Lou’s car shimmered like a mirage on the horizon, and I skidded into the passenger-side door, yanking at the handle before she’d even stopped the car.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” Lou said, pulling away from the curb. She was a little pale, a red slash of lipstick making it more obvious, and she was wearing dark cat-eyed sunglasses. It didn’t look like she had slept much last night, either.
“You look—”
“Better than you do,” Lou said. She didn’t take her eyes off the road.
“Where are we headed?”
“Chinatown.”
“We never go to Chinatown,” I said. An unpleasant idea, like cake smashed into cashmere: “Are we meeting Mr. Alibi there?”
Lou didn’t say anything. If I were a different woman, maybe I could’ve left it at that.
“Who is he? A new mark?”
We stopped at a light. I studied Lou’s profile, tipped away from me. The mussed hair. The long line of her neck, all smudgy with fingerprints I could almost see. Her silence was making my skin crawl. “Christ, an old mark?”
Lou checked her lipstick in the side mirror, slid a thumbnail around her bottom lip. “I wish I hadn’t said anything.”
Outside, the green palm trees were turning dizzy cartwheels against the sharp white sky. God, I hated the sun. I hated the heat. Of course I was wrong; he wasn’t a case. She wouldn’t have asked him to cover for her if he were. Well, there was now one thing between us he’d never have.
Lou’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and she was tapping the brakes steadily, which made the car jerk and jump. Good.
I couldn’t stop. The murder and no sleep, Ellen’s bulging eyes and little blue neck—and now this. “What about me, Lou? I’m just hanging out here, twisting in the fucking wind, no alibi, nothing? It wasn’t my idea to strangle her, if you remember. That was definitely not my idea.”
Lou slammed on the brakes at a red light, practically making a trampoline of them, and I jerked forward against the seat belt, smacking my hand against the dashboard. I stared at her, and she rubbed her hand across her face, trying to smooth out the anger. “Drunk again,” she said finally. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah, well.” I stared out the window. It wasn’t even noon. This day would never end. When we passed by dark buildings shimmering in the heat, the glare made a mirror of my window. Black smudges under my eyes. Lips chewed to bits. Dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail, an efficient style that wasn’t doing my face any favors. “I don’t think you can blame me for that today.”
After that, we rode for a while in silence. Lou nudged us onto the freeway, and I stared up at each shrub-covered overpass, refusing to break the silence. It stayed frosty between us through the golden twin-dragon gate, past the street vendors hawking yellow, red, and pink fake flowers on the sidewalk, past abandoned concrete curly-maned lions protecting no one, until Lou parked, not waiting for me to get out of the car before she was halfway through the gates to Chinatown.
I scampered after her, catching the full force of the gasoline fumes in my mouth where it mixed with the gin and made a not-unpleasant sweet taste on my tongue, and I wondered if it had even bothered her at all. Last night. Ellen. Any of it.
She led me through a square bookended by pagodas, one red, one green, decorated with sun-bleached lanterns that shimmied with any puff of air. Right, left, left—she didn’t slow down or check where she was going. The neon signs were quiet, waiting for a nighttime resurrection. I remembered what Jackal had told me once, that Chinatown had been designed by Hollywood scenery artists, a sort of living movie set. Except that people really made their homes here. Lou and I knew it well: when you kept up the illusion long enough, it became real. This city knew it, too.
Once or twice Lou moved out of sight and I had to pick up the pace to find her again. It wasn’t that she was faster than me, I realized. I had the longer legs. She was cruising on autopilot, finding her way back to some old haunt. Making a point of showing me the pockets of her life I didn’t know. Finally, Lou stopped in front of a matte-black door, a name buried in the corner of the shuttered glass window. She held the door open and followed me inside.
Lamps with dark Tiffany glass along the sleek bar cast an orange glow into the corners of the space. It made the bar look muddy, like clay. Even with the lamps, the bar had that darkness made for drinking, the kind the best can manufacture no matter the hour. Lush leather chairs grouped in corners. It was a good spot to seduce a mark for the first time—to make a not-so-random rendezvous seem like fate.
Lou picked a seat in the farthest corner from the door. She gave a nod to the bartender, busy polishing a glass, who nodded back. Without asking what I wanted, she held up two fingers as if to say, Two of the usual. Lou drew a cigarette out of the case in her purse, setting tip to flame, exhaling a feathery plume of smoke.
“You’ll like the drinks here.”
“I like the drinks everywhere,” I said. “They treat you like a regular.”
Lou took another long drag, blew it toward the ceiling. “I was, once.”
The bartender set two whiskeys in front of us. I gulped half of mine in one go. She watched me drink and said, “Now, are you ready to talk about it like adults?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t mention him before. I don’t know why you wouldn’t tell me.”
Lou waved her hand. “I meant getting our stories together. What’s bothering you?”
“The murder, mostly.”
Lou cut her eyes at the bartender and back at me. She didn’t have to say anything. I held up my hands, a half apology. Hours ago, if Ellen had made that mistake, mentioning the murder in public, I might have slapped her. But it wasn’t hours ago anymore. Funny how that worked.
“The police won’t find anything to trace”—Lou mouthed Ellen’s name at me—“back to us for a few days at least, and once they do, they’ll be less inclined to poke around. You know what I mean.”
I took another gulp of my drink. I thought about Lou’s face when she left my apartment, the look of knowing pity she gave me when I suggested she stay. I thought about that thing I knew about the police’s bribe money that she didn’t. What her face would look like then. I finished the drink.
Lou reached into her purse, drew out another cigarette. “After I left, did you go over to Robert’s?” She didn’t look me in the eye as she asked it, signaled to the bartender to bring me another. “Part of Jackal’s paycheck covers alibis. If it comes to that.”
“I didn’t want to involve him in this. I don’t want him to know about it.”
“You haven’t mentioned anything to him?”
“And I’m not going to,” I said, starting to feel annoyed. “The bartender sure is attentive. When did you stop being a regular? Why didn’t you ever bring me here before?”
“Does Jackal know Ellen’s name?”
“Yes, he knows her name.”
Lou leaned back in her chair, staring slightly above my head. The bartender reached in front of me, set down another drink. His T-shirt bunched up, and I could see the tattoo on his biceps, the white flesh pebbled like an uncooked chicken. He was looking straight at Lou. Staring at her, in fact.
“Thank you, that’s enough,” I snapped at him. He straightened and left.
Lou cleared her throat. “It’ll be on the news. He’ll want to know what happened. And,” she said, looking me over, “you’re half in the bag already.” She drew her phone from her purse, punching a few buttons with her thumb. When Jackal answered, she told him the address and hung up. Seeing my face she added, “You know it’s better if we tell him a handful of details. Get ahead of it. That way he won’t be guessing.”
“Sure,” I said, not liking the idea of all of us together in a bar, socializing. One cozy murderous family.
After that, it all went quickly. What to tell the police if and when they came to the office. If anyone asked, Lou had never met Ellen, never seen her even once. That part I’d insisted on. I’d watched Lou’s face as I’d said it, watched the way she opened her mouth and then shut it before nodding.
I was nursing the last of my third whiskey. It was a nice bar, even if it was the color of silt. Lou had excused herself to go to the bathroom, and in my alone time something else occurred to me, something that seemed more urgent even than the police. When Lou came back with splotches of wet on the front of her dress that could’ve been water or tears, I cornered her.
“Will you tell the tattooed bitch about our”—I pulled one hand away from my glass so I could make air quotes—“little problem?”
Lou froze, half crouched above the chair. “What?”
“That tacky, ugly blue.” I reunited with my drink and tickled the ice with my teeth. It had been a long thirty seconds apart for us both. “Woman with the blue tattoo, a.k.a. the Lady Upstairs, a.k.a. the boss you refuse to tell me anything about. Your hero.”
Lou frowned and leaned forward. “Blue tattoo? What are you talking about?”
“Might’ve told you, but you were probably busy with Alibi. Good old Alibi. Trusty old Alibi. I met her. In the office. What, you think I don’t have secrets, too?”
The look on Lou’s face made me grin. I stretched my arms over my head—pretty, pretty princess. My blouse was slicked to me like it had been painted on, but I felt in control of the conversation for the first time, even with the softness of the booze in my veins.
“I bet you’re jealous I met her and I didn’t need you to do it.”
“What was she doing in the office?”
That question knocked me close to sober. “I’m not sure. Looking for you. She said she’d find you.”
“The two of you spoke?”
“Uh-huh. Blue tattoo on her wrist. Not even a nice blue, like a navy. Ugly blue, ugly, ugly.”
“What did she say to you? Did you mention anything about Ellen? Even her name?”
Lou tucked her lips between her teeth and glared at me, staring intently at my face. I liked having an effect on her.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Jo . . . !”
“Temper, temper,” I chided. “I didn’t mention Ellen. I did not believe that Ms. Howard was relevant at that time.” I unfurled each word carefully from my tongue. “Should we mention her now?”
Lou shot me a what are you, crazy? look. “You better hope she never finds out.” She punched out her cigarette. “Jo, this isn’t a joke. She’ll say you’ve gotten lazy, that I’ve gotten soft. That I should’ve put you in that car with Ellen. Or at least left the two of you for the cops to find. She has a business to run.”
The bar door swung open, and Robert stood there, framed in light. It was still bright outside, still daytime. That was surprising. It felt like we’d been in the dark for hours, underwater.
Lou turned to him, and she was standing now, smiling for him, absolutely nothing wrong, nothing weighing heavy on her mind. She leaned forward as he stepped closer, and I noticed crow’s feet starting to tug at the corner of her eyes, gone when she didn’t smile or laugh. And I couldn’t help myself, him walking toward us, it slipped out, I said: “I’m glad, Lou. I’m glad it’s going to always be there between the two of us. Forever. Just you and me.”