Part 21 (1/2)
Finally, I find myself on my block and then at my building. As I walk from my car, I hear someone walking briskly to catch up with me. I turn with a start, waiting for the lightning bolt, or Joe Avalon's coal-eyed stare. Lately, it seems like I am always turning with a start.
”Detective Cudahy,” I blurt, not entirely relieved.
'You're not playing straight, even after our little talk,” he says with a creeping coldness in his voice.
”I don't know what you mean.”
”Where's your sister-in-law?”
I guess there are few secrets left. I lock eyes with him. He looks tired, frustrated, impatient. ”Where is she, Miss King?”
In my head, I start to say, Sister-in-law? I don't know what you mean. But I can't bear to keep playing. I can't stomach putting on the front.
So instead I say, ”I don't know. I came here looking for her.”
He looks slightly relieved at my bluntness. ”She knew we were closing in. We were tailing her.”
”And you lost her?”
”She lost us. I was staking out the party and she just disappeared. One minute she was there, the next she was gone. Must have left on foot. We're guessing she's on her way into hiding, or skipped town. This may come as a big surprise to you, Miss King, but she knows even more than you.”
”I thought maybe,” I say, inwardly relieved. He has figured out a lot, but not everything.
And then he pauses as if deciding something.
”We'll keep your brother out of it,” he finally says, nodding toward me.
I feel my eye twitch. I don't know why I wasn't expecting him to mention Bill. I don't know why I thought Bill was still safe.
I consider, fleetingly, telling him about the tickets to Brazil. But I have no real reason to believe Cudahy would, or could, keep my brother out of it. And, more pressingly, I have no reason to believe Bill would, or could, stay out of it.
”We know he doesn't know what he married into,” Cudahy continues. ”The circles your sister-in-law moved in.”
”Right.”
”You should have told me about him. About who you were.” ”I know.”
As I walk up the stairs, my head is blank. It crosses my mind that I can't be sure I'm not being followed now. Still, what choice do I have? I have to take my chances.
When I enter the apartment, the phone is ringing. Somehow I know it has been ringing for hours.
”It's Alice. Don't you think it's time we spoke?” I hear the roar of the ocean in the background.
I say, ”Where?” and she tells me.
On the long drive to meet Alice, I am careful to watch my rearview mirror. I take some winding detours and don't notice anyone.
I am thinking that there are so many things about Alice that I will never know. An airless gap between the stories of her low-rent childhood and her years working for studio costume departments. And do I even know if these exotically sketched narratives are true?
She made herself into someone you didn't ask questions of because somehow you didn't know the right questions to ask.
Or the questions you wanted to ask seemed impossibly naive in the face of the dark maw that lay behind her finely etched wife face.
Once I thought she was trying to escape a darkness, and she found rescue in Bill. Now I know that she wanted both. She liked the double life. It kept her alive.
I arrive at Miramar Point as the moon shows its full size, giving off a faint glitter on the water, whose waves cream forward into sleek spit curls before straightening out to stretched silk again. A lone boat knocks around the Santa Monica breakwater. Past it, the colossal gap of the ocean hangs a steely purple.
I park on a small ridge off the highway and make my way to the top of an endless flight of wooden steps. My hand moist on the nickel rail as I ascend higher and higher, I make the final turn to reach the restaurant. Its round booths, hung over with fairy lights, are uninhabited except for a young man with a shock of white-blond hair nodding off over his drink. A cat twined at his feet suddenly arches his back at me as I walk over and slide into a booth, ordering a short gla.s.s of red wine.
It is twenty minutes before I hear someone call. Looking out, I see her making her way up the long set of steps.
Through the brown-violet dusk, I can see her waving, waving as if somehow-against all reason-glad to see me.
As she walks up the last stretch, I think of nothing but the faint sound of pa.s.sing cars on the highway below. It is the only way.
Moments later, we are leaning, small gla.s.ses of anisette in hand, over the terrace rail behind the bar. Her hair, long and undone, swirls around her as she turns to face me. Every moment feels unutterably significant.
”Remember that night when I told you I felt like someone was following me?” she says evenly.
Before I can say I don't remember it at all, she adds, ”Isn't it funny that it was you?”
Taken aback, I say, ”I'm not following you.”
”No?” she says, and suddenly I'm not so sure.
She taps out the final cigarette from her creased pack, her fingers sallow at the tips.
”It's you who's followed me,” I insist severely. ”Telling Mike Standish things that you couldn't know.”
She only smiles.
”You wanted to scare me off this. But you can't.” I feel my nerve rise the more I speak. If she wants it straight, I'll give it to her. ”Why did you keep letting Lois go to Walter Schor when you knew the kind of man-”
I wasn't expecting the response.
”Why not?” Her eyes ringed red. ”If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else. Girls like us-” she begins, then lifts her shoulders almost in a shrug. The us is painfully, devastatingly vague.
”But you were out of it all. You could have been out.”
”There is no out.” Her eyes like fresh teeth, hooking into me.
”Don't you know?”
I ignore her question, try once again to s.h.i.+ft the conversation to the immediate, the practical.
”So Mike told you,” I say. ”What I'd found out.” I'm not sure if it is a question or not. The conversation feels unreal, unmoored. I feel drunk, nerves hot and tingling.
”Everything. He told me everything,” she says, and runs a finger along her lips, blue under the lights. ”He couldn't help it. He had to give me all of it. He was in love and he couldn't distinguish.”