Outside her front door, Ellen had set up a planter filled with fake succulents and a welcome mat that said #BLESSED in big block letters. Ellen didn’t answer the door right away, so I stood on her #BLESSED doormat and made a bloody mess of my cuticles with my teeth. I waited another twenty seconds before I rapped again on the door, harder, not stopping until she swung it open.
“Sorry,” Ellen said. “I was in the bathroom.” She turned away before I could study her face, but the waft of sweat and vomit coming off her let me know she hadn’t been in the bathroom prepping her face for me.
“Well, come in,” she said, sitting down on the couch and staring blankly at the television, which wasn’t on. “He’s in there.” She pointed in the general direction of the bedroom.
She seemed fairly normal, if a little stiff and pale. Better posture than I’d ever seen, spine perfectly straight like she’d been impaled on a board. Her hands were trembling on her lap, but otherwise, she didn’t seem that fragile. In shock, maybe.
From the living room, I could see a dark lump on the bed, spread-eagled, a thick black stain beneath him, turning the sheets a gluey, rusty color.
“Ellen, what did you do?”
“Is he . . . Is he really dead?”
I stepped into the darkened bedroom. Klein was in the center of the bed. Freshly dead, he looked like a mannequin, waxy and unreal. The back of his ruined head lolled off the side of a pillow. Blood had puddled onto the Berber on his side of the bed, and I could see small clumps of bone and viscera on the fog-gray walls, as far up as the crown molding. That satin headboard was a goner.
I’d never seen a dead body before.
“Yes,” I said, after a moment, leaving the doorway and turning back to Ellen. I didn’t need to take his pulse to be sure. I wasn’t going to touch that thing with my bare hands. “He’s dead.”
That’s when Ellen unspooled, my pronouncement unlocking shudders that started in her toes and moved up, until I could see even that poufy blonde hair start to dance on end. The whole time, she was chattering away, telling me what had happened, giving me every excuse.
“. . . said I was some dumb kid, a bimbo, not even worth the Viagra . . .”
How long had he been dead? How long had she waited to call me? I stared at the smudgy browning streaks on the Lucite coffee table between us, faint enough to have been chocolate if I didn’t know better, if there hadn’t been a man oozing behind me in the bedroom. Where had those streaks come from—Ellen herself? Had she touched the body? Had she been stupid enough to touch him?
“. . . and then he, he, he, he choked me, and we’d never done that before and I tried to act like it . . . was fine, but he wouldn’t stop, he was laughing, and then it was over and I don’t know, I think I . . .”
I forced my attention back to Ellen, trying to get a read on her. Her face was so pale it was almost blue. She was gouging at the threads of the couch cushion underneath her legs rhythmically with her nails. Her eyes wouldn’t settle on any one thing, but her glance kept being tugged back to the bedroom.
All those slaps. And that wife he wouldn’t leave. I wondered which had mattered more to Ellen, in the moment.
Days ago, I’d been so eager to catch those slaps on Jackal’s bedside mic. What great leverage they’d have been. I forced myself to shake it off, count backward from fifty until my head cleared. If I fell down that self-loathing path now, I’d be no use to Ellen or myself.
“. . . and you told me, you said, ‘Make him pay,’ and that’s what I . . . that’s what I thought . . .” She circled her hands in the direction of the ruined producer, fingers flopping and jerking from loose wrists.
“Wait, stop. Start over,” I said. Make him pay. Jesus Christ. Come on, Jo, get a grip. “Why was he even here?”
But I knew the answer to that one, or could guess. Which way had the call gone—inbound or outbound? Sorry, baby, let me make last night up to you. The same script, from either party. In the end, it didn’t matter. Here we were.
Instead of answering, Ellen’s face crumpled and she sobbed into her hands.
I let her sob. I walked back to the bedroom door, staring at the thickening black pool behind what was left of Klein’s head. One day before the sting. One day before I would have had my money back, before the Lady would have canceled the debt. I closed my eyes for a moment against the wave of nausea that burned my stomach. I’d been so close.
And now, instead of cash, I’d be laying a dead body at her feet.
From the corner of my eye, I saw something on the bed move and I flinched, but it was only his hand, made slippery with blood, settling. I turned away from the body and walked to Ellen’s window, the one I’d been on the other side of a few days prior, and peered down into the street. No one congregating in the alleyway, making notes about a suspected murder. No one outside at all, in fact. A fire escape that looked like it had seen very little use.
I hadn’t known what to bring, hadn’t been thinking at all, in fact. All I’d wanted to do was get in the car and see for myself. I hadn’t thought to bring anything to cover the body, and I didn’t even stock cleaning materials in serious supply in my own apartment. We’d have to use whatever Ellen had on hand. I looked around the living room—not so much as a wheeled bar cart we could’ve used to move him. I left Ellen chattering away in the living room, confessing everything to the walls like someone was capable of absolving her, and poked into her bathroom.
“I asked him to come over, I wanted to make sure he would still come over, after the, the party—” Ellen’s shower curtain wasn’t as opaque as I would have wanted, and it was decorated by gold and pink glitter swirls and a cupcake print, complete with cherry on top. In the top corner, gold foil spelled out Good Vibes Only! I yanked the curtain off the rod and brought it back to the living room, where Ellen was still talking.
“—and it was like, like everything was fine, you know? At least for a little while. He brought champagne. And flowers.”
With my arms still full of Klein’s pastel makeshift burial shroud, my eyes found the big spray of birds-of-paradise in a cut-crystal vase on Ellen’s mantel, which made me think of the duvet at the St. Leo. I wondered if Klein, too, had thought of the acrylic bedspread when he bought them, if that’s what had triggered thoughts of Ellen. His last living joke. I remembered a thing I’d heard once: birds-of-paradise are the goriest flower to kill. Decapitate them, and you have to deal with thick gray-green sap all over your hands, your clothes, the kind that never washes off. Birds-of-paradise bleed like any living thing.
“We made . . . love. But then he started choking me, you know, during, and he’s never . . . That was new, you know? I tried to play along, act like I was fine with it, like it turned me on even—” I caught Ellen’s shudder at that one. She was starting to repeat herself, verbatim. She’d practiced her speech before I got there, I realized. More than once.
“Oh my God,” she said, starting to hyperventilate. For the first time since I’d stepped into the apartment, I caught her looking at the body, really looking at Klein. Her mouth dropped open—maybe to start screaming—and her body rocked as she suppressed a gag.
I crossed the room in three strides and took her by the shoulders. I gripped her in a rough hug, pressing her face into my collarbone until I was sure she wouldn’t make a sound.
I was stroking her hair without even realizing it and murmuring soothing sounds into her ear, like you would with any frightened animal. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said over and over, the words like glass in my throat. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”
I needed her to keep it together. There was no way I could get Klein’s body out of the apartment by myself. It wasn’t going to be okay, for me or for Ellen or for Klein, but I needed her cooperation for what I knew would come next.
On the drive over, before I’d been sure that Klein was dead, I’d thought of all the worst-case scenarios, my next possible play.
If Klein really was dead, going to the police was not an option. I’d suspected Ellen wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut about the Lady, the operation, and she was confirming that belief more and more each second. Especially since they were still missing their bribe money. And now, with Klein dead, no chance to get it back. No chance to get any of it back.
And what would the Lady say when I brought her this conundrum? No money and one of my girls turned murderess, the body of a highly public figure, one who would be missed for the very same reasons we’d picked him as a mark, decomposing in her bed.
I couldn’t see that playing well, either.
I started to rattle questions off fast and hard at Ellen, wanting to shock her into giving me the truth, wanting to keep both of us from fixating on the corpse in her bed. This time, her answers were less practiced. No, she didn’t think she’d touched the body. Well, maybe she had—she couldn’t remember; she couldn’t be sure. He had screamed, a little, although no one had come to check—the shot had been so fast, muffled by the pillows, it hadn’t been any louder than a television sound effect. The gun was a present, from her uncle. (I’d stared hard at her at that one, trying to tell if she was lying.) No, she was pretty sure he hadn’t told anyone he was coming over.
It wasn’t great, but we would make it work—we had to. I told her to grab all the cleaning supplies she could find. Ellen sprang into action, flopping to her knees and putting sponge to carpet. She’d always been good with directions. But I already knew that: I’d profiled her myself. Make him pay. Oh yes, she could follow directions all right. My ears began to ring, and for a moment I felt light-headed, almost like I was going to pass out, but I gritted my teeth and braced my arms against the door frame of the bedroom. My gaze leveled, and I gulped down a few more breaths, bending over until I was steady, until I could think again.
Ellen started scrubbing down anything she could get her hands on, places I was sure Klein had never touched—the TV, the doorway, her kitchen tile. Anything to avoid the body in her bed. But some part of me had already guessed that would fall to me.
I began winding the sheets around the body, peeling him up from the mattress, where a pinkish stain spread out beneath him, trying to think only about the next thirty seconds. I didn’t let myself imagine what Lou would say. In my fingers, the body felt like rubber. His remaining eye was closed, but his mouth was open, a faint trace of pale peach sparkle slicked to one lip. Ellen’s lip gloss. I covered his mouth with the sheet and rubbed gently, trying to clean him off. His lips stuck to the sheet, to my fingers, which wouldn’t stop trembling. I gave up, shuddering.
“Miss Howard?”
The staticky buzz of the intercom in Ellen’s living room made me jump, but it made Ellen shriek outright. I thumped her on the shoulder and held a finger up to my lip. She stared at me from the floor, where she was trying to soak up Klein’s blood with a sponge, fingers curling and uncurling. What do I do? she mouthed.
“Miss Howard, it’s the front desk. Pick up, please.”
I nodded at her, and Ellen moved to the intercom on tiptoe, as though they could hear her on the other line. She pressed the buzzer with one trembling finger, staring straight at me.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Miss Howard, do you have a guest over tonight?”
Ellen’s finger slipped off the button, and I couldn’t suppress a rising tide of terror, staring down at the body next to me. Someone had heard his scream; someone had heard the shot. We were so fucked.
“Ummm . . . I . . . I’m not quite sure . . .”
“A silver Audi, parked in the guest spot? You have to fill out the paperwork ahead of time for guest spots, Miss Howard. We’ve been over this. Someone’s already reserved that parking spot tonight.”
I blew out a sigh of relief, leaning forward a little and then catching myself as I swayed too close to Klein’s body. In the living room, Ellen was laughing, borderline hysterical, thanking the front desk over and over, telling them she’d have her guest move the car as soon as he was no longer indisposed.
“It’s not a request, Miss Howard. Please move the vehicle now.”
“Hang up,” I hissed at her, looking around the room for where Klein might have left his keys. His coat, tossed over a dining room chair. I jumped off the bed, Klein bumping up and down as I did so, and shook the jacket loose, searching through the pockets. Nothing. No part of tonight was going to come easy.
The dead man’s pants were in the bedroom, crumpled at the foot of Ellen’s postcoital bed. I avoided making eye contact with the body as I picked them up by the hem.
“What are you doing?” Ellen shrieked.
I shook the pants out, and Klein’s keys jangled onto the floor. I fished them out and held them up to Ellen. She reached for them, and I had a sudden vision of Ellen flooring the gas pedal, driving off into the distance, and leaving me behind with Klein’s body in the bedroom.
“Huh-uh,” I said, snatching them back and shouldering past her and out the front door, checking both directions before I scurried into the lobby.
Ellen’s apartment was located on only the second floor of the Alto Nido. It was a short elevator ride down to the subterranean parking garage, but I counted the steps between Ellen’s front door and the lift: fifty-six. Three apartments on either side. One person stepping out into the hallway for a late-night drive, to take out the trash, and it’d be game over. No, it would have to be the fire escape. We’d have to try not to fumble Klein’s body over the side on the way down.
It didn’t take me long to find his car, a silver Audi with vanity plates that read MOVIEMN. At least he’d take his last ride in style. I checked before I slid in to see if anyone had noticed me—the last thing I needed was some witness remembering a tall brunette who didn’t live in the building driving a car with vanity plates into the alley. At the last minute, I remembered the bungee cords in my trunk—I’d helped Lou move a bookshelf weeks ago—and doubled back to my car to fish them out, taking the steps three at a time to get back to Ellen’s apartment.
When I opened the door, I recoiled back over the threshold, my eyes burning. The entire apartment reeked of bleach. I wondered if the smell could seep through the walls, if the neighbors would smell it and wonder. Coughing, I propped the windows open, then immediately shut them—that wouldn’t help our low profile.
In the bedroom, Klein was still swaddled in patchy sheets where I’d left him, the rest of the bed naked beneath him. Ellen was crouched above his head, careful not to touch the body, sobbing as she scrubbed at the reddening headboard, making a frothy mess of herself.
“Ellen,” I said, “we have to go.”
It wasn’t ideal—there was so much left to clean—but with the car parked in the alley, we had to move quickly. Tomorrow, when the clues started to pile up, I didn’t want anyone remembering Klein’s car parked behind the Alto Nido. Hey, did he know anyone there? Wait a minute, a bit player from one of his movies lives here? Strange coincidence . . .
She didn’t seem to hear me, her breathing getting heavier, her sobs turning into hiccups as she scoured the fabric.
“Ellen!”
I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her off the bed. She kicked Klein on the way down and gave a faint yelp. I pressed a hand over her mouth, gripping her cheeks so hard they turned white.
“We have to go now.”
Klein wasn’t a big man, a little taller than Ellen but not as tall as me, and while not thin, per se, not exactly fat, either, but he was heavier than I’d expected him to be and more difficult to hold on to. The blood made him slippery, and the feeling of his guts on my hands made the hackles at the back of my neck rise so that I jerked and nearly dropped him every time I thought I felt a slickness on my palms. Soon Ellen and I were sweating, wrestling the bedding and shower curtain around the body—starting to smell, which wasn’t helping matters, either—clipping Klein into place with the bungee cords.
“Oh God,” Ellen muttered as the body slumped against the bed frame, neck jammed unnaturally against the wood. Then she bent over and threw up on the floor, most of the splatter hitting the shower curtain tucked around him and outlining his sunken face in wet bile. I didn’t say anything as she apologized over and over again. I was too busy trying not to stare, trying not to get sick myself.
“Now or never,” I said, as much to myself as to Ellen, and grabbed him under the armpits. He was heavy and sagged unnaturally between us—a human hammock—but we got him to the window. Before I knew it, I had my arms full of dead producer on her fire escape, feeling backward with my toe for the next step, trying not to breathe through my nose, not to groan or trip or make any noise at all.
Together, we bumped him down the stairs. The shower curtain slipped once, and I caught a glimpse that made me queasy. I stopped to cover him back up so that I didn’t throw up, too. The entire time, a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, like even as everything was lurching forward without my permission—the dead producer, having to bring the car around to the alley before we could completely douse the apartment in bleach—it was all happening exactly the way it should.
When we reached the bottom, Ellen propped Klein against the car, shuddering and crying, her face turned away as she kept him in place while I popped the trunk. A bungee cord snicked loose as we slid him into the trunk, and I grabbed it and threw it in the back seat. As he rolled into the car, the shower curtain, tacky with blood, stuck on the carpet and shifted, revealing the corner of his blown-apart face. Just days since I’d seen him at Hollywood Forever, alive, if not well. I cursed under my breath, panting, unable to look away for a moment.
I pushed the trunk softly closed and shoved Ellen into the front seat. She was starting to hyperventilate, to make a strange sound deep in her lungs somewhere between a whistle and a howl.
“Stop that,” I said, my own voice harsh, almost unrecognizable. My arms were shaking from the effort it had taken to drag Klein down the fire escape, and my back was aching. I was crunched up against the steering wheel because Klein’s legs were shorter than mine and I didn’t want to stop to fix it until we’d driven him far, far away from the Alto Nido.
The glow of approaching headlights in the rearview blinded me for a moment. I turned the key in the ignition so sharply the car sputtered and died. Behind me, the headlights flicked their brights, annoyed. They’d gotten an eyeful of the vanity plate now, I thought. I ducked down in my seat and turned the engine again—this time, it caught. I stomped on the gas, spinning my wheels for a second as I screeched out of the alleyway, leaving scorched tire marks in my wake.
Ellen started to make a strange, high-pitched noise, unearthly. I couldn’t think with that sound in my head. But one thing was becoming clear. On the drive to Ellen’s apartment, I’d put off calling Lou. I’d had the fantasy I could handle it on my own. I’d already screwed up so many times. But now, with Klein decomposing in the car, I realized how mistaken I’d been. How much I needed her.
Lou would know what to do next. Lou would help me. I was almost positive.