The alarm went off: 6 p.m. Officially time for a drink. I was proud of myself; I’d been managing to wait longer and longer every night. It was even dark now.
I poured myself a little bourbon from the bottle that I kept under the sink in what had been Jackal’s office and dropped two sweating ice cubes into it. The heat had cooled but hadn’t left completely, even as we’d passed Thanksgiving and Christmas was on the horizon. Not that I had anyone to buy gifts for this year.
I read the paper as I sipped. Nothing fickler than a daily newspaper. There’d been a stir when Joel Klein was arrested on suspicion of his father’s and mistress’s murders. Multiple witnesses, among them a certain leading man, had reported a loud altercation between Junior and Ellen at a cemetery party just a day before the bodies were found. And while he’d never be convicted—money like that never was—it was a terrible marvel to realize that, in the end, Ellen had created the perfect cover for me. For us.
It would’ve made Lou laugh. Maybe she was laughing, wherever she was now.
A few days before Joel Klein was arrested, one of the local papers, not even the Times, dedicated a thumb’s width of space to the decease of a local woman, née Rita Palmer, at her home.
It made it worse, almost, that the name hadn’t been a lie. It made me wonder what else might have been true. But I’d never get those answers, so I pushed it away.
The deceased was found in her bathtub, with an injury to the head that had been sustained after a night of drinking. Investigating police officers said there was no sign of foul play, and the death was being investigated strictly as an accident.
That was all. That was all the article said. Nobody mentioned Ellen’s suitcase. Nobody mentioned it because it would never be found. MacLeish had been thorough in his favor, erasing all signs of me from the house. I tried not to think of what he’d done to stage her so well. Had he undressed her, lit a candle, splashed gin in the bathtub? No one else knew she hated it. Jo, be human. In the end, no justice for Ellen, no justice for Lou.
The day after that notice appeared, I’d called Lou’s phone carrier and asked that any calls that came to her phone, either cell or home, be redirected to my number. I explained the situation—a friend of mine had committed suicide, and I had no way of getting in touch with her family. But I wanted them to hear the news from a friendly voice before anyone else. It had taken all of three minutes to connect.
As the days went by and no one called, I felt a sadness deeper than any I’d known even when Ellen died, when I first realized what I was capable of. Lou had no one. Only me. And she hadn’t even wanted that. She’d preferred being alone to my company, at the last. And unlike Ellen’s death, her demise had inspired no speculation, no court reporters banging down her mother’s door. Only me. I supposed, in a way, that made her finally mine.
I’d gotten everything I wanted, hadn’t I. In the end. I stood up and poured myself another drink.
I’d kept coming into the office because there wasn’t much else I could think of to do. I was waiting, but I didn’t know for what. I’d moved Lou’s chair out of her office—it had a better cushion than mine—and I’d flipped through her desk, looking for anything with my name on it. I’d found nothing, which should’ve been a relief but wasn’t. I did find dozens of pictures of a younger Eve Dawes with six or seven different men. Staring at them, I understood why she’d kept ferrying Lou’s bribes to the police in order to keep them secret. They were truly lurid, but it was the look on her face she’d want to protect, I thought. The blankness in her eyes that made you wonder. It didn’t square with the woman she was trying to be now. It must have seemed worth the price of acting as an extra layer between Lou and the police. To keep being used by Lou.
The phone rang when I was on my second glass of bourbon. On the other end, a voice I’d never expected to hear again. “You must really not be scared of me,” Carrigan said. “You didn’t even bother to change your phone number.”
“I was sorry to hear about the election,” I said. I was a little surprised to find I meant it. “But at least you know I had nothing to do with it.”
There was a pained pause, and then Carrigan said, tightly, “Thanks. I don’t dwell in the past.”
“And yet here you are,” I said, “calling me.”
“I’d like to engage your services,” Carrigan said.
“I don’t fuck for money.”
“Since when?” he fired back. “Anyway, that’s not what I meant. I’d like to employ all of your services. I assume you’re still . . . in business?”
It was a good question.
I’d gotten lucky. MacLeish, not Lafferty or Escobar, had been the one to pull open Lou’s door that night. When he saw me, soaked and shivering, he’d shouted to his partner to phone it in, a 10-16. Whoever it was trudged back to the car, and MacLeish shut the door and looked at me, those droopy hangdog eyes, and said: “We’ll have five minutes, tops. Go out the back. Where is she?”
That’s how long it took us to reach a new understanding.
Later that night, MacLeish had called me from a number that showed up on my phone as Unlisted. He hadn’t bothered with pleasantries.
“The chief wanted me to pass something along,” MacLeish said.
“Yeah?” I thumbed Lou’s lighter, back and forth, back and forth. Trying to place my fingertips right over the dulled fingerprints I could catch in the light. If I pressed hard enough, maybe I could feel them pressing back.
“Said if you had a moment, he’d love an in-person meeting with the Lady. A few details to iron out.”
“I’ll bet,” I said, wondering how much Lafferty minded his partner covering up his girlfriend’s murder. “But there’s no Lady anymore. You fished her out of a bathtub tonight.”
“Chief thought you might say that,” MacLeish said. “Told me to tell you, if that changes, he’d appreciate a call.”
“I can’t imagine,” I said, closing my eyes as I said it, “what you owe him now. On my behalf.”
MacLeish sighed. “The chief’s not a sentimental man, I’ll say that much. But it wasn’t painless. And Jo”—and his voice got deeper as he said it—“one day I will collect.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. That was the problem of some future woman. Who knew who she’d turn out to be, what she could handle.
Another pause. A longer one. “Give the chief a call if the Lady’s ever back in business.”
“All right,” I said, and hung up before he could press it again. I flipped the lighter, dropping the hammer again and again. It really was a pretty thing. All cheap Art Deco imitation gold and black enamel, nothing of value but pretty all the same. It was almost enough to make a woman consider taking up smoking.
The irony wasn’t lost on me, that I’d sold out our sisterhood to a man, to a cop. That in the end, I’d chosen to put my life in his hands, the way I’d once laid everything at Lou’s feet. One day, there would be a heavy price tag. I knew that. Nothing is free—not kindness, not friendship. Certainly not favors. The implications unfurled before me, unending and evil. Maybe I’d spent too much time with Jackal, I thought, because I’d learned to gamble. Someday, I’d hear from MacLeish again.
I hadn’t expected to hear from Carrigan first.
“What exactly did you have in mind?” I asked him.
“You know what it takes to win elections these days?”
“Money,” I guessed. It was a pretty safe guess. It was true for most things that had to be won.
“Money,” he confirmed. “Money my lovely little wife’s family didn’t feel comfortable sharing. So now that my political aspirations have been, so to speak, doused in gasoline and lit on fire, I’ve turned my mind to other things. I don’t think I was well suited for office anyway. Too many public appearances, too many babies to kiss.”
“We charge by the hour and that counts for phone calls, too,” I reminded him.
“My father-in-law,” Carrigan clarified, “told me he couldn’t support my campaign because he had something grander in mind for me than public service. Said I was the son he’d never had, that he’d turn the business over to me someday. All bullshit. He won’t retire before he dies. Unless someone forces him to do it. I’d like to speed his timeline up, a little.”
“You could just ride it out. Law office no longer fulfilling?” I was doodling on my notepad, not taking notes the way Lou had trained me to. Instead, I’d doodled a constellation of stars—or freckles—and I was working my way between them, connecting everything together.
Carrigan cleared his throat on the other end of the phone. “No one has come right out and said it to my face, but I know they’re happy I lost the election. You know my firm never even bothered to put up a poster? Not one single poster,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice. “That’s reason enough for me.”
“I see,” I said.
“Could we grab a drink sometime?” Carrigan asked. “Go over the particulars?”
I thought about it. I thought about his wife and his big house and his even bigger bank account, and I thought about fucking him with Jackal’s eyes on me in his apartment, the way he’d shivered as I cried. I thought about the red blinking light on my answering machine that morning. When I’d clicked it, the voicemail button squishing under my fingernail like a ladybug, an unfamiliar voice had filled my office.
“Hi, um, hello? We met—well, no, we didn’t exactly meet, I guess, you left your card for me a few weeks ago at the, um, at the St. Leo. The hotel. I was there with a man, and he was, well, ha, you know. I spilled a beer into his lap. Jesus, Laura, shut up, you’re rambling! Anyway. You left your card for me. That’s all. You left your card for me and told me to call you if I wanted, um, a free drink? And, well.” A breathy little laugh. “Here I am. Calling.”
At the time, I’d rewound the tape, played it again. Wrote down the number she’d left me on my notepad and stared at it for a long time, wondering what to do about it. On the phone with Carrigan, I thought about that pretty young girl at the St. Leo, a million years ago, and what she might be able to do to the career of an old money man like Carrigan Sr. I thought about how I wouldn’t have to split the money with the Lady Upstairs, and about how grateful a man like Mitch Carrigan would be for my help. I thought about the power I had now over this girl’s life, if I called her back.
I thought about all of that and then I said, “Yeah, okay. I’d like that.”
We hung up, but not until after we’d agreed to meet the next week for a drink. I wondered what his company would be like when I wasn’t playing defenseless. I told Carrigan to pick someplace expensive. I told him to consider it an investment.
Somewhere during the phone call, I’d finished the bourbon. I crossed to the bar cart, uncapped the bottle, and poured a little more brown into my cup. Topped it off with a squeeze of lime juice from a warming green plastic bottle shaped to look like the fruit. A spritz of club soda on top of that. A proper cocktail.
Lou had asked me once, early, whether I thought what we did was evil. Testing me, maybe, when I was green and tender-fresh. “Not evil,” I’d said, surprising myself by how much I meant it. “Everything is currency.” And it was true: everything was currency of a sort. A smile applied at the right time like a crowbar—that was currency, a kind word the same. My body was mine to spend as I wanted. It wasn’t evil to not have good intentions with sex. I didn’t owe men pure motives. It wasn’t kind, what we were doing, it might not have even been right, but it wasn’t evil. Not then.
And some part of me still believed it. We’d done evil things. But that didn’t mean the game was flawed from the ground up. Not when men who shot their wives in the face could plaster their names all over the city and be remembered as good men, not when men’s potential was considered more important than women’s bodies, not when the game was so rigged against us all.
I’d learned things from Ellen, invaluable things. I would do it differently this time. I wouldn’t give this new girl, Laura, the chance to feel too much. You left someone in the orbit of charisma and of course she’d fall for it. It wasn’t her fault. It didn’t matter how tough she was; sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Particularly if she was heartbroken, or lonely, or borderline homeless, sleeping out of a car.
I’d watch Laura carefully. I’d take my time, make sure she was ready for it all, that she was more than ready for it: that she wanted in on it, too. I’d drill Lou’s one good lesson into her head: Never love anyone more than yourself. I’d be straight with the police. I’d send the pictures right to the papers. I wouldn’t give Carrigan Sr. a chance to barter his way out of it. This time, there’d be no Jackal, no other partners to complicate things, to play their own games in the dark. No distractions.
Before, there had been the beginning of something special with our work. But I’d learned from Lou’s mistakes, and from my own. It was why I was still there, in that office, watching the twilight settle over the city. It was why it wasn’t me six feet under, staring up at the sunset and looking for the living to play the part I’d outlined. The script was all mine now, not some faceless dead woman’s.
Maybe Lou had started out with good intentions, too. Maybe she’d thought she was building a sisterhood, a place for women to take back power using the weapons men haven’t learned how to defend against. That was the dream she’d sold me. Or maybe she’d only needed to protect herself at a moment when she had no other options. Maybe it was both. I’d never know. But her failings had taught me everything I needed to make sure that tiny glimmer of possibility, that glittering picture she’d painted for me one morning in a diner, became the reality. The artificial into the true, the alchemy of Hollywood. I’d take Lou’s vision, and I’d perfect it. And in the end, that would be Lou’s true legacy. In the end, a little piece of her would last forever.
I took a sip of my drink and watched the daylight purple and melt into twilight, become renewed with the dark. The sun was setting earlier these evenings. The heat that had plagued the city for weeks was mostly behind us—or long in front of us, if you wanted to think of it that way.
I went to the balcony at the back of the office and stood in front of the iron railing, drink in hand, and watched the lights of all of the city’s people flicker out, brief and bright, before me. As soon as one blinkered off, another one took its place, so it was never true dark. The night sky was clear and glittered hard, but not with stars. People read so damn much into the stars—star-crossed lovers, love like galaxies, written in the stars, all that jazz. In my city, we’d gotten rid of all that and in its place put something brighter and harder that never went out, so you could barely even see those stars at all.
I preferred it that way.