The Lady Upstairs’ Staffing Agency was located in the center of Little Busan Plaza, on the second floor, above Fish Heaven Aquarium Repair and Seven Galbi BBQ, and between a nail salon that never did any business—I had my own theories about that—and a payday loan shop that had long since been closed.
You could say we brought style to the place.
Seven Galbi was the main attraction, and their delicious specialty beef kept me shampooing my hair every day, trying to get the smell out. It was not the aphrodisiac you might have supposed. On weekends and at night, the restaurant was so crowded that we had to give the valet our keys. But during the day, I could’ve parked my car across three spaces and there still would’ve been room to spare. That day, there were only two other cars parked in the lot, a gray Mercedes and an oxidizing Honda that had once been beige.
It was a habit from another lifetime, one I couldn’t seem to shake, the need to be at the office by 8 a.m. Even when I knew Lou and Jackal wouldn’t be in for hours still. Even when I was so hungover I couldn’t remember my zip code. But that morning, having the threat of the Lady hanging over my head added an extra incentive. I needed all the time I could get to figure out Ellen’s next rendezvous.
I could feel Jackal and last night between my legs with each stair up to our office—the pleasant soreness of the well fucked, a little throbbing ache that lives in you like a secret—taking the steps two at a time to feel it deeper. It gave me something to focus on while I gnawed on the soft guts of a croissant, my pantyhose already sweat-chafing my thighs from the single flight of stairs.
Even this early in the morning, the smell of browning meat wafted up with me. I suppressed a gag. The sun bounced off the aluminum roof and cast dusty rays into my hangover, subtle as a spotlight, and I kept my head ducked like I was trying to crawl up the stairs incognito.
I’d almost bumped into her before I looked up.
She could’ve been twenty-five or forty, depending on which part of her you were looking at, with the calves of a go-go dancer and the carefully moisturized lipstick lines of a well-tended woman battling the inevitable with grace. She wore a silk blouse the color of a ripe melon, and the inch of dark roots under her bottle job seemed exactly right—the obvious artifice making it clear how good she looked. Large smoky sunglasses shaded her eyes, and she had one hand on our door. I couldn’t tell if she was coming or going.
“Hullo,” she said. Her voice was low for a woman, and her fingernails were painted a bright blue. She tapped one against the door and then her hand dropped. Around her wrist, another slim circle of blue. I squinted. A tattoo, little stars inked in a faded denim color.
“Can I help you?”
She flipped her sunglasses to the top of her head and studied me for a moment. Her dark eyes were bright but flat, the way I’d always heard sharks’ eyes described. Behind her ear, I could still make out the faintly tattooed outline of Perfect Alignment Massage’s logo on our door, the business that had owned the joint until the Lady came along.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think you can.” She didn’t move. I didn’t, either.
When the Lady had taken over the lease, back when Lou’s and my little side project had gone wrong and we’d needed cover, she’d registered our business as a staffing agency. It gave us cover for the shuffle of girls coming by the office, and more importantly, it gave us respectability. We’d created our cover so well that occasionally, we got mistaken for a real staffing agency. Sometimes, when business was slow and Lou was bored, she’d even take jobs and place girls for the hell of it, adding the seventy-five-dollar check to her rainy-day fund.
Half distracted, digging through my purse for the key and wondering how quickly I could reasonably expect Ellen to reschedule with Klein, I started to say, “Are you looking for a temp? Because I’m about to—” But she held up a hand. She hadn’t blinked since she’d taken off her sunglasses.
“Be a dear and give this to Lou for me,” she said, handing me a white envelope embossed with a blue fleur-de-lis. My scalp began to prickle. “I’d prefer it go to her unopened,” she added as she sashayed past me down the stairs, and I stepped automatically out of her way, then wished I hadn’t.
“Excuse me,” I called after her, but she held up a hand so I could see each cobalt almond perfectly. The diamond on her ring finger, big enough to anchor a small yacht, caught the sun, and little sequins of light burst across my face. My scalp prickled again, harder.
I dropped the croissant and followed her down the stairs, not sure what I meant to say, but she turned before I reached the bottom, one hand on the driver-side door of the Mercedes, like she’d been expecting me to follow, like it was a script, and said: “Lou told me you were pretty, but high hopes are such a bitch, aren’t they? Nowhere for them to go but down.”
And then she turned the engine and drove away.
Across the street, a congregation of women gathered on greenery in front of a flat-topped church. I watched her drive away, memorizing her plate number before I felt the eyes of someone else on me—one of the women clustered on the lawn, moving their arms in circles and slow spins, somewhere between kung fu and ballet. A sunglassed dumpling of a grandmother had her face tipped in my direction, and I held up a hand, dazed.
She gave me the finger.
I walked back up the stairs and unlocked the door. The massage parlor had left us with a small waiting area. Behind the front desk, there were three doors that led to separate offices for each of us. At the very back of the office proper, a bathroom, a sink, and a little balcony that afforded a view of dark glossy skyscrapers. At the front desk, a phone that almost never rang was nestled among neatly collated file folders.
At the front desk, I jotted down the license plate number on the back of the envelope in letters as small as I could manage. And then I peeked inside. It didn’t disappoint.
I stood listening to the envelope chatter in my hands, and that was how Jackal found me, pushing open the now-unlocked door. He snarled something rude at me, a word I only liked to be called behind bedroom doors, but it passed over my head. It didn’t matter. We would say and do worse to each other before our dance was over.
“Did you see her?” I asked.
“What? Who?”
“Blue nail polish.”
“Are you still drunk?” He shouldered past me to his office, the massage table long since replaced by a desk, even though his door still bore a trace of a lotus-flower sticker.
“The Lady Upstairs wears blue nail polish,” I said out loud, to no one.
Lou didn’t get to the office until noon, which surprised me: she’d had less to drink than me, and said she was going straight home. But my morning hadn’t gone to waste, at least: one call to Klein’s secretary had confirmed an opening in his schedule—for a prostate exam, which wasn’t exactly a lie—on both Thursday and Saturday afternoons. She’d promised to hold the spots in his calendar while she confirmed with him. I called the St. Leo and booked rooms for both afternoons, to be safe.
I sat at my desk, thinking about how the Lady’s blue fingernails would look wrapped around my throat, when Lou popped her head into my doorway. Her hair was dark and slightly damp, and she grinned at me, fresh and not hungover.
“Guess what!” Lou chirped.
I winced, sliding the Lady’s envelope into my desk drawer. “Good morning to you, too,” I said drily. “Or, I should say, afternoon. You’re in a good mood.”
“I’m a miracle worker,” Lou said, twirling into the seat across from me. I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for a month. “You’ve got until Friday.”
I bit off a tight smile in Lou’s direction. If I could convince Ellen, a Thursday afternoon rendezvous left a one-day turnaround. It was just possible. “Thank you,” I said with stiff lips. If Lou noticed I was less than thrilled, she didn’t show it.
“And,” Lou said, “I got this.” She held up another envelope, a twin of the one I’d tucked away in my desk. I jerked in my chair and tried to disguise it as a cough. “A new name,” Lou announced, her lopsided smile turning wicked. “We’re in a busy season.” She chucked the envelope onto my desk and then draped herself in the chair across from me.
As I opened it, pulling out the folded note—one single line, not even a full name, no other information: M. Carrigan—Lou asked, “Have you set the new date with Ellen?”
I danced the mouse across the pad at my desk, waking up my computer and typing in M. Carrigan, Los Angeles. “I’m expecting her any minute,” I said. “Where did you get this? Was it on your desk?”
Lou yawned, wide—goddammit, what had she been doing?—and shrugged. “Yep.”
Maybe the envelope the Lady had handed me was a test, a way to prove that even now, deadline looming, I was still loyal to her. “Lou, wait a second, let me—”
“Mitch Carrigan,” Lou went on happily. She was never as happy as at the beginning of the grift. All those possibilities still out there, all those different ways to ruin an asshole’s life.
Then it clicked.
“Carrigan? Like the city music hall Carrigans, those Carrigans? Old-money founding-fathers-of-Pasadena Carrigans, those Carrigans?”
“One and the same,” Lou said, her expression smug. “Ours. All ours. And once you’re done with Ellen”—her smile wavered—“we can work it together. Like the old days.”
“Like the old days,” I repeated. A sharp memory of a bra-clad Lou clutching my arm, fighting down giggles. Our very first case all over again—only this time, we wouldn’t leave any loose ends.
Lou came to my side of the desk so we could read the articles together on my screen. She rested her elbows on my back, sharp points that made me shiver as she shifted positions, shiatsuing my shoulder blades. “Mayoral dark horse thunders into the lead.” She read the Times headline over my shoulder. Goose bumps rose on my skin each time her elbows slipped. “Family name pays dividends for would-be mayor.” She read another, yawning again.
I shrugged her elbows off me and skated my chair backward so I could look at her. I could see each pale freckle on her nose. I could probably count them if I tried. I wanted to tell her I didn’t have time to waste on a new mark, not when I had four days to turn around Klein or else leave her and this life we’d built together before the Lady put me down like a dog shot in the street.
“Lou, I should tell you— Is that the same blouse you were wearing yesterday?”
“Hmm?” Lou had moved to the bar cart she’d bought to celebrate my first anniversary with the Lady—the same day I’d paid off twenty large on the debt—and was fixing a cocktail, humming as she did. My mouth watered, not pleasantly, and I narrowed my eyes at her back. Black, linen, sheer—I was almost positive I was right. I heard the chime of the front door—Jackal leaving. Even better. I didn’t want him to overhear what I was about to say.
“Never mind,” I said quickly. “Lou, come here and tell me if—”
Lou turned around, toasting me with a tumbler of tea-colored liquor, capsizing a maraschino cherry. “It’ll be tricky, but Mitch Carrigan, our biggest score ever—”
“Hello?”
Ellen rapped two small fingers on my office door and pushed it open, but she didn’t step inside. Her hair was pulled away from her face with a clip, which was a mistake—it wasn’t that kind of face. A small cluster of acne blossomed on her chin. She was wearing blue jeans and a tight pink sweater with embroidered pom-poms, and she looked younger than legal.
Lou’s mouth dropped open, but she recovered quicker than I did. “Hello,” she said, pulling Ellen in for a kiss on each cheek. “So nice to see you again.” Ellen stammered something back, half dazed. Lou could have that effect on people. It was why I’d had Lou meet Ellen and me for drinks at the St. Leo back at the beginning of the case: she was still the best at making the girls see past the payoff and want to be involved with what we did. Lou could sell anything.
There’s a magic Lou has, a certain kindness in her face. It’s a small miracle, finding a nice face in this city. People respond to it, even when they shouldn’t. Even when she was wearing day-old clothes and no makeup and hadn’t gotten enough sleep because God knew why.
“Ellen, a little birdie told me you’re killing this case. Jo says you’re one of the best we’ve ever had.” Lou smiled, warm and homey, and Ellen smiled back, a little uncertainly, making knots of her fingers and venturing a glance at me as Lou tugged her to my desk.
I was not smiling, not at either of them. I was wondering exactly how much Ellen had overheard and why she looked like such a flight risk.
I studied them as Lou chattered away at Ellen, tossing compliments her way, reaching out once to tuck some of Ellen’s frizz back against her head. Something Lou taught me years ago, good advice to live by: never trust women who don’t like other women. At the rate Lou was working Ellen, the three of us would be tangling together friendship bracelets by happy hour.
Finally, Lou pushed away from the desk and tossed a half-penitent shrug at me, as though she truly regretted leaving. “I’ll get out of your hair now,” Lou said, smiling over dazzled Ellen’s head at me, widening her eyes so I knew she, too, was wondering how much Ellen had heard, and shut the door behind her. Ellen stared after her, ignoring me. She didn’t want to meet my eyes, I realized.
Later, I thought about how it might have gone if I’d been wise enough to play nice, be the smart older sister with a plan. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Lady with her blue nail polish and her easy disposal of the girls she’d once worked with, and the envelope in my desk I hadn’t quite managed to mention to Lou, and speaking of Lou, where the hell had she gone last night after the bar, and then there was that hangover to consider, no small thing, the mezcal that was refusing to play nice with the gin. Maybe if any one of those things had been different, everything would have been.
There’s excuses, and then there’s excuses.
Instead, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t get up from my desk. Ellen was frozen, half turned to the door. I kept my eyebrows raised, waiting for her to make the first move. Finally, she took a step toward the chair, moving tentatively. She searched my face for an invite to sit and, when it wasn’t forthcoming, bypassed it and circled the room.
She paused in front of the drink cart. She turned the bottles this way and that, no doubt looking for something to do with her hands. Coming across like she’d never seen liquor before.
Maybe with Klein’s money in her pocket, the knowledge of what she could do to a powerful man, she wouldn’t always wait for other people to tell her what to do. I hoped so. I wasn’t convinced.
“Is this a good time?” Ellen asked finally, turning to me and rubbing her pale lips together. Her fingers drummed against the cart. Nervous. She’d been thinking since last night. I didn’t like it.
“As good a time as any. Pour me a drink and let’s get down to business.”
Ellen’s mouth dropped open, a who, me? thing that made me want to slap her.
“A . . . drink?”
“Gin. Straight.”
Ellen reached down on autopilot, hand hovering over the black glass bottle, and I felt a little smile in my chest, aha. I still had her. But then she pulled her fingers back like she’d been burned and said, “You want me to pour you a glass of gin?”
“Not all the way full. A few fingers, not the whole hand. It’s still early.”
She didn’t like it, but because I’d done my job well and picked a girl who could take a few slaps but couldn’t figure out if she minded, she yanked the top off the bottle like it had done something ugly and personal to her and dunked a few splashes into two separate tumblers.
She slammed the glass down on the desk, a few drops of gin splashing up onto my neck, and sat down in the chair across from me with even more force, crossing her legs and bouncing her foot up and down. It was a practiced move, not comfortable, like she’d seen someone do it in a movie once. She swirled her glass of gin and bent her face to it, sniffing. She took one big slug and her nostrils flared. But to her credit, she choked it down. I almost laughed.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Do you have any ice, at least?”
“No,” I lied.
She nodded, up and down, up and down, a little sad about the state of the world she’d found herself in. But I still had her. And even better, she was so distracted, she didn’t seem to have picked up on anything she might’ve overheard between me and Lou. Good.
I kept it brisk and all business. “Klein’s free Thursday afternoon. I’ve booked the St. Leo already so all that’s left is for you to call him—”
Ellen was turning red, and she started to shake her head. She mouthed something, but no sound came out, and I watched her face as I talked until the words exploded out of her: “No! No, no, Thursday isn’t going to work. No!”
The hangover was making it hard for me to focus on anything other than the blotchy red spots spreading across her cheeks.
“What, you have other plans? Okay, if Thursday’s no good, we could—”
“Thursday isn’t going to work because I’m not doing this anymore,” Ellen said. “Any of it. I mean it. I’m out. Finish the job without me because I’m done.”