Die A Little Part 21

Finally, I find myself on my block and then at my building. As I walk from my car, I hear someone walking briskly to catch up with me. I turn with a start, waiting for the lightning bolt, or Joe Avalon's coal-eyed stare. Lately, it seems like I am always turning with a start.

"Detective Cudahy," I blurt, not entirely relieved.

'You're not playing straight, even after our little talk," he says with a creeping coldness in his voice.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Where's your sister-in-law?"

I guess there are few secrets left. I lock eyes with him. He looks tired, frustrated, impatient. "Where is she, Miss King?"

In my head, I start to say, Sister-in-law? I don't know what you mean. But I can't bear to keep playing. I can't stomach putting on the front.

So instead I say, "I don't know. I came here looking for her."

He looks slightly relieved at my bluntness. "She knew we were closing in. We were tailing her."

"And you lost her?"

"She lost us. I was staking out the party and she just disappeared. One minute she was there, the next she was gone. Must have left on foot. We're guessing she's on her way into hiding, or skipped town. This may come as a big surprise to you, Miss King, but she knows even more than you."

"I thought maybe," I say, inwardly relieved. He has figured out a lot, but not everything.

And then he pauses as if deciding something.

"We'll keep your brother out of it," he finally says, nodding toward me.

I feel my eye twitch. I don't know why I wasn't expecting him to mention Bill. I don't know why I thought Bill was still safe.

I consider, fleetingly, telling him about the tickets to Brazil. But I have no real reason to believe Cudahy would, or could, keep my brother out of it. And, more pressingly, I have no reason to believe Bill would, or could, stay out of it.

"We know he doesn't know what he married into," Cudahy continues. "The circles your sister-in-law moved in."

"Right."

"You should have told me about him. About who you were." "I know."

As I walk up the stairs, my head is blank. It crosses my mind that I can't be sure I'm not being followed now. Still, what choice do I have? I have to take my chances.

When I enter the apartment, the phone is ringing. Somehow I know it has been ringing for hours.

"It's Alice. Don't you think it's time we spoke?" I hear the roar of the ocean in the background.

I say, "Where?" and she tells me.

On the long drive to meet Alice, I am careful to watch my rearview mirror. I take some winding detours and don't notice anyone.

I am thinking that there are so many things about Alice that I will never know. An airless gap between the stories of her low-rent childhood and her years working for studio costume departments. And do I even know if these exotically sketched narratives are true?

She made herself into someone you didn't ask questions of because somehow you didn't know the right questions to ask.

Or the questions you wanted to ask seemed impossibly naive in the face of the dark maw that lay behind her finely etched wife face.

Once I thought she was trying to escape a darkness, and she found rescue in Bill. Now I know that she wanted both. She liked the double life. It kept her alive.

I arrive at Miramar Point as the moon shows its full size, giving off a faint glitter on the water, whose waves cream forward into sleek spit curls before straightening out to stretched silk again. A lone boat knocks around the Santa Monica breakwater. Past it, the colossal gap of the ocean hangs a steely purple.

I park on a small ridge off the highway and make my way to the top of an endless flight of wooden steps. My hand moist on the nickel rail as I ascend higher and higher, I make the final turn to reach the restaurant. Its round booths, hung over with fairy lights, are uninhabited except for a young man with a shock of white-blond hair nodding off over his drink. A cat twined at his feet suddenly arches his back at me as I walk over and slide into a booth, ordering a short gla.s.s of red wine.

It is twenty minutes before I hear someone call. Looking out, I see her making her way up the long set of steps.

Through the brown-violet dusk, I can see her waving, waving as if somehow-against all reason-glad to see me.

As she walks up the last stretch, I think of nothing but the faint sound of pa.s.sing cars on the highway below. It is the only way.

Moments later, we are leaning, small gla.s.ses of anisette in hand, over the terrace rail behind the bar. Her hair, long and undone, swirls around her as she turns to face me. Every moment feels unutterably significant.

"Remember that night when I told you I felt like someone was following me?" she says evenly.

Before I can say I don't remember it at all, she adds, "Isn't it funny that it was you?"

Taken aback, I say, "I'm not following you."

"No?" she says, and suddenly I'm not so sure.

She taps out the final cigarette from her creased pack, her fingers sallow at the tips.

"It's you who's followed me," I insist severely. "Telling Mike Standish things that you couldn't know."

She only smiles.

"You wanted to scare me off this. But you can't." I feel my nerve rise the more I speak. If she wants it straight, I'll give it to her. "Why did you keep letting Lois go to Walter Schor when you knew the kind of man-"

I wasn't expecting the response.

"Why not?" Her eyes ringed red. "If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else. Girls like us-" she begins, then lifts her shoulders almost in a shrug. The us is painfully, devastatingly vague.

"But you were out of it all. You could have been out."

"There is no out." Her eyes like fresh teeth, hooking into me.

"Don't you know?"

I ignore her question, try once again to s.h.i.+ft the conversation to the immediate, the practical.

"So Mike told you," I say. "What I'd found out." I'm not sure if it is a question or not. The conversation feels unreal, unmoored. I feel drunk, nerves hot and tingling.

"Everything. He told me everything," she says, and runs a finger along her lips, blue under the lights. "He couldn't help it. He had to give me all of it. He was in love and he couldn't distinguish."

"In love."

"With you, my girl. I figured on a lot, but not on that." She draws in the smoke.

"I should have," she adds, almost kindly. The tone sets something off in me.

"Why don't you just tell me. Why don't you just tell me. Was it you? Did you kill her." My voice is like a knot unloosing too fast, uncontrollable. Even as I say it, I don't really believe it. But I want to see. I want to see how bad it is.

"I didn't kill her." Alice shakes her head. "But I might have, it's true. If I had to. She knew I couldn't leave everything behind. Not everything. Or couldn't yet. I still liked the perfume of it, even if I sometimes hated myself for it.

"Walter Schor, you know all about him, I guess? She showed up at his house. She knew you were never supposed to do that. She wasn't following any of the rules anymore. Schor called us both. Said get her out of here or there's going to be trouble. He was through with her anyway.

"When Joe and I got there, his flunkies, they said they didn't know where she was. But you could feel something in the air, something awful.

"We kept looking through the entire house, walking down corridor after corridor, in and out of over a half dozen bedrooms and sitting rooms and a projection room and pantries and a room, Lora, a room just for arranging flowers.

"The longer it took to find her, the more we both saw our futures shuddering before us. He could see trouble with cops and all the bad business that comes with it. I could see worse. The end of everything.

"It was a half hour before we found her. We'd already looked at his famous salt.w.a.ter pool and hadn't seen her. But when I was upstairs in one of the bedrooms, I stepped out. On a balcony and looked down at the big kidney shape, and there was something in it, floating.

"It looked like a big black rose, like those aerial shots in old musicals, round black-stockinged chorus girl legs fanning out into big flowers."

She spreads her blue-lit hand out over the water beneath us.

"It was her dress blooming.

"Joe and I ran down, and he kneeled over and he saw too.

"Neither of us jumped in. Isn't that strange?" She turns to me, as if wanting an answer.

I don't say anything. How can I say anything? I look down past the railing, into the surf. I look down and listen to her buzzing, relentless voice.

"And, Lora, it was so funny. Lois was leaning over herself, facedown, curled over like the top of a cane. Joe reached out and tugged her toward the pool's edge. I can still see him lifting her head up. Her eyes were wide open. I wasn't expecting that. They were beautiful.

"Before I pa.s.sed him off to Lois, I was Schor's girl for a long time, with the scars to show for it. He wasn't even as rough as they come. I've had rougher. But I knew it could have been me. In many ways, it was me: Alice Steele, folded up upon herself, and Alice King waiting there, ready to cut her losses, reborn free of old ties, old stories, old desires ...

"Joe called two of his boys and told them to dump her but first make her hard to identify. They didn't do much of a job. They didn't think they needed to. Who would stand up for Lois? Who would even look for her?"

She reaches out and grabs my face in her hand. "You really want to know?" Her grip is cold marble on my skin. "Listen"-she holds my chin more tightly, forcing my eyes to hers-"listen, Lora. Isn't this the kind of thing you've always wanted to know? Isn't this the kind of thing you've been touching with your fingertips since we met? Touching in the dark?"

No.

"They busted a cap together, he beat her raw, and when he was done, he pushed her in, and let her sink like a stone. Maybe he held her under, forcing all that hot dirty life out of her.

"Listen, Lora, listen."

The way she looks at me-I remember what Mike once said: She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.

Then she finishes me off. "When we got there, Schor was reading the racing form. Drinking cognac and circling sure things with a little blue pencil."

My hand darts out, knocks her arm away from me forcefully. Then slaps her face with a sharp crack. Her face shoots backward, but she doesn't even blink. I think she might smile.

"Just tell me. My brother-" I start, then feel all the sound rush out of me-when did he fall when did he fall so far-blood beating in my brain. It is too much.

"Of course." She nods, and now she is smiling but softly, a streak of red seared to her cheek. "Of course. That's what you really want to know. That's all you really want."

She shakes her head. "Lora, that doesn't matter."

"I don't. I don't," I say, shaking my head, shaking it loose.

"I came to him when I had no choice left. Bill, he ..." She starts, then stumbles.

"He was in love and he couldn't distinguish," I say, turning away from her, eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g. I say it not for her but for him. Only for him.

We each take a long drink from our gla.s.ses. The liqueur snakes down my throat, steeling me.

"I'm not stopping," I say in a scratchy voice I don't recognize. "I have to help him. He can't see ..."

Her expression turns from loose to tight, a flat mask. "You'll bring him down. Is that what you want? That b.u.m cop you're spilling to. Joe told me all about him. You do know he'll have your brother's badge. Lock him up and throw away the key. It'll be your fault. Is that what you want?"

I've never heard her talk quite this way, quite this hard.

"Is that what you want?" she prods.

"You-you crashed into him," I suddenly, incongruously say, then furl my brow. What am I saying? The words make no sense.

"I can save him." I recover. He's saved me.

"Listen," she says, brittle and dangerous. "The only way you can save him is by letting this go. Just let it get handled and shake the cop off us."

I feel my hand gripping the rail. I swivel toward her.

You think you can ... infect him. You think you have the right. You have no right. I can protect him from you, from it, from whatever this is that you've tried to ... pollute him with.

I think all this, my head throbbing, vein pulsing in my brain. But my only chance is in her not knowing that I found out about the plan to frame Joe Avalon and, most of all, the plan to leave the next day. I can't let her know that I learned he is risking everything and doing things he'd never, never do.

So all I say is, "Okay. Okay, Alice Steele."

He wouldn't tell me at all. He'd just make it go away.

The puckering anisette still in my veins, her voice still hot in my head, I drive straight to the only place where I have a chance, even though it is a slim one.

Parking my car half a block down on Flower Street, I walk quickly to Joe Avalon's house, rehearsing in my head what I will say.

He doesn't seem surprised to see me, even though it is nearly three in the morning.