Queenpin (16 page)

“You’re the candy kid,” Clancy was telling me, back at the station house, nearing seven A.M.

“My prints are on it too,” I said. “Don’t think about selling me. I played it square.”

He smiled. “You can unfurrow, sweetheart.”

“You don’t interest us at all,” Nast said, sliding me a cup of gray coffee.

“It’ll be over soon,” Clancy added, like he was my kindly uncle now that I’d given it up for him.

“Why do I have to be there?” I said, twisting in my skirt, numb as a housewife on Saturday night.

“We’re not taking any chances,” Clancy said, shoving a bear claw into his mouth. “Not with this one. She trusts you and we gotta use that.”

“You pick her up at the train station like regular,” Nast said, straightening his holster. “We’re watching nearby.”

“She can spot a tail a mile—”

“We’ll be a good distance,” Clancy said, mouth still glistening with pastry glaze. “We’ll follow you back to her place and make the cuff. Easy as apple pie. You just gotta stand back and watch the show.”

It was all happening so fast I didn’t have time to look at the thing. Before I knew it, I was sitting at the wheel at the deserted station, watching her walk toward the car.

That was when it started to hit me and I felt my leg go jerky, start shaking, my heel rattling against the gas pedal.

It was looking at her, looking at her coming through the early morning mist, head high, auburn hair swept up off her face, those enormous white-framed sunglasses, her fitted suit in creamy seafoam, those endless legs winding and unwinding with each step, her whole body arching and snapping like the showgirl she was.

I want the legs, that’s what I thought.

Walking toward me like that, she seemed ageless. Eternal. She could be one or a thousand years old and always be like this, always be walking slowly toward me, eyes on me, knowing everything.

Giving me everything.

She gave me everything.

But it was too late thinking like that now. The time had passed for

shimmery regrets like some kind of ladies’ picture tugging tears at the Bijou. We were never meant for that.

Her hand on the door, the filmy air flush on my face as she opened it…

“You look like you slept with your face mashed into a carpet,” she said, as she settled herself in the seat. “Don’t tell me you picked yourself up a new toy last night.”

I didn’t say anything, but my leg stopped shaking and I hit the gas.

As we drove the three miles to her place, she was yapping the whole way. About the mess she had to clean up in Tunsdell, about how everything had gotten jammed up when I was down for the count and now she had to work twice as hard to get the operation running again. You couldn’t leave any one of those stooges and filchers alone for a day without them mucking things up, one of them beating some sad-sack delivery man into a coma over a busted case of gin, another skimming off last night’s winnings, then blowing the wad at the carpet joint next door, one forcing himself on a cigarette girl, and another knocking around some coffee shop waitress until she cried bloody murder. It never ended. It just showed how you had to keep on top of everything all the time. No more slipups like the kind that had put us in this hole. We had to keep things running smooth as country cream or we were in for more trouble.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying not to glance in the rearview mirror. Trying not to see if Clancy and Nast were in sight. “It won’t happen again.” I kept my eyes on the road.

She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was looking at me.

“I don’t mean to lay it all on you, kid,” she said, which surprised

me. “It’s just a bump in the road.”

I nodded, feeling something vaguely pinching, tickling in my chest. I know it might not seem like much, but I’d never heard her say anything like that.

“Before you came along,” she went on, “I had to do it all myself and no one even to spill to.”

I felt my eyes turning hot. Goddamn her.

I couldn’t talk in the elevator up to her place and I knew it looked fishy. But I thought if I talked, my voice would do things, that I wouldn’t be able to stop it from shaking or going queer on me. I had a hard time looking her in the face too.

Standing there, I fixed my eyes on her hands, her white netted gloves. I made myself think about what those hands had done, could do. I thought about those hands wrapped around a brass blade, curled around gold grips. I thought about her face, what it could become, what she had shown me. The thing she had shown me, it would never leave. It was a scar just as thick and sealed over as those burn marks the bosses put on her. She had no right to leave those marks on me, bound as we were.

“You should clean up,” she said as she unlocked the door and we stepped in. “You go around looking like that, people are gonna think you spent the night tossing at a sawdust joint.”

“Okay,” I said, heart battering around in my chest. Would they come right away? Was it going to happen now? If they didn’t come now, could I hold on?

She set her overnight satchel on top of the tall console against the wall and opened it.

“I have something,” she said.

“A delivery for me?”

“No.” She pulled out a small bag of cream-colored velvet. “Something for you.”

I fidgeted, wrenching off one of my gloves and twisting it with the other hand. Was she going to pull this now? Was she going to give me a present right before I knifed her for the bulls?

She handed me the bag. She couldn’t help but see my hands trembling as I took it.

“It’s not a diamond necklace, kid,” she said. “Don’t get rattled.”

I shook the bag over my open hand and out dropped a long, narrow object, heavy for its size.

I stifled a gasp. It was a letter opener. Instead of the two heads at the top it was one woman’s head, with flowing hair that wrapped around the bronze blade, stem to sharp tip. Other than that, it was the same, felt the same. And the feeling of it in my hand was terrible. Vic’s chest, the sound in his throat, the way his eyes had fallen back, struck.

“It’s not exactly like before,” she said. “But it’s close.”

“Why … why would you give me this?” I felt my head go light. My hand to my chest, I began to think I might faint, like some girl.

“What do you mean?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s a replacement.”

“Why would you want to remind me of that? Of what you did to him?”

She shook her head. She even seemed to turn a little pale with surprise. “It ain’t like that, kid. Don’t you get it? That gift, it was the only thing anyone ever gave me. You see? It was the only thing I ever got like that.”

Her voice, as she said it, was steely as ever, but the soft words, they were rough on me. They did things to me. Even as I held that horrible thing in my hand, the words felt like knives in my ears.

At the same time, though, it hit me even harder how much all of this had to end. How much it had to be over. If I waited any longer, I might stop seeing that. Then it would be me and her, her and me, forever.

“Don’t you get it, Gloria?” I said, dropping the letter opener on the table. “I thought you’d get it by now.”

Before I could go on, not even sure what I was going to lay on her, the doorbell rang. Shaking off her heavy gaze, her slightly surprised eyes, I went to answer it. It was Clancy and Nast, guns out.

I whipped around to see her face. I wanted to see her face when it happened. Even as I thought it might really turn me to stone.

But her face showed nothing. It was the same arch mask. Smooth, expressionless, like a mannequin, a picture in a magazine, glossy and flat and untouchable.

“Don’t move,” Clancy was saying. “Hands in the air.”

“Which one is it,” she was saying in that granite voice of hers. “Make up your mind.”

“Get those goddamned hands in the air, Miss Denton,” Nast said, moving in on her.

She looked over at me. She looked at me to see what part I was playing—innocent bystander, accomplice, or worse.

But she could see the way it was going, the way they weren’t even looking at me. And I wasn’t trying to pretend. I didn’t bother to pretend.

It’s true. I wanted her to see. I wanted her to see I’d sung. I wanted her to see I’d sold her even as she’d given me everything and was ready to give me more.

I watched her eyes as she ran the numbers, jerked the lever, figured the odds, and it came up me. The look in her eyes when she realized there was no other way to figure it, when she knew I was the finger man and this was it—the look was nothing I’d ever seen in

her before. It wasn’t the cold, snaky wrath, it wasn’t the frenzied, red fury. It was something sad, pulsing, unshut.

It was there in her face, open and bare, for an instant.

But then it disappeared like a face card flipping over. And the hard face returned. And she had her hand on her overnight satchel.

And Clancy and Nast were moving in and shouting.

And I thought she might go for a gun.

She looked like she might.

“For that lousy chalk player?” she was saying to me. “You fingered me for some two-bit hustler with a head of hair and some shiny teeth?”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” I found myself shouting. “Why’d you have to break him like that, Gloria?” Even as I knew Vic was just one of my reasons for selling her like I did. There were so many. It was the easiest reason to give.

“You should’ve thanked me,” she snarled.

And I saw her go for the letter opener.

I saw her go for it and then I knew what she was going to do. I knew it and I couldn’t move and the cops were shouting their heads off because they didn’t see what she was going to do. But I did. I did.

She had her eyes on me the whole time she lifted its blade. Her eyes on me, dark and bottomless, as she dug its sharp tip fast, hard, and deep into her throat. She knew just how and where and she did it and—

Her face. Her face.

They got halfway across the room before it was over. They caught her before she hit the floor but her throat was already open, the blood pirouetting.

They were holding on to her, surrounding her, and when I walked over, I saw Clancy’s hands clasped tight around the frothing wound, red sluicing from between his fingers, Nast on his radio, voice high and frantic.

I looked down at them, looked down and caught her face, whiter than white, eyes staring up. They were still looking at me. Maybe they’d always be looking at me.

∞◊∞

Clancy said he’d never have believed it if he hadn’t seen it himself.

“If I hadn’t been standing right there, I would’ve called it homicide. Never saw anyone do that to their own throat like that, straight to the artery,” he said, shaking his head grimly. “The white coats say it’s impossible. But I saw it.”

Nast nodded, his face a little green. We were back at the station house.

“What a waste,” Clancy said. “We weren’t going after her. We were going to use her to get to the big boys.”

“She wouldn’t have gone for that,” I said, surprised to hear my

own voice, low and calm. “She wouldn’t play the stool for you.”

“Bet she thought the same of you,” he said.

“No,” I said, taking my gloves out of my purse and putting them

on. “You don’t get it.”

I looked down at my hands, stretched out my fingers. I felt like I could see things now I’d never seen before.

“She was so much better than me,” I said, as if to myself. Clancy paused, then said, “But look.”

“Yeah,” I said, getting up to go.

They never found Vic’s body. In some ways, I was glad, though I couldn’t say why. Somehow it fit Vic that he wouldn’t be in any fixed place, at least not for long. Now instead of in some junkyard or on some slab, I would forever be able to picture him on the move, flashing smile, bounding forward, eyes always on the horizon, on the next shot, the next roll, the flip of another card, the next chance to lose it all, all over again.

I gave Clancy and Nast some information, some drop spots, some clip joint addresses. They knew most of it anyway. I didn’t have that much to give. I was on the outside. I never got inside. She’d been careful that way and now it paid off. But I knew they’d keep me in their sights, in case. They told me not to leave town, but I knew damn sure I couldn’t stick around.

I was probably safe, sure. No one knew I was a rat. No one but the furrier and she was a rat too. No one knew my real name to find me. I could just slip away.

I thought about going back to the old man, showing him how I might have taken a wrong turn back there but in the end I’d fixed things and maybe that somehow made up for a year or more of making bucks off the sins both venial and mortal of lost souls and indulging in many of those same sins myself. He’d glower and sulk and send me to confession and make me have long meetings with Father Bernard, but I’d come out okay and start things fresh, clean hands, clear eyes, a still dewy-faced girl ready to make some clean-shaven, honest working stiff, probably some lunch-bucket worker from the neighborhood, a good home, a decent home, a home with laughing children and a crucifix on the wall above the bed.

In the end, though, I got in the Impala—my Impala now— and drove thirteen miles downriver, stopping in the first town I’d never been to that I knew wasn’t one of ours. Theirs. Hers. It looked just big enough to get lost in and just small enough that there was no action. Friday night poker games on lazy cul-de-sacs seemed as lively as it got and that was okay by me.

I had a small stack of cash I’d grabbed from my apartment before I beat town, a few pieces of paste I could pawn in a pinch, but not enough to high-life it on for more than a banker’s holiday. Two weeks in, I was doing payroll at Lavery’s Department Store, a big brick eyesore that ruled the main thoroughfare and looked straight off the curled pages of the Currier and Ives calendar on the kitchen wall when I was a kid.

There I was, back punching numbers at a metal desk, back in sensible flats and high-neck blouses, the stuff office girls wear in towns like this one, and back making a lousy dime. At least I wasn’t taking the bus.