Red lipstick looked wrong for the occasion—too celebratory, perhaps—and I couldn’t get the line right. I kept frowning at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. This close, my reflection was always choppy, like none of the parts of my face fit together. One arch of my lip was higher than the other, giving me the look of a demented Kewpie doll, and there was a shadow of Hell Hath No Fury beneath my lower lip.
I didn’t have many superstitions, but one thing Lou had taught me was that looking the part was the first step to feeling the part. Had I ever told Ellen that? I couldn’t remember. I hoped I had. Not that it mattered anymore.
When I stepped into the police office with the name of the Lady, the selection of Jackal’s photographs that didn’t showcase Lou, and the phone records, I would be wearing my power lipstick. I would feel confident because I would look confident, and that’s what they would see. Not a murderer, or a working girl, or someone with something to hide.
I grabbed the bullet and tried to even out the lines, but I couldn’t stop my hands shaking, and I realized, quickly, that I was making it worse rather than better. I took a deep breath and stared at myself in the rearview mirror. Now or never, Jo.
The heat had started to clear a little, and the trees with their banana leaves shimmied a little with the cool breeze. If you waited long enough, the heat on anything went down. You got used to living like that in the city. I grabbed my purse from the back seat and locked my car, wondering if it would be impounded if I was arrested, and stepped into the station. The station was a good-looking building downtown that might have once rivaled Doheny’s mansion for opulence. Above the entryway, a gold statue of Lady Justice welcomed entrants with a blind blank stare: her eyes had been gouged out. I blinked, looked again—but no, just the usual blindfold this time. A few anemic trees gave the illusion of landscaping outside the front doors. Healthier-looking blue agave cracked apart the dry brown soil, bursting from the ground like heads of buried pineapple.
Inside was less striking than the exterior: an open floor plan of rows and rows of identical cubicles. Justice is a bureaucracy like any other. I made eye contact with every blue I passed and smiled, as though I weren’t the least bit concerned to be there. How I imagined a woman who hadn’t murdered anybody would look at a police station.
I gave MacLeish’s name to the bored-looking receptionist and waited while she picked up the phone and let him know he had a woman at the front. I tried to ignore the way she eyed me, as though she could smell the sex for money on my skin, and looked past her to the small square of the station floor I could see. After a moment, I caught a flash of a face I recognized. Escobar and I realized it at the same moment. His jaw dropped and he caught my eyes and held them, but before either of us could move, MacLeish appeared behind the secretary and gave me a warm smile.
“Jo,” he said, friendly as I could’ve hoped for. “What a pleasant surprise. How can I help you?”
My mouth had gone dry. I peeled my gaze away from his partner, whose eyes were darting between us, and tried not to feel triumphant just yet. “Turns out, I do have some information that may interest you.”
MacLeish escorted me past the receptionist, past Escobar, who said, “William, what are you—” but then we were beyond him and into a small room at the very back of the station, a fluorescently lit room with a single plastic table and two uncomfortable chairs. An interrogation room straight out of central casting.
“Are there cameras behind that one-way glass?” I asked, thinking of Jackal and his recording equipment as MacLeish pulled a chair out for me.
MacLeish didn’t answer, but he did reach under the table and pull out a recorder. “You’re in the nick of time,” he said. “The St. Leo turns over the security tapes tomorrow. I wouldn’t be able to do anything for you, then.” He punched the recorder on, and nodded at me in encouragement.
I leaned down and grabbed my purse and pulled out the photographs, along with the phone records.
“What you said, about being under the Lady’s thumb. You’re right. I don’t want to live that way anymore.” I nodded at the photographs, telling myself I was doing the right thing. Even if I gave the Lady the money, Lou and I were too much at her mercy now. Knowledge is power, and she had too much of both. “This should be proof enough about the type of operation she’s running. I have a name, too.”
MacLeish stared at the photographs and, with one finger, spread them out across the table, a patchwork Kama Sutra. He mouthed the names of the men in the photographs as he looked at them. “Jesus,” he breathed softly, and then his eyes flicked up, away from the photographs, directly into the one-way glass. He kept them there for one long moment, and then he looked back at me, eyes full again of that hangdog sadness. He reached across the table and softly punched the recorder off.
That’s when I realized I’d made a mistake.
From outside the interrogation room, there came a swift two-knock. MacLeish crossed to the door and opened it. I expected his partner to walk through the door, but it seemed I couldn’t get anything right.
A man entered, dressed in black jeans and a white button-down shirt. Sleeves rolled up. Nice-quality shoes, black leather shined to mirrorlike proportions. The shoes always give the game away.
“Jo. My boss, the chief of detectives, Graham Lafferty,” MacLeish said. It was the most formal sentence I’d ever heard him pronounce. Graham. A little sound came out of me but I managed a nod.
Chief of Detectives Graham Lafferty stood a little over six feet tall, with a face a mother might’ve struggled to love. He stood and moved with the most perfect posture I’d ever seen, like he might be photographed at any time.
Mr. Alibi, I presume, I thought but didn’t say. It would only matter if I made it out of the room uncuffed. And I hated to admit it but it was another of Lou’s smart moves, an extra insurance policy. But if I was here, that meant he hadn’t cracked her—or that Lafferty didn’t know she was part of the Lady’s operations.
He turned his head to MacLeish and said, “A moment alone with the young lady?”
MacLeish stood up. He didn’t even look back. My palms started to sweat. When was the last time I’d been nervous to be alone in a room with a strange man? I couldn’t remember. That thought brought me back. There wasn’t a man alive who couldn’t be manipulated if you could find the right pull. Wear the con like a coat, hide in the spotlight, Jo.
Lafferty stared at me, not smiling and not friendly, until he finally said: “So tell me what happened. With the dead girl and the producer and the Lady.”
I stared at the tape recorder. Lafferty hadn’t bothered to turn it back on.
“Now, let’s be clear with each other,” he went on. “For whatever reason—and I’m a nice man, I won’t ask questions—our monthly stipend got lost somewhere. Okay, that happens. It’s not great business, but we have bigger problems now. Now, we have a body. Two bodies. Good people.”
I scoffed, trying to remember what a confident woman would say. “Define good. Klein was rich, certainly. I didn’t—”
Lafferty tucked his finger against his lips, the universal shhh sign, and shook his head. “It doesn’t really matter to me what you did or didn’t do. You’re going to keep selling the story that Howard wasn’t one of your girls? Or, rather, the Lady’s girls.” At the mention of the Lady, Lafferty’s gray eyes took on a brighter glow.
“Here’s a theory,” Lafferty said. “The two of you were working Hiram Klein, had yourselves a little party. All three of you together. Something went wrong, and he winds up dead. The two of you move the body, but Ellen gets squeamish, wants to call the police. You can’t have that. Now the dead bodies perform a miracle and multiply.”
I was still watching the tape recorder, looking for a little red light. Could they have rigged it to record without suspects ever knowing? They had it out on the table. You couldn’t pretend you weren’t informed about it. I licked my lips. I could see myself, suddenly, as he saw me: so confident, thinking I was such hot shit with my photographs—but what was that worth if he knew I’d been involved in Ellen’s murder? Nothing.
“If that was the case,” Lafferty went on, “you’d be looking at twenty years, give or take, a jury sends you, twenty-five years max. You’re pretty, you can cry on command I’m sure—so no jury gives you max. You might even get light, ten, fifteen years. No priors, after all. Some sob story about no money, no man, had to do what you could. All sorts of ways it could play, if that’s how things go. But that’s still likely a decade of your life we’re talking about. If that’s how things go.”
“If,” I repeated.
“I believe Detective MacLeish told you his views about the victim,” Lafferty said. “As it happens, I share them. Hiram Klein had a lot of money, and his death is taking up a lot of ink, but he lived large and he crossed the finish line a lot better off than most will. But Ellen Howard matters, to me.”
“You’re some sort of feminist,” I said, “threatening me here in this room.”
“Ellen Howard matters because she’s one of your girls,” Lafferty said, “isn’t she.”
It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. I crossed my arms and then unhooked them and scooted my chair closer. “What do you want from me?”
“I’m a reasonable man,” Lafferty said. “I bet your Lady likes the anonymity for her work, makes her feel more powerful. I can understand that. I’m not looking to take that away. Not entirely.
“But this Klein case isn’t good for business. The bodies, the publicity. Your boss needs to be brought to heel. I don’t mind a nice lady playing in the field, but I do mind when she overreaches herself and makes it messy for us all. I want a say on all the cases she takes from now on.”
“You don’t mind?” I said. “That’s big of you. I’m sure she appreciates your permission.”
A say on all the cases she takes on? I’d been hoping that when I gave them the photographs and her name, they’d lock her up and throw away the key, and Lou and I would be free to waltz off into our own new, shiny lives with the Carrigan cash. Not this. Not a partnership with Lafferty. Christ. She’d be even more powerful with closer ties to the police. And she’d know that I’d ratted—and, worse, that Lou had given me the name to do so. Retirement parties all around. I hadn’t counted on that. I licked my lips nervously, not sure what to do with the new information.
“You and MacLeish understand each other well,” I said, stalling.
Lafferty smiled, like a teacher who’d finally gotten his slow pupil to a passing grade. “He used to be my partner. When we met your girl Lou.”
I jerked a little in my seat and tried to disguise my surprise. One glance at his face and I knew he’d caught it. So he did know she was involved. I thought of Lou’s stress the last few weeks, the details she’d let slip. Maybe Lafferty had been hounding her from the other side, and not just about the murders.
“Six years ago. Sitting across from me in this very room. MacLeish there.” He nodded at the corner. “We were the first investors in your business, you might say.”
I had a flash, a sudden certain vision of a younger Lou sitting in this same chair, scared but not too much, in control of the situation, or trying to be. A plume of blue smoke from her cigarette covering her face like a veil.
“Then why isn’t Lou here, answering these questions?”
“Because Lou isn’t the one who was with Ellen Howard at the St. Leo. And because she has an airtight alibi for the night Ms. Howard died.”
Airtight. I tried not to picture his fingers on Lou’s body. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Tell me what you want to know.”
Lafferty cracked his neck, his eyes flicking up to the one-way glass above us. “I want your boss’s name,” Lafferty said. “I want anything you know about her. I want her address, I want her shoe size, I want her sitting here across from me. Or else I book you as a suspect in the Klein murders.”
It was no different than what I’d half expected from the moment MacLeish left me alone, but I still felt my stomach drop at the threat. “Then I guess I’ve made my decision,” I said. “But I want MacLeish in here, too, when I tell it.” I wanted a friendly face. I wanted no confusion about the deal I was getting.
Lafferty’s eyes flicked, almost imperceptibly, to the one-way glass. “I’ll be right back,” Lafferty said.
I took a moment to gather myself, breathed deeply, thinking about it all. Six years before, Lou had had a run-in with the cops—a case gone bad, probably, and she’d made an arrangement. Maybe more than one. Lou had taken so many lucky gambles in the Lady’s name.
When Lafferty came back, he brought with him a glass of water and MacLeish, looking unhappy but resolute. I tried to make eye contact with the detective, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes, instead stood behind his boss and smoothed his salt-and-pepper hair, brushing up the bristles of it, over and over.
Lafferty set the water down very delicately, as though he were worried about it splashing my face, a new form of police brutality. “Your boss,” he prompted. Neither one of them went for the tape recorder.
I hesitated, unsure where to start.
“Give it up,” Lafferty said. “Why are you protecting her? We know what happened. She gave you the order to kill Ellen once Klein was dead, didn’t she, Jo? Couldn’t have those loose ends around. Had to make sure that everything stayed on the up-and-up for your little staffing agency. So she told you to kill Ellen Howard, and stage the bodies to look like a murder-suicide. And this is the woman you’re protecting, Jo? The woman who made you a murderer?”
I didn’t like the way he kept saying my name. I didn’t like the shape of it on his tongue. It was a tactic I’d used before, a way to instill comradeship, build trust in the person across from you. I didn’t like it one bit.
“She didn’t make me a murderer,” I snapped, “because I didn’t kill anybody.” And I wished, so badly, that were true.
“It doesn’t matter,” MacLeish said wearily. “Don’t you get that? It doesn’t matter if you did or not. It looks an awful lot like you might have. It looks enough like that that you should start talking.”
“This is what I have,” I said, gesturing at the photographs, the proof of our blackmail. “And I’ve met her. Peroxided hair and a blue tattoo on her wrist. Her name is . . . Rita. Rita Palmer.” The name came out of me before I’d fully given it permission, and I coughed, almost in shock, after I said it. Self-preservation was a more powerful reflex than I thought. I tapped the phone bill. “Her phone number for you, too.”
Lafferty leaned forward and studied the pictures. MacLeish jotted something in his notebook. After a moment, and without a word between the two of them, he grabbed the phone bill and left the room.
“Where’s he going?” I half stood up out of the chair, craning my head after him. Lafferty put a hand on my shoulder, pushed me back into my chair, not roughly.
Unlike his former partner, Lafferty hadn’t taken notes of anything that I’d said. I had the feeling that all this information was more useful to him on a personal level. But now, Lafferty stretched out a hand and pressed the record button on the machine. “And how does the business work?”
I summarized for him our work—that the names came from the Lady, hired by someone, we didn’t know who, or picked by her as the occasion dictated. That they were always men, rich men, usually rich and despicable men, and that it was my job to find the girls who would most appeal to them, who would help me leave a trail that we could use. That most often we let them pay for the photographs, but that occasionally—and, I suspected, most closely associated with those names most personal to the Lady—we sent them to the paper. Or the man’s boss. Or his wife.
MacLeish came back in, threw two photographs down on the desk.
“Is that her?” he asked.
I blinked a few times, staring at the picture on top, a mug shot. She was younger than when I’d met her, but rougher, too, her skin worse, her eye makeup thick and cakey and leaking down her face. A woman who had seen too much. But it was her, the Lady Upstairs. I bit my lip, and then, before I could second-guess myself: “Yes, that’s her. That’s the Lady.”
Lafferty and MacLeish exchanged a glance. Finally, MacLeish said, almost gently, “No, it isn’t.”
“She isn’t anyone named Rita Palmer,” Lafferty added, pushing the second photo forward. Another mug shot of the Lady, but this one with the words LOS ANGELES, PROSTITUTION, DAWES, EVE across the bottom. “She’s another lackey, like you, brings us the money every month. We’ve tailed her before, has a nice house in the Hollywood Hills—not the nicest part. But she ain’t your boss, kid. She’s answered these questions, too. And more convincingly, I might add.”
I reached for the water to wash the acid and bile out of my mouth, then thought about my fingerprints on the glass, the DNA from my lips on its rim. Two red lip prints like a smoking fucking gun. I wrapped my arms around myself and tried to keep from shivering. It wasn’t working.
“You’re wrong,” I said.
MacLeish shook his head. “The phone number tracks back to Eve Lowenstein, née Dawes.”
“Eve Dawes,” Lafferty said. “Arrested her, oh, six or seven years ago, working a street corner downtown. She’s an ex–working girl your Lady turned out. There must be someone in her life she doesn’t want knowing about her past.” I thought of that yacht of a diamond ring, and Lafferty went on: “I imagine that’s how your boss keeps her ferrying cash. If you don’t believe me, look her up yourself. She’s not hard to trace. And she’s not your boss.”
She wasn’t the Lady. Or maybe she was, and she was a better liar than I. But the police seemed so sure and that was what mattered—they had to believe I’d given them the Lady, and they didn’t. Maybe there was a Rita Palmer and Lou hadn’t lied to me, but I sure as hell hadn’t found her. Maybe she’d made the name up completely. Christ. I was back to square one. I hadn’t given them anything they could use. My new life with Lou was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I shook my head, and once I’d started I couldn’t stop. “But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said, my teeth chattering. None of it made any sense. “That’s her, that’s the Lady, that’s her.”
“Aw, she doesn’t know anything,” MacLeish said to Lafferty.
“For her sake,” Lafferty said, “I hope that’s not true.” Like I wasn’t even in the room with them. He leaned across the table and switched off the recorder once again, and told me to stand up.
“What—what are you—”
“Stand up,” Lafferty ordered. “Turn around.”
“Are you arresting me?” I cried. “Because I can’t give you my boss’s name?” I’d gotten so close. But it wasn’t enough.
Lafferty stood up, and I clutched the side of my chair with both hands, trying frantically to make eye contact with MacLeish. “Wait,” I said, “wait, please.” I took a deep breath. One last gamble, Jo. Nothing left to lose now.
“Give it up, Jo,” Lafferty said. “You have nothing left to bargain with.”
But that wasn’t entirely true. “Give me twenty-four more hours,” I said. I had to get out of that room. I would’ve said anything. “I can bring you—I can bring you fifty grand. And I’ll tell you everything that happened with Ellen and Klein. Everything. I swear. And I’ll . . . I’ll try to find her for you. Please. I can find out more.”
Lafferty and MacLeish exchanged another glance, and I could see how they’d been partners once, that it was like a dance, or the lyrics to a song—once they’d learned it, they’d never quite forgotten.
“So now you do know something about it,” Lafferty said. “Convenient. How do we know you won’t skip?”
“You were right,” I blurted out. “The Lady wanted Ellen dead. Trust me, I want her held accountable for that as much as you do. You’ll never be able to find her without me, she’s too well-connected, she’s too smart. But if you give me one more day . . .”
Lafferty looked at me, his eyebrows raised. Wanting me to know he doubted me even as he was thinking it over. But MacLeish was the one who broke the silence first.
“Come on, boss,” MacLeish said quietly, ever the good cop. The harder role to play. “We can give her twenty-four hours, can’t we?”
Lafferty nodded, his gray eyes never leaving me. “You’re lucky my detective wants that money,” he said, pretending like MacLeish had changed his mind, like this wasn’t a part they were both playing. “But this is a one-time deal, you hear me? If you don’t come back in twenty-four hours with fifty large and a name, you’re on the hook for the Klein/Howard murders.” He gave his old partner one last look and then turned on his heel. When he got to the door, he turned around and said to me, “I overestimated. You’re not that pretty. You’ll do the full twenty-five.”
I stood up on legs that didn’t feel fully solid, and moved toward the door of the interrogation room. MacLeish kept a sympathetic eye on me, then said, softly, “Come on, kid. Don’t make us book you.”
I shook my head over and over. There were too many things that didn’t fit. Too many pieces of a puzzle I’d gotten some glance at but couldn’t put together. But nothing made any sense; nothing led anywhere that would help me. I was out of time and out of clues.
To my horror, real tears came to my eyes, and I covered my face. MacLeish handed me a handkerchief, which I waved away. He kept it under my nose until I took it, dabbed at my face, and handed it back to him, stained with mascara. I sniffled and said, trying to get myself back together, “The bribe is for you? Not Lafferty?”
“It’s frowned on for police chiefs to take bribes,” MacLeish said. “That’s how people get fired. It’s how people lose stripes.”
“What?”
“Works out better this way for us both,” MacLeish said. “Even if I had to take a hit for it. Still a better paycheck. But I tell you what, it stings when you realize your old partner calls your shots.” MacLeish shook his head, his forehead creasing in anger. “That one takes some getting used to.”
My scalp tingled, some shadowy glimmer of an idea pressing at my brain, but I couldn’t think; I couldn’t touch it. I didn’t say anything but got up on rubbery legs and made for the door. MacLeish touched my arm as I passed. “The chief’s a reasonable man, I promise you that,” he said. “Find a way to give him what he wants, and I promise it’ll be okay. I only want to help you, kid. Give him the money and a name and then be a good friend to yourself and get out of this line of work.”
Instead of saying anything, I nodded in his general direction and stepped back out into the station. I could barely see a foot in front of my face, but I clocked Escobar watching me all the way out. I wondered if he’d be thrilled to see me in cuffs or disappointed that he hadn’t been the one to do it.
Lafferty was waiting for me by the door. He wasn’t done with me yet. As I passed by him, he called after me, “Any information you get—any way you get it—is appreciated. Remember that, Jo,” and that froze me in my tracks for a moment, trying to process the ramifications of it, but then I squared my shoulders. They were letting me leave. I had one more chance, and I had to use it.
I had to be Jo for a few hours longer.