock!” She was too focused to acknowledge him. It took all her concentration to keep her gun aloft and her feet slapping the pavement. She had never killed before and, apart from Miss Curlew, never really wanted to. Her plan that night was to catch the rape fiend, not to kill him, but he wasn't stopping, and it certainly wasn't her fault if he took a bullet. “Stop or I'll shoot!”
The villain saw Joe hurtling toward him down the alley with such hot fury, such terrifying menace that the fiend spun around and ran back toward Anna, gun or no gun. Her heart and mind fused. Extraneous thoughts ebbed away, muscled out of place by her solitary purpose—to shoot the rape fiend. She prepared to fire, feet planted, gun arm extended, tracking him as he ran closer, closer, remembering from somewhere that one shouldn't shoot until one saw the whites of the enemy's eyes.
She looked into his face, seeing it for the first time, locking eyes with the villain—bright blue eyes with thick dark lashes. Eyes that had smiled at her when they'd talked about shoes. Anna lost concentration. The strength left her gun arm. She shot wild and hit a coal door in the side of the alley wall. The bullet ricocheted and Joe Singer went down.
Anna charged after the rape fiend, who had fled past her toward the street. She remembered Joe and spun around, rushing past the bound man and the undressed woman.
Anna fell on her knees beside Joe, crossing herself. He was sprawled on his back, chalk white, a hole in his vest over his ribs. Panting, frantic, having shot the man she could have loved if she were stupid enough to do so, she ripped back the vest. There was a bullet hole in his leather holster, and a bullet hole in her holstered François Pinet shoe, and a bullet lodged halfway through the silver shoe buckle. She peeled back the fabric of his ink-stained shirt and found smooth male skin stretched over a muscular breast and a small, rosy nipple like her own. “You're fine. You're fine. You're perfect.” She lightly touched his skin where a welt the size of Texas was growing on his ribcage and a spreading redness that would no doubt turn into a nasty bruise. Anna wondered how many of Joe Singer's ribs she'd cracked.
She looked down the alley toward where the rape fiend had made his escape. The woman sat in the muck beside the gagged and bound man who had wet himself. Anna bit her knuckle. “What do I do now?”
Joe's eyes were closed, his teeth clenched, his jaw jutting forward in what might have been pain or rage. “Shoot me in the head because I'd rather die than tell my uncle what just happened here.”
At three-thirty in the morning, a patrolman drove Anna back to Bunker Hill. The whole trip, he smiled, and she couldn't help but feel that, inside, he was laughing at her.
She thought about the gentleman from the trolley, how kind he had been to her, how they had talked about shoes. She had the irrational thought that the rape was an act, and the man on the trolley, he was the real man.
She had saved a woman's virtue tonight, but she also shot an officer in the ribs and lent her lips to the man who, though he used them well, had no business doing so. She had seen a man's bare chest—a first and a highlight of the evening. She had hunted a rape fiend and let him slip through her fingers because…he was handsome and she liked him.
She didn't want to think of it anymore—the humiliated man, the cowering woman who had to be treated for hysteria in the one-room receiving hospital above the station. She wouldn't be able to sleep. Anna needed a distraction. She needed a good book.
She lied about her address for the sake of discretion, and the patrolman dropped her off several blocks from her house at someone else's mansion. She refused to allow him to see her to the door. Anna limped straight to Clara's. The Breedloves had a library. Not a collection of nursery books like they had at home, but an uncensored library. Though Clara herself wasn't much of a reader, Theo collected every book he could get his hands on. He never seemed to miss a book after Anna borrowed and gutted it.
Anna tiptoed to Clara's front door and let herself in with the key Clara had given her when Anna had come to stay. She knew the Breedloves would be asleep in their respective bedrooms. A light glowed in the kitchen. The cook had begun to bake the morning's bread. Anna padded down the hall in the dark.
The library bookshelves ran from floor to ceiling. A ladder slid on rails from side to side. Moonlight
trickled through a stained glass window and cast a red-and-blue glow. It smelled of books and furniture polish. Anna scaled the ladder in her sore bare feet and scanned the shelves, considering, but passing up, Gothic romances, a whole row of men's dime novels, and a slew of medical books on every possible topic.
Her eye settled on two by Sigmund Freud—The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which seemed related to crime, and Studies on Hysteria, which was pertinent after her experience with the victim tonight. She took them down, slipped out a side door, and lugged them home under her arm.
Anna arrived before the sun rose and limped up the back stairs to her room, spent, but not drowsy. Her mind whirled like an eggbeater. She dumped the heavy books on her bed, selected one, and read for the remaining hour before she had to get up.
The most important thing she learned was that doctors treated hysterical women with bed rest, sensory deprivation, a diet free of Mexican food, and by massaging their nether parts until they were aroused to paroxysm. She was feeling a little hysterical herself after the excitement of the night and thought about the last cure, although one was not supposed to self-treat. She wondered what a woman should do if she found herself in an extreme situation. For example, if she were shipwrecked on a desert island with someone—say, Officer Singer—and their clothes were torn, and all they had were coconuts and one blanket, and she became very hysterical, and she had rested with her eyes closed and eaten no tamales, and she was only getting worse, and she couldn't self-treat. She wondered if it would be permissible for Officer Singer to treat her, as part of first aid. She thought about it for a long, long time.
Anna dropped off the Widow Crisp at the designated bungalow and drove to the station. She arrived slightly embarrassed, but not without her dignity. She had failed by shooting Joe and letting the criminal get away. But if a male officer was kissed by Officer Singer, and made to patrol those diseased streets alone, would he have done better? She didn't think so. She lifted her chin and strode through the station doors.
The Secret Life of Anna Blanc Page 16
