by Susan Dunlap
The escalator leveled out. She took a deep breath, stepped off and headed for the ticket counter.
The counters were empty.
Empty!
The whole ticketing area was empty!
Behind the counters the lights were dimmed. The counters said only: Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. The Departures screen listed no flights before 6 A.M.
She couldn’t believe it. It was like a bad dream, a horror movie.
It was not yet 2 A.M. She couldn’t stay here. The dark windows reflected her image; her every step was like a drumbeat. Felton groaned and she was sure the desolate sound was echoing throughout LAX. “Hush,” she whispered. But he didn’t hush. There was no fighting it. She pulled him out of his carrier and sat in a phone nook stroking his coarse hide, murmuring disconnected words, looking down at his little crinkled black and white face, his mobile pink snout sniffing with a million questions, rooting into her armpit, burying his face in the safety of her body.
The emptiness rose up around her, the silence broken only by the announcements for American flight four twenty-five from Dallas landing at gate something or other and Craig Leffers, Mister Craig Leffers to the white courtesy phone. She pressed farther back in the phone nook, knowing it was useless as a hiding place, knowing no alternative. She needed Jay.
She squeezed back tears. She couldn’t let herself cry, not even for Jay, Jay who she loved so much, Jay with his blood gushing, Jay, oh God, Jay…
She’d been here so often, dropping him off, waiting while he bought a last minute ticket. She’d strolled to a gate, her arm in his. She’d stood right here and nestled into him, letting the last kiss sprong through her before he ran for his plane. She could feel his sweater-covered ribs, the vestigial prickling of his shaven cheek against hers. His thick dark hair still crushed from the cap he’d decided to wear.
But that wasn’t at the airport; he never wore caps in L.A. That was at the Richland grade—had it been only a month ago? She could see his sleek sharp face drawn up laughing as he shook his head at the botch he’d made of the picnic plans. The great gush of rain on the rental car’s windshield had curtained off the world, and their breaths clouded the inside. The torrent had created a wall of sound and after a while he’d abandoned the pretext of lunch and slipped his hand up under her sweater and pulled her over against him and—
Was she crazy? Here in the airport with killers after her and she was daydreaming about Jay’s car picnic at the Richland grade. But it had been his last thought, the memory of that silly day when they made love in the car like teenagers. If Jay were here, he’d—
But Jay was dead.
Where could she go? To a friend’s? She shoved off the thought. That kind of friend she didn’t have. She’d never had. Friends asked questions. Jay had never prodded her or she him about things unmentioned; how could she have allowed anyone else to poke into their life?
There was nothing to hang onto, nowhere to turn, nobody she could trust. She stared at the ticket counter signs: Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. She couldn’t stop shivering.
But there was Ellen Baines. Ellen would come. She’d come because she had to, but she would come.
A bang resounded in the distance. She clutched Felton to her. There were no more bangs, but the cavernous departure hall wasn’t silent either. Now, she heard plastic bumping, something—a mop—swishing, a distant loudspeaker whining about Craig Leffers, Mister Craig Leffers to the white courtesy phone, please. There was ample noise to cover careful footsteps. No way could she be alert enough to be safe.
Liza called the airlines and the ordinariness of the reservations process calmed her. By the time she’d made a hotel reservation and dialed Ellen Baines’s number in Kansas City—it would be almost 4:30 A.M. there—she’d almost convinced herself that the hour, and her request, were reasonable. “Ellen?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Liza Silvestri. Jay’s been shot. He’s dead. I’ve made you a plane reservation, United to San Francisco. The first flight out tomorrow morning. I got you a room at the Rosewood Hotel downtown. Will you come?”
It was a moment before Ellen said, “Yes, of course I’ll come, Liza. Are you okay?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. But you’re coming, right?”
“Yes, Liza. How could I not come?”
Her breath came in a great gush as if she’d been holding it since Jay died. “Thank you. God, Ellen, thank you.”
The connection was gone and she’d replaced the receiver before it occurred to her that she’d said her husband was dead and Ellen Baines hadn’t sounded surprised.
She couldn’t worry about that now. She gave Felton a final hug, slipped him into the carrier, and walked purposefully onto the escalator. In five hours she’d be safely in San Francisco waiting for Ellen’s plane.
The passageway was empty but it didn’t frighten her now. Walking threw her into a rhythm, and going somewhere reminded her she had choices. By the time she got out of the elevator at the blue level she was considering which freeway to head for, trying to remember how much gas she had—not much, unless this weekend was different from all others—and to guess where she’d be most likely to find an open station in these pre-dawn hours. Trying to figure where she’d be safe.
In the vestibule she shifted Felton’s carrier to her left hand and readied her car keys. Then she stepped from the bright, tiled elevator foyer into the drafty garage. Nothing else moved. Half the spaces were empty. She’d left her car at the end of a line, in the roadway really. What’s the worst that can happen, you’ll be towed? And she hadn’t been towed. Not even ticketed. By now, despite the emptiness of the airport, travelers or employees had materialized from somewhere and driven off in the cars that had sat next to hers. The red Mustang looked as if she’d abandoned it in the middle of Wiltshire Boulevard.
Felton squealed. A “gotta go” squeal.
“Hang on, boy. I’ll let you out the first time we see grass.”
After a final visual sweep, she stepped out into the roadway, stopped, listening for an engine cranking up, for footsteps, for breathing. There was no sound but her own breath hitting the sides of her nose, her own heartbeat, her own pig breathing louder than she was.
She threw her shoulders back, strode across the cement to the car, half expecting bullets to whiz by from all directions. But there were no bullets, no assassins. She put the carrier down and opened the car door. The bullet-cracked glass shimmied. Shifting Felton’s carrier across her onto the passenger seat, she slipped in, stuck the key in the ignition and turned it.
“Jeez,” Jay would say, “you’re worried about killers and you don’t check under the hood? You could be blown up.”
But that didn’t happen. Nothing happened.
She turned the key and pressed the gas three more times before she got out, pulled up the hood and spotted tubes and wires, their yanked and ripped ends sticking up like arms severed in an explosion.
Six
ELLEN BAINES WAS SHAKING when she put the phone down. It was 4:26 A.M.; the heat had been off for hours in her apartment, and snow had been coating Kansas City since dusk. But her shiver came from deeper than the skin. Liza! Poor Liza! She had never heard Liza sound so scared. No, wait, not “so scared.” She had never seen Liza scared at all. Nothing frightened Liza, at least not in college. For Liza breaking the rules merely meant accepting the price. She’d spent more weekends “under house arrest” than any freshman girl in the history of the school. Most of the girls at St. Enid’s College for Girls with No Better Alternative—which was one of Liza’s names for the place—considered her a California snob. Snooty, abrupt, and much too beautiful. And they were right. Liza had hated the place—St. Enid’s of the Frigid Youth (her February coinage), and that only made Ellen think better of her.
And now Liza’s husband was dead, shot like a gangster! God, poor Liza. Ellen pulled her covers up around her shaking shoulders. Shot! She could hardly believe it, and yet she�
��d seen Jay Silvestri and she wasn’t surprised… and yet, and yet, shot! Decent people don’t get shot dead. Jesus! Poor Liza!
And poor Mom. She picked up the phone before she had time to reconsider. Mom would be up, getting ready to leave for St. Enid’s cafeteria to start the water for oatmeal. Cooking for two hundred girls was too big a job for a woman her age even with help but Ellen knew there was no point in going through that again, particularly at four thirty in the morning. “Enough that I can stay near your brother,” Mom would say and that would be the end of it.
“Mom, Liza’s husband died,” she blurted out before her mother could even speak. Died, not was killed, not shot.
“Oh, dear, Ellie, poor little Liza. How could that happen to her—she’s so young?”
“Well, her husband was older, maybe ten years, maybe even more.” Jeez, soon she’d be talking heart attack and clogged arteries. And clogged was one thing Jay Silvestri certainly wasn’t. Oh, Jeez, Ellen, get a hold on yourself! What was Mom saying now?
“…you know, Ellie, I still see her as that little orphan at Thanksgiving.”
She forced herself out of the warm bed to the closet and yanked her suitcase off the shelf. She could see the picture in her mother’s mind: Liza, the little blonde freshman her mother invited to Thanksgiving dinner because “the poor little thing” had nowhere to go. Mom always felt sorry for the “holiday orphans,” which just proved how sweet and how naive she was. She never imagined that later those girls would giggle with their friends about their make-do Thanksgiving with Mrs. Baines, the lady who ladled out cream corn on the cafeteria line. It never occurred to her that the girls were not stiff from post-adolescent awkwardness but from concealing smirks at her shabby two-room suite the college provided, or the mismatched plates, or, worst of all, at her nervous fawning when Mr. Sleem, the cafeteria manager, made his inevitable appearance. Ellen yanked open her underwear drawer, grabbed a handful of pants and slammed them in the suitcase. Each year had brought a new wave of humiliation. Liza was a freshman her senior year, and Ellen had expected the worst.
“Ellie, remember how sweet Liza looked that Thanksgiving in that smart teal dress with the little silk jacket and those high heels that just about had her standing on her toes. Just like a little girl playing dress up.”
Ellen added a bra to her pile, half slip, stockings and a pair of socks just in case. She’d been fooling herself to think she could call Mom for just two minutes, particularly talking about Liza. Liza, her favorite of the St. Enid’s girls, could do no wrong.
“And that bottle of wine she brought, Ellie! You know I didn’t know what to do, her being a big city girl and all. Should I serve her wine, underage and all? But I couldn’t, could I, not with those two sophomore girls eyeing the bottles, Mr. Sleem sitting right there.” A little laugh stopped her, and Ellen had to laugh too, even though they had been over the Thanksgiving scene dozens of times. How had Liza managed to get that wine? Ellen had never asked.
In the end the disaster had not been the one she’d expected, but Mr. Sleem drinking almost the entire bottle himself, babbling endlessly, and ending up patting Mom’s butt. She could still see Mom cringing.
Her stomach tightened now just as it had when she glanced over at Liza—a pat on the butt; that would amuse the freshman dorm all the way to Easter.
“That little smile on Liza’s face, so sweet. You know, Ellie, I was watching Mr. Sleem then”—after ten years replaying this scene they could dip in at any point without explanation—“and he was still full of himself from patting my fanny. I could tell he thought Liza was smiling because he was such a cosmopolitan ladies’ man. But when she handed him her little jacket, well…” Ellen knew Mom was blushing, even after all these years, feeling a bit guilty as they both pictured Mr. Sleem’s round red face transfixed with sensual greed as he unconsciously rubbed the silk between his fingers, while eyeing one firm young white arm sliding into the left soft, slippery sleeve, the nubile breasts lift and dip as the blonde Lolita from L.A. twisted to enter her other arm into the waiting right sleeve. “What was he thinking?” Mom had asked later and been appalled when Ellen and Liza hooted.
What he hadn’t been expecting was Liza twisting so quickly that she caught his hand between her arm and breast, her letting out a dainty cry, Mom gasping with true horror, and Ellen letting out a cry she could not in all the years of discussion after, ever quite define. And the two sophomores staring open-mouthed.
Ellen added a black dress—too dressy for a funeral but the only one she had, jeans, a green wool sweater. She didn’t know which had startled her more—Liza’s unthinking support of Mom, or Mr. Sleem’s having been too drunk to remember the incident. Or more surprising yet the length of time it took for the rumors about Mr. Sleem to circulate. She didn’t remind Mom of the wretched rest of that winter when nothing changed in Mom’s life except her fears for Liza and for the one job she could get near to Eddie.
The three years in age was too great a gulf for friendship then, but she and Liza did trade St. Enid’s slurs in whispers or anonymous notes until Easter, when in a maneuver Ellen hadn’t fully understood for years, Liza gave the Baineses freedom.
It was a gift so overwhelming her mother thanked God for Liza every night in her prayers, and Ellen never thought of Liza without seeing her own inadequacy, which, she had to admit, only made her feel more inadequate and not a small bit petty.
“But, Ellie, how could Liza’s husband die? She never mentioned him being sick or anything. You know I keep in touch with Liza. Better than you do, hon.”
“I know you do, Mom, and you keep me up on her. That’s why Liza called me. I’m flying out there first thing this morning. That’s why I’m calling you now.”
“Does Liza need me to come, too? I could get off work. We owe it to her—”
“No, Mom. I can handle it.”
“I’m sure you can, Ellie. All that paperwork about death and those miserable funeral directors, and lawyers and who knows what out there in California. You know Liza’s not good at spotting pitfalls. She’ll need you, honey.”
“Yeah, Mom.”
“You’re not going because you feel you have to, are you?”
“No, Mom. I’ll call you when I get back. Bye.” She certainly did owe Liza, but she wasn’t going out of debt. Ever since she’d seen Liza’s husband last month at the St. Enid’s West Coast Alumnae reunion in Portland she’d known the man was a sleaze. Look at how he led Harry Cooper on, huddled in a corner with him like he was really interested in Harry’s arcane railroad talk. Harry did love railroading and, alas, he did go on. She’d zoned out more than once herself. And Jay Silvestri, well, clearly he was a fast-lane guy. He probably mocked Harry all the way back to L.A. Harry was such a lamb, and Liza’s husband, well anyone could see the man was a predator and for him an innocent like Harry Cooper was mutton on the hoof. Of course she hadn’t told Mom. But how could Liza not see the man was a snake?
She was shivering hard and now it was from the cold. The clock said 4:46 A.M. She dialed Harry Cooper and let the phone ring till his machine picked up. She wasn’t surprised he turned off the ringer at night; it was the sensible thing to do.
She walked to the apartment window and stared out at the best view in town. In the park snow covered the grass and outlined the more protected trees. Moonlight skated on the stream. Her view was really the nicest part of the four months she’d been in Kansas City.
But she hadn’t expected more. She knew Harry Cooper was a “settled for.” Harry Cooper loved her and that should be enough. She was no Liza Cummings. Not blonde, not beautiful. She was what she’d always been: the daughter of the woman who served the creamed corn at St. Enid’s cafeteria. The kernel of reliability—that witticism from a date who thought she missed the insult.
She’d tried it on her own in Portland and look what happened. She should consider herself lucky that a reliable man, a sweet man like Harry wanted her enough to create a job for her in Kansas City.
It wasn’t enough; the whole move here had been a mistake, but she couldn’t go back to Portland, and besides, poor Harry, well, she couldn’t do that to him. At least she was a good assistant for him, organized, alert, able to see through problems.
If Harry had told her what Silvestri said to him in Portland…but when she had asked he’d skewered her with, “Well, Ellen, if you didn’t want me to find out what kind of slick operator your friend Liza married you shouldn’t have egged me on to talk to him.”
Seven
LIZA SLAMMED THE HOOD down on her ravaged engine, scrambled for her cell phone in the back of the car. 911? Police? No way. She punched 6 on speed dial, one of the exorbitantly priced airport limos. “E. Six. Double your rate if you’re here first.”
The parking lot was almost empty. In the corner farthest from the exit lane security guards used, a black car’s engine roared. She punched 7. “E. Six. Double your rate if you’re here first.”
Tires squealed. The black car sped at her, veering left, cutting off her escape to the stairs.
Pain filled her chest, as if she’d already been shot. She forced herself to breathe, to move, to crouch next as she hit 8 and repeated the offer.
The black car stopped ten feet away. The driver’s door jerked open. A shot cracked her windshield.
Wheels screeched. Headlights striped the cement. A white limo skidded around the corner, squealing to a halt by the man emerging from the black car. A black limo shot in from the exit lane.
Liza flung open the car door, grabbed the pig carrier and the gun and ran for the stairs, thrusting the gun in her purse as she raced down two flights, nearly slipping as she jerked around the corners, her center of balance thrown off kilter by the weight of the squirming pig. The cell phone clanked to the floor but she couldn’t stop. She yanked open the exit door and ran for the moving walkway, running on it, leaping off the other end and racing past the escalator into a whole different cavernous room.
